Territory of the Military Commander in Serbia

• 1. Introduction

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  The Territory of the Military Commander in Serbia had a puppet government led by Milan Nedić. On the 18th of September 1943, Nedić traveled to Adolf Hitler's Wolf's Lair to ask for more land. He wanted East Bosnia, Montenegro, the Sanjak, Kosovo-Metohija and Srem folded into the region he ran. Hitler said no. It was an unusual request from a man with no independent power of his own. Nedić's administration existed only because German occupiers allowed it, inside territory the Wehrmacht had seized from the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in April 1941.

  So who actually held power in this occupied region, and why did Germany run it differently than the rest of Yugoslavia? What did that rule cost the people living under it, and who among them chose to resist, collaborate, or do both? And when German power finally broke, what remained of the arrangement Nedić had traveled to Hitler's headquarters to expand?

• 2. A Government Without Power

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  On the 22nd of April 1941, the Territory was placed under the supreme authority of the German Military Commander in Serbia. Day-to-day administration went to the chief of the military administration staff. Real Serbian involvement came five weeks later. On the 30th of May 1941, Milan Aćimović assembled a ten-member cabinet known as the Commissioner Government, the first Serbian administration the German occupiers permitted. Aćimović had served as Yugoslavia's Minister of Internal Affairs before the war and had already been in contact with German police. His commissioners included Steven Ivanić, Momčilo Janković, Risto Jojić, Stanislav Josifović, Lazo Kostić, Dušan Letica, Dušan Pantić, Jevrem Protić and Milisav Vasiljević. Each ran one surviving pre-war ministry; the Ministry of Army and Navy had been abolished.

  Real authority never rested with Aćimović's cabinet at all. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler kept his own representative in charge of policing and security. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring installed a man to run the economy. Reichsminister Joachim von Ribbentrop sent an envoy to handle foreign affairs. Historians note the lines of German command were never unified, and the Serbian government answered to several competing masters instead of one.

  By the 29th of August 1941, the Germans discarded the Commissioner Government entirely. In its place came a second cabinet, the Government of National Salvation, led by General Milan Nedić. Nedić's government drew some support, but most Serbs viewed it with hostility. It carried no status under international law, and no power beyond what German officials chose to grant it. It functioned as an instrument of German rule, nothing more.

  Within weeks, an uprising would test that instrument, one his government had just been created to crush.

• 3. Uprising and Reprisal

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  The day after Yugoslavia's capitulation, the SS Motorised Infantry Division Reich executed 36 Serbs in reprisal for the killing of one of its own soldiers. Three days later, German troops razed the village of Donji Dobrić, east of the Drina river, after a German officer was killed there. Generaloberst Maximilian von Weichs, commander of the German 2nd Army, responded with a ruthless order. Troops were to round up and shoot men of fighting age near any armed group, then hang their bodies in public. On the 19th of May 1941, Weichs issued a further order: 100 Serbs would be shot for every German soldier harmed in an attack.

  In late July 1941, an uprising erupted so quickly it overwhelmed the Serbian gendarmerie, the German police, and the German rear-area infantry. Two very different forces drove it: the communist-led Yugoslav Partisans and the monarchist Chetniks, fighting the occupier side by side. The Government of National Salvation could not contain it. Its failure forced the Germans to bring in front-line divisions pulled from occupied France, occupied Greece and the Eastern Front.

  In late September 1941, German forces launched Operation Uzice and drove the Yugoslav Partisans out of the Territory. That December, Operation Mihailovic scattered the Chetniks in turn. Neither operation ended the resistance; fighting continued in one form or another until 1944.

  Even as German troops chased armed rebels through the hills, a separate killing campaign was already underway. Its targets had taken up no arms at all.

• 4. The Final Solution in Serbia

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  One of the Aćimović administration's first tasks was ordered directly by the German administrator Harald Turner. Every Jew and Romani person in the Territory had to be registered, then placed under severe restrictions. That registration became the foundation for what followed. German forces took the leading role in carrying out the Final Solution in Serbia, aided by Serbian collaborators. The authorities murdered nearly all Jews living in the region.

  The killing arrived in two distinct waves. In 1941, German forces carried out mass shootings, targeting men as reprisals for resistance attacks. By early 1942, the killing shifted to gas vans, mobile chambers the Nazis used to kill women and children.

