Although the land was tilting slowly toward spring, frost still crusted the creases of the land a thick, shiny white, but where the horses had passed the frosty ground had turned to one trodden into slippery chunks and mud. Cars, trucks, horse-drawn wagons, tanks, half-tracks, everything and anything that could roll had been scooped up. The German retreat had passed over the land like a rake, uprooting all before and behind it while beside the road men marched and walked, emerging and vanishing from the mist. Somewhere, maybe south, maybe east, where the Russians were, artillery rumbled like distant wheels on a wooden deck.
The traffic on the road lifted, lessened, and then there was nothing, the only sound the steady hiss of the river beneath its veil of mist. The radio crackled with orders, and the Feldjaeger stirred themselves to move. Benfeld pulled a Horch up next to him, and Reinhardt stood a last moment by the fire, on the edge of its heat, then tossed the flask into the broken tangle of branches and coals. Feeling as if a weight had been lifted, he climbed into the car, his men boarding their own vehicles, chivvying the men they had rounded up—stragglers, the lost, the dazed, one or two certain deserters—into the trucks. All was silent, the men turned in on themselves, on the weights they bore that seemed to pulse the only truths worth conceiving. That they were still alive. That they had survived another night, with another day to come.
The car rocked over the bridge, past the engineers laying their demolition charges, and a curious sensation grew in him, a push-pull as if the land behind him were reaching in and tugging at a tight knot of memories, and pulled one out in particular. Two years ago, a molten sun setting across the knuckled mountains, and the realization that the truth one saw within was as important as, more important than what others thought. He had misled himself since that night, thinking he was owed more. Owed recognition, thanks, the chance to participate in something grander and greater than him. But that was not the way life worked. He knew it then, and he knew it now, but he had forgotten it along the way, too obsessed with his own survival while cradling his hurts and injuries, real and imagined.
And even if it beat to its own rhythm, in and out of time, a broken heart still beat. A body still moved. Responsibilities had to be met. Benfeld bumped the car onto the northern bank, into Croatia, the small column of Feldjaeger merging into a broken flow of men and vehicles, all moving west. Its verges strewn with the wrack and ruin of an army in retreat, the road paralleled the river before drawing away across fields where water threaded pewter lines across the sodden ground. The road wound its way up the crest of a long, low hill, and at the top, Reinhardt looked back, just once. The sun had risen higher, and the fog and mist had begun to thin and shred, vanishing like a receding tide and exposing the plain that had lain beneath. The land on the southern side of the river was flat, not the mountains he was used to, a hummocked horizon of hills and mounds that thrust up like islands, jutting like peninsulas across the soft spread of the mist. Against a far horizon, where no seam showed between land and sky, the sun flared and flattened up as if stricken, sucked up into the white sky in a flare of light that washed across the clouds.
The car crested the hill, pointed its nose north, and Bosnia was gone.
HISTORICAL NOTE
On 6 April 1945, four years to the day since German bombers attacked the city, Sarajevo was retaken by Tito’s Partisans. They found a city reeling after four years of German and Ustaše occupation. Sarajevo’s infrastructure was in ruins, its people stunned by the brutality they had lived under, especially during the last months, when the Ustaše’s rule had veered toward the crazed and uncontrollable.
Sarajevo’s Jews were all but exterminated, as were the Roma. Thousands of Serbs were killed or imprisoned, their properties confiscated, and hundreds more fled to the hills and to the ranks of the Partisans or the . The city’s Bosnian Muslims, torn between the demands of their German and Ustaše overlords and their own visions of a future of their own, navigated a path to survival that involved a mixture of collaboration, tolerance, and resistance.
