The German Occupation Regimes in Southeastern Europe as a Research Problem in Yugoslav and Serbian Historiography

Research before 1990

The place in historiography given to the wartime experience of occupation, with all its complex effects on the Yugoslav and, for its part, Serbian postwar social and political realities, has been scarcely satisfactory, considering its significance. During the war the Yugoslav territory was divided among four occupying forces, in an arrangement settled during the Vienna negotiations of 21-22 April 1941. The wartime circumstances were further complicated by the influence of events like the capitulation of Italy, the expansion of the Bulgarian occupation zone, and military administrative control of the Serbian territories by the Germans—all of which changed the patterns of occupation.

After the war’s end, that would become a serious challenge for historians. During the course of the war Serbia within its current borders was divided into as many as five different territories and occupation systems.^[1] Parts of the occupied territory changed status during the war; in the cases of the two Slovenian northern provinces, Carinthia and Styria, they were destined to be fully annexed. Within the German occupied territory there were collaborationist local administrations; but from the summer of 1941 onwards a strong armed rebellion movement began operations, and then from autumn 1941 an internal civil war was waged simultaneously with counterinsurgency groups reacting to the rebels’ efforts. As a result there grew up deep and long-lasting political and ideological divisions.

After 1945 the new communist authorities made reference to the wartime experience and the legitimacy of the revolution. They linked it to the winning of the war, and that inevitably led to the establishment of an ‘official history’, a history which naturally enough included the occupation. The interpretations of the 1941-1945 war that were established during the time of socialism in Yugoslavia have had lasting effects which have not been overcome today, more than twenty-five years after Yugoslavia ceased to exist. After Yugoslavia’s breakup there occurred a paradigm shift. The history of the Second World War has been ‘nationalised’, meaning that it was subjected to the influence of a national(ist) focus on history narrowly understood, all too-often with self-victimizing implications. Despite their regional characteristics and emphases on their own priorities with regard to research agendas, the historiographies of the Yugoslav socialist republics had been parts of the whole of Yugoslav historiography—albeit never sufficiently interconnected. Today, they have become strictly national, ‘state’, historiographies. It was expected, if not demanded, that scholars give ‘historical legitimacy’ to the now independent post-Yugoslav states, in a process that presupposed detachment from the historical idea of Yugoslavism and from any notion of a collective Yugoslav history. Such limitation of the research horizons of every historiography of Yugoslavia’s successor states had the unavoidable effect of concomitant loss of interest in any research that might cover the entire Yugoslav territory, let alone other parts of Southeastern Europe, or beyond. Along with other matters concerning the general phenomenon of ‘historical revisionism’, the already sporadic engagement in research looking beyond Yugoslav or national boundaries almost became a ‘historiographical incident’.

Historiographical examination of the German occupation policies in Yugoslavia and in fact in all of Southeastern Europe produced only partially satisfactory results. Historians in socialist Yugoslavia focused on and asked questions about those topics which could provide grounds for turning the so-called ‘national liberation struggle and revolution’ into a state-legitimizing matter. The history of the partisan movement became the key part of the ideological and political-historical legitimacy of the new Yugoslav society, and studying its history was imposed as an educational priority. However, in spite of the focus on topics pertaining to the Second World War the development of a new research field— the contemporary history of Yugoslavia—was neither swift nor uniform. The first Department of the History of Yugoslavia was established only in 1976, at the Faculty of Philosophy at Belgrade University.^[2] In 1969 it had been Belgrade too that had seen the foundation of the Institute of Contemporary History,^[3] and then in 1985 the Department of General Contemporary History was founded in the same Faculty. In its programme it included topics of wider Southeast European contemporary history, and importantly on the history of the workers’ movement and on the wartime experience. Similar foci stood at the centre of the Institute of Contemporary History and of the Institute of Serbia’s Workers’ Movement, which is the oldest of the research institutions established after the war, founded in 1965. Since 1992 it has been called the Institute for the Recent History of Serbia.^[4] In the other republics and in the provinces, the examination of the history of the 1941-1945 war was similarly handed over to institutes studying the workers’ movement, as occurred in Zagreb and Ljubljana; or was included in programmes for the study of national history, as in Skopje and Podgorica.

