‘Pacified Areas’ vs.

‘Unheard of Bestialities:’
Wehrmacht Perceptions of Mass Violence in the Independent State of Croatia

Jonathan Gumz
The historiography of Yugoslavia during World War II concentrates heavily on the history of
resistance movements and Western involvement in those movements. Aside from the now
standard references to German shock at the severity of the violence of the Croatian fascist Ustaša,
the few works on the Third Reich’s involvement in the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna
Dr ava Hrvatska or NDH) have simply attempted to chart the course of Reich policy in the NDH
without subjecting German shock at Ustaša violence to sustained analysis. My paper, by
contrast, analyzes the German Army’s (Wehrmacht) perceptions of violence in the Independent
State of Croatia during the Second World War. In particular, I focus on why Wehrmacht
perceptions of their own violence and Ustaša violence differed radically, in spite of the fact that
both the Ustaša and Wehrmacht employed violence on a mass scale in the NDH. While
Wehrmacht self-perception of its violence was thoroughly positive, the Ustaša’s violence against
the NDH’s Serb minority sparked massive indignation within the Wehrmacht. This divergence
did not arise because the Wehrmacht and Ustaša were opponents on the battlefield. Indeed, the
Wehrmacht and Ustaša were close allies during the war. The first reason for the difference in
perceptions centered on Wehrmacht convictions as to the sharply contrasting strategies that
undergirded Ustaša and Wehrmacht violence. The second reason for the difference lay with
Wehrmacht discourse of its own violence in the NDH. This discourse was marked by a binary
opposition between Ustaša and Wehrmacht violence. In the end, an examination of the
Wehrmacht’s perceptions underscores the Wehrmacht’s belief in the existence of a divide
between West and East based neither on notions of race nor on ideas about Eastern Europe being
inherently more prone to violence, but on ideas about the correct deployment of mass violence.

This paper is primarily based on Wehrmacht, Foreign Ministry, and SS archival sources in the
National Archives Captured German Documents collection and archival collections from the
Austrian Kriegsarchiv in Vienna. In addition, Serbo-Croatian, German, and French secondary
sources were used for this paper.
Jonathan Gumz

I am currently a second-year doctoral student in history at the University of Chicago studying

under the direction of John W. Boyer and Michael Geyer. I specialize in twentieth century
German and East European history with a particular emphasis on the interaction between
industrial war, mass death, and genocide in World War I and World War II. My proposed
dissertation is entitled: “Streams of Violence: Industrial War, Ethnic War, and Genocide in the
Independent State of Croatia in World War II.” Prior to coming to the University of Chicago, I
earned my B.A.(history) and M.A. (history) at the University of Wisconsin and studied for a year
at the University of Toronto.
‘Pacified Areas’ vs. ‘Unheard of Bestialities:’
Wehrmacht Perceptions of Mass Violence in the Independent State of Croatia

Jonathan Gumz

In early autumn 1942, two violent, and yet for the time, unremarkable incidents, took place in the
Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Dr ava Hrvatska or NDH), an ally of the Third Reich.1
In spite of these incidents’ comparable level of brutality, the Wehrmacht viewed them in a starkly
divergent manner.

On September 28, 1942, the Croatian fascist Ustaša killed several hundred Serbs in Bosnia.
According to Wehrmacht observers, the Ustaša “slaughtered” many of the Serbs from the
villages of Grubisno Polje and Grdevac during the night. Two weeks later, other Ustaša
members returned to the villages to “plunder” the holdings of the surviving inhabitants. These
actions, according to the Wehrmacht, typified “the domination of the Ustaša which the
population feels as terror.” “Slaughter”, “plunder”, and “terror:” All were standard vocabulary in
Wehrmacht portrayals of Ustaša violence.2

The second incident occurred during the Wehrmacht’s assault on Josip Broz Tito’s Communist
Partisans in the Samarica Mountains. On September 5, 1942, a battalion of the 714th Infantry
Division attacked “enemy occupied heights” in Samarica. At the cost of 1 German soldier, the
battalion inflicted 480 dead on the enemy.3 This lopsided ratio revealed that Wehrmacht
violence hit not armed Partisans, but primarily unarmed civilians. Still, the number of civilian
deaths left 714th Division unconcerned. Moreover, the 714th maintained that its “persistent
cleansings [of the Samarica region]” brought order to the region, relief to its population, and led
to the successful suppression of Communist insurgents.4

Both descriptions underscore the extremity of violence in the NDH during the Second World
War. They also demonstrate that not all violence was qualitatively equal from the Wehrmacht’s

1
The Independent State of Croatia was created on April 17, 1941 after the Third Reich invaded Yugoslavia. Its
borders encompassed Croatia proper, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and parts of Dalmatia. Serbia was reduced to its pre-
1912 borders and placed under a German military administration. Later the Serbian military man, General Milan
Nedic, was made the nominal ruler of this state. In the NDH, control of the government was given to the small
fascist Ustaša party whose leader was Ante Paveli . Unlike the Croatian Peasant Party which was supported by a
majority of Croatians, the Ustaša party was an extremely small party and many of its members, including Paveli ,
spent most of the 1930's in exile in Mussolini’s Italy. In short, the Ustaša’s main goal during the 1930's was the
destruction of the Yugoslav state and the creation of a national Croatian state in its place. The NDH was also
divided among German and Italy into spheres of influence. Germany’s sphere was in the eastern half and Italy’s was
in the western half. Italy also annexed portions of the Dalmatian coast; an act which remained a source of constant
friction between the Ustaša government and Italy throughout the war.
2
714th Division, Operations Staff, “Activity Report: Recent Fighting,” National Archives Captured German
Document Collection, Microcopy T-315, Records of German Field Commands: Divisions, Roll 2258, Frame 1026
(hereafter T-315/Roll/Frame). All translations from the National Archives Captured German Documents Collection
are my own unless otherwise indicated.
3
714th Division, Operations Staff, “Activity Report for September 1942-Bandenbekampfung,” T-315/2258/891.
4
714th Division, Intelligence Staff, “Enemy Intelligence Report Nr. 1,” September 17, 1942, T-315/2258/970.
perspective. While the Wehrmacht’s self-perception of its violence was thoroughly positive, the
Ustaša’s violence against the NDH’s Serb minority sparked massive indignation among
Wehrmacht officers. What lay behind this contrast in perceptions among Wehrmacht staffs and
leaders?
One might contend contrasting perceptions appeared because the Ustaša inflicted genocidal
violence on Serbs, whereas Wehrmacht violence was not genocidal. Genocide angered
Wehrmacht officers who retained a few moral scruples. This explanation is linked to the belief
that the Wehrmacht, unlike National Socialist organizations such as the SS, remained Germany’s
“untarnished shield” during the war.5 Yet, research in the last twenty-five years on the
Wehrmacht in Eastern Europe and Russia shows that many soldiers tolerated or took part in
genocide against Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs.6 By using a social historical approach, these
historians, especially Omer Bartov, look past the motivations of Wehrmacht commanders and
staff officers, to the motivations of junior officers and, where possible, the rank and file.
National Socialist ideology, these historians contend, especially those portions concerning Jews
and Slavs, deeply influenced many Wehrmacht officers and soldiers. Using this line of
argument, one could argue Ustaša violence was problematic for a Wehrmacht saturated with anti-
Slavic racism because Slavic Croatians were practitioners of violence.

With regard to the occupation of the Balkans, Mark Mazower and Walter Manoschek are the
foremost advocates of the argument stressing anti-Slavic racism. Mazower emphasizes racial
stereotypes that influenced Wehrmacht views of Greeks and, in turn, Wehrmacht
counterinsurgency efforts in Greece. He maintains National Socialist ideology held together
Wehrmacht counterinsurgency efforts and even denies the Wehrmacht had “a coherent military
strategy for countering the guerrillas.”7 In Serbia, Manoschek believes that Wehrmacht
commanders, especially Austrians who were former Habsburg Army officers, possessed a violent
anti-Serbianism which meshed with the anti-Slavic racism endemic to the Wehrmacht. Thus,
General Franz Böhme harkened back to 1914 and the idea of a punishment raid against the Serbs,
when he issued his most brutal orders for the suppression of insurgents in Serbia during the
autumn of 1941.8

