Nazi hunter: Nedic's rehabilitation insult to Nazis' victims

Nazi hunter: Nedic's rehabilitation insult to Nazis' victims

Last week's news from Belgrade was shocking, but not surprising. Given the developments in other countries in post-Communist Eastern Europe, the decision by a Belgrade appeals court to start rehabilitating Serbian Nazi collaborator Milan Nedic fits into the ongoing pattern of World War II and Holocaust distortion that has flourished in recent years throughout the region, and especially in the Baltics and Hungary, almost unchallenged.

These efforts seek to rewrite the history of the period from 1939-1945 in order to hide or at least minimize, the crimes of local Nazi collaborators and promote the canard of equivalency between Nazi and Communist crimes. In view of the fact that the Nazis' helpers in this region were in many cases active participants in the mass murder of the Jews (unlike the role played by those who collaborated with the Third Reich elsewhere in Europe, whose involvement in implementing the Final Solution ended at the local train stations and was therefore accessory to murder but not mass murder), the attempts to whitewash the role of those who actively facilitated and/or participated the annihilation of the Jews is particularly outrageous and should be opposed by all available legal means.

In order to fully understand why last week's decision was so terrible, all one has to do is summarize the role played by Milan Nedic during his tenure as Prime Minister of the puppet Government of National Salvation, from its establishment by the Nazis on August 29, 1941, until it was disbanded on October 4, 1944 in the wake of the success of Tito's partisans in the armed struggle against the Germans. In a speech on Radio Belgrade on September 1, a mere three days after being installed by the Nazis as Prime Minister, Nedic justified his acceptance of the post by declaring that his intention was to save "the core of the Serbian people." He also publicly called upon the population not to oppose the Germans and/or organize any resistance to the occupation because of the harsh policy instituted by the Nazis who threatened to kill 50 Serbs for any German wounded and 100 Serbs for any German soldier killed.

If Nedic had any illusions that he could influence German policy regarding Serbia, and Serbian Jewry, he should have realized long before his Quisling government was disbanded, that he was virtually powerless and was merely a puppet of the Nazis and completely at their mercy. Thus during his tenure, 300,000 Serbs were murdered, including 80,000 in concentration camps, and the mass murder of the Jews of Serbia, as well as a group of 1,150 Jewish refugees who set out from Austria to Palestine and were stranded in Kladovo due to freezing over of the Danube, was initiated with horrific results. From August 1941 until May 1942, 14,500 of the approximately 16,000 Jews living in Serbia were murdered, along with all the 1,150 Jewish refugees who had been stranded in Kladovo. About half of these victims were murdered in gas vans used at the Sajmiste concentration camp on the outskirts of Belgrade.

Nedic's role as Prime Minister of a Quisling regime which served the interests of the Third Reich is sufficient reason to deny him rehabilitation. His failure to save Serbs and Jews is clear proof that for whatever reason, he made a terrible mistake by agreeing to head a puppet administration that failed the citizens of Serbia. He clearly does not deserve rehabilitation, and any such step will be a grave insult to the Nazis' victims in Serbia, as well to the memory of those who bravely fought against the Nazi regime and sacrificed their lives to free their country from the yoke of the Third Reich, the most genocidal regime in human history.