The fragmentation of the war experience, its frequent removal from its broader Yugoslav, Balkan, and European context and its reduction to a form of local history ensured results that were limited in their scope and overall quality. To be sure, such disintegrated treatment of the phenomenon of occupation was also an effect of the complexity of Yugoslav wartime realities. It was indeed a rather unsurprising response to the numerous occupation systems with their respective ‘subsystems’, and of the ensuing difficulties of encompassing them with historiographical tools. Archival sources exist in various languages both in the formerly occupied territories and in the archives of the former occupation powers.

On the other hand it was precisely the complexity of the ‘Yugoslav case’ which had broad regional repercussions. That was true even if its examination was concerned with consideration of territorially limited occupation regimes, for example central Serbia with the Banat, or the German-occupied parts of Slovenia. That opened the possibility of comparative research of the wartime occupation within a single state—for example, the German, Bulgarian, or Italian occupation zones in Greece and Yugoslavia. Yet such research was conducted very rarely and only in limited form. However, what did happen was a gradual liberation of the historiography from ideological influences, and that was in fact a sign of professional maturation. During the 1960s professional historians took over from the previously predominant war-veterans-turned-military historians. The improvement in quality began in the early 1970s when the study of the Nazi regime’s policies towards Yugoslavia and Southeastern Europe gained new, valuable impulses—at the international level too.

The first serious attempt to examine the entirety of the occupation policies in Yugoslavia using systematic historiographical methods was the edited volume Les systèmes d’occupation en Yougoslavie 1941-1945, collected as a result of the Third International Congress of the History of the European Resistance which took place in the Czechoslovak town of Karlovy Vary in 1963.^[5] The quality of the contributions was uneven, and rather traditional. Conspicuously ideologized subjects prevailed, namely the military organization of the occupation and collaboration systems, the armed resistance of the National Liberation Movement, and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY).^[6] Against that background Jovan Marjanović’s work on the establishment of the German occupation system in Serbia in 1941 stands out for its quality. Marjanović gave a detailed reconstruction of the occupation system, while tracing the changes in its structure during the first year of the war. By doing so he laid the groundwork for a sufficiently scholarly approach to studying German occupation policies in Serbia.^[7] The specific point about the ‘Serbian case’ was the autonomous status of the German minorities, reliable supporters of the occupation system in the Banat about which Sandor Vegh wrote a lengthy study.^[8] Adding to that first collective volume an important monograph on the instrumentalisation of the German minorities in Berlin’s policy on Yugoslavia during 1933-1945 was published by the Slovenian historian Dušan Biber in 1966.^[9] After that, the next decades saw the emergence of a whole new body of literature on Yugoslavia’s ethnic Germans, the Volksdeutsche, during the Second World War.^[10]

Apart from the archival material that was confiscated at the end of the war and placed in the Yugoslav archives, researchers gained access to documents of German and other origin, primarily stored on microfilm at the National Archives in Washington.^[11] Furthermore, during the 1960s and 1970s historians from Yugoslav universities and research institutes travelled to foreign archives to do more systematic research. The specificity of Yugoslavia’s international status enabled those historians to work in archives of both German states, the GDR and the FRG. In fact, the first doctoral dissertation by a Serbian historian on a subject concerning the Second World War and German occupation policies was defended at the Humboldt University of (East) Berlin in 1968.^[12] As part of the Military Archive’s major editorial enterprise, there appeared four volumes of the comprehensive Zbornik dokumenata i podataka o Narodnooslobodilačkom ratu jugoslovenskih naroda (Collection of documents and data about the National Liberation War of the Yugoslav peoples) that contain the documents of the German Reich (Dokumenti nemačkog Rajha 1941-1945) covering the different segments of the German occupation policy.^[13] In the wake of its publication scholars like Živko Avramovski, Vuk Vinaver, and Andrej Mitrović made systematic studies of the German regime’s policies towards Southeastern Europe from 1933 until the end of the Second World War, and published a substantial number of significant studies.^[14]

