Over the next three years the Germans mounted 43 large scale anti-partisan operations in Russia, the vast majority in the Belorussia region. Bach-Zelewski was no SS bureaucrat but a man who led from the front. He was often found at the head of anti-partisan sweeps, and he particularly liked to fly over partisan-controlled territory in his Luftwaffe Fieseler Storch light aircraft looking for possible targets. One of his favourite tricks was to machine-gun villages from his aircraft in the hope of prompting any partisans taking shelter into returning fire. This would give him the justification to move in his troops to liquidate the offending village's population.

The failure of anti-partisan measures

As the partisan war escalated through the summer of 1942, it was soaking up an increasing number of German Army troops. With the Red Army resurgent, the Wehrmacht needed every man at the front, and a new source of manpower was sought to take over the burden of fighting the partisans. Himmler now turned to the auxiliary Schuma police units. Ukrainian Catholics from the Galicia region and the Baltic states were initially a fertile recruiting ground for these auxiliary units, and Himmler was soon admitting them into the ranks of his Waffen-SS.

Ultimately, the German anti-partisan effort in Russia was a major disaster. The brutal tactics of Bach-Zelewski and his Waffen-SS soldiers totally turned the population against the German cause. At the height of the decisive 1943 summer campaign season, for example, the partisans were able to disrupt German supplies in key sectors and severely hamper the ability of the Wehrmacht to resist the advance of the Red Army. Stalin, although initially suspicious of the partisans (they were behind the German lines and thus outside his area of control), was soon lavishing praise on their ability to cause the Germans trouble. The Waffen-SS was a major factor in losing Germany the partisan war in Russia.

In Yugoslavia, the partisan war again sucked in large numbers of Waffen-SS troops as the conflict escalated out of control, because of heavy handed German responses to attacks on their troops. The basic German strategy in Yugoslavia was one of "divide and rule", using locally recruited forces to avoid having to divert large numbers of Wehrmacht troops from the Eastern Front for occupation duties in what was considered a strategic backwater. Yugoslavia's complex ethnic mix played into the Germans' hands, and allowed them to break up the country. The Germans gave the Dalmatian coast, Kosovo and what is now Slovenia to the Italians. Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary were rewarded with chunks of territory along their borders. The rump of Serbia and Bosnia was placed under direct German rule. Croatia became an "independent" fascist state.

Responsibility for internal security was initially in the hands of the Wehrmacht, which was primarily interested in keeping open lines of communications to Greek ports to supply German troops fighting the British in North Africa. The SS presence was restricted at first to intelligence and secret police operatives, whose main interest was in playing one ethnic group off against the other. Higher SS and Police Leaders headquarters were set up in each of the main regions of Yugoslavia and they operated independently of the Wehrmacht High Command in the country. The SS drafted in several of its police regiments and strong contingents of Gestapo agents to give their leaders in Yugoslavia some back-up. They soon got to work arresting and executing anti-German elements throughout the country. Not surprisingly, this generated both fear and resentment among large segments of the population.

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