Page:Robert M. Kennedy - German Antiguerrilla Operations in the Balkans (1941-1944) - CMH Pub 104-18 (1954).pdf/27

 18 Macedonia, and their I Corps to Thrace. A subsequent reassignment of units, with the movement of Bulgarian troops into the German zone in Yugoslavia, brought the I Corps to southeastern Serbia and a provisional "Aegean Corps" to Thrace. Later in the war, the Aegean Corps was relieved by the II Corps. A number of incidents involving the native population in Macedonia caused the Bulgarians to turn from a benevolent to a harsh policy of pacification. In Greece, where they felt they were recovering territory lost to the Greeks in the Second Balkan War of 1913, the policy of the Bulgarians was arbitrary and severe from the outset of the occupation.

The Hungarians occupied several small areas of Yugoslavia to the west and south of Hungary, and immediately incorporated them into their national state. Inhabited by large Hungarian minorities, these territories had formed part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918, hence the Hungarian attitude toward the population was far more lenient than that of the other occupation forces in their respective zones.

V. The Puppet Governments

Puppet regimes were installed to lighten the administrative burden of the occupied areas and exploit the differences between the various Greek and Yugoslav national and political factions. Native police, security forces, and national armies were also organized to reduce the number of occupation troops required to keep order and protect the various new governments.

The collaborationist regime in Greece was organized under the premiership of General Tsolakoglou, who had surrendered the Army of Epirus to the Germans on 20 April 1941. Although this government formed police and security units and actively assisted the German and Italian occupiers, it did not organize armed forces on a national scale.

In Croatia a kingdom was organized under the nominal rule of the absentee Italian Duke of Spoleto, with actual authority vested in Ante Pavelitch, the Poglavnik (Prime Minister), who began his administration with a ruthless persecution of the Serbian minority within the borders of the new Croatian state.

Pavelitch, living in exile under Italian sponsorship, had been indirectly involved in the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia at Marseilles in 1934. Arriving in Croatia in the wake of the Germans in 1941 with fewer than a hundred of his Ustascha, a politico-military group similar to the Italian Blackshirts, Pavelitch quickly organized a political army of 15 battalions, and a Ustascha Guard of 1 infantry regiment and a cavalry squadron. Under the aegis of the Italian authorities, he also began the conscription of a national military force, which did not progress beyond eight mountain and light infantry