BOMBING OF BELGRADE

On Palm Sunday, April 6th, 1941, the mighty Wehrmacht plunged into the Balkans. Advancing from Romania, the first German ground troops drove through rough terrains towards Belgrade, followed by tank divisions and infantry, in a coordinated attack with Italian and Hungarian forces. Undeterred by unfavorable weather conditions, the German motorized equipment surpassed all expectations, slicing through treacherous mountain roads with amazing speed. In that early morning hour the streets of Belgrade were still dark. Visitors and villagers from the countryside swarmed through the streets to celebrate their religious holiday. Dark browed Serbian farmers and their wives, in bright embroidered clothes, strolled on the sidewalks; small groups huddled together in front of shop windows, laughing and whispering among themselves. Sitting behind rickety tables at Terazije square, the very heart of the city, local artists waved at dozens of horse drawn carts, filled with peasants wrapped in thick fur jackets. There were smiles and laughter all over the square, when suddenly the festive atmosphere was shattered by the wailing of air raid sirens and people screaming. The roar of 400 hundred German bombers and 200 fighter planes rolled like thunder across the skies, on the way to Belgrade, flying from air bases in Hungary, Austria, Bulgaria, and Romania. Operation Punishment was under way. It was six-forty on that Sunday morning. In a small house on the Slaviya hill of Belgrade a Cossack servant walked into a living room and placed a breakfast tray in front of a radio. Sitting next to it was Ruth Mitchell, a tall red haired American

photographer, on assignment for a British publication in Belgrade. She began to pour her tea, when the chirping sound of her shortwave radio became louder. An emergency signal interrupted the broadcast. Leaning over the table, she closed her eyes in fear when the urgent voice of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister, crackled like dry sparks: Die Bomben fallen und jetzt in diesem Augenblick steht schon ganz Belgrad in Flammen [ The bombs fall and already now this instant all Belgrade is in flames.] A few minutes later, her body trembled by the roar of a terrifying wind following the explosions, bursting off every door from its hinges. The entire neighborhood began to collapse and smoke poured from rows upon rows of houses.

Fifteen minutes passed and a second wave of bombers tore through the city skies, jolting most of the citizens of Belgrade out of their beds. Mitchell ran out to the street, where she saw men and women pinned beneath piles of stones and burning rubble. Wounded were lying everywhere, powerless to move, weeping in common grief, suffocated by the acrid stench of brick dust and burning wood. Vehicles layed overturned in the streets and charred bodies of adults were glued to the pavement by the heat, shrunken to the size of children. With no time to grieve, survivors removed bodies from the rubble and carried them away, under the shrill screams of air raid sirens. Belgrade was in flames. A reddish-orange glow flickered in the horizon under a cloud of dark smoke rising and twisting over the city. Three blocks away, under the gardens of a nearby park, a bomb shelter for school

children received a direct hit, leaving an enormous gaping hole and uprooted trees. Staggering around fallen trees, suffocated by the smoke and dust, mourning mothers and fathers desperately collected small parts of human bodies from their branches. The attack persisted for four days, with the unrelenting thud of bombs and crumbling of buildings. After 516 individual missions, the city was ravaged. Eighty percent of the residential areas and ninety percent of the industries and infrastructure were decimated. Twenty four thousand corpses were taken away to the local cemeteries, while the rest lie buried under the ruins. The collapse of Yugoslavia was more than a military defeat. The original idea of a unified political entity for the south Slavs would never recover from such catastrophe. Thousands of Belgrades 370000 citizens were burned alive or asphyxiated, as the fire consumed the citys oxygen. Spearheaded by coordinated efforts of the Luftwaffe and Panzer units, the fast advancing German war machine broke the defenseless Yugoslav resistance with relentless speed. The lack of fighting spirit among many ethnically divided units of the Yugoslav army was decisive. Yugoslavia's collapse was swift. The thirty divisions of the Royal Yugoslav Army were not equipped or prepared to meet the overwhelming power of the fifty-two invading German, Italian and Hungarian divisions, plus the Bulgarian forces that had attacked Macedonia. On April 12, an SS patrol led by Commander Fritz Klingenberg entered Belgrade on foot, and hoisted a Nazi flag atop the German legation.

