World War II and The Holocaust
In 1941, Kosovo was incorporated into the Italian-ruled Greater Albania. In July 1943, when Italy left the war, the Germans took control of Kosovo. In 1944, communist partisans recaptured Kosovo from Albania and made it part of the Democratic Federal Yugoslavia.
Current literature indicates five sets of numerically recorded deportations from Kosovo:
1) August 1941, Mitrovica, under German occupation, 88 Jews are reported to have been sent to Sajmište Concentration Camp near axis occupied Belgrade where they were killed. Prior to deportation all Jewish men in Mitrovica / Mitrovice are alleged to have been arrested, while women were sent to daily forced labor. In February 1942, the women are said to have been detained with their children, Jewish property taken by local collaborators, and the synagogue destroyed. A 1960 report to the Administration of the State Security of NR Serbia details names of victims from 12 families shot at the camp in winter 1941. [5]
[Source [5] can be crossed referenced with second generational verbal accounts of deportations from Mitrovica that can still be sourced today. Supplementary survivor testimony in the Shoah Foundation Archive also makes reference to experience of the holocaust in relation to movements through Kosovska Mitrovica]
2) 1942, Prishtina. 250 Yugoslavian Jews, including an unknown number of native Kosovo Jews, transferred to the Albanian interior. As of 1943 historian Daniel Perez relates they made up part of 500 Jews held under house arrest or in concentration camps in the Albanian towns of Berat, Kruja and Kavaja. He also indicates movements of both native and non-native Jews from Kosovo to Albania were ongoing throughout the war period. [6]
3) March 1942, Prishtina. Italian military police detained 51 Jewish refugees and passed them to the Nazis. According to historian Noel Malcolm they were sent to Sajmiste. Daniel Perez details that the deportation list was compiled by Italian authorities and local Albanian police and that they were first sent to a "concentration camp" [probable terminiological error - as it was a holding camp] in Prishtina before being transferred to Mitrovica. [5] [6] [7]
4) May 14, 1944, Prishtina. Nazi Chief Heinrich Himmler organized the Skanderburg Unit which were commanded by the Germans to arrest 281 Jews who were sent to Bergen-Belsen via occupied Belgrade where, according to Noel Malcolm, 'more than' 200 died, or according to Martin Cüppers, 'at least' 177 died. [7] [6] [8] [9]
5) August 1944, Prishtina, An extensive list of 789 mainly non-Jewish victims including Bosniak, Albanian, Serbian, communists, partisans and activists, arrested by the SS Skanderburg division to be transported to the Reich has been published by Robert Elise. 31 people are listed as Jews, and a further 11 people, mainly children, are listed purely on the basis of belonging to a Jewish family. Their fate is unknown. [10]
Though the majority of historians seem to draw consensus around the 281 figure Albanian historian Haxhi Bajraktari is said to have written that only 43 Jewish names were included in a total of 249 deportees, whom he describes as mainly Communists and Partisans. [11] Analysis of apparently original Nazi transport lists suggest Bajraktari's apparent figures for Jews to be understated. Serbian historian Pavle Dzeletovic Ivanov also puts the number of arrests on May 14 at 400 (which conversely suggests overstatement). [12] The names of those who both survived and perished at Bergen-Belsen are recorded at source [5]
Noel Malcolm summarises that out of 551 native Kosovo Jews present before war, 210 had died by the end. [7] This does not correspond numerically with the full evidence above. The true number therefore remains unknown.
Video interviews with Kosovo Jews who survived the Holocaust can be found at the Shoah Foundation.
Extensive testimonies and photographs can be found at the USA Holocaust Museum website. [13]
An extract from the statement of Hedviga Schönfein, prisoner of the Judenlager Zemlin (Sajmište) prison camp has been published by the Centre for Democracy and Reconciliation in South East Europe:
"Immediately upon our arrival at the camp, the Germans told us that the camp would gradually be evacuated, because they intended to imprison communists at the Fair, but they did not want to tell us where they were going to take us.... For the first transfers they invited volunteers and the first to be invited was the group I was from – Jews from Kosmet. (...) Those who were designated for transport were ordered, or, more precisely, kindly advised to take their most valuable possessions with them, and to pack all the rest carefully and put their exact address on the package. (...) Thus, these transfers departed almost every day. On Sundays and holidays there were usually no transfers or removals, but there were days when the car would make two rounds. The driver of the grey car often entered the camp alone, gathered children around him, caressed them, took them in his arms and gave them candies. The children liked him and whenever he came, they would rush toward him to get candies. No one in the camp suspected that people were taken to their deaths. It was strongly believed they were being transferred into a work camp." [14]
A statement from Albert Ruben suggests a deportation from Prishtina in winter 1943, not recorded by the academic historians above:
"At the end of 1943, it was already winter, maybe November or December, the SS men came to all Jewish homes to round us up. They got us out of our beds and took us straight to the barracks near the football field. There were a lot of us, more than four hundred people. We stayed there for two days. Everyone brought some food with them. We didn't have a toilet, so we dug a hole and put some wooden boards over it. They were threatening us, telling us to hand over our gold and other valuables, and we were throwing them into the toilet. What we had not given to the poor earlier we were now throwing into the toilet. Before long they put us into cattle wagons and drove us to the Belgrade camp for Jews at the Sajmiste."
