Hitler's Foreign Executioners

by Christopher Hale

  Historians have tended to assume that these sentiments had equal significance for the Bosnian recruits as they had for their German officers; this is unlikely. Anti-Semitism had limited appeal in the old Ottoman territories of the Balkans; it was, as we have seen, much more potent in Catholic Croatia. Pogroms had been unknown in Bosnia–Herzegovina – and it was a Muslim scholar Dervis Korkut who successfully hid the renowned ‘Sarajevo Haggadah’ from greedy German eyes.38 This is why Himmler and el-Husseini invested so heavily in the divisional Imams and their training. The Muslim religious authorities in Sarajevo, the Ulema, had enthusiastically backed the formation of the ‘Handschar’, hoping it would protect their villages from attacks by Croatian and Chetnik murder squads – and it was the Ulema that had recruited the thirty or so Imams who would serve with the division. Both Himmler and the Mufti insisted that training would take place in Germany at a large villa in Berlin-Babelsberg, near Potsdam. Most of the new Imams had been schoolteachers; many had been educated in Cairo and Alexandria where some had been exposed to the radical teachings of the fundamentalist ‘Muslim Brotherhood’. El-Husseini took a close interest in the young men. They were enthusiastic smokers and whenever he visited Babelsberg, he brought extra cigarette rations. The Imams also visited the Mufti at his splendid villa in Zehlendorf. ‘What splendour and oriental beauty,’ one recalled. He insisted that each Imam must be ‘an example and ideal in his ways, actions and posture’; he must make his comrades ‘despise death and achieve a full life’.

  Lectures at the Imam school in Babelsberg included ‘The Waffen-SS: its organisation and its ranks’ and ‘The History of Nationalism’, as well as the rudiments of the German language. The Mufti lectured: ‘Never in its history has Germany attacked a Muslim nation. Germany battles world Jewry, Islam’s principal enemy. Germany also battles England and its allies, who have persecuted millions of Muslims, as well as Bolshevism, which subjugates forty million Muslims and threatens the Islamic faith in other lands.’39 The course was a rush job: it took just three weeks to complete, but it had a powerful impact on some of the young Bosnians. Writing in Handzar, the division’s newspaper, Husejin Dzozo, one of the Imams, celebrated the mission of the SS as follows. Aping his German teachers, he denounced the ‘Versailles-Diktat’ which allowed ‘Jews and Freemasons’ to corrupt European governments. ‘Communism, capitalism and Judaism stand shoulder to shoulders against the European continent’ – only the SS, the Imam concluded, can build a new Europe. Under Ottoman rule, Jews and Muslims had lived amicably in Bosnia–Herzegovina; now Himmler and the Grand Mufti rode roughshod over centuries’ old traditions of tolerance.40

  The Imams had undeniable impact. The divisional commander Sauberzweig claimed that the Bosniak recruits ‘gladly accepted’ Nazi doctrine, and that they had begun to regard Hitler as ‘a second prophet’ after Mohammed. But not every ‘Handschar’ recruit took the same view as Sauberzweig and Imam Dzozo. Quite the contrary – they joined the division to wage war against the Reich, rather than its ‘Jewish-Bolshevik’ foes. The allegiance of these men was to the Yugoslav partisan cause, not Hitler or the Grand Mufti. Berger warned Himmler that Tito had ‘issued an order that everyone [that supported the partisans] should report for police duty in Croatia’, which implied that partisans would try to infiltrate the new SS division.41 It was the fear that the ‘Handschar’ would prove ‘porous’ to hostile elements that had persuaded Berger and Himmler to transfer recruits ‘out of harm’s way’ to France. But as events would shortly prove, they had closed the stable door much too late.

