The Milan Nedić government

On 1 September 1941 General Milan Nedić, a former chief of the general staff and minister of war of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, who would turn sixty-three the next day, stepped up to the microphone of Radio Belgrade. He spoke as premier of a new Serbian government, which he called the Government of National Salvation (Vlada narodnog spasa). He told his compatriots that he had accepted office in order to “save the core of the Serbian nation”, and he called on them to give up the fight against the occupier. To the thousands of peasants who had been taking up arms in the forests of western Serbia since July, and to the Germans, who had nothing with which to crush them, the meaning was plain: the Germans had found a Serbian general who was to do for them what they could not do themselves.

Popular chronologies place the formation of the Nedić government under 1 September. Formally it happened three days earlier: the government was appointed on 29 August 1941 by the German military commander in Serbia, General der Flieger Heinrich Danckelmann, after the resignation of the existing commissarial administration. 1 September, by contrast, was the first day on which the new premier set out his programme in public, and the day on which the German command in the Balkans issued its first orders to put down the uprising with the help of the new Serbian authorities. Both dates therefore describe the same beginning of a collaborationist government that lasted until October 1944.

Serbia under military administration

After the capitulation of Yugoslavia on 17 April 1941 the Germans neither annexed Serbia to the Reich nor gave it even the appearance of statehood. In the partition of the country Serbia, roughly within its borders from before the Balkan Wars and shorn of Kosovo, Macedonia and Srem, became the Territory of the Military Commander in Serbia (Gebiet des Militärbefehlshabers in Serbien). It was the only country in occupied Europe governed directly by a German general. What chiefly interested the Germans here were two routes, the Danube and the railway from Belgrade to Salonika and Athens, together with the copper, lead and antimony mines. Adolf Hitler regarded the Serbs as a nation of traitors who in March 1941 had overthrown the government that had signed up to the Tripartite Pact, and he had no intention of promising them anything.

Day-to-day administration was nonetheless left to the Serbs. From 30 April a so-called commissarial administration (Komesarska uprava) worked under German supervision, headed by the former interior minister Milan Aćimović: ten commissioners, most of them known for their pro-German sympathies and their anti-communism. They were overseen by the head of the administrative staff attached to the military commander, SS-Brigadeführer Harald Turner. The new administration’s first task was to register Jews and Roma and to impose restrictions aimed at them. Meanwhile tens of thousands of refugees were pouring into Serbia: Serbs fleeing the terror of the Ustaše in the Independent State of Croatia, people expelled from Hungarian-occupied Bačka and Bulgarian-occupied Macedonia, and Slovenes deported by the Germans from Lower Styria. By German reckoning, some hundred thousand people had arrived from Croatia alone by August.

The summer of the uprising

In the spring Serbia was quiet. In the mountains of the west of the country Colonel Dragoljub Mihailović had, it is true, been organising a centre of resistance on Ravna Gora since May, but for the time being the Chetniks did not intend to fight, only to prepare for the day the Allies landed. The German attack on the Soviet Union changed the situation. The Communist Party of Yugoslavia under Josip Broz Tito called for armed struggle, and on 7 July at Bela Crkva near Krupanj the Partisans fired the first shots of the uprising in Serbia. The same summer saw the uprising in Montenegro against the Italians and a revolt by the Serbs of western Bosnia and Herzegovina against the Ustaše.

The Germans were poorly prepared for this. Before attacking the USSR they had withdrawn from Serbia the armoured and motorised divisions that had conquered the country in April. What remained were three occupation divisions, the 704th, 714th and 717th, made up of older age groups, mostly from Austria, without heavy weapons or transport and scattered in small garrisons guarding mines, bridges and stations. The insurgents blew up railway lines and telephone wires, raided gendarmerie posts and municipal offices, and burned records. According to German tallies, 246 attacks on the Serbian administration and gendarmerie were recorded between 1 July and 15 August, and 242 in August alone, 135 of them in the last ten days of the month. The number of Partisans was estimated in August at around 14,000. At the end of August some Chetnik units also joined the fighting, often against the wishes of the cautious Mihailović.

The occupier answered with terror. From July hostages were shot for attacks on Germans, above all communists and Jews: on 29 July in Belgrade Einsatzgruppe Serbien shot a hundred Jews and twenty-two communists in reprisal for the burning of a German lorry. On 17 August five men were hanged from lamp posts in Terazije Square in the centre of the capital and their bodies left on display to passers-by. By the end of August the number of those shot and hanged had reached a thousand. The commissarial administration tried to help: on 13 and 14 August the Belgrade newspaper Novo vreme published an “Appeal to the Serbian Nation”, signed by 545 or 546 well-known figures, including three Orthodox bishops and at least eighty university professors, which condemned the uprising as a communist adventure. Some of the signatories, as the historian Stevan K. Pavlowitch wrote, signed under pressure. The appeal changed nothing. General Danckelmann, who had taken over command in Serbia at the end of July, asked for reinforcements, but the Eastern Front had priority and he received a few companies at most. So the search began for a Serb who would build up a force of his own and use it against the insurgents.

