Operation Kugelblitz

At the beginning of December 1943 the German 2nd Panzer Army under General Lothar Rendulic launched Operation Kugelblitz (“Ball Lightning”) in eastern Bosnia and the Sandžak – the most ambitious German winter undertaking in Yugoslavia at the turn of 1943 and 1944, and the largest in terms of the forces committed. Its aim was to encircle and destroy the II and III Corps of the National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia before Josip Broz Tito’s partisans could cross the Drina into Serbia. The exact starting date is given differently in the literature: German studies say 2 December, English-language ones 3 December, while Yugoslav historiography, which describes the operation as the battle on the Lim and the Drina, dates it from 4 December, when the main columns struck. The fighting lasted until 16–18 December. The Germans inflicted heavy losses on the partisans and took a number of towns, but the main forces of both corps slipped out of the encirclement.

Yugoslavia after the Italian surrender

Since April 1941 Yugoslavia had been divided between the Axis powers and their allies. Two mutually hostile movements were fighting the occupiers: Tito’s communist partisans and the Serbian nationalists – the Chetniks of General Dragoljub Mihailović, who more and more often co-operated with the Italians and Germans against the communists. In the spring of 1943 the Germans tried to crush the partisans in Operation Schwarz, which culminated in the Battle of the Sutjeska. Tito’s main group suffered enormous losses then, but broke out of the encirclement.

The Italian surrender in September 1943 and the German Operation Achse changed the situation in the Balkans. In many places in the former Italian zone the partisans forestalled the Germans, disarmed some of the Italian garrisons and seized huge quantities of weapons, ammunition and supplies. Some of the Italians went over to their side. From the remnants of the Venezia and Taurinense divisions, which had joined the partisan II Corps, the Italian partisan Garibaldi Division was formed at the beginning of December 1943; according to Yugoslav studies it comprised about 11,000 soldiers in all.

In the autumn the II Corps, reinforced by the 2nd Proletarian Division, took control of the Sandžak and northern Montenegro, driving out the Chetniks and the Muslim militia. The III Corps, with the 5th Krajina Division brought over from central Bosnia, operated in eastern Bosnia, took Višegrad and pressed towards Serbia. For the Germans this was a serious threat: Serbia, through which ran the Belgrade–Salonika railway, was the hinterland of their entire defence of the Balkans. After 29 November the partisans also had their own seat of authority – at Jajce in Bosnia the second session of AVNOJ had met and set up a provisional government headed by Tito.

Forces and plan

The Germans were weak at this time. In November 1943 the III SS Panzer Corps had left for the Eastern Front, and the infantry divisions sent in its place were poorly equipped. Three of them, including the strong 371st Infantry Division, had only been lent to Rendulic by the high command for the winter and were due to leave for other fronts by the end of March 1944. December was therefore the last opportunity to use them against the partisans.

The main weight of the operation rested on General Artur Phleps’s V SS Mountain Corps. Its two mountain divisions, which had already fought on the Sutjeska – the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division Prinz Eugen and the 1st Mountain Division – were to attack from the south: Prinz Eugen from the Gacko–Nevesinje line in Herzegovina, and the 1st Mountain Division, with the 2nd Regiment of the Brandenburg special unit, from the Sjenica area in the Sandžak. To the west, north and east the blocking line Sarajevo – Han Pijesak – Vlasenica – Srebrenica – Drina was to be closed by units of the 369th (Croatian) Infantry Division, the 187th Reserve Division, several independent regiments, part of a German police regiment, the Russian Protective Corps and the Bulgarian 24th Infantry Division, operating from occupied Serbia. Croatian units of the Independent State of Croatia and Chetniks also took part.

The plan was for the southern columns to break up the partisans and drive them north of the Višegrad–Pale line into a pocket closed by the blocking forces, where the 2nd, 5th, 17th and 27th partisan divisions were to be destroyed. The name reflected the two phases of the operation: the swift closing of the encirclement (the “ball”) and the strike against those trapped inside (the “lightning”).

The bridge at Prijepolje

The best-known episode of the operation was the attack on the bridge over the Lim at Prijepolje. Instead of an ordinary assault on the forward positions, the Germans decided to seize it with a commando raid just before the main attack. Before dawn on 4 December disguised soldiers of the 2nd Brandenburg Regiment, led by guides from the Muslim militia, worked their way round the positions of a battalion of the 2nd Proletarian Brigade and captured the bridge intact. According to Yugoslav studies, on that day alone units of the 2nd Proletarian Division lost 395 killed and 13 taken prisoner. The commander of the battalion that took the bridge, Captain Konrad Steidl, was awarded the Knight’s Cross. Even Yugoslav historiography regarded it as one of the best-executed German tactical actions in Yugoslavia, and attributed the defeat also to failures of reconnaissance and command on the partisan side.

