(For Ages 12 & up)
(photo credit: wikidata)
My forthcoming book, Dark Shadows Hover, will be released on January 26 to coincide with events surrounding International Holocaust Remembrance Day, annually recognized on January 27. I'm honored thatAmsterdam Publishers in the Netherlands, which specializes in Holocaust memoir and some fiction, is the book's publisher. PRE-ORDER NOW ON AMAZON.
This weekly series of blog posts will introduce the reader to some basic history before reading my book, a biographical fiction based on the young life of Moris Albahari, who at the age of twelve became a Yugoslav Partisan. Though it’s not critical to read the posts to enjoy the book, I trust you’ll find them interesting. If you’d like to receive subsequent blog posts leading up to book publication, and are not already on my email list, subscribe at jordanstevensher.com.
The Nazis, their Collaborators, and Tito’s Partisans in World War II Yugoslavia
Part 2: The Nazis and their Puppets, the Ustasha, go on a Murderous Rampage
In Serbia, German military and police authorities imprisoned most Jews and Roma (Gypsies) in detention camps during the summer of 1941. By the end of summer, uprisings based in Serbia and Bosnia, and initiated by the Communist-led partisan movement, and by the Serb nationalist Chetnik Movement of Draza Mihailovic, had inflicted serious casualties upon German military and police personnel. Hitler ordered that, for every German death (including those of ethnic Germans in Serbia and the Banat), German authorities were to shoot 100 hostages.
During the late summer and autumn of 1941, German military and police units used this order as a pretext to shoot virtually all male Serb Jews (approximately 8,000 persons), approximately 2,000 actual and perceived communists, Serb nationalists and democratic politicians of the interwar era (the two world wars), and approximately 1,000 male Roma. The German Security Police rounded up Jewish women and children and incarcerated them in the Semlin detention camp in the autumn of 1941. In the winter of 1942, Hitler ordered a gas van—a truck with a hermetically sealed compartment that served as a gas chamber—to Belgrade. Between March and May 1942, German Security Police personnel killed around 6,280 persons, virtually all Jews and mostly women and children from Semlin concentration camp. By the summer of 1942, virtually no Jews remained alive in Serbia, unless they had joined the partisans or were in hiding.
In the so-called Independent State of Croatia, the Ustasha leadership instituted a reign of terror so extensive that German and Italian troops essentially had to administer the countryside. The Ustasha regime murdered or expelled hundreds of thousands of Serbs residing in its territory. In rural areas, Croatian military units and Ustasha militia burned down entire Serbian villages and killed the inhabitants, frequently torturing men and raping women. In all, Croat authorities killed between 320,000 and 340,000 ethnic Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1941 and 1942.
By the end of 1941, Croat authorities had incarcerated about two-thirds of the approximately 32,000 Jews of Croatia in camps throughout the country. The Ustasha murdered between 12,000 and 20,000 Jews in the Jasenovac system of camps, located roughly 60 miles from the Croat capital, Zagreb. In two operations—August 1942 and May 1943—Croatian authorities transferred about 7,000 Jews into German custody. The Germans deported these Jews to Auschwitz and Birkenau. Approximately 3,000 Croat Jews evaded these deportations, largely because they were exempted from the deportations due to intermarriage, or because they managed to flee to the Italian-occupied zone of Yugoslavia.
(Information attributed to the U.S. Holocaust Museum)
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