5
Gerald Reitlinger, The SS: Alibi of a Nation, (London, 1962); Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941-
1945: A Study in Occupation Policies (London, 1957).
6
See, Manfred Messerschmidt, Die Wehrmacht in NS-Staat (Hamburg, 1969); Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden:
Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetische Kriegsgefangenen 1941-1945 (Stuttgart, 1978); Helmut Krausnick and Hans
Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges (Stuttgart, 1981), 205-280; Jürgen Förster, “Das Unternehmen
‘Barbarossa’ als Eroberungs-und Vernichtungskrieg,” in Das Deutsche Reich und das Zweite Weltkrieg: Der Angriff
auf die Sowjetunion, vol. 4 (Stuttgart, 1983); Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third
Reich (Oxford, 1991); Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann, eds., Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen des Wehrmacht
(Hamburg, 1995).
7
Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-1944, (New Haven, 1993), 173. See
also Mark Mazower, “Military Violence and National Socialist Values: The Wehrmacht in Greece, 1941-1944,” Past
and Present 1992 (134): 129-158.
8
Walter Manoschek, “Serbien ist Judenfrei:” Militärische Besatzungspolitik und Judenvernichtung in Serbien
1941/1942 (Munich, 1993), 60. See also, Walter Manoschek and Hans Safrian, “717./117. ID: Eine Infanterie
Division auf dem Balkan,” in Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann, eds. Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen des
Wehrmacht (Hamburg, 1995), 359-373; Walter Manoschek, “Partisanenkrieg und Genozid: Die Wehrmacht in
Serbien, 1941,” in Walter Manoschek, ed., Die Wehrmacht im Rassenkrieg (Wien, 1996), 142-167.
While this analysis offers a potential explanation for the Wehrmacht officers’ and leaders’
contrasting perceptions of violence, it cannot fully answer why these differing perceptions
existed. Manoschek’s work, for example, scrupulously avoids dealing with events in the NDH
during the war. What can account for the tremendous slackening of German reprisal measures in
the NDH in 1942 although Wehrmacht leaders and staff officers believed reprisals led to the
successful suppression of insurgents in Serbia in 1941? More fundamentally, why did the
Ustaša’s violence towards Serbs disturb a Wehrmacht supposedly infused with virulent anti-
Serbianism? Wehrmacht leaders and staff officers, those men who controlled the application of
violence, held contrasting views of violence in the NDH for reasons beyond simple contempt for
Slavic peoples. The first reason concerned the different strategies guiding Wehrmacht and
Ustaša violence. The Wehrmacht’s primary strategic concept in World War II evolved out of the
operational deadlock of World War I and achieved dominance within the Wehrmacht late in the
interwar period. It stressed constant maximization of force on tactical and operational levels as
the only way to achieve strategic success. According to Michael Geyer, who explains this
strategy most completely, it was “guided by the sense that ‘more is better,’ the belief that the
optimal and unrestricted use of all possible means of warfare was necessary to break the
enemy.”9 This was a thoroughly technocratic strategy in that it emphasized the importance of
methods over goals. General Erich Ludendorff’s statement in the final German attack of 1918
epitomized the priority given methods over goals. “We hack a hole [in the front],” Ludendorff
exclaimed, “the rest comes on its own.”10 Moreover, the Wehrmacht recognized this strategy as
the sole correct strategy for the prosecution of modern warfare. Spatial constraints limiting the
area subjected to violence consistently accompanied this strategy. This was especially the case in
the NDH where the Wehrmacht functioned under conditions of scarcity in terms of manpower
and material.

For the Wehrmacht, its strategy of escalatory, space-centered force stood apart from the Ustaša’s
strategy of nationalizing war.11 In this instance, nationalizing war refers to the extensive use of
military and political violence to reduce a multi-national state to a nation-state. Explicit claims
regarding the ethnic basis of the state often accompany this type of war. Ethnicity along with
other cultural factors became determinative of a person’s relationship to the state. More broadly,
nationalizing wars are a particularly severe manifestation of twentieth-century Europe’s
transition from imperial states to nation-states. In the NDH, the Ustaša, committed to a extremist
nation-state ideology, inherited a multi-national state. It pursued a nationalizing war aimed at
9
Michael Geyer, “German Strategy in the Age of Machine Warfare, 1914-1945,” in Peter Paret, ed., Makers of
Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, (Princeton, 1986), 547. This strategy of escalatory force,
Geyer further argues, focused on the innovative use of high tactics and operations in addition to the complete
mobilization of society for war in a relentless effort to maximize German force. Strategy’s nineteenth century
conception as the limiting of force in order to attain certain ends receded as the only goal became the maximization
of force. Force no longer was “subordinated” to certain strategic ends, but was an end in itself. In this sense, Geyer
argues that professional strategy, as way to limit force in the pursuit of goals devised partially outside the military
sphere, disappeared completely. Thus, the switch to the strategy of escalatory force in Germany, finally completed
in 1938, essentially meant the end of professional strategy in its nineteenth century sense.
10
Michael Geyer, “German Strategy,” 552.
11
For more on the concept of the nationalizing war, see Charles Bright and Michael Geyer, “Global Violence and
Nationalizing Wars in Eurasia and America: The Geopolitics of War in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Comparative
Studies in Society and History 38 (4): 619-657; Michael Geyer, “The Place of the Second World War in German
Memory and History,” New German Critique 8 (1996): 23.
creating a greater Croatian nation-state through exterminating, deporting, or forcibly converting
to Catholicism Gypsies, Jews, and especially Serbs. Ustaša violence was neither space-centered
nor geared to the maximization of force, but was people-centered.
From these strategic differences there emerged a particular Wehrmacht discourse of violence
which strengthened the Wehrmacht’s convictions regarding violence in the NDH. Binary
oppositions between the language describing Ustaša violence and the language describing
Wehrmacht violence marked the poles of this discourse. The language of Ustaša violence
emphasized its passionate and imprecise nature, implicating it in the breakdown of order and
authority in the NDH. The language of Wehrmacht violence, by contrast, reinforced its
technocratic nature and connected it with the creation of order in a land bereft of this quality. In
1942, as German troops flooded the NDH to fight burgeoning resistance movements and Ustaša
violence against Serbs reached a fever pitch, Wehrmacht convictions as to the stark divergence
between Wehrmacht and Ustaša violence crystalized.

The Strategies of Wehrmacht & Ustaša Violence

Across occupied Eastern Europe and Russia in World War II guerrilla warfare appeared endemic.
Extreme violence that enveloped not only insurgents but also civilian populations marked
Wehrmacht operations against guerrillas. The goal was the destruction of the insurgents will to
resist, while increasing force was sole means for achieving this objective. Failure meant
increased Wehrmacht violence. Wehrmacht leaders funneled higher amounts of violence against
defined, concentrated spaces plagued with what they perceived as intolerably high insurgent
activity. When applied to the NDH, with its multiple resistance groups, the Wehrmacht’s
strategy assumed devastating dimensions.12 Because Wehrmacht force focused on spaces,
intensifying Wehrmacht violence inevitably meant that potential targets within these spaces were
expanded beyond armed Partisans or etniks. Civilians, by virtue of their presence within the
sites of Wehrmacht clearing operations, became explicit, not incidental, targets of Wehrmacht
violence. Consequently, destruction of civilian infrastructure, depopulation, and annihilation of
civilian groups regardless of gender, age, or ethnicity became integral parts of Wehrmacht
violence. Kampfgruppe (battle group) Westbosnien’s attack on west Bosnia and the Kozara
Mountains during summer 1942 most typified the Wehrmacht’s application of this strategy.

General Alexander Löhr provided an abstract vison of how to prosecute this type of war. Löhr, a
former Habsburg Army officer and in 1942-1943 a Luftwaffe general commanding all
Wehrmacht troops in the Balkans, was a hard-driven officer, with a special interest in Balkan
issues, and far from an enthusiastic National Socialist. In his view, however, subtlety in strategy

12
The two main resistance groups in the NDH were the etniks and the Partisans. The etniks were Serbian
nationalists under the nominal command of Colonel Draza Mihailovic, and were strongest in portions of
Herzegovina and Nedic’s Serbia. The Partisans were Communists under the command of Josip Broz Tito and were
strongest in the NDH, especially the German sphere of influence in the eastern half of the country. The Partisans
were more centralized than the etniks, whose leadership only weakly controlled those groups claiming to be etniks.
The etniks were more inclined to a passive strategy vis-a-vis the Germans because of the fear of incurring civilian
casualties from German reprisals. The Partisans preached resistance at any cost, even if it meant including heavy
civilian casualties. Since the fall of 1941, the etniks and Partisans were themselves the bitterest of enemies and
fought for supremacy among resistance groups in the NDH until summer 1943 when the Partisans destroyed the
etniks in a series of battles in Montenegro.
receded before demands for maximization of force against enemy armies and societies. Adamant
that the main objective of war was to “break the enemy’s will” through the use of every available
means, Löhr believed he lived in an age in which barriers restraining violence in warfare were
falling rapidly and moving in the direction of “boundlessness.”13 The movement of history from
the French Revolution onward, Löhr argued, eroded the restrictions on violence in warfare.
Therefore, Löhr placed the disappearance of restrictions on violence within the progression of
history and outside the boundaries of decisions made by military organizations and leaders.14
From Löhr’s perspective, the rapid increase of violence against non-combatants resulted from the
logic of modern warfare. Technological changes, especially the introduction of the airplane,
pushed this process forward and “set aside the concept of the non-combatant.”15 The idea of a
civilian population that would be set aside from the direct effects of military force was alien to
Löhr. In his essay, Löhr, although a former Habsburg army officer, revealed his belief in the
German World War I concepts such as maximization of force, war as a contest which involved
the whole societies as well as armies, and legitimacy of using military violence against enemy
societies. These three impersonal ideas were integral parts of the Wehrmacht’s strategy of
escalatory force.