In 1970 the Croatian historian Ferdo Čulinović published an extensive monograph on the division of Yugoslavia by the occupying forces. His work set a new standard as the most serious and comprehensive attempt to examine the topic until then,^[15] and in his preface he emphasized that ‘in the series of strikes against other states, the axis powers’ fragmentation of Yugoslavia, which began in 1941, holds a special place’. Its specificity, he argued, consisted in the fact that for the purpose of breaking up the state of Yugoslavia the ‘attacking forces […] organized and took advantage of internal collaborative elements’. Parts of the state were turned into ‘administrative territorial units’ that ‘gave them a false notion of statehood’. Utilizing the collaborationist forces and their obsession with the ‘national question’, the occupying powers created a reign of terror that they proceeded to direct at the ‘self-extinction of the people of Yugoslavia’.^[16] That said, Čulinović encompassed the prehistory of the axis powers’ attack on Yugoslavia, an analysis of the causes primarily of German, but also of Italian policies until April 1941 when the Yugoslav territory was divided. Čulinović looked too at the emergence and functioning of the system of occupation during the war, as well as its evolution, which was detrimental. What is more, Čulinović assessed his topic, with all its complex specificities, within the prevailing broader regional Southeast European and overall European context of the war. He based his analysis on a rather broad collection of sources—published and unpublished, national and foreign—as well as on his own sound knowledge of the historiographical literature in numerous European languages. For example, he was one of the Yugoslav historians who researched materials in West German archives, particularly the Political Archive of the German Foreign Ministry, and he used numerous secondary sources as well as works by German historians. He also made critically alert use of the work of Yugoslav emigrant historians, and occasionally took issue with their positions, especially concerning the nature of the so-called ‘Independent State of Croatia’ (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH) and the question of the scope and nature of the support it had among the Croatian people.^[17] While the ideological ‘official line’ is present in his interpretation, it is often reduced to mere ‘window dressing’. Čulinović’s deep analysis of the organization and functioning of the German occupation system in the territories of Slovenia and Serbia, and the influence of Berlin’s policies on the Independent State of Croatia, on Bulgaria, Hungary, and Italy makes his book to a great extent still an important basis for a detailed introduction to the occupation and collaborationist regimes in the Yugoslav territory. The author delves into the most sensitive issues of Yugoslav wartime history, such as the genocidal policy of the Ustasha towards Serbs and Jews in the Independent State of Croatia.

An important and, so far as the results are concerned, qualitative step forward in studying Nazi policies towards Yugoslavia from 1933 until the end of the Second World War was made in 1973 when an international symposium was held in Belgrade.^[18] The results were published a number of years later as an extensive collection of 37 symposium papers in English, French, German, and Italian, the whole volume amounting to close to 800 pages.^[19] Besides work by Yugoslav historians^[20] the volume included studies by German historians ‘from both sides of the wall’, as well as contributions from Italian, French, Soviet, Romanian, Polish, British, and Hungarian historians.^[21] The policy of the Third Reich towards Yugoslavia in the Southeastern context was followed up in all its crucial phases. Not only were Berlin’s political and diplomatic actions examined, but consideration was given to the place of ‘the Southeast’ and of Yugoslavia in German discussions and plans about the ‘supplementary economic area’. Analyses were made too of the role of those visions in the actual German economic advance on the Southeast and, not least, the differences between German and Italian views concerning Yugoslavia. Among the effects of the occupation policies on the status of certain parts of the Yugoslav territory in the complex ‘new order’ that was established, the authors discussed the military occupation regime in Serbia and the reprisals against its population; the denationalizing policy in Slovenian Carinthia and Upper Carniolia; the role of the German national minority; economic exploitation; and the matter of collaboration. Although the individual chapters differ in quality, together they do succeed in conveying a diverse and complex image of the ‘Third Reich’s’ policies and practices in Yugoslavia, and they include hints at the lacunae remaining in the research.

