Hitler's Foreign Executioners

by Christopher Hale

  At the end of the meeting, however, Hitler refused to make an immediate decision; he knew that the Croatian government would fight tooth and nail to resist any suggestion of Bosniak autonomy. Hitler had no interest in upsetting the hitherto pliant Poglavnik Ante Pavelić. But Himmler did not regard Hitler’s prevarication as a serious setback – and by January 1943 active discussions were taking place between the SS and Siegfried Kasche, the pro-Pavelić German envoy in Zagreb. Himmler had little respect for Pavelić, who was after all supposed to be a client ruler. On 13 January, a second conference took place at Rustenburg – and this time Hitler agreed to permit the formation of the new Bosnian Muslim SS division. ‘I hope to reach out to a people,’ Himmler wrote to the German Plenipotentiary Glaise von Horstenau, ‘who stand apart from the Croatian state and have a long tradition of attachment to the Reich, which we can utilize militarily.’ By ‘the Reich’, Himmler meant in this case the defunct Hapsburg Empire. He believed erroneously that the Bosniaks had served in the Austro-Hungarian army. He would use the very same argument later that year when he began recruiting Ukrainians in the old Austrian province of Galicia.

  The German SS representatives based in Zagreb now had to placate Pavelić, who was violently opposed to any ‘autonomist’ concession to Bosnian Muslims. Himmler should have understood the Croatian dilemma: if you arm any group of separatists, you risk turning them into a nationalist militia – and the Poglavnik desperately needed Bosnia–Herzegovina to remain part of the NDH. Glaise von Horstenau warned Himmler: ‘[the Croatians] saw this as a dangerous blow against their false principle of a national unified Croatian state.’ To soothe Pavelić, Hitler dispatched von Ribbentrop, who it will be recalled had supported Croatian independence in 1941. The Foreign Minister ordered Kasche to go back to Pavelić and insist that ‘the enemy has to be dealt with as forcefully as possible. It would be in the best interest of the common war effort that this German-led division be formed. I hope that that the Poglavnik will agree.’ To Ribbentrop’s great irritation, the Poglavnik certainly did not agree – and he may well have been encouraged to resist Ribbentrop’s appeal by Kasche himself, who was an ardent admirer of the murderous Ustasha regime. Vjekoslav Vrančić, one of Pavelić’s closest advisors, told a Muslim friend: ‘We cannot give a No answer to the German request, but we can make it impossible for them to succeed. Allowing the Germans to establish a Bosnian division in Bosnia … would be the same as losing Bosnia.’28 Pavelić now made a counter proposal: a Croatian SS division that would recruit both Muslims and Catholic Croatians, but have Croatian officers and use Serbo-Croat as the language of command. The Germans refused; discussions again bogged down. Ribbentrop, sensing another humiliating impasse, beat a hasty retreat.

  Only Hitler could break the deadlock. Croatia was in principle a sovereign nation state and an ally of the Reich. But Hitler had been unimpressed by Croatian soldiers both on the Eastern Front and as partisan fighters in their own backyard. So he now insisted that the SS proceed immediately to form a Muslim division that had no connection with the discredited ‘Croatian’ militias. In February, Phleps flew to Zagreb to hammer out details with the Croatian government, represented by Dr Mladen Lorković, the Foreign Minister. Phleps was astonished to discover that Lorković had evidently made a decision to fight Himmler every inch of the way. Now he would agree only to a ‘Ustasha SS division’ – the only concession Lorković was prepared to make was to adopt regional names for regiments, one of which would be called ‘Bosna’. Phleps turned Lorković down flat and retreated to seek advice from Himmler, who refused to contemplate any compromise with the Ustasha government. So Phleps returned to Zagreb to meet Pavelić himself, who turned up accompanied by his tame deputy Dr Džafer-beg Kulenović, who declared himself a ‘Croat of Muslim Faith’. Pavelić again refused to budge, and Phleps, who did not hide his astonishment that the Poglavnik still dared to resist the Reichsführer-SS, stormed out of the meeting, slamming the door behind him. In March, Himmler seemed to blink. After more discussions (this time without Phleps) Himmler agreed to permit a Croatian SS Volunteer Division, to be recruited by the Croatian government jointly with Waffen-SS, but with German as ‘the language of command’. It appeared that Pavelić had won.

