In January 1943, as the German Sixth Army was being destroyed at Stalingrad, German forces in occupied Yugoslavia faced a different threat—a powerful communist-led partisan movement under Josip Broz Tito that was destabilizing the entire Balkan region. Berlin responded with massive anti-partisan offensives, deploying newly formed divisions built from collaborationist troops across occupied Europe. One of these formations was the 369th Croatian Infantry Division, a unit of roughly 14,000 Croatian volunteers commanded by German officers. The men wore Wehrmacht uniforms marked with a Croatian checkerboard patch and swore a dual oath of allegiance to both Adolf Hitler and Ante Pavelić, the fascist leader of the Independent State of Croatia, which had been established in April 1941 after the Axis conquest of Yugoslavia.
The new division carried the number of a regiment that had been annihilated at Stalingrad. The original 369th Croatian Reinforced Infantry Regiment, known as the Croatian Legion, had been raised in July 1941 and deployed to the Eastern Front. By the autumn of 1942, it had been drawn into the brutal fighting at Stalingrad, where it was reduced to a third of its original strength of roughly 5,000 men. When the Soviet Red Army encircled the German Sixth Army, the Croatian Legion was trapped inside the pocket.
Nearly 900 surviving legionaries marched into Soviet captivity in late January 1943 and were sent to camps in Siberia, where most died of starvation, cold, and disease. The new formation adopted the nickname of a Croatian unit from the First World War, the Devil’s Division, and was initially intended for the Eastern Front. But the worsening partisan threat in Yugoslavia changed German plans, and in December 1942 the division was redirected to the Balkans. From the beginning of 1943, the division took part in large-scale sweeps across Bosnia and Herzegovina 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 shot or hanged without trial, livestock was seized, food stocks destroyed, and homes burned. Entire settlements were driven from their homes and left as burned ruins. These were not incidental excesses but the deliberate application of German anti-partisan doctrine, which mandated reprisal executions of up to 100 civilians for every German or allied soldier killed. Captured partisan fighters were routinely executed rather than held as prisoners, with German command having explicitly declared that the laws of war did not apply in this theater.
The scale of violence against civilians over more than two years was the product of a deliberate institutional method, not a breakdown in discipline. The most concentrated single episode of mass murder involving the division came between the 26th and 30th of March 1944, when it participated alongside the SS division Prince Eugen and the Chetnik Dinara division in a punitive sweep through the Dalmatian hinterland near the town of Trilj in what is today Croatia. Partisan forces had already retreated, and what followed was a systematic massacre of the civilian population. On the first day, soldiers entered the village of Donji Dolac and forced inhabitants into their homes, which were then set alight.
Those who tried to escape were shot. In that village alone, 272 people were burnt alive, among them 103 children. Over the following days, the same method was applied across neighboring villages. In Voštane, between 337 and 400 civilians were killed, including 143 children.
The pattern was 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 other estimates placing the number as high as 3,000. 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, Fritz Neidholdt, soldiers entered the villages of Zagna and Udora near the city of Stolac in Herzegovina. All the men of the villages were hanged, and the women and children were driven out of their homes.
By the autumn of 1944, the military situation was collapsing on all fronts. Soviet forces had entered Romania and Bulgaria, while the partisan movement had come to control large portions of Yugoslavia. Desertions from the Croatian ranks of the division became a flood. In one battalion, Croatian soldiers even killed their German officers and liaison personnel.
The division, which had never been a fully unified fighting force, was fracturing along the internal contradictions it had always contained. By April 1945, the Croatian manpower of the division had shrunk to between 2,000 and 3,000 men. During the last weeks of the war, what was left of the division fought in northwest Bosnia and Slovenia, retreating toward Austria. On the 11th of May 1945, part of the division was stopped and disarmed by partisan forces.
Another group attacked a brigade of partisans near the town of Dravograd in Slovenia as it tried to cross into Austria, territory which was considered safer for its men because of their crimes in the Balkans. On the 15th of May 1945, most of the Croatian armed forces survivors formally surrendered. In total, 160 officers and 2,876 men of the 369th Croatian 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, the division’s commander 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 Devil’s Division is that 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.