The 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division Prinz Eugen of the German Waffen-SS during World War II

Описание: The 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division "Prinz Eugen" (7. SS-Freiwilligen Gebirgs-Division "Prinz Eugen"), initially named the SS-Volunteer Division Prinz Eugen (SS-Freiwilligen-Division "Prinz Eugen"), was a mountain infantry division of the Waffen-SS, an armed branch of the German Nazi Party that served alongside but was never formally part of the Wehrmacht during World War II. At the post-war Nuremberg trials, the Waffen-SS was declared to be a criminal organisation due to its major involvement in war crimes and crimes against humanity. From 1942 to 1945, the division fought a counter-insurgency campaign against communist-led Yugoslav Partisan resistance forces in occupied Yugoslavia. It was formed in 1941 from both Reich Germans and Volksdeutsche – ethnic German volunteers and conscripts from the Banat, Independent State of Croatia, Hungary and Romania. The division surrendered on 11 May 1945 to Yugoslav Partisan forces, with thousands of stragglers surrendering by the 15th near the Austrian border.
After the invasion, occupation and dismantling of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia by the Axis powers on 6 April 1941, the Wehrmacht placed Serbia proper, the northern part of Kosovo (around Kosovska Mitrovica) and the Banat under a military government. The division was formed in late 1941 following the invasion initially from German-speaking Danube Swabian Selbstschutz in the Banat autonomous area within the Territory of the Military Commander in Serbia. The unit was given the title Prinz Eugen after Prince Eugene of Savoy, an outstanding military leader of the Habsburg Empire who liberated the Banat and Belgrade from the Ottoman Empire in the Austro-Turkish War of 1716–18. A key figure in the organisation of the division was the Higher SS and Police Leader in Serbia, SS-Obergruppenführer und Generalleutnant der Polizei (Police General) August Meyszner.
After the initial rush of Volksdeutsche to join, voluntary enlistments tapered off, and the new formation did not reach division size. Therefore, in August 1941, the SS discarded the voluntary approach, and after a favorable judgement from the SS court in Belgrade, imposed a mandatory military obligation on all Volksdeutsche in Banat, the first of its kind for non-Reichsdeutsche.
One of the reasons for the forced conscription of ethnic Germans was the disappointingly low number of volunteers for the division after the initial recruitments (no more than 5,000). While the division remained "volunteer" in name, few of the conscripted ethnic Germans actively sought entry into the unit. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had announced that the wishes of the Volksdeutsche were irrelevant, while in connection with the Balkan Germans the SS head of recruitment Gottlob Berger remarked: "kein Mensch [kümmert] [sich ja] darum, was wir unten mit unseren Volksdeutschen tun" ("no person cares what we do with our ethnic Germans in the South").
Ethnic Germans in the Balkans were therefore powerless and could not oppose conscription into the SS. The unwillingness of ethnic Germans to serve in the unit is illustrated by a mutiny of 173 Croatian Germans of the division in 1943 in Bosnia when apparently the men of mixed ancestry did not speak German and were mistreated by their superiors as a result. Many of these men preferred service in the Croatian Home Guard for a variety of reasons; Himmler intervened personally in the problem. In 1942, the Pančevo-based unit was declared a Mountain Division. Its troops were issued with a significant amount of non-standard German weapons and used captured equipment such as Czechoslovak machine guns like the ZB-53[7] and French light tanks. They were provided with excellent German-made mountain artillery such as the 10.5 cm Gebirgshaubitze 40 howitzer and 7.5 cm Gebirgsgeschütz 36 mountain gun. When the division was formed, it was assigned to the Balkans as an anti-Partisan mountain division.
In October 1942, the division led a German-Bulgarian anti-guerrilla offensive by the name of Operation Kopaonik against the Chetniks in the Kopaonik, Goč and Jastrebac mountains in Serbia. The operation was aimed at the destruction of the Rasina Corps of the Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland, commanded by Major Dragutin Keserović, whose headquarters was located in the village of Kriva Reka. The division's first major action thus ended in a failure, as the Germans and Bulgarians cleared the Chetnik free territory (and in the process committed war crimes against the Serbian civilian population), yet the Chetniks themselves successfully withdrew beyond the reach of the occupation forces. The Prinz Eugen was next involved in counter-insurgency activities on the Serbian-Montenegro border in the mountains east of river Ibar.

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