  Ferid Dzanic was a clever young man from a notable Muslim family who had joined Tito’s Yugoslav National Liberation Army (JANL), but then had been captured and incarcerated in German camp near Sarajevo. On 1 August, Muslim recruiters came calling, looking for ‘Handschar’ recruits, and Dzanic applied to join. He was well educated and had been an officer cadet in the Royal Yugoslav Army, so he was eagerly accepted. German SS officers were just as impressed and awarded him a commission. He was dispatched to Dresden where the Mufti had set up another ‘Mullah Training School’, which was also used to indoctrinate promising ‘officer-class’ recruits. It was only later, after Dzanic had revealed his true allegiance, that the Germans characterised him (using an odd set of conflicting epithets) as ‘power hungry, subservient, corrupt and vague … possessing a strong will and power of persuasion’.42 In Dresden, Dzanic ran into Bozo Jelenek, a Catholic Croatian and Communist Party member, and Eduard Matutinovic. NikolaVukelic was another Catholic who, although not yet 20, had also been highly praised by his German commanding officer. Along with another Muslim, Lutfija Dizdarevic, Dzanic formed a secretive cadre determined to derail German plans. It was impossible to do much more than talk and plot in Dresden. But all four conspirators served in the same battalion (SS Gebirgs-Pionier Bataillon 13) and ended up billeted together when they arrived in the French town of Villefranche-de-Rouergue. And it was here that the Bosniak conspirators hatched up a daring plan to wreck the SS division.

  Dzanic left no record of his intentions, but it is pretty clear that the conspirators planned to arrest and execute their German officers inVillefranche, then march their battalion to Rodez and the other towns in the département where the rest of the SS division was billeted. Then the SS ‘Handschar’ would either join Allied forces in Italy or return to Croatia. The plan was both daring and naïve – for Dzanic had not taken into account the loyalty of the Imams. Just after midnight on 17 September, Dzanic and ‘about ten armed men’ burst into the barracks where some twenty-five German NCOs lay fast asleep. The mutineers roughly shook them awake and locked them in a storeroom. The revolt took the Germans completely by surprise. Once the first barracks had been secured, Dzanic and the mutineers rushed to the École Superieure, the girls’ school that served as battalion headquar-ters. They arrested and disarmed the German officers and locked the commander Heinrich Kuntz in his room. Then they proceeded to the Hotel Moderne, where other officers had been quartered. One was the unit doctor Willfried Schweiger, who later wrote a detailed report. He heard the rebels demand: “‘Are you with Germany or with us?” Seconds later, a shot … a loud crash. Then it was the turn of SS-Hstuf. Kuntz. The same question … another shot.’

  Meanwhile, Dzanic returned to the Hotel Moderne, armed with a pistol, submachine gun and a knife, where he roused Imam Halim Malkoc. ‘All the German officers are under arrest and will be shot,’ he was informed. Dzanic demanded: ‘Imam come with us, for if you do not you are our enemy.’ The Imam was then left alone to dress. He said later: ‘I was well aware of what the consequences of this action would be.’ As soon as he had dressed, the Imam started talking with other Bosnians and tried to persuade them Dzanic and the other ringleaders had deceived them. Imam Malkok assembled a small party of Reich-loyal Bosnians and released some of the German officers and NCOs. According to Dr Schweiger’s report, the Imam called out ‘Heil Hitler! Long live the Poglavnik [Pavelić]!’ In a series of confused skirmishes, the Germans and loyal Bosnians tracked down the mutineers and shot many of them dead. Thanks to the Imam, by morning the Germans had restored order. The mutiny was over, but the shock waves had begun rippling towards Berlin. It was time for recrimination – and vengeance.

  All but one of the ringleaders, Nicola Vucelik, had already been shot or escaped, but Imam Malkoc helped Sauberzweig and the German prosecutor, Dr Franz von Kocevar, identify many others who had joined in the revolt. By midday 18 September, von Kocevar had handed down fourteen death sentences – and that afternoon, loyal Bosnians assembled in an open field opposite the town cemetery to receive a lesson in SS justice. As an SS squad loaded their standard-issue Mauser rifles, a Croatian interpreter called out the names of the condemned one by one when it was their ‘turn at the stake’. Afterwards, SS-Rottenführer Hans-Wolf Renner stepped forward to administer a ‘mercy shot’ to finish off anyone who had not succumbed. The bodies were immediately buried in shallow graves dug in the rocky soil. A few weeks later, dogs un
earthed the corpses. On 28 September, four Bosnians escapees were tracked down hiding out near Villefranche, and shot dead on the spot.43

  From Berlin, recrimination followed swiftly. Himmler blamed the relocation to France: Villefranche was positively crawling with unreliable foreigners, including ‘Jews from the Balkan lands’ who had corrupted his noble ‘Mujos’. The solution was obvious. Potential traitors must be weeded out of the division and the rest sent to benefit from proper Germanic instruction ‘governed by the law of drill, the law of obedience’ – in Germany.44 The revolt had caught Sauberzweig on the back foot. But with Prussian zeal, he set about weeding out unreliable ‘dark elements’. On 27 September, at the railway station in Mende, he watched with some satisfaction as loyal ‘Handschar’ men herded more than 800 alleged ‘unreliables’ into cattle trucks. Their destination: Dachau.

