Terror in the Balkans (47 page)

Hungarian offi cer corps were opening up before the Great War were

more likely to be susceptible to the prejudices upon which National

Socialist ideology would eventually build. Such prejudices could affect

their prosecution of counterinsurgency also. One of the most pivotal

phases in the process that shaped offi cers’ worldview was the Great War.

During its course, offi cers underwent experiences which could be both

varied and brutalizing.

And there is one fi nal respect in which an offi cer’s experiences earlier

in life may have hardened him particularly. Counterinsurgency warfare,

it should be remembered, was widely seen as a particularly thankless

and unglamorous form of soldiering. A German army offi cer would

likely have felt additionally frustrated by the fact that it emphatically was

not the kind of warfare that would have enabled him to demonstrate the

technocratic, operational prowess for which the German military was

renowned. His resentment at having instead been “dumped in a back-

water” would probably have been considerable.31 Those offi cers who, at

some time, had served in technocratic or elite branches of the army may

Conclusion
253

well have found the experience particularly galling, frustrating, and in

turn brutalizing.32

The radical offi cers featured in this particular study, it appears, were

not radicalized beyond the norm by their social class. On this score

there are no startling contrasts with their less extreme colleagues. There

is certainly every reason to suppose that offi cers’ middle-class origins

helped them to imbibe harsh ideological and military attitudes. Yet there

is nothing to suggest that those origins were what took radical offi cers

that decisive
further
step towards
extreme
ruthlessness.33 Similarly, most of the offi cers featured in this study, however ruthlessly they conducted

themselves, served at some time or other in technical or elite branches of

the particular army to which they belonged.

More decisive, perhaps, were the experiences offi cers underwent dur-

ing the Great War. Every European battlefront of the Great War infl u-

enced offi cers in ways that could mark them well into their lives. The

lengthier an offi cer’s service in a particular theater, the more deeply it

might mark him. But what seems yet more apparent among the individu-

als in this study is that, of all such theaters, it was the East that could

subject offi cers to a particularly potent combination of brutalizing expe-

riences. The reasons why this may have been so are numerous. In the

East, men underwent not only savage fi ghting—against frontline troops

or insurgents—and miserable environmental hardship. They also had

fi rsthand experience of groups who, under the Third Reich, would be

singled out for special contempt or hatred—Jews, Bolsheviks, and east-

ern Slavs. For these reasons, Eastern Europe during the Great War and

its immediate aftermath was arguably an especially potent incubator of

the ideological harshness National Socialism would come to exploit in

its military servants a quarter of a century later.34 One might expect, then,

that offi cers who served in the East during the Great War would behave

particularly ferociously, in certain circumstances, during World War II.

Among such circumstances were those that were encountered by offi cers

who found themselves waging a brutal, protracted, and often fruitless coun-

terinsurgency campaign, amid hostile terrain and a population of dubious

loyalties, with largely substandard units at their own disposal, against a

254
terror in the balk ans

resourceful, effective, and sometimes savagely ruthless opponent. Offi cers

ferocity was likely to be heightened if that opponent was both Slavic—even

if southern Slavs per se stood higher on the Nazi racial-ideological scale

than their eastern brethren—and Communist. All these conditions applied

to the Wehrmacht’s campaign in Yugoslavia during World War II.

It follows from this, then, that offi cers’ experience of the East during the

Great War was likely to increase the brutality with which they responded

to such conditions during World War II—even if they were serving in the

southeast during World War II, rather than in the East proper.