In 1975, Živko Avramovski, who also wrote some shorter studies on the German occupation economy, published a significant study on one of the key strategic economic objects for the German wartime economy in the Balkans, namely the copper mine in Bor.^[22] A few years after Avramovski the military historian Muharem Kreso published Njemačka okupaciona uprava u Beogradu 1941-1944 (The German occupation administration in Belgrade 1941-1944) based on archival material from what was then the ‘Archive of the Military History Institute’, today called the Vojni Arhiv (Millitary Archive), the Istorijski Arhiv Beograda (Historical Archive of Belgrade), and the Arhiv Srbije (Archive of Serbia). Avramovski used editions of foreign and domestic materials as well as extensive secondary literature, and he introduced a number of new elements into the discussion of the German occupation. Apart from a reconstruction of the German occupation apparatus in Serbia and Belgrade, Kreso elaborated on their occupation system in the Balkans, and he followed the changes to that apparatus which were due to the effects of the uprisings. He examined too the policy of retaliation on a grand scale—all until the collapse of the apparatus of occupation in Serbia in the autumn of 1944.^[23] Most interesting is the fourth chapter of Kreso’s book, which focuses on the conditions of life, work, and survival among Belgrade’s inhabitants. Kreso discusses in some detail housing, nutrition, and health conditions, as well as economic, educational, and cultural issues.^[24]

In the same year of 1979 two extensive monographs by Branko Petranović and Milan Borković were published which included discussion of the interdependencies between the occupation policies of the ‘Third Reich’, the emergence of the collaborationist system, and the brutal suppression of resistance with its counter-effect, which was of the spread of armed resistance.^[25] Even though, judging by the terminology used, ideology clearly permeates both books, both are nevertheless still usable—and not only due to their marshalling of facts. Some ten years later Branko Petranović liberated his work from all ideological additives and delivered one of the best historical syntheses of the Second World War in Serbia, along with events in other parts of Yugoslavia and the wider Balkans.^[26]

When it comes to the matter of a systematic examination of the German occupation of parts of the Slovenian lands the most prolific author remains Tone Ferenc. In 1968 Ferenc published a book on the policy of denationalization and Germanification of the Slovenians in Styria and Carinthia that would set the standard for decades.^[27] He continued his research well into the years after Slovenia’s independence. On Ferenc’s death in 2003 his research was effectively continued, when his findings were jointly published between 2006 and 2010 along with the studies of his associates. These are the three thematic books on the occupation systems in Slovenia: ‘Dismemberment and Annexation’; ‘Violence and the Exploitation of Resources’; and ‘Denationalization’; and together they offer a comprehensive and problem-oriented assessment of the German and Italian occupation systems.^[28]

At the time of its publication certainly the most ambitious and comprehensive attempt to cover the German occupation policy in the countries of Southeastern Europe was offered by the Serbian historian Dušan Lukač. Between 1982 and 1987 his Treći Rajh i zemlje Jugoistočne Evrope (The Third Reich and the countries of Southeastern Europe) appeared as a total of four parts, in three volumes.^[29] Lukač explored the relations between the ‘Third Reich’ and the seven countries of Yugoslavia, Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia and neutral Turkey. He wrote his books ‘in detail, with consideration of their complexity’ and despite the ‘dissimilarity of topics, dynamics of events, vastness of space and time, and, especially, the extensiveness of sources and literature’. As Lukač himself maintained, all this had a ‘threatening effect on the author, especially during the research phase’. However, a single monograph that would encompass the German policy towards the entire area had been missing, so Lukač pulled together a great deal of sources and extensive literature. He pointed out the problem of uneven preservation of sources, accessibility of archives and the ‘modest possibilities for the author’s research in foreign archives’, which he said had caused the obvious ‘preponderance of sources of Yugoslav and German origin’.^[30] While in the first two volumes Lukač organized his work along the conventional lines of division by country, separately tracing their relations with Berlin, in the third and fourth volumes he addressed wartime events in the Southeast in terms of comprehensively argued research problems. He emphasized the dramatic changes in the region after April 1941, along with their ‘prelude’ in 1940 when a section of Romania’s territory was handed over to its neighbours, Hungary, the Soviet Union, and Bulgaria. Apart from dealing with the military operations, relations with the axis powers, and Germany’s diplomatic and economic activities, Lukač went into detail about the establishment of the military occupation apparatus in Serbia and Greece, the civil administration that was established in the Slovenian provinces of Styria and Carinthia, and looked at the suppression of the resistance movements, reprisals against the population, and the Holocaust. To be sure Lukač’s approach remained within the traditional methodological framework, and for the most part in his conclusions on the nature of the war he shared the position of the majority of the representatives of the ‘official historiography’. Yet in spite of that, to this day his book offers the most ambitious, comprehensive, and useful approach to studying the relationships between the Third Reich and Southeastern Europe.

