The Central Powers’ horrible atrocities against Serbians

Colonel Aleksandar Protogerov, commander of the 3rd Brigade of the 11th “Macedonia” Division, together with his comrade Todor Aleksandrov, took control of the region of Štip in Eastern Macedonia. At the end of October he ordered extermination of 120 wounded and sick Serbian prisoners of war from the town hospital: they were killed in a village near Štip by both units of 11th Division and comitadjis under the command of voyvoda Ivan Yanev Bŭrlev.⁵³

Similar killings took place in other parts of Macedonia, such as the village of Resan, where [the Central Powers] massacred 28; the town of Kruševo, where comitadjis cut throat to 13, or Topolčani near Bitola, where regular units slaughtered 30 Serbian soldiers;⁵⁴ and in Kosovo, for example near Priština, where [Central Powers] cavalry troops killed 500 Serbian prisoners, or on the banks of the Drim, where 195 were killed and their bodies thrown into the river.⁵⁵ Crimes were committed in many other places.

It was a war, someone might say; and, remembering the experience from the Balkan Wars, we may claim that what [Central Powers] regular troops and comitadjis did to Serbian prisoners was probably an act of revenge or something “normal” in times of war.

But some important factors tell us that the reality was not that simple: first of all, the [Central Powers] soldiers interrogated by the Swiss criminologist R. A. Reiss admitted that they had received specific orders from their superior officers to kill Serbian prisoners,⁵⁶ and — this may be crucial — not only soldiers but also civilians were the target of massacres.

Here we can clearly see that at the moment of invasion the intention to eradicate every aspect of Serbian influence in the region, primarily by killing the Serbian and pro‐Serbian elements, had already existed as a precise plan in the Bulgarian army and comitadji bands.

Regular troops took control of the region, but comitadjis were appointed mayors and prefects, and they retained control of the whole police structure.⁵⁷ Every major town was controlled by a comitadji leader (voyvoda),⁵⁸ whose power became absolute and legitimized through a new administrative system in Macedonia; they operated strictly in order to eliminate Serbian presence in their territories.

It was not a difficult task, because in the towns — like in most of Serbian Macedonia — the Slavic population was not entirely Serbian or pro‐Serbian, and this meant that comitadjis in the towns had to eliminate the Serbian administrative structure — if still there, because most officials had withdrawn with the army to Albania or to Greece — composed predominantly of Serbs from pre‐Balkan wars Serbia who had the duty to pursue and oversee the Serbianization of the region (teachers, priests, officials, etc.) — and all elements who collaborated with them.

For the same reason destructions and mass murders took place in many villages where the population was Serbian or loyal to Serbian authorities,⁵⁹ concentrated in the area between Veles, Prilep and Brod (region of Poreče). The destructions looked like punitive expeditions against previously defined targets, where [Central Powers] regular troops and comitadjis arrived with the clear intention (and probably orders or, if not, at least freedom of action) to destroy and kill.

On 14 November Bulgarian units of the 7th “Rila” Division and [Ottoman Imperialists] of the village of Crnilište entered the villages of Dolgovac and Kostinci near Prilep. Together they pillaged houses and slaughtered people who were still inside or who tried to escape, including children and women, at least more than 70 of them;⁶⁰ then they gathered the remaining 200 Serb civilians in the place called “Samakovo” and slaughtered them with no mercy, “rushing with their bloody knives from person to person”.⁶¹

The same happened in the village of Bogomila near Veles, where all Serb inhabitants where massacred and their homes destroyed; women were raped and tortured before they were killed.⁶² Massacres were committed in many other places in that Macedonian area, as R. A. Reiss reported from one of his sources:

In the village of Bogomil they killed 95 persons, of whom just 20 were men and the others were children and women; […] in the village of Gostirachna 65 persons, of whom 10 men and the rest women and children; in Strovie 80 persons, of whom only 15 were men […]; in Dolgavatz 280 persons, of whom 20 men older than 50 years and all the rest women and children; in Kostentzi 60 persons, of whom only 8 men; in Brod […], on the 12th/25th of December 1915, 105 persons were killed […] and the day later other 100 on the way to Dobrech; in Stounje, 18 persons.⁶³

It was calculated that in the early period of occupation more than 2,000 Serb civilians were killed by [Central Powers] regular troops and comitadjis in the area between Veles, Prilep and Brod alone, and that tens of Serb‐inhabited villages were razed to the ground;⁶⁴ but many other civilians shared the same fate, especially in the towns, which were the target of the “cleansing” of the Serbian element by the comitadjis.

[…]

A special commission composed of Colonel Kalkadzhiev, Major Ilkov, Second Lieutenant Yurukov and Sergeant Vitanov, all of the 42nd Regiment, 3rd Brigade, 1st Division “Sofia”, and Second Lieutenant Simonov and Sergeant Erchikov of the 5th Place Regiment,⁷⁵ was set up in the town with the sole duty to select prisoners and decide which from the deported groups should be executed immediately.

Mass executions of Serbs were committed in a nearby place called “Duboka Dolina” and the victims were buried in mass graves; we do not know much about how the commission decided who should be executed, but thanks to Reiss and other researches we know that by the end of April 1916 about 2,000–3,000 civilians had been killed in that place.⁷⁶ For this reason Surdulica was nicknamed the “slaughterhouse of Serbs”.⁷⁷

(Emphasis added.)

:::spoiler The Central Powers’ occupation of Serbia bears a striking resemblance to the Axis occupation of Poland. Even when the Central Powers occupied Poland, they did not pursue a goal of annihilating Polish culture (although a few officials did consider the option).

At the end of the war the Inter‐allied Commission in Serbia affirmed that the nature of those murders was clearly political, because the [Central Powers] had wanted to eliminate the Serbian élite in order to deprive the common people of their leadership;⁷⁸ and at the same time to carry out the process of Bulgarization, erasing any evidence of Serbian culture in Macedonia and, especially, in the Morava region.

The forced introduction of the Bulgarian church and clergy was the first step in building a new Bulgarian culture instead of Serbian, because ecclesiastic institutions were centres spreading national spirit; in Balkan societies they were more powerful than any other cultural or educational institution, especially considering that in countries like Serbia more than eighty percent of the population were illiterate and lived in the countryside often without contact with any other culture except the one promoted by the church.

Serbian language was forbidden everywhere, schoolteachers were brought from [the Central Powers], Serbian books were taken from libraries, schools and private collections, and publicly destroyed⁷⁹ (but the most important of them were sent to [the Tsardom of] Bulgaria, along with sacred icons and treasures looted from Serbian monasteries and churches).⁸⁰

[…]

The methods of Bulgarization, such as the exclusive use of Bulgarian, Bulgarian schools and ecclesiastical institutions, were reaffirmed, and the violence of this process explicitly formulated: “To implement Bulgarization in this region it is necessary to destroy all myths, pillars and all elements of Serbdom and it is necessary that on their ruins should only remain the Bulgarian ones.” :::
One can also liken the Central Powers’ occupation of Serbia to the Zionist occupation of Palestine. As the Inter‐allied Commission put it: The conditions in which the internees in the camps lived were so bad that one could think that their extermination was the main goal.

Although the Central Powers were less annihilatory towards the population in western and northern Serbia, they were still unafraid to resort to extreme measures there:

In order to keep subdued 1,375,000 people estimated to populate the Austro‐Hungarian occupation zone in Serbia with the relatively small and weak contingent of occupation troops, severe preventive measures were undertaken against civilians: deportation (internment), disarmament and hostage‐taking.