Terror in the Balkans: German Armies and Partisan Warfare

Abstract

Ben Shepherd’s new study on German army counterinsurgency in Yugoslavia is a welcome addition to his earlier work, War in the Wild East (2004) on similar operations in Belarus. His main interest in both books is the motivation of German officers and troops engaged in brutal counterinsurgency operations. Shepherd thus works within the broader questions concerning Wehrmacht complicity in Nazi atrocities more generally and, more specifically, individual perpetrator motivations within the context of the war. For Yugoslavia, as with Belarus, Shepherd examines the problem from the perspective of divisional command records, which include operational reports, but he also incorporates other good finds including officers’ letters back to Germany. At the same time, he is mindful of the backgrounds and mentalities of senior Wehrmacht officers of German and Austrian origin who faced guerrilla war in the Balkans. Shepherd argues, as do Isabel Hull and others, that German army brutality in World War II was the product of traditions extending to the imperial period, wherein German units in Africa and then Belgium combatted real and imagined resistance with ruthless reprisals. He also joins a host of scholars in pointing to the officer corps’ conservative traditions, its bitterness over the German defeat in 1918, its devil’s bargain with Nazism in 1934, and its complicity in atrocities against Polish civilians in 1939. Regarding Yugoslavia after the Axis invasion and breakup of the kingdom after April 1941, Shepherd notes that Adolf Hitler’s alliance with the Ustasha regime in the Independent State of Croatia placed Wehrmacht units throughout Yugoslavia at great disadvantage. The Ustasha’s signature brutality against Croatia’s Serb minority triggered bitter Serb resistance throughout Yugoslavia as well as a growing Communist Partisan movement under Tito. The military demands of the lengthening war against the Soviet Union, meanwhile, meant that Wehrmacht units assigned to counterinsurgency in Serbia and Croatia were substandard.