Arrest and Vojlovica

When Germany invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, Bishop Nikolai — an outspoken opponent of the Axis and a symbol of Serbian resistance — was quickly placed under arrest. He spent most of the occupation in enforced confinement in Serbian monasteries, first at Ljubostinja and then, with Patriarch Gavrilo, at Vojlovica near Pančevo, until the deportation to Germany in 1944.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox (glorified 2003)

The Invasion and the Bishop’s Position

The German-led Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941 dismembered the country and placed Serbia under a harsh German military occupation. Nikolai, then bishop of Žiča, had been a prominent public opponent of Nazi Germany and of the Axis in the years before the war, and he was closely identified with the currents of Serbian and Yugoslav patriotism that the occupiers regarded as hostile (“Nikolaj Velimirović,” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org; OrthodoxWiki, “Nicholas (Velimirović) of Žiča,” orthodoxwiki.org). His anti-German stance is one of the securely established features of his wartime record, and it is a fact that his defenders rightly stress against the charge that he was pro-Nazi: whatever the content of his writing on Jews and modernity (see The Charge of Antisemitism), he was arrested and imprisoned by the Third Reich as an enemy, not embraced by it as a collaborator.

The Monastic Confinements: Ljubostinja and Vojlovica

With the occupation, Nikolai was removed from the free exercise of his office and placed under German-supervised confinement. He was held first at the monastery of Ljubostinja — a fourteenth-century convent in central Serbia — and later transferred, together with the Serbian Patriarch Gavrilo V (Dožić), to the monastery of Vojlovica near Pančevo, north of Belgrade, where the two chief figures of the Serbian Church were kept under guard for an extended period during the occupation (OrthodoxWiki, “Nicholas (Velimirović) of Žiča,” giving the Žiča → Ljubostinja → Vojlovica sequence; “Nikolaj Velimirović,” Wikipedia). The confinement of the Patriarch and the most famous bishop of the Serbian Church together at Vojlovica is well attested and is a significant fact of the occupation: the Germans had effectively interned the leadership of the Serbian Orthodox Church.

The Ljubostinja confinement is the setting to which one of the most-discussed defense claims of the whole controversy is attached: the testimony of Ela Trifunović (née Nayhaus), who in a letter to the Serbian Orthodox Church in 2001 stated that as a Jewish girl she had been sheltered for some eighteen months in the Ljubostinja monastery, smuggled there and later helped to move on with false papers, in an account connected with Nikolai (see the full treatment, with its evidentiary limits, in The Charge of Antisemitism). That claim is examined in Section 06; it is noted here only to locate it geographically, at the monastery of Nikolai’s own confinement.

The Character of the Confinement

The conditions of the monastic confinements at Ljubostinja and Vojlovica were those of house-arrest and internment rather than of a concentration camp: Nikolai and the Patriarch were held under guard, deprived of liberty and of the free exercise of their office, and subject to German control, but they remained within Serbian monasteries and within the life, however constrained, of the Church. This is a materially different situation from the Dachau imprisonment that followed, and the distinction matters for an accurate account (see Imprisonment in Dachau). During these years Nikolai continued to write; the wartime origin of the contested text Words to the Serbian People Through the Dungeon Window is traditionally placed in this period of imprisonment, though its authorship and dating are themselves disputed (see Words to the Serbian People).

Toward Deportation

The confinement at Vojlovica ended in the autumn of 1944 when Nikolai and Patriarch Gavrilo were removed from Serbia and deported to the German concentration camp at Dachau (see Imprisonment in Dachau). The reasons for this escalation — from internment in a Serbian monastery to deportation to a camp in the Reich — are bound up with the collapsing military situation of 1944 and with German calculations about the two churchmen; the sources do not give a single settled account. What is clear is the trajectory: a bishop who had opposed the Axis, arrested at the invasion, interned through the occupation with his Patriarch, and finally deported to Dachau as the war neared its end. This arc — a Serbian churchman imprisoned by the Nazis from first to last — is the indispensable frame for the controversy of Section 06, and it is one of the strongest cards in his defenders’ hand.

See Also

• Imprisonment in Dachau — the deportation and the disputed conditions of the camp
• Words to the Serbian People — the text traditionally assigned to this period of imprisonment
• The Charge of Antisemitism — where the arrest, the Ljubostinja rescue claim, and the imprisonment all bear on the debate
• Bishop of Žiča and Ohrid — the episcopate the occupation interrupted

References

• “Nikolaj Velimirović.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org. (The April 1941 invasion and arrest; the anti-Axis stance; the sequence of confinements and the deportation to Dachau; used to locate the outline, not as a terminal citation.)
• “Nicholas (Velimirović) of Žiča.” OrthodoxWiki, orthodoxwiki.org. (The Žiča → Ljubostinja → Vojlovica sequence and the joint confinement with Patriarch Gavrilo.)
• “Gavrilo V, Serbian Patriarch.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org. (The joint arrest and confinement of Patriarch Gavrilo and Bishop Nikolai and their deportation to Dachau.)
• Byford, Jovan. Denial and Repression of Antisemitism: Post-Communist Remembrance of the Serbian Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović. Budapest–New York: Central European University Press, 2008. (The wartime record and its role in the later debate; the Ela Trifunović / Nayhaus claim, treated in Section 06.)