YUGOSLAVIA IN WW II - GOVERNMENT UNDER OCCUPATION
Hitler had sketched out the lineaments of the country's occupation and partition on 12 April. This was now put into effect.
The aim of the new regime was to
secure for Germany what it required in the area (principally, control over the main lines of communication and certain economic assets) while rewarding (and making use of) the Reich's allies and those Yugoslav peoples thought by Hitler to be amenable to his purposes.It was also designed to give expression to Nazi racial doctrines (e.g. Germanization of northern Slovenia, now incorporated into the Reich; 'Aryan' status for the Croats and Slav Muslims of an independent Croatia which included Bosnia and Herzegovina; self-government for the German minority in Banat) and to eradicate the very idea of a South Slav state.
This meant that the Serbs, as the Yugoslav Staatsvolk and authors of
the insult of 27 March, were singled out for condign punishment. Hitler did not originally intend that the rump of Serbia should have even a spurious statehood. The establishment during the summer of a Quisling regime under General Milan Nedic came in response to a predictable outbreak of Serbian rebellion.The rebellion happened, above all, because of the Ustasas' initiation in May 1941 of a campaign of terror and genocide against Croatia's nearly two million Serbs. (The far smaller numbers of Jews, gypsies, and communists were, of course, also targeted for destruction.) The Ustasas' aim was to produce an ethnically and ideologically 'pure' Croatia by expelling to Serbia, converting to Roman Catholicism, and murdering its 'oriental minorities' in roughly equal proportions.
Less predictable was the dissatisfaction and rivalry which soon came to prevail among both Hitler's allies (who wanted more that they had got) and the Yugoslav beneficiaries of his largesse (who gradually found reasons to repent of their initial enthusiasm for the 'new order').
The super-nationalistic pretensions of the NDH had in any case been crippled at the outset by its enforced cession of much of Dalmatia to Italy and by the designation of an Italian prince as Croatia's future king. The subsequent revelations of Ustasa barbarism against Croatia's Serbs and of the nullity of NDH 'independence' completed its delegitimation.
The oppressive
Bulgarian regime in Macedonia eventually disabused people there also of their inclination to regard Sofia as a deliverer.Hitler's 'new order' was, in fact, to prove a principal cause of both the resistance struggle and the accompanying civil wars, as well as of the Axis powers' inability to extirpate the former while making use of the latter.
M.Wheeler,
Oxford Companion to the Second World War (1995), p.1295