The Holocaust in German-occupied Serbia

[1][2] They carried out operations with the assistance of Milan Nedić's puppet government and Dimitrije Ljotić's fascist organization Yugoslav National Movement (Zbor), which had joint control over the Banjica concentration camp in Belgrade along with the German Gestapo.

The main Holocaust perpetrators in Serbia - Nazi German officers Harald Turner, August Meyszner and Johann Fortner - were extradited after the war to Yugoslavia, where they were tried and executed.

Yugoslav Foreign Secretary Anton Korošec, who was Roman Catholic priest and leader of Slovenian conservatives, stated in September 1938, that "Jewish issue did not exist in Yugoslavia….

The Axis forces partitioned Serbia, with Hungary, Bulgaria, Italy and the Independent State of Croatia occupying and annexing large areas.

In July 1941, a major uprising began in Serbia against the German occupiers, which included the establishment of the Republic of Užice, the first liberated territory in World War II Europe.

At Hitler's personal command to crush the resistance, the German military started executing tens-of-thousands of Serb civilians, among whom they included thousands of Jews.

[3] To assist in quelling the rebellion the German occupiers in August 1941 put in place the puppet government of Milan Nedić, which was also given responsibility for many Holocaust-related activities, including the registration and arrest of Jews and joint control over the Banjica concentration camp in Belgrade.

[1] On 13 April 1941, before the Royal Yugoslav Army formally capitulated, Wilhelm Fuchs – Chief of the Einsatzgruppen based in Belgrade – ordered the registration of the city's Jews.

The order prescribed the wearing of yellow armbands, introduced forced labor and curfew, limited access to food and other provisions and banned the use of public transport.

The law excluded Jews and Roma from public and economic life, their property was seized, they were obliged to register in special lists (Judenregister and Zigeunerlisten) and for forced labor.

The first, which lasted between July and November 1941, involved the murder of Jewish men, who were shot as part of retaliatory executions carried out by German forces in response to the rising anti-Nazi, partisan insurgency in Serbia.

[17] Thus, by the November of 1941 “there were almost no living male Jews who could be used as hostages.”[18] The second genocidal activity, between December 1941 and May 1942, involved the incarceration of the women and children at the Semlin, or Sajmište concentration camp and their gassing in a mobile gas van called a Sauerwagen.

The German concentration camp, in the old fairgrounds or Staro Sajmište, near Zemun was established across the Sava river from Belgrade, on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia, to process and eliminate the captured Jews, Serbs, Roma, and others.

As the historian Christopher Browning explains: 'Once loaded, the [gas van] drove to the Sava bridge just several hundred meters from the camp's entrance, where Andorfer [the camp commander] waited in the car so as not to have to witness the loading […] On the far side of the bridge, the gas van stopped and one of the drivers climbed out and worked underneath it, connecting the exhaust to the sealed compartment.

The baggage truck turned off the road while the gas van and the commandant's car drove through the middle of Belgrade to reach a shooting range...ten kilometres south of the city.'.

[20]Between 19 March and 10 May, the drivers, Götz and Meyer, accompanied by the camp commander Herbert Andorfer, made between 65 and 70 trips between Semlin and Jajinci, killing 6,300 Jewish inmates.

Gendarmes of Milan Nedić, Dimitrije Ljotić and Chetniks by September 1944 captured about 455 remaining Jews in Serbia who were handed over to the Banjica camp where they were immediately killed.

In September 1941, as part of retaliations for a Partisan attack on Šabac, the Germans took the Jewish men on a 46 kilometer, forced “bloody march”, during which they killed 21 stragglers.

[24] In October 1941, Wehrmacht squads shot the rest of the Jewish men, as part of executions of 2,100 hostages in retaliation for 21 German soldiers killed by Partisans.

[24] In January 1942 the Germans took the women and children to Zemun, then forced them to march 10 kilometers through the snow to the Sajmište concentration camp, with some infants dying along the way.

[25] Although the Wehrmacht, after the war, stated that it took no part in the genocidal programmes, General Böhme and his men planned and executed the slaughter of over 20,000 Jews and Gypsies without any signal from Berlin.

Second the Communist-led resistance began in Serbia, and in the mass shootings of hostages in reprisal, the Germans included a large number of Jews held in concentration camps.

[34][14][35] Historian Christopher Browning who attended the conference on the subject of Holocaust and Serbian involvement stated: Serbia was the only country outside Poland and the Soviet Union where all Jewish victims were killed on the spot without deportation, and was the first country after Estonia to be declared 'Judenfrei,'" a term used by the Nazis during the Holocaust to denote an area free of all Jews.To assist in the fight against the growing Partisan-led resistance in Serbia, the German military set up an entirely subservient, collaborationist administration, with limited power, under Milan Nedić.

Those Jews who joined the Partisans survived as well as Jewish members of the Royal Yugoslav Army captured in the invasion who ended up in Germany as prisoners of war.

[50] Jaša Almuli, former president of the Jewish Association in Belgrade, wrote that the number of saved Jews was not higher because the occupying forces introduced the cruellest regime in Europe, besides the Soviet Union, which included the retaliation laws and prescribed executions.

The release of the Embassy of Israel concluded: "The new law is a noble act of a great country that will breathe new life into the small Jewish community that it is today.

The councillors defended Ljotić's wartime record and justified the initiative by stating that "[collaboration] ... is what the biological survival of the Serbian people demanded" during World War II.

[61] Koštunica and his Democratic Party of Serbia (Demokratska stranka Srbije, DSS) actively campaigned to rehabilitate figures such as Ljotić and Nedić following the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević and his socialist government in October 2000.