Hitler's Foreign Executioners

by Christopher Hale

  Hitler’s Balkan campaign may well have begun as a way to get Mussolini out of trouble. The destruction of Yugoslavia which has so often been presented as a fit of rage is much less easy to accept as a spontaneous response to an inconvenient coup. Even for the mighty German army, military campaigns required planning time. Enormous numbers of troops had to be diverted to south-eastern Europe. Premeditation surely guaranteed that the Balkan campaign was enacted at breakneck speed and achieved its strategic aims within a few weeks. Although Hitler was forced to delay launching Operation Barbarossa until the summer, the destruction of Yugoslavia and the occupation of Greece very effectively tied up his ragged south-east flank which had been so impetuously weakened by Mussolini. In any case, the occupation of the Balkans provided another opportunity for the Germans to refine the apparatus of occupation. As they had for Operation Tannenberg, Reinhard Heydrich’s RSHA cataloguers had diligently compiled ‘special lists’ of Greeks considered to be ‘hostile elements’. Gestapo agents combed Athens seeking out their human prey.8 In the meantime, Wehrmacht and SS troops swept across Greece, like grey locusts, seizing whatever they could lay their hands on – from goats and olive oil to clocks and even lingerie. While German troops ravenously ‘lived off the land’, the Greeks went hungry, and soon began to sicken and then to die. The numbers of dead overwhelmed the authorities and mass graves had to be dug outside Athens. It is estimated that the final death toll from hunger and disease by the end of 1942 was in the hundreds of thousands. Other species of locust followed. Alfred Rosenberg’s Sonderkommando units scoured ancient Salonika in search of cultural treasures and artefacts to stock his new ‘Library for Exploration of the Jewish Question’. Robber barons dispatched by the Reich Economics Ministry and German industrial giants like Krupp seized iron, chrome and nickel mines, and dismantled entire factories to send them piece by piece back to the Reich.

  To begin with, the SS adapted a dilapidated army barracks not far from Athens in Haidari to use as a holding centre for political prisoners and hostages. The camp commander SS-Sturmbannführer Radomski and his mainly ethnic German guards were drunken brutes. From their offices in Athens, with splendid views of the Acropolis, SS administrators brought bloody terror to Greece and destroyed some of the oldest Jewish communities in the world. At the end of 1942, SS-Sturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann sent trusted aides Dieter Wisliceny and Alois Brunner to organise the deportation of 50,000 Jews from Salonika. When the Greek Jews finally arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, camp commander Rudolf Höß recorded that ‘they were of such poor quality that they all had to be eliminated’. Anti-Semitism had never contaminated Greek political culture and yet at least 90 per cent of Greek Jews did not survive the war.9

  The fate of the former Kingdom of Yugoslavia was equally terrible. In the wake of the German armies came savage ethnic cleansing and bloody civil war. Inevitably Jews were the first victims. They had first come to the Balkan region after 1565, when Sephardi Jews settled in the Miljacka river valley near Sarajevo in central Bosnia. They had been expelled from Spain half a century earlier. Now they had to rebuild their lives in a poor, harsh land ruled by the Ottoman ‘Caliphate’ in faraway Istanbul. The Sephardi and later Ashkenazi Jews were, by and large, welcomed by their Muslim neighbours (the Bosniaks) and over time became a small but influential Yugoslav community. Then came catastrophe on an unimaginable scale. Between 1941 and 1945, at least a million citizens of the former Kingdom of Yugoslavia died violently; many of the victims were Jews: few survived the German occupation.

  In the nineteenth century, Ashkenazi Jews began to settle in Yugoslavia for the first time, mainly in Croatia-Slavonia and the province of Vojvodina. Like the Sephardim, the new arrivals were by custom urban dwellers who toiled in commerce, crafts or the liberal professions. Many Jews contracted ‘mixed marriages’ to Muslims or Christians and by the end of the nineteenth century, the majority identified themselves as Serbs or Croats and later Yugoslavs. In 1919, Jewish leaders had joined the National Council of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes as ‘self conscious nationalist Jews’.10 It was only when Nazi Germany began meddling in the Balkans that anti-Semitism, as one historian put it,‘crept into the Yugoslav’.11 Racial chauvinism became especially potent in Croatia, the most fractious region of the kingdom. But even there, by the mid-1930s radical nationalists like the Ustasha movement had been marginalised. Most Ustasha leaders, including Ante Pavelić, had fled to Fascist Italy. Very few Croatian Jews could have foreseen the tragedy that would engulf their community in the spring of 1941.