  The Banjica concentration camp in Belgrade sat at the center of this system, run jointly by Nedić's Government of National Salvation and the German army.

  Carrying out these orders depended on manpower the Germans did not have themselves. So they built a growing roster of local forces to do it for them.

• 5. Collaborators and Auxiliaries

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  Nedić's Government of National Salvation, unlike Aćimović's before it, was authorized to raise its own armed force: the Serbian State Guard. The SS and Police Leader took control of the Guard almost immediately. It operated as a German auxiliary force until the German withdrawal in October 1944.

  Bulgarian troops joined the occupation as well, remaining under German control throughout. Albanian collaborators in northern Kosovo secured the Trepça mines and the Belgrade-Skopje railway for the Germans. In return, they earned real autonomy from Nedić's government in Belgrade, an arrangement the Germans later made official.

  Even Draža Mihailović's Chetniks split on the question of collaboration. Mihailović explained his own reluctant approach directly: 'When it is all over and, with God's help, I was preserved to continue the struggle, I resolved that I would never again bring such misery on the country unless it could result in total liberation.' On those terms, he let some of his fighters join Nedić's forces, armed by the Germans, to fight Tito's Partisans instead of the occupier.

  One area where the Government of National Salvation found real, if limited, success was resettlement. It took in Serb refugees fleeing other parts of partitioned Yugoslavia, a population later estimated in the hundreds of thousands.

  None of these arrangements happened in a vacuum. The ground underneath them, and what it held, would decide how far Germany was willing to go to keep it.

• 6. A Region Worth Occupying

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  Of all the parts of occupied Yugoslavia, only the Territory of the Military Commander in Serbia had German occupiers running a military government outright. Everywhere else, the Germans delegated rule to a puppet state with more formal standing, like the Independent State of Croatia. Two things drove that decision: the key rail lines and Danube transport routes running through the region, and its valuable non-ferrous metal deposits.

  The Banat, the region's northeast corner, functioned as an autonomous zone throughout the occupation. It was nominally answerable to the puppet governments in Belgrade, but real control sat with its ethnic German, or Volksdeutsche, minority.

  Kosovo held some of the Territory's most valuable ground. The Trepça mines produced lead and zinc. The region also held a lead mine at Belo Brdo, an asbestos mine near Jagnjenica, and a magnesite mine at Dubovac.

  This was a region defined by what could be extracted from it, and fought over by competing German offices. Even its name was never settled.

• 7. What To Call It

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  German occupiers gave the region a formal name, Gebiet des Militärbefehlshabers in Serbien, rendered in English as the Territory of the Military Commander in Serbia. In Serbian, it was Подручје Војног заповедника у Србији, romanized as Područje vojnog zapovednika u Srbiji.

  Historians since have rarely settled on one label for it. Some call it a German-controlled Serbian Residual State, others a rump Serbian state, still others a so-called German protectorate or a special German-protected area. It also appears simply as German-occupied Serbia, as Nedić's Serbia, or as Serbia under German military administration.

  None of those competing labels changed what happened on the ground, from the earliest reprisals to the final withdrawal.

• 8. Collapse and Reckoning

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  In 1941, the Territory's military commander, Franz Böhme, applied a brutal reprisal formula to entire towns rather than individual hostages. It struck first at Kragujevac and Kraljevo, both massacres carried out by the Wehrmacht.

  Those massacres backfired on the Germans almost immediately. In Kraljevo, the dead included a Serbian workforce that had been building airplanes for the Axis war effort, undercutting the labor the occupiers needed. The losses also destroyed any remaining chance of building genuine Serbian support for Nedić's regime. Nedić himself urged Böhme to stop the arbitrary shootings, and Böhme agreed, ordering a halt.

  By the fall of 1944, the Eastern Front had nearly reached the Territory. The Red Army, Yugoslav Partisans and Bulgarian forces carried out the Belgrade Offensive, and most of Serbia was liberated from German control. The German administration evacuated from Serbia to Vienna that October, and Nedić's government dissolved along with it.

  After the war, several German and Serbian leaders from the Territory were tried and executed for war crimes. Milan Nedić did not stand among them in open court. He died in custody in Belgrade in 1946, still waiting for his own trial on a charge of treason.