Thus, the exceptionally ruthless General Hinghofer spent a partic-

ularly lengthy, uninterrupted stretch of the Great War on the eastern

front; in this, he contrasted with his fellow divisional commanders in

the Serbia of 1941. In the NDH, more radical divisional commanders

such as Neidholt, Zellner, and Eglseer all spent signifi cant amounts of

time in the East during the Great War. The less radical commanders

operating alongside them—Fortner and Dippold—spent none. In the

Soviet Union, similarly, General Lendle of the 221st Security Division—

a relatively enlightened divisional commander who spent no time on the

eastern front during the Great War—was outdone for ruthlessness by his

predecessor in 1941, General Pfl ugbeil, and by his neighbor in 1942, Gen-

eral Barton. Both commanders, again, spent considerable time on the

eastern front between 1914 and 1918.35

It would be wrong, particularly given the small number of offi cers

considered here, to judge such matters sweepingly. Soldiers of the Cen-

tral powers were not always repelled and brutalized by their encounter

with the eastern front and its peoples. Even if they were, this did not

mean that offi cers who experienced the eastern front during the Great

War would inevitably conduct themselves particularly ferociously in the

confl agration of a quarter of a century later.36 By the same token, the bru-

talizing effect of lengthy service in the trenches of the western front, or

in another theater, should not be underestimated either. But the pattern

that emerges among the radical offi cers whom
this
study has examined

suggests that this group was particularly brutalized by its experience

of the eastern front. And the case of General Hinghofer suggests that

such experience could be even more brutalizing if it was of particularly

lengthy duration and exposed an offi cer to insurgency.

Conclusion
255

Yet, though one must again be cautious with a sample of this size, the

evidence appears most striking when considering the signifi cance of

where these offi cers were born. It was Austria-Hungary, not Germany,

that experienced years of fi rsthand confrontation with Serbia in the run-

up to the Great War. It was this confrontation that, in 1914, led directly

to war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, and infused that confl ict

with particular animosity. Habsburg troops’ experience of Serbian

irregulars during 1914, the humiliating defeats in the fi eld at the hands

of the Serbian army, and the collective memory of the death march to

which Austro-Hungarian prisoners were subjected during the winter of

1915–1916 all served to exacerbate such bitterness. So too did the fact that

the exiled Serbian army remained a rallying point, for the rest of the war,

for disaffected southern Slavic soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian army—

with all the peril to the Habsburg Empire’s stability that this posed. So

too, fi nally, did the Serbian army’s central role in the autumn 1918 Balkan

campaign that led directly to Austria-Hungary’s collapse.

Austrian-born offi cers, then, were likelier than their German col-

leagues to be animated by Serbophobia. Granted, the Great War did

not make it inevitable that this hate-fi lled instinct would one day fi nd

expression in such abominations as General Boehme’s 1941 reprisal cam-

paign. After all, the occupation regime to which the Austro-Hungarians

subjected Serbia between 1916 and 1918, harsh and exploitative as it

was, was more lenient than it might have been. Yet it was not this legacy

that Boehme invoked in autumn 1941, but the more poisonous one that

preceded it. The majority of those Austrian-born offi cers receptive to

Boehme’s pitiless exhortations had not actually fought in Serbia during

the Great War. But this, apparently, mattered little; the toxic dissonance

of embittered collective memory could color their behavior anyway.

It is also distinctly possible, though the link is less clear, that the Aus-

trians’ contempt for what they perceived as brutish Serbian savagery

was part of a more general aversion to the “primitive” southern Slavs of

the Balkans. This was perhaps a distant echo of General Conrad’s con-

temptuous sentiments towards the Bosnian irregulars he encountered

between 1878 and 1882. This may well help explain why Austrian-born

offi cers, irrespective of the conditions their units faced or the duration

of their prior experience of the Yugoslav campaign, could also comport

256
terror in the balk ans

themselves with particular harshness in the NDH—perhaps especially

against its ethnic Serb inhabitants—as well as in Serbia.

The German army offi cers in this study belonged to an institution that

favored a terroristic doctrine of counterinsurgency warfare. During

World War II, German army units in Eastern and south-eastern Europe,

and their commanders, applied this doctrine extensively in response

to the resistance they faced. In time, some commanders acknowledged

the folly of pursuing it at the expense of a more measured, insightful

approach that appreciated the importance of winning hearts and minds.

