Milan Nedić
Milan Nedić was a Yugoslav and Serbian army general and politician who served as the Chief of the General Staff of the Royal Yugoslav Army, Minister of War in the Royal Yugoslav Government. During World War II, he collaborated with the Germans and served as the Prime Minister of a puppet government, Government of National Salvation, in the German occupied territory of Serbia. After the war, the Yugoslav communist authorities imprisoned him. In 1946, they reported that he had committed suicide by jumping out of a window in the prison.
Early life and military career
Milan Nedić was born in the Belgrade suburb of Grocka on 2 September 1878 to Đorđe and Pelagia Nedić. His father was a local district chief and his mother was a teacher from a village near Mount Kosmaj. She was the granddaughter of Nikola Mihailović, who was mentioned in the writings of poet Sima Milutinović Sarajlija and was an ally of Serbian revolutionary leader Karađorđe. The Nedić family was originally from the village of Zaoka, near Lazarevac. It traced its origins to two brothers, Damjan and Gligorije, who defended the Čokešina Monastery from the Turks during the Serbian Revolution. The family received its name from Nedić's great-grandmother, Neda, who was a member of the Vasojevići tribe in Montenegro.Nedić finished gymnasium in Kragujevac in 1895 and entered the lower level of the Military Academy in Belgrade that year. In 1904, he completed the upper level of the academy, then the General Staff preparatory, and was commissioned into the Serbian Army. In 1910, he was promoted to the rank of major. He fought with the Serbian Army during the Balkan Wars, and received multiple decorations for bravery. In 1913, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He served with the Serbian Army during World War I and was involved in rearguard actions during its retreat through Albania in the winter of 1915. That year, he was promoted to the rank of colonel. At 38, he was the youngest colonel in the Serbian General Staff. He was appointed ordnance officer to King Peter in 1916. Towards the end of the war, Nedić was given command of an infantry brigade of the Timok Division.
Royal Yugoslav Army
Nedić remained a brigade commander within the Timok Division until the end of 1918 and served as the 3rd Army chief of staff. Beginning in 1919, he also served as the de facto head of the 4th Army District in Croatia because its nominal commander, General Božidar Janković, was old and infirm. Nedić's cousin, Dimitrije Ljotić, and their mutual friend Stanislav Krakov, also served in the 4th Army District and were commanded by Nedić. When the Royal Yugoslav Army was formed in 1919 he was absorbed into the army at the same rank. He was promoted to Divizijski đeneral in 1923, and subsequently commanded a division then was Secretary-General of the Committee of National Defence. In 1930, Nedić was promoted to the rank of Armijski đeneral, and assumed command of the 3rd Army in Skoplje. Nedić was appointed Chief of the General Staff in June 1934, and held this position until the following year, when he became the third member of the Military Council, probably because of his strained relations with the Minister for the Army and Navy, Petar Živković. At the time, British diplomatic staff observed that he was "somewhat slow-thinking and obstinate". On 13 August 1939, Nedić was appointed Minister of the Army and Navy as part of the Cvetković–Maček Agreement. Ljotić later assisted the SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt in establishing contacts with him. He also exploited the connections he had with Nedić to ensure that the banned Zbor-published journal Bilten was distributed to members of the VKJ. The journal was published illegally in a military printing house and distributed throughout Yugoslavia by military couriers.Because of his disapproval of a potential participation in the war against Adolf Hitler's Germany, Nedić was dismissed on 6 November 1940 by regent Paul. This was most likely out of unease with Nazi Germany's ally, Fascist Italy which at the time harboured the Croatian extreme nationalist Ustashe leader Ante Pavelić in exile in Rome, and because of the rhetoric of some Italian fascists in the past such as the late Gabriele D'Annunzio, who were violently opposed to a Yugoslav state. Nedić welcomed the coup of 1941 which deposed the pro-Axis regime, and fought for Yugoslavia in the German-led Axis invasion that followed.
