Yugoslavia capitulates

On the evening of 17 April 1941, in German-occupied Belgrade, two representatives of the defeated state, the former foreign minister Aleksandar Cincar-Marković and General Radivoje Janković, signed the unconditional surrender of the Royal Yugoslav Army. The terms were dictated to them by the commander of the German Second Army, Colonel General Maximilian von Weichs. The ceasefire came into force at noon the next day. Eleven days after Germany attacked Yugoslavia, its army had ceased to exist, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers were marching into captivity. The state, however, did not capitulate. King Peter II and the government of General Dušan Simović were already in Greece and intended to carry on the war from exile.

War chronologies state under this date that “a government-in-exile is formed in London” and that “King Peter flees to Greece”. The King had in fact flown to Greece on 14 or 15 April, before the surrender was signed. Nor was any new government formed in London. It was Simović’s existing government that went abroad, reaching Britain by way of Greece, Palestine and Egypt only in June 1941. Under 12 April, in turn, the chronologies record that Belgrade surrendered, and under 16 April that the Germans were advancing south into the interior of Yugoslavia. Both events belong to the same story of the state’s collapse.

Belgrade surrenders to an SS patrol

Having broken through the front in the first days of the war, three German armoured groups converged on the Yugoslav capital. From the south, up the Morava valley, came the 11th Panzer Division of Colonel General Ewald von Kleist’s Panzer Group 1; from the west, between the Drava and the Sava, the 8th Panzer Division; and from the north, through the Banat, XLI Panzer Corps with the SS division Reich and the Großdeutschland regiment, which on 11 April reached Pančevo on the far bank of the Danube. The Yugoslav forces left Belgrade on the evening of 12 April. The bridges over the Danube had been blown.

On the afternoon of 12 April the commander of the Reich division’s motorcycle company, SS-Obersturmführer Fritz Klingenberg, crossed the river with a handful of men in captured boats. Accounts speak of anything from a few to a dozen or so SS men. The patrol entered the deserted city almost unopposed and at around 5 p.m. raised the swastika flag over the German legation. Some two hours later the Mayor of Belgrade, Jevrem Tomić, in the presence of a German Foreign Office official who had earlier been interned by the Yugoslavs, handed the city over to Klingenberg. According to accounts, Klingenberg was bluffing, threatening the mayor with an air raid and an artillery bombardment if the city did not surrender. For this exploit he received the Knight’s Cross in May, and Reich propaganda made a hero of him.

The main forces entered Belgrade the following day. According to German reports, the leading units of the 8th Panzer Division reached the centre during the night of 12–13 April; from 6.32 a.m. the tanks of the 11th Panzer Division drove into the city with Kleist himself at their head, and patrols of the Großdeutschland regiment came in from the north. The race for Belgrade ended almost in a dead heat. The Germans held a parade in front of the parliament building. The city, wrecked by the air raids of 6 and 7 April, came under occupation. Soon between 3,500 and 4,000 of Belgrade’s Jews were forced to clear rubble from the streets.

The pursuit to the south

The fall of the capital did not end the fighting, but it robbed it of purpose. The Yugoslav high command still hoped that the remnants of the army would withdraw into the mountains of Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro and form a redoubt there. The Germans gave them no time to do so. Weichs divided his forces into two pursuit groups, which converged on Sarajevo from the west and the east. They were in a hurry also because the panzer divisions had to return north as quickly as possible to prepare for the war against the Soviet Union. On 14 April Knin, Jajce, Doboj, Zvornik, Valjevo and Kruševac fell. Near Užice and Zvornik tens of thousands of soldiers at a time went into captivity. On 15 April the 8th and 14th Panzer Divisions entered Sarajevo simultaneously, and the headquarters of the Yugoslav Second Army capitulated there. In the area around the city the Germans also captured the high command.

On 16 April, the date given in the chronologies, the Germans took Mostar, Novi Pazar, Kosovska Mitrovica and Podgorica. On the coast the Italians advanced south along Dalmatia: they took Split on 15 April, Šibenik on 16 April, and on 17 April Dubrovnik and Kotor, where the divisions coming from the north met the troops advancing from Albania. In Mostar and in Dalmatia there were the first clashes between Serbs and Croats, a portent of what was to come. The chronologies also link this day with the Germans cutting off the Greek army in Albania, but that is a separate chapter of the Balkan campaign.

The last act was played out by the navy. Most of the ships of the Yugoslav navy fell into Italian hands undamaged in the Bay of Kotor. On 17 April two young officers, Milan Spasić and Sergej Mašera, blew up the destroyer Zagreb at Kotor so as not to surrender her to the enemy, and died with her. The submarine Nebojša and two motor torpedo boats broke out to Alexandria and fought on alongside the British.

The King and government fly out

The government, which had left bombed Belgrade on 6 April, wandered around the country for a week, increasingly cut off from the army. On 13 April, Catholic Easter Sunday, the ministers met at Pale near Sarajevo. Simović described the situation as very grave but not hopeless, and spoke of a defence on a new Drina–Sava line, but it was decided to move the government to Nikšić in Montenegro, from where it would be possible to fly abroad. Simović, who until then had been both Prime Minister and Chief of Staff of the Supreme Command, handed the latter post to General Danilo Kalafatović. The ministers were already blaming one another for the defeat, and the Croatian ministers, with Vladko Maček, had been in Zagreb for several days.