At the end of 1991, when the Yugoslav crisis was spreading like a cancer in metastasis, I published my own monograph Nemački ‘novi poredak’ i Jugoistočna Evropa 1940/41-1944/45. Planovi o budućnosti i praksa (The German ‘New Order’ and Southeastern Europe, 1940/41-1944/45. Plans for the future and practice). That study was my attempt to determine the place of Southeastern Europe in German wartime policies and practice, an elaborate complex of plans and operations by various institutions of the Nazi regime—the state, the party, the Wehrmacht, the SS; public and private economic factors; research institutions; and influential individuals.^[31] Relying on the solid basis set up by the explorations mentioned here of the role of ‘the Southeast’ as a ‘supplementary economic space’ in German economic conceptions—as it had been understood since the First World War and during the Weimar Republic,^[32] I analyzed the German ‘new order’ during the war, looking carefully at the roles of specialized economic and scholarly organizations like the Mitteleuropäischer Wirtschaftstag (Central European Economic Conference, MWT) and the Südosteuropa-Gesellschaft (Association Southeastern Europe, SOEG). My purpose was to examine their strategies for economic advancement and their projecting Southeastern Europe’s future role in the ‘new Europe’. To that end I rehearsed their discussions on controlled changes of the economic, social, and ethnic structure in the region, looked at the role of the German minority and considered the disagreements between the Germans and the Italians. Then there was the role of German banks in the economic occupation; and this is to mention only certain issues. I wrote the book primarily after studying extensive materials of German origin from the Political Archives of the German Foreign Ministry, the Military Archive in Freiburg, the Federal Archives in Koblenz (now in Berlin), and materials held by the Institute for Global Economy (Institut für Weltwirtschaft) in Kiel, alongside sources of other origin, as well as numerous secondary sources. Germany’s strategy and planning as well as its operations in ‘the Southeast’—a crucial military, political, and ideological war economy and occupation force—were displayed as a specific part of the vision they had that upon ‘victory’ they would use radical political and military means to ‘integrate’ the region into the German Großraum (enlarged space) as a ‘supplementary territory’.

Research after the End of Yugoslavia

Since the mid-1990s scholars in Serbia have taken a sporadic interest in various aspects of the complex contexts of the German occupation. Their interest has been primarily restricted to Serbia, and only rarely included other parts of Yugoslavia. Notably, the older and more experienced generation of Serbian historians have persevered with their work, while younger scholars have only gradually started to engage in research on the German occupation, albeit not in very significant numbers. The deep political crisis, wars and violent conflicts that shook the territories of former Yugoslavia also dragged the proponents of national historiography into their whirlpool. What is more, the re-definitions and the fragility of statehoods in the region more generally resulted in the limiting of scholarly interest to ‘strictly national’ subjects, which then declined until it betrayed symptoms of the degradation of critical and scholarly thinking. Ironically enough, the interpretation of the Second World War in the new political and ideological contexts continued to serve the role of providing ‘historical legitimacy’. In this way, no serious methodological, scholarly, exploratory, and analytical breakthrough occurred; there was no enrichment of knowledge. The ‘escape from the Balkans’, or from the ‘Southeast’ to ‘Europe’, or ‘Central Europe’ was, in various forms and intensities in all Yugoslav successor states, above all an ‘escape’ from collective historical experiences. Among those, what featured most prominently was the idea of Yugoslavia, and the Yugoslav state with its collective wartime history from 1941-1945. But all of that belongs of course to wider historical and cultural contexts in the Balkans and Southeastern Europe.

