With the Devil in Titoland: A Wehrmacht Anti-Partisan Division in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1943

Abstract

This article contributes to greater understanding of the forces that shaped the prosecution of Wehrmacht anti-partisan warfare at the level of divisions in the field. The article explains the approach to anti-partisan warfare of the divisional command of the 369th Infantry Division and compares it with the approach of other divisional commands which operated in the same region of Y ugoslavia during early 1943. In doing so, it highlights the particular importance of the troops' level of fighting power, and of the formative life experiences of divisional commanders during the First World War, in shaping conduct. IA nuanced debate is now emerging over how far the lower levels of the Wehrmacht were involved in the ideologically coloured, ruthless, and exploitative National Socialist policies which higher-level directives conveyed; how far, conversely, those lower levels sought to ameliorate the worst effects of those policies; and the various reasons for this differentiated behaviour. In the process, a picture of lowerlevel Wehrmacht conduct is emerging which is considerably more nuanced than those earlier accounts which tended to depict the Wehrmacht in blanket terms, and exonerate or condemn it wholesale. 1 A fruitful focus has been the Wehrmacht's middle level -divisions, regiments, and medium-sized occupation jurisdictions. This level of analysis is sufficiently far down the command chain for the historian to investigate the interaction of forces which shaped the motivation and conduct of individual officers and their units on the ground. At the 1 T.