Army Group E

• 1. Introduction

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  Army Group E, known in German as Heeresgruppe E, held one of the most sprawling and brutal commands of the entire Second World War. Created on the 1st of January 1943, it was formed from the 12th Army and stretched across the Eastern Mediterranean: Albania, Greece, the Territory of the Military Commander in Serbia, and the Independent State of Croatia. What unfolded under its command over the following two and a half years was a story of occupation, atrocity, desperate retreat, and final collapse. How did a force occupying sun-drenched Greek islands end up fighting its last battle in the mountain passes of the Balkans? And what happened to the tens of thousands of soldiers and allies who were still three days from safety when the war officially ended?

• 2. Occupation and Atrocity

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  In September 1943, German troops under Army Group E's command executed over 5,000 Italian prisoners of war in what became known as the Cephallonia Massacre. The killings followed the disarmament of the Italian army, which had until that moment been an Axis partner. The scale of the execution was staggering, and it was not an isolated event. Across Greece, the group's units carried out the massacres of Kalavryta and Distomo. In September 1944, troops were also involved in the Chortiatis massacre. These were not acts committed on the fringes of the command. They took place during anti-partisan operations that ran as a central part of the Army Group's mission in Greece and Yugoslavia. Within the Army Group's order of battle were twenty-two penal "fortress battalions" of the "999" series, a designation that marked their soldiers as men serving punitive assignments. At the same time as the Cephallonia executions, Army Group E successfully drove back a British attempt to seize the Italian-occupied Dodecanese Islands, demonstrating the group's capacity to conduct conventional operations alongside its anti-partisan campaigns.

• 3. The Long Retreat

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  When Romania fell to the Soviets in the summer of 1944, Army Group E's position in the southern Balkans became untenable. The withdrawal from the Greek islands and mainland was ordered, and by the autumn of 1944, the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts, fighting alongside the People's Liberation Army of Yugoslavia, had conquered central Serbia during the Belgrade Operation. Soviet forces then redeployed to Hungary, but the damage was done. Army Group E and the 2nd Panzer Army were forced to push through the extremely mountainous terrain of southwestern Serbia, northern Montenegro, and finally southeast Bosnia, aiming for Croatia. Throughout that march, the Partisans harassed the German columns, sometimes with British assistance in an operation called Operation Floxo. The journey was grueling, but Army Group E eventually reached the Bosnian border and managed to establish a stable defensive line. There, on the 25th of March 1945, it absorbed what remained of Army Group F, which had just been dissolved. Some units were dispatched to Hungary, and others moved toward Austria and southern Germany. During this retreat phase, the various fortress units were folded into the LXXXXI Army Corps.

• 4. The Final Stand in Croatia

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  Colonel General Alexander Löhr commanded the last attempt to hold the Independent State of Croatia against the People's Liberation Army. On the 12th of April 1945, a major offensive by Yugoslav Partisan forces began, pressing the Germans hard toward the Slovenian-Austrian border area. On the 30th of April 1945, Army Group E still fielded a complex force: the LXIX Command with its StuG Brigade South East, XV SS Cossacks comprising the 2nd Cossacks, 1st Cossacks, and 11th Luftwaffe Field Division, the XXI Mountain Corps with five divisions including the 22nd Volksgrenadiers and the 369th Croatian, and several other corps commands carrying Croatian and mountain formations. Löhr negotiated a partial agreement with the British Commander-in-Chief to accept surrendering German units. When the formal surrender came on the 8th of May 1945, the main body of Army Group E was still three days' march from the Austrian border. By the 15th of May, numerous units had managed to cross into Austria, but 150,000 German soldiers were captured by Tito's forces. Army Group E at that point consisted of seven German divisions, two Cossack divisions of the XV SS Cossack Cavalry Corps, and nine Croatian divisions.

• 5. Aftermath and the Bleiburg Massacre

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  Among the forces that fled toward Austria alongside Army Group E were 220,000 members of Croatian forces. After their surrender, the British extradited them to Tito's Partisans. Several thousand of those Croatians were subsequently killed in what became known as the Bleiburg Massacre. The fate of these men, handed over by one set of Allied forces to another, remains one of the more painful episodes of the immediate postwar period in the Balkans. One member of Army Group E who later rose to international prominence was Kurt Waldheim. He served in the military administration of Thessaloniki during the occupation and went on to become the President of Austria and the Secretary-General of the United Nations. His wartime service, and the question of what he knew during the Army Group's operations in Greece, became a significant controversy decades after the war ended.