A general as premier

The idea came from Turner, and it was carried out by the German Foreign Ministry’s envoy, SS-Standartenführer Edmund Veesenmayer, who in April had prepared the proclamation of the Ustaše state in Zagreb. After talks with several candidates Veesenmayer concluded that Nedić would be the best choice. The general had authority among the officer corps and the public, was a firm anti-communist and had long believed in a German victory: as minister of war in the autumn of 1940 he had urged the regent, Prince Paul, to join the Axis and seize Salonika, and had been dismissed for it. In April 1941 he had commanded the 3rd Army Group, whose front in Macedonia collapsed in the first days of the war. Unlike most Yugoslav generals he was not taken into captivity in Germany but placed under house arrest in Belgrade. That summer he suffered a personal tragedy: on 5 June, in the explosion of an ammunition dump in the fortress at Smederevo, which killed at least several hundred people (some sources give far higher figures), he lost his only son and his pregnant daughter-in-law.

Nedić hesitated. According to historians’ findings, the Germans put heavy pressure on him, threatening that if he refused they would bring Bulgarian and Hungarian troops into the whole of Serbia, Belgrade included, and send him to a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. On 27 August some seventy-five representatives of Serbian parties, chambers, associations and the university met in Belgrade and resolved that Nedić should form a “government of national salvation”. That same day the general wrote to Danckelmann that he would accept office on several conditions: he wanted armed forces of his own, the return from captivity of some of the prisoners of war, above all the older and the sick, German intervention on behalf of the Serbs persecuted in Croatia and under Bulgarian and Hungarian occupation, and the right to use Serbian state symbols. It is not known whether Danckelmann accepted these conditions in writing. He met some of them, among other things agreeing to the use of the Serbian coat of arms and flag. An arrangement with Kosta Pećanac, leader of the old, pre-war Chetniks, who placed his units at the occupiers’ disposal, also played its part.

On 29 August the commissarial administration resigned and the German authorities appointed the Nedić government. Aćimović moved into it as minister of the interior. The cabinet was made up of Nedić’s own men, followers of Aćimović and ministers linked to the fascist Zbor movement of Dimitrije Ljotić, a distant relative of the premier. It had neither a foreign minister nor a minister of war. The new government had no standing in international law; no state recognised it, not even Germany’s allies, and the Germans sent no ambassador to Belgrade. The economy, finances, police and army remained in the occupier’s hands. The German minority in the Banat governed itself. Historians agree that the Nedić government was merely an auxiliary organ of the German occupation regime, with no power beyond what the Germans chose to hand it. Tellingly, the appointment took even the German commander-in-chief in the Balkans, Field Marshal Wilhelm List, by surprise, since no one had warned him of it. List accepted the fait accompli but did not share Danckelmann’s optimism about what Nedić could achieve.

The broadcast of 1 September

The new government’s first days coincided with the moment when the uprising was at its height. On 31 August eighteen attacks on stations and railway lines were recorded, and a Chetnik detachment from the Jadar valley, acting in concert with the Partisans, took Loznica on the Drina, the first town to be liberated in Serbia. On 1 September the insurgents surrounded two German companies guarding the antimony mine at Krupanj. After three days of fighting, despite air support, the Germans tried to break out; little more than thirty men from the two companies reached Valjevo, and their losses amounted to 9 killed, 30 wounded and 175 missing.

It was in this atmosphere that Nedić made his first broadcast on 1 September. He announced that his government accepted the occupation in order to “save the core of the Serbian nation” from destruction at the hands of the occupiers and hostile neighbours, condemned the uprising as the work of communists and called on the insurgents to lay down their arms. A few days earlier, on 28 August, the prime minister of the government-in-exile, General Dušan Simović, had argued on the BBC that Yugoslavia’s April war had delayed the German attack on the USSR by five weeks. Nedić answered him from Belgrade with mockery, calling him “the saviour of Bolshevism”.

The speech foreshadowed his entire policy. Nedić presented himself as a father who took upon himself the disgrace of collaboration to save his nation from annihilation, and he compared his role to that of Marshal Philippe Pétain in France. At the same time his government adopted the occupier’s language. Its speeches and propaganda, financed by the Germans, spoke of the “communist-Jewish rabble” and the “communist-Masonic-Jewish-English mafia”, and its ideology, as the German historian Marie-Janine Calic writes, combined extreme conservatism, a cult of the peasant community and Orthodox messianism with a racial conception of the nation. Nedić nonetheless remained a monarchist. He maintained that the young King Peter II had been misled by bad advisers, which only deepened Berlin’s distrust of him.