  In Sarajevo, Jews prospered – as metalworkers, tanners, doctors. Sometime in the 1580s, they built their first synagogue, Il Kal Grande. In the mid-1600s Rabbi Samuel Baruch established the beautiful Jewish cemetery in Kovacici. For centuries, these Bosnian Jews survived and prospered. But in 1940, the Yugoslavian government passed ‘Numerus Clausus’ laws to restrict Jewish enrolment in schools and universities. The intent was to please Hitler’s Germany, an aggressive trading partner with a rapacious interest inYugoslavia’s natural resources. Then came the catastrophe of May 1941. On 16 April, German troops tramped through the streets of Sarajevo. That day, they ransacked then demolished every one of the city’s eight synagogues. They plundered sacred books, silver, entire libraries and sacred manuscripts. By the summer of 1942, the old Jewish communities in Bosnia had vanished. Any Jews who survived the German onslaught had escaped to the mountains and joined partisan units led by Josip Broz (Tito). One of his closest advisors, Moshe Pijade, was a Bosnian Jew.12

  On 12 April, even before the Yugoslav army had surrendered, Hitler issued a directive dividing Yugoslavia into German and Italian spheres of influence. He then hacked the Balkan Peninsula into territorial morsels and divided them between Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria. In occupied Serbia, Wehrmacht commander Heinrich Danckelmann appointed a ‘quisling’, General Milan Nedić, the former minister of the army and navy who had been sacked by Prince Paul in November 1940. Nedić was backed by the Serbian fascist ZBOR movement and its military wing, the Srpski dobrovoljački korpu, which had for some time courted the German Reich. The main beneficiary of the German occupation would be a then little-known Croatian nationalist called Ante Pavelić and his Ustasha movement. The Ustasha militia, modelled on the German SS and Italian Blackshirts, would become the vanguard agents of a spasm of mass murder that in many important respects prefigured the escalation of the German war against the Jews that began in the occupied Soviet Union that summer. The Balkan genocides have rarely been discussed by historians of the German Holocaust. And yet Croatian nationalists had been especially responsive to radical chauvinist ideas that had been hatched and incubated in Germany.

  After the creation of Yugoslavia in 1921, many Croatians resented Serbian domination of the new federated kingdom. Tensions between Serbs and Croatians steadily grew more intense. On 20 June 1928, during a parliamentary session, a Serbian deputy of the Radical Party assassinated two representatives of the Croatian Peasant Party and wounded three others. One was Stjepan Radić, the most charismatic of the Croatian leaders who died of his wounds six weeks later. This shocking event, it was said, ‘plunged all of Croatia into indescribable agitation’ – and led to the foundation of a Croatian terrorist faction the Ustasha (meaning ‘uprising’) by Ante Pavelić, a former lawyer who represented the minuscule separatist Croatian Party of the Right in the Yugoslav parliament. Described by an American intelligence agent as an ‘extremist even in his youth … quarrelsome … sulky’, Pavelić revered Mussolini and adopted his histrionic mannerisms.13 In 1929 when the Serb King Alexander abolished the 1921 constitution and turned Yugoslavia into a royal dictatorship, Pavelić fled first to Vienna and then Italy accompanied by a cadre of Ustasha men, dedicated to creating an independent Croatia by any means, including terror. With Mussolini’s blessing, the Ustasha exiles set up military-style training camps in Italy and at Janka Puszta in Hungary, where they joined forces with Macedonian and Bulgarian nationalists to plot the downfall of King Alexa
nder and his bastard state. On 9 October 1934 an Ustasha gunman who had been trained at Janka Puszta, assassinated King Alexander and the unlucky French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou during a state visit to Marseilles. Pavelić was naturally delighted by the success of the mission, but the international hue and cry it provoked severely embarrassed Mussolini who had no interest in upsetting either the French or the Yugoslavian governments. He had the Ustasha leaders arrested. While Pavelić was incarcerated in a succession of comfortable villas in Sienna and Florence, the Italians banished Ustasha rank and file to the bleak and windswept Lipari Islands.