In those circumstances, in the face of fragmented historiographies focused only on local, national topics, scholarly interest in more comprehensive exploration of the Second World War has almost completely disappeared, at least for now. Accordingly, recent developments in the European and global historiography of the war, which have included broader geographical perspectives, have left almost no trace behind in the works of domestic historians over the last twenty or so years. Instead, among other things there has been a tendency to relativize on the topics of collaboration, war crimes, and genocide, a tendency which has gone hand in hand with the re-activation of old propaganda and ideological mechanisms dating back to the Second World War itself. Furthermore, and as a consequence of that tendency to polarize rather than differentiate, over the last twenty years younger historians have preferred to turn instead to other topics, showing for example more interest in the period following World War II, which to a certain extent is understandable. When the World War was taken up in scholarly work, it was mostly with the focus on ‘inner factors’. The role of the monarchist anticommunist Chetnik movement (the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland) was re-assessed, as were issues of collaboration and the Independent State of Croatia, including the matter of genocide against the Serbs. In synthesis, even though one might reasonably have expected that it would be the younger generation of historians who would offer methodologically fresh and more differentiated views on questions pertaining to the Second World War and the occupation, in fact for the first ten years of the new millennium it was the older generation who published more monographs and other scholarly studies, and it was they in fact, who did the more serious research.

Branislav Božović, an established researcher of Serbia’s wartime history and a member of the oldest generation of Serbian historians, during the turmoil of the 1990s published a tremendously well-documented book on the initial period of the occupation in Belgrade. Božović analysed the circumstances surrounding the emergence in 1941 and subsequent functioning of the first, temporary collaborationist administration, and he did not fail to include its unsuccessful attempts to normalize everyday life.^[33] Božović also wrote a monograph about the collaborationist Serbian special police in Belgrade, in which he gave a precise reconstruction of the German occupation system and its apparatus of repression. Apart from that, Božović’s monograph is a detailed description of what was one of the most important internal instruments of repression. He gave details of the special police’s role in the suppression of the resistance and its relationship with the German administration, and added biographies of the people who were at its forefront.^[34] As a third endeavour, Božović published a monograph on the sufferings of the Jews in Serbia’s capital. For that project he analysed the preparations for the Holocaust made by the German occupational entities, such as registration of Jews and decrees to do with the many antisemitic regulations. Božović went on to describe the illegal appropriation of Jewish property, the organisation of camps in Belgrade, the deployment of Jews for forced labour and the phase that followed when more than 80% of the Jews in the Serbian capital were liquidated. He also applied detailed and reasoned scrutiny of the role of the domestic collaborationist administration as an instrument for the assistance of the occupation system. Božović gave particular attention to the special police and their Department for Jews, which was responsible for the registration and the tracking down of hidden Jews, and handing them over to the Gestapo.^[35]

Dragan Aleksić, a historian of the middle generation, has concentrated on research into the economy of occupied Serbia, for which he has relied on the results of the German historian Karl-Heinz Schlarp, extended with Aleksić’s own findings from primarily Serbian archival material.^[36] The Belgrade historian Zoran Janjetović, apart from examining the above mentioned research on the German minority during the war and their postwar fate, is also the author of a book about forced labour in occupied Serbia.^[37]

Milan Koljanin has written a great deal about the Holocaust in Serbia and the concentration camp system in occupied Serbia. Significant among his works is his book on the Judenlager Semlin which was established in December 1941 on the left bank of the river Sava. The camp was in fact the former premises of the Belgrade fair, built on territory which formally stood within the borders of the Ustasha-led Independent State of Croatia—also called Logor Sajmište. The camp’s first inmates were Jewish and Romani women and children from Belgrade who by spring 1942 had been killed using a special truck prepared as a gas chamber. The purpose of the camp changed numerous times before the liberation of Belgrade at the end of October 1944. Koljanin assessed the motives and the processes that led to the decision to set up the camp, how it functioned, and the living conditions of its inmates. He also attempted to confirm the exact number of those who died in the camp in the various phases of its existence.^[38]

