Although the Serbian version of history portrays wartime Serbia as a helpless, occupied territory, Serbian newspapers of the period offer a portrait of intensive collaboration. In Serbia during WW2, a new pro-Nazi government was established under the leadership of General Milan Nedic which governed until 1945. Nedic supported Hitler and met with him in 1943. Indeed, with Nazi blessings, Nedic established the Serbian State Guard, numbering about 20,000, compared to the 3,400 German police in Serbia. Recruiting advertisements for the Serb police force specified that "applicants must have no Jewish or Gypsy blood". This new government established even harsher racial laws than Prince Paul had enacted and immediately established three concentration camps for Jews, Gypsies and others. Nedic formed his own paramilitary storm troops known as the State Guard. The Guard was comprised of former members of the Cetniks which had existed as an all-Serbian para-military police force under Alexander and Paul to enforce loyally from non-Serbian members of the armed forces. When Yugoslavia disintegrated, one faction of cetniks swore allegiance to the new Serbian Nazi government. Another group remained under the pre-war leader Kosta Pecanac who openly collaborated with the Germans. A third Cetnik faction followed the Serbian Fascist Dimitrije Ljotic. Ljotic's units were primarily responsible for tracking down Jews, Gypsies and Partisans for execution or deportation to concentration camps.
The Serbian Orthodox Church openly collaborated with the Nazis, and many priests publicly defended the persecution of the Jews. On 13 August 1941, approximately 500 distinguished Serbs signed "An Appeal to the Serbian Nation", which called for loyalty to the occupying Nazis. The first three signers were bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church. On 30 January 1942, Metropolitan Josif, the acting head of the Holy Synod of the Serbian Orthodox Church, officially prohibited conversions of Jews to Serbian Orthodoxy, thereby blocking a means of saving Jewish lives. At a public rally, after the government Minister Olcan "thanked God that the enormously powerful fist of Germany had not come down upon the head of the Serbian nation" but instead "upon the heads of the Jews in our midst", the speaker of these words was then blessed by a high-ranking Serbian Orthodox priest.
Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic, today revered by the majority of Orthodox Serbs as the greatest Serbian religious figure since medieval times and recently canonized as a saint by the Serbian Orthodox Church, espoused writings that were anti-semitic. He claimed that "democracy, labour strikes, socialism, atheism, tolerance to other faiths, pacifism, revolution, capitalism and communism" were all "brought on" by the Jews and "their father the Devil". He was puzzled why the Europeans showed so much tolerance to them and could not see through their "ploys". He also criticized European scientific achievements in the field of particle physics for being anti-Chrtistian and possibly introduced by Jews. Further, he criticized the "mania for cleanliness" as being introduced by the Jews. (Here he used an archaic pejorative term 'Civutin').
Contrary to popular perception of Bishop Velimirovic as somebody who was actively engaged in saving Jews from Nazi-occupied Serbia, only one such action has any basis in history. Ela Trifunovic, born Neuheus, wrote to the Serbian Orthodox Church in 2001, claiming that she had spent 18 months hiding in Ljubostinja monastery where she was smuggled by Velimirovic, guarded and later helped move on with false papers.
In a speech in 1939, Bishop Velimirovic claimed that Serbs were of Arian race "by blood". In the same speech he talked of tribes of "poorer race and lower faith".(Speech for 550th Vidovdan, 28 June 1939 in Ravanica Monastery). In a treatise on Saint Sava, he expressed his admiration for Hitler by comparing him to Saint Sava. He said that Saint Sava had already done for the Serbs what Hitler was doing for the Germans. (See "Nationalism of Saint Sava", in Collected Works of Nikolaj Velimirovic (Vladimir Maksimovic: Belgrade 1996), page 36.
By August 1942 the Serbian government would proudly announce that Belgrade was the first city in the New Order to be Judenfrei or "free of Jews." Only 1,115 of Belgrade's twelve thousand Jews would survive. Ninty-five per cent of the Jewish population of Serbia was exterminated. Still other Chetniks rallied behind Draza Mihailovic, a 48 year-old Army officer who had been court-martialed by Nedic and was known to have close ties to Britain. Early in the War Mihailovic offered some resistance to the German forces while collaborating with the Italians. By July 22, 1941 the Yugoslav Government-in-Exile announced that continued resistance was impossible. Today, many Serbs proudly cite the Chetniks as a resistance force and even claim that the Chetniks were somehow allied with the United States during the Second World War, but this is simply historical revisionism. According to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Chetnik resistance against the Nazis came to a complete stop as early as the end of 1941. Thereafter, the Chetnik resistance actively collaborated with the both Nazis and Fascists, and for this reason Jewish fighters found it necessary to abandon the Chetniks, in favour of Tito's Partisans.
Most Serbs joined the Partisans in great numbers late in the War as entire Cetnik units changed their allegiance. By 1943 Allied support shifted to Tito and by 1944 the Partisans were the only recognized Allied force fighting in Yugoslavia. Josip Broz (Tito) a Croatian Communist, organized a multi-ethnic resistance group, which took up the fight against the Nazis, as well as against the Ustasha's and Chetniks. The overwhelming bulk of resistance activity against German nazis occurred in Bosnia and Croatia. According to Yugoslav statistics, at the height of the war in late 1943, there were 122,000 partisans active in Croatia, 108,000 in Bosnia, and only 22,000 in Serbia.
It is ironic that Serbs, from 1945 onward, continued to use the same coat-of-arms used by the Nazi government of General Milan Nedic during World War II. The Serbian arms, which appeared so prominently on the world' s most viciously anti-Semitic postage stamps during the War, continued to be proudly displayed by Serbian Communist regime. (the Serbian cross with the four cyrillic c's)
Topic: the serbs are friends of the jews (I've removed the accidently placed "NOT") (Read 39945 times)