Yugoslavian POW’s

[Vulture14]

I know around 375,000 POW’s were taken prisoner by the axis after the invasion of Yugoslavia was complete. But what happened to them? Did they go to German factories or were they formed into the Croatian home guard Serbian state guard etc? Any help is greatly appreciated

[Larry D.]

Off the top of my head from research I did in the German documents back in the 1980's, they were initially put in DULAGs and STALAGs in occupied Yugoslavia and in the Reich. They were then screened to separate the Volksdeutschen from the Roman Catholic Croatians from the Pravoslavni. The first of these were released almost immediately, the Croatians a few weeks later. The Pravoslavni were either permanently confined, used as forced labor, became Hiwi, or allowed to join the Serbian State Guard. A number of them were shot, too. You should be able to find a fair amount of literature on this, although most of it is in Serbo-Croatian (Cyrillic alphabet).

L.

[TISO]

AFAIK Italians released most of them especcialy those that came from their zone of occupation (or said they were from their zone - according to many they really didn't bother to check to much). At least that was the case with slovenes. Most of the slovene officers and NCO's later ended in internation which is a rather sordid story of using italians to get rid of competition (using bogus mobilisation letters sent by post which was under italian censorship). That is how one of my father's uncles ended in Gonars camp. As germans are concerned most were treated as for example french POW's i.e. another fathers uncle was doing farm work as POW somewhere in germany.

[Poot]

Some served in a forced labor capacity as far away as Norway. There was an article a few years back on this in English, but I never saved it, nor the citation.