Under the Gallows Remembering the German Occupation in Yugoslavia
Under the Gallows
Sabina Ferhadbegović
Little is known about the photograph. We do not know who took it or who the victims are. While we know who found it – investigators from the Yugoslav State Com mission for Investigating the Crimes of the Occupiers and their Collaborators – we do not know where it was found. It shows three lifeless bodies, probably men, hanging from a tree. Three other men are gazing at them, two uniformed soldiers and a civilian. The equip ment, uniform, and helmet of the soldier in the fore ground suggest he is a member of the German forces. Only the caption gives us a more precise idea of the vic tims, place of the crime, date, and probable perpetra tors: “Tree blossom in Serbia. Spring 1941.” The photograph of the hanged men was a souvenir, a military memento of the war and spring 1941 in Ser bia. Thousands of similar photos exist. They are discon certing. They show laughing Wehrmacht soldiers in front of beautiful Bosnian orchards. Only upon closer inspection do we recognise the bodies hanging from every tree. Or they present the Swabian-German Cul tural Association marching down Belgrade’s main thor oughfare, lined with hanging corpses. Executions on gallows, trees, lampposts, and poles were not crimes against humanity committed behind the gates of the ex termination camps or hidden from view in forests and ravines. They were crimes perpetrated in public as open displays of inhumanity by a criminal regime. Like their counterparts in other Allied countries, the investigators in Yugoslavia began collecting evi dence of the occupation crimes while the Second World War was still underway. Their goal was to bring the per petrators to justice after Germany’s defeat. But the State Commission to Investigate Crimes Committed by
the Occupiers and their Collaborators (henceforth “ Yugoslav Commission”) was much more than just an investigative authority. It influenced the jurisprudence and narrative of the Second World War, the German occupation, and the civil war in Yugoslavia. Its photo graphic material provided a foundation for the visual remembrance of the Second World War and the war crimes. The photographs of atrocities collected by the Yugoslav Commission were shown in public for the first time at the exhibition Crimes of the Occupiers and Their Collaborators, which opened at the centrally located Art Pavilion in Belgrade on 15 March 1946. Such exhibi tions were not uncommon in post-war Europe. They were often co-organised by the national commissions entrusted with investigating the crimes. The bestknown is perhaps the French exhibition Crimes Hit lériens.1 By exhibiting their collected evidence, the com missions laid the groundwork for the remembrance of the German occupation of Europe. The exhibitions were shown in Paris, London, Warsaw, Prague, and Vienna, and in all these places, visitors saw the same or similar images: destroyed cities, levelled villages, hanged people, firing squads, emaciated, lifeless bodies in death camps, execution posts, and gallows. The Yugoslav exhibition on the crimes of the occupiers and their collaborators was also conceived as a travelling show. Unfortunately, the files kept by the Yugoslav Commission provide no information about its curators, who presented the commission’s evidence on around 36 wall panels. These panels were designed as collages of photographs, documents, and newspaper clippings. They recalled the wall newspapers used by the partisans’ agitprop departments during the Second World War to inform the population of the crimes of the occupying forces. As a rule, each panel had its own “slogan”, according to which the images were arranged. The conceptual similarity to Aby Warburg’s Mne mosyne Atlas was unmistakable, but whereas Warburg’s atlas showed unexpected similarities between images, the panels followed a different logic: the photos were not meant to speak for themselves, but were arranged as illustrations of the respective slogan. In this way, the exhibition served as a selective visual repository that shaped Yugoslav collective memory and exposed or sug gested connections between subjects and events. This method had been frequently used in works created by leftist artists in the interwar period, including the pho tomontages of John Heartfield. As Susan Sontag has emphasised, observing the pain of others tends to serve the dual purpose of not only arousing emotion but also provoking action.2 If we assume that what was depicted in the execution images was less important than their
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