The New York Times reported in a Budapest dispatch today that the Nazi authorities were preparing to unleash anti-Jewish programs throughout Serbia, Bosnia and Macedonia, as part of a sweeping movement to crush anti-German resistance.
Times correspondent Ray Brock, who remained in Yugoslavia throughout the brief campaign, said the ruthless drive on Serbians would be timed to follow departure of the last of the foreign diplomats from Belgrade next Thursday, when the American mission is scheduled to depart.
German officers told Brock in Belgrade that when this last restraining factor was removed “we can proceed with the treatment these Serbians deserve.” The “treatment” planned by the Germans would include “systematic execution, internment in concentration camps, or sentences to forced labor for every Serbian man or woman judged guilty of opposition to Germany since March 27.”
Brock reported that some of the program was already under way. He said Jews were segregated and forced to wear yellow armbands under penalty of execution. Jewish men were being organized into labor gangs to clear bomb wreckage and excavate bodies buried since the first week of April. Jews are forbidden to shop in the public market before 10.30 a.m., when most stocks are exhausted.
Brock said that all Jewish-owned shops were looted and sealed immediately upon arrival of the German troops on April 12. Jews caught trying to escape from Belgrade were shot.
“But this,” Brock quoted the Germans as saying, “is just the beginning.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
