Commissioner Government

The Aćimović government lacked any semblance of power, and was merely an instrument of the German occupation regime, carrying out its orders within the occupied territory.

One of its early tasks was the implementation of German orders regarding the registration of Jews and Romani people living in the territory, and the placing of severe restrictions on their liberty.

In early July, a few days after a communist-led mass uprising commenced, Aćimović reshuffled his government, replacing three commissioners and appointing deputies for most of the portfolios.

The members of the Commissioner Government collaborated with the occupiers as a means to spare Serbs from political influences that they considered more dangerous than the Germans, such as democracy, communism and multiculturalism.

They actively assisted the Germans in exploiting the population and the economy, and took an "extremely opportunistic" view of the Jewish question, regarding their own participation in the Holocaust as "unpleasant but unavoidable".

The German occupied territory of Serbia was also rich in non-ferrous metals such as lead, antimony and copper, which Germany needed to support its war effort.

The first military commander in the occupied territory was General der Flieger[b] Helmuth Förster, a Luftwaffe officer, appointed on 20 April 1941,[7] assisted by the chief of his administrative staff, SS-Brigadeführer[c] and State Councillor Harald Turner.

[14] From the date of the Yugoslav capitulation, pro-German politicians, including the president of the fascist Zbor movement, Dimitrije Ljotić, former Belgrade police chief and Minister of the Interior, Milan Aćimović, the current Belgrade police chief, Dragomir Jovanović, along with Đorđe Perić, Steven Klujić and Tanasije Dinić met almost daily to assist in this process.

[32] The Commissioner Government was capable of handling routine administrative tasks and maintaining law and order in a peacetime situation only,[33] and was closely controlled by Turner and Neuhausen.

[17] Neuhausen was effectively an economic dictator, and had complete control over the economy of the occupied territory and finances of the puppet administration, to one end – maximising the contribution they made to the German war effort.

[35] One of the first tasks of the administration involved carrying out Turner's orders for the registration of all Jews and Romani people in the occupied territory and implementation of severe restrictions on their activities.

These were aimed at bringing the occupied territory into line with the rest of Nazi-occupied Europe, and included the wearing of yellow armbands, the introduction of forced labour and curfews, and restricted access to food.

[36] By this means, the Commissioner Government took part, albeit under German orders, in the "registration, marking, pauperisation, and social exclusion of the Jewish community".

When Aćimović requested the release of Serb POWs, arguing that the camps could become hotbeds of nationalist and communist agitation, and that the men were needed as labourers, Förster flatly refused and deported them to Germany.

[43] The boundaries of the occupied territory were settled on 21 May, with 51,000 square kilometres (20,000 sq mi) of land and 3.81 million inhabitants, including between 50 and 60 per cent of Yugoslav Serbs.

[7] On 9 June, the commander of the German 12th Army, Generalfeldmarschall[h] Wilhelm List, was appointed as the Wehrmacht Commander-in-Chief Southeast Europe, with Schröder reporting directly to him.

[51][52] During June, the Aćimović government, preoccupied as it was with dreams of expanding the occupied territory into a Greater Serbia, wrote to Schröder urging him "to give the Serbian people its centuries-old ethnographic borders".

This meeting resolved to shift from sabotage operations to a general uprising, form Partisan detachments of fighters and commence armed resistance, and call for the populace to rise up against the occupiers throughout Yugoslavia.

[30] To bolster its reputation with the Germans, the Aćimović government arranged public meetings and conferences to encourage collaboration by the populace, with the purported aim of saving the occupied territory from civil war.

[61] On 13 August, Bader reneged on Danckelmann's pledge to allow the Commissioner Government to maintain control of the Serbian gendarmerie, and ordered that it be re-organised into units of 50–100 men under the direction of local German commanders.

[62] He also directed the three divisional commanders to have their battalions form Jagdkommandos, lightly armed and mobile "hunter teams", incorporating elements of Einsatzgruppe Serbia and the gendarmerie.

[63] In response to the revolt, the Aćimović administration encouraged 545 or 546 prominent and influential Serbs to sign the Appeal to the Serbian Nation, which was published in the German-authorised Belgrade daily newspaper Novo vreme on 13 and 14 August.

The Serbian Bar Association unanimously supported the Appeal, but some notable personalities, such as the writers Isidora Sekulić and Ivo Andrić and university professor Miloš N. Đurić,[69] refused to sign.

[57][58] In addition, Aćimović gave orders that the wives of communists and their sons older than 16 years of age be arrested and held, and the Germans burned their houses and imposed curfews.

[70][71] To strengthen the puppet government, Danckelmann wanted to find a Serb who was both well-known and highly regarded by the population who could raise some sort of Serbian armed force and who would be willing to use it ruthlessly against the rebels whilst remaining under full German control.

[58] In response to a request from Benzler, the Foreign Office sent SS-Standartenführer Edmund Veesenmayer to provide assistance in establishing a new puppet government that would meet German requirements.

[73] Veesenmayer engaged in a series of consultations with German commanders and officials in Belgrade, interviewed a number of possible candidates to lead the new puppet government, then selected former Yugoslav Minister of the Army and Navy Armijski đeneral[l] Milan Nedić as the best available.

The Germans had to apply significant pressure to Nedić to encourage him to accept the position, including threats to bring Bulgarian and Hungarian troops into the occupied territory and to send him to Germany as a prisoner of war.

The historian Alexander Prusin asserts that on closer examination, they accepted collaboration with the occupiers as a means to spare Serbs from political influences that they considered more dangerous than the Germans: democracy, communism, and multiculturalism.

[79] In post-war communist Yugoslavia, Aćimović was referred to as a traitor,[80] but since the fall of Slobodan Milošević in the late 1990s there have been gradual moves to rehabilitate members of the Serbian collaborationist puppet governments on the basis of their anti-communism.