WHY HITLER (AND CHURCHILL) NEEDED BELGRADE

 

‘”On the morning of Palm Sunday, while children slept their innocent sleep and the church bells were ringing for prayer to God, the German aeroplanes without warning let fall a rain of bombs on this historic town”’.

So wrote King Peter of Yugoslavia after the bombing of Belgrade 6^th April 1941. ‘The King went on to describe the terror of the women and children who were machine-gunned as they fled from their homes by low-flying planes.’ (1)

Hitler termed this invasion Operation Strafgericht, a word that in English means Retribution or Punishment. To understand why Hitler labelled it like this, it is necessary first to know something of Belgrade's geography and then something of its history. 

Belgrade lies at the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers, and the modern visitor taking a stroll down its Sava shoreline passed the boats to the left and the restaurants to the right, can see without difficulty the strategic importance of the city. Anyone who controls Belgrade controls the river traffic from the far east of Europe to its west. In the days before air freight and autobahns this was of vital importance, as the Celts, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Huns, the Slavs, the Bulgars, the Hungarians, the Turks, the Austrians, the Serbs and the Nazis will tell you. 

To the left in this image is the Sava River flowing westwards to Zagreb and Ljubljana. In the distance, the trees run along the shore of the mighty Danube that flows all the way from Romania to Germany. 

 

  

 

The Fort built for the defence of Belgrade sits directly on this confluence, at Stari Grad, the old town, and some sort of military fortress has existed here since Roman times.

An army cannot function without supplies and communication. Belgrade, in its position on the rivers and the railways was nec-essary to Hitler for both. This image from my 1915 World Atlas shows the route of the Danube from Romania through Belgrade to Germany. The oil fields of Romania were the largest in Europe and ess-ential to the Nazi war machine. (4) Later on in the war, the Allies attempted to derail the industry by bombing the oil fields and disrupting the transport system that took it by river to Germany. 

Next, let us take a look at the railways from my 2007 Heinemann Atlas. I took the 24 hour train trip from Athens to Belgrade in 1985, and it is an easy connection from there all the way to Germany. The Germans needed control of the railways to supply their troops in North Africa. Every day 48 trains ran through Belgrade to Athens, there to load their supplies onto ships that crossed the Mediterranean to where Rommel and his army awaited them. (2)

Between the convenient rivers and the convenient railway, it doesn't take much imagination to understand why Hitler wished to punish the Yugoslavs for not rolling out the red carpet. 

Enter the British. 

The British had had connections in Yugoslavia for years before the war, particularly in Belgrade. Significantly, their Intelligence Service had been active during Germany's march towards war in order to monitor and assess the response it was provoking in the Balkans. The Yugoslav regent Prince Paul was something of an Anglophile. Like his nephew, the seventeen-year-old King Peter who was a descendent of Queen Victoria through his mother, Paul had been to school in England. Serbia, Bosnia and Macedonia were rich in bauxite, coal, iron ore, lead and zinc, and British mining engineers and businessmen had been working in Yugoslavia before the war. At least one of them, Captain Bill Hudson, fluent in Serbo Croat and allegedly one of Ian Flemming's inspirations for James Bond, was later used as part of Special Operations (7). 

Britain wanted Yugoslavia as an ally.

Although the reasons would change as the war continued, in 1941 Yugoslavia was also the gateway to Greece and of great significance to the British defence of Greece which was to occur that April. 'The important thing, Eden [the British Foreign Secretary] said, was that the Yugoslavs should deny the passage of German troops, especially through the Monastir Gap, which would threaten the Greek flank.' (8)

Under the regency of Prince Paul from 1934, Yugoslavia had maintained a semi-peaceful relationship with Nazi Germany with the aim of not getting involved in war, but in February 1941, Hitler suddenly called upon the Yugoslav Prime Minister and Foreign Minister to throw their lot in with Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Japan, and on 25th March Prince Paul signed the Tripartite Pact (5). Two days later on a wave of public indignation, a military coup disposed him, made his nephew Peter the King, and General Dušan Simović of the Yugoslav Air Force the leader of a National Government.

Churchill, needless to say, watched all this with interest. Yugoslavia had "found its soul", he remarked. But 'The Fűhrer had at first refused to believe the news – "I thought," he said later, "that it was a joke."' (5)

We all know what happened next. Hitler lost his famous temper and ordered that Yugoslavia be wiped from the map 'with unmerciful harshness and the military destruction done in lightning-like fashion' (5). Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria and Italy invaded the country from all sides and dismantled it between them. Naturally, Germany claimed first rights to its natural resources, particularly the bauxite mines in Herzegovina, to the south east of Bosnia, because it needed aluminium for the construction of aeroplanes. 

