Sabina Ferhadbegović

Remembering the German Occupation in Yugoslavia

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 Commission 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 equipment, uniform, and helmet of the soldier in the foreground suggest he is a member of the German forces. Only the caption gives us a more precise idea of the victims, place of the crime, date, and probable perpetrators: “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 Serbia. Thousands of similar photos exist. They are disconcerting. 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 SwabianGerman Cultural Association marching down Belgrade’s main thoroughfare, lined with hanging corpses. Executions on gallows, trees, lampposts, and poles were not crimes against humanity committed behind the gates of the extermination 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 evidence of the occupation crimes while the Second World War was still underway. Their goal was to bring the perpetrators 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 photographic 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 exhibitions were not uncommon in postwar Europe. They were often coorganised by the national commissions entrusted with investigating the crimes. The bestknown is perhaps the French exhibition Crimes Hitlériens. 1 By exhibiting their collected evidence, the commissions 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 Mnemosyne 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 suggested connections between subjects and events. This method had been frequently used in works created by leftist artists in the interwar period, including the photomontages 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

implicit message,3 the question arises as to what emotions they were intended to trigger and what story they told.

In many occupied countries, above all in Eastern Europe, images of the crimes that the Nazis committed as Sühnenmaßnahmen (reprisal measures) – especially of the mass shootings and hangings – were part of the iconography of the Second World War.4 The Belgrade exhibition placed these images at the centre of remembrance. Particularly in Yugoslavia, where partisan units offered strong resistance, the occupying forces applied systematic methods of terror as means of coercion and reprisal. These included the murder of civilian hostages and the hanging of communists and partisans. The first victims were always people defined as Jews or Roma. Anyone killed by shooting had to be hanged afterwards – this was stipulated by the directive issued by the commander of the Second Army, Maximilian von Weichs.5 However, the many photos of gallows are also explained by the fact that gallows are a typical subject of “war trophy photography”.6 During the First World War, many German and Austrian soldiers took pictures of their victims as war souvenirs. Similar examples can be found in the lynch photography of the American South. The soldiers of the occupying forces converted lanterns, bridges, trees, and utility poles into murderous objects and backdrops. Their goal was not just to symbolise disempowerment, express perversion, or demonstrate masculinity, but also to dehumanise their victims. They did so simply because they could.

Tree Blossom in Serbia is just one of the many trophy photographs discovered in the pockets of captured or fallen German soldiers. When the Yugoslav Commission exhibited such trophy images, it not only sought to show the suffering of the Yugoslav population, or point to the moral turpitude of the occupying German forces. It also used the symbolic indeterminacy of the gallows – long a symbol of both fair punishment and egregious injustice – to directly reference the systemic criminal logic of the occupation. Moreover, it drew on this indeterminacy to integrate the Yugoslav population after the Second World War through the shared experience of suffering. At the exhibition, visitors did not observe the suffering of others – they observed their own suffering. It was thus all the more important to invest this suffering with a higher meaning. For this reason, the Yugoslav Commission used the exhibition to construct the idea of the Yugoslav population (“our people”) as a community of resistance fighters. One photograph, in particular, shows how the symbol of the gallows became inscribed with new meaning – the now iconic image of the communist Stjepan (Stipan) Filipović, just 25 at the start of the occupation. Filipović was a member of the Communist Party and organised the resistance in the Serbian town of Valjevo. During Christmas 1941, he was arrested by Serbian Chetniks7 and handed over to the Gestapo in Belgrade. Despite being tortured, he did not reveal any information, and the German military court sentenced him to death in spring 1942. On his way to the gallows, Filipović shouted antifascist slogans. Once there, standing on the scaffold, he raised his fists to the sky and addressed the crowd: “What are you waiting for? Why are you enduring this oppression? Arm yourselves and expel the bastards from the country!”8 Thanks to a young female photographer, Slobodanka Vasić, all these scenes were captured. She was just 17 when she photographed Filipović’s execution.

It is not surprising that this photograph was widely disseminated, as it succinctly captured central slogans of the Yugoslav Communist Party. Filipović’s raised fists signal “no surrender”. The photograph shows that this is not a frightened victim submitting to his fate. In the cropped composition, the gallows recedes into the background – as do the German and Serb soldiers present at the hanging. The young man standing on the gallows epitomises resistance.

