In January 1943, as the German Sixth Army collapsed in the snow at Stalingrad, another front of the war was burning through the mountains of occupied Yugoslavia. There, the communist-led partisans of Josip Broz Tito had grown into a serious threat to German control of the Balkans. To contain them, Berlin poured in entire divisions, including a new formation assembled from Croatian volunteers, commanded by German officers, and sworn to both Adolf Hitler and the fascist puppet state of Croatia. The men who formed this unit carried the number of a regiment that had just been destroyed at Stalingrad.
They called themselves the Devil’s Division. The name would prove accurate. The story of that division begins with the conquest that created it. On the 6th of April 1941, Nazi Germany and its allies attacked the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and overran it in less than two weeks.
On the 10th of April, the Germans established the Independent State of Croatia, known in Croatian as the Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, or NDH, and placed it under the control of the Ustaše, a Croatian fascist movement led by Ante Pavelić. Modeled on Hitler and Mussolini, Pavelić immediately launched a campaign of mass murder against Serbs, Jews, and Roma within his new state’s borders. The Ustaše government aligned itself completely with Nazi Germany and sought to prove its worth as an ally through military contribution. On the 25th of June 1941, less than three months after the occupation began, Pavelić sent an envoy to Berlin offering Croatian volunteers for service against the Soviet Union.
Hitler accepted, and recruitment began at once. The first formation raised was the 369th Croatian Reinforced Infantry Regiment, known informally as the Croatian Legion, assembled in July 1941 in the cities of Varaždin and Sarajevo with approximately five thousand men, including a Bosnian Muslim battalion. After training in Austria, the regiment deployed to the Eastern Front as part of the 100th Jäger Division within the 17th Army of Army Group South. Through 1941 and 1942, the regiment fought reliably in difficult conditions and earned the respect of German commanders.
By the summer of 1942, it was advancing with Army Group South toward the lower Volga River. In the autumn, it was drawn into the fighting at Stalingrad, the ruined industrial city that had become the focal point of the war in the east. The regiment fought around the Red October Factory and on Mamayev Kurgan, the vital hill overlooking the city. By December 1942, it had been reduced to a third of its original strength.
When the Red Army closed its encirclement, the Croatian Legion was trapped inside the pocket alongside roughly three hundred thousand German, Romanian, Italian, and Hungarian soldiers. As the pocket tightened through January 1943, approximately one thousand wounded Croatian soldiers were evacuated by air before the end. On the 31st of January, Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus surrendered the Sixth Army, and the remaining Croatian legionaries, nearly nine hundred men, marched into Soviet captivity. Sent to camps in Siberia, most of them died of starvation, cold, and disease.
The Croatian Legion ceased to exist as a fighting formation. Its surviving evacuees, along with newly recruited volunteers, became the nucleus of a new unit. The Germans had begun forming this division on the 21st of August 1942, while the original regiment was still fighting in the east, honoring the doomed unit by giving the new formation its number. The 369th Croatian Infantry Division also adopted the nickname of a Croatian unit from the First World War, the 42nd Home Guard Infantry Division of the Austro-Hungarian Army, known as the Vražja Divizija, the Devil’s Division.
The new formation numbered roughly fourteen thousand troops. Its Croatian volunteers wore Wehrmacht uniforms with a Croatian checkerboard patch on their sleeves and helmets, and swore a dual oath of allegiance to Hitler and Germany, and to Pavelić and the Independent State of Croatia. Command was almost entirely German. Some three thousand five hundred German officers and specialists ran the division from top to bottom, controlling the Croatian volunteers at every level.
Although originally intended for the Eastern Front, the worsening situation in Yugoslavia changed the plan. Tito’s partisans had become a serious military threat, and Berlin needed reliable formations to contain them. In December 1942, the High Command redirected the division to the Balkans. As it arrived in Croatia, desertions began almost immediately, driven by reports of Axis defeats in the east and in North Africa.
