Did you know that ultranationalist Croatians, known as the ustasha, committed such heinous
crimes against that it left the German present there bewildered.
But why was that?
Since the Wehrmacht itself also committed acts of terror and mass murder in occupied Yugoslavia. In their war against
the partisans whole areas were cleansed and women nor children were spared.
How come the Germans were outraged by the mass violence perpetrated by the ustasha in Croatia?
In this video you are going to learn about the Wehrmacht perspective of mass violence in
Croatia. Keep watching.
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On 9 April 1941 the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia started.
On 10 April the Germans entered Zagreb and Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia.
The proclamation had been stage-managed by the Germans.
The new Croatian state extended over almost 40% of the former Yugoslav Kingdom.
It consisted roughly of modern-day Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina: Catholic Croats
amounted to around half of the 6.5 million people: it had 750,000 Muslims, 40,000 Jews
and 1,9 million Serbs.
It was called the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska; NDH).
Germany and Italy had divided their own spheres of influence.
The Germans were heavily influenced in the country's economy.
From day one there were German soldiers on the streets of Zagreb and diplomatic representatives
occupied important places.
Therefore the NDH can be hardly called independent.
The state officially became a kingdom with an Italian Prince Aimone as Tomislav II on
the throne.
He never resided there.
Ante Pavelic – who at the time of the Croatian independence declaration was still in Italy
– became the leader of the NDH:
“A significant part of the population, generally in towns and particularly in Zagreb, viewed
it favourably.
The ustashas had a modicum of popular support in western Herzegovina and Lika, but virtually
nowhere else.
However, most people accepted 'the resurrection of the Croatian state' with the feeling that
the war had ended quickly and that the worst had been avoided.”
But the worst was about to come.
Already on 17 April a law 'on the Protection of the People and the State' was issued which
made it possible to kill anybody the ustashas wanted to remove.
Three groups were mainly targetted by them: Jews, Serbs and Gypsies (Roma and Sinti).
The ustashas have become known for their murderous policies.
Jews were arrested on the first day the Germans arrived in Zagreb.
The first mass killing of Serbs took place near the end of april in the village of Gudovac
(near the Croatian city of Bjelovar) where 200 Serbs were rounded up and executed by
firing squad.
The survivors were finished off with bayonets.
This particular incident set in motion a whole wave of mass killings all throughout the
NDH.
Confinement in camps started in July.
The largest Croatian concentration camp was the Jasenovac complex which was a death camp
were Jews, Serbs, Gypsies and undesirable Croats would meet their fate in horrifying
ways.
Then there were also concentration camps for children such as Sisak and Jastrebarsko.
Many Serbs and Jews (we're talking about men, women and children) died at the hands of ustasha death
squads that roamed the countryside.
The present Germans weren't too keen on the chaotic terror.
And one German general reported: “The ustashas have gone raving mad.”
Protests from German officials stationed in the NDH led Pavelic to outlaw the 'wild killings',
but this was little more than cosmetic since Hitler had encouraged him to pursue a 'nationally
intolerant policy'.
What made the Wehrmacht so appalled by the ustasha mass violence?
The Wehrmacht itself also committed mass violence in Yugoslavia.
Countless of Serbs were massacred by the German army in Bosnia, then part of the NDH, but
also in other areas as well.
The Germans had a disdain for the Serbs.
How come they disaproved the ustasha violence?
For that we have to differentiate the violence of the ustasha and the violence of the Wehrmacht.
So in order to pinpoint the difference we need to discuss its goals.
The goal of the ustasha was the purify their state of what they perceived as unwanted people:
Serbs, Jews and Roma and Sinti.
Muslims weren’t targetted by the NDH authorities.
The Ustaša – Croatian Revolutionary Movement – originated in the interwar period.
Its ideology was drawn from Croatian ultranationalism, Italian Fascism and German Nazism, from authoritarianism
and peasantism.
So it wasn't a one on one copy of either Italian or German totalitarianism.
It had three basic components: racism, religion and violence.
Its leader, Ante Pavelic, once stated:
'Knives, revolvers, automatic pistols and time bombs are the bells that ring in the
dawn and rebirth of the Croatian state'.
Let’s take a look at the German side.
What were their goals regarding Yugoslavia? Well, to be fair, Hitler's
plans to invade Yugoslavia were drawn up fairly late.
Initially Hitler wanted Yugoslavia as an ally and use the country’s railway network to invade Greece.
The regent of Yugoslavia (Paul) signed the Triparte Pact
But he was overthrown shortly after by Serbian military leaders.
Hitler then vowed to destroy Yugoslavia.
So he did.
Yet, the south Slav state never was a prime target of the Nazis.
They had their eyes on the USSR which they wanted to cleanse of its inhabitants and colonize
the lands.
Yugoslavia therefore was more or less a side project.
And the Germans were heavily involved in the country's economy after they've overthrown
the kingdom because the needed the resources for the Eastern Front.
Operation Barbarossa started more or less two months after they had conquered Yugoslavia.
Especially in Croatia the German army worked under conditions of scarcity in terms of manpower
and material.
What they wanted was ORDER.
But order was very much lacking in Axis-"controlled" Yugoslavia.
From the getgo there was resistance.