These years were among the worst in Sarajevo’s history. Much of its commercial or industrial activity was stifled or shut down. Food was constantly in short supply. Outbreaks of disease such as typhus stalked the city. In the face of German and Ustaše disinterest and incompetence in making any attempt to run Sarajevo and provide basic services, the city’s various charities and cultural societies filled the gap, providing vital and lifesaving assistance. The workers and volunteers of Napredak, Prosvjeta, and Merhamet did their best for their communities, often in the face of overwhelming difficulties, often in the face of official discouragement and even opposition, and it was not unusual for the charities’ supplies or properties to be commandeered by the occupying forces. Although the city was stretched to the breaking point, the complex web that bound the different communities together frayed but did not break.
Exactly how many Sarajevans died during the war is unknown. The closest estimates come from the findings of a commission formed in 1981 by the city’s veterans. It established that some 10,900 Sarajevans had died as a direct result of the war, the overwhelming majority of whom were Jews. As one Yugoslav historian wrote, they were hemmed into a city in which they could not live and that they could not leave. Thus cornered, and subject to every sadistic and nonsensical whim and vagary that legislation or fascist imagination could come up with, some seven thousand Jews perished during the four-year occupation of the city. This figure is made all the more sobering when one considers that it accounts for more than two-thirds of all Sarajevans the commission found were killed during the war, and for three-quarters of the city’s prewar Jewish population. The abject conditions to which they were subjected were documented in detail after the war by a judge, Bujas, who was appointed as one of the trustees of the Jewish community by the Ustaše. Horrified by what he saw happening, Bujas did his best for Sarajevo’s Jews. Motivated by his humanity, an agile and persistent negotiator, Bujas was personally able to save many among the city’s Jewish population.
Of the other Sarajevans killed in the war, the majority were Serbs. Some 1,420 Serbs died or were killed, as well as more than four hundred Muslims and more than one hundred Croats. In addition, several thousand Sarajevans died serving in the ranks of the Partisans or operating within the city clandestinely as part of the Communist Party’s resistance network. Serb and Bosnian Muslim refugees flooded into the city over the course of the war, to the extent that despite the years of conflict and deaths, Sarajevo’s prewar population of some ninety thousand people had actually grown to something over one hundred thousand when it ended.
Of course, the deaths in the city do not include the deaths in the countryside, where the exactions of the Ustaše upon Bosnia’s Serbs reached genocidal proportions, and from which tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims fled at times equally bloody depradations of the . Furthermore, the war was not confined to Bosnia-Herzegovina but involved the whole of prewar Yugoslavia. By the end of the war, some 1.7 million Yugoslavs were dead, and the majority—approximately one million people—had been killed by their fellow compatriots in an internecine and fratricidal conflict, by Croat Ustaše killing Jews, Muslims, Serbs, , and Partisans; or by Partisans killing and Ustaše; or by killing Ustaše, Muslims, and Partisans.
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Under the command of Vladimir , known as Valter, the Communist Party in Sarajevo was the only organization to offer effective—if often only clandestine—armed resistance. was an able organizer of urban resistance despite being in his very early twenties when he took over the Communist Party’s networks in 1943. Notably, the Communist Party was the only organization that was able to bridge the ethnic and sectarian cleavages that the Ustaše and would not, or could not, cross. Added to strong links to the countryside in which the Partisans operated, the Communist Party also overcame the rural-urban divide that had been such a distinct characteristic of Sarajevo’s history. Communist Party cells made up of five people—known
as “fivesomes” or petorke—were active and instrumental in the final days of the occupation, disrupting German and Ustaše movements, defending key installations and cultural sites from damage, and liaising with the advancing Partisans.
It was during these operations that was killed, under circumstances that are still shrouded in mystery, on the very last day of the city’s occupation. This event added both to his myth and to the mythology of the Partisans’ and Communist Party’s activities, with his legend inspiring the classic film Valter Brani Sarajevo (Valter Defends Sarajevo). Given the obscurity around death, I have exercised a touch of artistic license in order to involve Reinhardt in it.