But this dawning realization was never enough to overturn the basic

principles of Wehrmacht counterinsurgency warfare decisively—not

least because too many commanders continued subscribing to those

principles themselves.

But fi eld commanders did not just behave according to the collective

mind-set of their institution. Among other things, such was the nature of

the directives emanating down to them that they often enjoyed consider-

able freedom of action. The ruthless thrust of many of these directives

was unmistakable. But offi cers often chose to implement them with vary-

ing amounts of severity. The conditions in the fi eld they and their units

experienced could profoundly affect their conduct.

So too could the experiences offi cers had undergone earlier in their

lives. The years between 1914 and 1945 may not have been a second

Thirty Years’ War in every respect. But offi cers who were subjected to

the destructiveness of its earlier years could be enduringly affected by

the experience. It seems that the legacy of those years was still mark-

ing offi cers’ behavior, in sometimes immensely brutal ways, more than a

quarter of a century later. Investigating this phenomenon, through both

this study and others, is important for a fuller understanding of what

motivated the agents of the Third Reich.

Appendixes

Abbreviations

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

a p p e n d i x a

Source References

for Featured Offi cers

The full set of offi cer sample data that was obtained from the sources that follow is accessible via http://www.gcu.ac.uk/gsbs/staff/drbenshepherd/.

y u g o s l av i a - b a s e d d i v i s i o n a l c o m m a n d e r s

Heinrich Borowski:
Militärishe Sammlungen, entry for Heinrich Borowski; United States War Department,
Histories of Two Hundred and Fifty-One Divisions of the German Army

Which Participated in the War (1914–1918)
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Offi ce, 1920), 33–35, 654–656.

Benignus Dippold:
RH7, Heeresgeneralkartei. File on Benignus Dippold; PERS 6, fi le on Benignus Dippold. United States War Department,
Histories of Two Hundred and Fifty-One Divisions of the German Army Which Participated in the War (1914–1918)
, 101–103; Hans Jäger,
Das K. B. 19. Infanterie-Regiment König Viktor Emmanuel III. von Italien
(Munich; Schick, 1930),
passim.

Karl Eglseer:
RH7, Heeresgeneralkartei. File on Karl Eglseer; KA Vienna, Offi ziers-Belohnungsanträge. Karton 328, Nr. 249.501. Karl Eglseer; KA Vienna. Nachlaß, Karl Egl-

seer. Lebenslauf; Edmund Glaise von Horstenau et al.,
Österreich-Ungarns letzter Krieg
, vols. 1–7 (Vienna: Verlag der Militärwissenschaftlichen Mitteilungen, 1930–1938), order-of-battle entry for 87th Infantry Regiment, Vol. I, pp. 62–91; index entries for 87th Infantry Regiment and commanding formations, Vols. I and VII.

Johann Fortner:
BA-MA, MSg 9. File on Johann Fortner; United States War Department,
Histories of Two Hundred and Fifty-One Divisions of the German Army Which Participated
259

260
Appendix A

in the War (1914–1918)
, 101–103;
Das K.B. 5. Infanterie-Regiment Großherzog Ernst Ludwig
von Hessen
(Munich: Schick, 1929; no author details).

Walter Hinghofer:
RH7, Heeresgeneralkartei. File on Walter Hinghofer; Glaise von Horstenau et al.,
Österreich-Ungarns letzter Krieg,
order-of-battle entries for 11th Field Artillery Regiment: Vol. I, pp. 62–91, Vol. II, Beilage 14; order-of-battle entries for 11th Field Artillery Brigade: Vol. III, Beilage 2, Vol. IV, Beilage 2, Vol. V, Beilage 7, Vol. VII, Beilage 3; index entries for 11th Field Artillery Regiment and commanding formations, Vols. I and II; for 11th Field Artillery Brigade and commanding formations, Vols. III–VII. The brigade’s whereabouts during 1917 were traced via the documents contained in the KA Vienna, NFA,