Zero Mercy: When 2,300 SS Collaborators Met Yugoslav Justice JJ

April 1941, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Germany and its Axis allies invade the country, overwhelming the Royal Yugoslav  Army in a matter of days. In Serbia, one of the most important parts of the occupied  kingdom, the new authorities soon find willing collaborators among the followers of ZBOR, a  small fascist movement that has spent years promoting authoritarian rule, antisemitism  and close relations with Nazi Germany.

The German occupation transforms ZBOR from  a marginal political movement into an active collaborator. Thousands of its followers  eventually serve in the Serbian Volunteer Corps and alongside German forces fight the  Communist Partisans led by Josip Broz Tito. Others assist in tracking down Jews who have escaped  capture, drawing the movement ever deeper into collaboration with the Nazi occupation regime.

 But by 1945, Nazi Germany is collapsing, and ZBOR’s followers are retreating westward.  Many eventually surrender to the British, believing they have escaped the  advancing Partisans. Instead, thousands will be returned to Yugoslavia  and handed over to the very forces they have spent years fighting. For many,  there will be no escape a second time.

The Yugoslav National Movement, better known as  ZBOR, was founded in Belgrade on 6 January 1935 through the merger of several smaller nationalist  and far-right organizations. At its head stood Dimitrije Ljotić, a Serbian politician and  former Yugoslav Minister of Justice who rejected parliamentary democracy and wanted to replace it  with a centrally organized authoritarian state.

Another prominent member was  Velibor Jonić, who served as ZBOR’s secretary-general during its early years. ZBOR presented Christianity, traditional values and corporatism as the foundations of  this order. Ljotić spoke of uniting Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in a common Yugoslav state,  but he envisioned Serbia as the dominant force.

The movement was fiercely anti-communist  and xenophobic, and ZBOR became the only political party in Yugoslavia to openly  promote antisemitism. One German observer described it as a kind of National Socialist  party, built around opposition to Jews, Freemasons, communists and Western capitalism.

 Yet these ideas found little support among ordinary Serbs. ZBOR never had more  than around 10,000 active members, and its attempts to gain power through elections  ended in failure. Ljotić’s open sympathy for Nazi Germany only made him more unpopular in a country  where anti-German feeling remained widespread. What ZBOR lacked in domestic support,  however, it increasingly found abroad.

German industrial companies and intelligence  services provided the movement with money, strengthening a relationship with Nazi Germany  that would become increasingly important. When the Second World War began in September 1939,  Ljotić publicly supported Yugoslav neutrality. At the same time, he argued that the country’s  foreign policy should be oriented toward Berlin. By then, German influence inside  ZBOR extended even further.

 The movement had been infiltrated by the SS, the Gestapo,  the Nazi secret state police, and the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence service. During 1940, the movement became increasingly violent. Clashes with communist youth helped  fuel the growth of ZBOR’s student wing, known as the White Eagles.

 On 23 October, its members  gathered at the University of Belgrade armed with pistols and knives. Students and faculty  were threatened, several people were stabbed, and the attackers praised Adolf Hitler and Benito  Mussolini while shouting antisemitic slogans. The violence caused outrage across Serbia. The  following day, the Yugoslav government banned ZBOR and subsequently detained several hundred of its  members.

 Ljotić went into hiding and a government investigation concluded that his movement had  committed high treason by accepting German money. Yet the authorities stopped short of arresting  Ljotić himself, fearing the reaction from Berlin. By early 1941, ZBOR had been  driven underground. But the German invasion of Yugoslavia was only  months away, and ZBOR’s ties to Berlin were about to place its followers  in an entirely different position.

On 6 April 1941, Nazi Germany and  its Axis allies invaded Yugoslavia. The country capitulated just 11 days later,  and Serbia came under direct German military occupation. For ZBOR, the collapse of the  Yugoslav state completely transformed its position.

 A movement that had been outlawed  only months earlier could now operate under the protection of the occupying power. Ljotić emerged from hiding, and ZBOR members soon became involved in the  new collaborationist administration. This is where the work of our team of historians, researchers and editors  becomes the story you hear. I’m Marchand Steenkamp and since 2022,  I’ve had the privilege of being the voice behind World History.

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Now, let’s get into today’s story. On 30 April 1941, the Germans established a  Commissioner Government headed by Milan Aćimović, a former Yugoslav interior minister. Ljotić was  offered the position of economic commissioner but declined, partly because he was deeply  unpopular among Serbs and did not want to play a secondary role.

 In August, the Germans  replaced Aćimović’s administration with the Government of National Salvation, headed  by former Yugoslav general Milan Nedić. ZBOR also became increasingly involved in  propaganda. In October, the movement helped organize the Grand Anti-Masonic Exhibition in  Belgrade with German financial support. Through photographs, posters and other displays, the  exhibition promoted the conspiracy theory that Jews, Freemasons and communists were secretly  working together to achieve world domination.

But propaganda was only one part of ZBOR’s new  role. As armed resistance against the occupation spread across Serbia, the movement’s followers  would soon be given weapons of their own. By the summer of 1941, armed resistance to the  German occupation was spreading rapidly across Serbia.

