During World War II, he collaborated with Nazi Germany and served as the prime minister of the puppet government of National Salvation, in the German occupied territory of Serbia.

She was the granddaughter of Nikola Mihailović, who was mentioned in the writings of poet Sima Milutinović Sarajlija and was an ally of Serbian revolutionary leader Karađorđe.

[1] Beginning in 1919, he also served as the de facto head of the 4th Army District in Croatia because its nominal commander, General Božidar Janković, was old and infirm.

[5] Nedić was appointed Chief of the General Staff in June 1934, and held this position until the following year,[1] when he became the third member of the Military Council, probably because of his strained relations with the Minister for the Army and Navy, Petar Živković.

[12] Nedić's viewpoint was Serbian rather than Yugoslav, and his primary concern was to protect Serbia from losing territory to neighbors such as Hungary, Bulgaria and Italy, which he believed could be best achieved with an alliance with Germany.

[11] Paul's trump card was that though Yugoslavia was poor, but the kingdom was rich in deposits of coal, iron, copper, gold, silver, lead, zinc, chrome, manganese and bauxite.

[15] Nedić welcomed the coup d'état of March 1941 which deposed the regime that had signed the Tripartite Pact, and commanded the 3rd Army Group in the German-led Axis invasion that followed.

[17] Wehrmacht commander Heinrich Danckelmann decided to entrust Nedić with the administration of German-occupied territory of Serbia in order to pacify Serb resistance.

After the start of Operation Barbarossa, the main German priority was the war against the Soviet Union, and Nedić's government was created in order to provide indigenous forces to hunt down the guerillas.

[12] Danckelmann reported to Berlin that his mission in defending the mines and railroads of Serbia against guerrilla attacks in a highly rugged country full of mountains and mud roads with only three divisions was impossible, and that he needed additional Wehrmacht and SS/police units to put down the rebellion, only to be told that Operation Barbarossa was the main priority and that no additional forces would be sent to Serbia until Barbarossa was finished.

[19] The German historian Marie-Jannine Calic wrote that Nedić's ideology was "...a mixture of ultraconservatism and the chauvinism of the fascist Zbor movement, a strange conglomerate of heterogeneous ideological elements creating an ethnic-racist, blood-and-soil cult and religious Orthodox messianism, coupled with a fixation on an age-old Serb patriarchal family structure and village community".

[20] On 1 September 1941 Nedić made a speech on Radio Belgrade in which he declared the intent of his administration to "save the core of the Serbian people" by accepting the occupation of Germany in the area of Šumadija, Drina Valley, Pomoravlje and Banat.

Unlike the government of Marshal Philippe Pétain in France, which the Germans at least treated as a sovereign state with full diplomatic relations, Nedić's "Government of National Salvation" was not allowed full sovereignty as control of the economy, the financial system, the police and the military always rested in German hands and Germany was not represented by an ambassador in Belgrade.

[18] Nedić was always unpopular with most Serbs as the urban middle class by and large stayed loyal to King Peter II and his government-in-exile in London while the peasants distrusted his government, which proved incapable of stopping or even reducing the German economic exploitation of Serbia.

[23] Nedić imposed a strict censorship, created a National Labour Service, and "cleansed" the education system by firing all teachers and university professors suspected of opposing the occupation.

[18] Nedić had a strong distrust of intellectuals and he brought in a Serbian Cultural Plan for the "renewal" of Serbia that defined being Serb in racial terms.

Also in that context, Nedić's government brought regulations for implementing the policy of the occupation authorities about losing the rights to work of Romani and Jewish population.

[18] However, Nedić's inability to stop the Ustaše violence against the prečani Serbs did much to undermine his image in Serbia as he was forced to admit that he had asked the Germans to try to change the mind of the government in Zagreb.

[31] By December 1941, the Partisans had been driven out of Serbia following an offensive that saw half-million German, Italian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian troops along with the forces that Nedić had raised committed against them, fleeing into the mountains of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

[45] Recently, Miodrag Mladenović, a former officer with the Yugoslavian OZNA, said that on 4 February 1946, he received an order to pick up a dead body at Zmaj Jovina street, where the prison was located at the time.

He never attempted to see the face of the person that he was carrying, but the day after, he read in the news that Nedić had committed suicide by jumping through the prison window at Zmaj Jovina street.

[47] During the Miloševic era, the regime and some Serb historians found it extremely important to win over eminent Yugoslav Jewish organizations and individuals for the idea of the joint Serbo-Jewish martyrdom.

Patriarch Pavle held a memorial service for Nedić in 1994, during which he justified his collaboration with Nazi Germany on the grounds that it was "the only way to save the Serbian people from the revenge of the occupiers".

[51] The publisher of a 2002 secondary school history textbook, Nebojša Jovanović, told the daily Politika that collaboration with the Nazis was a way of preserving the ‘biological substance of the Serbian people".

[53][54] Revisionist interpretations required that Nedić's collaboration with the occupying forces and responsibility for the execution of Jews under his rule be obscured, in order to remember him as the "savior of the Serbian people".

[54] On 11 July 2018, The Higher Serbian Court in Belgrade rejected an application to rehabilitate the quisling Prime Minister of occupied Serbia during World War II, Milan Nedić.

[55] During the rehabilitation trial, historian Bojan Dimitrijevic from the Institute for Contemporary Serbian History claimed, based on archived documents, that Nedić was not directly involved in the persecution and killing of Jews.

[62] Dubravka Stojanović commented on this lecture and emphasized that the games played with fascism and anti-fascism when it comes to "basic good and evil" brought the society into complete disorientation.