  February 1944: the ‘Handschar’ men completed training in Germany and began the long journey back to their distant homeland. They came back to a traumatised land, scarred byAxis occupation and savage civil war. At their SS training camp in Neuhammer, the SS ‘Handschar’ had been reformed root and branch – in theory. Now they would be put to the test in combat.

  In Germany, the Bosnians had been subjected to a bizarre cultural experiment designed to weld together Nazism and Islam. At the end of October 1943, the ‘Handschar’ celebrated Bairam, the Turkish equivalent to Id al-Fitr, the joyous end of Ramadan. The Bosnians ‘ate good food and halva’. Sauberzweig did what he could to inspire an esprit de corps: he declared that ‘Your fate is Germany’s fate’. Sauberzweig had little to say about ideology. That was the job of Imam Abdulah Muhasilovic, who had, like Imam Malkoc, become a fanatical SS propagandist. When he took the podium, wrapped in oak leaves and a giant swastika, he made sure the ‘Handschar’ understood who was to blame for the atrocities committed in their homeland: ‘An entire army of our brothers, our refugees, wander about from city to village, wrapped in rags, barefooted, hungry and cold. Their Bairam feast will be spent in misery and distress … Chetniks and Partisans carry on their activities, murdering and plundering wherever they go.’ Raising a gloved hand, the Imam went on:

  The world’s Muslims are engaged in a life-or-death struggle … The entire world has divided itself into two camps. One stands under the leadership of the Jew, about whom God says in the Koran ‘They are your enemy and God’s enemy!’ … On the other side stands Nationalist Socialist Germany, with its allies, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, who fight for god, faith, morality.

  At the beginning of 1944, Himmler visited the Bosniaks at Neuhammer. His lecture to the division can be found in the National Archives in Washington DC: ‘Today the world knows what the SS is. We have more enemies than friends … The enemy knows that we are soldiers from the heart of Europe.’ He called for his German officers to embrace their Bosnian and Croatian comrades: ‘there is to be no difference between a German from the Reich, a Bosnian, Croatian, or a German from the south east … We have sworn the same oath to the same leader.’45

  Another important visitor was, inevitably, the Grand Mufti, who arrived at the SS camp accompanied by Muslim notables from Sarajevo and from Albania, where the SS had recruited another Muslim division with the Mufti’s backing. El-Husseini spent three days at Neuhammer and presented Muslim soldiers with packets of tobacco and pots of honey. According to a radio broadcast, the Mufti ‘inspected troops in training and prayed with them’. He said he had been reminded of his own soldiering days during the First World War (he fought in the Turkish army). The Mufti, though, was evidently well informed about the military situation in the Balkans. As soon as he had returned to Berlin, he met with Berger to discuss conditions of service for the ‘Handschar’ when they returned to fight in Bosnia. He reminded Berger that in September (just as Dzanic was planning the mutiny in France) the entire Home Guard garrison of Tuzla had defected to Tito’s partisans. This was shrewd, for the loss of Tuzla had been a wake-up call for the German occupation authorities.46 Imam Hasan Bajraktarevic and two other clerics who had just returned from Bosnia made the same point. Many Muslims, they warned, had acquired a ‘negative impression’ of the Germans and feared that the ‘Handschar’ men would be sent to serve on the Eastern Front as cannon fodder. Chetnik attacks on Bosnian Muslim villages continued unabated and Tito had redoubled efforts to recruit disaffected Muslims. Himmler sent money and clothes to a Bosnian Muslim welfare association – on condition that his gifts would be distributed after the ‘Handschar’ had returned to Bosnia.47 But his grudging generosity would prove too little, too late. As the ‘Handschar’ men completed training in Germany, thousands of Bosniaks rushed to join Tito’s armies.