Nor was this the end. Christie Lawrence in Irregular Adventure recalls later in 1941 seeing half the sky in flames in the rural areas south of Belgrade. It was German terror tactics, the systematic destruction of Serbian villages in response to any show of resistance by the Yugoslavs to the Nazi occupation. ‘The total result of our revolution was that we killed about seven or eight thousand Germans and lost 125,000 men and women shot by them. Three towns and fifty-three villages ...were burned out, and our organization was virtually destroyed.’ (6) 

The question is, what part had Britain played in the Belgrade coup d'etat that had precipitated this disaster and why? (8) 

Britain, of course, had been kept well-informed of the political jostling in Belgrade prior to Prince Paul putting his pen to the poisoned Pact. 'In the six months prior to the coup, the British attitude toward Yugoslavia had changed from accepting Yugoslav benevolent neutrality, to that of pressing the Yugoslavs for more active support in the war against Germany.' (8) Romania with its all-important oil fields had already signed the Pact on 23rd November 1940 after Hungary on 20th November, Slovakia followed on 24th November and lastly Bulgaria on 1st March 1941. Aside from Ustasha-controlled Croatia, already loyal to the Nazis, only Yugoslavia remained. To the British, two things were clear, one, that Prince Paul should not sign the Tripartite Pact with Germany and two, if he did, 'subversive political action' should be placed that ultimately supported the military coup of March 27th.' The British planned to persuade the Yugoslav people and its political parties to exert pressure on Prince Paul and, failing that, to get rid of him. They succeeded only in the latter. They first persuaded several cabinet members to resign in order to destabilize the government, and the final step was to get the Yugoslav military involved in a coup. 

As I read this article (8) I wondered, as I often do with British war history, how much British self-glorification was involved. In any event, whatever they might have been planning bore no fruit. It is true that the Yugoslav military was not prepared for war and collapsed in only eleven days. I have read that Ustasha fifth columnists also had a hand in it (3). Prince Paul, King Peter, General Simović and what would become the Yugoslav Government-in-Exile in Claridge's Hotel London fled the country. The Commando Captain Christie Lawrence who had been captured in Crete, jumped into Serbia from a German train in June 1941. During the twelve months he spent in the country, it seemed to him preindustrial, its remaining leaders confused and bewildered, wanting to help but not knowing what to do. Draža Mihailović, whom everyone had just run off and left, sounded forlorn and Lawrence had not even heard of Tito (6). It wasn't until May 1943 that Churchill parachuted a military party into the country to investigate the Yugoslav Partisans about whom he was beginning to receive rumours. During the Allied Invasion of Sicily in July 1943, the Partisans kept dozens of German Battalions occupied and out of Italy, which pleased Churchill. Of course. 

NOTES

1 - Balkan Essays Hubert Butler, the Irish Pages Press 2016
2 - Glenny, Misha: The Balkans 1804 - 2012 Penguin books 1999
3 - 1941 the Year That Keeps Returning, Slavko Goldstein New York Review BooksNov 05, 2013
4 - Romania's Age Of Oil (rferl.org)
5 - Maclean, Fitzroy: The Heretic: the life and times of Josip Broz-Tito. Harley and Brothers NY, 1957
6 - Christie Laurence Lawrence, Christie Irregular Adventure Faber and Faber 1947
7 - Deakin, FWD: The Embattled Mountain Oxford University Press 1971
8. soe-and-british-involvement-in-the-belgrade-coup-detat-of-march-1941.pdf (cambridge.org) From this article comes the notable quote from Sir Alexander Cadogan, the permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office, "All these Balkan peoples are trash."

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THE POPE AT WAR by David Kertzer - book review

You don’t meet men like Pope Pius XII anymore. Erudite and aristocratic, he was far removed from his proletarian people yet he confessed a quiet ambition to one day be their Pope. Readers of David Kertzer’s book about him are lucky. They have the benefit of knowing that Hitler was evil. For Pius XII, it was as if the truth crept up on him only slowly while he battled the demons that bound him, his fear of communism and his belief that the Roman Catholic Church in Europe must survive.

Elected on the eve of World War 2, Pius XII had previously served as Papal nuncio to Germany. Mussolini’s ambassador to the Vatican wrote that he was ‘the Cardinal preferred by the Germans’ and ‘prone to bend to pressure.’ These two observations create the framework for Kertzer’s book. Between the opening of the Vatican Archives in March 2020 and his publication in 2022, Kertzer completed a vast amount of research, but it is the pace and clarity of his writing that has made the work accessible to a broad audience. For Christians, a distinction must be made between the Roman Catholic Church, which was an ornate, Italian institution, and Jesus Christ who brought the kingdom of heaven to ordinary people. Pius XII wanted to preserve the Italian institution, and I’m not convinced that his scruples and sensitivities made him a Christian I could ever relate to. His was an Italian story with all the drama of Hamlet. So many questions about what was nobler in the mind! So many clerical Polonius’s hiding behind curtains! So many Maglioni’s, Tardini’s, Ciano’s, Montini’s and Pirelli’s. All it lacked was Ophelia, unless you count Clara Petacci, Mussolini’s mistress.