 Both the communist Partisans and the  royalist Chetniks were attacking German forces, and the occupation authorities increasingly  turned to local collaborators for help. In September, ZBOR members formed the  core of a new armed formation known as the Serbian Volunteer Detachments. Command  was eventually given to Konstantin Mušicki, a former colonel in the Royal Yugoslav Army and a  committed supporter of Ljotić.

 The volunteers were overwhelmingly anti-communist, and their principal  task was to fight the Partisans alongside German and other collaborationist forces. Although closely associated with Ljotić and ZBOR, the formation operated under German  supervision. It was supplied with weapons and equipment by the occupation authorities and  gradually expanded as the fighting intensified.

The detachments were later reorganized  as the Serbian Volunteer Corps, or SDK. The armed formation remained closely connected to  ZBOR, whose members would soon play a role in one of the most notorious atrocities of the German  occupation of Serbia: the Kragujevac massacre. In October 1941, German commanders launched  brutal reprisals after resistance fighters killed 10 German soldiers and wounded 26.

  Thousands of civilians were subsequently rounded up in and around the city of Kragujevac.  Among those detained were workers, teachers, schoolchildren, Jews, Roma and men  seized from their homes and workplaces. ZBOR members were allowed to inspect the  prisoners, after which more than 3,000 detainees identified as supporters of the movement or  considered politically reliable were removed from the execution lists.

 Those who remained were  marched to fields outside the city on 21 October, where German troops from the 717th  Infantry Division opened fire. By the time the massacre was over, nearly  2,800 men and boys had been murdered. Over the following years, the Serbian volunteers  became an increasingly important part of the German campaign against the resistance.

 The SDK  fought primarily against the Communist Partisans, taking part in operations alongside German  troops and other collaborationist forces. Despite its Serbian leadership, it remained  under close German control and could not conduct major operations independently. Its role also extended beyond the battlefield. SDK members assisted the Gestapo in tracking  down Jews who had escaped earlier arrests and helped send captured Jews to the Banjica  concentration camp in Belgrade.

 As the war continued, the corps expanded considerably,  reaching almost 10,000 personnel in 1944. By the autumn of 1944, Soviet forces were  approaching Serbia from the east, while the Partisans were advancing across the country. In October 1944, Soviet and Partisan forces entered Belgrade, forcing the Germans  and their collaborators into retreat.

Ljotić fled the Serbian capital together  with Milan Nedić and hundreds of officials from the collaborationist administration.  The Serbian Volunteer Corps also withdrew westward with the retreating German forces. By the end of October, Ljotić and much of the SDK had reached the city of Osijek, today  Croatia, and were continuing west toward Slovenia.

 In the following weeks, the corps  reached German-controlled Slovenian territory, where it continued fighting the Partisans  while Ljotić attempted to bring together the various Serbian anti-communist forces for  a final stand against the communist partisans. But the military situation was hopeless. By  the spring of 1945, the Third Reich was only weeks from defeat, and the Partisans were  closing in from the east.

 Ljotić and his remaining followers now looked toward Italy  and Austria, hoping to reach the Western Allies before Tito’s forces could capture them. Dimitrije Ljotić, however, would never make it. On 23 April 1945, while traveling through  Slovenia, he was killed in a car crash. The 53-year-old ZBOR leader died just weeks  before the end of the war in Europe.

His death, however, did nothing to stop  the retreat. With Germany collapsing, the surviving members of the Serbian Volunteer  Corps continued toward Italy and Austria, where they hoped to surrender to British  forces rather than fall into Partisan hands. For many, reaching the British appeared to offer a way out. But surrender would not  bring the safety they expected.

In the final weeks of the war, thousands of  SDK members crossed into Italy and Austria and surrendered to British forces. Some of those who  surrendered in Italy remained in Allied custody and eventually emigrated to Western countries.  For those who reached Austria, however, the escape from Yugoslavia had only been temporary.  They were handed over to Tito’s Partisans.

Thousands were returned across the border,  and large numbers were executed without trial. It is estimated that between 2,100 and 2,300  SDK members were executed in May 1945, with some killed in the forests of Kočevski Rog in Slovenia,  where their bodies were buried in mass graves. Other leading collaborators met different fates.

 Milan Aćimović, who had headed the first collaborationist administration in German-occupied  Serbia, joined the Chetniks of Draža Mihailović during the final months of the war and was killed  while retreating from the Partisans in May 1945. Milan Nedić, who had subsequently headed  the Government of National Salvation, was captured by the British and handed over to  Yugoslavia.

 He died in custody in Belgrade on 4 February 1946 after falling from a window, though  the circumstances of his death remain disputed. Kosta Mušicki, the commander of the Serbian  Volunteer Corps, was also taken into British custody and subsequently transferred to Yugoslav  authorities. In 1946, he was brought before a military court in Belgrade and sentenced to death.

 Velibor Jonić, who had served as education minister in Nedić’s government, stood trial  alongside him. Both were executed on 17 July 1946. By the end of the war, ZBOR had effectively  ceased to exist. Its leader was dead, several other prominent figures associated  with the movement faced post-war trials, and thousands of its armed followers had  been killed or captured.

 The human cost of the occupation had been enormous. Around  1 million people had lost their lives across Yugoslavia. Among them were more than 67,000 Jews  killed by Nazi Germany and its Axis partners. In Serbia alone, of the approximately  17,200 Jews who had lived there before the Second World War, around 88 percent  were murdered during the Holocaust.

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