Milan Nedić (; 2 September 1878 – 4 February 1946) was a Yugoslav and Serbian army general and politician who served as the Chief of the General Staff of the Royal Yugoslav Army and minister of war in the Royal Yugoslav Government. During World War II, he collaborated with Nazi Germany and served as the prime minister of the puppet government of National Salvation, in the German occupied territory of Serbia. After the war, the Yugoslav communist authorities imprisoned him, where in 1946, according to the official version, he committed suicide. There have been attempts since the 1990s to present Nedić's role in World War II more positively. All applications to rehabilitate him have so far been declined by the official Serbian courts.
Early life Milan Nedić was born in the Belgrade suburb of Grocka on 2 September 1878 to Đorđe and Pelagia Nedić. His father was a local district chief and his mother was a teacher from a village near Mount Kosmaj. She was the granddaughter of Nikola Mihailović, who was mentioned in the writings of poet Sima Milutinović Sarajlija and was an ally of Serbian revolutionary leader Karađorđe. The Nedić family was originally from the village of Zaoka, near Lazarevac. It traced its origins to two brothers, Damjan and Gligorije, who defended the Čokešina Monastery from the Turks during the Serbian Revolution. The family received its name from Nedić's great-grandmother, Neda, who was a member of the Vasojevići tribe from modern-day Montenegro.
Military and political career Nedić finished gymnasium in Kragujevac in 1895 and entered the lower level of the Military Academy in Belgrade that year. In 1904, he completed the upper level of the academy, then the General Staff preparatory, and was commissioned into the Serbian Army. In 1910, he was promoted to the rank of major. He fought with the Serbian Army during the Balkan Wars, and received multiple decorations for bravery. In 1913, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He served with the Serbian Army during World War I and was involved in rearguard actions during its retreat through Albania in the winter of 1915. That year, he was promoted to the rank of colonel. At 38, he was the youngest colonel in the Serbian General Staff. He was appointed ordnance officer to King Peter in 1916. Towards the end of the war, Nedić was given command of an infantry brigade of the Timok Division.
Nedić remained a brigade commander within the Timok Division until the end of 1918 and served as the 3rd Army chief of staff. Beginning in 1919, he also served as the de facto head of the 4th Army District in Croatia because its nominal commander, General Božidar Janković, was old and infirm. Nedić's cousin, Dimitrije Ljotić, and their mutual friend Stanislav Krakov, also served in the 4th Army District and were commanded by Nedić. When the Royal Yugoslav Army (, VKJ) was formed in 1919 he was absorbed into the army at the same rank. He was promoted to Divizijski đeneral in 1923, and subsequently commanded a division then was Secretary-General of the Committee of National Defence.
In 1930, Nedić was promoted to the rank of Armijski đeneral, and assumed command of the 3rd Army in Skoplje. Nedić was appointed Chief of the General Staff in June 1934, and held this position until the following year, when he became the third member of the Military Council, probably because of his strained relations with the Minister for the Army and Navy, Petar Živković. At the time, British diplomatic staff observed that he was "somewhat slow-thinking and obstinate".
On 13 August 1939, Nedić was appointed Minister of the Army and Navy as part of the Cvetković–Maček Agreement. Ljotić later assisted the SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Central Office, RSHA) in establishing contacts with him. He also exploited the connections he had with Nedić to ensure that the banned Zbor-published journal Bilten (Bulletin) was distributed to members of the VKJ. The journal was published illegally in a military printing house and distributed throughout Yugoslavia by military couriers.
Because of his disapproval of a potential participation in the war against Adolf Hitler's Germany, Nedić was dismissed on 6 November 1940 by Prince Paul. This was most likely out of unease with Nazi Germany's ally, Fascist Italy which at the time harboured the Croatian extreme nationalist Ustashe leader Ante Pavelić in exile in Rome, and because of the rhetoric of some Italian fascists in the past such as the late Gabriele D'Annunzio, who were violently opposed to a Yugoslav state. Prince Paul sympathised with Britain and Greece, but would not bring Yugoslavia into the war at present while Nedić had pressed for Yugoslavia to accept Hitler's offer of having Yugoslavia sign the Tripartite Pact. The prince regent wanted to keep Yugoslavia neutral as he was painfully well aware of the greater military power of the Reich, but did not want an alignment with Germany, which led to clashes with Nedić.
Germany had also offered Yugoslavia the province of Greek Macedonia as a reward for signing the Tripartite Pact, which would have given Yugoslavia Thessaloniki, Greece's second-largest city, and access to the Aegean Sea. Paul, who was married to a Greek princess, rejected the bribe of Greek Macedonia; Nedić had been in favor of accepting the offer. Nedić believed that Germany would win the war and favored having Yugoslavia join the winning side while also being very keen to annex Greek Macedonia. Nedić's viewpoint was Serbian rather than Yugoslav, and his primary concern was to protect Serbia from losing territory to neighbors such as Hungary, Bulgaria and Italy, which he believed could be best achieved with an alliance with Germany.