Löhr, other Wehrmacht commanders, and staff officers like him from the 714th Division, 718th
Division, the Kommandierender General und Befehlshaber in Serbien,16 and High Command
Southeast, designed the Wehrmacht anti-partisan sweeps of spring, summer, and fall 1942.
These sweeps peaked in destructiveness with the operations of Kampfgruppe Westbosnien in
portions of west Bosnia and Kozara Mountains. Within two months, the Wehrmacht failed to
permanently destroy the Partisan presence in the region but annihilated the civilian population.
In this operation, the Wehrmacht crossed age and gender barriers that previous Wehrmacht anti-
partisan sweeps in the NDH had yet to cross.17 In the end, the Wehrmacht declared the people of
west Bosnia and Kozara an enemy population.

The Wehrmacht began planning the assault on west Bosnia and Kozara in late May 1942. Its
estimates of 8,000 to 10,000 Partisans were, according to Yugoslav historians, far higher than the
actual 3,000 Partisans within the area.18 Wehrmacht leaders believed the Partisans were creating
a republic in west Bosnia and Kozara. In addition to targeting armed Partisans, Kampfgruppe
Westbosnien defined its target spatially. “The West Bosnian area,” explained Captain Artur
Konopatzki, the intelligence officer of the Kampfgruppe Westbosnien, “finds itself completely in

13
General Alexander Löhr, Unpublished Essay Entitled “Wege des Luftkrieges,” Summer 1943, Nachlaß Löhr,
Kriegsarchiv Wien, B/521, Nr. 55.
14
Ibid., 11.
15
Ibid., 17.
16
This position was held by General Paul Bader. Though his title appears to indicate that his power was limited to
Serbia, during 1942 he was the commander of all Wehrmacht forces in the NDH as well as Serbia.
17
In the previous large-scale operations of Kampfgruppe Bader in the NDH during the spring of 1942, the
Wehrmacht had chosen to return the civilian population to the area they had cleared. See, Kommandierender
General und Befehlshaber in Serbien, Intelligence Staff, “Operations in Bosnia,” May 23, 1942, T-501, Records of
German Field Commands: Rear Areas, Occupied Territories, and Others, Roll 250, Frame 575 (hereafter T-
501/Roll/Frame).
18
Ahmet Donlagi , et al, Jugoslavija u drugom svetskom ratu (Belgrade, 1965), 87-88.
the hands of the Partisans.”19 “West Bosnia,” declared General Wilhelm Kuntze’s order
concerning the formation of Kampfgruppe Westbosnien, “is to be cleared through attack and
finally to be pacified.”20 Kampfgruppe Westbosnien confined its operations to a strictly
demarcated early in the planning for the operations. The area encompassed the “land between
the Save-Una-German-Italian demarcation line-Vrbas.”21 In mixing these references to Partisans
and space, the Wehrmacht eventually conflated one with the other.

The ethnic composition of Kampfgruppe Westbosnien was also intriguing. The Wehrmacht
contributed only two infantry regiments, some artillery units, a small Panzer unit, plus the
commander and headquarters staff. Over 15,000 troops in Kampfgruppe Westbosnien, however,
were members of the Croatian Army, while another 2,500 were troops from special Ustaša
units.22 That Croatians, including Ustaša members, participated in these operations left the
Wehrmacht undisturbed and was acceptable because the Croatians participated under the
umbrella of Wehrmacht strategy.

The Wehrmacht explicitly targeted civilians within the Kozara region. Initially, Kampfgruppe
Westbosnien focused on male civilians over the age of 14. The commander, General Friedrich
Stahl, in agreement with other Wehrmacht leaders,23 ordered the male population of Kozara
above age 14 detained and placed in holding camps. Stahl’s later orders that his troops gain
information on Partisan positions from male detainees using the “threat of execution” offered a
glimpse into the violent nature of this detainment.24 Halfway into the attack, Stahl hinted that he
considered nearly the entire population, including women and children Partisan supporters. In
his assessment, Stahl warned that “numerous parts of the civilian population serve as additional
helpers [for the Partisans],” not distinguishing between male, female, or under-age civilians.25

Once the attack commenced, the disparities in Kampfgruppe Westbosnien’s casualty ratios
revealed that many civilians were falling to the violence of Wehrmacht and Croatian troops.
From June 26 to July 15, Kampfgruppe Westbosnien killed 3,914 of the enemy and yet captured
less than 750 firearms.26 In the end, Wehrmacht casualty reports showed nearly 20 enemy dead
for every single German or Croatian casualty.27 In its divisional history, the 714th Division

19
Kampfgruppe Westbosnien, Intelligence Staff, “Enemy Intelligence Report Nr. 1,” June 4, 1942, T-501/249/1224.
20
General Wilhelm Kuntze, Wehrmacht Commander Southeast, “The Conduct of War in Croatia,” May 20, 1942, T-
501/249/1262.
21
Kampfgruppe Westbosnien, Operations Staff, “Guidelines for the Operations in Western Bosnia,” June 4, 1942, T-
501/249/1220.
22
Kampfgruppe Westbosnien, Operations Staff, “Strength of Croatian Units,” June 28, 1942, T-501/249/1144.
23
Glaise-Horstenau, “Minutes of the Conference with Bader and Stahl in Banja Luka from July 13 to July 15, 1942,”
T-501/267/455.
24
General Friedrich Stahl, “Order for Mopping-Up the Area Northwest of Prijedor,” June 24, 1942, T-
501/249/1151.
25
General Friedrich Stahl, “Assessment of the Situation in West Bosnia,” June 24, 1942, T-501/249/1153.
26
Kommandierender General und Befehlshaber in Serbien, Operations Staff, Activity Reports for the Periods from
June 26 through July 5 and July 6 through July 15, T-501/351/1145, 1167.
27
Ernst Wisshaupt, The Battle Against the Resistance Movement in the Southeast Theater (February 1944 report
prepared by the Wehrmacht Archivist for the Southeast High Command), translated and ed. By Paul Hehn (New
York, 1979), 132-133.
included women and children among its enemies. The history describes an enemy population’s
desperate attempts to break out of the Wehrmacht-directed encirclement. “A woman screamed,”
explains the divisional historian, “and then hundreds fell in with her: Men, women, and children
with an animal-like battle cry against our lines.”28 Rather than viewing these people as civilians
trying to escape a violent battle, the chronicler portrayed them as savage enemies using primitive
military tactics. Even after the fighting concluded Wehrmacht violence in the Kozara region had
not reached its conclusion.

The Wehrmacht believed it faced a Partisan society in Kozara. Therefore, the commander of all
German troops in the NDH, General Paul Bader along with General Stahl, ordered the
depopulation of the region. In their orders for the depopulation, they demanded troops “be
ruthless in the use of firearms against those who try to flee.”29 The decision to depopulate the
region meant Wehrmacht violence now explicitly included all women and children in the space
subject to the Wehrmacht attack. Whereas less than a year earlier the Wehrmacht contented itself
with directing its violence against males and Jews only in suppressing a revolt in Serbia,
Wehrmacht violence decisively crossed age and gender barriers in Kozara under which it had
been restrained and encompassed an entire population. Kozara, declared Glaise-Horstenau, “was
cleared till the last man and likewise, the last women and last child.”30 By the end of August,
Kampfgruppe Westbosnien captured at least 50,000 men, women and children.31 Clearly, this
was much higher than the 3,000 Partisans present in west Bosnia and Kozara before its assault.
Yet, Kampfgruppe Westbosnien’s target was an enemy population within west Bosnia and
Kozara as well as armed Partisans. The Wehrmacht sent the men to hostage camps and later
transported those who survived these camps to labor camps in the arctic regions of Norway. Few
survived the war. Women and children were deemed “the concern of the Croatian state,” given
to Croatian authorities for imprisonment and, for many, eventual death, in Croatian concentration
camps.32 “Great success” was the assessment of Kampfgruppe Westbosnien’s operation within
the Wehrmacht.33

Though Glaise-Horstenau questioned the success of the operation given that Kozara was filled
with Partisans a few months later, his was a solitary voice of skepticism.34 Indeed, a few weeks
after the operations in west Bosnia and Kozara, Wehrmacht leaders wanted to depopulate the
Samarica Mountains, but rejected this option because troop shortages precluded the plan’s
implementation. In 1943, the Wehrmacht renewed efforts to maximize violence in Operations

