Invasion of Yugoslavia Brought Shoah to the Balkan

…  and very probably cost Adolf Hitler his war, his party, his state, his country and his very life. Very probably because this forced invasion (aka April War or Operation 25) forced Hitler to postpone for more than a month his invasion of the Soviet Union (initially set for May 15th, 1941).

Due to this delay, he simply did not have enough time to destroy the red Army, capture Moscow and cause the collapse of the Soviet state before the weather conditions slowed his blitzkrieg to a crawl… and finally stopped it cold (literally).

Hitler was forced to launch the invasion of Yugoslavia because of the coup d’;tat that overthrew the pro-Axis government in that country. The new government immediately signed the Treaty of Friendship and Non-Aggression with the Soviet Union in Moscow which created a very real possibility of a “stab in the back” of Germany after its invasion of the latter (ironically, that’s exactly what happened).

The order for the invasion was put forward in “F;hrer Directive No. 25”, which Adolf Hitler issued on 27 March 1941 – hours after Yugoslav coup d’;tat. The invasion commenced with an overwhelming air attack on Belgrade and facilities of by the Luftwaffe and attacks by German land forces from southwestern Bulgaria.

These attacks were followed by German thrusts from Romania, Hungary and Austria. Italian forces were limited to air and artillery attacks until 11 April, when the Italian Army attacked towards Ljubljana and down the Dalmatian coast.

On the same day, Hungarian forces entered Yugoslav Ba;ka and Baranya, but like the Italians they faced practically light resistance. Italians moved into Dalmatia also from Italian-controlled Albania, after repelling an initial Yugoslav attack there.

An armistice was signed on 17 April 1941, based on the unconditional surrender of the Yugoslav army, which came into effect the next day. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia was then occupied and partitioned by the Axis powers.

Most of Serbia and the Banat became a German zone of occupation while other areas of Yugoslavia were annexed by neighboring Axis countries, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Albania and Bulgaria. Croatia got its independence.

It did not help Germany much, though because Germans now faced a full-fledged guerilla war with well-armed Yugoslav (mostly Serbian) Home Army numbering initially over 100,000 (it grew to 800,000 by 1945). Which kept stabbing Wehrmacht in the back… pretty much during the whole Second Great War.

The genuinely murderous (and quite predictable) side effect of German occupation of Yugoslavia was expansion of Shoah to the Balkans – namely to Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia. In Serbia, it proceeded pretty much as in the USSR at the same time.

The first phase, which lasted between July and November 1941, involved the murder of Jewish men, who were shot as part of retaliatory executions carried out by German forces in response to the rising anti-Nazi, partisan insurgency in Serbia.

In October 1941. Franz B;hme (commander of Wehrmacht forces in the Balkans), ordered the execution of 100 Serbian male civilians for every German soldier killed and 50 for every wounded.

Altogether some 30,000 Serbian civilians were executed by German troops during the first 2 months of this policy, among them 5,000 Jewish men, or nearly all the Jewish males above age 14 in Serbia.

The second phase, between December 1941 and May 1942, involved the incarceration of the women and children in Sajmi;te concentration camp and their subsequent gassing in a mobile gas van. Over 10,000 were killed.

The Holocaust in neighboring Croatia was even more brutal. Of the 39,000 Jews who lived in independent Croatia in 1941, more than 30,000 were murdered (77%). Of these, 6,200 were shipped to Nazi Germany and the rest of them were murdered locally, the vast majority in Usta;e-run concentration camps, such as Jasenovac (a genuine Hell on Earth).

Croatia was the only country other than Nazi Germany who operated its own extermination camps for the purpose of murdering Jews and members of other ethnic groups (i.e., Serbs).

Still, German invasion of Yugoslavia postponed (by a month) the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and (quite possibly) in German-controlled Europe.