Yugoslavia was occupied and divided in April 1941 between Germany, Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the puppet states the Germans set up. The wartime Yugoslav territories had different fates depending on which occupying force controlled them. The largest and most lethal arena was Croatia, where the Ustasha state ran the Jasenovac camp complex; that story is told on the Croatia page. The other Yugoslav territories produced their own particular records. The Jewish population of pre-war Yugoslavia was around 80,000. Around 65,000 of them were murdered, a death rate of around 80 per cent. The remainder survived through partisan networks, escape to Italian-controlled territory, or hiding among the local population.
The Yugoslav Jewish population before the war
Yugoslav Jewry was a federation of communities of different traditions. Sephardic Jews, descendants of those expelled from Spain in 1492, were the dominant group in Bosnia, Macedonia and parts of Serbia. Ashkenazi Jews predominated in Croatia and Vojvodina. Belgrade had a mixed community. Sarajevo had been one of the great Sephardic cities of the Balkans, with a Jewish population of around 12,000 living alongside Muslim, Croat and Serb neighbours. The Yugoslav Jewish communities had been comparatively well integrated into Yugoslav public life since the country’s formation in 1918, though antisemitism existed in the right-wing political fringe.
Serbia under German occupation
Germany directly occupied Serbia and installed the Nedic puppet government. The Serbian Jewish community of around 16,000 was largely murdered in 1941 and 1942. The killings were carried out partly by the German army, partly by the Einsatzgruppen, and partly by the Serbian collaborationist police forces. Mass shootings of Jewish men took place in autumn 1941 around Belgrade, particularly at the Sajmiste site near the city. Jewish women and children were held at Sajmiste through the winter of 1941 to 1942 and were murdered between March and May 1942 in mobile gas vans, in one of the earliest uses of gas vans in the Holocaust. The German military commander in Serbia, General Franz Bohme, declared Belgrade Judenrein (free of Jews) in August 1942. Germany was the first European state to declare a major capital city free of Jews.
The Italian zones
Italian forces occupied parts of the Adriatic coast, Slovenia, and parts of Bosnia. Like the Italian zones in France and Croatia, the Italian commands here refused to deport Jews to the Germans. Several thousand Yugoslav Jews escaped to Italian-controlled territory and survived until Italy switched sides in September 1943. After the Italian capitulation, the German army occupied the former Italian zones and the killings resumed; some of the Italian-protected Jews escaped to the Yugoslav partisan-controlled areas in time, others did not.
The Hungarian-occupied territories
Hungary occupied parts of northern Yugoslavia in April 1941, including Vojvodina and the area around Subotica. The Jewish populations of these territories, around 15,000 people, fell under Hungarian jurisdiction. They were treated as Hungarian Jews and subject to the same restrictive but pre-deportation regime as the rest of Hungarian Jewry until March 1944, when they were deported to Auschwitz alongside the rest of Hungarian Jewry. Most were murdered.
The Bulgarian-occupied territories
Bulgaria occupied parts of Macedonia. The Jewish population of Bulgarian-occupied Macedonia, around 7,000 people, was deported by the Bulgarian state to Treblinka in March 1943, alongside the Thracian Jews from Bulgarian-occupied Greece. The Bulgarian deportation of these territories’ Jews is the dark counterpart to the Bulgarian protection of native Bulgarian Jews described on the Bulgaria page.
The Yugoslav Partisans
The most effective resistance to the German and Croatian killing programmes in Yugoslavia was the Yugoslav Partisan movement under Josip Broz Tito. The partisans were the largest organised armed resistance movement in occupied Europe and held substantial territory in the western Yugoslav mountains by 1943. Around 4,500 to 5,000 Jewish partisans served in the Yugoslav forces over the course of the war. Several Jewish doctors and engineers held senior positions. The partisans accepted Jewish refugees, sheltered Jewish families in their forest camps, and treated them under the standard partisan code as fellow Yugoslav citizens. Around 5,000 Yugoslav Jews survived the war as partisans or as refugees in partisan-controlled areas.
The Sarajevo Haggadah
One particular incident from the Sarajevo Holocaust deserves mention. The Sarajevo Haggadah, a fourteenth-century illuminated manuscript that is one of the most precious surviving Sephardic Jewish books, was held in the Sarajevo National Museum in 1941. The museum’s Muslim director, Dervis Korkut, hid the manuscript from the German and Croatian occupying forces by removing it from the collection and sheltering it with a Muslim friend in a remote village in the Bosnian mountains. Korkut also sheltered a Jewish girl, Mira Papo, by passing her off as a Muslim member of his household. Both the manuscript and the girl survived the war. The Sarajevo Haggadah is now back in the Sarajevo Museum. Korkut was recognised as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 1994.
The post-war record
Yugoslav Jewry was largely destroyed. Around 15,000 Yugoslav Jews survived the war, most of them through partisan service or hiding. The post-war Yugoslav state under Tito treated all wartime victims as Yugoslavs rather than as members of specific national or religious groups, and the specifically Jewish dimension of the killings was downplayed in Yugoslav memorialisation. The breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s opened the wartime record to local re-examination, with the Croatian state engaging more openly with the Ustasha record (or, in some Croatian nationalist circles, attempting to rehabilitate it), the Serbian state addressing Sajmiste and the Belgrade killings, and the Bosnian state acknowledging the role of Sarajevo Muslims in protecting the city’s Jews. The Jewish communities of the former Yugoslavia today are tiny, around 6,000 people altogether, mostly in Belgrade and Zagreb.
See also
Sources
- Jonathan Steinberg, All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust 1941-1943, Routledge, 1990
- Christopher Browning, Fateful Months: Essays on the Emergence of the Final Solution, Holmes and Meier, 1985
- Bjorn Westerlund (ed), The Holocaust in the Balkans, Vallentine Mitchell, 2002
- USHMM: Yugoslavia