After breaking through the front on the Lim, the 1st Mountain Division and the Brandenburgers advanced rapidly. On 5 December they took Nova Varoš and on 6 December Pljevlja, from where part of the force turned towards Bijelo Polje. The Prinz Eugen Division advanced through Čajniče to the Ustiprača–Goražde area on the Drina and on 7 December made contact with the 1st Mountain Division. In the north, German columns from Tuzla and Zvornik, supported by tanks, moved on Kladanj and Vlasenica, and from the Sarajevo area on Sokolac.

The partisans slip away

Despite these successes the ring did not close. The II Corps managed to break contact with the enemy before the 1st Mountain Division linked up with Prinz Eugen. The III Corps, which had first tried in vain to cross the Drina to the east, assembled on the Romanija plateau and around Rogatica. The Germans closed the encirclement round the 27th Division, but on the night of 15/16 December the partisans slipped unnoticed through the blocking line of the 187th Reserve Division near Han Pijesak. The 5th Krajina Division, instead of waiting to be attacked, itself set off southwards in three columns, straight at the advancing German units, and broke through near Sjeversko. The wide terrain, the mountains, the winter and too few soldiers to hold the encirclement line tightly allowed the partisans to pass through the gaps between the German groupings.

The losses on both sides are hard to establish. According to German studies, the Germans reported 2,926 enemy killed, 1,604 rifles and 107 machine guns captured. The discrepancy between the number of “killed” and the number of weapons captured, typical of German reports on anti-partisan fighting, suggests that the reports also counted people outside the armed units. Some studies put the partisans’ total losses (killed, wounded and missing) as high as about 9,000; German losses are given as 106 killed, 535 wounded and 7 missing. The 2nd Proletarian and 5th Krajina Divisions suffered most. According to accounts, Hitler was furious that the partisans had once again escaped encirclement.

The Chetniks and the civilians

Chetnik units fought on the German side in the operation. The Chetniks of Major Vojislav Lukačević, who in the autumn of 1943 had concluded a local truce with the Germans, advanced together with a battle group of the 1st Mountain Division. On 22 December its commander, Colonel Remold, praised them in an order as “faithful comrades in arms” in the fight against the communists. Elsewhere, too, the Chetniks and the Muslim militia co-operated with the Germans against the partisans. This was one of the pieces of evidence of collaboration that the British were gathering against Mihailović in those weeks.

The civilian population was caught between the fighting sides. German anti-partisan operations in Yugoslavia went hand in hand with the burning of villages deemed to be partisan, the shooting of hostages and suspects, and deportations to camps; historians of German occupation policy in the Balkans place the winter operations of 1943/1944 within this pattern too. After the Germans entered Prijepolje, on 5 December the Muslim militia and local Chetniks arrested 16 partisan sympathisers, Serbs and Muslims, and handed them over to the occupiers; six of them died in German camps. In the areas through which the front passed there were also settlings of scores between Chetniks, Ustaše and partisans, which claimed civilian victims of various nationalities.

Place in the war

Kugelblitz was the first and most important of a series of 2nd Panzer Army operations that Yugoslav historiography called the Sixth Enemy Offensive. While the fighting was still going on, the Germans prepared their next blow. Operation Schneesturm (“Blizzard”), conducted from 18 to 27 December by the same forces, was aimed at the partisans operating further west, around Vareš and Kakanj. This time the Germans tried to encircle individual battalions and regiments rather than whole divisions. Even so, on the night of 25/26 December the partisans broke out of the pocket and assembled on the Romanija. At the same time the Germans conducted smaller operations in Herzegovina, western Croatia and on the Dalmatian islands.

In January 1944 Operation Waldrausch in central Bosnia gave the Germans Jajce, where AVNOJ had met a few weeks earlier, but the partisans once again slipped out of the encirclement. In the first half of January the 5th Krajina Division had already retaken Foča, Čajniče, Goražde and Kalinovik, restoring the free territory. Once the borrowed German divisions had left for other fronts, the 2nd Panzer Army no longer had the strength for similar undertakings. In May 1944 the Germans tried another method: they dropped paratroops on Tito’s headquarters at Drvar. Tito survived.

The winter operations of 1943/1944 showed that the Germans could win individual battles but could not destroy a partisan army that kept growing, gaining weapons and experience, and escaping the trap every time. For the British, who were just then deciding whom to support in Yugoslavia, this was a further argument in favour of Tito: it was his forces that were tying down more than a dozen German and allied divisions, while the Chetniks were fighting ever more openly alongside the occupiers. The December fighting in Bosnia and the Sandžak thus preceded the Allies’ turn towards the partisans in the first half of 1944. In the autumn of that year the partisans, together with the Red Army, liberated Belgrade.