To begin: Pope Pius XII was an experienced diplomat and had frequent opportunities to demonstrate his skills. ‘In August 1939, as he was finalizing plans for invading Poland, Hitler was also engaged in negotiations with Pius XII so secret that not even the German ambassador to the Holy See knew about them.’ (1)  The middle-man was Prince Philipp von Hessen, son-in-law of the King of Italy, and on 11th March 1940 the Pope also met with Hitler’s foreign minister Von Ribbentrop. Pius complained politely about the Nazi suppression of the Catholic Church in Germany and Poland while his Secretary of State, Maglione, was less accommodating. Ribbentrop was not pleased and labelled Maglione an enemy of the Nazis.

The chapters recording the Pope’s failure to react to the German invasion of the Low Countries, the continuing brutality in Poland and the appeals of ordinary Italians to prevent Italy from entering the war, make poignant reading. Kertzer repeats two points, firstly that Pius XII believed the war would be over in a few months following an Axis victory, and secondly that he was intimidated by Mussolini. Indeed, his subservience to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany did not impress the British and the French. ‘The moral prestige of the Papacy began to decline,’ wrote Osborne, Churchill’s envoy to the Vatican. ‘The Holy Father will say nothing for the moment,’ wrote D’Ormesson, his French counterpart, 'and will only…speak publicly to emit some pious and expertly balanced moans. One gets the impression that, for [the Pope], communism is Public Enemy Number One. [He] seems to me above all to be a conservative of a monarchical stamp….[who] seizes every opportunity to show his loyalty to the Fascist government.’ (1)

From the beginning of the Holocaust the Pope received reports of German atrocities against Europe’s Jews, initially from members of his clergy who had witnessed them. Though deeply distressed, he did not respond.

Why not?

‘[Because] it was best not to alienate either Mussolini or the Fűhrer,’ concludes Kertzer. Osborne added, ‘The Pope’s policy of silence and neutrality at all costs is destroying the moral authority of the Vatican.’ A Swiss newspaper reported that, ‘the moral leadership of the Papacy is conditioned by considerations of opportunism and expediency.’ The French, the Americans, ambassadors from Britain, Brazil, Belgium, Poland, the Netherlands, Norway, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, and churchmen from the Ukraine, all sent appeals to the Pope to protest about the horrors committed against Jews unfolding in their own countries. ‘It is widely believed,’ begged Roosevelt’s envoy Myron Taylor of the Pope in September 1942, ‘that Your word of condemnation would hearten all others who are working to save these thousands from suffering and death…I should like to know whether the Holy Father has any suggestions as to any practical manner in which the forces of civilized public opinion could be utilized in order to prevent a continuation of these barbarities.’ (1)

A month later the Vatican replied, ‘Up to the present time it has not been possible to verify the accuracy of the…severe measures taken against non-Aryans’ (1). It also expressed its fear that ‘any papal criticism risked provoking a backlash against the church in German occupied Europe’. (1) In September 1943, as Italy was capitulating to the Allies, German troops were pouring over its northern borders to occupy the country as far south as Rome. This invasion marked the end for Italy’s Jews. Separated from their Italian compatriots by the Racial Laws of 1938, to which the Pope had made no protest, their deportation to the Nazi death camps was likewise accomplished in silence.

The Third Reich made a point of reminding all its churches, Protestant and Catholic, that it supported them financially, and the soldiers responsible for the wartime atrocities considered themselves good Christians. After all, in the 1939 census only 1% of Germans declared themselves unbelievers.

What was a Pope to do?

What he did do was to continue to liaise with Germany in order to mitigate suppression of the church and, as Allied bombers commenced pounding Italy’s industrial north, he wrote to Britain and America in an endeavour to spare Italy further suffering. Osborne reported to London, ‘Owing to the fact that His Holiness never made any specific condemnation of the deliberate [German] slaughter of thousands of civilians, he is precluded …from condemning our recent raids on Milan, Genoa and Turin.’ (1) Pius received a similar retort from Roosevelt.

Care should be taken by the reader to differentiate between propaganda and fact. A notable instance was the German and Italian proclamations that the war was rescuing Christian Europe from Bolshevist Russia, the ally of Britain and France. The Allied bombing of Rome did a lot to promote this. The Pope’s fear of communism runs as a thread throughout the book and was richly exploited by the men who intimidated him.

Like The Force of Destiny by Christopher Duggan, another long book about Italy’s depressing modern history, The Pope at War ultimately says to me that Italians should stick to food and culture. To say that they’re good at anything else is to believe their own propaganda. It’s little wonder that so many novels feature Vatican intrigues. Occupying Germans scheming to get the Pope’s approval, Jews hiding in convents, priests who drive them into the arms of the Nazis, a pontiff who says nothing, Allies arguing about who was responsible for bombing Italian heritage while Europe lay in ruins. The Vatican is an opera in itself.

‘Why should we quarrel? [The church] will swallow anything provided they can keep their advantages’                                                                      – Adolf Hitler. (2)



1 – The Pope at War, David Kertzer. Random House New York, 2022.

2 – Balkan Essays, Hubert Butler. The Irish Pages Press 2016.

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