On 14 or 15 April, depending on the source, Simović instructed Kalafatović to seek a ceasefire. At its last meeting on home soil, at Nikšić on 15 April, the government adopted a principle drawn up by the Deputy Prime Minister, Slobodan Jovanović: only the army was to capitulate, not the state. The King and government were to go abroad and from there continue the war alongside Britain. Peter II flew from an improvised airstrip at Nikšić to Greece during the night of 14–15 April, or according to some sources on 15 April. The ministers followed him, Simović flying out on 15 April. Part of the National Bank’s gold reserves was also flown out. Most of the aircraft that landed at the Greek airfield at Paramythia (PL) were destroyed by the Italian air force soon afterwards, but a few aircraft, some thousand soldiers and several hundred airmen got through to Egypt.

From Greece, which the Germans were by then also attacking, the King and government moved on to Palestine and Egypt. On 4 May in Jerusalem Simović declared that the 1939 agreement with the Croats remained the basis of the state’s policy. In June 1941 the King and government reached London, where they were welcomed as heroes who had refused to submit to Hitler. Only there did the Yugoslav government become a government-in-exile, one of several that London had been hosting since 1939 and 1940.

The signature in Belgrade

As early as 14 April the commanders of the Yugoslav Second and Fifth Armies tried to conclude local truces with the Germans, but they were sent away empty-handed: the only basis for talks was the unconditional surrender of the entire army. Late that evening a government envoy presented himself at Kleist’s headquarters asking for an immediate ceasefire. The Army High Command entrusted the negotiations to Weichs, who flew to Belgrade on the afternoon of 15 April and drew up the terms. On 16 April a Yugoslav emissary arrived, but he had no full powers. He was given a draft of the document and an aircraft with which to fetch authorised representatives.

On the evening of 17 April, at around 9 p.m. according to German sources, Cincar-Marković and Janković, authorised by Kalafatović, signed the instrument of surrender. According to Serbian accounts, the ceremony took place in the building of the Czechoslovak legation. Some studies state that Kalafatović signed in person, but most, including the work of Tomasevich, name Cincar-Marković and Janković as the signatories. Weichs signed for Germany and, for Italy, the military attaché Colonel Luigi Buonofati, with the reservation that “the same terms apply to the Italian army”. Liaison officers from Hungary and Bulgaria were also present, but did not sign the document, since their countries were not formally at war with Yugoslavia. The instrument provided that officers and men were to go into captivity, and that weapons, depots, fortifications, ships, means of transport, minefield maps and government archives were to be handed over intact. The surrender came into force at 12 noon on 18 April. Serbian historians later argued that it was legally dubious, because Cincar-Marković had not been a minister since the coup of 27 March, and Janković was already a prisoner.

The scale of the defeat

The Germans took between about 254,000 and 345,000 Yugoslav soldiers prisoner, and the Italians some 30,000 more. Prisoners were treated according to nationality. Croats, Slovenes, Bosnian Muslims, Germans and Hungarians from the Yugoslav army were quickly released, while Serbs were taken to camps in the Reich. According to various estimates, from about 180,000 to more than 200,000 of them spent the whole war in captivity. Yugoslav losses in killed were never accurately counted. By their own figures the Germans lost 151 killed, 392 wounded and 15 missing; the Italians about 800 killed, mainly in the fighting in Albania; and the Hungarians about 120.

The defeat was so swift that the search for culprits began at once. Serbian politicians accused the Croats of treachery; Croatian politicians blamed the Serbian high command and the governments in Belgrade. Historians point rather to the weakness of the army itself – obsolete weapons, a plan to defend the entire frontier with no reserves, late mobilisation and the loss of communications after the bombing of the capital – and only then to desertions and mutinies.

Its place in the war

Yugoslavia as a state vanished from the map of Europe, although its King and government carried on in London and were recognised by the Allies. On 21 and 22 April the foreign ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Galeazzo Ciano agreed the partition of the country in Vienna. Germany annexed northern Slovenia and placed a truncated Serbia and the Banat under military administration. Italy took southern Slovenia with Ljubljana, a large part of Dalmatia and Montenegro, and joined most of Kosovo to Albania. Hungary received the Bačka, Baranja, Međimurje and Prekmurje, and Bulgaria most of Macedonia and slivers of Serbia. The largest part of the country went to the Independent State of Croatia of Ante Pavelić’s Ustaše, with Bosnia and Herzegovina and Syrmia, which at once began persecuting Serbs, Jews and Roma.

Some soldiers did not go into captivity. Colonel Dragoljub (Draža) Mihailović and a group of officers refused to recognise the surrender, and in May 1941 set up a centre of resistance in the mountains of western Serbia from which the Chetniks grew. After the German attack on the Soviet Union the communist partisans of Josip Broz Tito took up the fight. Their rivalry, the terror of the Ustaše, German and Italian reprisals and the collaborationist government of General Milan Nedić in Belgrade turned the country that had capitulated after eleven days in April into one of the bloodiest battlefields of occupied Europe for four years. The surrender of 17 April therefore did not end the war in Yugoslavia. It merely changed its nature.