The Government of National Salvation (Serbian: Влада народног спаса, romanized: Vlada narodnog spasa; German: Regierung der nationalen Rettung, abbr.

Unlike the Independent State of Croatia, the regime in occupied Serbia was never accorded status in international law and did not enjoy formal diplomatic recognition of the Axis powers.

The Government of National Salvation was evacuated from Belgrade through Budapest to Kitzbühel in the first week of October 1944, before the German withdrawal from the occupied territory was complete.

Following the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, Germany put Serbia proper under the authority of a military government to maintain control over important resources.

Those included two major transportation routes, the Danube River waterway and the railroad line connecting Europe with Bulgaria and Greece, along with the nonferrous metals that Serbia produced.

Nedić soon lost control of the State Guard, when, on 22 January 1942, General August Meyszner, the Higher SS and Police Leader in Serbia, took command of it.

[13] Dimitrije Ljotić, the leader of one of the most effective anti-partisan detachments, the Serbian Volunteer Corps, maintained some degree of influence over the prime minister, although he refused to take a government position himself.

General Paul Bader, the new Military Commander in Serbia, had Turner speak with Nedić, pressuring the prime minister to withdraw the memorandum.

[19] Cooperation between the Serbian puppet government and the Chetniks began in the fall of 1941, during a major German operation in western Serbia against the partisans.

[21] The Chetniks made a number of agreements with the Germans in 1943, bypassing the Serbian puppet government, which resulted in Nedić and his regime losing what support it had left among the people.

Many members of his administration, including government officials, as well as military and police officers, made secret deals with the Chetniks themselves.

[citation needed] German officials pointed out that transfers of people from the NDH to Serbia increased the unrest in the territory, because some refugees joined the Partisans or the Chetniks.

The Serbian government, and some German officials, wanted to repatriate some Serbs to the places that they came from, but this was denied by the military administration, due to the difficulties that would be present for them in the NDH.

[22] As the tide turned against Germany during the war, the German occupational administration sought to ally all anti-communist forces to fight against the partisans, including Mihailović's Chetniks.

He had formerly worked in Romania and Greece, and sought to improve the German military position in the region by increasing the power of the Nedić regime.

He also attempted to curtail the authority of the German military in Serbia, return command of the SDS to Nedić, and to reopen the University of Belgrade.

Nedić criticized the large burden of occupation costs and German interference at even the lowest levels of his administration, and the fact that none of his proposals for improving the situation were accepted.

After that, the Military Commander in Serbia (Hans Felber, who replaced Bader in 1943) asked Nedić for his opinion about a change of policy towards the Chetniks, but it was also ignored.

[13] The SDS was also known as the Nedićevci after Milan Nedić, the prime minister of the Government of National Salvation, who eventually gained control of its operations.

[13] In October 1944, as the Red Army closed on Belgrade, the SDS was transferred to Mihailović's control by a member of the fleeing Nedić administration,[17] at which point it fled north and briefly fought under German command in Slovenia before being captured by the British near the Italian-Yugoslav border in May 1945.

The organization was divided into nineteen detachments, and after being renamed the Serbian Volunteer Corps, received a new structure that included companies, battalions, and regiments.

It consisted of White émigrés living in Serbia that wanted to fight against the communist partisans, and included about 300 Soviet prisoners of war.

[27] The SDS was then renamed the "Serbian Shock Corps (Srpski udarni korpus or SUK) of the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland" once again under the command of Radovanović and it joined the withdrawal of other Chetnik formations towards the Sandžak region then into northeastern Bosnia.

[28] In the last days of December 1944, the SUK participated, along with other Chetnik formations, in an unsuccessful attempt to capture the Partisan-held city of Tuzla in northeastern Bosnia.

By mid-January 1945, 5,000 former SDS members had rejoined the Germans, with some returning to Serbia to take advantage of Josip Broz Tito's amnesty.

Most were transported to Austria where they were used in labour battalions under the direction of Organisation Todt, but about 1,500 were allowed to move to the Ljubljana Gap area, where they could join other collaborationist forces, such as the SDK or the Chetnik formations of Momčilo Đujić or Dobroslav Jevđević.

[31] In October 1941, the Germans ordered the Nedić government to reorganise the territory, as the existing structure was not suitable and did not meet military requirements.

[32] As a result, the district (Serbian: okrug) subdivision (which had existed in the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes prior to the formation of the banovinas) was restored.

Racial laws were introduced in all occupied territories with immediate effects on Jews and Roma people, as well as causing the imprisonment of those opposed to Nazism.

[44] Collaborationist armed formations forces were involved, either directly or indirectly, in the mass killings of Jews, Roma and those Serbs who sided with any anti-German resistance or were suspects of being a member of such.