The liberation of Novi Sad

On 23 October 1944 Yugoslav Partisans, followed by soldiers of the Red Army, entered Novi Sad, the largest city of Bačka and the former capital of the Yugoslav Danube Banovina. The last German and Hungarian units left the city without much fighting, withdrawing west and south across the Danube into Syrmia (Srem). After three and a half years of Hungarian annexation, Novi Sad returned to Yugoslavia – three days after the liberation of Belgrade, at a time when the Soviet armies to the north were already fighting the Battle of Debrecen.

The statement that the city was “liberated by Soviet troops in cooperation with Tito’s Partisans” needs a small qualification. The date of 23 October is certain and is still celebrated in the city as Liberation Day. According to accounts collected by Novi Sad historians (among them the director of the city archives, Petar Đurđev) and the memoirs of General Kosta Nađ, then commanding the Partisan forces in Vojvodina, the first to enter the city, at dawn on 23 October, were sub-units of the local Novi Sad Partisan Detachment; during the day they were followed by further companies of the detachment and units of the Vojvodina Partisan brigades (Nađ mentions the 12th Brigade), and after them by scouts of the Soviet 75th Rifle Corps. A day earlier, on 22 October, naval scouts of the Soviet Danube Military Flotilla had already appeared in the city. It was therefore not a battle for the city but its occupation after the enemy’s withdrawal, made possible because the great Soviet offensive into Hungary and Serbia had already cut its lines of communication.

Bačka under Hungarian rule

Novi Sad – Újvidék in Hungarian, Neusatz in German – was a multinational city in 1941. Its inhabitants included Serbs, Hungarians, Germans, Jews, Slovaks and Rusyns, and Bačka itself, the plain between the Danube and the Tisza, had belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary until 1918. The Treaty of Trianon awarded it to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, and Budapest never accepted this.

In April 1941, when the Germans attacked Yugoslavia, Hungary sent troops into Bačka and Baranja. Prime Minister Pál Teleki, who a few months earlier had signed a treaty of “eternal friendship” with Belgrade, took his own life on 3 April, when it became clear that Hungary would take part in the attack. In the partition of Yugoslavia Hungary received Bačka, Baranja, Međimurje and Prekmurje, and in December 1941 formally incorporated them into the state. Petrovaradin and its fortress, facing Novi Sad across the Danube, ended up in the Independent State of Croatia.

From the very first days the new authorities set out to change the ethnic make-up of the region. Several hundred Serbs and Jews are estimated to have been killed during the occupation of Bačka itself, and Serb settlers who had arrived after 1918 were expelled. Hungarians were brought in to replace them, among them Székelys from Bukovina.

The “Raid” on the Danube

The worst crime of the occupation was the round-up in southern Bačka in January 1942, which Serbs simply call the “Raid” (Racija). The pretext was the fight against a small group of Partisans from the area of Žabalj, whose strength the Hungarian command put at no more than about a hundred and fifty. From 4 January Hungarian soldiers and gendarmes under General Ferenc Feketehalmy-Czeydner combed the villages of the Šajkaška, and on 20 January they surrounded Novi Sad and imposed a curfew. On 21–23 January those arrested were marched to the beach on the Danube, shot in temperatures as low as minus thirty degrees and thrown into holes cut in the ice.

In Novi Sad itself, according to city records, 1,246 people were killed, more than 800 of them Jews; in the operation as a whole, by various estimates, between about 3,300 and more than 4,000 people died, mainly Serbs and Jews (the Novi Sad massacre). The affair caused a shock in Hungary itself. In 1943 a group of officers was put on trial, but some of them, including Feketehalmy-Czeydner, fled to Germany. The crime was later described in the literature of both nations, notably by Aleksandar Tišma, who himself narrowly escaped death during the round-up, in his novel about the fate of a Novi Sad Jew named Blam.

