The last commander of the Prinz Eugen Division was SS-Brigadeführer Otto Kumm, bearer of the Knight’s Cross with Oakleaves and Swords. Photographed here as an SS-Standartenführer, Kumm was a veteran of the earliest days of the SS-Verfügungstruppe, and had commanded the Der Führer regiment within the Das Reich Division. Under Kumm’s command the Volksdeutsche of the Prinz Eugen Division performed well in the role of ‘fire brigade’, rushed from one crisis point to another on the collapsing Balkan front in 1944-45 to ensure the safe evacuation of major German forces.

Collapse in the East, 1944-45

In the autumn of 1944, as the situation on the Eastern Front became increasingly critical, Bulgaria and Romania deserted the Axis cause and transferred their allegiance, declaring war on Germany. In September 1944, General Phleps flew from Montenegro to his home country of Transylvania on the Romanian/Hungarian frontier in hopes of organising resistance; he was killed, reportedly when his light aircraft was shot down on 21 September, but alternative accounts have since been published.

With Soviet and Bulgarian forces approaching from the east and Tito’s partisans threatening to join up with them, Prinz Eugen was committed to Unternehmen ‘Rubezahl’, smashing its way into partisan forces moving eastwards. The division surrounded and completely destroyed one large force, although Allied air forces again played a part, landing in the surrounded pocket and evacuating partisan wounded.

Enemy attention now turned towards the capture of the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade. Prinz Eugen was initially given the task of intercepting lead enemy units approaching Belgrade; but then was almost immediately transferred to the area around Nisch, where it was to play an important role in covering the retreat of over 300,000 German troops of Heeresgruppe E under General-Field Marshal Lohr, who were falling back through Yugoslavia from occupation duty in the Aegean. The division was strung out along a 90-mile front, in an area of Macedonia infested with partisans, threatened on its right by the Bulgarian 2nd Army and on its left by the Soviet 57th Army. Despite the enemy’s overwhelming numerical superiority, Prinz Eugen held on to its positions in this ‘Vardar Corridor’ under repeated attacks over a number of weeks. Once again the division suffered significant casualties, and this time it reported numbers of its troops deserting. Under attacks by very strong partisan forces Prinz Eugen’s units became fragmented and cut off. In late November the divisional commander, SS-Brigadeführer Kumm, was forced to order his troops to break out; but Prinz Eugen had succeeded in its mission of holding back the enemy long enough to allow Lohr’s troops to escape. After breaking out, the remnants of the division – now less than 4,000 strong – had to carry out a forced march over four days to reach their designated ‘rest’ area.

In November 1944 the German cadre remnants of the Albanian 21. SS Division Skanderbegwere ordered incorporated into the division; and one source states that SS-Frw GebJr Regt 14 was authorised to take the title ‘Skanderbeg’, though the incorporation seems never in fact to have taken place.

Thereafter Prinz Eugen fought numerous rearguard actions against both partisans and Soviet units, as the Germans retreated from Yugoslavia and the partisans tried to delay them long enough for the Red Army to overtake and destroy them. In mid-January 1945 the Germans attempted to drive off the partisan forces which were harrying them by launching Unternehmen ‘Frühlingssturm’. Operating under XXXIV Korps, Prinz Eugen seized the town of Nemeci and formed a bridgehead at Buzot; a second phase, ‘Wehrwolf’, lasted from 4 February until the end of that month, after which the division was transferred to Heeresgruppe E reserve. It was soon in action again, against powerful partisan forces encircling German units in the town of Zenica north of Sarajevo; before long Prinz Eugen pushed the enemy back and relieved the town.

The tempo of operations now became desperate as the enemy pressed in all around the retreating German forces, and Prinz Eugen fought with notable determination. No sooner had the division relieved Zenica when elements were detached and sent to the south of Sarajevo to relieve a Croatian infantry division which had been trapped by partisans. There then followed a remarkable episode when, in order to relieve yet another cut-off German Army unit, the entire division scaled Mount Igman, moving through deep snow drifts. Prinz Eugen emerged behind the partisan units, not only relieving their Army comrades but pursuing the enemy into the mountains. ‘When the partisans regrouped on a high peak a vicious battle ensued, with the summit changing hands several times before the rate of casualties on both sides persuaded them that this exposed peak – lacking any sort of cover, and where every shell burst caused many casualties – was no longer worth contesting. The Army unit relieved in Sarajevo ran into yet another partisan ambush, and once more Prinz Eugen came to the rescue.

