One of Nazi Germany’s most notorious foreign legions, a Croatian unit whose nickname “the Devil’s Division” became a byword for atrocity across the Balkans, met its end in a chain of surrender, execution, and one hanging that closed the loop on its crimes, according to a detailed account of the unit’s history.
The story begins not with the division itself but with the wreckage of an earlier one. In January 1943, a German army was freezing to death inside the ruined Russian city of Stalingrad, where the Soviet Red Army had closed a ring of steel around some 300,000 men. Trapped inside were Germans, Romanians, Italians, Hungarians, and roughly 900 Croatians, the last survivors of a regiment that had marched east two years earlier with 5,000 men.
Almost all of them were gone. The few who walked out of that pocket alive were sent to camps in Siberia, and most never came home. But their number did.
Berlin took the number of that destroyed regiment and stamped it onto a brand new division of 14,000 fresh men, new uniforms, and German officers, a unit that borrowed its nickname from an older war. They called themselves the Devil’s Division.
Over the next two years, that name stopped being a nickname and started being a description.
To understand how such a unit came to exist, the account goes back to April 6, 1941, when Nazi Germany and its allies invaded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The country did not last long. In under two weeks, the whole thing collapsed.
Germany did not simply occupy the land. It broke it into pieces and handed some of those pieces to local allies.
On April 10, 1941, while the fighting was still going on, a new state was announced: the Independent State of Croatia, known in Croatian as Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, or by three letters, NDH. The men put in charge of it were the Ustaše, a Croatian fascist movement led by Ante Pavelić, who copied Hitler and Mussolini in almost everything and wasted no time.
Within weeks of taking power, his movement began mass killings of Serbs, Jews, and Roma inside the borders of the new state. Pavelić wanted to prove he was worth something to Berlin, so he offered the one thing Berlin always wanted: soldiers. By June 25, 1941, less than three months into the occupation, his envoy was already in Berlin with an offer of Croatian volunteers to fight the Soviet Union.
Hitler said yes.
Recruiting started at once. The first unit raised was the 369th Croatian Reinforced Infantry Regiment, universally known as the Croatian Legion. It was put together in July 1941 in Varaždin and Sarajevo and included a Bosnian Muslim battalion, about 5,000 men in total.
They trained in Austria, then were sent east and attached to the German 100th Jäger Division, which sat inside the 17th Army in Army Group South.
Here is something worth saying plainly: as a fighting unit, the Legion did its job. Through 1941 and 1942, it held up in hard conditions, and German commanders thought well of it. Whatever came later, on the Eastern Front these men were treated as reliable soldiers.
That reliability took them straight into the worst place on Earth.
By summer 1942, the Legion was moving with Army Group South toward the lower Volga. By autumn, it was inside Stalingrad. The regiment was thrown into two of the ugliest fights in the city: the Red October Factory, a wrecked steel plant where men fought room by room, and Mamayev Kurgan, the hill that overlooked everything.
Whoever held that hill could see the whole battlefield, so both sides kept feeding men into it.
By December 1942, the Croatian Legion was down to a third of its strength, roughly 1,500 men left out of 5,000. Then the Red Army closed the ring, and the Legion was trapped with everyone else. Through January 1943, as the pocket shrank, about 1,000 wounded Croatians were flown out.
They were the lucky ones.
On January 31, 1943, Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus surrendered the Sixth Army. Around 900 Croatian soldiers walked into Soviet captivity and were sent to Siberia. Most died there of hunger, cold, and disease.
The Croatian Legion was finished. It no longer existed.
The Germans did not wait for the end to start over. Back on August 21, 1942, while the original regiment was still fighting in Russia, work had already begun on a replacement. It was formed at Stockerau and Döllersheim in Lower Austria and called the 369th Croatian Infantry Division, the same number as the doomed regiment.
That was deliberate. It was meant as an honor.
The new division also took a nickname from the First World War. In the old Austro-Hungarian Army, there had been a Croatian unit, the 42nd Home Guard Infantry Division, known as the Vražja Divizija, in English, the Devil’s Division. The new formation had about 14,000 men.
They wore German Army uniforms with the Croatian checkerboard patch on the sleeve and helmet. They swore an oath twice over, once to Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, and once to Ante Pavelić and the Independent State of Croatia.
But the men giving the orders were not Croatian. Around 3,500 German officers and specialists ran the division from the top all the way down. Every level had a German holding the reins.
The soldiers were Croatian, the command was German. That gap sat inside the unit from day one, and it never closed.
The plan was to send the division east again. That plan changed. In occupied Yugoslavia, communist-led partisan forces under Josip Broz Tito had built a resistance movement in the forests and mountains, and it was no longer a small problem.
