Wehrmacht General Who Thought He Would Get Away With It—Belgrade,1947 D

Yugoslavia, 1943. The war in the Balkans has   become a war without mercy. German troops, joined  by Croatian and other Axis forces, fight not only   against partisans of Tito’s Communist Party but  also against the civilians who feed and shelter   them.

Each ambush brings brutal reprisals  – villages are burned, hostages are shot,   and families are driven from their homes.  German reports call these actions anti-partisan   operations, but in reality, they are massacres.  The countryside turns into a landscape of ruins,   where terror replaces order and every civilian  learns to fear the sight of German uniforms. Among   the divisions sent to carry out this campaign is  a new formation of Croat volunteers and German   officers, the 369th Croatian Infantry Division,  known by its grim nickname, the Devil’s Division.

Its reputation for cruelty spreads wherever it  marches, leaving fire and death in its wake.   Leading it with cold precision and unbending  obedience is a German general Fritz Neidholdt. Fritz Neidholdt was born on the 16th of  November 1887 in the quiet Thuringian village   of Sankt Kilian, then part of the German  Empire.

His father, a Protestant pastor,   taught him the values of discipline and obedience,  and the boy grew up in a home of regular prayers   and firm rules. Yet Fritz’s imagination was caught  less by the church than by the army. The sight of   uniforms and order, of rank and command,  appealed to him more than the priesthood   ever could. On the 30th of August 1907, not yet  twenty, Fritz Neidholdt joined the German Army.

It was a time when the German Empire still  stood proud and confident, and young men like   him believed service to the Kaiser and the German  Empire was the highest honour a life could offer. Neidholdt began his military career at  the 96th Regiment of the 7th division of   the Thuringian infantry, which was part  of the German army.

In the ranks of this   unit Neidholdt began to learn the trade  of soldiering through drill, marching,   and started to climb through the army ranks. When  the First World War broke out in August 1914,   Neidholdt went to the front with his  men. They fought first in Belgium,   near the city of Namur and later was sent with his  unit to the Eastern front.

During the war years   he served on a various post in the field but also  doing staff work at military headquarters. During   the First World War he was wounded and received  various military awards such as the Knight’s Cross   of the Royal Saxon Order of Albrecht with  Swords and both classes of the Iron Cross. When the war ended in the German defeat,  Neidholdt stayed in the army of the newly   founded Weimar Republic.

The German empire was  gone, the monarchy had fallen, but the habit of   obedience remained. He served quietly through  the 1920s and was one of the many officers   who neither questioned nor resisted the shifting  politics of Weimar Germany. He was no visionary,   only a man of the army – methodical, precise,  and entirely devoted to command in the small army   which was limited by the Versailles treaty to 100  000 men.

But Neidholdt stayed in the German army   long enough to see the small Reichswehr, which  was the professional army of the Weimar Republic,   transform again into the growing  Wehrmacht of Hitler’s new regime,   which came into power in January 1933. On 21 May  1935, after seeing the revival of the German army,   Neidholdt retired, perhaps hoping  for peace. Yet peace never came.

In December 1938, as Germany successfully  rearmed, Neidholdt was recalled to active duty. When the Second World War started on 1 September  1939 he was again in the field and at the end of   September 1939, he was commander of 322nd infantry  regiment stationed in conquered Poland. At the   end of 1939, he moved with the regiment to the  Western Front and later led his soldiers in an   assault during the Western Campaign which  started on 10 May 1940.

After successful   victory over France in June 1941, Neidholdt  and his unit were placed on a military leave,   but they were called up again in the March of  1941. In a summer of that year they participated   in the German attack against the Soviet  Union. For his actions in the first part   of the Second World War he was awarded the  German Cross in gold, a military decoration   given in a case of repeated exceptional acts  of bravery and troop leadership.

In June 1942   he went away from his former unit and was sent  to a Führerreserve, awaiting his next command. The new assignment arrived on 1 September  1942, when he was given command of the 369th   Croatian Infantry Division – a new unit formed  under German authority from volunteers of the   Independent State of Croatia, a brutal fascist  puppet-state known also as an Ustaša regime.

The division, which was created in the  town Stockerau in Austria, drew from some   of the remains of the 369th Croatian Reinforced  Infantry Regiment, which had been used by Germans   on the Eastern front and later was destroyed at  Stalingrad. Its men came from villages and towns   under the Croatian Ustaša regime, its officers  from the German army.