Over the following days the division provided rearguard cover for withdrawing German units making their way north-’west towards Austria. At Brod the bridge over the River Sava had already been captured by strong partisan forces; but Prinz Eugen pioneers successfully ferried the entire mixed Army/Waffen-SS force across the river in assault boats, though at the cost of abandoning all heavy equipment. As the Third Reich finally collapsed in April/May 1945 German units were determined not to fall into the hands of the vengeful partisans, and for this reason fighting continued in this area even after the German surrender on 8 May.

Eventually, an agreement was reached with the enemy that Prinz Eugen would surrender its arms in return for safe passage to the Austrian border. Unsurprisingly, this agreement was not honoured, and the division was forced to put in a counter-attack four days after the war had officially ended.

On 12 May the division discharged its troops, leaving each man to try to make his own way to safety, and some groups succeeded in reaching Austrian soil. Those still in enemy territory finally surrendered at Cilli in Slovenia on 16 May, fully eight days after the war in Europe had ended. The treatment meted out to them by the partisans was predictably brutal, and not many survived.

The form of warfare in which the Prinz Eugen Division was involved was perhaps uniquely ugly, and the formation was reportedly guilty of many atrocities. Occupied Yugoslavia was the arena for merciless guerrilla warfare, but not simply between the Germans and their allies on one hand and unified patriots on the other. The Communist and Chetnik resistance movements were divided by mutual hatreds; the Communists devoted great energy to fighting the Royalists, and there were instances of Chetniks joining forces with the occupiers to fight the partisans. This internal war was often pursued as ruthlessly as 55 anti-guerrilla operations (a fan that should not surprise us, in the aftermath of the Balkan wars of the 1990s), and claimed perhaps as many lives as Axis security operations. Nevertheless, there can be no denying that the SS-led anti-partisan sweeps nearly always involved barbarous reprisals against local civilians in areas of anti-German activity. In this kind of warfare neither side expected or offered any quarter, and all the participant forces committed atrocities. In the last months of the war Prinz Eugen units showed themselves capable of courageous fighting against odds, and six members of the division were decorated with the Knight’s Cross; but the stain of its atrocities against civilians cannot be avoided.

Formation The formation of the Prinz Eugen Division was the culmination of the hopes long held by the recruitment department chief, S5-0bergruppenführer Gottlob Berger, to form an entire SS division from ethnic Germans living outside the Reich. In previous centuries many German-speaking emigrants to the east and southeast had founded communities along the borders of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire and even further afield. Their descendants were seen as a rich seam of potential manpower for the SS, since earlier restrictions on SS recruitment imposed at the insistence of the Army applied only to Reichsdeutsche (German citizens), and not Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans living outside Germany’s borders).

This new division was to be raised primarily from ethnic Germans living in Yugoslavia, mainly in the Serbian Banat, a frontier region heavily colonised by ethnic Germans since the Middle Ages; later the net would be widened, and Romanians and Hungarians of German background were taken in. The division was officially formed in March 1942; although attempts were made to recruit it entirely from volunteers (Freiwillige), and the divisional titles specifically identified it as a volunteer formation, the response was disappointing and conscription was quickly introduced – all the region’s Volksdeutsche males between 17 and 54 years were made liable for service with the division. An initial strength of around 15,000 was reached, though there were still shortages in trained and experienced officers and NCOs.

The senior leadership cadre were almost exclusively German and Austrian, but the shortage of junior leaders was resolved to some degree by transferring ethnic Germans who had been conscripted into the Yugoslavian Army and were at that point still being held in POW camps by the Germans. Ultimately the division reached a full strength of just over 21,000 men. The first divisional commander, Artur Phleps, was an ethnic German from the Transylvanian borderland of Romania, who had previously served in the Austro-Hungarian Army, had commanded Romanian mountain troops, and had also gained more recent experience as a regimental commander in the SS Wiking Division.

