Bombing of Belgrade, 1941: the Luftwaffe's Palm Sunday raid

On the morning of 6 April 1941 German bombers appeared over Belgrade with no ultimatum and no warning. The raids opened Germany's invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece and left the center of the Yugoslav capital in ruins. Thousands of people died in their homes, in cellars and in the streets, and how many is still disputed.²

Background: a coup and a punishment

On 25 March 1941 the government of Prince Regent Paul signed Yugoslavia up to the Tripartite Pact, the alliance of the Axis powers. Two nights later officers led by the air force general Dušan Simović overthrew it and placed the seventeen-year-old King Peter II on the throne. Crowds demonstrated against Germany in Belgrade and other Serbian cities. The new government in fact assured Berlin that it wanted friendly relations, and the U.S. Army's postwar study and the historian Winfried Garscha both note that Simović did not repudiate the pact.³

Hitler took the coup as betrayal. On 27 March he told his commanders that he had decided to "destroy Yugoslavia as a military power and sovereign state", in the words of the U.S. Army study, and his directive of that day ordered the Luftwaffe to destroy the city of Belgrade by continuous day and night attacks, as both the U.S. Army study, drawn from German records, and Garscha record. The attack was to coincide with the invasion of Greece, which Germany had already planned.⁴

Historians still differ on what kind of attack followed. Brett Holman, a historian of air power, notes that it is sometimes described as indiscriminate, since Hitler ordered the destruction of the city, and sometimes as targeted, since the operational orders of Luftflotte 4 named military and communications targets in the center. Garscha, who quotes the order signed on 31 March by the air fleet's commander, the Austrian general Alexander Löhr, argues that because the attack came without ultimatum or warning, the first wave's main target was the civilian population.⁵ › Yugoslavia in World War II

The attackers and the defenders

Luftflotte 4, the air fleet that had bombed Warsaw in September 1939, flew the raids from airfields in Austria and Romania. The U.S. Army study counts about 150 bombers and dive bombers in the first attack, protected by a heavy fighter escort, and an eyewitness report quoted by Holman speaks of 150 Dorniers accompanied by Stukas. Against them Yugoslavia had a small air force and few anti-aircraft guns.⁶

Belgrade had no warning and no chance to prepare. Most of its people were asleep on an early Sunday morning. Garscha notes that 6 April was Palm Sunday only for Catholics, since the Orthodox Palm Sunday fell two weeks later, and that villagers from around the city were bringing their produce to the Sunday markets; History.com writes that people from nearby towns had come in for Palm Sunday.⁷

The raids in phases

Sunday morning. The first raid came in three waves about fifteen minutes apart, each lasting about twenty minutes, so that bombs fell on the city for nearly an hour and a half. The main effort was against the center, where the government buildings stood. The few Yugoslav fighters and anti-aircraft guns that rose to meet it were quickly overwhelmed, and the dive bombers came down to rooftop height.⁸

The air war over the country was just as one-sided, though the figures differ. The U.S. Army study, drawing on German reports, says that twenty Yugoslav planes were shot down and forty-four destroyed on the ground for the loss of two German fighters on the first day. History.com writes that all of Yugoslavia's airfields were bombed and most of its 600 aircraft destroyed on the ground.⁹

The bombs wrecked the city's power and water supply, and with the water gone the fires could not be fought. Not only government and military buildings were hit: the raids used incendiaries as well as high explosive, as Garscha shows from the commander's orders, and the Historical Archives of Belgrade records that ordinary housing took much of the damage. A great many people left the city as soon as they could.¹⁰

Sunday to Monday. Further raids hit the center through the afternoon and the night of 6 to 7 April; Garscha counts five waves in all between Sunday morning and Monday evening. Attacks on Belgrade went on, more lightly, until 12 April.¹¹

Turning point: the capital silenced

The bombing achieved its military purpose at once. The U.S. Army study, based on German accounts, says it virtually destroyed all communication between the Yugoslav high command and its forces in the field, so that coordination was impossible from the outset. The government left the city. Holman points out that with German armies already advancing on Belgrade it would have had to go anyway, and he argues that the raids were a true blitz, meant to wreck a command and supply center ahead of a ground advance, like Guernica in 1937 and Warsaw in 1939.¹²

German armies then drove on the capital from three directions. Belgrade was occupied on 12 and 13 April, and on 17 April the Yugoslav army signed an armistice.¹³

The National Library

The bombs also struck at the memory of the nation. The National Library of Serbia stood on Kosančićev venac above the Sava; German incendiaries burned it out, leaving only fragments of the building standing. The Historical Archives of Belgrade speaks of about 350,000 books and some 500,000 other volumes lost, among them medieval manuscripts, charters and incunabula. Garscha lists 1,300 medieval manuscripts on parchment and paper, a collection of Ottoman manuscripts, more than 200 books from the first Serbian presses of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, some 2,000 letters of writers and other public figures and the first editions of the 300,000 books printed in Serbia and its neighbors since 1832, together with all the catalogs.¹⁴

Counting the dead

The figures are far apart, and each comes from a different kind of source. The official count published by the city gave 2,271 dead, with a very large number wounded. Garscha writes that 2,274 bodies were recovered and that most postwar estimates put the dead at around 4,000. Holman thinks the official number probably too low and notes that British newspapers at the time reported 12,000. The U.S. Army's 1953 study, drawn from German accounts, states that more than 17,000 inhabitants lay dead under the debris, and History.com repeats that figure, calling it the largest number of civilian dead in a single day since the start of the war.¹⁵

The damage to the city is better documented. The Historical Archives of Belgrade records about 600 tons of bombs between 6 and 12 April, 714 buildings completely destroyed, 1,888 badly and 6,615 lightly damaged, almost half of the city's housing, with the water and sewage systems, electricity and trams knocked out and the bridges over the Sava and the Danube down. Garscha gives slightly lower figures for the buildings: at least 692 destroyed and 1,476 badly damaged.¹⁶

Aftermath

Even on the official figure, Holman points out, the toll was higher than any single night of the Blitz on Britain, though it was spread over several days. The city was occupied within a week, and Yugoslavia was carved up among Germany and its allies.¹⁷

Alexander Löhr, the Austrian general who commanded the air fleet, was convicted of war crimes after the war and executed in Belgrade in 1947, ORF reports; Garscha, writing of his role, calls the Belgrade attack another demonstration of the Luftwaffe used as an instrument of terror against civilians, after Warsaw.¹⁸

Legacy and memory

For Belgrade, 6 April opened years of occupation and war. Garscha places the bombing in a line of German terror raids that ran from Guernica through Warsaw, Rotterdam and Coventry, and Holman in the same line of blitzes against command centers ahead of an advancing army. Both see the same pattern: a city struck without warning at the opening of a campaign.¹⁹ › 6 April in military history

The loss of the National Library is counted among the heaviest cultural losses of the war in Serbia: the Historical Archives of Belgrade stresses the enormous cultural and historical value of what burned, and Garscha notes that even the catalogs were lost, so that much of what was destroyed cannot even be listed.²⁰