  How then did Himmler finally end up with the Bosnian Muslim division that he had wanted all along? The answer is simple: he brushed aside the agreement with the Croatian government and ordered Phleps to begin a recruitment campaign in Bosnia that would exclusively entice Muslims. And it was at this juncture, in the spring of 1943, that Berger and Himmler turned for help to the Grand Mufti. They had chosen their moment well. The Grand Mufti was still locked in a battle with his rival in Berlin, Rashid Ali el-Gaylani, and had been bitterly disappointed by the German withdrawal from North Africa and the recall of the Rauff Kommando. He yearned to take action against the Jews and their purported allies, the British. He was well aware that the hated British had backed Tito’s communist partisans in the Balkans – so the new SS division offered a means to strike at two mortal enemies on the same battleground. On 24 March, Berger and Phleps met the Mufti at his villa in Berlin. A week later, on 30 March, he was driven to Tempelh of Airport to board a special flight to Sarajevo. The Mufti’s Bosnian crusade had begun. In a sermon delivered on the eve of his departure, he preached: ‘The hearts of all Muslims must today go out to our Islamic brothers in Bosnia who are forced to endure a tragic fate. They are being persecuted by the Serbian and communist bandits, who receive support from England and the Soviet Union.’29

  In Bosnia, the Grand Mufti was treated like a Sultan. When he swept into Sarajevo, his hosts installed him in the sumptuous palace of the former Austrian governor. It was inside the palace that on 28 June 1914, Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand had expired from wounds inflicted by Bosnian assassin Gavrilo Princip. ‘The Mufti was an extremely impressive personality, ’SS officer Balthasar Kirchner recalled. ‘His reddish blond beard, steady motions [sic], expressive eyes and charismatic facial features gave him more the look of a philosopher than a revolutionary.’30 The Mufti’s bodyguard, a Bedouin, appeared never to sleep, eat or rest. According to the German Consul Dr Winkler: ‘The faithful recognized [the Mufti] as a true Muslim; he was honoured as a descendant of the prophets. Friends from his theological studies in Cairo and pilgrimage to Mecca [the Haj] welcomed him.’ Kirchner recalled that the Mufti was ‘quite reserved’ with respect to ‘fighting Bolshevism’ – ‘His main enemies were the Jewish settlers in Palestine and the English’. He had not perhaps completely grasped that the Germans regarded the Bolshevik and the Jew as virtually coterminous. In Sarajevo’s main mosque, the Mufti delivered a sermon and urged Muslims to support Germany and ‘take weapons from them’. His grand tour was managed by the SS, but el-Husseini was determined to further his own cause. He was committed, Glaise von Horstenau later explained to Himmler, to the establishment of ‘a United States of Islam extending all the way from Morocco to Bosnia’ and the destruction of Zionism. His counsel to ‘take their weapons’ shows that he hoped that SS recruitment of Muslims would further his own Jihad just as much as Hitler’s crusade.

  On 12 May, following his triumphant grand tour, the Mufti met Himmler at SS headquarters in Berlin and made a number of astonishingly naïve proposals. He wanted agreement that the mission of the new SS division must be to protect the Muslim families ‘of the volunteers’. The division must therefore never be deployed outside Bosnia–Herzegovina. The officers must be Muslims and the SS should not poach men from Hadziefendic’s Muslim Legion, which should be left intact.31 Himmler listened politely but refused to make a decision. However, on 19 May, he signed a formal agreement with the Mufti that guaranteed that Imams would be appointed and charged with the ideological training of recruits. This implied that the Bosniak recruits would not receive ‘political’ instruction from SS officers, but from the Mufti’s own clergy.32 As we will see, Himmler would exploit el-Husseini’s Imams for his own purposes. As to the Mufti’s specific proposals, he
left it to Berger to officially reject all of them. The Mufti was no longer essential. His job had been to play the role of figurehead: he was the barker, not the ringmaster.

