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A flag bearing a swastika is raised over the city hall in Sarajevo after German forces captured the city. Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, April 16, 1941. See more photographs |
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YUGOSLAVIA |
In 1941, some 78,000 Jews lived in Yugoslavia, including about 4,000 foreign or stateless Jews who had found refuge in the country during the 1930s. Nazi Germany invaded southeastern Europe, the Balkans, in April 1941. Supported by military units from Italy, Bulgaria, and Hungary, German forces quickly occupied the Balkans. |
Yugoslavia was partitioned among the victors. Germany occupied northwestern Yugoslavia, annexing northern and eastern Slovenia and occupying Serbia. Germany and Italy established the pro-German, fascist state of Croatia in northern Yugoslavia. Hungary received Backa, the region around Subotica in northern Yugoslavia. Bulgaria annexed Yugoslavian Macedonia (the area between the cities of Skopje and Bitola in southern Yugoslavia). Italy occupied the coastal areas of Yugoslavia. Conflicts in the policy and tactics of Germany and its allies affected the fate of the Jews living in Yugoslavia. |
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SERBIA |
CROATIA By the end of 1941, about two-thirds of the Jews of Croatia had been imprisoned in camps throughout Croatia (Jadovno, Kruscica, Loborgrad, Djakovo, Tenje, Osijek, and Jasenovac). The Ustasa murdered more than 20,000 Jews in the Jasenovac concentration camp, roughly 60 miles from the Croatian capital of Zagreb. In 1942 and 1943, about 7,000 Jews were deported from Croatia to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Many Croatian Jews who survived the war sought refuge in the Italian-occupied areas. Rejecting German demands to hand over Jews in these areas, Italian authorities instead assembled many of those in Italian-occupied Yugoslavia in the Rab island camp, which was in the Italian zone. After the Italian government agreed to an armistice with the Allies in September 1943, Germany occupied the Italian zone of Yugoslavia. Yugoslav partisans helped many former prisoners of Rab avoid capture by German forces. HUNGARIAN- AND BULGARIAN-OCCUPIED YUGOSLAVIA Bulgaria did not deport Bulgarian Jews, but did deport non-Bulgarian Jews from the territories it had annexed from Yugoslavia and Greece. In March 1943, Bulgaria arrested all Jews in Macedonia, formerly part of Yugoslavia, and in Thrace, formerly part of Greece. In Macedonia, about 7,000 Jews were interned in a transit camp in Skopje. In Thrace, about 4,000 Jews were deported to Bulgarian assembly points at Gorna Dzhumaya and Dupnitsa, and handed over to the Germans. Bulgaria deported more than 11,000 Jews to German-held territory, and by the end of the month most of them had been deported to the Treblinka extermination camp in German-occupied Poland. German troops withdrew from northwestern Yugoslavia in late April 1945. Approximately 60,000 Yugoslav Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Thousands of Yugoslav Jews survived by hiding with friends or neighbors or by joining the partisans. |
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