Milan Nedić

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Milan Nedić
September 2, 1878 – 1946
Place of birth	Grocka, Kingdom of Serbia
Place of death	Belgrade, Yugoslavia
Years of service	37
Rank	General

Milan Nedić Serbian Cyrillic Милан Недић (September 2, 1878 – 1946) was a Serbian soldier and politician who led a puppet government in the German-occupied Serbia during World War II which was popularly known as Nedić's Serbia or officially as Government of National Salvation (Влада Националног Спаса, tr.Vlada Nacionalnog Spasa).

Nedić was born in Grocka, Kingdom of Serbia. He finished the gymnasium in Kragujevac and entered the lower level of the Military Academy in 1895. In 1904 he completed the upper level of the Academy, then the General Staff Preparatory, and enlisted into the Army.

He was promoted to the rank of major in 1910. He served during the Balkan Wars and received a number of decorations and medals for bravery. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1913.

During World War I, in 1915 he was promoted to colonel and served in the general staff as the youngest colonel in the Serbian Army. During the Serbian retreat through Montenegro and Albania in November 1915 through January 1916, his troops provided cover. He was appointed the ordinance officer of King Peter I of Serbia in 1916. In September 1918, he commanded the Infantry Brigade of the Timok Division when they made a break at Thessaloniki.

After the war, he continued as the commander of the Infantry Brigade, before he was made the staff commander of the 4th and 3rd Army Oblast as well as the commander of the Drava Division Oblast. He was made division general in 1923 and finally army general in 1930. Between 1934 and 1935, he commanded of the General Staff of the Yugoslav Army.

In 1939 he was made the Minister of Army and Navy in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, but because of his open alignment with Adolf Hitler's Germany, he was dismissed on November 6, 1940 by regent Paul. On April 28, 1941, the Yugoslav government declared him to be responsible for the breakup of Yugoslav defences in Macedonia during the Axis invasion.

The Wehrmacht commander Heinrich Danckelmann decided to entrust Nedić with the administration of German-occupied Serbia after he was put forth by the Serbian aristocracy. Not long ago, Nedić had lost his only son and pregnant daughter in law in a munition explosion in Smederevo, but he accepted the post of the prime minister in the puppet government, dubbed "Government of National Salvation", on August 29, 1941.

On September 1, 1941, Nedić made a speech on Radio Belgrade where he declared the intent of his administration to "save the core of the Serbian people" by accepting the occupation and working with the Germans. He also spoke against organizing resistance against the occuping forces. Together with Dimitrije Ljotić, Nedić managed to pacify Serbia and drive out the communist Partisan forces and those Chetniks who would not agree to collaborate with the Germans.

Serbian government under Nedić accepted many refugees mostly of Serbian descent, but also many Slovenes, including Milan Kucan who was a child at the time. Around 600,000 adults and 86,000 Serbian children from the western parts of Yugoslavia controlled by the collaborationist NDH regime (in present-day Croatia and Bosnia), as well as 150,000 Serbs from Kosovo and Metohia, tens of thousands of Serbs from Srem and Bačka (the latter controlled by Hungary), and 20-30,000 Slovenes and Croats.

During the war, over 200,000 people died in Serbia of war-related causes: 67,000 Partisan fighers, 70,000 people in German concentration camps and in German reprisals, that demanded 100 killed Serbs for one killed German soldier, like Kragujevac massacre, and 69,000 Chetniks. In August 1942, Germans proclaimed Serbia Judenfrei. According to Nikola Živković, during the Nedić administration in WWII, 6,478 libraries, 1,670 schools, 30 colleges, 19 museums, 7 theatres, 52 Orthodox churches and monasteries, 216 mosques, 63 sinagogues and over 60 miscellaneous scholarly institutions were destroyed or pillaged.

On October 4, 1944, Nedić's government was disbanded. On October 6, he escaped from Belgrade to Kitzbühel, Austria together with much of his government ministers. On January 1, 1946, the British forces handed him over to the Yugoslav forces.

He was incarcerated in Belgrade, and regularly interrogated by major Milo Milatović. On February 5, the newspapers ran the news that Milan Nedić committed suicide by jumping out of a window while the guards weren't looking.