Mass evacuation, forced displacement, expulsion, and deportation of millions of people took place across most countries involved in World War II. The Second World War caused the movement of the largest number of people in the shortest period of time in history. A number of these phenomena were categorised as violations of fundamental human values and norms by the Nuremberg Tribunal after the war ended. The mass movement of people – most of them refugees – had either been caused by the hostilities, or enforced by the former Axis and the Allied powers based on ideologies of race and ethnicity, culminating in the postwar border changes enacted by international settlements. The refugee crisis created across formerly occupied territories in World War II provided the context for much of the new international refugee and global human rights architecture existing today.
During World War II, some individuals and groups helped Jews and others escape the Holocaust conducted by Nazi Germany.
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 and minister of war in the Royal Yugoslav Government. During World War II, he collaborated with Nazi Germany and served as the prime minister of the puppet government of National Salvation, in the German occupied territory of Serbia. After the war, the Yugoslav communist authorities imprisoned him. In 1946, it was reported that he had committed suicide. He was included in the 100 most prominent Serbs list. There have been attempts since the 2000s to present Nedić's role in World War II more positively. All applications to rehabilitate him have so far been declined by the official Serbian courts.
The Banjica concentration camp was a Nazi German concentration camp in the Territory of the Military Commander in Serbia, the military administration of the Third Reich established after the Invasion and occupation of Yugoslavia during World War II. In response to escalating resistance, the German army instituted severe repressive measures – mass executions of civilian hostages and the establishment of concentration camps. Located in the Banjica neighborhood of Dedinje—a suburb of Belgrade—it was originally used by the Germans as a center for holding hostages. The camp was later used to hold anti-fascist Serbs, Jews, Roma, captured Partisans, Chetniks and other opponents of Nazi Germany. By 1942, most executions occurred at the firing ranges at Jajinci, Marinkova Bara and the Jewish cemetery.
The Sajmište concentration camp was a Nazi German concentration and extermination camp during World War II. It was located at the former Belgrade fairground site near the town of Zemun, in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH). The camp was organized and operated by SS Einsatzgruppen units stationed in occupied Serbia. It became operational in September 1941 and was officially opened on 28 October of that year. The Germans dubbed it the Jewish camp in Zemun. At the end of 1941 and the beginning of 1942, thousands of Jewish women, children and old men were brought to the camp, along with 500 Jewish men and 292 Romani women and children, most of whom were from Niš, Smederevo and Šabac. Women and children were placed in makeshift barracks and suffered during numerous influenza epidemics. Kept in squalid conditions, they were provided with inadequate amounts of food and many froze to death during the winter of 1941–42. Between March and May 1942, the Germans used a gas van sent from Berlin to kill thousands of Jewish inmates.
The Crveni Krst concentration camp, also known as the Niš concentration camp, located in Crveni Krst, Niš, was operated by the German Gestapo and used to hold captured Serbs, Jews and Romanis during the Second World War. Established in mid-1941, it was used to detain as many as 35,000 people during the war and was liberated by the Yugoslav Partisans in 1944. More than 10,000 people are thought to have been killed at the camp. After the war, a memorial to the victims of the camp was erected on Mount Bubanj, where many inmates were shot. A memorial museum was opened on the former campgrounds in 1967 and in 1979 the campgrounds were declared a Cultural Monument of Exceptional Importance and came under the protection of the Socialist Republic of Serbia.
The history of the Jews in North Macedonia stretches back two thousand years, beginning during Roman antiquity, when Jews first arrived in the region. Today, following the Holocaust and emigration, especially to Israel, around 200 Jews remain in North Macedonia, mostly in the capital, Skopje and a few in Štip and Bitola.
The history of the Jews in Serbia is some two thousand years old. The Jews first arrived in the region during Roman times. The Jewish communities of the Balkans remained small until the late 15th century, when Jews fleeing the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions found refuge in the Ottoman-ruled areas, including Serbia.