The division’s mission was planned as the suppression of guerrilla activity in occupied Yugoslavia, where both Communist ‘Partisan’ and Royalist ‘Chetnik’ resistance movements – led by Tito and Mihailovic respectively – were active against the Italian and German occupation forces in the wooded mountain terrain. For such ‘police’ duties it was not necessary to equip the formation to the standards demanded on the Russian Front, and for this reason much of Prinz Eugen’s equipment was obsolescent captured French or Czech material. It did have the addition – unusual for a mountain division – of an armoured element. Even though this one-company ‘battalion’ had predominantly old French Renault light tanks, given that the opposition were lightly armed partisans this augmentation of its mobile firepower was a definite advantage.

Campaigns: Yugoslavia 1942-44

After just over six months of training the division was considered ready for action, and its first operation was against Chetniks on the Serbia/Montenegro borders in October 1942. These first actions were judged successful, and within two months Prinz Eugen was declared to have reached a sufficient level of combat efficiency to be allocated to the order of battle of 12. Armee. It was headquartered in the ZagrebKariovac area, and its first major engagement was as part of the German forces committed to Unternehmen ‘Weiss’, an ambitious German-Italian operation which aimed to trap and destroy Tito’s forces in Bosnia. The operation was unsuccessful, and the bulk of the partisans escaped destruction by slipping away to the south-east between the sectors of Prinz Eugen and the Italian 6th Army. Nevertheless, the division captured Bihac from the partisans in mid-January 1943, operating in conjunction with other German, Italian and Croatian units; and in late February/ early March Prinz Eugen took part in further actions around Lapac and Dvar. The division then provided forces to protect the important bauxite mines at Mostar.

In April 1943 the division received an influx of personnel from the disbanded so-calIed ‘Einsatzstaffeln’, SS-controlled ethnic German ‘self defence’ battalions from Croatia (one of which was coincidentalIy named ‘Prinz Eugen’).

In May 1943, Prinz Eugen was attached to Heeresgüppe E for operations in western Montenegro, taking part in another major antipartisan sweep by German, Italian and Bulgarian forces, code-named Unternehmen ‘Schwarz’. During operations along the Dalmatian coast near Dubrovnik bitter fighting against Tito’s Communist partisans cost the division over 500 killed and wounded. During this period the divisional commander Artur Phleps was promoted, eventually taking over as commander of V SS-Gebirgskorps on 21 April, and command of Prinz Eugen passed in June to SS-Brigadeführer Ritter von Oberkamp. After the completion of Operation ‘Black’ the division was given a brief period of rest, taking over occupation duties around Mostar from Italian forces.

When the Italians concluded their separate armistice with the Allies in September 1943 some units of the Italian 2nd Army in Yugoslavia simply abandoned their equipment to the guerrillas and took ship for Italy, while others actually deserted to the partisans. The latter moved swiftly to seize large quantities of abandoned Italian equipment, which gave their strength a substantial boost. Prinz Eugen was then serving under XXV Gebirgskorps of 2. Panzerarmee, and was involved both in the disarming of remaining Italian troops on the Dalmatian coast and in resisting partisan exploitation of the Italian collapse. Not all Italian units surrendered their arms peacefully; the division captured more than 30,000 Italians at Dubrovnik on 10 September, and took Split only on the 27th, after two weeks of fierce fighting. Prinz Eugen then took part in anti-partisan operations on the Peljesac Peninsula and surrounding islands, occupying these for some weeks before returning to anti-partisan duties north-east of Sarajevo and Gorazde in eastern Bosnia in December.

In early January 1944, Prinz Eugen operated along with the Army’s 1. Gebirgs Division in Unternehmen ‘Waldrusch ‘; it suffered serious casualties, and was beginning to show the symptoms of a drop in morale. There were almost 1,500 cases of trench foot in the division at this time. From mid-January 1944 the division was in reserve around Split for refitting and further training before returning to the field in March. Shortly after returning to active operations under V SS-Gebirgskorps the division was reportedly involved in atrocities in Dalmatia which took over 800 civilian lives during anti-partisan actions.

In May 1944 the division took part, alongside Army units and SS paratroopers, in Unternehmen ‘Rōsselsprung’, the operation which attempted to capture Tito in his headquarters at Drvar. The task of Prinz Eugen was to seal the area, seizing partisan supply dumps, railway stations and road crossings to prevent the escape of any partisan forces.

