A protest against the rehabilitation of Nedic. Photo: Facebook

The US State Department said in a report published on Tuesday that the Serbian government led by Milan Nedic collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II and was responsible for killing 90 per cent of the country’s Jewish population during the Holocaust.

Meanwhile the Higher Court in Belgrade is continuing its legal deliberations on the possible posthumous rehabilitation of Nedic, the State Department notes in its annual religious freedom report.

“The proponents of his rehabilitation continued to try to prove Nedic was not a war criminal responsible for the killing of Jews and Roma at the Banjica concentration camp,” the report says.

Nedic headed the so-called Government of National Salvation, a puppet government in Serbia during World War II that operated from August 1941 until October 1944.

At the end of the war, he fled to Austria. The Yugoslav Communist authorities who took over after WWII charged him with collaborating with the Germans and with committing treachery, but the case was cut short when he committed suicide in a prison cell in February 1946.

Nedic’s family and the Association of Political Prisoners and Victims of the Communist Regime – which filed the request – claim that he was not a traitor who was guilty of causing suffering during the Nazi occupation of the country.

They also claim that he did not commit suicide, but was murdered by the Communist authorities.

Those who oppose Nedic’s rehabilitation, however, say that the facts are on their side, and that the only people in Serbia who support Nedic’s rehabilitation are “marginalised” right-wing groups.

Opponents of Nedic’s rehabilitation often protest against the hearings in front of the Higher Court, while his supporters, many of them members of right-wing groups, gather to show their support.

According to the State Department report, small publishing houses and groups in Serbia which have been characterised in the media and by NGOs as ultra-nationalist continued in 2016 to sell translations of anti-Semitic literature, such as the discredited ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’.

Several websites run by individuals and groups which have also been characterised as ultra-nationalist posted material online in 2016 which observers said promoted anti-Semitism, although not always explicitly, the State Department report also said.