In late March 1944, a brutal anti-partisan operation in the Dalmatian hinterland of occupied Yugoslavia turned into one of the bloodiest massacres of civilians in the region during World War II. The operation, carried out by German and collaborationist forces, resulted in the deaths of thousands of villagers, including women, children, and the elderly.
The massacre took place beneath the slopes of Mount Kamešnica between March 26 and March 30, 1944. Troops from the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division "Prince Eugen" and the 369th Infantry Division descended on Croat villages in the Kamešnica Valley. What began as a counterinsurgency campaign quickly became an act of collective punishment against the local population.
The background to the atrocity began with the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941. After Italy’s failed campaign against Greece, Nazi Germany sought to secure its southeastern flank. Yugoslavia joined the Axis on March 25, 1941, but the agreement was deeply unpopular, and the government soon signaled it would not honor the pact. Adolf Hitler ordered the invasion of Yugoslavia on March 27, 1941. Within 11 days, the kingdom collapsed and was carved up among the Axis powers.
Following the occupation, the Dalmatian region fell under Italian control. The mountainous interior became a stronghold of partisan resistance. When Italy surrendered to the Allies in September 1943, German forces moved in to seize the area and impose martial law. The 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division "Prince Eugen" was deployed to suppress the growing insurgency.
The division was already notorious for its brutality against civilians across the Balkans. Its ranks were filled with ethnic German volunteers from Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Romania. The 369th Infantry Division, a German army unit made up mostly of Croatian troops serving under the fascist Ustaša regime, joined the campaign.
As partisan activity intensified around the Mosor and Kamešnica mountains, German authorities accused local Croat villages of helping the resistance. In late March 1944, German command ordered a punitive operation in the Kamešnica Valley. The operation began on March 26, with forces advancing from the direction of Mosor toward the valley, pursuing retreating partisan units.
When the partisans slipped away into the mountains, the Nazis turned their fury on the local population. Villagers were accused of sheltering the resistance, and reprisals began almost immediately. On March 28, the divisions swept through the villages of Otok, Ruda, and Donji Dolac. In a single day, 834 people were murdered, including women, children, and the elderly.
More than 500 homes were burned, and everything of value was taken. Soldiers tore rings, watches, and other valuables from the bodies of the dead. Families were gathered into courtyards and barns, then shot with machine guns while grenades were thrown among the wounded. Others were locked inside their homes, which were soaked with petrol and set on fire.
In one house in the village of Otok, 45 burnt bodies were found. In another, 22 corpses lay piled together. In the village of Ruda, locals were rounded up in one place and executed. Anyone who tried to hide or run was hunted down and killed on site. Even those who had been forced to follow the soldiers to carry ammunition and supplies were murdered. Not even infants in their mother's arms were spared.
Witnesses later said the massacres had been carefully prepared in advance, as the villagers had offered no resistance and gave the Germans no reason for reprisal. By the time the operation ended on March 30, the valley beneath Mount Kamešnica lay in ruins. The village of Donji Dolac lost 272 inhabitants, including 103 children. The village of Vrba suffered the heaviest losses, with between 337 and 400 civilians killed, among them 143 children.
Estimates of the total death toll vary. At least 1,500 civilians were confirmed killed, while other wartime reports place the number as high as 3,000. The Hostages Trial, one of the postwar Nuremberg follow-up trials, later recorded 2,014 victims across 22 villages.
In the months following the massacre, the men of the Prince Eugen and 369th Infantry Divisions continued their brutal campaign across Yugoslavia, leaving behind burned villages and murdered civilians as they retreated north. Though many of those responsible for atrocities across the region never faced trial, justice would eventually catch up with the perpetrators of the Kamešnica massacre.
In the final weeks of the war, the remnants of the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division "Prince Eugen" retreated north through Bosnia and Croatia, trying to reach Austria to surrender to the Western Allies. On May 10, 1945, they reached the Slovenian town of Celje. The following day, they laid down their arms before units of the Yugoslav People’s Army, three days after Germany’s capitulation.
All personnel of the Prince Eugen division taken prisoner by the Yugoslav army were then killed. Most were executed wholesale without trial and disposed of through various methods immediately after their surrender. The killings, which were never punished, were ordered by local Yugoslav commanders, who apparently acted in direct violation of Marshal Josip Broz Tito’s instructions to detain the captives in prison camps and screen them for war criminals.
In 2010, a large mass grave was uncovered near the Slovenian village of Brezice, containing the remains of around 2,000 Prince Eugen soldiers. They had been stripped naked, bound together with telephone wire, and shot, their bodies buried in a trench during a summary mass execution on May 22, 1945. Many of the soldiers' relatives later perished during the expulsion and killing of German-speaking civilians across Eastern Europe.
The commander of the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division, SS-Brigadeführer August Schmidhuber, met a similar fate. On May 11, 1945, he was captured by Yugoslav partisans and handed over to authorities in Belgrade. A Yugoslav military tribunal tried him on charges of massacres, deportations, and atrocities against civilians and sentenced him to death by hanging. He was executed in February 1947 in Belgrade.
The 369th Infantry Division would soon share the fate of the Prince Eugen Division. Initially numbering around 14,000 troops and organized into two infantry regiments, it was commanded by about 3,500 German officers, non-commissioned officers, and specialists. By April 1945, it was reduced to battle group strength, numbering only about 3,000 men, with most of its German officers already dead or missing.
In the final weeks of the war, the remnants of the division retreated through northwestern Bosnia and the Croatian region of Slavonia toward Austria. Scattered and exhausted, the surviving troops were intercepted by Yugoslav partisans near the town of Dravograd in Slovenia. On May 11, 1945, the division, apart from a single company, was disarmed.
A total of 160 officers and nearly 2,900 men surrendered to British forces. Because the division consisted of both Germans and Croatians, the German members were held in Austria while the Croatian soldiers were handed over to the partisans, who executed most of them. The division’s commander, Generalleutnant Fritz Neidholdt, was extradited to Yugoslavia, tried for war crimes, and hanged in Belgrade in February 1947.
It is estimated that during the Second World War, around 1.2 million people were killed in Yugoslavia, of whom approximately 581,000 were civilians.