Forewarned of the attacks, the partisans had prepared strong defensive positions; Prinz Eugen ran into bitter resistance almost immediately, and Tito’s units even succeeded in mounting local counter-attacks against the SS troops. The partisans also had the advantage of being able to call on Allied air support from Italy, and German units were subjected to constant harrying attacks.

The division captured Ribnik on 27 May; but although the partisans were surrounded, the forest and mountain terrain prevented the German cordons from achieving a real entrapment. The strong and confident partisan forces were liable to appear almost anywhere to mount concerted attacks on German positions – even Prinz Eugen’s divisional headquarters came under heavy attack for a while. Several of the basic objectives of the operation were met – considerable casualties were inflicted, supply dumps were captured and the enemy were driven out of the area (albeit temporarily); but Tito himself had escaped just before the operation commenced, and all the Germans found was one of his discarded uniforms.

Prinz Eugen performed effectively during this period, relentlessly pursuing Tito’s elite 1st Proletarian Division through Croatia and into Serbia despite significant casualties, and destroying its ability to undertake any further offensive actions. This series of operations ended in no distinct final battle, but rather in a gradual petering out of confrontations with the partisans in the first week of August.

Immediately after the end of the Second World War, civil war erupts in Greece and leads to British troops being deployed on the streets of Athens.

In Greece, resistance to the Axis occupiers began almost immediately. The largest group was the leftist National Liberation Front (EAM – Ethnikon Apeleftherotikon Metopon), with the National People’s Liberation Army as its military wing. It had poor relations with the more conservative National Republican Greek League, and the two groups fought each other during the winter of 1943–1944, although a truce was arranged in February 1944. When the Germans pulled out of Greece, EAM held the vast majority of the country.

In Greece, infighting among the National Popular Liberation Army (ELAS – Ethnikos Laikos Apeleftherotikos Stratos), the National Republican Greek League (EDES), and the Communist National Liberation Front (EAM) led to a civil war after World War II had ended.

Damaskinos, Archbishop, 1891–1949

After the Germans had been forced out of Greece, CHURCHILL and EDEN wanted to restore the monarchy in Greece. They were prevented from doing this because of intense fighting between left and right wing groups. After an armistice with EAM (Greek National Liberation Front Communists) had been negotiated in December 1944, they persuaded the King to delay his return until after a referendum had been held on the question of the monarchy. Damaskinos was the popular and neutral figure who was made Regent in the meantime. He had earned his popularity because he was a liberal and because of his resistance to the Germans. As Regent he was in a difficult position because he could not find a stable government and in October 1945 was forced to become his own Prime Minister since he could find no suitable candidate. However he successfully supervised the plebiscite which brought back King GEORGE II and Damaskinos resigned.

List of Greek Resistance organizations

Greek People’s Liberation Army

National Liberation Front

National Republican Greek League

National and Social Liberation

Panhellenic Union of Fighting Youths

In October 1944 the Partisans liberated Belgrade from the Germans. Seen here is a column of Partisans entering the liberated capital.

Tito had come a long way in a year. At the Teheran conference it was agreed to give the Partizans all possible military support, including commando operations, and the ideological character of the Partizan movement was now no longer a matter for prevarication by Stalin, who only six months earlier had dissolved the Communist International, so as not to give offence which might delay the opening of a second front. On 23 February 1944, a Soviet military mission was parachuted in to the Partizan HQ located in the Bosanski Petrovac area, and in May the Allies forced the resignation of the Yugoslav government in London. It was a political triumph for the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, but the military situation remained perilous. Despite increased Allied airdrops, the Partizans still had their backs to the wall. The Sixth and Seventh Offensives by German, Bulgarian and Chetnik forces, which lasted from November 1943 until the summer of 1944, again drove the Partizans back into western Bosnia, always their last refuge in extremity.

Even there, on 25 May 1944 (Tito’s birthday), German paratroopers almost captured the entire Partizan HQ in an attack on Drvar. Tito was wounded in a desperate escape, and flown out to the tiny island of Vis in mid-Adriatic, made safe by Allied air cover. There he met with Ivan Subasic, briefly Ban of Croatia in 1939, now the new London premier of Yugoslavia. Subasic was forced to agree on a mixed government of emigres and Communists, though Tito consented only under pressure from Stalin to accept a monarchist state, until a Yugoslav Constituent Assembly should settle the question. In the meantime, the Party leadership hastened to lay the foundations of the post-war order, beginning with the State Security Service (13 May 1944), the Department for the Defence of the People (OZNa). Three new regional Anti-fascist Councils for Slovenia, Montenegro and Macedonia were added to those already in existence for Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina, foretelling the constitutional form of the communist state.

