Memorial to the Victims of Nazism at the Jewish Cemetery of Belgrade
Spomenik žrtvama nacizma na Jevrejskom groblju
A memorial on the Jewish cemetery in Belgrade has since the beginning of the 1950s commemorated the over 9,000 Belgrade Jews who were murdered by the German Wehrmacht or SS or deported to concentration camps from 1941 on.
History
The Serbian capital Belgrade was home to over 9,000 Jews in 1941. In April 1941, the German Wehrmacht and its allies conquered Yugoslavia. The country was divided among the invaders, and German units occupied the Serbian heartland. Immediately, they began taking measures against the Jewish population: Jews were excluded from public life, they were registered and forced to wear a badge on their clothes. In the summer of 1941, when resistance against the Wehrmacht formed, the Germans decided to take »retributive actions« against the Jews: For each killed German soldier, the Germans killed 100 Serbian men; for each wounded soldier, 50 Serbs were shot. The occupiers mostly chose Jewish men as victims of their »retribution«. Jewish women and children were initially spared. However, in the winter of 1941 they were deported to various camps, first and foremost to the Sajmište concentration camp at the Belgrade trade fair grounds (German: »Judenlager Semlin«). At the beginning of 1942, the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) deployed a gas van to Belgrade. The Germans murdered about 6,500 prisoners of the Sajmište camp with motor fumes. Most of the victims were Jewish women and children. In the summer of 1942, the Belgrade commander of the security police and security service Schäfer sent the following report to his superiors at the RSHA in Berlin: »Serbia is free of Jews«.
Victims
Only few of the over 9,000 Belgrade Jews survived. Before the war, Serbia was home to about 12,500 Jews; all but 2,000 of the Jewish men, women and children were murdered by German units.
After the First World War, the Kingdom of Serbia became part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. In 1929, King Alexander I (1888–1934) from the Serbian Karađorđević dynasty established a dictatorship with the overall support of Serbian officers. The state was now known as Yugoslavia. In April 1941, it was occupied by German troops and their Italian, Hungarian and Bulgarian allies and split into a number of annexed and occupied territories serving as puppet states of the Nazi regime.
The Bačka region of Serbia was occupied by Hungary and southern Serbia by Bulgaria, with the remaining Serbian territory falling under German occupation. The resistance was led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (partisans) and the royalist Serbian militia (Chetniks) led by General Dragoljub Mihailović (1893–1946); there was also fighting between these two groups. From autumn 1941, the German military administration extended its campaign against these underground groups by launching a full-scale war against the civilian population. A hundred Serbs were to be killed for every murdered German soldier and fifty for every wounded German soldier. Within a few weeks, Wehrmacht soldiers had killed nearly all of the Jewish men and thousands of male Roma in these »reprisal measures«. The communist resistance in Serbia was also destroyed or driven out, with the result that the Chetniks now fought alone against the enemy regime.
The Red Army entered Serbia in October 1944, closely followed by units of the »People’s Liberation Army« led by Marshal Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980). Serbia became one of the six states in the new Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. As the communist leader of Yugoslavia, Tito had tens of thousands of former opponents and civilians – including Chetniks – persecuted and murdered. State commemoration of the Second World War focused on the partisan campaign. Monuments to the partisans were put up all over the country, also at the sites of mass shootings of civilians such as Kragujevac. At the same time, Tito used national commemoration to bridge the differences between the various ethnic groups in Yugoslavia as well as between different forms of resistance, terror and collaboration. The memorialization of the victims of the Holocaust and the mass murder of Roma is still incomplete.
After the death of Tito, and especially under the regime of President Slobodan Milošević (1941–2006) between 1989 and 2000, the »Croat« Tito fell out of favour in Serbian memory. Monuments dedicated to Tito and his communist partisans were removed and streets were renamed. Instead, there was a strong revival of support for the royalist Chetniks and their leader Mihailović, who had been shunned since 1944-45. In summer 1991, whilst the break-up of Yugoslavia was still underway, the Serb-dominated Yugoslavian People’s Army launched a war against Croatia, which was to last until th e end of 1995. During this war, the Croatian memorial site at Jasenovac was occupied and badly damaged by Serbian troops and the museum was looted. January 2009 saw the first Serb-organised seminar on the history of the Holocaust. This event was held in conjunction with a commemoration at which Christians and Jews remembered the massacre of at least 3,775 Jews, Roma and Serbs by Hungarian units in Novi Sad at the end of January 1942.
The most important historical site of the Holocaust in Serbia is the former fairgrounds Sajmište in Belgrade, where up to 7,500 Jews had been murdered in 1942 and later the »Anhaltelager Semlin« had its premises. In 2020, Serbian parliament voted to create an adequate memorial site on the decrepit compound.
Remembrance
At the beginning of the 1950s Belgrade-based architect Bogdan Bogdanović was commissioned by the Jewish community with designing a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, to be erected on the Sephardic Jewish cemetery. The approximately 10-metre high »Memorial to the Jewish Victims of Fascism« was dedicated on the cemetery in 1952. Each wing bears a Hebrew quote and a Star of David, and located between the wings is the sculpture of a menorah. The memorial on the Jewish cemetery of Belgrade was one of the first and at the same time one of the few memorials honouring the Jewish victims of the Holocaust to be erected in communist Yugoslavia. The remembrance culture in Yugoslavia was until the 1990s centred around commemorating the partisan struggle and honouring communist resistance fighters.