  Although the Mufti had impressed the Bosnian Muslim community, the campaign to recruit Bosniaks got off to a poor start. By mid-April, just 8,000 men had come forward. Berger had been hoping for numbers well above 30,000. Appraised of this mortifying result, Himmler was at last forced to eat humble pie. He immediately flew to Zagreb to announce that Catholic Croatians could be accepted as recruits, provided that the numbers of Muslims exceeded that of Catholics by a proportion of ten to one. Even this proved hard to achieve: nearly 3,000 Catholics were eventually inducted, which made nonsense of the ratio Himmler had demanded. Although the SS chief had on balance won the battle, the frequent renaming of the SS division made clear that the recruitment had been a strategic fudge: the Kroatische SS-Freiwilligen-Division (Croatian SS-Volunteer Division) was amended to Kroatische SS-Freiwilligen-Gebirgs-Division (Croatian SS-Volunteer Mountain Division), then the SS-Freiwilligen-Bosnien-Herzegowina-Gebirgs-Division (Kroatien) or 13. SS-Freiwilligen-Bosnien-Herzegowina-Gebirgs-Division (Kroatien). It was only in May 1944 that the Germans settled on 13. WaffenGebirgs-Division der SS ‘Handschar’ (kroatische Nr. 1) – the 13th SS Mountain Division ‘Handschar’. Recruits took an oath of loyalty to both Hitler and Ante Pavelić as head of the Croatian state. The Muslim SS division would never shed its titular link to Hitler’s puppet state.

  Smarting from his battle with Pavelić, Himmler was all the more determined to puff the Bosniak credentials of this new division. Handschar derives from Handzar (Turkish hancar) – a Bosnian fighting knife. The basic uniform would be field grey with special collar patch showing a scimitar (the Handschar) twinned with a swastika. The national arm shield, on the other hand, used the Croatian red and blue checkerboard. But as if to distract attention Himmler ordered recruits to wear, instead of the usual field caps, a most picturesque kind of headgear: a fez, made of crushed felt which bore both the Hoheitszeichen (German eagle and swastika) and the SS skull and crossbones, complete with a tassel. (In fact two kinds of fez were issued: one field grey, the other a dark red.)33 These highly visible, mandatory fezzes loudly proclaimed the division’s Muslim ethos and identity and at the same time its allegiance to the Reich. To please the Mufti, Himmler also guaranteed that Muslim recruits would enjoy a diet that conformed to Muslim dietary laws and, crucially, that they would have their own divisional Imams.

  The recruits were not quite Islamic warriors. According to German officer Wilhelm Ebeling (in an unpublished memoir cited by historian George Lepre), ‘most were dirt poor and illiterate … It proved difficult to record their personal information for many didn’t know how old they were, so we had to estimate. Some had several wives. In these cases, it had to be determined which wife was to receive the man’s military benefits.’ According to another SS officer, tuberculosis, epilepsy and other serious illnesses were endemic and so ‘a large number of the candidates could not be accepted’. Erich Braun remembered that they ‘arrived in clothing that was simply indescribable. When they received their new SS uniforms, they were overjoyed … Some of the men took their newly-issued uniforms and sold them on the black market. They would then report in the next day as if they were new.’34 On his return from Bosnia, the Mufti had assured Himmler that many Muslims had served in the Austrian army. But as recruitment got under way, it became all too clear to SS recruiters that most of those volunteers who claimed to have military experience were largely decrepit. This shortfall in officer class recruits had two consequences. The Germans had to promote a larger proportion of Catholic Croatians than Bosnian Muslims – and Berger was forced to transfer unusually high numbers of German and ethnic German officers borrowed from the SS ‘Prinz Eugen’ to form the officer corps of the new division.

  Himmler had assured the Mufti and other Muslim leaders in Bosnia, as well as the Croatian government, that the ‘Handschar’ would be trained and deployed in Croatia; to be exact, at the Zemun campon the Duna River, south-east of Novi Sad. But on 6 June 1943, Himmler reneged on his promise – a decision that would have fateful consequences. By now Phleps had returned to the depleted SS ‘Prinz Eugen’ and another Austrian, SS-Standartenführer Herbert von Obwurzer had been appointed to command the SS ‘Handschar’; he would later take over command of the 15th Latvian SS Division. This tall, overbearing and choleric Austrian was an experienced ‘bandit hunter’ and had no doubt that his task was to turn the Bosnian Muslims into ruthless anti-partisan fighters. German occupation authorities had reported with mounting concern a steady drift of young Bosniaks to Yugoslavian insurgent forces. So to ring fence the Muslim recruits, von Obwurzer urged Berger to move the ‘Handschar’ out of harm’s way. One might have expected the Waffen-SS leadership to transfer the division to a German training camp, such as the one at Wildflecken, near Frankfurt. Instead, Berger ordered von Obwurzer to move his SS division to south central France. In the rolling green hills and villages of the mid-Pyrenees, German SS officers like Gerhard Kretschmer and Anton Wolf would hammer these mountain boys of the Balkans into shape as SS men.

