By early 1943, German forces were stretched across Europe. In the east, the Sixth Army was being destroyed at Stalingrad. In the Balkans, a different war raged in the mountains of occupied Yugoslavia, where communist-led partisans under Josip Broz Tito threatened to destabilize the German Reich.
Berlin responded with massive anti-partisan offensives, deploying Wehrmacht divisions, SS formations, and collaborationist units from across occupied Europe. Into the mountains of northern Bosnia marched a new division assembled from Croatian volunteers, commanded by German officers and pledged to both Adolf Hitler and the fascist Croatian state. Behind it lay a legacy of catastrophic defeat.
The men carried the number of a regiment destroyed at Stalingrad. They called themselves the Devil’s Division.
On April 6, 1941, Nazi Germany and its allies attacked the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and conquered it in less than two weeks. On April 10, 1941, Germany established the Independent State of Croatia, known as the NDH. This puppet state was placed under the control of the Ustaše movement, a Croatian fascist organization led by Ante Pavelić, who modeled himself on Hitler and Mussolini.
The regime immediately launched a campaign of mass murder against Serbs, Jews, and Roma people within its territories.
The Ustaše state aligned itself completely with Nazi Germany and sought to prove its value as an ally through military contribution. By June 25, 1941, less than three months after the occupation began, Pavelić had sent an envoy to Berlin offering Croatian volunteers for service on the Eastern Front. Hitler accepted, and recruitment began immediately.
The first formation raised was the 369th Croatian Reinforced Infantry Regiment, known informally as the Croatian Legion. Assembled from volunteers in July 1941 in the cities of Varaždin and Sarajevo, it included a Bosnian Muslim battalion and numbered approximately 5,000 men. After training in Austria, the regiment was deployed to the Eastern Front under the command of the 100th Jäger Division, part of the 17th Army within Army Group South.
During 1941 and 1942, the regiment performed reliably in difficult conditions, earning 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 where one of the war’s legendary battles was taking shape.
The Battle of Stalingrad became the destruction of the Croatian Legion. The regiment fought around the Red October Factory and for Mamayev Kurgan, the vital hill overlooking the city. By December 1942, it had been reduced to one-third of its original strength.
When the Soviet Red Army completed its encirclement of the German Sixth Army, the Croatian Legion was trapped inside the pocket alongside roughly 300,000 German, Romanian, Italian, and Hungarian soldiers.
As the encirclement tightened through January 1943, about 1,000 wounded Croatian soldiers were evacuated by air before the final collapse. On January 31, 1943, Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus announced the surrender of the Sixth Army. Nearly 900 Croatian legionaries marched into Soviet captivity and were sent to camps in Siberia, where most died of starvation, cold, and disease.
The Croatian Legion ceased to exist as a fighting formation.
The survivors who had been evacuated, along with newly recruited Croatian volunteers, became the nucleus of a new unit. As early as August 21, 1942, while the original regiment was still fighting in the east, the Germans had begun forming the 369th Croatian Infantry Division at Stockerau and Dürres Heim in Lower Austria, honoring the doomed regiment by giving the new formation its number. The 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, which had been known as the Vražja Divizija, meaning the Devil’s Division.
The new formation numbered approximately 14,000 troops. Its Croatian volunteers wore Wehrmacht uniforms with a Croatian checkerboard patch on their sleeves and helmets. They swore a dual oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, but also to Ante Pavelić and the Independent State of Croatia.
Command was almost entirely German. Roughly 3,500 German officers and specialists ran the division from top to bottom, controlling their Croatian volunteers at every level.
Although originally intended for the Eastern Front, the worsening situation in Yugoslavia changed German plans. Tito’s partisan movement had grown into a serious military threat, and Berlin needed reliable formations to contain it. In December 1942, the German High Command redirected the division to the Balkans.
As it arrived in Croatia, desertions began almost immediately, driven by reports of Axis defeats on the Eastern Front and in North Africa. The men who stayed were about to fight a war in which their unit had low combat value in anti-partisan fighting but distinguished itself with 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.
Their male inhabitants were rounded up, and those accused of aiding partisans were shot or hanged without trial. Livestock was seized, food stocks were taken or destroyed, and houses were burned. Entire settlements were driven from their homes, leaving burned ruins behind.
These were not incidental excesses but the deliberate application of German anti-partisan doctrine, which often mandated reprisal executions of up to 100 civilians for every German or allied soldier killed, and around 50 for those wounded in response to partisan attacks in the Balkans. Prisoners of war received no better treatment. Partisan fighters who were captured were routinely executed rather than held.
The laws and customs of war governing the treatment of prisoners, already routinely ignored in the anti-partisan war in Yugoslavia, were treated by the division as irrelevant.
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 against civilians during more than two years in Yugoslavia was not the result of a breakdown in discipline but the product of a deliberate and institutional method.
The most concentrated single episode of mass murder in which the division took part came between March 26 and March 30, 1944, when it 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 in what is today Croatia. Partisan forces had already retreated by the time the soldiers arrived in the villages, and what followed was a systematic massacre of the civilian population that remained.
On March 26, the first day of the sweep, soldiers entered Donji Dolac and forced its inhabitants into their homes, which were then set alight. Those who attempted to escape were shot. In the village, 272 people were burnt alive, among them 103 children.
In the days that followed, the same method was applied across the 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. Other estimates based on contemporary Wehrmacht and partisan reports place the number as high as 3,000.
The pattern of collective punishment reached one of its clearest documented expressions on September 11, 1944, when under the direct orders of the division’s commander, Fritz Neidholdt, soldiers of the 369th 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. What had been presented as a 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, were fighting a war that was already lost.
By April 1945, the Croatian manpower of the division had shrunk to between 2,000 and 3,000 men. During the last few weeks of the war, what was left of the division fought in northwest Bosnia and Slovenia, retreating toward Austria. After moving through northern Croatia, it broke up into various groups that went to northern Slovenia and Austria.
On May 11, 1945, part of the division was stopped and disarmed by partisan forces. The remaining group attacked a brigade of partisans near the town of Dravograd in Slovenia as it tried to cross into Austria, territory which was safer for them due to their crimes in the Balkans. On May 15, 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.
Generalleutnant 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 March 5, 1947.
The history of the 369th Croatian Infantry Division is that of a formation assembled from the wreckage of a 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.