Yugoslavia, 1943.

The war in the Balkans has become a war without mercy.

German troops, joined
by Croatian and other Axis forces, fight not only against partisans of Tito’s Communist Party but
also against the civilians who feed and shelter them.

Each ambush brings brutal reprisals
– villages are burned, hostages are shot, and families are driven from their homes.

German reports call these actions anti-partisan operations, but in reality, they are massacres.

The countryside turns into a landscape of ruins, where terror replaces order and every civilian
learns to fear the sight of German uniforms.

Among the divisions sent to carry out this campaign is
a new formation of Croat volunteers and German officers, the 369th Croatian Infantry Division,
known by its grim nickname, the Devil’s Division.

Its reputation for cruelty spreads wherever it
marches, leaving fire and death in its wake.

Leading it with cold precision and unbending
obedience is a German general Fritz Neidholdt.

Fritz Neidholdt was born on the 16th of
November 1887 in the quiet Thuringian village of Sankt Kilian, then part of the German
Empire.

His father, a Protestant pastor, taught him the values of discipline and obedience,
and the boy grew up in a home of regular prayers and firm rules.

Yet Fritz’s imagination was caught
less by the church than by the army.

The sight of uniforms and order, of rank and command,
appealed to him more than the priesthood ever could.

On the 30th of August 1907, not yet
twenty, Fritz Neidholdt joined the German Army.

It was a time when the German Empire still
stood proud and confident, and young men like him believed service to the Kaiser and the German
Empire was the highest honour a life could offer.

Neidholdt began his military career at
the 96th Regiment of the 7th division of the Thuringian infantry, which was part
of the German army.

In the ranks of this unit Neidholdt began to learn the trade
of soldiering through drill, marching, and started to climb through the army ranks.

When
the First World War broke out in August 1914, Neidholdt went to the front with his
men.

They fought first in Belgium, near the city of Namur and later was sent with his
unit to the Eastern front.

During the war years he served on a various post in the field but also
doing staff work at military headquarters.

During the First World War he was wounded and received
various military awards such as the Knight’s Cross of the Royal Saxon Order of Albrecht with
Swords and both classes of the Iron Cross.

When the war ended in the German defeat,
Neidholdt stayed in the army of the newly founded Weimar Republic.

The German empire was
gone, the monarchy had fallen, but the habit of obedience remained.

He served quietly through
the 1920s and was one of the many officers who neither questioned nor resisted the shifting
politics of Weimar Germany.

He was no visionary, only a man of the army – methodical, precise,
and entirely devoted to command in the small army which was limited by the Versailles treaty to 100
000 men.

But Neidholdt stayed in the German army long enough to see the small Reichswehr, which
was the professional army of the Weimar Republic, transform again into the growing
Wehrmacht of Hitler’s new regime, which came into power in January 1933.

On 21 May
1935, after seeing the revival of the German army, Neidholdt retired, perhaps hoping
for peace.

Yet peace never came.

In December 1938, as Germany successfully
rearmed, Neidholdt was recalled to active duty.

When the Second World War started on 1 September
1939 he was again in the field and at the end of September 1939, he was commander of 322nd
infantry regiment stationed in conquered Poland.

At the end of 1939, he moved with the
regiment to the Western Front and later led his soldiers in an assault during the Western
Campaign which started on 10 May 1940.

After but they were called up again in the March of
1941.

In a summer of that year they participated in the German attack against the Soviet
Union.

For his actions in the first part of the Second World War he was awarded the
German Cross in gold, a military decoration given in a case of repeated exceptional acts
of bravery and troop leadership.

In June 1942 he went away from his former unit and was sent
to a Führerreserve, awaiting his next command.

The new assignment arrived on 1 September
1942, when he was given command of the 369th Croatian Infantry Division – a new unit formed
under German authority from volunteers of the Independent State of Croatia, a brutal fascist
puppet-state known also as an Ustaša regime.

The division, which was created in the
town Stockerau in Austria, drew from some of the remains of the 369th Croatian Reinforced
Infantry Regiment, which had been used by Germans on the Eastern front and later was destroyed at
Stalingrad.

Its men came from villages and towns under the Croatian Ustaša regime, its officers
from the German army.

They took the nickname of the unit as Teufelsdivision, meaning the Devil’s
Division, borrowed from an Austro-Hungarian division formed by the Croat soldiers that
had fought in the First World War.

This new Devil’s Division would earn its name again,
but this time not for courage, but for cruelty.

At first, the unit was meant to be sent to
the Eastern Front, but instead it was sent to Yugoslavia, where partisan resistance was
spreading like fire through the mountains.

Entire villages were burned, livestock stolen, and
men, women, and children executed as collective punishment.

In early 1943, Neidholdt’s men
entered the Balkans as part of Operation Weiss, the massive Axis Offensive against Tito’s
partisans in Bosnia.

The terrain was wild, the partisans invisible, and the enemy’s
faces looked similar to those of local peasants and villagers.

Frustrated by ambushes
and heavy losses, Neidholdt’s division struck back against civilians with savage reprisals.

Villages suspected of helping the partisans were burned.

Eyewitnesses and postwar investigations
documented mass killings, rape, and destruction of civilian homes.

German reports praised the
division’s discipline but Yugoslav memories spoke mainly about the brutal attacks, the fire and the
screams of the civilians.

In the next offensive, nicknamed this time “Fall Schwarz” or
Case Black, members of the 369th division fought across Montenegro and southern Bosnia,
Neidholdt’s men again formed the hard centre of the German offensive against partisans and their
reputation for brutality only grew stronger.

The Devil’s Division, under Neidholdt’s command,
left behind a trail of death wherever it went.

Neidholdt’s command in the Balkan brought him
little glory.

Slowly but steadily was war in the Balkans turning against the occupiers.

Italy
had surrendered to the Allies in September 1943, the German armies were stretched thin
over the region, and partisan control over the Balkan territory was growing.

The 369th Division remained in the field, carrying out sweeps and reprisals that
hardened into routine.