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By 1944, with the Germans and their allies in full retreat across most of Central and Eastern Europe, Sarajevo assumed an increasingly vital and strategic place. It was a key transit point for the German retreat, and the decision was made at the highest levels to hold the city at all costs. This meant increasing control over the city and its population and increasing the repression. In February 1945, the leader of the Ustaše, Ante , sent Vladimir “Maks” to Sarajevo with orders to destroy the resistance movement. Perhaps best known for being the commandant of the notorious Jasenovac concentration camp, in which tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and others were murdered, was a committed Ustaše and a particularly imaginative proponent of state-sponsored terror. He was responsible for a substantial increase in the levels of repression with arrests, tortures, murders, and mass executions. Much of this was ordered or carried out from a villa on the banks of the Miljacka. It was called at the time “the house of terror”; I have renamed it “the Pale House.” Its horrors were documented by, among others, an American journalist called Landrum Bolling who entered Sarajevo with the Partisans on 7 April.
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What hints at to Reinhardt—that the Ustaše could not be allowed to escape—does come true. The last days of the war saw several hundred thousand Croats—Ustaše, soldiers, and civilians—turned back into Yugoslavia by British troops at Bleiburg, on the Austrian border. Once back in Yugoslavia they were taken prisoner by the Partisans. What ensued remains a stain on Yugoslav history, as well as a sore that festered for decades, as the Partisans summarily executed tens of thousands of Croats and Ustaše, with tens of thousands more succumbing to ill treatment on forced marches to concentration camps.
Despite this carnage and the virtual extinction of the Ustaše as a movement, many of the Ustaše’s fighters and most of its highest leaders abandoned their people and escaped the British and the Partisans, vanishing into the Austrian forests and mountains. Some were eventually captured, but some of the worst of them, including and , eventually escaped using “ratlines,” which is what Reinhardt stumbles across in Sarajevo.
I have not termed what Reinhardt finds as a “ratline” as such, as that description did not yet really exist. The ratlines were escape routes of varying complexity that mainly operated after the war to bring Nazis and other fascists out of liberated Europe to safety in other countries. Perhaps the most famous Nazi ratline was called ODESSA, run by SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny, but there were many more, with new evidence coming to light in declassified archives in Argentina and Italy of extensive state-sanctioned operations.
The destinations were often Frankist Spain or South America, and the Catholic Church—from individual priests, up to the highest levels of the papacy, and often using Vatican resources—played a depressingly central role in the ratlines’ functioning. There is also evidence that the Allies, particularly the United States, were also involved in the escape of some of these individuals, particularly as postwar western and eastern tensions began to solidify into what would become known as the Cold War. Allied disinterest or involvement was certain; how else could someone like live virtually undisturbed in American-occupied Austria until April 1946 before escaping to Rome, where he was sheltered by a network of Croatian priests in, among other places, a monastery that had been infiltrated by U.S. intelligence?
Whoever moved them, and however they were moved, the fact remains that hundreds, if not thousands, of Nazis and fascists, among them some of those most guilty of heinous crimes during the war, escaped Europe and lived peaceable and peaceful lives elsewhere. Whether their consciences ever troubled them, who can know. For sure, save for some notable exceptions— was eventually killed in 1969 by a man later alleged to be an agent of the UDBA, the Yugoslav secret services, and was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt in Argentina and died in 1959 in Spain—and save for the efforts of some notable activists such as Simon Wiesenthal and the Klarsfelds, they were rarely troubled in any official capacity to account for what they had, or had not, done during the war.
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By early 1945, the German Army was in full retreat across most of Europe. The war in the east was very different from that in the west, and the Germans had recourse to various forms of discipline in order to maintain order and cohesion in the field. Two of the most notable included the Feldjaegerkorps and penal battalions.