  Most German officers assigned to the ‘Handschar’ despised the young Bosnian men who had enlisted in the elite Waffen-SS. Relations between the German commanders had also become fractious. On 23 July, von Obwurzer arrived in the French town of Mende and immediately began rowing with his fellow Austrian Erich Braun. Himmler disliked Obwurzer and news of the rift forced his hand. His first choice as a replacement was Hermann Fegelein, who had led the SS cavalry into the Pripet Marshes in July 1941. But he eventually settled on an obscure Wehrmacht colonel: Karl-Gustav Sauberzweig. It was a distinctly odd choice. Sauberzweig was a Prussian of the old school, who had lost an eye in the First World War and, by the time he assumed command of the SS ‘Handschar’, was a physical wreck. He spoke no Serbo-Croat, had never tried to learn any and had never served in the Balkans or with a ‘Gebirgs’ (mountain) division. But he had a reputation for efficiency (his nickname was Schnellchen – speedy) and, according to reports, much liked by his officers and men. On 9 August, Sauberzweig arrived in Mende to take over command of the ‘Handschar’. It was said that he called the Bosnians ‘his children’. But Sauberzweig’s new military family would never be a happy one.

  In the meantime, Berger had flown to Zagreb in an effort to acquire more recruits for the ‘Handschar’, which remained under strength. At a meeting with the Foreign Minister Lorković, Berger insisted that all Muslims be released from the Croatian armed forces to serve in the ‘Handschar’. The forceful SS recruitment chief got his way and 3,000 new recruits were soon boarding trains for training in France. Berger’s bullying left Pavelić reeling. In Sarajevo, Muslim community leaders complained bitterly that the perfidious Waffen-SS had not just stripped farms and villages of their young men, but dispatched them to another faraway country. Now their homes and families were in grave danger – for by the summer of 1943, the unrelenting and vicious war between Germans and partisans and between Chetniks and communists had turned the former Yugoslavia into an abattoir.

  The murderous activities of Phleps’ SS ‘Prinz Eugen’ made matters a great deal worse – as even Himmler would belatedly acknowledge. That July, a ‘Prinz Eugen’ battalion entered the Muslim village of Kosutica where they discovered the remains of a dead SS man. Revenge followed swiftly and without mercy. The SS men, all ethnic Germans from the Banat, pushed and shoved the people of Kosutica into the village square then opened fire with machine guns, killing forty women, children and old men.

  Some of the dead were, as it turned out, the fathers, wives, daughters and sons of the men now being trained in France.35

  Rumours about the atrocities soon reached the men of the SS ‘Handschar’. They had sworn oaths of loyalty to Hitler and the Croatian government, but SS commander Phleps’ ‘root-and-branch’ tactics had in return robbed them of loved ones. Himmler shed a few crocodile tears and lectured Phle
ps on ‘the old discipline and training’. But for the German occupying forces, reprisal was a military norm. Soon after the Kosutica atrocity, Phleps killed at least 3,000 unarmed civilians in villages along the Dalmatian coast – and this time he was careful to report them to his SS masters as ‘enemy dead’.

  In France, emotional turmoil among the SS recruits put enormous pressure on the new Imams. It will be recalled that the Mufti’s agreement with Himmler obligated the Germans to appoint and train a divisional clergy. This had advantages for both parties. Most importantly, Himmler could rely on the Mufti to use the Imams as ideological educators, not just guardians of faith. Part of the job description was to ram home a simple message: ‘kill all Jews’. Himmler regarded the ‘Handschar’ Imams as ‘trustees of Islam’ who would turn the raw Bosnian recruits into ‘good soldiers and SS men’.36 The Wehrmacht was served by Christian chaplains, but Himmler rejected any such pastoral care for Waffen-SS recruits. Himmler was attracted to a mishmash of pagan faiths and regarded Christianity as a ‘Jewish’ creed that would undermine ‘hard’ SS values. He professed himself a Gottgläubiger – a ‘believer in God’ – and many SS recruits followed his example. But he took a different position on Islam. In a long oration delivered to both German and Bosnian SS men in January 1944, Himmler elaborated on the close affinity between Islam and National Socialism:

  In the past two centuries, Germany, its government and leaders were friends of Islam on the basis of conviction, not opportunism or political expediency … almighty God – you say Allah – … sent the Führer to the tortured and suffering people of Europe … It was the Führer who first freed Europe and later will free the whole world from the Jews, this enemy of our country … They are also your enemies for the Jew has always been your enemy.37