Kosta Pećanac

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Kosta Pećanac (around 1912/1913)

Kosta Milovanovic Pecanac ( Serbian - Cyrillic Коста Миловановић Пећанац * 1879 in Dečani , Kosovo Vilayet , Ottoman Empire ; † 25 May 1944 in Nikolinac , Serbia ) was a Serbian Vojvode of Chetnik associations in the Balkan wars and in the First and Second World War . As such, he was a collaborator with Nazi Germany and the puppet government of Wehrmacht-occupied Serbia during World War II .

Life

First World War

Kosta Pećanac (1916)

Together with the Serbian army, the Chetnik units withdrew from the Austro-Hungarian troops via Corfu to Saloniki . The Bulgarian occupation regime in southern Serbia took on increasingly cruel forms, so that at the end of 1916 a Chetnik group under Kosta Pećanac returned there. It had the order to delay a mass uprising of the population until the Serbian army could support it. After he could no longer prevent the so-called Toplica uprising , Pećanac took its lead in February 1917. After initial successes, the insurgents were defeated by Bulgarian troops and bloody reprisals against the Serbian civilian population followed.

Interwar period

In 1932 Pećanac became president of the politically influential Chetnik Veterans Association, which, according to the association's report from 1938, is said to have had 1,000 sections with a total of 500,000 members. The strictly national-Serbian and ultra-conservative veterans' association had developed into the main agitator against the Communist Party in the 1920s.

Second World War

After the Balkan campaign (1941) of the German Wehrmacht in World War II and the subsequent occupation of Yugoslavia , Pećanac began setting up an armed Chetnik group, which by the summer of 1941 comprised around 3,000 men in southern Serbia. At this time, the SS security service made contact with Pećanac with the knowledge of the military commander.

After the attack on the Soviet Union at the end of June 1941, Pećanac publicly announced that his Chetniks would not resist the German occupiers, and forbade his Chetniks to attack German and Italian troops if they behaved correctly towards the civilian population. He left an offer from the Chetnik leader Draža Mihailović to work together and made his people available to the Wehrmacht leadership to fight the partisans. Pećanac called for collaboration with the German, Italian and Bulgarian occupying powers in the hope of protecting his supporters from reprisals.

Later he agreed to use his own associations, the so-called Pećanac-Tschetniks, against communist partisans and to keep them away from the Chetniks of Draža Mihailović. Pećanac's troops were initially used by the German occupying forces as an auxiliary gendarmerie in the area of central Serbia . The German commander in Serbia hoped “that the new government, in a certain connection with Četniki (of Kosta Pećanac - W. [alter] M. [anoschek]) will make a significant contribution to restoring peace and order and at least induce the nationally minded Serbs to not to make common cause with communists ”. Pećanac's local troops did not insignificant services to the German Wehrmacht and the Serbian collaboration government under Milan Nedić in the summer and autumn of 1941. The head of the German military administration and SS group leader Harald Turner certified that Pećanac had adhered to the promised political line and had achieved good results against communists (report of December 3, 1941).

By the winter of 1941/1942 the Pećanac-Tschetniks grew to 5,255 men and were under German authority.

In May 1942 its maximum strength was 13,400 men. However, Pećanac's position was completely undermined by the occupation of his home territory of Prokuplje in south-east Serbia in January 1942 by the Bulgarian army.

The Serbian population of this area feared annexation by Bulgaria and turned to the communist Tito partisans . The Germans also distrusted Pećanac. In autumn 1942 they disbanded most of his associations. Some of the teams were transferred to the Serbian State Guard, the gendarmerie force of the government of Milan Nedić.

Pecanac was competing Tschetnikverbänden captured and in 1944 Nikolinac in Sokobanja on the orders of Mihailovic due to the collaboration of a so-called " black troika " executed .

Awards (selection)

Web links

Commons : Kosta Pećanac  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Ladislaus Hory, Martin Broszat: The Croatian Ustasha State 1941–1945 . 2nd Edition. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1965, p. 113 f .
  2. ^ A b Walter Manoschek: Serbia is free of Jews. Military occupation policy and the extermination of Jews in Serbia 1941/42 (=  contributions to military history . Volume 38 ). Munich 1993, ISBN 3-486-55974-5 , p. 113 .
  3. ^ A b c d e Walter Manoschek: Serbia is free of Jews. Military occupation policy and the extermination of Jews in Serbia 1941/42 (=  contributions to military history . Volume 38 ). Munich 1993, ISBN 3-486-55974-5 , 1. The Četniks of Kosta Pećanac, p. 110 f .
  4. ↑ Management report from the end of August 1941 to AOK 12 for the period August 21–31, 1941 ; quoted from Walter Manoschek: Serbia is free of Jews. Military occupation policy and the extermination of Jews in Serbia 1941/42 (=  contributions to military history . Volume 38 ). Munich 1993, ISBN 3-486-55974-5 , p. 133 , fn. 111 .
  5. ^ Klaus Schmider : The Yugoslav theater of war . In: Karl-Heinz Frieser (Ed.): The German Reich and the Second World War . tape 8 , The Eastern Front 1943/44 - The War in the East and on the Side Fronts. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-421-06235-2 , pp. 1084 f .
personal data
SURNAME Pećanac, Kosta
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pećanac, Kosta Milovanović
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Leader of the Chetnik movement in the Balkan Wars and in the First and Second World Wars
DATE OF BIRTH 1879
PLACE OF BIRTH Dečani
DATE OF DEATH May 25, 1944
Place of death Nikolinac at Sokobanja