Anniversary of start of Germany's attack against Kingdom of Yugoslavia

The aftermath of the German bombing of Belgrade in April 1941; Photo: Wikipedia/German Federal Archives

In the early morning hours of April 6, 1941, Nazi Germany launched a mass-scale attack against the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

Recommended

With the attack, Yugoslavia was drawn into the Second World War, although the Yugoslav governments, both before and after the March 27 coup, tried to avoid that by any means.

Namely, the coup government led by Dusan Simovic also tried to avoid war, and even recognized the act signed on March 25 in Vienna saying it would respect the obligations that the previous royal government had undertaken.

Germany, and its allies Italy, Bulgaria and Hungary, attacked the Kingdom of Yugoslavia without a declaration of war.

As far as is known, 484 German planes took part in the air strikes against Belgrade, which started at around 6:30 am, and lasted for several days, in several waves. The aircraft used by Germany included 234 bombers and approximately 120 fighter planes.

The exact number of victims has never been determined, it is usually assumed that the death toll was about 2,274. German estimates put the death toll in Belgrade at between 1,500 and 1,700 people.

In Belgrade, the airstrikes destroyed a large portion of housing and infrastructure facilities, but also numerous cultural facilities and temples. The fate of the national library is especially tragic.

Already in the first, out of a total of four waves of bombing, the building of the National Library on Kosancicev Venac was damaged. The old library building caught on fire that was not extinguished.

The library's fund of about 350,000 books, including numerous manuscripts and various antiquities burned in that fire. It was largely an irreparable loss.

The April attack on Yugoslavia came in retaliation for March 27, 1941, when the government and viceroyalty whose top figure was Prince Pavle Karadjordjevic was overthrown.

Two days earlier, on March 25, the Cvetkovic-Macek government, in an effort to somehow keep the country out of the war, and after numerous instances of pressure and conditions arriving from Berlin, signed a protocol on joining the Triple Alliance in Vienna.

Mass demonstrations followed in Belgrade and other cities on March 27, 1941, as an expression of support for the coup, and for the Western allies. Most of the Serbian cultural and political elite enthusiastically supported the coup of March 27, as did the top of the Serbian Orthodox Church, led by Patriarch Gavril Dozic.

The April 6 attack against Yugoslavia followed. In fact, the attack began during the previous night in the Djerdap area of the Danube in Serbia.

The government of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was previously precisely informed about the time of the start of the attack by the country's military attache in Berlin, Colonel Vladimir Vauhnik, a top intelligence officer.

Despite the heroic resistance on several levels, especially by the Air Force, the balance of power and the general position of Yugoslavia was such that resistance was largely hopeless, especially considering that German troops quickly occupied the Vardar valley moving in from Bulgaria, so a withdrawal through Greece, like in the First World War, was made impossible. Greece, too, was occupied by the end of April, even though 62,000 British soldiers fought in parallel with the Greeks.

The Yugoslav Kingdom's army capitulated on April 17.

(Telegraf.rs)