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Were all the Jews in Serbia murdered only by Nazis and Muslims? Well, let us see what a real historian has to say about that! Excerpts from Raul Hilberg's "The Destruction of the European Jews": Page 684: The Serbs dislike foreign domination in practically any form, and German-occupied Serbia was consequently the scene of continuous partisan warfare. ...in Serbia, German army reacted to the rebellious outbreaks by shooting hostages, especially Jewish hostages...
During the late summer of 1941,... two camps were set up, one in Belgrade, the other in Sabac. At the same time, systematic roundups of Jewish men were set in motion in the entire Serbian territory. Aparently the [German] military was already beginning to think in terms of large-scale shootings of Jews.
...At the beginning of September a traveling envoy from Berlin joined Foreign Office Plenipotentiary Benzler in Belgrade. The traveler was Edmund Veesenmayer, a party member, businessman, and Foreign Office troubleshooter. On September 8, 1941, Veesenmayer and Benzer ...proposed that 8,000 Jewish men be removed from Serbia, perhaps in barges moving downstream on the Danube to the delta of the river in Romania...
Page 685: ...Expert in Jewish affairs, Rademacher... turned to Adolf Eichman. The RSHA's expert on Jewish affairs had a remedy: "Eichman proposes shooting."
Page 686: On October 2, 1941, things were already hapenning in Serbia. At town in Topola a truck convoy of Company 2, 521st Signal Batallion, was ambushed by partisans. Twenty-one men were killed immediately; another died later. Two days later General Bohme instructed the 342d Division and the 449th Signal Batallion to shoot 2,100 inmates of the Sabac and Belgrade camps. The ice was broken.
On October 10 Bohme decided to go all the way. He ordered the "sudden" (schlagartige") arrest of all Communists and suspected Communists, "all Jews", and a "certain number" of "nationally and democratically inclined inhabitants." The arrested victims were to be shot according to the following key: for every dead German soldier or ethnic German, a hundred hostages; for every wounded German soldier or ethnic German, fifty hostages. (This was the key Bohme had applied to the Topola ambush.) Limiting the role of the SS in the killing, Bohme specified that the shootings were to be carried out by the troops and that if possible, the executions were to be performed by the units that suffered the losses. Straight revenge...
Page 688: In a private letter written by Staatsrat Turner [the chief of civil administration under Bohme] to the Higher SS and Police leader in Danzing, Gruppenfuhrer Hildebrandt, on October 17, 1941, he wrote: "...for murdered Germans, on whose account the ratio 1:100 should really be borne by Serbs, 100 Jews are shot instead; but the Jews we had in the camps - after all, they too are Serb nationals,..."
Page 690: While the German army was completing the shooting of 4,000 to 5,000 men, there remained a problem of killing about 15,000 women and children; for "it was contrary to the viewpoint [Auffassung] of the German soldier and civil servant to take women as hostages," ... The Jewish women and children consequently had to be "evacuated."
Page 691: At the end of October, Minister Benzler, Staatsrat Turner, and Standartenfuhrer Fuchs, joined by Foreign's Office's expert, Rademacher, were considering various methods of quietly removing the women and children. The bureaucrats planned a ghetto in the city of Belgrade, but Staatsrat Turner, who did not like ghettos, urged a quick removal of the Jews to a transit camp on a Danubian island at Mitrovica, not far from the Serbian capital. When the proposed Danubian island turned out to be under water, the choice fell upon Semlin (Zemun), a town (oposite Belgrade) originally under the jurisdiction of the Befhelshaber [occupying force] in Serbia but now transferred to Croatia. The Croatian government graciously gave its permission for the construction of a camp in Semlin. (The quote is originally from correspondence Rademacher to Luther, December 8, 1941, NG-3354).
On November 3, 1941, Turner instructed the Feld- and Kreiskommandanturen to start counting the Jewish women and children in all Serbian towns. Preparations were completed in December. Troop units began to move the families of the dead hostages to Semlin...
As the Jews arrived, they were accomodated in the camp. From time to time a batch of women and children were loaded on a special vehicle that drove off into the woods. The vehicle was a gas van.
Slowly but methodically the gas van did its work. In March 1942 the Jewish population of the Semlin camp fluctuated between 5,000 and 6,000, in April the number dropped to 2,974, and in June Dr. Shafer reported that apart from Jews in mixed marriages there was no longer any Jewish problem in Serbia.

When Generaloberst Lohr took over as Oberbefehlshaber Sudost in August 1942, Staatsrat Turner jotted down a few notes for a persnal report to his new chief. In this report Turner itemized all the achievements of the previous administration. With a considerate satisfaction he wrote down a unique accomplishment: "Serbia only country in which Jewish question and Gypsy question solved." Further comments to follow...