‘Germany is your pal now’: Outgoing US ambassador insults Serbia at memorial for schoolboys executed by Nazis

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Searching for to honor schoolboys and different Serbian civilians murdered in a mass execution by Germans in 1941, the US ambassador in Belgrade spoke about progress in direction of a peaceable, united Europe – similar to the Nazis did again then.

On Thursday, Ambassador Anthony Godfrey visited the monument in Kragujevac, devoted to some 2,800 civilians the Nazi occupiers executed on October 21, 1941. Bowing to the “tragic victims” and even referencing a poem memorializing the bloodbath of a complete class of schoolboys, Godfrey then pivoted to milking the occasion for political functions.

“Germany right now stands with Serbia as an important pal, which speaks of the power of reconciliation and the necessity to stroll ahead collectively in direction of a united Europe, dominated by peace and unity,” he tweeted.

First off, that is merely not true. Secondly, it’s far too shut for consolation to rhetoric the Nazis themselves used within the 1940s, as they massacred their approach throughout Serbia and elsewhere.

“Serbia” is a little bit of a misnomer right here, as that was the designation given by the Axis powers to the German occupation zone after Adolf Hitler personally ordered Yugoslavia be “wiped off the map” in April 1941. Restored in 1945, Yugoslavia was once more obliterated in 1991, with the keen participation of the reunited “democratic” Germany. The 1999 air battle NATO waged on the final entity by that title – which broken the Kragujevac monument – was the primary fight mission for the Luftwaffe since WWII. After the occupation of Kosovo and the secession of Montenegro, all that continues to be is a “Serbia” that nearly matches the borders of Hitler’s occupation zone.

Lately, Germany likes to convey up its “investments” in Serbia. So did the Reich of yore, with posters proclaiming “Germany has jobs for everybody” depicting smiling women and men – versus the grim actuality of slave labor factories for Slavic “subhumans.” 

The primary time I noticed that poster was in a monograph about Nazi wartime propaganda, which I picked up on a go to to Belgrade in 2004. It’s now accessible on-line, although it helps in the event you can learn Cyrillic. As an apart, it’s ironic that the Nazis revered the Serbs’ language at the same time as they murdered them en masse and endorsed a genocide of them within the “Unbiased State of Croatia,” whereas NATO lately makes use of the Croatian script, as evidenced by Godfrey’s tweet. 

Different posters within the assortment characteristic Nazi rhetoric about “European unity” that jogs my memory a lot of Godfrey’s. One declares June 22 – the day on which Hitler’s invasion of the us started – to be “Europe’s nationwide vacation” and a “day of liberation from Bolshevik aggression.” 

One other poster describes “what is going to occur as soon as national-socialism wins,” and it needs to be learn to be believed.

“The Serbian individuals will turn out to be a member of the good European household,” it declares. “There can be no concern of future wars, and the individuals will commit themselves to enhancing their very own and common well-being, supported by a united Europe.” Sound acquainted? However there’s extra: “A brand new, higher life will start. Within the blood of Europe’s best sons, a brand new period will daybreak for Serbia as nicely – an period of peace and prosperity for the individuals.”

The EU, NATO and the US “messaging” to Serbia lately harps on the identical issues: prosperity, unity, peace… if solely they submit. Uncanny, isn’t it?

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Properly, again in 1941, the Serbs refused to submit. A variety of royalist officers retreated to the forests and the mountains, waging an insurgency by way of sabotaging roads and railways and making hit-and-run assaults on German garrisons. In June, after the Axis invasion of the us, the Communists launched their very own insurgency. The 2 factions initially labored collectively, earlier than falling out in a wrestle for postwar supremacy.

Western Allies would find yourself enjoying a shameful function in that civil battle, betraying the royalists to aspect with the Communists – and carpet-bombing Serbian cities in 1944 on their behalf, killing many harmless civilians – even because the royalists organized the biggest rescue of downed Allied airmen in historical past, often called Operation Halyard.

Final month, Ambassador Godfrey and Normal David Tabor, commander of the Particular Operations Command Europe, attended a ceremony commemorating the Halyard rescue. Besides they thanked “Serbian farmers” and fully erased the royalist troops that had been concerned.

Again in October 1941, the Communists and royalists nonetheless labored collectively. They struck the garrison in Gornji Milanovac, killing 10 and wounding 26 Germans. The occupation command responded by ordering a reprisal: 100 Serb civilians can be shot for each Wehrmacht soldier killed, and 50 for each wounded. The practically three,000 hostages shot in Kragujevac labored out to a few tenth of the city’s inhabitants – a literal decimation. 

Amongst these executed had been 144 schoolboys, shot to demise alongside their lecturers – one in every of whom is claimed to have exclaimed, “Shoot, however I’m nonetheless giving my lesson.”

That is what Ambassador Godfrey desires the Serbs to forgive and neglect, for the sake of “strolling ahead collectively in direction of a united Europe, dominated by peace and unity”? What’s the State Division pondering? Oh. By no means thoughts.

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