  As the big, slow-moving German troop trains taking the SS ‘Handschar’ home rumbled across the Croatian border, the young men on board had few illusions about what they would find.48 The big trains steamed on ponderously, passing through station after station fortified to repel partisan attack. Alongside the line lay twisted train wrecks, some still smouldering. The German trains had to halt frequently to check the line. The ‘Handschar’ men knew much better than their German officers that their mountainous homeland favoured their foes. This is an unforgiving region of dense forests, high rocky ridges, plunging ravines and fast-moving torrents. Bosnia is a nightmare for even the best-equipped conventional military forces. For the agile partisan, however, forests can become natural fortresses; rock-strewn ridges (the balkans) rip vehicle tyres and the toughest boots to shreds. Flat, open land is rare – a gift to secretive, fast-moving bands who need to avoid aerial surveillance. This is a land of great beauty that repels mighty armies and favours lightning strikes and swift retreat. The Bosnian balkans can be hostile to intruders in many different ways. An endless chain of serrated ridges generates a tortuous mosaic of rain shadows. Shattering, unexpected downpours are frequent and demoralising. In the forests and ravines, nights are truly pitch-dark. Military historian Jonathan Trigg (who served in Bosnia in the 1990s) emphasises that ‘mountain fighting, just like fighting in urban areas and woodland, soaks up men on a huge scale’.49

  Although he was now in charge of a ‘Gebirgs division’, ‘Speedy’ Sauberzweig had no experience of real ‘mountain combat’. Sauberzweig travelled to the mustering point in Mostar in much greater comfort than his men. In an open letter addressed to the ‘Handschar’, Sauberzweig tried to express empathy.50 He described passing ruined fields and burnt out villages. In the blighted land, anyone who remained alive lived like troglodytes in cellars and shelters. Thousands more starved in refugee camps. Naturally, Sauberzweig wrote, this was all the fault of partisans not the German occupiers. He concluded:

  I also saw some of your fathers. Their eyes, when I told them that I was your division commander, shined as brightly as your own. Before long, each of you shall be standing in a place that you call home … standing firm as a defender of the idea of saving the culture of Europe – the idea of Adolf Hitler.

  In fact, little love was lost between Sauberzweig’s German officers and their Bosnian recruits. German officers had fallen out with both their ethnic German comrades and the Bosnians, whom they regarded as ‘substandard’: ‘The complete inability of the Prussians to deal with soldiers of other nations is clear,’ an informer told Glaise von Horstenau, who was no friend of the SS: ‘No one makes an effort to learn [Serbo Croat]. [Germans] become angry when ethnic German officers speak [with the enlisted men] in their own tongue! Little can be expected from this division.’51

  The men of the ‘Handschar’ would soon discover what the ‘idea of Adolf Hitler’ meant on the battlefield. At the beginning of March, the ‘Handschar’ celebrated Mevlud, the birthday of the Prophet – a Balkan speciality which orthodox Muslims (who call the day Mawlid) despise as ‘too Christian’. Sauberzweig made sure his men enjoyed the day in high style. Then two days later, he ordered reconnaissance patrols to enter the Bosut Forest, a near impenetrable partisan stronghold north of the old Bosnian border which had to be clea
red before the division could commence the main campaign to secure north-east Bosnia. To completely liquidate the partisan units, it was vital to block any escape routes; for Tito’s men had perfected the art of the tactical retreat often by fleeing along the narrow river valleys. Sauberzweig commandeered an old Austrian gunboat, the Bosna (which had been sunk and raised at least twice), to guard the Sava River and sent a ‘Handschar’ regiment north to patrol the main road. Sauberzweig ordered the main attack on 10 March: five ‘Handschar’ spearheads battled their way into the Bosut Forest, forcing the partisans to retreat towards the Sava. Here the Bosna, its mainly Croatian crew commanded by Hermann Schifferdecker, surprised a partisan unit trying to cross the river and began firing on them. Heavy return fire erupted from the bank and the Croatian captain of the Bosna turned the boat around and fled at full speed. Dismayed, Schifferdecker forced the Croatian crew to turn the Bosna round too. By this time, the wounded crewman had died. As Schifferdecker cautiously chugged up river, urging on the terrified captain, they again came under heavy fire from the south side of the river. Panic erupted. Officers and crew threw themselves on to the deck. In the chaos, one of the German officers fell overboard and had to be retrieved under fire with a grappling hook. As bullets smashed into the Bosna’s superstructure or whined menacingly over head, Schifferdecker found himself under ‘friendly fire’ from a ‘Handschar’ unit on the other (north) side of the Sava. It was only with the greatest difficulty that Schifferdecker managed to retrieve his men and return to headquarters. That night, the Bosna vanished; its crew had had enough. Like the Americans in Vietnam, the SS ‘Handschar’ faced a determined and wily guerrilla force that could run rings around any armed force sent to attack.