28
714th Division Divisional History, “The Battle in Kozara,” Undated, T-315/2258/1472.
29
Kampfgruppe Westbosnien, Operations Staff, “Order for the Creation of Rear Area North,” August, 18, 1942, T-
501/249/1116.
30
Letter from Glaise-Horstenau to Alexander Löhr, January 4, 1943, T-501/264/574.
31
Vlado Strugar, Jugoslovenski oslobodila ki rat (Belgrade, 1968), 84-85. Ahmet Donlagi , et al, Jugoslavija u
drugom svetskom ratu (Belgrade, 1965), 87-88.
32
Glaise-Horstenau, “Minutes of the Conference with Bader and Stahl in Banja Luka from July 13 to July 15, 1942,”
T-501/267/455. German commanders also wanted to round up the entire male population in the next operation
against the Partisans in the Samarica region, near the Kozara Mountains, but decided that they lacked the forces to
implement such a policy. See, Kampfgruppe Westbosnien, Operations Staff, “Samarica; Assessment of the Current
Situation and Proposals,” July 27, 1942, T-501/250/87.
33
Ernst Wisshaupt, The Battle Against the Resistance Movement, 133.
34
Letter from Glaise-Horstenau to Alexander Löhr, January 4, 1943, T-501/264/574.
White and Black, a series of attempts to encircle Partisans and etniks in Bosnia and Montenegro.
A later escalation of violence came with the arrival of the Second Panzer Army under the
command of General Lothar Renduli . He wanted another twenty Wehrmacht divisions at his
disposal so that he could “kill everybody in this country [NDH].”35 Given this relentless drive
for maximization, the Wehrmacht needed to keep its violence free of limitations. This inevitably
meant that Wehrmacht violence in the NDH was not limited to particular ethnic groups and the
Wehrmacht rarely designated Serbs as targets in its assaults on insurgent areas. Such a
designation would have broken the space constraints that accompanied Wehrmacht clearing
operations while simultaneously limiting the number of targets within areas of violence by
excluding Croatian or Muslim civilians.

The Ustaša’s massive violence against the Serb minority of the NDH created this simultaneous
limitation and extension of violence. By summer 1941, Wehrmacht officers were aware of the
intensity and scope of Ustaša efforts against Serbs.36 The officers’ alienation from Ustaša
violence arose because that violence was based on a strategic framework alien to the
Wehrmacht.37 The Ustaša-state pursued a nationalizing war that sought to purify the NDH of
Jewish, Gypsy, and, most of all, Serb, populations, transforming the country into decidedly
Croatian and Catholic state.

What were the ideological specifics that led to the nationalizing war guiding Ustaša violence?
Ustaša ideology evolved in a specifically Southeastern European context and resulted from three
intertwined intellectual and social components: Ethnicity, religion, and violence. The Ustaša
adopted the ideology of Ante Starcevi , who, firmly convinced of the ethnic differences between
Croats and Serbs, once declared Serbs “beasts worse than any.” Ustaša ideology reserved its
harshest animus for Serbs living outside historic Serbia, primarily in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Among these Serbs, the Ustaša distinguished between those who were “‘illegally’ settled on the
‘historic-volkisch’ territory of the Croatians and those who, though Orthodox, ‘originally’ were
Croatians.”38 As Holm Sundhaussen points out, however, the Ustaša only considered Croatian
those Serbs who were members of the Greek Orthodox Church, while the vast majority of Serbs
who were members of the Serbian Orthodox Church were deemed “illegal” settlers within
historic Croatia. Consequently, most Serbs were inferior, ethnic intruders on the territory of
historic Croatia.

35
Edmund Glaise von Horstenau, “Im Führerhauptquartier September 1943,” in Peter Broucek, ed., Ein General im
Zwielicht: Die Erinnerungen Edmund Glaises von Horstenau, vol. III (Vienna, 1988), 272.
36
Report by Charge d’Affaires von Troll to the German Foreign Ministry, DGFP, D, Doc. 90, p. 114; Report by
Charge d’Affaires von Troll to the German Foreign Ministry, August 10, 1941, in Documents on German Foreign
Policy 1918-1945 (abbreviated hereafter as DGFP), Series D, Vol. 13, ed by George Kent, et al (Washington D.C.:
U.S. Government Printing Office, 1950), Doc. 191, p. 301. Report by Kasche to the German Foreign Ministry,
DGFP, D, 13, Doc. 350, p. 552; Report by Felix Benzler to the German Foreign Ministry, September 10, 1941, T-
120/380/200/153417; Office of the German General in Zagreb to the Wehrmacht High Command, July 15, 1941, T-
501/267/905.
37
Among present-day historians there exists consensus that the Ustaša-directed genocide the Serbs compelled many
Serbs into the ranks of the insurgents. See Jozo Tomasevich, The etniks (Stanford, 1975); Jill Irvine, The Croat
Question: Partisan Politics in the Formation of the Yugoslav Socialist State (Boulder, 1993).
38
Holm Sundhaussen, “Der Ustascha-Staat: Anatomie eines Herrschaftssystems,” Österreichische Osthefte, 37
(1995): 528.
The distinctions the Ustaša made among Serbs who settled in Croatia also illustrated how the
religious component of Ustaša ideology intermixed with the racist component. Confessional
tensions between Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs exacerbated Ustaša antipathy towards
Serbs.39 The Ustaša state was not only an avowedly Croatian state, but also a staunchly Catholic
state. Shortly into the new state’s existence, a Catholic newspaper wrote: “Christ and the Ustaša,
Christ and the Croatians-all march together through history.”40 Even among those portions of the
Catholic hierarchy hesitant to embrace wholeheartedly Ustaša ideology, support for a Croatian
Catholic state whose borders were commensurate with those of the NDH was solid.41
Symbolically, the Ustaša attempted to tie itself to Catholicism. The Ustaša’s menacing symbols
were a Catholic crucifix and dagger.

The crucifix and dagger also symbolically fused the Catholic element of Ustaša ideology with
violence. From its inception in 1929, the Ustaša never hesitated to use violence to achieve its
goals and consistently glorified the use of violence in pursuit of those goals. Their leader, Ante
Paveli , once declared that “Knives, revolvers, automatic pistols and time bombs are the bells that
ring in the dawn and rebirth of the Croatian state.”42 Indeed, its extremely small size and
conspiratorial nature during the interwar years only increased the fascination with violence
within the movement given that violence was virtually the only way for the Ustaša to break out of
obscurity.

This ideology envisioned a Croatian and Catholic nation-state that encompassed Bosnia and
Herzegovina, in addition to Croatia and Dalmatia. Ustaša ideology determined a person’s ties to
the state through perceived ethnic and religious forms. People who, in the state’s eyes, lacked
Croatian or Catholic forms were largely excluded. Even the Ustaša realized the NDH, as
constituted in April 1941, was a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional state. Ethnic Croatians
comprised barely 50 percent of the population of this avowedly national state. Serbs made up
thirty percent of the NDH’s population, while Muslims made up another fifteen percent. The
Ustaša simply declared Muslims ethnic Croatians. Almost immediately upon taking power, the
Ustaša government also began promulgating Nürnberg type laws dealing with Serbs, Jews, and
Gypsies. Milovan Zanic, a Croatian governmental minister, exclaimed that “this [the NDH] must
be the land of the Croatians and no one else. There are no methods which we as Ustaša will not
make use of in order to make this land Croatian and purify it of Serbs.”43 These types of
comments were manifestations of an emerging strategy of nationalizing war.

As a consequence, people were subject to Ustaša violence because they were Serbs. People were
not the object of violence because they lived within a particular space or territory in which

39
Jonathan Steinberg, “Types of Genocide,” 189; Fikreta Jeli -Buti , Ustaše i Nezavisna Dr ava Hrvatska, 1941-
1945 (Zagreb, 1977), 214-221.
40
Martin Broszat and Ladislus Hory, Der kroatische-ustascha Staat (Stuttgart, 1964), 94.
41
Stella Alexander, Triple Myth: The Life of Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac (New York: Columbia University Press,
1987).
42
Bogdan Krizman, Ante Paveli i Ustaše (Zagreb, 1978), 85.
43
Report by Captain Artur Haeffner to Glaise-Horstenau, “Report on the Most Urgent Problems of the NDH,” June
14, 1941, T-501/267/344.
resistance groups appeared to thrive, as in the case of Wehrmacht violence. Most Wehrmacht
officers recognized that Ustaša violence emanated from a strategic framework different from the
Wehrmacht’s and therefore rejected Ustaša violence. The simplest form of recognition consisted
in the realization that Serbs, however determined, were the main targets of Ustaša violence.
Captain Konopatzki maintained that “Serbs,” not Partisans, not etniks, not enemies, were the
object of Ustaša attacks.44 Major C. Geim, General Bader’s intelligence officer, argued that the
Ustaša attacked Serbs with the objective of “exterminating the Serbian portion of the population
in Croatia.”45 Geim connected this violence with state strategy when he later complained that
Ustaša attacks on Serbs were ordered by Paveli .46 Wehrmacht officers rarely tempered these
comments with secondary explanations for the Ustaša’s attacks on Serbs such as pointing to a
conflation of Serbs with Partisans. In contrast to what the Wehrmacht correctly perceived as the
Ustaša’s deliberate targeting of Serbs, the Wehrmacht rarely targeted specific ethnic groups as
part of anti-partisan operations in the NDH. In fact, Wehrmacht units, demanded their troops,
“not to distinguish between members of different nationalities” when trying to determine an
enemy.47 Even the conflation of Jews and insurgents, so common to Wehrmacht anti-partisan
warfare in Serbia during the 1941 uprising48 and throughout Russia,49 was relatively unknown
due to the small numbers of Jews in the German sphere of influence in the NDH. When the
Wehrmacht did assist the SS in deportations of Jews who took shelter in the Italian zone of
occupation, these efforts were made with virtually no reference to anti-partisan warfare.50 Thus,
unlike the extermination of Jews or Gypsies extermination of Serbs was foreign to the
ideological outlook of most Wehrmacht officers. For these officers, Serbs were an inferior
people to be treated with little respect and much contempt, but their mere existence within the
NDH posed no inherent threat.