At a meeting with Churchill in Naples on 12 August, Tito assured his host that he had no wish to create a communist Yugoslavia, but a week later he ‘levanted’ (as Churchill put it) from Vis to Moscow, where he came face-to-face with Stalin for the first time. A momentous deal was struck. The Red Army was now nearing Yugoslavia, with the spearhead of its advance cutting through Romania and Bulgaria. Marshal Tolbukhin would request permission from the National Committee of Liberation to enter Yugoslav territory, and the task of securing Yugoslavia would be left to the Peoples’ Liberation Army, strengthened by the addition of two airborne and twelve infantry divisions provisioned and equipped by the USSR. Belgrade was liberated on 20 October 20, after 11 days of bitter street battles. As Soviet forces hurried on in pursuit of the Germans, Tito had a second meeting (1 November) with Subasic in Belgrade, at which it was agreed that King Petar (who was not consulted) would not be allowed to return to Yugoslavia, pending a referendum on his future, and AVNOJ was recognized as the provisional government until elections for a Constituent Assembly could be held. During 9–12 September, the first session of the Anti-fascist Assembly (not ‘Council’) for the Peoples’ Liberation of Serbia met and immediately entered into an agreement with the five Anti-fascist Councils to form a Democratic Federative Yugoslavia.

Stalin was distinctly worried about the effect of all this on his western allies, and on 9 October a visit by Churchill and Eden to Moscow resulted in the notorious ‘percentages agreement’, in which the Central and Eastern European states were to be divided into spheres of influence, with Yugoslavia pencilled in as ‘fifty-fifty’. At a meeting with Djilas and Kardelj on 22 November (Tito refused to go), Stalin revealed the deal which had been struck, but the leaders of the Yugoslav Party ignored Stalin’s intention to restore the balance in favour of the London government. They held all the cards, as Churchill confessed to Subasic at the beginning of January 1945. OZNa, the State Security Service, headed by the Party’s hatchet-man Aleksandar Rankoviç, was zealously carrying out Tito’s instruction to ‘strike terror into the bones of those who do not like this kind of Yugoslavia’. The Peoples’ Liberation Army, now numbering about 200 000 troops, was reorganized into four regular army corps on 1 January, and at the end of the month a network of trade unions was installed, the characteristic transmission belts of communist power.

It was all over bar the formalities. When Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill met again at Yalta (4–12 February 1945), it was agreed that the Tito–Subasic bargain should be honoured by including in government some of the deputies elected to the National Assembly in 1938, but within Yugoslavia the process of securing the Party’s grip on power rolled on undisturbed. The Peoples’ Liberation Army was renamed the Yugoslav Army on 1 March, and on 7 March the Democratic Federative Yugoslavia received the accolade of Allied recognition, a full two months before the ending of hostilities in Europe.

The consolidation of power was achieved with great speed and disciplined energy by a Party that now counted 140 000 cadres, against a backdrop of continued fighting. The western areas of Yugoslavia, where the Partizans had spent most of the war, were actually the last to be freed. Bulgaria changed sides on 9 September 1944, and Nis fell to the Red Army on 14 October, forcing the Germans to make their final retreat through Kosovo and Bosnia, so that Sarajevo was not liberated until 6 April 1945, four years to the day after the bombing of Belgrade which began the war. On May Day, Yugoslav troops were still fighting in the battle for Trieste, and it was only on 15 May, six days after VE Day, that the remnants of the Wehrmacht’s Army Group ‘E’, comprising about 300 000 German soldiers, together with Ustasha and Chetnik hangers-on, surrendered to the Yugoslav Fourth Army, after a desperate battle to break through into Austria. Once again Stalin felt obliged to apply the brakes, in order to prevent the Yugoslavs from precipitating a major crisis with his western Allies over Trieste and Austrian Carinthia.

