Gramith on Prusin, 'Serbia Under the Swastika: a World War II Occupation'
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H-German X-Post: Gramith on Prusin, 'Serbia under the Swastika: A World War II Occupation' Discussion published by Chris Fojtik on Monday, June 11, 2018 Review published on Saturday, June 2, 2018 Author: Alexander Victor Prusin Reviewer: Luke Gramith Gramith on Prusin, 'Serbia under the Swastika: A World War II Occupation' Alexander Victor Prusin. Serbia under the Swastika: A World War II Occupation. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017. 232 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-252-04106-8. Reviewed by Luke Gramith (University of West Virginia)Published on H-War (June, 2018) Commissioned by Margaret Sankey (Air War College) Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=52012 Alexander Prusin provides readers with a concise study of the social, military, and political history of occupied Serbia during the Second World War. With this geographically focused but thematically broad approach, Serbia under the Swastika stands out from existing scholarly works, which have focused either on the wider Yugoslav occupation experience or on more narrow questions of guerrilla and antiguerrilla warfare.[1] It parallels recent regional studies of the occupation years in other parts of the dismembered Yugoslavia.[2] In Serbia under the Swastika, Prusin makes several well-supported arguments using a range of archival, newspaper, and memoir sources. Most should not surprise readers familiar with the existing literature on German-occupied Europe. First, Prusin convincingly shows that the German occupation regime was riven with internal contradictions and rivalries, which in turn hindered the realization of German goals. Second, the occupation unleashed a Serbian civil war that was political-ideological in nature, distinct from the ethnoreligious conflicts in other parts of occupied Yugoslavia such as the Independent State of Croatia. Third, all active participants in this civil war, from the communist guerrillas to the collaborationist figurehead Milan Nedić, sought to use the context of war and occupation to transform Serbia into something new. Finally, even amid civil war and occupation, most Serbians neither actively resisted nor actively collaborated; rather, they spent the war years attempting to survive, accommodating those who made demands of them at gunpoint. Prusin makes these arguments in a concise text, organized into an introduction, nine short chapters, and a conclusion. Apart from the first chapter, which provides background information on interwar Yugoslavia, each chapter treats a single theme for the years 1941-44, and only a loose narrative thread runs between them. Following the conclusion, readers can view a section of endnotes (pared down to the bare minimum), a bibliography consisting mostly of English-, Serbo-Croatian-, and German-language works, and a short index limited to key organizations and persons. Citation: Chris Fojtik. X-Post: Gramith on Prusin, 'Serbia under the Swastika: A World War II Occupation'. H-German. 06-11-2018. https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/discussions/1915993/x-post-gramith-prusin-serbia-under-swastika-world-war-ii Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-German Chapters 2-5 define the book’s key actors. After detailing the rapid collapse of Yugoslavia in April 1941, chapter 2 sketches the earliest German approaches to occupied Serbia. A comprehensive racial reordering was not the goal, but rather material exploitation and the creation of a pacified hinterland for easy transportation and communication in the Balkans. The Wehrmacht created the office of the Military Commander-in-Serbia to accomplish these goals, but from the first days of its existence it faced challenges from other German agencies. Chapter 3 explores the Germans’ efforts to construct a collaborationist regime capable of realizing their goals. Prusin shows how these efforts failed due to intra-German power struggles and a refusal to grant any real autonomy to the collaborationist Council of Commissars or its successor, the Government of National Salvation. The tight leash on Serbian collaborators stands in striking contrast to the free rein received by Ante Pavelić’s Ustasha regime in the Independent State of Croatia. It resulted in the Serbian collaborators lacking both the legitimacy and the muscle necessary to pacify the territory. Here Prusin displays an objectivity in his treatment of Serbia’s collaborators, particularly in his recognition of the lives saved by the Government of National Salvation’s rapid response to the refugee crisis unleashed in 1941 as hundreds of thousands of Serbs flooded Serbia from other areas of occupied Yugoslavia. In this