Biographies & Memoirs

24

The March of the 14th Division

At New Year 1944, the 14th Partisan Division regrouped in a collection of villages north-west of Novo Mesto after the II SS Panzer Corps’ offensive. The Ljubo Šercer Brigade was joined by two other brigades – the 1st and 13th Brigades, known as the Tomšič and Bračič Brigades respectively, altogether numbering 1,112 fighters. With them was a collection of couriers, medics, clerks, typists, and even a chaplain, barber, and dentist.1 Their objective was to move north to fight the Germans in Štajerska. It would be a brutal winter march from Dolenjska, but Štajerska had manpower, food, tall mountains, dense forests, and a population desperate for liberation. Getting there would not be simple. It could be reached in a week or two, but the direct path led over the Sava river. Going west via Gorenjska was also unappealing, as Stane’s experience in 1942 had showed. Instead, the 14th would march east into Croatia, turn north, and cross back into Slovenia from the east. Were he fit for action, John Denvir might have returned to Maribor. Sadly, he had been badly wounded during the SS offensive. He was smuggled to the Adriatic coast, evacuated to southern Italy, and then to an Allied hospital. John Denvir survived and went home to New Zealand.2 The last of the XVIIID Partisans was out of the fight.

On 6 January 1944 the division set off in a five-kilometre column. Croatian terrain was forgiving, but bad weather meant it took a whole month to loop around to Štajerska. The Ustaše (the fascists governing Croatia) were weak by now and only fought minor skirmishes against the division, and German attention was far away. Still, injuries and illness led to nearly 100 casualties by the time the division crossed into Štajerska.3 Luck was against them; they entered Kozje, where thousands of ethnic Germans from Ljubljana Province had been resettled, and these locals raised the alarm as the weather took a harsh turn. Moving west in deep snow, the Partisans were easy to track. Their pack mules were dying from cold, and fighters were succumbing to frostbite. Then came the enemy under Colonel Egon Treeck, the perfect man for the job. An experienced mountaineer, Treeck received the Knight’s Cross for a bold attack against Anzac and British forces in Crete and had also seen harsher weather than even the Alps could offer, fighting the Soviets inside the Arctic Circle.4 Treeck pursued with a force of 3,000.

The Partisans were now mired in snow, wedged between the Sava and Savinja rivers and deprived of the element of surprise. Over two weeks the 14th Division fought running battles, crossing the Savinja river and passing Celje. To hold off Treeck, they set up a defensive position on high ground in the ruins of the medieval Lindek Castle.5 A single valley now separated the 14th Division from Pohorje, where they could regroup and link up with the Lackov Odred, but they might not make it that far. Night temperatures were -20°C, supplies were nearly exhausted, the pack mules were dead or had been given to local farmers, and the gun lubricant was freezing weapons shut. To survive, the Partisans had to make a bold play.

On 18 February they got their chance: a heavy snowstorm. The march would be hell, but the storm would mask their tracks. The division tried to break out into Pohorje but were spotted on a major road crossing, and Treeck’s forces attacked. Only 162 Partisans succeeded in getting through; 360 were killed, captured, or went missing during the fighting. Many more wounded would die soon after.6 The survivors retreated west, climbing Mount Basališče in deep snow. They hoped to rest and recover, if only for a day. Treeck would not allow it; he deployed his last reserves to the Partisans’ west and sent ski troops up the mountain. They caught the 14th Division unaware. Retreating further west, the Partisans used their last ammunition to smash through German encirclement, make for the Kamnik-Savinja Alps, and link up with the Koroška Odred.

Photo

A map of the northern part of Slovenia with local towns marked. The location of the Pohorje Battalion battle on 8 January 1943 is marked, south east of Maribor.

Map 9. Štajerska region

The 14th Division was divided across two mountain ranges and had suffered heavy casualties. But Treeck’s forces were exhausted too. Believing the Partisans all but destroyed, the German offensive ended on 25 February.7

Blocking any path for the Partisans back south was a new enemy. Following the German takeover in Ljubljana, new collaborators had appeared. In spite of the fact that they had attempted to join the Allies in 1943, once German forces arrived, the SLS had bent with the prevailing wind and reorganized their forces into an SS auxiliary: Slovensko domobranstvo (the Slovenian Home Guard). However, the SLS could see that the Nazis were losing the war, and they did not want to be bound to a sinking ship.8 The Germans were also hesitant to hand any power to an established political party. So they appointed Leon Rupnik, a sixty-four-year-old Slovenian former general in the Yugoslav Army, as figurehead president of Ljubljana Province in late 1943.

