Terror in the Balkans (82 page)

the divisions were also seeing to it that their own troops were being condi-

tioned to approve of such measures. This in turn would help provide the

psychological preconditions for the occupation divisions’ direct involve-

ment in a later, more terrible phase of the persecution of the Serbian Jews.

It was this phase, a shift from discrminatory measures to scapegoating Jews

for insurgent attacks and victimizing them in mass reprisals, that would

become so closely intertwined with the Wehrmacht’s security campaign.

And even this early on the 704th Infantry Division, like the German

occupiers generally, could be heavy-handed towards the wider Serbian

population also. The 704th’s divisional command declared early in June

“that interference by the population or attacks on Wehrmacht personnel

or property (must) be punished on the spot with suitably just but harsh

measures.”27 A divisional order of a fortnight later urged the “punish-

ment,” by what means it did not specify, of civilians caught with radios.28

As long as Serbia remained largely quiescent, the troops were not going

to interpret such imprecise exhortations as a blank check for brutality.

But they might do so were resistance to fl are up.

And though insurgent attacks on German personnel were very rare dur-

ing the occupation’s opening weeks, the Germans’ reaction to such cases

was an ominous straw in the wind. On April 18, the day after Yugoslavia’s

capitulation, the Waffen-SS Division “Das Reich” executed thirty-six

88
terror in the balk ans

Serbs in retaliation for the shooting of one of its own men. The shooting

of a German offi cer in the village of Donji Dobric´ three days later brought

the village’s complete destruction and a fi erce directive from Field Mar-

shal von Weichs, commander of the Second Army. Weichs ordered that,

wherever an armed band appeared, men from that area capable of bear-

ing arms were to be seized and shot, and their corpses hanged for public

display, unless they could prove they had no connection with the “ban-

dits.” Hostages were to be seized in advance. Then on May 19, Weichs

stipulated that in the future one hundred Serbs should be shot for every

German soldier who “came to harm” in any Serb attack. As yet, German

units in the fi eld chose not to go that far. But Weichs’ 1:100 order would

soon prove to be the most ominous straw in the wind of all.29

And Weichs’ use of the term
bandit
is instructive; only in summer

1942 would
Reichsführer
-SS Heinrich Himmler himself order the term

to replace
partisan
in offi cial communication.30 Although the term was

frequently being employed by German commands before this date,

Weichs and the German army formations serving in Yugoslavia were

particularly quick to employ it. It is not only likely that, as with Himmler

in 1942, they were seeking to dehumanize the insurgents in their men’s

eyes. It is also likely that the region’s long history of banditry was infl u-

encing their perception of the enemy they were facing.

By the eve of the invasion of the Soviet Union the 704th’s unease was

increasing, as sightings of “bandit” groups grew more frequent. June 20,

two days before the invasion, brought reports that irregulars were caus-

ing unrest and unsettling the population east of the main Valjevo-Užice

road.31 Some attacks, such as those around the towns of Kacˇan and Kos-

jeric´, were the work of civilian marauders.32 Their mere presence stirred

the German military’s traditional abhorrence of armed civilians. Around

the same time LXV Corps urged its divisions to form
Jagdkommandos
,

well-equipped and highly mobile “hunter groups.” Such units were

designed to carry out reconnaissance patrols or larger “hunting expe-

ditions” to locate, pursue, and annihilate irregular groups.33 Forming

viable hunter groups from the paltry forces available would prove dif-

fi cult in the extreme. But this was what was now expected.

In fact, the potential danger to security was even more serious. So

rapidly had the Yugoslav army collapsed that many of its troops had

Islands in an Insurgent Sea
89

never even been taken prisoner; instead they had simply gone home. In

areas where Yugoslav army units had dissolved themselves thus, vast

quantities of small arms remained unaccounted for and ripe for seizure

by would-be irregulars.34 Before the invasion of the Soviet Union, the

irregular fi ghters—as distinct from outright bandits or marauders—who

were most at large in Yugoslavia were known as Chetniks.

Chetniks had had a centuries-old involvement in the region’s confl icts

right up to the Great War. By 1918 they enjoyed status as a leading patriotic

group, and considerable political infl uence. By World War II, however, the

movement had fragmented. Initial Chetnik attacks on the Axis occupation

regime were the work of uncoordinated individual bands. But there were

two larger Chetnik groups of note. The fi rst was a stridently pro-Axis group,

a few thousand strong, under Kosta Pecánac.35 The second group, com-

prising only thirty men initially but soon to expand rapidly,36 was based in

the Ravna Gora region under Draza Mihailovic´. Mihailovic´ was a colonel

of the former Yugoslav army who, in contrast to Pecánac, had resolved to

form an anti-Axis underground following Yugoslavia’s collapse. Yet he and

his forces were able to establish themselves largely because they quietly

built up their organization and numbers while keeping their heads down.37

Thus, crucial as the MihailovicĆhetniks’ role in the confl ict would even-

tually become, it was not they but the smaller, uncoordinated Chetnik

bands who most disrupted the occupation until Barbarossa.