In my own book, U potrazi za utočištem (In search of refuge) I traced the tactics and paths of survival of Yugoslav Jews and some 5,000 Jewish refugees from Central European countries who went to Yugoslavia only to become caught up in the war. The book revealed how entangled was the history of the Holocaust with the specifics of relations between the different occupation regimes and the collaborationist authorities in the Balkans and other parts of Europe—including neutral countries. My focus there was the policies on the Jews and on Yugoslav Jewish refugees in countries overseas such as the USA and Latin America. The concealment of and assistance given to Jews who survived in German-occupied Serbia, in cities and especially in the countryside, are equally part of the occupation experience, complex and harsh as it was. Yugoslav Jews and Jews who had fled from Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Austria to Yugoslavia all lived through a common fate.^[39]

Kosta Nikolić, in his book about daily life during the occupation, Strah i nada u okupiranoj Srbiji (Fear and hope in occupied Serbia), focused on matters like religiosity, living with reprisals, life in the countryside, and the effects of the guerrilla war between domestic forces. His work is based largely on collaborationist newspapers, Serbian archival materials, and literature.^[40] Slobodan Kerkez, a professor at the University of Niš, published a book on Serbian society during the war years 1941-1945. Based on his own extensive doctoral thesis which he defended at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade in 1989, Kerkez focused on the effects of the occupation as the social conditions worsened. He looked at the repression that went on, explained the political and ideological divisions, and described the civil war. Kerkez’s book, while traditional in its approach, is written conscientiously and is rich in content.^[41]

An important contribution to the history of daily life under occupation was provided by Nataša Miličević and Dušan Nikodijević who edited a war diary written by a ‘Belgrade resident’, as the title of the book puts it, to which the editors added an extensive and detailed preface. There, more or less elaborately, they dealt with important matters in the life of the citizens of Belgrade and the rest of occupied Serbia, things like food supply and the availability of clothing and footwear, for example, or firewood. The book explains how the black market worked, examines corruption and the effects of pricing policy and considers health conditions and medical treatment. Propaganda was a factor, so too the lack of information about war events, and both had their effects on perceptions of reality. The diary itself is equipped with a critical apparatus, so that it represents a truly exceptional document on the wartime survival of the populace.^[42]

Among the authors who studied Serbian cities other than Belgrade, Žarko Jovanović, another of the historians of the older generation, wrote a worthwhile monograph about Valjevo, in western Serbia. His focus too was clearly on the effects of the four years of occupation on the lives of the inhabitants of what was in 1941 a small town of about 10,000. Jovanović described the restoration of the domestic civil authority and the emergence of collaborationist forces on the one hand, and of armed and other forms of resistance on the other. His book gives details of crimes against civilians, and tells us tales of survival—or not—during the blockade of the city that was carried on during the autumn of 1941 jointly by partisans and Chetniks. Further topics are the ideological divisions between the groups that were involved; problems of supply; the position of women; economic, educational, and cultural questions; the influence of propaganda, as well as other pertinent matters.^[43]

As for similarly local levels of exploration, Bogdan Himmelreich and Janez Cvirn have provided a thorough study of the Styrian town of Celje in central Slovenia. They offered a new perspective with their analysis of the problem of supply regimes not in only one World War, but both of them.^[44] Celje has proved to be a fortunate object of study because of its exceptionally well-preserved source materials. Tone Kregar and Alexander Žižek published a ‘visual history’ of life in Celje under the occupation; they based their work on the rich photographic documentation held by the municipal archive.^[45]