The Wehrmacht—the German armed forces—shared with the Soviets the unenviable distinction of incarcerating or executing the highest numbers of their own soldiers for real or perceived breaches of discipline. Although the 999th Balkan Field Punishment Battalion never existed, strafbattaliones—often translated as penal battalions—were indeed formed, sometimes under the control of the Feldgendarmerie, to which soldiers who had been sentenced for various breaches of military conduct were assigned. These units were often poorly armed and assigned to the most dangerous and menial tasks, including suicide missions such as leading or covering attacks, often against overwhelming odds, and the construction of front-line defenses under arduous conditions. Sometimes, soldiers who survived their terms were deemed fit to return to normal duties. However, as the war worsened, military tribunals came under increasing pressure to assign those sentenced to penal battalions. By war’s end, it is estimated that tens of thousands of Wehrmacht personnel had served in punishment units. The survival rate is unknown but was probably not high given that those sentenced to them were considered as the lowest of the low.
The Pale House features a penal battalion, albeit one with a high percentage of foreign volunteers, or hilfswiliger—hiwis. These were men whom the Germans enlisted, or who volunteered, to serve in auxiliary or supplementary functions such as drivers, cooks, medical orderlies, and porters. The word now has an overwhelmingly pejorative nature, especially regarding the tens of thousands of Soviet citizens who served with the Wehrmacht in the USSR. Hiwi has almost become synonymous with them, but there were many such people from most of the countries the Germans conquered during the Second World War. Partly as a means of demonstrating the upheavals engendered by war, the novel includes hiwis who were gathered up in the penal battalion’s retreat across the Balkans, a collection of Greeks, Serbs, Albanians, and Croats, all of whom had good reasons for not being able to stay on in their own countries after the Germans had gone. Alexiou and his men, for instance, had served in the security battalions formed by the German collaborationist government in Greece and had fought in a bitter civil war in which, like in Yugoslavia, the German occupation had been the trigger that fractured wide a whole range of prewar political cleavages.
The Feldjaegerkorps was created in November 1943, partly as a solution to the perceived inability of the Feldgendarmerie and other existing military police units to maintain desired levels of discipline. The Feldjaegerkorps accepted only officers and noncommissioned officers, and in order to be eligible for service soldiers had to have a minimum of three years front-line combat experience and have earned the Iron Cross Second Class. The authority of the Feldjaegerkorps came directly from the armed forces high command—the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht—and thus even the lowest-ranking soldier theoretically carried more power than an officer, and their authority extended even to the Waffen SS (the armed branch of the SS).
The Feldjaegerkorps’s ba
sic duties included maintaining order and discipline behind the lines, preventing retreats (especially those driven by panic), gathering and organizing stragglers, and rounding up deserters. Their duties, and the harsh environments in which they operated, have given them a mixed reputation. Without doubt, they could be harsh. Drumhead courts-martial and executions were not unknown. However, and despite their extensive powers, there is much evidence that they were far from needlessly brutal and could be tough but fair.
Three Feldjaeger “commands” were created: Commands I and II served on the Eastern Front and were all but destroyed by the end of the war. Command III was formed in Vienna and fought mostly on the Western Front. In an interesting detail of history, Feldjaegerkorps III was the last German unit to formally lay down its arms, in June 1946, with the U.S. occupation forces in Germany using it to help ensure discipline among German prisoners of war. Although there are no records of the Feldjaegerkorps having served in the Balkans, it seemed an ideal opportunity to detach a small unit and send Reinhardt there with them.
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The War Crimes Bureau existed. It was a special section of the legal department of the armed forces high command formed to investigate reports of alleged Allied war crimes for the purposes of lodging diplomatic protests, war crimes trials, and for official government publications (also known as “white books”). The Bureau, including several of its senior staff, were the direct successors of a similar body formed in the Prussian war ministry during World War I. The Treaty of Versailles effectively cast all guilt and blame upon Imperial Germany for crimes committed during the first war, and the feeling was probably strong that the same was not to happen again. Although the Bureau’s mandate did not exclude investigating war crimes committed by Germans, the majority of their work was devoted to investigating allegations of war crimes committed against German soldiers and civilians, and the vast majority of what they investigated occurred on the Eastern Front.
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