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Thanks for putting that together. I know very little about that part of the world and am always interested in learning more history.

What little I do know, apparently, gave me an incorrect impression. I know from some WWII documentaries that some of the Nazi concentration camps had Serbian guards whose brutality, apparently, was legendary. Many of the survivors of Bergen-Belsen(?) never forgot the Serbs who served the Nazis as camp guards.

I know that there has been a great deal of tension between the Serbs and Albanians but, I evidentally fell asleep around the time that Albania disappeared off the map and wasn't aware of what was actually going on.

Again, I appreciate you taking the time to enlighten me.

"I know from some WWII documentaries that some of the Nazi concentration camps had Serbian guards whose brutality, apparently, was legendary"

You have to be mistaking the Serbs for others. What particular documentaries are you talking about?

Serbs were not guards - Serbs were inmates. Hitler hated the Serbs and bombed (beginning April 1941) and invaded Serbia. Historical fact. The Germans shot and hung Serbs. They executed thousands of Serbian school boys in Kragujevac "The Kragujevac Massacre" because Serb rebels were killing German soldiers. The Germans made a rule to kill 100 Serbs for every German soldier killed.

The Serbs were also put in concentration camps in Croatia - one infamous one called Jasenovac. The Serbs fought the Germans, after Germany invaded Serbia, in both WWI and WWII, while the non-Serbs cooperated with the Germans.

The Serbs were probably the second most depised people on Hitler's list. The Serbian uprising (coup d'etat, March 27, 1941) delayed Operation Barbarossa (the invasion of the USSR) and caused the Germans to get bogged down and decimated by the Russian winter. His bombing of Belgrade was codenamed Operation Punishment for a reason. In addition, the unrest in the Balkans forced Hitler to send a bunch of divisions to the peninsula - the divisions he needed on the Eastern Front.

Had he had the extra soldiers and the crucial weeks he had to spend on the Balkan problem, the course of history would've been much different.

His hatred of the Serbs, however, goes back to WWI. The Royal Serbian Army humiliated the Cental Powers by pulverizing the invading Austro-Hungarian armies three times in as many months in the early days of the war. The first Allied victory in WWI was actually won by the Serbs (The Battle of Tser).

D.M.

Sorry for the late response to this, but I think you may have confused "Serbs", with "Ukranians", in your late-night-TV documentary viewing. There were NO Serbs among the many nationalities who faught in the Waffen SS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffen-SS

But there were quite a few Ukranians serving as camp guards. Most notable among them, a former American Steelworker, John Demjanjuk, whom Justice Dept. investigators identified as a former camp guard named "Ivan the Terrible". His trials -- in the U.S., and in Israel -- took over a decade, I think, and were sometimes front page stuff.

But he, like the other guys, were all Ukranians, not Serbs