Positions of power around Rupnik primarily went to the Slovenian members of a small, pro-Nazi group, Zbor.* Their members were mostly ambitious students, believing in their own superiority. Due to this group’s youth and behaviour, the SLS called them ‘the kindergarten’.9 Their leading propagandist was a slender and charismatic twenty-year-old called Lyenko Urbančič. His rabid speeches earned him the nickname ‘Little Goebbels’.10 Urbančič’s recruitment drives swelled Domobranstvo* ranks, which, despite the moderating influence of the SLS, proved an effective Nazi puppet. The Domobranstvo participated in German offensives, held garrisons and key infrastructure, and assisted in the Holocaust, hunting down the survivors of Ljubljana’s small Jewish community.11 At the end of June 1944 in a radio broadcast that launched the ‘Great Anti-Communist National Assembly’ in Ljubljana, Urbančič outlined the new collaborators’ ideology:

It is not important if I speak over the radio in these times as the youngest Slovenian journalist. What is more important is the truth, which is centuries old. This is the truth about all the mean designs of the chosen people – the 15 million of the tribe of Israel . . . [we wish the English] would taste German weapons so fundamentally that they shall see that their place is only in togetherness of European nations with Germany against Asian and Jewish Bolshevism . . . Does the American and English soldier know what he is fighting for? Negroes, Chinese, and Indians are [fighting against Europe] for a free block of land in America.12

Urbančič also devoted part of this speech to condemning the SLS. He let everyone know that when Italy had surrendered, the SLS had decided to fight the Axis. In the following days the Gestapo began arresting SLS members, along with 500 ‘politically unreliable’ Domobranstvo members.13 Others who opposed the Nazis were kidnapped in the dead of night and taken to Sveti Urh, a converted church east of Ljubljana. Here the victims were tortured and murdered.14

For the Partisans in the south facing the Domobranstvo and the SS, the situation was tenuous. They badly needed food and new recruits if they were to triumph. Their hopes, and the hopes of thousands in Štajerska, lay on the battered shoulders of the 14th Division. The division had only 440 battle-worthy fighters left, but recovered as best it could through March.15 Supplies were gathered, and recruits taken on. A novel tactic was developed for the latter: the Partisans halted rail services in an isolated spot and took on new members from the passengers.16 Soon the 14th Division was back up to 800-strong, although many lacked weapons. In Pohorje, the Lackov Odred yielded a whole new brigade, the Zidanšek or 11th Brigade, via the escape line from Maribor. Many Wehrmacht conscripts defected while on leave, either alone or in small groups of fellow Slovenians. Zidanšek comprised 300 such defectors. They brought their own weapons, uniforms, and training.17 There were, as always, black sheep, in this case the Bračič Brigade. The most inexperienced of the 14th Division’s brigades, a high fatality rate induced a psychotic atmosphere. While other Partisans prized Wehrmacht deserters, here seven such men were executed on suspicion of spying. The evidence was deranged, including accusations of ‘placing scrunched-up twigs in a suspicious manner’, supposedly some sort of code.18

In late March 1944, the division was ordered by 4th Zone HQ – responsible for all Partisan forces in Štajerska – to defeat several German garrisons, creating a ‘liberated area’, a permanent Partisan base in either the Savinja Valley or the twin towns of Velenje and Šoštanj. The Maribor OF underground had been infiltrating the towns, and the division was nearby, so Velenje and Šoštanj became the aim.19 Preparations went on all April, but the Partisans had little ammunition and no heavy weapons, and the attack on 1 May went poorly, particularly at Šoštanj. There, some Partisan officers got drunk before the attack; one tried to burn a Nazi office by mixing gasoline and hay, with the resulting explosion killing the officer and two others. Exasperated, 4th Zone ordered most of the division to retreat to Pohorje.20 It seemed to be a hopeless pantomime. But help was on the way, in the form of a daring American spy . . .

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