Terror in the Balkans: German Armies and Partisan Warfare by Ben Shepherd (review)

The German Army commander in Serbia informed his soldiers in September 1941, “Your objective is to be achieved in a land where, in 1914, streams of German blood flowed because of the treachery of the Serbs, men and women. You are the avengers of those dead” (2). During the cataclysmic counterinsurgency, civil war, and ethnic violence that followed, 1.75 million people died in Yugoslavia, i.e., 11 percent of the population. Ben Shepherd tries to explain the role of the Wehrmacht in this bloody internecine combat, specifically looking at why some units became more brutal whereas others pursued relatively more “sane” policies (242). His conclusion is simple and stark: “the troops were expected to single out, victimize, and kill Jews, Communists, and Sinti and Roma, as scapegoats or reprisal victims for insurgent attacks” (5). Yet the reasons for this were complicated.

Shepherd is well positioned to examine the Balkan theater. His previous work explored the war against the partisans in the northern Soviet Union, with a focus on the extremely brutal tactics used there (War in the Wild East: The German Army and Soviet Partisans [2004]). He now turns his gaze to a much more complex situation in which Nazi racial ideology and pragmatic military concerns mixed with centuryold antagonisms and the shifting agendas of various state actors. This study focuses on the division level of operations and is organized chronologically and regionally. Shepherd also provides the reader with three introductory chapters on the evolution of the Wehrmacht and on the historical background of the region. In short, the Germans faced a politically volatile and fractured population in which there was conflict among communist Yugoslav partisans, Serbian nationalist Chetniks, Croatian fascist Ustasha, as well as a Croatian puppet government. As Shepherd points out, the German leadership chose to deploy “a cut-price military occupation, employing second-rate commanders, the better to resource the army’s frontline formations” (81).

Taking into account explosive local conditions, the remaining chapters look at attempts by four German army divisions to defeat a very real insurgency. This investigation, which forms the core of the book, provides the foundation of Shepherd’s argument. He begins by showing the bewildering complexity of the political, geographic, and ethnic terrain on which the German army operated. From the beginning the German commander, Franz Boehme, enforced a policy of harsh reprisal executions of civilians in retaliation for attacks on Wehrmacht formations; these became more extreme over time. The experience of the “700-series” infantry divisions underlined the difficulty of the Germans’ task in the Balkans, while highlighting both the organizational success of the communist partisans and the counterproductive machinations of Serbian and Croatian paramilitary formations. German military units were hopelessly underequipped, understaffed, undertrained, and outmatched by the insurgents’ tactical skills, as well as hurt by the support the latter received from the local population: “all divisional commanders in Serbia, together with their officers and men, probably felt the mocking contrast between their current, wretched situation and the decisive maneuver that was the German military’s meat and drink” (117).

In the context of this deteriorating situation, Shepherd argues that “German reprisals now assumed terrifying dimensions,” with no attempt “to distinguish between guilty and innocent” (121). German army units increasingly practiced a “’mainstream’ ruthlessness” (250). Insurgents frequently escaped and the Germans, “whether through frustration, pressure from above for results, or the belief that cowing the population was at least one means of combating the insurgents, turned on civilians” (159). Shepherd shows clearly, as others have, that the victims could not possibly have all been armed combatants, i.e., many were innocent civilians.

Shepherd is nevertheless careful to point out that individual units could and did choose different paths in response to Balkan violence. For example, the leaders of the 718th Infantry Division advised their men in 1942 that they were aware that past operations had led to “sometimes pointless destruction on the greatest scale, and...