  As a political force, Pavelić and the Ustasha might then have simply disappeared into political obscurity. In the mid-1930s, Mussolini began to flex his political muscles in the Adriatic and once again began cultivating Croatian radicals like Pavelić, hoping to use them to undermine Yugoslavia. But the quarrelsome Pavelić was his own worst enemy. He squabbled unendingly with other Croatian nationalists, accusing them of being in league with Serbs, Jews and other ‘enemies of the Croats’. This habit did not impress his Italian hosts. Like many fissiparous ultranationalist factions in the 1930s, the Ustasha looked increasingly marginal. But as Hitler plunged Europe into war after 1939, Pavelić’s fortunes began to change. Hitler’s attack on Poland inspired Italian Foreign Minister Ciano to raise the ‘Yugoslav question’ again. He persuaded Mussolini that Yugoslavia posed the same threat to Italy as Poland allegedly had to Germany. Hitler weighed in too, urging the excessively proud Italian dictator that ‘Italy should grasp the first favourable opportunity to dismember Yugoslavia and occupy Croatia and Dalmatia’.14 Hitler’s statement clearly indicates the destruction of Yugoslavia was on his agenda well before he struck in the spring of 1941. With the Balkans thus set out before him as a prize, Mussolini decided once more to renew his acquaintance with his Ustasha friends.

  Ciano now held a series of meetings with Pavelić; he later described the temperamental Croatian, rather oddly, as ‘an aggressive, calm man’. Naturally Pavelić had no interest in having his homeland occupied by a foreign power. So Ciano mollified him by proposing that the Ustasha, backed by Italian troops, return to Croatia and proclaim an independent state, forcing the break up of Yugoslavia.15 But Mussolini’s Axis partner did not appreciate this Italian meddling in the Balkans. Hitler hoped to avoid providing the British with another excuse to get more deeply involved in the region. So Ribbentrop twisted Italian arms and persuaded Ciano to leave Yugoslavia alone. It was this heavy-handed Axis ‘diplomacy’ that fuelled Mussolini’s intemperate response to the German seizure of the Romanian oilfields that led in a few short months to the German destruction of Yugoslavia.

  Now in April, with the Balkans in the German bag, Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop (who had opposed Hitler’s plan to invade the Soviet Union and fallen badly from grace) spotted an opportunity to mend his reputation by creating a new state on the Slovakian model. He dispatched a message to the German Consul General in Zagreb ordering him to inform Croatian leaders ‘that we would provide for an independent Croatia within the framework of a New Order for Europe’.16 Ribbentrop began casting around for a suitable puppet to lead his new state. Pavelić was not his first choice. He shared Hitler’s disdain for fractious extremists and, unlike other European ultranationalist factions, the Ustasha had hitherto received minimal support from Germany. The pig-headed Pavelić was viewed as a creature of the Italians. Well-informed German diplomats favoured instead the moderate Vladko Maček. But Ribbentrop was aware that his rival Alfred Rosenberg backed Maček. To follow Rosenberg’s lead would have been out of the question. Maček, in any case, refused to have anything to do with a fabricated ‘Croatian’ state and fled to his farm pleading ‘incorrigible pacifism’. So Ribbentrop had no choice but to swing behind Pavelić and the Ustasha.

  So it was that SS-Brigadeführer Edmund Veesenmayer, representing the ‘Dienstelle Ribbentrop’ and already an expert ‘manufacturer’ of client states such as Slovakia, arrived in Zagreb on 10 April. He was accompanied by Ustasha leader and a former Austro-Hungarian lieutenant colonel Slavko Kvaternik. A few hours before the first German troops rolled into the Croatian capital to a tumultuous welcome, Veesenmayer took Kvaternik to the local radio station, sat him down in front of a microphone and jointly proclaimed a ‘free, independent Croatia’ – ‘Nezavisna drzava Hrvatska’ – usually referred to as the NDH. In his first report, Veesenmayer declared:

  the proclamation of a free, independent Croatia was made; this fact called forth tremendous rejoicing and the immediate decorating of [Zagreb] with flags … The faith and trust of the entire Croatian people in the Führer and his Wehrmacht … is moving … I have not committed myself in any way as regards the interpretation of the concept of freedom.17

  In other words, Veesenmayer and his boss Ribbentrop would be the real metteurs en scène of Croatian statehood.18

  Ribbentrop’s machinations pleased Hitler who had previously assumed that Croatia would fall into the hands of the Italians. Now he could add another puppet state to his collection. For his part Mussolini, still smarting from his Greek disgrace, had good reason to hope that Pavelić, who had enjoyed his largesse for so long, could still be of use. He sent him to Trieste, on the border with Croatia, where a few days later he rendezvoused with Ustasha men who had been held on the Lipari Islands. The Italians provided buses and a few rickety cars and the motley Ustasha crew drove south and crossed the border into independent Croatia. As Pavelić and his cronies approached Zagreb, a delegation led by Kvaternik and Veesenmayer waited to greet the new Croatian head of state. In the early hours of 15 April, under cover of darkness, the Ustasha government slipped quietly into Zagreb, at the head of a few hundred paramilitaries kitted out in Italian uniforms.