Already then, the remit of the 704th and its fellow divisions was wid-

ening beyond guarding railways. June brought their fi rst protestations

at their low combat effectiveness. Already at the end of May, XI Corps,

a frontline formation on the point of departing Yugoslavia, asserted that

the occupation divisions’ training was so poor that all other consider-

ations should be subordinate to it. It also asserted that the divisions were

too weak to execute even their static security duties effectively.38 The

state of their equipment became parlous also, with all divisions suffering

alarming shortages of guns and ammunition.39

The rump state of Serbia, with its sixty thousand square kilometers

and 3.8 million inhabitants, was occupied by barely twenty-fi ve thou-

sand German military and police personnel—one man, in other words,

for every 2.4 square kilometers and 152 inhabitants.40 Unsurprisingly, the

704th’s biggest problem was that its static units were spread far apart,

90
terror in the balk ans

sometimes to company level, and connected only by an often execrable

road system. It also lacked suffi cient men to operate its horse-drawn

transports.41 Its more southerly units had some access to rail transport

but reaped only limited benefi t from it. Fierce storms and endemic theft

blighted the Serbian postal service. If the telephone system failed too—

and the 704th feared it would, given its signals company’s paltry resources

and personnel—then the division would be wholly reliant on radio.42

Meanwhile, boredom and fatigue were already beginning to erode

the troops’ discipline. At the end of May General Borowski was aghast

to observe a column of soldiers marching through a village, some wear-

ing only swimming trunks. He remarked, understatedly, that “images like

these damage the troops’ standing.”43 On July 21, divisional command

was appalled by several cases of soldiers going unpunished after they had

failed to get themselves screened following sex with local women.44 At the

end of that month, the latrines in the 704th’s jurisdiction were found in an

“indescribable condition,” with all the threat of infection this posed. The

division pledged to punish future infractions by canceling leave.45

These were not trivial matters. Offi cers would have known from their

Great War experience of the damage unchecked discipline could wreak

upon soldiers’ fi ghting power. And if indiscipline did go unchecked, it

could eventually develop into the kind of wild behavior that debilitated

relations with the population—relations neither higher command nor

divisional command were yet prepared to endanger unnecessarily. Gen-

eral Borowski demanded that plunder cases be thoroughly reported—a

clear sign that such cases were increasing.46 But the troops seem to have

ignored him.47 And discipline problems went wider than the 704th; LXV

Corps declared on June 20 that “the tasks of the Category 15 divisions

under command of LXV Corps can only be carried out in the long term if

the troops’ discipline and manner towards the population are
fi rst-class
.

Discipline manifests itself in attitude, appearance, and proper recogni-

tion of authority.”48 All three were clearly suffering, but “the population

must have and
retain
respect for the Wehrmacht.”49

June 22 brought the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and with it an

entirely new dimension to the burgeoning unrest in Yugoslavia. There

Islands in an Insurgent Sea
91

was an almost immediate call from Stalin for the Europe-wide Commu-

nist movement to take up arms in the antifascist struggle.

The Yugoslav Communists, under their leader Josep Broz—“Tito”—

numbered eight thousand members in spring 1941. This was not a huge

number, but it was dramatically higher than the fi fteen hundred they

had counted at the end of 1937.50 The Communists had achieved this

growth, despite their prohibition since 1920, thanks to their increased

contact with the labor movement, their “popular front” strategy of forg-

ing links with bourgeois opposition politicians, and their infi ltration of

nonpolitical groups such as sports clubs and cultural societies.51 The

Communists were also highly disciplined and, after years of persecu-

tion by the Yugoslav police, seasoned in evasion and subterfuge. They

would harness these qualities to form and organize the Partisan detach-

ments that would come to embody the Yugoslav Communist movement’s

military strength.52 Tito wanted a full-blown uprising both to drive out

the occupiers and attain national power for the Communists in postwar

Yugoslavia. He also wanted a central staff to lead the uprising. Accord-

ingly, on April 10, 1941, the Central Committee of the Yugoslav Com-

munist Party established a military committee headed by Tito himself.53

All depended, however, on when the signal to rise up was given by the

Soviet Union. Moscow gave it on July 1:

The hour has struck when Communists are obliged to raise the

people in open struggle against the occupiers. Do not lose a single

minute organizing Partisan detachments and igniting a Partisan war

in the enemy’s rear. Set fi re to war factories, warehouses, fuel dumps

(oil, petrol, etc.), aerodromes; destroy and demolish railways, tele-

graphs and telephone lines; prohibit the transport of troops and

munitions (war materials in general). Organize the peasantry to

hide grain, drive livestock into the forests. It is absolutely essential

to terrorize the enemy by all means so that he will feel himself inside

a besieged fortress.54

As a precursor to driving the Axis out of Yugoslavia completely, and as

a foundation for a postwar Communist order, Tito sought to establish

liberated territories and administer them through people’s liberation

92
terror in the balk ans

committees (NOOs). It was in Croatia, with its more advanced industry

and labor movement, that the prewar Yugoslav Communist organization

had been strongest. Hence, Croats would predominate among the Par-

tisan leadership throughout the war. But Tito came to believe that west-

ern Serbia, with its hilly, wooded terrain, Communist-leaning industrial

centers, and tradition of resistance to foreign invasion—not to mention

the arrival there, over summer 1941, of huge numbers of Serb refugees

uprooted by the Ustasha—would be the ideal region in which to com-

mence the revolt.55 The Communists’ hubris was fueled by their belief

that the withdrawal of German forces to the East heralded the occupi-

ers’ imminent collapse as it had done in 1918, and that the Red Army

was about to attack to liberate its “brother Slavs.”56 Yet the Communists

could hope neither to cajole nor persuade large sections of the popula-

tion to revolt unless the conditions the population faced were intolerable.

Fortunately for the Communists, however, this was precisely what was

now happening.

The uprising erupted in July. It received by far its greatest boost not

from the Communists, but from the hundreds of thousands of ethnic

Serbs expelled from or fl eeing from the atavistic Ustasha savagery now

convulsing the NDH.

The Ustasha had been discriminating against Serbs, Jews, and Sinti