Serbia and the Serbs in World War Two (review)

Abstract

SEER, 91, 4, OCTOBER 2013 918 marching through Finland, through Petsamo (Pechenga). Hitler’s concerns with this part of the world, as Lunde brings out well enough, comprised a great deal: possession of nickel for the German armaments industry, fear of British landings on the northern shore, and cutting the Murmansk railway and capturing its ports so as to prevent aid to the Soviet Union from outside. The Germans were intent on marching and some sort of assistance was undoubtedly to be required from the Finns. A cynic might say that the Finns might have supplied the Germans with better maps since they never got to Murmansk. Curiously, there had been a small German naval detachment stationed near there on the Litsa river in the happier days of Nazi-Soviet cooperation. Did they not make maps? And General Talvela himself ought to have had some knowledge of the terrain from previous parallel experiences with his bus company in Finnish Lapland. True enough, the Finns were under the spell of the German Blitzkrieg in Western Europe. But this apart, the horny fact of political geography, called Petsamo in Finnish, was there. That is why, at the time of the peace made at Moscow in 1940, J. K. Paasikivi had wanted the area to be given to the Russians. Having had to get into war, Finland’s participation in the Continuation War was fraught with contradiction. It was limited because the country did not want its troops to attack Leningrad (Talvela did). The Finnish forces also soon desisted in their attempts to cut the Murmansk railway. Finnish policy was, however, expansive in intent. It did not stay at getting back the lost lands. Ryti dreamt of the Kola Peninsula and of seeing a Leningrad conquered by the Germans turned into a trading depot. Mannerheim wanted East Karelia, and as Lunde says, in 1944 kept troops there who might have been better employed defending the Soviet onslaught coming up through the Karelian Isthmus. There is a fog of war that may even envelop the bits and pieces of a Blitzkrieg. University of Turku George Maude Ramet, Sabrina P. and Listhaug, Ola (eds). Serbia and the Serbs in World War Two. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2011. xvii + 324 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Glossary. Notes. Further reading. Indexes. £65.00. SabrinaRametandOlaListhaug’sSerbiaandtheSerbsinWorldWarTwoaims to reassess the experience of Serbs and Serbia under Nazi occupation as well as critique recent revisionist interpretations of Milan Nedić’s collaborationist administration and Draža Mihailović’s Chetniks. The book is divided into four sections: the first considers occupied Serbia and Vojvodina; the second looks at the fate of the Jews and the conduct of the Orthodox Church; the third examines the Partisans and the Chetniks while the fourth focuses on contemporary historiographical debates. One of the volume’s central REVIEWS 919 hypotheses is that the intensity of debates in contemporary Serbia about the Second World War and attempts at ‘sweeping historical revisionism’ make Serbia ‘a unique case in contemporary Europe’ (pp. 1, 285). A number of essays provide important new insights into life in Serbia under Occupation. Given the lack of serious English-language studies on the subject, that alone makes the volume welcome. Some of the essays are very well written: particularly good is Jovan Byford’s chapter on the destruction of the Jews. Admirably balanced, it constructs a complex picture of Serbian collaborationist involvement in the Holocaust. In so doing, Byford effectively challenges historical narratives that absolve the Nedić regime of all responsibility for the destruction of the Jews while rejecting counter-arguments that aim to draw a moral and functional equivalence with Ante Pavelić’s Ustasha regime. Similar comments apply to his diverting biography of the controversial bishop of Žiča, Nikolaj Velimirović. Sabine Rutar’s study of the social politics of forced labour is enlightening and her call for a non-ideological multilayered historiographical approach to the subject is well taken. Likewise, Olga Manojlović Pintar’s often-interesting discussion of cultural politics and ideology under Nedić is insightful, not least because it highlights the ways in which Nedić’s Serbia was both similar to and differed from other states in occupied Europe. In her study...