The men who stayed were about to fight a war in which the division distinguished itself not for combat effectiveness, but for indiscriminate brutality. From the beginning of 1943, the division was deployed across Bosnia and Herzegovina in a succession of large-scale sweeps aimed at destroying partisan bases and the civilian networks that supported them. The methods followed a standard pattern. Villages suspected of contact with the resistance were surrounded.
Male inhabitants were rounded up, and those accused of aiding partisans were shot or hanged without trial. Livestock was seized, food stocks taken or destroyed, and houses burned. Entire settlements were driven from their homes, leaving behind burned ruins. These were not incidental excesses but the deliberate application of German anti-partisan doctrine, which often mandated reprisal executions of up to one hundred civilians for every German or allied soldier killed, and around fifty for each wounded.
Captured partisan fighters were routinely executed rather than held. The division operated in a theater where German command had explicitly declared that the laws of war did not apply, and it acted accordingly. The scale and consistency of the violence over more than two years was not a breakdown of discipline but the product of a deliberate institutional method. The most concentrated episode of mass murder came between the 26th and 30th of March 1944, when the division participated alongside the SS division Prince Eugen and the Chetnik Dinara division in a punitive sweep through the Dalmatian hinterland between the Kamešnica and Mosor mountains near the town of Trilj.
The partisans had already retreated by the time the soldiers arrived, and what followed was a systematic massacre of the civilians who remained. On the 26th of March, the first day, soldiers entered Donji Dolac and forced the inhabitants into their homes, which were then set alight. Those who tried to escape were shot. In that village, 272 people were burned alive, among them 103 children.
In the days that followed, the same method was applied across neighboring villages. In Voštane, between 337 and 400 civilians were killed, including 143 children. The same pattern repeated in villages such as Pudi, Ruda, Otok, Krivodol, Liut, and Rože. Across the entire area, at least 1,525 civilians were killed in the space of five days, with some estimates placing the number as high as three thousand.
The pattern of collective punishment reached one of its clearest documented expressions on the 11th of September 1944, when under the direct orders of the division’s commander, General Fritz Neidholdt, soldiers of the 369th entered the villages of Zagna and Udora near the city of Stolac in Herzegovina. All the men were hanged, and the women and children were driven from their homes. By the autumn of 1944, the military situation was collapsing on all fronts. Soviet forces had entered Romania and Bulgaria, and the partisan movement now controlled large portions of Yugoslavia.
Desertions from the Croatian ranks of the division became a flood. In one battalion, Croatian soldiers killed their own German officers and liaison personnel. The unified fighting force was fracturing along the internal contradictions it had always contained, Croatian volunteers and German cadre who had never fully trusted one another fighting a war that was already lost. By April 1945, the Croatian manpower of the division had shrunk to between two and three thousand men.
During the last weeks of the war, what remained fought in northwest Bosnia and Slovenia, retreating toward Austria. After moving through northern Croatia, it broke up in various groups making for northern Slovenia and Austria. On the 11th of May 1945, part of the division was stopped and disarmed by partisan forces. Another group attacked a partisan brigade near the town of Dravograd in Slovenia as it tried to cross into Austria.
On the 15th of May 1945, most of the Croatian armed forces formally surrendered. In total, 160 officers and 2,876 men of the 369th Croatian Infantry Division surrendered to the British. The Germans were sent to camps in Austria and spared repatriation. The Croatians were handed over to the Yugoslav partisans, sent back across the border, and most were executed.
General Fritz Neidholdt, who commanded the division from its formation in August 1942 until October 1944, was extradited to Yugoslavia after the war. He was tried for war crimes committed among others by the 369th Croatian Infantry Division, found guilty, and hanged on the 5th of March 1947. The history of the 369th Croatian Infantry Division is the history of a formation assembled from the wreckage of one catastrophe only to be destroyed in another.
It distinguished itself not on the battlefield, but in the number of civilians it killed, leaving behind burned homes, mass graves, and shattered communities.