Territory of the Military Commander in Serbia in the context of "The Holocaust in Serbia"

World War II in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia began on 6 April 1941, when the country was invaded and swiftly conquered by Axis forces and partitioned among Germany, Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria and their client regimes. Shortly after Germany attacked the USSR on 22 June 1941, the communist-led republican Yugoslav Partisans, on orders from Moscow, launched a guerrilla liberation war fighting against the Axis forces and their locally established puppet regimes, including the Axis-allied Independent State of Croatia (NDH) and the Government of National Salvation in the German-occupied territory of Serbia. This was dubbed the National Liberation War and Socialist Revolution in post-war Yugoslav communist historiography. Simultaneously, a multi-side civil war was waged between the Yugoslav communist Partisans, the Serbian royalist Chetniks, the Axis-allied Croatian Ustaše and Home Guard, Serbian Volunteer Corps and State Guard, Slovene Home Guard, as well as Nazi-allied Russian Protective Corps troops.

Both the Yugoslav Partisans and the Chetnik movement initially resisted the Axis invasion. However, after 1941, Chetniks extensively and systematically collaborated with the Italian occupation forces until the Italian capitulation, and thereon also with German and Ustaše forces. The Axis mounted a series of offensives intended to destroy the Partisans, coming close to doing so in the Battles of Neretva and Sutjeska in the spring and summer of 1943.

The Kragujevac massacre was the mass murder of between 2,778 and 2,794 mostly Serb men and boys in Kragujevac by German soldiers on 21 October 1941. It occurred in the German-occupied territory of Serbia during World War II, and came as a reprisal for insurgent attacks in the Gornji Milanovac district that resulted in the deaths of ten German soldiers and the wounding of 26 others. The number of hostages to be shot was calculated as a ratio of 100 hostages executed for every German soldier killed and 50 hostages executed for every German soldier wounded, a formula devised by Adolf Hitler with the intent of suppressing anti-Nazi resistance in Eastern Europe.

After a punitive operation was conducted in the surrounding villages, during which over 400 males were shot and four villages burned down, another 70 male Jews and communists who had been arrested in Kragujevac were killed. Simultaneously, males between the ages of 16 and 60, including high school students, were assembled by German troops and local collaborators, and the victims were selected from amongst them. The selected males were then marched to fields outside the city, shot with heavy machine guns, and their bodies buried in mass graves. Contemporary German military records indicate that 2,300 hostages were shot. After the war, inflated estimates ranged as high as 7,000 deaths, but German and Serbian scholars have now agreed on the figure of nearly 2,800 killed, including 144 high school students. As well as Serbs, massacre victims included Jews, Romani people, Muslims, Macedonians, Slovenes, and members of other nationalities.

A gas van or gas wagon (Russian: душегубка, romanized: dushegubka, lit. 'soul killer'; Serbian: душегупка/dušegupka; German: Gaswagen) was a truck re-equipped as a mobile gas chamber. During World War II and the Holocaust, Nazi Germany developed and used gas vans on a large scale to kill inmates of asylums, Romany people, Jews, and prisoners in occupied Poland, Belarus, Nedić's Serbia, the Soviet Union, and other regions of German-occupied Europe. There are several documented cases of gas vans used by Soviet NKVD during the Great Purge.

The Government of National Salvation (Serbian: Влада народног спаса, romanized: Vlada narodnog spasa; German: Regierung der nationalen Rettung, abbr. VNS), also referred to as Nedić's government or Nedić's regime, was the colloquial name of the second Serbian collaborationist puppet government established after the Commissioner Government in the German-occupied territory of Serbia during World War II in Yugoslavia. Appointed by the German Military Commander in Serbia, it operated from 29 August 1941 to 4 October 1944. Unlike the Independent State of Croatia, the regime in occupied Serbia was never accorded status in international law and did not enjoy formal diplomatic recognition of the Axis powers.

Although the regime was tolerated by some Serbs living in the occupied territory and even actively supported by a part of the Serb population, it was unpopular with a majority of the population who supported one of the two factions which at first were perceived as connected to the Allied Powers, the Yugoslav Partisans or the royalist Chetniks. The Prime Minister throughout was General Milan Nedić. The Government of National Salvation was evacuated from Belgrade through Budapest to Kitzbühel in the first week of October 1944, before the German withdrawal from the occupied territory was complete.

The Serbian Volunteer Corps (Serbian Cyrillic: Српски добровољачки корпус, Serbian: Srpski dobrovoljački korpus, SDK for short; German: Serbisches Freiwilligenkorps), also known as Ljotićevci (Serbian Cyrillic: Љотићевци), was the paramilitary branch of the fascist political organisation Zbor, which collaborated with the forces of Nazi Germany in the German-occupied territory of Serbia, while loyal to the King of Yugoslavia Peter II, during World War II.

In July 1941, following a full-scale rebellion by communist Yugoslav Partisans and royalist Chetniks, the German military commander in Serbia pressured Milan Nedić's collaborationist government to deal with the uprisings under the threat of letting the armed forces of the Independent State of Croatia, Hungary, and Bulgaria occupy the territory and maintain peace and order in it. A paramilitary militia called the Serbian Volunteer Detachments was formed, the unit, never formally part of the German armed forces, numbered about 3,500 men, mostly Serbian but also included some Croats and Slovenes. It was reorganised as the Serbian Volunteer Corps, at the end of 1942, and placed under the command of Colonel Kosta Mušicki. By 1944, the majority of the Serbian Volunteer Corps recruits were draftees as opposed to volunteers and reached a peak strength of 9,886 men.

The Serbian State Guard (Serbian: Srpska državna straža, SDS; Serbian Cyrillic: Српска државна стража; German: Serbische Staatsgarde/Serbische Staatswache), also known as the Nedićevci, was a collaborationist paramilitary force used to impose law and order within the German occupied territory of Serbia during World War II. It was formed from two former Yugoslav gendarmerie regiments, was created with the approval of the German military authorities, and for a long period was controlled by the Higher SS and Police Leader in the occupied territory. It assisted the Germans in imposing one of the most brutal occupation regimes in occupied Europe and helped guard and execute prisoners at the Banjica concentration camp in Belgrade. Its leaders and much of the rank and file were sympathetic to the Chetnik movement of Draža Mihailović, and it was purged by the Germans on several occasions for that reason. In October 1944, as the Soviet Red Army closed on Belgrade, the SDS was transferred to Mihailović's control by a member of the fleeing Nedić administration, but it quickly disintegrated during its withdrawal west, with only a small number of former SDS members being captured by the British near the Italian-Yugoslav border in May 1945.