Occupied Serbia
commander Heinrich Danckelmann decided to entrust Nedić with the administration of German-occupied territory of Serbia in order to pacify Serb resistance. Not long before, Nedić had lost his only son and pregnant daughter in law in a munitions explosion in Smederevo, in which several thousands died. He accepted the post of the prime minister in the government called the Government of National Salvation, on 29 August 1941. At the same time mass imprisonment of the Jews started where police and gendarmerie of quisling government under Nedić assisted the Germans in arresting the Jews.On 1 September 1941 Nedić made a speech on Radio Belgrade in which he declared the intent of his administration to "save the core of the Serbian people" by accepting the occupation of Germany in the area of Sumadija, Drina Valley, Pomoravlje and Banat. He also spoke against organizing resistance to the occupying forces. His state's propaganda was funded by Germany and promoted anti-Semitism and anti-communism, particularly linking these up with anti-masonry. In his speeches he uses terms such as "Communist-Jewish rabble" and "Communist-Masonic-Jewish-English mafia". In March 1942, Nedić established the Serbian State Guard who together with the Gestapo participated in the guarding of the Banjica concentration camp, and were responsible for the killings of inmates, including children. In October 1943, the State Guard came under control of the SS. Its members were also engaged in the execution of captured Partisans.
The puppet government under Nedić accepted many refugees mostly of Serbian descent. The civil war unleashed by German occupation in Serbia was the cause of losing more lives than German terror. In total, between 141,000 and 167,000 people died in Serbia of war-related causes. These deaths included 34,000 killed by the Germans and their Serb helpers, 46,000 deaths in prisons and camps, and 33,000 Chetnik and 42,000 Partisan combatants. At least 300,000 people were deported from Serbia or held in prisons and concentration camps. German reprisals demanded that 100 Serbs be killed for each killed German soldier and 50 for each wounded German soldier, as in the Kragujevac massacre. Nedić implemented Hitler's anti Semitic policies and Belgrade became the first city in Europe to be declared Judenfrei while Serbia itself was declared as such in August 1942. Nedić also secretly diverted money and arms from his government to the Chetniks. The military forces of Ljotić and Nedić together with the Wehrmacht participated in anti-Communist operations. In the 1942 Christmas address, he announced that "the old world, which had destroyed our state, is over and replaced by the new one. This new world will elevate Serbia to its rightful and honorable place in the new Europe; under the new leadership we look courageously into the future". In 1942 he outlined a memo of his vision of Great Serbia in which Bosnia-Herzegovina, Srijem, and Dalmatia are within Serbia's borders with local population replaced by Serbian settlers. On 28 February 1943, the commanding general in Serbia reduced the reprisal orders to 50 hostages for each German soldier, armed forces employee, civilian or Bulgarian soldier killed, and 25 for each German or Bulgarian wounded. Nedić was received by Adolf Hitler in September 1943 when they talked about security and order in the occupied territory. Nedić's Ministry of Education, Ljotić and the intellectuals from the Zbor prepared Serbia and its youth by changing the education system in order to prepare the society for Hitler’s New Europe, in which anti-Semitism and anti-Communism were integral parts of the new ideological framework.
On 4 October 1944, with the successes of the Yugoslav Partisans and their onslaught on Belgrade, Nedić's puppet government was disbanded, and on 6 October Nedić fled from Belgrade to Kitzbühel, Austria where he took refuge with the occupying British. On 1 January 1946 the British forces handed him over to the Yugoslav Partisans.
He was incarcerated in Belgrade on charges of treason. On 4 February 1946, it is believed that Nedić either jumped out of the window of the Belgrade hospital where he was being detained or that he was pushed out to his death. According to official records, he committed suicide by jumping through the window.
Recently, Miodrag Mladenović, a former officer with of the Yugoslavian OZNA, said that on 4 February 1946, he received an order to pick up a dead body at Zmaj Jovina street, where the prison was located at the time. When he arrived there, the body was already wrapped in a blanket and rigor mortis had already set in. Following the orders given to him, he took the body to the cemetery where it was buried in an unusually deep grave. He never attempted to see the face of the person that he was carrying, but the day after he read in the news that Nedić had committed suicide by jumping through the prison window at Zmaj Jovina street.