At 18:30 pm, after receiving an order demanding his presence, the terrified mayor of Belgrade handed over the keys of the city to a smiling Klingenberg. Within 11 days the country was occupied and the Yugoslav High Command surrendered. The king and surviving members of the government were flown to Athens. By taking such exceptional revenge on Yugoslavia for its defiance, without a declaration of war, the Germans savagely tore apart what the Treaty of Versailles had once united into a single nation. Belgrade, once a beautiful center of culture and history, was reduced to rubble, after 360 tons of bombs descended on it. The weak Yugoslav air force, and the inadequate flak defenses were wiped out by the first wave of attack, permitting the dive bombers to raid the city at rooftop levels. An Air Force Captain, Vladimir Kren, secretly flew his aircraft to Graz, Austria, as early as April 3, 1941, and handed to the Germans classified defense plans and maps of secret Yugoslav airfields dispersed in the mountains of Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia. With his help, in a few hours, the entire Yugoslav air force was decimated. Kren was later rewarded for his actions and promoted as head of Pavelic air force. The ill-prepared Yugoslav forces capitulated within twelve days and Royal Yugoslavia ceased to exist. Standing in sinister prominence among them all, the Ustasha also conducted a fierce fight in the rear of Yugoslav army units. By creating widespread disorganization, they enabled the swift Nazi conquest of Yugoslavia. Numerous cultural institutions were destroyed, including the Serbian National Library, which contained 300 000 precious manuscripts and books from the

medieval period. As the Yugoslav army faced the blows of the invading German Wehrmacht, they were simultaneously stabbed in the back by Ustashi terrorist detachments, which, under the direct leadership of many Roman Catholic priests, destroyed communication lines, and disarmed isolated Army units. The captured Serbian officers and soldiers were handed over to the Germans and sent to concentration camps, where they were executed. Many Croats, blinded by chauvinism, eagerly enlisted in the service of the invading armies, possessed by a hysterical rage of murder and sadism. The German occupation was ruthless. Serbian civilians were randomly rounded up, shot, or hanged from lamp posts in a sweeping campaign of terror. The first execution occurred in the streets of Belgrade. A Jewish store owner, watching the German troops marching by, ran to the front of the store and shouted: You will never destroy us. You will destroy yourselves. Before he could shout again, his body fell to the ground, pierced by a single bullet. While an estimated 30000 eventually died during and after the Luftwaffe bombing of Belgrade, Zagreb and the entire Croatia were left untouched by the Germans. Belgrade was still burning when jubilant crowds at Jelacic Square cheered, as German tanks rolled into an untouched Zagreb, for a heroes welcome. Public support for Nazism in Croatia had been promoted long before, as early as 1939, through the official Church publication "Katholicki List", praising "Mein Kampf",and also, adding that there was no conflict between being a good Catholic

a good Nazi supporter. From his room at Hotel Kaiserhof, in Berlin, Andrija Arturovik, the impending Interior Minister of the NDH, called on Croats to kill Serbs, as bombs rained over Belgrade. In their war of conquest of 16 million Yugoslavs, the Germans only lost 151 of their soldiers, with 407 wounded or missing. Hitler achieved his revenge against the defiant government of Yugoslavia, but at high price - the German campaign in the Balkans forced the Nazis to postpone their planned attack against Russia by four full weeks. Due to the delay, deep snow and freezing temperatures paralyzed the German army and allowed the Russians to position themselves to stop the invaders. Ante Pavelic's long awaited dream came true, but only as a windfall. He suddenly found himself at the center of a rapid and turbulent chain of events. His knobby face and insulting eyes carried a fierce determination, and there were no limits to his ruthlessness. After the Yugoslav Army capitulated on April 17th, 1941, the country was partitioned. Serbia would remain under German occupation. The Ustashe, favored by the invading forces, took advantage of their status and mobilized to create the Nezavina Drzava Hzvatika, NDH, the acronym for the Independent State of Croatia. Even before entering Yugoslavia the Ustasha were aware that they had no popular support, and could only stay in power through a massive campaign of terror.

As the awesome power of the German Wehrmacht overtook the country, two separate groups of Serbian nationalists scattered into the rugged mountainous landscape, ready to defy their invaders. The Chetnniks, led by General Draza Mihailovich,were loyal to the traditional principles of the old monarchy, family values, and private property.The other resistance group, the Partisans, were led by the Croat Josip Broz, the guerrilla leader known as Tito. The Partisans were a communist faction, bent on liberating Yugoslavia and establishing a communist state.The Chetniks, in contrast to the Partisans, lacked centralized leadership. This bipolar resistance force against the Germans set the stage for yet another intercine war that would reverberate for years. The Germans would soon discover that, despite the cessation of hostilities, many areas of Yugoslavia were far from pacified ; the fighting spirit of the Yugoslav people would be revealed during the ensuing years. The Third Reich's true war for that land was only beginning. Operating from mountain sanctuaries, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes and other groups unified their efforts to plague the occupying German and Italian forces. On the other hand, Nazi-sympathizers organized themselves into mobs, convinced that the Serbs dragged them into an unwanted war. They started to destroy their businesses, buildings and homes. The Serbs, Jews and Roma realized that their own worst enemy had for long been within their borders, living next to them and planning their destruction. Hitlers invasion only opened their gates.