The Topovske Šupe concentration camp was a concentration camp located on the outskirts of Belgrade which was operated by Nazi Germany with the help of Milan Nedić's quisling government during World War II. Located in the neighborhood of Autokomanda, on the site of an old military base, the camp held between 5,000 and 6,500 inmates from its establishment in August 1941 until its closure that December. About 4,300 inmates were killed during its operation, of whom 3,000 were killed as hostages and 1,300 as suspected anti-fascists.
The diplomatic relations between Israel and Serbia were established on January 31, 1992, when Serbia was part of FR Yugoslavia. Israel has an embassy in Belgrade and Serbia had one in Tel Aviv. Yugoslavia was the second country in Europe to recognize Israel in 1948. The two countries have economic and cultural ties, helped by a sizable community of Jews from the former Yugoslavia in Israel. Serbia agreed to move its embassy to Jerusalem on 4 September 2020 but decided not to after Israeli recognition of Kosovo as a sovereign state, something Serbia disputes.
Xhafer Deva was a fascist Kosovo Albanian politician during World War II. A notable local politician in Kosovo and in Axis-occupied Albania, he took charge of German-occupied Mitrovica and worked with the Germans to establish a pro-German Albanian government in Kosovo. Following the capitulation of Italy from the war, he helped form a provisional government under German occupation and set up the Second League of Prizren alongside other Albanian nationalists.
The Holocaust in the Independent State of Croatia involved the genocide of Jews, Serbs and Romani within the Independent State of Croatia, a fascist puppet state that existed during World War II, led by the Ustaše regime, which ruled an occupied area of Yugoslavia including most of the territory of modern-day Croatia, the whole of modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina and the eastern part of Syrmia (Serbia). Of the 39,000 Jews who lived in the NDH in 1941, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum states that more than 30,000 were murdered. Of these, 6,200 were shipped to Nazi Germany and the rest of them were murdered in the NDH, the vast majority in Ustaše-run concentration camps, such as Jasenovac. The Ustaše were the only quisling forces in Yugoslavia who operated their own extermination camps for the purpose of murdering Jews and members of other ethnic groups.
The Holocaust in German-occupied Serbia was part of the European-wide Holocaust, the Nazi genocide against Jews during World War II, which occurred in the Territory of the Military Commander in Serbia, the military administration of the Third Reich established after the April 1941 invasion of Yugoslavia. The crimes were primarily committed by the German occupation authorities who implemented Nazi racial policies, assisted by the collaborationist forces of the successive puppet governments established by the Germans in the occupied territory.
The Holocaust in Albania consisted of crimes committed against Jews in Albania while Albania was under Italian and German occupation during World War II. Throughout the war, nearly 2,000 Jews sought refuge in Albania-proper. Most of these Jewish refugees were treated well by the local population, despite the fact that Albania-proper was occupied first by Fascist Italy, and then by Nazi Germany. Albanians often sheltered Jewish refugees in mountain villages and transported them to Adriatic ports from where they fled to Italy. Other Jews joined resistance movements throughout the country.
Ferhat Bey Draga (1880–1944) was a noted Kosovo Albanian politician during the Balkan Wars and World War I and Axis collaborator during World War II.
The Kladovo Transport was an illegal Jewish refugee transport, started on November 25, 1939, in Vienna, the aim of which was to flee to Eretz Israel. As a result of an early freeze of the Danube, the refugees in the Yugoslav river-port of Kladovo had to overwinter. As 1940 progressed, they waited in vain for a sea-going vessel to continue their journey. In 1941, they had to move to the port of Šabac on the Sava, where they were caught by the Nazis. Only about 200 young people and a few adults could be saved or escaped on their own. The men of the transport were shot on 12 and 13 October by units of the Wehrmacht on the orders of General Franz Böhme. In early January 1942, the women were transferred to Sajmište concentration camp, where they were murdered between 19 March and 10 May 1942 in a gas van, by order of Herbert Andorfer.
Ljubica Štefan (1921–2002) was a Croatian historian. She was awarded honorific title Righteous Among the Nations.
Balkan Jews refers to Jews who live or lived in the Balkans.
Israel–Yugoslavia relations were historical foreign relations between Israel and now split-up Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Positive initial relations between the two states were subsequently negatively affected by the Arab–Israeli conflict and close relations between Yugoslavia and some Arab states, particularly Yugoslav relations with Egypt. Despite cancelation of the formal relations after the Six-Day War informal, commercial and cultural exchanges continued throughout the Cold War period.
Mirjana Lehner Dragić is a Serbian painter.