A few perceptive Wehrmacht officers went beyond simply recognizing the manifestations of
Ustaša strategy that differed from Wehrmacht strategy. These officers understood the Ustaša-
state’s effort against the Serbs as part of a nationalizing war within the NDH. Foremost among
this group of perceptive officers was the Wehrmacht representative in Zagreb, General Edmund
von Glaise-Horstenau. A former Habsburg Army general staff officer, Glaise-Horstenau
believed the NDH and the Habsburg Empire were comparable insofar as their multi-national

44
714th Division, Intelligence Staff, “Enemy Intelligence Report Nr. 1,” September 17, 1942, T-315/2258/969.
45
Kommandierender General und Befehlshaber in Serbien, Intelligence Staff, “Situation Report for the Period from
September 11-20, 1942,” T-315/2258/911.
46
Kommandierender General und Befehlshaber in Serbien, Intelligence Staff, “Situation Report for the Period from
September 21-30, 1942, T-315/2258/936.
47
342 Infantry Division, Operations Section, “Combat Directives in Croatia,” January 6, T-315/2258/508. The 714th
Division released a copy of this same order to its unit commanders when it began operations in the NDH as well.
48
Christopher Browning, “Wehrmacht Reprisal Policy and the Mass Murder of Jews in Serbia,”
Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 1983 (1): 31-47; Walter Manoschek, “‘Gehst mit Juden erschießen?’ Die
Vernichtung der Juden in Serbien,” in Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann, eds. Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen des
Wehrmacht (Hamburg, 1995), 39-56.
49
Hannes Heer, “Killing Fields: Die Wehrmacht und die Holocaust,” in Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann, eds.
Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen des Wehrmacht (Hamburg, 1995), 57-77; Hans Safrian, “Komplizen des Genozids:
Zum Anteil der Heeresgruppe Süd an der Verfolgung und Ermordung der Juden in der Ukraine 1941,” in Walter
Manoschek, ed., Die Wehrmacht im Rassenkrieg (Vienna, 1996), 90-115.
50
Jonathan Steinberg, All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust (London, 1991), 68-69; 206-219.
composition. This multi-national character recommended the NDH to Glaise-Horstenau. He
viewed Ustaša attacks on Serbs as a deliberate strategy to nationalize, through extensive violence
and coerced conversion to Catholicism, the multi-national territory of the NDH. In one report to
his superiors after the initial wave of Ustaša attacks on Serbs in the summer of 1941, Glaise-
Horstenau noted the NDH was “no national state, but on the contrary a nationality state.”51
Months later, Glaise-Horstenau blamed the Ustaša government for “wanting to govern a
Völkerstaat like a homogeneous nation-state.”52 After Ustaša attacks on Serbs in spring and
summer of 1942, Glaise-Horstenau argued the Ustaša government “must give up the idea that
Croatia can be handled like a national state and [realize] that different nationalities want to live
in this country and will live here in the future.”53 Later, in a private letter to General Walter
Warlimont, Glaise-Horstenau declared the Ustaša government, by virtue of its anti-Serb policies,
still unable to recognize that the NDH was a “nationality state, not a national state.”54

In spite of this division regarding strategy, the Wehrmacht and the Ustaša were allies in the
NDH. They shared an interest in subduing resistance movements in the NDH and in seeing an
Axis-victory in the war. Still, they remained, from the Wehrmacht’s perspective, far apart in
terms of the strategic concepts that guided the violence of both organizations. On one side of this
chasm, stood the strategy of space-centered, escalatory force, while on the other stood the
Ustaša’s strategy of nationalizing war.

The Discourse of Violence

A particular Wehrmacht discourse of violence deepened this chasm between Wehrmacht and
Ustaša violence. Of course, the Wehrmacht’s views of the different strategies at play in the NDH
caused its negative stance towards Ustaša violence and its positive stance towards its own
violence. Yet the specific language within Wehrmacht descriptions of violence created and
became part of a discourse that reified and furthered the Wehrmacht’s sense of difference
regarding the two types of violence. Binary oppositions between Ustaša and Wehrmacht
violence marked this discourse of violence. The language of Wehrmacht violence emphasized its
technocratic nature by accentuating its passionless character, its clinical and calibrated aspects,
and the resulting establishment of islands of authority inside the sea of lawlessness that was the
NDH. The language of Ustaša violence, however, consistently stressed its criminal, primitive,
and passionate nature, imbricating it in this sea of lawlessness.

Consistently, Wehrmacht violence was conveyed through terms like “elimination

[Vernichtung],” “mopping-up [Säuberung],” “combing through [durchkümmern],” or
51
Report by Glaise-Horstenau, “Lage im Kroatien,” November 21, 1941, T-501/268/445.
52
Report by Glaise-Horstenau to Wehrmacht Commander Southeast, “The Situation in Croatia in Mid-December
1941,” December 14, 1941, T-501/267/610.
53
Report on a Meeting between Glaise-Horstenau and General Alexander Löhr in Sofia, September 17, 1942, T-
501/264/620.
54
Letter from Edmund Glaise von Horstenau to General Walter Warlimont, February 15, 1943, T-501/264/556. See
also, Edmund Glaise von Horstenau, “Report on the Serbian Question in Croatia,” September 9, 1942,
T/501/267/555; Edmund Glaise von Horstenau, “Conference at Wehrmacht Commander Southeast in Salonika,”
October 31, 1942, T-501/267/448.
“pacification [Befriedigung].” These words permeated the Wehrmacht’s description of its
assault on western Bosnia and Kozara. Before the attack, Kampfgruppe Westbosnien defined its
objectives as the “elimination of the resistance, pacification of the area through the restoration of
public order and security.”55 Once Kampfgruppe Westbosnien pushed the Partisans and civilian
population entirely into the Kozara Mountains, Stahl gave further orders for the “mopping-up” of
the Kozara Mountains and the “elimination of the resistance.”56 According to Captain
Konopatzki, the troops embarked on a “ruthless combing through of mopped-up areas.”57 Once
the assault subsided, Geitner declared that “[the Kozara Mountains] have been mopped-up for the
most part by the troops of Kampfgruppe Westbosnien.”58 Later, he stated that the “mopping-up
of Kozara/Prozara and the Una-Savebogens ended with the elimination of the Partisans in these
regions.”59

This language constituted more than a psychological defense mechanism designed to insulate
Wehrmacht leaders and staff officers from the extreme violence of their methods.60 Words like
“mopping-up” or “elimination” bestowed on Wehrmacht anti-partisan operations a clinical and
restrained appearance; an appearance which contradicted these operations’ wholesale brutality.
In addition, the terms’ clinical nature reinforced the leaders’ and staffs’ self-image as technocrats
or engineers of violence. Technocrats of violence did not kill or maim, they “pacified” and
“eliminated.” The constant invocation of these words further underscored the transformative
effects of Wehrmacht violence. Through their exposure to Wehrmacht violence regions were
fundamentally remade. Not simply was the Partisan threat reduced, but the Partisans were
“eliminated,” the region “combed through,” “mopped-up,” and eventually “pacified.”