Under the strong German pressure with the Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop threatening war if Yugoslavia did not sign the Tripartite Pact, Prince Paul had Yugoslavia sign the pact on 25 March 1941, but he added the proviso that Yugoslavia would not grant transit rights to Germany to invade Greece. Paul's advantage was that though Yugoslavia was poor, the kingdom was rich in minerals including coal, iron, copper, gold, silver, lead, zinc, chrome, manganese and bauxite. Germany was Yugoslavia's largest trading partner, with 41% of all Yugoslav exports going to the Reich by 1939, and the mines of Yugoslavia were important to sustaining the German economy. Hitler preferred to have Yugoslavia as a German ally rather than risk the destruction of Yugoslavia's mines, over which he sought control. Nedić welcomed the coup d'état of March 1941 which deposed the regime that had signed the Tripartite Pact, and commanded the 3rd Army Group in the German-led Axis invasion that followed. The new prime minister, Dušan Simović, thought very highly of Nedić and gave him the command of the 3rd Army Group, saying he was the best general available. Unlike the other Yugoslav generals captured by the Wehrmacht in April 1941, Nedić was not sent to a POW camp in Germany, but instead released to his home in Belgrade.
German-occupied territory of Serbia
Wehrmacht commander Heinrich Danckelmann decided to entrust Nedić with the administration of German-occupied territory of Serbia, officially named the Territory of the Military Commander in Serbia, in order to suppress Serb resistance. With the commencement of Operation Barbarossa in 1941, the Reich made defeating the Soviet Union its main priority; Nedić's government was created in order to provide indigenous forces to hunt down guerillas. The three Wehrmacht motorised divisions that had conquered Yugoslavia in April were pulled out by June for Operation Barbarossa; the total Wehrmacht forces in Serbia in the summer of 1941 amounted to three second-rate infantry divisions, ineffective against guerrilla bands in the mountainous countryside. Danckelmann demanded additional Wehrmacht and SS/police, only to be told that no additional forces would be sent to Serbia until Operation Barbarossa was concluded. Danckelmann's deputy, Harald Turner, suggested raising Serbian forces to put down the Partisan rebellion, which in turn required a Serbian government.
The German Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Office) sent out Edmund Veesenmayer to Belgrade with orders to find a prominent Serb leader who was well-respected, could be trusted to deal "ruthlessly" with the guerrillas, and was capable of raising a para-military force. Veesenmayer selected Nedić under the grounds that he had the necessary experience to raise para-military forces, was well-respected by the Serbs, had an authoritarian personality and leadership style, and was fanatically anti-Communist and a great believer in the Nazi "final victory".
Nedić had recently endured the loss of his only son and pregnant daughter-in-law in a munitions explosion in Smederevo, in which several thousands died. He accepted the post of the prime minister in the government called the Government of National Salvation, on 29 August 1941. Mass imprisonment of the Jews started, with police and gendarmerie of under Nedićs quisling government assisting the Germans.
The German historian Marie-Jannine Calic wrote that Nedić's ideology was "...a mixture of ultraconservatism and the chauvinism of the fascist Zbor movement, a strange conglomerate of heterogeneous ideological elements creating an ethnic-racist, blood-and-soil cult and religious Orthodox messianism, coupled with a fixation on an age-old Serb patriarchal family structure and village community". Calic wrote that Nedić was motivated to collaborate by his beliefs that he could protect the Serbs from the worst of the occupation, that Germany would win the war and that he could best secure Serbia's place in the "New Order of Europe", and that Serb society had become "sick" and needed his stern regime to cure it. Nedić did not envision the restoration of Yugoslavia after the war; he instead expected to lead a Serb state. Hitler regarded all Serbs as treacherous and scheming, whom he contemptuously labelled a nation of "bandits", and Nedić was never fully trusted in Berlin. Nedić did not help his cause in Berlin by professing to be still loyal to the House of Karađorđević as he maintained that the teenage King Peter II had been merely misled.
On 28 August 1941, the prime minister of the government-in-exile, General Dušan Simović gave a speech on the BBC's Serbo-Croatian language station in which he claimed that the invasion of Yugoslavia had delayed the invasion of the Soviet Union by five weeks and presented Yugoslava's defeat as a sort of victory for the Allies. Nedić responded by giving a speech on Radio Belgrade in which he mockingly called Simović "the savior of Bolshevism".
On 1 September 1941 Nedić made a speech on Radio Belgrade in which he declared the intent of his administration to "save the core of the Serbian people" by accepting the occupation of Germany in the area of Šumadija, Drina Valley, Pomoravlje and Banat. He also spoke against organizing resistance to the occupying forces. Unlike the government of Marshal Philippe Pétain in Vichy France, which the Germans treated as a sovereign state with full diplomatic relations, Nedić's "Government of National Salvation" was not allowed full sovereignty. The control of the economy, the financial system, the police, and the military always rested in German hands, and Germany did not send an ambassador to Belgrade. Nedić was also denied any authority over the volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) living in Serbia, who were organized into a state-within-the-state under direct German control.