and subsequent chapters, he keeps the scale of active collaboration in perspective, diverging from polemical and even anti- Serbian works on the topic, most notably Philip Cohen's Serbia's Secret War (1996). The sketch of institutions is followed in chapter 4 by a closer examination of the range of Serbian collaborators, from Dimitrije Ljotić’s fascist Zbor movement to the archconservative General Milan Nedić, head of the Government of National Salvation. In one of the book’s most enlightening sections, Prusin explicates Nedić’s archconservative vision for a Serbian “zadruga-state,” modeled after the medieval Serbian socioeconomic unit in which an authoritarian family chief—a domaćin—ruled over the property and persons of an extended kin group (p. 62). In the early years of occupation, when German victory seemed certain, Nedić formulated a vision in which he would rule as domaćin over a purified Serbian nation, with Serbia existing as a German puppet state. Communists, liberals, and Jews had no place in this future society and thus, far from merely “shielding” the population, Nedić used the modest police power at his disposal to wage war against these enemies. As Prusin later writes, Nedić was “both an ideological soldier with his own agenda and a willing tool in the hands of the occupying power” (p. 159). Chapter 5 concludes the introduction of actors, detailing the emergence and initial cooperation of the well-known resistance movements—the fractured Chetniks loyal to the royal government-in-exile, and Tito’s communist-led Partisans, who were committed to overthrowing the old order and creating a communist Yugoslavia. Prusin shows that already by late 1941, when the Partisans created a short- lived liberation government called the Užice Republic, many Chetniks had begun to see the Partisans as more threatening to the royal government-in-exile than the Germans, prompting their drift toward collaboration. For the most part, the remaining chapters detail certain “experiential” themes. Chapter 6 explores the emergence of the Germans’ ruthless reprisal policy. Though the Germans initially had no plans for the systematic brutalization of the Serbians, just weeks into the occupation a Wehrmacht officer ordered that one hundred Serbians be killed for each German killed by Serbian guerrillas and fifty killed for each German wounded. This policy led to hundreds of reprisal actions, chief among them Citation: Chris Fojtik. X-Post: Gramith on Prusin, 'Serbia under the Swastika: A World War II Occupation'. H-German. 06-11-2018. https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/discussions/1915993/x-post-gramith-prusin-serbia-under-swastika-world-war-ii Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-German the Kragujevac Massacre of October 1941, in which Wehrmacht units and Serbian collaborators murdered well over two thousand civilians. Particularly insightful is Prusin’s demonstration that the Holocaust in Serbia unfolded as part of these antiguerrilla reprisals, Nedić volunteering Serbia’s Jews as the first hostages for execution. Serbia under the Swastika not only shines light on this lesser- known aspect of the Holocaust, but also joins a litany of works that debunk the claim that the Wehrmacht was an honorable fighting force free of complicity in Nazi crimes. Chapter 7 turns to the “quiet” Serbia of 1942-44. In these years, with the Užice Republic dismembered, the bulk of Partisan resistance activity shifted westward into Croatia and Bosnia. The Partisans in Serbia slowly regrouped and carried out sabotage actions as their comrades outside Serbia prepared for a push toward Belgrade. The Chetniks, shaken by German reprisals and seeing the Partisans growing in strength, largely ceased outright resistance and drifted toward collaboration. The primary Chetnik leader, Draža Mihailović, formed a last-ditch alliance with Serbia’s collaborationist forces in 1944 with the aim of forestalling a communist seizure of power, but Tito was in Belgrade by October. Throughout this and previous chapters, Prusin’s treatment of Mihailović is evenhanded, recognizing the latter’s increasingly impossible position without minimizing the fact that his actions often served the interests of the Germans. The eighth chapter addresses the relationship between Serbians and Jews both before and during the occupation. Prusin finds that it was not just Ljotić and the fascist Zbor militants who participated in the murder of most of Serbia's fifteen thousand Jews, but also Nedić and his conservative allies. Prusin details a systematic attempt by the German occupation forces and their chief collaborators to inculcate antisemitic ideas in the native population, but suggests, in contrast to Philip Cohen, that virulent antisemitism remained a fringe phenomenon. He provides anecdotal