In the spring of 1944, after the German occupation of Hungary, Bačka suffered another blow. The surviving Jews of the city and the region were confined in ghettos and transit camps and then deported, most of them to Auschwitz. The pre-war Jewish community of Novi Sad, numbering several thousand, practically ceased to exist. According to the Novi Sad city archives, more than 5,000 of the city’s inhabitants died during the war in all, and on the day of liberation it had fewer than 40,000 people, compared with about 60,000 in 1941.

The front moves to the Tisza

The fate of Bačka was decided in the autumn of 1944, far away from it. After the coup in Romania and the Red Army’s entry into Bulgaria, the Soviet fronts stood on the borders of Yugoslavia and Hungary. Marshal Fyodor Tolbukhin’s 3rd Ukrainian Front entered Yugoslavia through the Iron Gates and advanced on Belgrade, while the left wing of Marshal Rodion Malinovsky’s 2nd Ukrainian Front entered the Banat. The 46th Army crossed the Tisza and the Timiș, took Pančevo and threatened the Belgrade–Novi Sad railway, and its corps pushed further north across the Tisza towards the stretch of line between Novi Sad and Subotica.

Josip Broz Tito, who had flown secretly to Moscow on 21 September, agreed with Stalin that the Red Army would leave Yugoslavia once operations were over and that the Partisans would take over the civil administration of the liberated territories. Partisan brigades and detachments were already active in Vojvodina by then, and volunteers were flocking into the ranks of the National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia. For the German and Hungarian garrisons in Bačka the situation was becoming hopeless: after the fall of Belgrade on 20 October and Malinovsky’s advances in Hungary they were in danger of being cut off. They therefore withdrew north towards Hungary and south across the Danube into Syrmia, where since the end of September the Germans had been building successive defensive lines.

22 and 23 October

The last days of the occupation passed in tension. The Germans and Hungarians evacuated their offices, and some of the local Germans and Hungarians, fearing reprisals, fled with the troops. The bridges over the Danube linking Novi Sad with Petrovaradin and Syrmia were destroyed by the time of liberation. Most of the Croatian units in Petrovaradin had already left for the west, for the front line taking shape in Syrmia, and the rest surrendered almost without a fight.

On 22 October Soviet naval scouts of the Danube Military Flotilla entered the city, and in the afternoon groups of young Partisans began to appear. At dawn the next day the 2nd Battalion of the Novi Sad Partisan Detachment marched in, and its soldiers hung a flag on the town hall. At about 11 a.m. two companies of the 1st Battalion arrived, and at about 1 p.m. units of the Vojvodina General Staff and the 7th Vojvodina Brigade. Crowds of inhabitants greeted the arriving troops in the streets. During the day Soviet soldiers also passed through the city. As Petar Đurđev writes, the city was entered by “the liberators from the National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia, followed by the soldiers of the Red Army”.

This order of events later took on symbolic importance. Yugoslav historiography stressed that the Partisans had largely liberated the country themselves, and that Soviet help had been confined to Belgrade and north-eastern Serbia. For Novi Sad this is largely true: the city’s fate was decided by the Soviet offensive, but its actual occupation was the work of local Partisans, and the Red Army units passed through it on their way north-west towards Hungary.

Military administration and reprisals

Liberation wore very different faces for the inhabitants of Bačka. As early as 17 October Tito had issued an order establishing a military administration in the Banat, Bačka and Baranja, which lasted until 27 January 1945. Its commander was General Ivan Rukavina. Justifying the step, Tito wrote of the need for the quickest possible return to normal life and the establishment of “people’s democratic authority”; in his view the special conditions of the occupation and the presence of “foreign ethnic elements” settled there by the occupier required all power to be concentrated in the hands of the army at first. In his very first order Rukavina called on the army to “protect the national future and the South Slav character” of these lands.