In August, the founding congress of the Peoples’ Front of Yugoslavia marked the beginning of the end of party pluralism, though it took a year or so to complete the interment rites. The Peoples’ Front was a monolithic umbrella organization encompassing all others, the peacetime guardian (according to Article 1 of its Statute) of the achievements of the Peoples’ Liberation Struggle, and Tito was its President. The elections held on 11 September gave 89 per cent of the vote to the Peoples’ Front candidate-list, and the Federal Assembly proclaimed a Republic on 29 November (communist Yugoslavia’s National Day). The settling of wartime accounts was already in full swing. One estimate of the number killed by the victorious Communists puts the total at 250 000. Even if the alternative figure of 100 000 victims (and then some more) during 1945–6 is nearer to the truth, it is clear that mass terror ruled the country. Tens of thousands also endured forced marches and labour camps, from where they were put to work on reconstruction of the crippled economic infrastructure.

In Serbia Gen. Milan Nedić, a well-respected former Yugoslav Defence Minister, wanted to minimise the horrors of the Axis occupation and, as a Serbian nationalist and fervent anti-Communist, sympathised with Mihailović and hated Tito. He formed a 17,000-strong Serbian State Guard, divided into City Police, Rural Police, Fire Service and plain-clothes Village Guards, equipped with small-arms (which they often passed on to Chetniks). The Germans condemned the Guard as unreliable; and in October 1944 Nedić’s organisation, now only 5,000 strong, and the Serbian Frontier Guard, once 6,000 men, joined Mihailović in Bosnia as the Chemik ’1st Serbian Shock Corps’.

In September 1941 the Serbian Fascist Dimitrije Ljotić formed a Serbian Volunteer Command, after September 1940 re-designated Serbian Volunteer Corps. It grew from twelve companies (odredi) in 1941 to 7,000 men in early 1944, in five regiments numbered 1st to 5th and an artillery battalion, under Gen. Konstantin Mušieki. Considered by the Germans to be the only efficient Serbian force against Partisans and Chetniks, it transferred in October 1944 to Slovenia, where the Waffen-SS absorbed it. Also in September 1941, Czarist émigrés in Serbia formed the Russian Defence Corps (Russisches Schutzkorps) with an authorised strength of 3,000. By September 1944 the Corps, organised in five three-battalion regiments (1st to 5th), mainly infantry, with some cavalry and a Cossack battalion, was 11, 197 strong. Of low combat value, it was relegated to guard duties.

In the Banát an ethnic-German home guard (Heimwehr) was formed, and from June 1942 Auxiliary Police regiments (1st to 3rd) and battalions (1st to 10th) for service in Serbia. Many Banat Germans joined the 7th SS-Division ‘Prinz Eugen’. In Montenegro the Italians failed to exploit native nationalism. Some local police units were formed, but the Montenegrins remained staunchly pro-Tito or pro-Mihailović, and anti-Italian. In 1944 the Germans formed a plain-clothes Montenegrin Volunteer Corps with 5,649 men in three regiments, but it proved unreliable and in December joined Mihailović in Bosnia. In the Sandjak region (Western Serbia and Northern Montenegro), the Italians had formed in 1942 a ‘Moslem Legion’ to fight guerillas, but by 1943 it had disintegrated.

In April 1941 the newly formed Bulgarian 5th Army (1st Cavalry Bde.; 14th, 15th and initially 6th Divs.) occupied most of Yugoslav Macedonia. The territory was formally annexed in May, and Bulgaria policed it with such efficiency and brutality that no significant Partisan units emerged until 1944. In January 1942, responding to German demands for reinforcements, the 1st Army (7th, 9th, 21st Divs.) occupied almost all Serbia, and from mid-1943, now with the 22nd, 24th, 25th and 27th Divs., it opposed Partisan advances into Western Serbia. Meanwhile in summer 1942 Germany had to intervene in Italian-occupied West Macedonia, claimed by Bulgaria, to halt armed clashes between her allies.

Unwilling to fight the Soviet Union, Bulgaria changed sides in September 1944 and placed her 450,000 troops under Soviet command. The Germans reacted swiftly and advanced into Serbia and Macedonia. The Bulgarian 1st Army was easily disarmed, but the 5th Army (14th, 15th, 27th Divs.) offered stubborn but short-lived resistance.