Finally, since the beginning of the 1990s matters pertaining to the history of culture and education have received more attention in the historiography of the occupation years.^[46] Miroslav Savković’s study on film-making in Serbia between 1941 and 1945 turned out to be an informative rather than analytical endeavour,^[47] while going into greater depth is the lengthy monograph by Boro Majdanac on Serbian theatre, published in 2011. Under the stringent wartime conditions, the theatre was one of the few cultural ‘vents’ at the inhabitants’ disposal, but it was also an opportunity for the occupation and collaborationist authorities to emphasize the ‘normality’ of everyday life. For example after it was damaged during the air raids of 6 April 1941, the authorities insisted on the immediate renewal of the National Theatre in Belgrade, and arranged for local theatre groups to be engaged to perform there. The theatre formed an element of propaganda activities too, which after the war cost a number of popular actors their political and civil rights, if not their lives.^[48]

Ljubinka Šodrić has offered valuable insights into the wartime policies of the Ministry of Education and Religious Faith. Education was crucial to the shaping of the consciousness of the young generation, and not least their national awareness. Consequently, activities in that field were under the strict diktat and censorship of the occupation authorities, with the help of the collaborationist domestic administration.^[49] Slobodan Kerkez, already mentioned above, in his second monograph discussed the cultural and educational policy in occupied Serbia in detail. He focused on the German occupation of Yugoslav territory from 1941-1945, although in certain instances he did refer to the wider Southeast European framework.^[50]

Conclusion

As must have become obvious, the framework for the satisfactory study of the history of Southeastern Europe has not changed. It still requires the financial means to pursue the dispersed archival materials, and scholars who are fluent in many languages. If those things had not already been at hazard, the interruption of scholarly communication after the wars of the 1990s, the emergence of new ‘national scientific priorities’ after Yugoslavia’s destruction and not least the poor situation overall of humanistic scholarship have made things even more difficult. Scholars themselves have been hesitant to launch serious long-term projects that would focus on problems with more complex geographic structures and could overcome narrow, nationalized frameworks. The dissolution of the union state of Yugoslavia ensured the dissolution too of the remains of what could be called ‘mutual historiography’; that is at least, history-writing on topics that had served the task of building and maintaining a collective historical identity and legitimacy. And the Second World War is clearly among those topics. The fragmentation of Southeastern Europe into so many small states nurtured the pursuit of as many ‘historiographical priorities’, different ‘understandings’ and ‘interpretations’ of the roles of ‘our’ nation—as opposed to the nations of ‘others’. Core questions here concern the political and other elites of wartime, collaboration, resistance, and the relationship with the occupying forces.

Whether the representatives of such fragmented historiographies like it or not: a common, collective history has taken place. The narrowing down of the foci of attention cannot do away with the fact that the history of Southeastern Europe has always been a complicated and entangled matter. What we see now is an incomplete, damaged picture, without any broader context, and that is because of the geographical and political structures of today. There have been recent new divisions and new, inauthentic and geographically incorrect concepts have been invented such as the ‘Western Balkans’—which actually includes parts of the central and southern Balkans. Perhaps the worst thing has been the reduction of the scholarly agenda exclusively to what may be perceived as national matters.

All that said, I must conclude by emphasizing that the recent historiographical production on the German occupation in Serbia and Slovenia does have significant scholarly value. Although it is often true to say that the occupation system with all its entangled effects has not been sufficiently stressed as the crucial factor it was, many of the works I have mentioned here are worthy examples of historiography. But even a limited account of the situation and of the results clearly suggests that considerable room has been left for further research, both in terms of topics that have still not been covered and in the matter of the posing of methodologically innovative questions. To raise the standard—or rather to regain the standard that was lost with the new experience of war and of the loss of state and identity in the 1990s—there is a strong need for communication and cooperation among researchers with similar interests but working in the different centres of scholarship in the formerly Yugoslav area; and not only there but beyond too, in wider (Southeastern) Europe. After all, the occupation regimes, German, Italian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian, with all their regional characteristics that emerged and existed in Yugoslav territory and neighbouring countries, were all part of what the Germans had intended would be their ‘new order’. Regardless of whether research questions and interests address a broader area such as Southeastern Europe, Yugoslavia, or Greece, or geographically smaller units such as regions, cities, or local societies, the general framework of events and processes, the links among them, their shapes and how they changed, all need to be taken into account. Only then shall we begin to approach an adequate understanding of the brutal realities of war in their full complexity.