Through this photo, the Yugoslav Commission reencoded death on the gallows, transforming it into an act of resistance and a symbol of antifascist martyrdom. It individualised the victims of the occupiers’ violence by naming their names and rendering them visible as human beings to be remembered and mourned. It is estimated that more than 50,000 people visited the travelling exhibition during its 38day run in Belgrade. The exhibition was later shown in cities all across Yugoslavia, from Ljubljana to Niš, and even in places like Kragujevac, where the mass crimes had been committed. In total, it attracted almost 100,000 visitors.

This visual interpretation of the occupation had a powerful influence on Yugoslav public memory of the Second World War as reflected in the numerous gallows monuments built in the following decades. Among these are the Ballad of the Hanged (1967) by the Subotica sculptor Nandor Glid, and the Avenue of Fallen Patriots (1959) by the Yugoslav architects Bogdan Bogdanović and Svetislav Ličina. The latter monument commemorates the victims of the execution carried out in Belgrade on 17 August 1941.9

The photograph of Stjepan Filipović is referenced by two large monuments erected in his honour: one in Valjevo, where he was executed, and the other in Opuzen, his birthplace. Both show the partisan with raised fists, a gesture of resistance against fascism.

The Monument to the Revolution erected in Ljubljana in 1975 integrates the raised fists and the gallows in a bronze sculpture that is 11 metres high and 17 metres wide. Reliefs and figures meld together to form a gallows

monument on whose upper edge we see outstretched arms with clenched fists raised defiantly. The work exemplifies the evolution of Yugoslav monument architecture moving away from the typical socialist realism. The core message, though, has remained the same: the triumph of life over death.10 Out of thousands of photographs and motifs, the image of the gallows established itself as a symbol of the systematic criminal nature of the occupation – and a unifying common signifier for all its victims. The occupying forces executed all antifascists, regardless of their ethnic, national, or religious background. In the realm of Yugoslav collective memory, the gallows had multiple meanings. It was not only a place of suffering, but also a place of resistance, a place on the threshold of freedom.

1 See the companion catalogue to the exhibition that reconstructed the original show in Germany in 1945/46:

Hitlers Verbrechen / Crimes

Hitlériens: Eine Ausstellung der französischen Besatzungsmacht, ed. Hans-Georg Merz and Herbert Uhl (Stuttgart, 2008). I wish to thank Rachel

Perry for this reference.

2 See Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York, 2003), 80.

3 See Bernd Stiegler, “Photographie im Amerikanischen und Spanischen Bürgerkrieg”,

Bürgerkriege erzählen: Zum

Verlauf unziviler Konflikte, ed.

Sabina Ferhadbegović and

Brigitte Weiffen (Konstanz, 2011), 113–52, here 115.

4 See Dieter Reifarth and

Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhof,

“Die Kamera der Henker: Fotografische Selbstzeugnisse des

Naziterrors in Osteuropa”, Fotogeschichte 7, no.3 (1983), 57–71.

5 The order is published verbatim in Verbrechen der

Wehrmacht: Dimensionen des

Vernichtungskrieges 1941–1945 (Hamburg, 2021), 510.

6 Anton Holzer has written a remarkable study on this subject, see Anton Holzer, Die andere Front: Fotografie und

Propaganda im Ersten Weltkrieg (Darmstadt, 2007).

7 Chetnik (Četnici, from četa, meaning military squad) originally referred to members of the military units that fought to overturn Ottoman rule in the Balkans in the 19th century. During the Second

World War, the name was adopted by the Serbian nationalist and royalist forces led by General Dragoljub

“Draža” Mihailović. Under

Mihailović, the Chetniks organised the resistance against the occupation, but also cooperated with the

German and Italian occupation forces. For a detailed discussion, see Jozo Tomasevich,

The Chetniks: War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945 (Stanford, 1975), 115–21. 8 Milan Radanović, “Stjepan

Filipović: heroj radničke i antifašističke borbe: 70 godina od smrti”, http:// www.starosajmiste.info/ blog/stjepan-filipovic-heroj -radnicke-i-antifasisticke -borbe-70-godina-od-smrti/.

9 In addition to numerous smaller memorials at the execution sites themselves, there are (or were) additional large gallows monuments in

Gospić (1956–1991), Zaječar (1971), and Koprivnica (1985).

10 This point was emphasised by Bogdan Bogdanović, one of the most famous Yugoslav architects, in an interview with

Vladimir Kulić. See Vladimir

Kulić, “The Scope of Socialist

Modernism: Architecture and

State Representation in Postwar Yugoslavia”, in Sanctioning Modernism: Architecture and the Making of Postwar

Identities, ed. Vladimir Kulić et al. (Austin, 2014), pos.1316.