They took the nickname of   the unit as Teufelsdivision, meaning the Devil’s  Division, borrowed from an Austro-Hungarian   division formed by the Croat soldiers that  had fought in the First World War. This   new Devil’s Division would earn its name again,  but this time not for courage, but for cruelty. At first, the unit was meant to be sent to  the Eastern Front, but instead it was sent   to Yugoslavia, where partisan resistance was  spreading like fire through the mountains.

Entire villages were burned, livestock stolen, and  men, women, and children executed as collective   punishment. In early 1943, Neidholdt’s men  entered the Balkans as part of Operation Weiss,   the massive Axis Offensive against Tito’s  partisans in Bosnia. The terrain was wild,   the partisans invisible, and the enemy’s  faces looked similar to those of local   peasants and villagers.

Frustrated by ambushes  and heavy losses, Neidholdt’s division struck   back against civilians with savage reprisals.  Villages suspected of helping the partisans were   burned. Eyewitnesses and postwar investigations  documented mass killings, rape, and destruction   of civilian homes. German reports praised the  division’s discipline but Yugoslav memories spoke   mainly about the brutal attacks, the fire and the  screams of the civilians.

In the next offensive,   nicknamed this time “Fall Schwarz” or  Case Black, members of the 369th division   fought across Montenegro and southern Bosnia,  Neidholdt’s men again formed the hard centre of   the German offensive against partisans and their  reputation for brutality only grew stronger. The   Devil’s Division, under Neidholdt’s command,  left behind a trail of death wherever it went.

Neidholdt’s command in the Balkan brought him  little glory. Slowly but steadily was war in   the Balkans turning against the occupiers. Italy  had surrendered to the Allies in September 1943,   the German armies were stretched thin  over the region, and partisan control   over the Balkan territory was growing.

The 369th Division remained in the field,   carrying out sweeps and reprisals that  hardened into routine. On 11 September 1944,   Neidholdt issued one of his last terrible orders.  His men surrounded the villages of Zagnježđe and   Udora near the city of Stolac in southern  Herzegovina. More than a hundred men were   murdered and women and children were forced out of  their homes and the villages were left in ruins.

By October 1944, the front in the Balkans was  collapsing. The Red Army was advancing from   the east, the partisans from the south.  Neidholdt resigned his command and once   again went to a Führerreserve after he came  back to Germany. Before the end of the war,   he went again through various military posts  and when Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945,   he was arrested by the Allied troops.

The Allies extradited him to Yugoslavia   in early 1947. In Belgrade, a special court  convened for what became known as the fourth   Yugoslav War Crimes Trials Proceedings, which  took place between 5th and 16th of February 1947.   Alongside Neidholdt stood six other senior German  officers: Alexander Löhr, Josef Kübler, Johann   Fortner, Adalbert Lontschar, Günther Tribukait,  and August Schmidhuber.

They represented the   hierarchy of the German occupation in the Balkans  – men who had commanded over whole regions,   divisions, and armies and ordered brutal  acts of revenge against civilian population.  The court heard testimony from witnesses who had  survived the massacres done by Croats and Germans.   They spoke of the hangings and shootings, of the  fires that lit the night sky, of families wiped   out without warning.

Reports captured from German  headquarters confirmed that the killings had been   ordered as reprisals, and that Neidholdt had  signed the papers himself. He did not deny that   civilians were executed, but insisted he had  acted within the laws of war and under orders   from his superiors. His voice remained firm and  calm, the voice of an officer who still believed   that duty and obedience could justify anything. The judges were not persuaded by his arguments.

On   16 February 1947, Neidholdt and his co-defendants  were found guilty of war crimes and crimes against   humanity. All were sentenced to death. Appeals for  clemency were rejected by the Yugoslav government.   The condemned men were told they would be executed  within next weeks, all except Löhr by hanging.

When Neidholdt was hanged as a war criminal  on 5 March 1947, he was fifty-nine years old. Before we end today’s story, take a look at  world history.tv, your special destination   for true history lovers. Discover exclusive  documentaries and incredible stories you won’t   find anywhere else. Thank you for watching  and don’t forget to subscribe for more.