The language used to describe Wehrmacht violence also removed the notion that emotions or
passions were connected to the violence. Wehrmacht units killed and carried out forced
depopulation efforts out of necessity, not anger. Enemy dead were presented in a matter of fact
manner and always disassociated from the particulars of the violence that caused their deaths.
General Bader’s operations staff provided one example of this passionless terminology in
describing the final stages of operations of Kampfgruppe Westbosnien. “Group Borowski:”

55
Kampfgruppe Westbosnien, Operations Staff, “Guidelines for the Operations in Western Bosnia,” June 4, 1942, T-
501/249/1216.
56
Kampfgruppe Westbosnien, Operations Staff, “Operational Plan for the Elimination of the Partisans in Kozara,”
June 28, 1942, T-501/249/1139.
57
Kampfgruppe Westbosnien, Intelligence Staff, “Enemy Intelligence Report Nr. 1,” June 4, 1942, T-501/249/1230.
58
Kampfgruppe Westbosnien, Operations Staff, “Order for the Creation of Rear Area North,” July 18, 1942, T-
501/249/1114.
59
Kampfgruppe Westbosnien, Operations Staff, “Interim Report Nr. 2 for July 7-August 4, 1942,” August 6, 1942,
T-501/250/52. Other examples of the use of these terms abound, see, for example, Kommandierender General und
Befehlshaber in Serbien, “Operations in Bosnia,” May 23, 1942, T-501/250/575; Kampfgruppe Westbosnien,
Intelligence Staff, “Enemy Intelligence Report Nr. 1,” June 4, 1942, T-/501/249/1224; 714th Division, Intelligence
Staff, “Morale Report,” June 18, 1942, T-315/2258/717; Kampfgruppe Westbosnien, Operations Staff, “Order for
the Mopping-up of the Area Kostajnica-Bosanska Novi-Prijedor-Bosanska Dubica,” June 12, 1942, T-501/249/1188;
“Order for the Mopping-up of the Area Prijedor-Trnova-Bronzami Majdan-Gomjenica Bach-Bahnlinie nach
Prijedor,” June 17, 1942, T-501/249/1173; “Order for Mopping-up of the Area Northwest of Prijedor,” June 24,
1942, T-501/249/1151.
60
For a discussion of how this language served as a “psychological shield,” see Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s
Greece, 190.
states the report “36 enemy dead in the mopping-up, 54 preliminary arrests, 269 previous arrested
shot.”61 Another instance of this passionless terminology arose in the portion of the 714th
Division’s history that dealt with the Kozara operation. “It was a battle without mercy, without
pity,...” the history states, “only a cold heart can order what must be ordered.”62

By sealing off acts of violence from those who carried out the violence, these descriptions
discursively precluded the possibility that these acts of violence could be connected to emotion-
filled impulses of the Wehrmacht. This violence was the work of cool technocrats, not angry
men. The omnipresence of this technocratic language meant the Wehrmacht in the NDH carried
out few reprisal measures which set aside a number of civilians to be killed in “atonement” for
German soldiers killed or wounded in insurgents’ attacks. The low number of reprisals was a
drastic change from the Wehrmacht’s practice a year earlier in the Balkans when it extensively
employed these measures in putting down a rebellion in Serbia, executing over 11,000 civilians
within three months.63 This turn against reprisals as a method of brutality in the NDH arose
because the language of reprisals “Sühnemassnahmen” (atonement measures) or
“Vergeltungsmassnahmen” (reprisal measures) was the language of revenge.64 Therefore, this
language came perilously close to the language describing Ustaša violence and threatened to
bridge the binary oppositions between Wehrmacht and Ustaša violence which bounded the
Wehrmacht’s discourse of violence.

The omnipresence of numbers within the descriptions of Wehrmacht violence further reinforced
the technocratic nature of the violence. Consistently, precise numbers of “enemies” killed in
reports of Wehrmacht staff officers and leaders. For example, during the operations of
Kampfgruppe Westbosnien in June and July 1942, General Bader’s staff reported 2,468 “enemy
dead” in the NDH and 4,913 captured. On one day in late July, the Wehrmacht’s 718th Division
meticulously reported that at the cost of 7 dead and 8 wounded, one battalion killed 450 enemy,
wounded another 250 in an attack on a Partisan stronghold.65 These examples and a plethora of
others throughout Wehrmacht staff reports in the NDH had several consequences beyond
exposing how anti-partisan warfare was intentionally directed towards civilians.66 On one level,
the presence of numbers in Wehrmacht discourse allowed officers to track the precise
effectiveness of their effort to maximize violence. On another level, these numbers partially
masked the uncontrolled nature of the drive to maximize Wehrmacht violence and instead made
that violence appear precisely calibrated and measured. Moreover, numbers “lent a feeling of
greater legitimacy to what were arbitrary acts” as Götz Aly remarked regarding the omnipresence

61
General Bader to WB-Sudost, Daily Report from 31 July 1942, T-501/351/1195.
62
714th Divisional History, Operations Staff, “Battle in Kozara,” T-315/2258/1473.
63
Christopher Browning, “Wehrmacht Reprisal Policy,” 45-57.
64
For references to the revenge filled nature of the language of reprisal, this case in Italy, see Michael Geyer, “‘Es
muß daher mit schnellen und drakonischen Maßnahmen durchgegriffen werden:’ Civitella in Val di Chiana am 29.
Juni 1944,” in Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann, ed., Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht, 1941-1944,
(Hamburg, 1995), 208-237.
65
718th Division, Intelligence Staff, “Activity Report for the Period from July 6-December 31, 1942-Entry for July
30, 1942,” T-315/2271/11.
66
To gain a feel for the pervasiveness of numbers see, for example, the July reports of General Paul Bader’s
operations staff in, Kommandierender General und Befehlshaber in Serbien, Daily Reports, July 5-July 31, 1942, T-
501/351/1063-1196.
of numbers in National Socialist documents concerning Jews but could just as easily be applied
to the case of the Wehrmacht in the NDH.67 The presence of numbers insured that Wehrmacht
violence rarely appeared wild. The Wehrmacht did not kill, take prisoner, or deport
undetermined numbers of people in uncontrolled attacks, but killed and captured precisely
determined numbers of people in rationally and efficiently planned operations. The
omnipresence of numbers bolstered this type of logic.

Finally, the language of Wehrmacht violence connected that violence with the resurrection of law
and order in a disorderly country. In reviewing the situation in the NDH prior to the operations
of Kampfgruppe Bader and Kampfgruppe Westbosnien, Major Walter Kleinenberg, the
operations officer of the 714th Division, argued the “Croatian state was not in the position to
maintain law and order. German troops had to step in.” The manner of that “stepping in” and
the restoration of law and order, according to Kleinenberg, were the combat operations of
Kampfgruppe Bader and Kampfgruppe Westbosnien.68 In the divisional history of the 714th
Division, the section on Kampfgruppe Westbosnien highlighted the transformative effects of
Wehrmacht violence. The language changed those who survived Kampfgruppe Westbosnien’s
assault from wild Partisan supporters into passive “Orthodox peasants” after their exposure to
Wehrmacht violence.69 This did not mean the Wehrmacht accorded the peasants milder
treatment. They remained an enemy population. Yet, as the excerpt from the divisional history
shows, they became a safe enemy population in psychological terms, passive and unresisting
through their exposure to Wehrmacht violence.

Avoiding completely the terms such as “elimination” or “pacification,” the language of Ustaša
violence created a picture of that violence as excessive, primitive, and bordering on lawlessness.
Therefore, the language of Ustaša violence marked the opposite pole of the Wehrmacht’s
discourse of violence in the NDH. This pole featured the use of words with criminal overtones,
animalistic or naturalistic metaphors, the passionate nature of Ustaša violence and the near
complete silence as to numbers of Serbs killed in Ustaša attacks.

Terms like “plunder [Plunderungen],” “excesses [Übergriffe],” or “atrocities [Greueltaten]”

littered descriptions of Ustaša violence. These words denoted criminal violence. The word
“plunder” was rampant in Wehrmacht portrayals of Ustaša violence. Near the conclusion of
Kampfgruppe Westbosnien’s operations, the Wehrmacht’s 718th Division, headquartered in
Sarajevo, frantically reported that “the Ustaša’s plundering [in eastern Bosnia] was growing
worse.”70 In early June, Glaise-Horstenau asserted that Ustaša “plundering” of Serbs created
unrest in eastern Bosnia.71 “Plunder” interlaced the violence of Ustaša members with the pursuit
of individual gain and personal profit, something never suggested in the case of Wehrmacht
violence. Two other terms ubiquitous in Wehrmacht descriptions of Ustaša violence were

67
Götz Aly and Karl Heinz Roth, Die restlose Erfassung: Volkszählung, Identifizieren, Aussondern im
Nationalsozialismus (Berlin, 1984), 90.
68
714th Division, Operations Staff, “Activity Report for August 1942,” T-315/2258/804.
69
714th Division, Operations Staff, Divisional History, “Battle in Kozara,” T-315/2258/1473.
70
Kommandierender General und Befehlshaber Serbien, Operations Staff, Daily Report, July 25, 1942, T-
501/351/1164.
71
Edmund Glaise von Horstenau, “Report on the Serb Question in Croatia,” September 9, 1942, T-501/267/555.
“atrocities” and “excesses.” The intelligence officer of the 718th Division claimed “every farmer
owned a rifle to protect himself against the excesses of the Ustaša” in some heavily Serb areas.72
In October 1942, Major Kleinenberg continued to complain of the Ustaša’s “atrocities, plunder,
and murder.”73 At a meeting of the highest military leaders in the Southeastern theater, Glaise-
Horstenau railed against the “excesses of these [Ustaša] units.”74 Words like “atrocities,”
“excesses,” and “plunder” left impressions which bolstered Wehrmacht perceptions of Ustaša
violence as uncontrolled and transgressing all boundaries. The same terms, “plundering,”
“excesses,” and “atrocities,” also described acts which Wehrmacht commanders explicitly
prohibited their troops from participating in and therefore further reinforced the terms’ criminal
connotations when used in reference to Ustaša violence.75