Legacy and Revisionism in Modern-day Serbia
After 2000, revisionists' demands for the rehabilitation of Milan Nedić began. Nedić's portrait was included among those of Serbian prime ministers in the building of the Government of Serbia. In 2008, the Minister of Interior and Deputy PM Ivica Dačić removed the portrait after neo-Nazi marches were announced in the country. Revisionist interpretations required that Nedić's collaboration with the occupying forces and responsibility for the execution of Jews under his rule be obscured, in order to remember him as the "savior of the Serbian people".On 11 July 2018, The Higher Serbian Court in Belgrade rejected an application to rehabilitate the quisling Prime Minister of occupied Serbia during World War II, Milan Nedić.
In 1941 in Kragujevac and Kraljevo during Milan Nedić puppet government Germany's military presence in Serbia was strengthened and there was more than one mass shooting of civilians when more than 5 thousand people most of them Serbs where killed during same puppet Nedić government that has claimed to protect Serbs from German killings. Events are known as Kragujevac massacre and Kraljevo massacre.
During the rehabilitation trial, historian Bojan Dimitrijevic from the Institute for Contemporary Serbian History claimed, based on archived documents, that Nedić was not directly involved in the persecution and killing of Jews. According to Dimitrijevic, Nedić's administration only registered Jews and gave them fake Serbian documents while the Germans rounded them up and performed all the executions.
During the Miloševic era, the regime and some Serb historians found it extremely important to win over eminent Yugoslav Jewish organizations and individuals for the idea of the joint Serbo-Jewish martyrdom. In order to accomplish this, Serbia had to falsify history by obscuring the fact that the Serb quislings Milan Nedic and Dimitrije Ljotic ́ had cleansed Serbia of her sizeable Jewish population by deportations of Jews to East European concentration camps or killing them in Serbia. In 1995, the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts published a volume entitled 100 Outstanding Serbs, and included Nedić on the list. The minor Serbian Liberal Party attempted to promote his rehabilitation as an anti-Nazi who did his best in an impossible situation, sparking controversy in Serbia.
Other opinions claims that it was Nedić role in order to protect Serbs from further executions in NDH and by Germans in Serbia to provide some reprisal toward Jews and that was mostly done with confiscating and selling Jews property after they were executed by Germans who were not interested to buy homes and lands of Jews in Serbia and prior that to give list of Jews to Germans.
As one of biggest reasons for killing about 11,000 Jews in Serbia by Germans, Jewish reporter, author of many books about Jews in Serbia, historian and president of Jew community Belgrade, Jaša Almuli claims that it was reprisal for resistance against Germans in occupied Serbia and that Jews where killed for same reasons as Serbs in order to fulfill Hitlers quota towards Serbs and Serbia - for one wounded soldier kill 50 and for dead German soldier kill 100 people. For that reason together with Serbs and Gypsies about 5000 Jews were shot. German SS general Harald Turner was main culprit behind shooting Jews in occupied Serbia.
According to Cohen and Riesman in Nedić's Serbia about 15,000 of Jews perished or about 94% of Serbian Jews.According to Jelena Subotić in the pre-occupation Serbia 27,000 Jews from them 33,500 were killed in the Holocaust, and another 1,000 from central Europe, mostly from Czechoslovakia and Austria. In German-occupied Serbia lived around 17,000 of Jews and very early 82% of Jews were killed, this includes 11,000 of Belgrade Jews.
"One Hundred Greatest Serbs" the book from 1993, published by Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts included an entry on Milan Nedić in which editor of the book historian Dejan Medaković clame that he was "one of the most tragic figures in Serbian history" whose collaboration saved "a million Serbian lives". Patriarch Pavle held a memorial service for Milan Nedić in 1994. Publisher of the recent secondary school history textbook Nebojša Jovanović, in 2002 told the daily Politika that collaboration with the Nazis was a way of preserving the ‘biological substance of the Serbian people".