When Hitler’s Devil Division Was Finally Brought to Justice 

When Hitler’s Devil Division was finally brought to justice in January 1943, a German army was freezing to death inside a ruined Russian city around Stalenrad. The Soviet Red Army had closed a ring of steel. 300,000 men were trapped inside it. Germans, Romanians, Italians, Hungarians, and about 900 Croatians.

 Those Croatians were the last 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 of them never came home. But their number did. Berlin took the number of that destroyed regiment and stamped it onto a brand new division.

 14,000 fresh men, new uniforms, German officers, and a nickname the unit borrowed from an older war. They called themselves the Devil’s Division. Over the next 2 years, that name stopped being a nickname and started being a description. If you like real history told straight with no exaggeration and no madeup drama, subscribe to the channel right now and hit the bell icon.

 that way you never miss an episode. It costs you nothing and it helps this channel more than you know. Now, let’s go back to the beginning. On the 6th of April 1941, 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 the 10th of April 1941, while the fighting was still going on, a new state was announced. It was called the independent state of Croatia. In Croatian, Nzavisna, Durjava, Hervatzka. Most people know it by three letters, NDH. The men put in charge of it were the Ustache, a Croatian fascist movement led by anti- Pavlich.

 Pavlich copied Hitler and Mussolini in almost everything, and he 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. Pavllich wanted to prove he was worth something to Berlin. So, he offered the one thing Berlin always wanted. soldiers.

 By the 25th of June 1941, less than 3 months into the occupation, his envoy was already in Berlin with an offer. Croatian volunteers sent east to fight the Soviet Union. Hitler said yes. Recruiting started at once. The first unit raised was the 369th Croatian Reinforced Infantry Regiment. Everyone called it the Croatian Legion.

 It was put together in July 1941 in Varragein and Sievo and it included a Bosnian Muslim battalion about 5,000 men in total. They trained in Austria. Then they were sent east and attached to the German 100th Jagger 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 Vulga.

 By autumn, it was inside Stalenrad. The regiment was thrown into two of the ugliest fights in the city. One was the Red October factory, a wrecked steel plant where men fought room by room. The other was Mamey Kiran, 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 onethird 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 the 31st of January 1943, Field Marshal Friedrich Pace 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 the 21st of August 1942, while the original regiment was still fighting in Russia, work had already begun on a replacement.

 It was formed at Stakarau and Dullesheim in Lower Austria, and it was called the 369th Croatian Infantry Division. 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 Austrohungarian army, there had been a Croatian unit, the 42nd Homeguard Infantry Division known as the Vraa Devisia, 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 Pavllich and the independent state of Croatia. But the men giving the orders were not Croatian. Around 3 and a half thousand German officers and specialists ran the division from the top all the way down.

Every level had a German holding the reigns. 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, communistled partisan forces under Ysef Bros Tibo 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 desertion 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 Herzgoina 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 antipartisan orders in the Balkans set reprisal ratios out loud. For every German or allied soldier killed, up to 100 civilians could be executed. For everyone 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 2 years. The worst single episode came in the spring of 1944. Between the 26th and the 30th of March, the 369th took part in a punitive sweep through the Dalmatian hinterland in the area near the town of Trilge between the Kameshnitsa and Mosor mountains that is inside modern-day Croatia.

 Fighting alongside it were the SS division, Prince Ujin, and the Cetnik Dinara Division. By the time the soldiers arrived, the partisans had already pulled out. Only civilians were left. On the 26th of March, the first day, soldiers entered the village of Donji Doatch. 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. 103 of them were children. Over the following days, the same method moved village to village. In Vosane between 337 and 400 civilians were killed, 143 of them children. The same thing happened in Podi, Ruda, Otto, Civadol, Loot, and Roger.

 Across those 5 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 the 11th of September 1944, under direct orders from the division’s commander, Fritz Nighhalt, soldiers of the 369th entered the villages of Zagj and Udora near the city of Stolock in Herzgoina.

Every man in those villages was hanged. The women and children were driven out of their homes. Remember that name, Fritz Nighhalt. 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 2 and 3,000 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 the 11th of May 1945, part of the division was stopped and disarmed by partisan forces. The rest tried to punch through. Near the town of Draagrad in Slovenia, they attacked a partisan brigade to force a crossing into Austria. On the 15th of May 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 Nidholt. He was a general lieutenant and he 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 the 5th of March, 1947, Fritz Nighhalt 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. If this is the kind of history you want more of, told carefully and told straight, subscribe to the channel and turn on the bell so the next episode reaches you.

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