Terms linked with animals or the killing of animals peppered Wehrmacht descriptions of Ustaša
violence. Major Kleinenberg described the killing in eastern Bosnia as “in defiance of all the
laws of civilization. The Ustaša murder, without exception, men, women, and children.”76 In the
midst of the Kozara operation, an intelligence officer in the 714th Division complained of the
Ustaša’s “inhuman atrocities” against the Serb population in Bosnia.77 The word “butchery”
frequently appeared in depictions of Ustaša violence. Captain Konopatzki detailed the attacks of
the Ustaša’s “Black Legion” on Serbs in eastern Bosnia, calling them a “new wave of butchery of
innocents [Metzeleien].”78 In the fall of 1942, the Wehrmacht worried about disturbances caused
by the Ustaša’s “wholesale butchery [Abschlachtung]” of Serbs in Srem.79 Near Jasenovac, the
Ustaša-state’s largest concentration camp, the Wehrmacht reported that the Ustaša had “driven
out and butchered” the population of three villages.80 A Wehrmacht regimental commander in
Bosnia, Lieutenant Colonel von Wedel, who commanded a regiment in Kampfgruppe
Westbosnien, complained to Glaise-Horstenau of an Ustaša’s company massacre of Serb women
and children. According to von Wedel, the Ustaša killed the women and children “like cattle” in
a series of “bestial executions.”81 These terms placed Ustaša violence in proximity with the

72
718th Division, Intelligence Staff, “Activity Reports of the Intelligence Staff for the Period from July 6-December
31, 1942-Entry for July 18, 1942,” T-315/2271/08.
73
714th Division, Operations Staff, “Activity Report for October 1942 - General,” Undated, T-315/2258/1021.
74
“Minutes of the Conference at Wehrmacht Commander Southeast on October 31, 1942,” Undated, T-501/267/448.
See also, 714th Division, Intelligence Staff, “Morale Report,” March 12, 1942, T-315/2258/431; 718th Division,
Intelligence Staff, “Activity Reports for the Period from July 6-December 31, 1942-Entry for September 1, 1942,” T-
315/2271/18; Glaise-Horstenau, “Report on the Serb Question in Croatia,” September 9, 1942, T-501/267/556-557;
Kommandierender General und Befehlshaber in Serbien, Intelligence Staff, “Situation Report for the Period from
October 19-29, 1942, T-315/2258/108.
75
Minutes of a Conference with Major Geim and the Croatian General Staff, May 26 and 27, 1942, May 28, 1942,
T-501/267/459-460.
76
714th Division, Operations Staff, “Activity Report for the Month of April 1942,” Undated, T-315/ 2258/503.
77
714th Division, Intelligence Staff, “Morale Report,” June 11, 1942, T-315/2258/694.
78
714th Division, Intelligence Staff, “Enemy Intelligence Report for the Period from April 16-30, 1942,” May 6,
1942, T-315/2258/519.
79
Kommandierender General und Befehlshaber in Serbien, Intelligence Staff, “Situation Report for the Period from
September 11-20, 1942,” September 20, 1942, T-315/2258/911. For other examples, see, 714th Division, Operations
Staff, “Activity Report for September 1942,” Undated, T-315/2258/887.
80
714th Division, Intelligence Staff, “Enemy Intelligence Report Nr. 6,” October 20, 1942, T-315/2258/1096.
81
Letter from Glaise-Horstenau to the German Minister in Zagreb, Siegfried Kasche, October 29, 1942, T-
501/264/1038.
violence of animals or violence used against animals transforming it into something primal and
base that broke all civilized boundaries. Butchers, after all, were involved in crude non-technical
killings of animals who lacked any form of defense. As a result, Ustaša violence was distanced
further from what the Wehrmacht believed was its militarized, technocratic, and cleaner violence
directed against armed insurgents and enemy populations.

Another feature of the Wehrmacht’s language of Ustaša violence was the insistence upon how
passion, hate, and terror infused the violence and its aftermath. In connection with attacks on
Serb communities in Bosnia, the Wehrmacht accused the Ustaša’s “Black Legion” of “senseless
hate against all Serbs.”82 “The hate between Serbs and Croatians has climbed to an unbearable
level,” Konopatzki maintained, as a consequence of Ustaša “atrocities.”83 The invocation of the
hatred-infused nature of the violence buttressed its appearance as uncontrolled and irrational.
Cruelty or revenge seeking crystalized such hatred. Major Geitner maintained the Ustaša “tried
to commit acts of revenge [Racheakte].”84 “The Ustaša,” as several captured German officers
told Milovan Djilas in 1942 “were cruel, had no experience or real military organization.”85
Passion dominated violence led to conditions where the terror became the order of the day.
Where the Ustaša ruled, asserted Major Geim, “arbitrariness and terror dominated.”86 Geim later
portrayed a wave of massive killings in Srem during August and September of 1942 as having
draped the region in “terror.”87

A notable silence within Wehrmacht descriptions of Ustaša violence also reinforced the degree of
difference between Wehrmacht and Ustaša violence. This silence centered around casualty
figures from Ustaša attacks on Serbs. Unlike in the case of Wehrmacht violence, exact counts of
those killed in Ustaša attacks rarely surfaced. Even estimates of the numbers of Serbs killed in
Ustaša attacks arose infrequently in Wehrmacht reports, while Wehrmacht commanders and
staffs never ventured a guess as to the total number of Serbs killed in Ustaša attacks, with the
exception of a single report by Glaise-Horstenau in late-September 1942.88 Obviously,
discovering precise numbers of dead Serbs was very difficult for the Wehrmacht since its troops
were rarely at the scene of these killings. If the Ustaša did keep statistics for numbers of Serbs
killed, it did not make them known to the Wehrmacht. Regardless of the reasons for the absence

82
714th Division, Intelligence Staff, “Enemy Intelligence Report for the Period from April 16-30, 1942,” May 6,
1942, T-315/2258/519.
83
714th Division, Intelligence Staff, “Enemy Intelligence Report for the Period from June 1-15, 1942,” June 18,
1942, T-315/2258/717.
84
Kampfgruppe Bader, Operations Staff, “Report on the Supply of Troops during Operations Rogatica und Foca,”
May 20, 1942, T-501/250/941. Concrete examples of the extreme violence involved in typical Ustaša expeditions
against Serbs can be found in: Vladimir Dedijer, The War Diaries of Valdimir Dedijer, vol. 1, translator unknown
(New York, 1990), 269-272 and Djilas, op cit., 11.
85
Milovan Djilas, Wartime, translated by Michael Petrovich (New York, 1977), 235.
86
Kommandierender General und Befehlshaber in Serbien, Intelligence Staff, “Situation Report for the Period from
October 19-29, 1942,” Undated, T-315/2258/1081.
87
Kommandierender General und Befehlshaber in Serbien, Intelligence Staff, “Situation Report for the Period from
September 21-30, 1942,” September 30, 1942, T-315/2258/936; Kommandierender General und Befehlshaber in
Serbien, “Situation Report for the Period from September 11-20, 1942" September 20, 1942, T-315/2258/911.
88
Glaise-Horstenau, Report to Wehrmacht High Command-Foreign Section, September 22, 1942, T-501/268/147-
148.
of numbers, when taken in comparison with the Wehrmacht’s obsessive concern for gathering
precise numbers of enemies its forces killed or captured, this discursive silence reinforced certain
convictions regarding Ustaša violence. In particular, it supported the sense that Ustaša violence
was unmanageable because there was no evidence of quantification, while it deprived Ustaša
violence of the “greater legitimacy” which Wehrmacht violence received from quantification.
Ustaša violence was not carefully measured application of high levels of force which the
Wehrmacht believed characterized its own violence. It was not the work of Wehrmacht
technocrats of violence, but of “butchers” and therefore incapable of being quantified.

Given the language of Ustaša violence, it inevitably became imbricated in the panorama of
disorder that was the NDH. Throughout 1942, the Wehrmacht viewed the NDH as a state on the
brink of collapse. Partisans, various etnik units, Ustaša units, and armed bands of Bosnian
Muslims roamed a country whose central government barely functioned. As a result, General
Walter Kuntze, commander of Wehrmacht forces in Southeastern Europe through August 1942,
characterized the NDH as the “problem child” of Southeastern Europe.89 His successor, General
Löhr, wrote to his friend Jaromir Diakow that “the Schwerpunkt (main weight) of the south Slav
question lies in Croatia...there things stand at their worst.”90 Geim contended that in parts of
NDH “state authority has disappeared; in its place is the arbitrariness of local power holders
rules.”91 This “general lawlessness [led],” Geim earlier asserted, “to conditions similar to those
of the Thirty Years War.”92 Kleinenberg declared that “in the entire Croatian state territory there
appears...a condition of state powerlessness.”93 “The Ustaša terror and mass slaughter in Srem,”
exclaimed Kleinenberg, “brought forth a new wave of unrest, which place into serious question
all the previous efforts at pacification.” He immediately connected Ustaša violence to the
“general insecurity” and the “renewal of bands” in areas of the country the Wehrmacht had
“mopped-up.”94 “The boundless and undisciplined efforts of the Ustaša,” stated Geim, “are the
main reasons for the further development of anarchic conditions.”95 Thus, the end result of the
Wehrmacht’s language of Ustaša violence situated that violence firmly within the chaos of the
NDH.