Gendarmes, volunteers and special courts

Nedić got what mattered most to him: permission to arm Serbs. By 9 September, with Danckelmann’s consent, he had increased the Serbian gendarmerie from two or three thousand to five thousand men, taking in former soldiers of the Yugoslav army, and created an auxiliary police and a kind of militia. The Germans gave him 15,000 rifles and machine guns. The government set up summary courts, which sentenced communists to death in expedited proceedings, and began a purge of the administration. In September the Germans also allowed Ljotić to form the Serbian Volunteer Detachments, from which the Serbian Volunteer Corps later grew, the only Serbian formation the occupiers genuinely trusted. In the spring of 1942, in turn, the Serbian State Guard was formed from the former gendarmerie regiments; it was known after the premier’s name as the nedićevci, but it soon passed under the orders of the Higher SS and Police Leader in Serbia.

For the moment the results were meagre. On 15 September Nedić again called on the insurgents over the radio to lay down their arms. At the same time one gendarmerie battalion refused to fight and another surrendered to the Partisans without firing a shot. The Germans had to send an infantry battalion to Šabac to disarm the local gendarmes, who did not want to fight their own countrymen. According to Serbian historians, on 16 September Nedić proposed at a cabinet meeting that the government should dissolve itself and leave the restoration of order in Serbia to the troops of the neighbouring countries. He was talked out of it by Mihailo Olćan, a minister from the Zbor movement, who promised volunteers. By mid-September the Germans no longer controlled anything west of the line Mitrovica–Šabac–Valjevo–Užice.

The German response

Berlin drew its own conclusions, but not those Nedić had hoped for. On 14 September the Army High Command agreed to send the 342nd Infantry Division and a battalion of captured French tanks from occupied France to Serbia. On 16 September Hitler issued a directive ordering List to crush all resistance in the south-east, and the chief of the OKW, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, signed an order on combating “communist armed resistance movements” in all the occupied territories: for the life of every German soldier, fifty to a hundred “communists” were to be killed in reprisal. The man to carry this out was General der Gebirgstruppe Franz Böhme, an Austrian, who on 19 September, with the staff of XVIII Mountain Corps, took up the post of Plenipotentiary Commanding General in Serbia in Belgrade. In his orders to the troops he openly invoked revenge for 1914, when the Austro-Hungarian army had been defeated in Serbia, and in October he fixed the highest rate for Serbia: a hundred people shot for every German killed and fifty for every one wounded.

At the end of September the 342nd Division launched its first large operation in the Mačva, between the Drina and the Sava. The clearing of Šabac itself lasted from 24 to 27 September, and thousands of its men were herded into camps. On that same 24 September the Partisans took Užice, which became the capital of the largest liberated area in occupied Europe, later known as the Republic of Užice.

Place in the war

The Nedić government did not fulfil the hopes the Germans had placed in it, but nor was it, as its creator claimed, a shield protecting the Serbs. The hostage policy adopted a couple of weeks after its appointment produced in October 1941 the largest massacres in the history of occupied Serbia. Between 15 and 20 October the Wehrmacht shot some two thousand men in Kraljevo; according to the report of the 717th Infantry Division, 1,736 men and 19 women were killed. On 21 October in Kragujevac the Germans killed, according to the findings of Serbian and German researchers, between 2,778 and 2,794 people, including more than a hundred secondary-school pupils; Böhme’s report spoke of 2,300 hostages. Nedić protested, threatened to resign and forced the Germans to moderate the practice of indiscriminate shootings, but the principle of reprisal itself was applied until 1943. Among the hostages shot in the autumn of 1941 were almost all the adult Jewish men of Serbia. The women and children were confined in the Sajmište camp on the other side of the Sava, on Croatian territory, and in the spring of 1942 were asphyxiated with exhaust fumes in a gas van. In the summer of 1942 Turner boasted that Serbia was the only country in which the “Jewish question” had been solved. The police and gendarmerie of the Nedić government helped with the arrests, and its offices took over the property of those murdered.

The uprising collapsed not because of Nedić but because of the German offensive and civil war. On 1 November Mihailović’s Chetniks attacked the Partisans, and at the end of November the Germans took Užice and drove Tito’s units into Bosnia. Some Chetniks “legalised” themselves within the Nedić government’s forces, and the government itself secretly kept up contacts with Mihailović. From the beginning of 1942 the Germans handed an ever larger part of Serbia over to Bulgarian occupation, which was what Nedić feared most. His authority dwindled year by year: the Germans ignored his memoranda, and in 1943 they concluded agreements with the Chetniks themselves, over his head. On 4 October 1944, as the Red Army and the Partisans entered Serbia, the Government of National Salvation ceased to exist and Nedić fled to Austria. Handed over to Yugoslavia, he died in February 1946 after a fall from a window of the prison in Belgrade.

The dispute over the Nedić government did not end with the war. For communist Yugoslavia it was a symbol of treason. From the 1990s some Serbian circles portrayed him as the “father of Serbia”, who through collaboration had saved thousands of lives and taken in hundreds of thousands of refugees from Croatia. Historians point out, however, that in occupied Serbia, governed by the Germans with the help of his administration, between 141,000 and 167,000 people died, and that the Holocaust there was exceptionally swift and almost total. In 2018 a court in Belgrade rejected an application to rehabilitate the general, and in 2019 the court of appeal upheld that ruling.