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It began Palm Sunday at 5.15 a.m .: On the morning of April 6, 1941, German troops initially crossed the Yugoslav border from Bulgaria, and at the same time bomber and fighter squadrons penetrated into Yugoslavia's airspace.
They had two main tasks: firstly, to lay Belgrade in ruins in order to plunge the country's leadership into chaos, and secondly, to eliminate as many air bases of the opposing air forces as possible.
Both succeeded: Parts of Belgrade's inner city, including the royal palace and the national library, were destroyed by fires within a few hours, and many of the approximately 200 modern Yugoslav fighter planes, including the German types Dornier Do 17 and Messerschmitt Bf 109, were devastated.
Propaganda report from an Air Force magazine about the attack on Belgrade
Source: Wikimedia
Released under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license
The Yugoslav air force had been warned: On April 5, a British military attaché had brought the army command in Belgrade the very specific announcement that the capital would be bombed at 6:30 a.m. the following morning.
The colonel said nothing about the origin of this information;
most likely he didn't know the answer himself.
The top secret decryption center Bletchley Park north of London had decrypted a German radio message protected by the Enigma system.
As early as the spring of 1941, messages from the German Army and the Air Force could be read there on a regular basis.
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Adolf Hitler ordered the attack at very short notice: It was not until March 27, 1941 that he gave orders to invade Yugoslavia at the same time as Greece.
The latter offensive had been in preparation since mid-December 1940, mainly because the last British troops were stationed here on mainland Europe.
However, Yugoslavia only moved into the crosshairs of German strategists after a coup by pro-British military officers in Belgrade overthrew the pro-German prince regent Paul.
The fact that the new government under the nominal but not yet of legal age King Peter II immediately concluded a (diplomatically worthless) non-aggression pact with Stalin's Soviet Union also angered the German dictator, because he had long been planning the quick overthrow of his unloved ally in the east for the summer.
The new Yugoslav government had declared Belgrade an “open city” in the event of hostilities, indicating that the metropolis would not be defended against attacks.
In fact, the German embassy in Berlin had reported that there were no anti-aircraft guns in the city.
According to the rules of the Hague Land Warfare Ordinance of 1899 (HLKO), an attack with this would be a war crime.
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Actually, Hitler and the Wehrmacht leadership were no longer interested in the rules of the HLKO;
She had injured Germany countless times since the march into Prague in March 1939.
Nevertheless, the Goebbels propaganda always spoke of the "Belgrade Fortress" in connection with the air raid of April 6, 1941.
A transparent maneuver that did not get caught in Switzerland, Sweden, and certainly not in the USA.
The troops of the German 12th Army, which had been stationed in Romania since the beginning of 1941, had been relocated to western Bulgaria in March and were now ready to invade south-east Yugoslavia.
The XXX.
motorized corps was to take Skopje, the capital of the province of Vardar (essentially today's Macedonia), the 1st Panzer Group under Colonel General Ewald von Kleist was to march on Belgrade.
Border post near Klagenfurt in April 1941: The Yugoslav border shield is overturned
Source: picture-alliance / akg-images
The Yugoslav troops, which were strategically unwise positioned along the approximately 3,000 kilometers of land borders, offered bitter resistance.
But they didn't have a chance.
Although, thanks to the quickly drafted recruits, officially almost twice as strong as the German units with 700,000 men, they only had a fraction of the combat strength of the Wehrmacht.
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The German motorized units were still predominantly equipped with tanks II and III as well as Czech 38t captured tanks;
the more powerful Panzer IV were hardly in use.
But the roughly 850 mostly light and medium-sized German types were compared to only 110 Yugoslav tracked vehicles, of which only 54 Renault R-35s were modern.
The rest were mostly old Renault FT, which had been produced for the French army towards the end of the First World War.
With 6.5 tons of weight, 40 hp and a machine gun as armament, they were even inferior to the German Panzer I, which was only used by the Wehrmacht as a support and command vehicle.
As if this numerical and technical inferiority hadn't been bad enough, there was something else: After the surprisingly good interplay between tank tops and ground combat aircraft in the western campaign in 1940, a concept for the coordinated use of such different weapons was only developed: the Balkan campaign should be the first specifically planned blitzkrieg.
"The rapid success of German army units in southern Yugoslavia was also due to the uninterrupted deployment of the 8th Air Corps", writes the military historian Detlef Vogel in the third volume of the series "The German Reich and the Second World War": "On the very first day, the air supremacy was through Continued attacks on Yugoslav airfields are achieved, and Wolfram von Richthofen's squadrons demoralized Yugoslav army troops by constantly bombarding columns, supply facilities and staffs. "
The successes led to the disintegration of the multi-ethnic Yugoslav army: Macedonian and Croatian soldiers gave up in many cases just two to three days after the offensive began and withdrew, while ethnic Serbs mostly continued to fight.
On April 10, 1941, Maundy Thursday, units of the Wehrmacht marched into Zagreb, this time coming from Styria.
The former Austro-Hungarian army officer Slavko Kvaternik, second man in the nationalist-fascist Ustascha, then proclaimed the independent state of Croatia, whose dictator Ante Pavelic, the Ustascha founder, who had returned from Italian exile, became the dictator.
Two days later the Wehrmacht captured Belgrade;
Ewald von Kleist took down a parade of German tanks in front of the hardly damaged Yugoslav parliament.
The Goebbels propaganda highlighted the achievement of the Waffen SS officer Fritz Klingenberg, who had led a raid to the city center, hoisted a swastika flag and demanded that the mayor surrender.
Otherwise, the 28-year-old Klingenberg bluffed, there would be another devastating air raid.
At this point he had exactly six men under his command.
On April 17, 1941, the last units of the Yugoslav army surrendered - by this time Kleist's powerful tank units had already withdrawn.
King Peter II was under British protection in Greece and was soon brought to safety in Jerusalem.
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What the Wehrmacht had not expected: tens of thousands of soldiers of the defeated Yugoslav army did not give up, but hid in the wooded low mountain range.
Here they joined either the Serbian nationalist Cetniks or the Communist People's Liberation Army in the coming months.
These two partisan associations were spider enemies and fought each other, but so did the German occupation troops.
The actual campaign against Yugoslavia had only cost 151 Wehrmacht soldiers their lives;
The asymmetrical war claimed at least a hundred times as many victims until the liberation of Belgrade in autumn 1944. The Yugoslav civilian population had to pay an even higher blood toll: it is estimated that the three and a half years of occupation resulted in half a million victims.
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