  That same day, the elderly German Plenipotentiary General in Croatia, Edmund Glaise von Horstenau, and the German envoy Siegfried Kasche presented their diplomatic bona fides to the Croatian leader, known as the Poglavnik – a title with the same connotations as Führer. Although the NDH, as Jonathan Steinberg writes, ‘lacked everything’ including enough cars to drive its Cabinet members to meetings, Pavelić shrewdly inaugurated his rule by appointing a head of propaganda, Vilko Rieger, a journalist who had studied for his doctorate in Berlin. Pavelić told him to ‘Consider as friends those I consider friends, and as enemies those I consider enemies’. Dr Rieger lavished his modest departmental budget on conjuring up a conspicuously Catholic leadership cult. The Poglavnik, Rieger proclaimed, was ‘the most ideal man of contemporary Croatia, since in the eyes of the people He is their saviour and redeemer’.19 This was rhetoric all too reminiscent of Josef Goebbels. Although Mussolini had hoped to use Pavelić to dominate ‘independent Croatia’, Italy would end up Hitler’s frustrated junior partner in the Balkans – and the Poglavnik and his henchmen the willing tools of German-inspired terror. Rieger wrote later (on the eleventh anniversary of Hitler’s seizure of power), ‘The Ustasha movement is the only movement in this part of Europe that according to its programme and activities is so close to German National Socialism’.20 The national policy of the Ustasha puppet regime would be to build a mono-ethnic state dominated by the Roman Catholic Church but respecting the historic faith of the Bosnian Muslims to secure their allegiance. The message for Serbs, Jews and gypsies was plain. The Ustasha regime spewed out a steady stream of political decrees that embodied a brutally plain maxim: ‘only Croats rule always and everywhere.’

  In Croatia, radical nationalist ideology had been nourished both by what Michael Burleigh calls a ‘crude nativism’ that claimed that anyone not descended from a peasant family was ‘not Croat at all, but a foreign immigrant’, and by academic pseudoscience.21 In the aftermath of the First World War, the Croatian intelligentsia violently rejected ‘Yugoslavism’. ‘Yugoslavists’ advocated a kind of Balkan melting pot in which the super-heated force of modernity would dissolve the old ethnic and religious barriers. Academics and government officials joined forces to develop a radical s
ocial policy that they believed would bring forth the new ‘Yugoslav man’. They embraced the full armoury of modernist social engineering from rapid urbanisation to eugenics.

  Croatian scholars took an altogether different line. Unlike Serbia, which had thrown off the shackles of empire in the nineteenth century, the Croatian lands remained locked inside the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of the First World War. Croatian nationalism emerged against a backdrop of tremendous ethnic diversity and Croatian nationalists looked for any distinctiveness that gave them an edge over their neighbours. The father of Croatian separatism was Ante Starčević, a philosopher and theologian who founded the Croatian Party of Rights. A prolific writer of popular pseudoscientific books, journalist and political agitator, Starčević insisted that Serbs at best disguised Croats or, at worst, an inferior and degenerate race descended from nomadic ‘Vlach’ shepherds. He promoted what would become a persistent theme in Croat racism: the idea that Bosnian Muslims, the Bosniaks, possessed the purest Croatian bloodlines. This was, even on its own terms, nonsense: the Bosnian Muslims were Slavs just like the Croats and Serbians and had no special claim to ethnic purity. In any case, Starčević’s claim was not intended to flatter Muslims, who resented the ‘pure Croatian’ appellation anyway because it implied that the Bosnian heartlands, to which they claimed a vague kind of right, were, by default, an integral part of Croatia. But for Catholic Croatians, these fantasies of ethnic singularity had insidious popular appeal, at least in part because Starčević and his followers were unaffiliated ‘gentlemen scholars’ rather than elite university academics. This populist ethnic advocacy soon found its political champions in Josip Frank’s Pure Party of Rights and the Croatian Peasant Party, led by future Croatian martyr Stjepan Radić. On the streets of Zagreb, party activists began attacking Serbs, chanting slogans picked up from Starčević’s pamphlets and books.