The Yugoslav resistance manifested itself in two groups: the Chetniks and the partisans.
The Chetniks were Serbian nationalists under the nominal command of Draza Mihailovic.
The partisans were communists under the command of Josip Broz Tito and were strongest in the
NDH.
Eventually they clashed with one another and Chetniks detachment collaborated with the
Axis forces.
In name they were led by Mihailovic, who at some point believed the Axis brutal reprisals
weren't worth the resistance activities.
In practise many Chetniks units operated on their own.
The partisans on the other hand were way more centralized.
In order to combat this resistance the Wehrmacht set up battle groups (Kampfgruppen) who had
a space-centred approach.
One of its commanders, General Alexander Löhr, believed it was the time to drop barriers
restraining violence in warfare:
“From Löhr's perspective, the logic of modern warfare compelled rapid increase of
violence against non-combatants.
Technological changes, especially the introduction of the aeroplane, accelerated this process
and 'set aside the concept of the non-combatant'.
Löhr endorsed the maximization of force, viewed war as a contest between whole societies
as well as armies, and believed military violence could legitimately be directed against enemy
societies.”
In other words: not only men of fighting age were targetted, but also the elderly, women
and children.
All to achieve the goal of 'creating order out of chaos'.
But chaos was also caused by the ustashas who
had a people centered approach and killed anyone they didn't deem worthy of life.
The ustasha did little to hide their crimes.
When the first mass killing occured at the village of Gudovac the Germans stationed nearby soon learned about
this atrocity.
The German commander sent a investigation commission to
investigate what had happened. The German officers were clearly dismayed by the killings and even arrested 40 suspects.
Why?
“A more likely explanation is that the act of investigation, just like the arrest of
suspects, was a demonstration of German authority, a way of appeasing the local population, restoring
order and sending a message to the Ustasha that they could not operate with impunity.”
The arrested suspects were soon released.
On more occasions the Germans sent investigation commission to investigate cases of Ustasha atrocities.
German (and also Italian) soldiers who owned cameras took photographs:
“Some did so because they were shocked by the brutality of their cobelligerents, others
as part of the more routine practice of creating ‘a memento from a life being lived’ and
detailing the realities, and horrors, of war in the Balkans.”
German General Edmund Glaise von Horstenau filed a report to Himmler:
“I am frequently told that German occupation troops would finally have to intervene against
Ustaše crimes.
This may happen eventually.
Right now, with the available forces, I could not ask for such action.
Ad hoc intervention in individual cases could make the German Army look responsible for
countless crimes which it could not prevent in the past.”
General Paul Bader proposed in the spring of 1942 to shoot at ustasha troops who committed
such atrocities: ‘not out of consideration for the Serbs, but to restore order’.
As said before, the German high command was keen on order.
Interesting is to look at the words the Germans used in their reports to describe their own
violence.
They used words such as Vernichtung (elimination), Säuduberung (cleansing) durchkammen (combing
through), or Befriedigung (pacification).
“Words like 'cleansed' or 'elimination' bestowed on German efforts a clinical and
restrained appearance; an appearance undermined in fact by the wholesale brutality associated
with these operations.”
However, when speaking of the crimes of the ustasha the Germans used words as: Plünderungen
(plunder), Übergriffe (excesses), Greueltaten (atrocities) and Abschlachtung (butchery).
The Wehrmacht believed they used violence out of necessity and the ustasha used violence
out of anger.
The Wehrmacht acted brutally against the Serbs with their space-centred approach.
Contrary to the ustasha who had a people-centred approach (killing people
indiscriminately) the Germans confined their violence to specific areas.
And try to grasp this.
I'm not advocating that the Wehrmacht in Yugoslavia was GOOD.
Comparing Wehrmacht mass violence with ustasha mass violence in WW2 I think you compare the “super
terrible” with the “ultra terrible”.
If that makes sense.
The Germans:
“... saw the two approaches as having conflicting objectives: Ustasha brutality was blamed for
fuelling the armed rebellion that the German army sought to quash.”
We discussed what the German high command thought of the ustasha mass violence.
I wasn't able to find sources on what ordinary German soldiers thought of this.
I can imagine they weren't to keen on the violence either for the same reason
the German high command wasn't too keen on it.
But also because the ustasha brutality was way more extreme.
See, there is killing and there is killing.
The Germans mostly killed people in Yugoslavia with bombs or with rifle (and machine gun) fire.
The ustasha killed their victims in way more sadistic ways.
Using knives, clubs, axes, saws and hammers.
Although not German I did find an account of a Dutch volunteer in the Waffen-SS (Dutch
Volunteer Legion).
He wrote:
“The merger with Germany was met with widespread opposition.
Moreover, the presumptuous manner in which the Ustasha, roughly the Croatian SA, acted,
also made the government unpopular.
The [Croatian] government was therefore chronically in trouble and lacked any prestige.
Under these circumstances it is hardly surprising that the bands of Tito and Mihailović were
more feared than the governmental organs, which were otherwise very unreliable, like
the national militia.”
This account does resonate with the Wehrmacht view of the Croatian state.
I did make an episode about the Dutch Volunteer Legion, see the pinned comment.
If you have any additional information.
Perhaps are related to or spoken to someone who witnessed what happened in Croatia during WWII
please lemme know in the comments!