Conclusion

89
German High Command-Southeast, “Minutes of a Conference in Salonika,” May 20, 1942, T-501/267/464.
90
Letter from General Alexander Löhr to Jaromir Diakow, September 9, 1942, KAW, B/521, nr. 52, 1492.
91
Kommandierender General und Befehlshaber in Serbien, Intelligence Staff, “Situation Report for the Period from
September 21 through September 30,” September 30, 1942, T-315/2258/936.
92
Kommandierender General und Befehlshaber in Serbien, Intelligence Staff, “Situation Report for the Period from
August 1 through August 10, 1942,” August 10, 1942, T-315/2258/814-815.
93
714th Division, Operations Staff, “Activity Report for August 1942,” T-315/2258/804
94
714th Division, Operations Staff, “Activity Report for September 1942,” T-315/2258/887.
95
Kommandierender General und Befehlshaber in Serbien, Intelligence Staff, “Situation Report for the Period from
October 19-29, 1942, Undated, T-315/2258/1081.
The binary oppositions within the Wehrmacht’s discourse of violence played a critical role in
completing the separation of Wehrmacht violence from Ustaša violence. The discourse of
violence anchored Wehrmacht brutality in the technocratic production of order, while placing
Ustaša violence in the chaotic disruption of that order. In 1942, this discourse combined with the
differences the Wehrmacht perceived in the strategies undergirding Wehrmacht and Ustaša
violence to draw a picture of two radically different types of violence on the Axis-side in the
NDH. Though Ustaša and Wehrmacht violence wreaked havoc upon the NDH, killing thousands
and creating near anarchic conditions, this commonality was wholly absent in the Wehrmacht’s
views of violence. The real differences between the strategies behind Ustaša and Wehrmacht
violence brought forth the basic division in Wehrmacht perceptions of violence in the realm of
discourse. At the same time, the binary oppositions within the Wehrmacht’s discourse of
violence extended and hardened the level of difference between Ustaša and Wehrmacht violence
for Wehrmacht leaders and their staffs. Ustaša violence, the product of a strategy of
nationalizing war, was excessive, hated by the entire population, and the central fundament of
disorder within the NDH. By contrast, Wehrmacht violence, the consequence of a strategy of
space-centered, escalatory violence was measured, welcomed by the law-abiding population of
the country and a producer of order.

The divergent strategies and the discourse of violence also allowed the Wehrmacht to maintain
two contradictory and dualistic visions regarding violence. First, the Wehrmacht’s adherence to
the strategy of escalatory force afforded Wehrmacht officers the chance to maximize Wehrmacht
force, while discursive elements reinforced these officers’ self-image as calibrators of violence.
The calibration of force contained within it the notion of restraint in the application of force.
Therefore, strategy and discourse made Wehrmacht officers both maximizers and restrainers of
violence. The second contradictory Wehrmacht vision centered on Ustaša violence. On the one
hand, Ustaša violence was the product of a rational, yet deeply flawed, strategy. On the other, the
language of Ustaša violence depicted that violence as chaotic, unmeasured, and fundamentally
irrational. That neither of these seemingly contradictory tensions were resolved or even came
into conflict with one another testified to the strength of both Wehrmacht convictions regarding
strategy and the Wehrmacht’s discourse of violence.

A more harmful consequence of the interaction between strategies and discourse was that it
facilitated complete rigidity in Wehrmacht anti-partisan practices in the NDH. An examination
of other theaters of war in Eastern Europe and Russia makes this rigidity especially apparent. In
these theaters, portions of the Wehrmacht began to question the effectiveness of Wehrmacht anti-
partisan warfare. Though the Wehrmacht used intense and widespread violence against
perceived resistance movements in these theaters, significant voices appeared calling into
question such extreme violence, if for no reason other than its inability to reduce resistance to
German rule. Even recent scholars of Wehrmacht anti-partisan warfare admit this fact. In
Ukraine, Truman Anderson found certain units and commanders, such as General Heinrich von
Fredrici, raised doubts as to the effectiveness of massive violence in the anti-partisan war.96 In
December 1942, after 16 months of intense violence in the anti-partisan war in Belorussia, Army
Groups A and B also began to question the usefulness of depopulation efforts and the
96
Truman O. Anderson, “The Conduct of Reprisals by the German Army in the Southern USSR, 1941-1943,” (Ph.D.
Dissertation, University of Chicago, 1995), 342.
“Menschenjagden [people hunts].” In this case, Hannes Heer explained that representatives from
the Army Groups along with staff officers from High Command, proposed a slackening of
indiscriminate violence and an increase, albeit it quite small, in autonomy and personal rights for
occupied peoples.97 Some Rear Army Area commanders in Russia, as Theo Schulte
demonstrated, viewed brutal and indiscriminate attacks on civilians as “excessive.”98 Meanwhile
in Greece, a series of Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS massacres in 1944 eventually brought into
doubt the efficacy of brutality.99 Of course, as Hannes Heer and Mark Mazower point out,
merely questioning the efficacy of violence in anti-partisan warfare did not fundamentally change
the character of Wehrmacht anti-partisan efforts in either Russia or Greece. Moreover, this
questioning emanated from purely utilitarian motives and not out of the slightest humanitarian
impulse. Aside from Glaise-Horstenau, the Wehrmacht in the NDH failed to even reach the
stage of utilitarian questioning of space-centered, escalatory violence in anti-partisan warfare.100

The flawed strategy of Ustaša violence and the language surrounding Ustaša violence provided
the Wehrmacht with an explanation for its failure to subdue insurgency in the NDH. The answer
was simple: Wehrmacht strategy as applied to anti-partisan warfare was successful, but Ustaša
violence continually subverted this strategy in 1941 and 1942. The language of Wehrmacht
violence, when juxtaposed with the language of Ustaša violence created a discourse of violence
that bolstered the Wehrmacht’s belief in its strategy. This dangerous interaction allowed
Wehrmacht leaders and staffs to proceed with complete assurance in their effort to maximize
violence against supposedly insurgent controlled spaces, in spite of its abject failure in
eradicating resistance movements.

Within the NDH, Wehrmacht strategy proved superficially resistant to infection by the anti-
Slavic components of National Socialist ideology. Neither Löhr nor Stahl nor their staff officers
indulged in racist tirades against Serbs or Croats. Yet, Wehrmacht strategy deliberately inflicted
tremendous damage upon the primarily Slavic peoples of the NDH. In this sense, the
Wehrmacht’s strategic principles achieved a comfortable co-existence with a National Socialist
ideology that prescribed the brutal treatment of Slavic Untermenschen. Hitler and the
Wehrmacht High Command stripped away legal restrictions on the use of force against non-
combatants and made possible the Wehrmacht’s use of extreme violence. The main method for
maximizing Wehrmacht force, one which came to the fore in Kozara, expanded the type of
objects for Wehrmacht violence. Those new objects were civilians who were more vulnerable
than armed insurgents to the power of the Wehrmacht military formations. Instead of passing
over civilians the Wehrmacht either marked them for destruction through military force or
rounded them up and placed them in deportation or concentration camps. In turn, they raised the
number of targets for their violence. Civilians, especially those designated as part of an enemy
97
Hannes Heer, “Die Logik der Vernichtungskrieges: Wehrmacht und Partisanenkampf,” in Hannes Heer and Klaus
Naumann, eds. Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen des Wehrmacht (Hamburg, 1995), 128-129.
98
Theo Schulte, The German Army and Nazi Policies in Occupied Russia (Providence, 1989), 139-140.
99
Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece, 179-180. The memoir of Hermann Neubacher also points to the
controversy caused by these massacres, see Hermann Neubacher, Sonderauftrag Südost (Göttingen, 1956), 113.
100
The protests of Glaise-Horstenau in 1943 and 1944 against what he called “the policy of terror” remain the single
serious voice questioning the effectiveness of such policies. See, Letter from Glaise-Horstenau to Löhr, January 4,
1943, T-501/264/573; Report by Glaise-Horstenau to Wehrmacht High Command, October 26, 1943, T-
501/264/774-776.
population, became instruments through which the Wehrmacht maximized its violence. In
essence, civilians were a new form of technology through which the Wehrmacht maximized
force. As a counter to this technocratic strategy, which was continually buttressed by the
Wehrmacht’s discourse of violence, stood the ubiquitous violence of the Ustaša. The negative
perception of Ustaša violence, fueled by the strategy of nationalizing war and the Wehrmacht’s
discourse of violence, offered to Wehrmacht staff officers and leaders a comforting rationale for
their failure to subdue resistance movements in the NDH.