In practice the military administration became a time of mass arrests and executions. Its victims included people accused of collaboration and war crimes, but also people regarded as political opponents and civilians punished for their nationality. After the Partisans entered Novi Sad on 23 October, mass arrests began in the city on Rukavina’s orders. In the Rajina Šuma woods outside the city an estimated 200–250 Serbs accused of Chetnik sympathies were shot; those killed in the city included the pre-war mayor, industrialists, journalists and sportsmen.

In terms of the number of victims, the hardest hit were the ethnic Germans, the local Danube Swabians. Before the war about 350,000 of them lived in Vojvodina, and after the evacuation carried out by the Germans in the autumn of 1944 an estimated 160,000–200,000 remained. They were stripped of their citizenship and property, and most were confined in camps, where many died of hunger, disease and cold. Estimates of German victims in Vojvodina range from about 17,000 to almost 60,000; a Serbian state commission set up in 2009 compiled a list of more than 27,000 named German victims from the whole of Serbia.

Hungarians also fell victim to the reprisals, especially in Bačka, where the memory of the 1942 “Raid” was fresh. The figures here are particularly disputed: the Yugoslav register of executed “war criminals” lists 1,686 people executed in Bačka, about a thousand of them Hungarians; the historian Aleksandar Kasaš estimates the number of Hungarians killed at about 5,000, other authors at more than ten thousand or even several tens of thousands. In 2014 the same Serbian commission registered more than 6,000 Hungarian victims. As early as November 1944 the military administration itself admitted that “mistakes” had been made in Bačka. At the same time thousands of Vojvodina Hungarians joined the Partisans, among them the 15th Vojvodina “Sándor Petőfi” Brigade. In 2013 the Serbian parliament adopted a declaration condemning the killings and the application of the principle of collective guilt to Hungarians, and the Hungarian President, János Áder, apologised in Belgrade for the crimes committed against Serbs and Jews during the Hungarian occupation.

The Syrmian Front

The liberation of Novi Sad did not mean the end of the war on the Danube. On the other side of the river, in Syrmia, the Germans managed to halt on fortified lines they had been building since 24 September with the help of local ethnic Germans and Serbian civilians pressed into labour. Among the troops manning them were remnants of the forces that had broken out of encirclement near Belgrade, including a battle group of the 117th Jäger Division. Serbian historiography dates the existence of the so-called Syrmian Front from 23 October, the day of Novi Sad’s liberation. Its main centre was Sremska Mitrovica, and the lines were meant to cover the retreat of the German Army Group E from Greece and the Balkans.

The Red Army had no intention of fighting a long battle there. The Soviet command sent the 3rd Ukrainian Front north-west into southern Hungary, and as early as November its troops crossed the Danube at Batina and Apatin, on the border between Bačka and Baranja. The burden of the fighting in Syrmia passed to Yugoslav divisions, largely made up of newly mobilised young recruits from Serbia and Vojvodina, supported in the autumn by Soviet units and in the winter also by Bulgarian divisions.

Place in the war

The liberation of Novi Sad completed the operation that in October 1944 took control of Serbia and the lower Danube away from the Germans. It allowed the Red Army to turn the forces of the 3rd Ukrainian Front towards Hungary, and gave Josip Broz Tito control of a large and fertile region that became a base for the rest of the war and for the new state. In 1945 Vojvodina became part of Serbia as an autonomous province of federal Yugoslavia, with Novi Sad as its capital.

The Syrmian Front tied down Yugoslav troops throughout the winter, until it was broken on 12–13 April 1945; the losses suffered there, especially among half-trained recruits, long remained a sensitive subject in Yugoslavia. For the people of Bačka, 1944 ended the occupation but not the violence: alongside the memory of the 1942 “Raid” and the deportation of the Jews in 1944, local history preserves the memory of the military administration’s reprisals, which were passed over in silence in Yugoslavia for decades and became the subject of state commissions’ work and of gestures of reconciliation between Serbia and Hungary only in the twenty-first century. In 1975 Novi Sad was awarded the title of Hero City of Yugoslavia.