It was threatening the whole German rear across the Balkans. So, in December 1942, the German High Command sent the division to the Balkans instead.
The desertions started almost immediately, before the unit had done anything at all. News was coming in from the Eastern Front and from North Africa, and none of it was good. Men could read the direction the war was going.
The ones who stayed went into the mountains of Bosnia.
Let’s be honest about what this unit was. As a combat formation against the partisans, it was not impressive. Its fighting value in anti-partisan operations was rated low.
It did not win famous battles. What it did instead was something else entirely.
From the start of 1943, the division was sent across Bosnia and Herzegovina in one big sweep after another. The stated goal was to destroy partisan bases and the civilian networks feeding them. The method was always the same.
Surround a village suspected of helping the resistance. Round up the men. Shoot or hang anyone accused of aiding the partisans with no trial.
Take the livestock. Take or destroy the food. Burn the houses.
Drive out whoever is left. Captured partisan fighters were usually shot rather than held as prisoners.
This was not soldiers losing control. This was the doctrine. German anti-partisan orders in the Balkans set reprisal ratios out loud.
For every German or Allied soldier killed, up to 100 civilians could be executed. For every one wounded, around 50. German command in that theater had openly stated that the normal laws of war did not apply there.
The division took that at face value and acted on it for more than two years.
The worst single episode came in the spring of 1944. Between March 26 and March 30, the 369th took part in a punitive sweep through the Dalmatian hinterland, in the area near the town of Trilj, between the Kamešnica and Mosor mountains, inside modern-day Croatia. Fighting alongside it were the SS Division Prinz Eugen and the Chetnik Dinara Division.
By the time the soldiers arrived, the partisans had already pulled out. Only civilians were left.
On March 26, the first day, soldiers entered the village of Donji Dolac. They forced the people inside their own houses. Then they set the houses on fire.
Anyone who tried to run was shot. In that one village, 272 people were burned alive. Of them, 103 were children.
Over the following days, the same method moved village to village. In Voštane, between 337 and 400 civilians were killed, 143 of them children. The same thing happened in Poda, Ruda, Otak, Krivodol, Lut, and Rožaj.
Across those five days, at least 1,525 civilians were killed in that area. Some estimates, based on German army and partisan reports written at the time, put the number closer to 3,000.
The pattern kept going. On September 11, 1944, under direct orders from the division’s commander, Fritz Neidholdt, soldiers of the 369th entered the villages of Zagnježđe and Udora, near the city of Stolac in Herzegovina. Every man in those villages was hanged.
The women and children were driven out of their homes. Remember that name. It matters at the end of this story.
By autumn 1944, the war was collapsing everywhere. Soviet forces had pushed into Romania and Bulgaria. Tito’s partisans now controlled large parts of Yugoslavia.
And inside the 369th, the Croatian soldiers started leaving in numbers the Germans could no longer hide. In one battalion, Croatian soldiers killed their own German officers and liaison staff. That crack had been there from the beginning: Croatian volunteers on one side, German cadre on the other, neither side fully trusting the other, all of them fighting a war that was already lost.
By April 1945, the Croatian strength of the division had dropped to somewhere between two and three thousand men. In the last weeks, what was left fought in northwest Bosnia and Slovenia while retreating toward Austria. Moving through northern Croatia, the division broke apart.
Groups scattered toward northern Slovenia and Austria. They were not running toward Austria by accident. They knew what they had done in the Balkans.
Austria meant British hands instead of partisan hands, and they believed British hands were safer.
On May 11, 1945, part of the division was stopped and disarmed by partisan forces. The rest tried to punch through. Near the town of Dravograd in Slovenia, they attacked a partisan brigade to force a crossing into Austria.
On May 15, 1945, most of the surviving Croatian armed forces formally surrendered. From the 369th Croatian Division, 160 officers and 2,876 men gave themselves up to the British.
Then the two halves of the division were separated for the last time. The Germans were sent to camps in Austria. They were not sent back.
The Croatians were handed over to the Yugoslav partisans, taken back across the border, and most of them were executed.
That leaves Fritz Neidholdt. He was a General Lieutenant and commanded the division from its formation in August 1942 until October 1944. The Stolac hangings had been carried out under his direct orders, and the Dalmatian massacres of March 1944 happened while he was in charge.
After the war, he was extradited to Yugoslavia. He was put on trial for war crimes, including crimes committed by the 369th Croatian Infantry Division. He was found guilty.
On March 5, 1947, Fritz Neidholdt was hanged.
The story of the 369th is a strange loop. It was built from the wreckage of one disaster and then destroyed in another. Twice the same number, twice the same ending.
It never made its name in battle. It made its name in the villages. Burned houses, mass graves, communities that never fully recovered, and in some cases never came back at all.
That is what the Devil’s Division actually left behind.