Serbian Volunteer Corps (World War II) - Surrender and Afterwards

Surrender and Afterwards

At about this time, 22 April, Neubacher paid his final visit to Ljotić. A total collapse of German forces in the Balkans and in Italy was recognized as being only a matter of weeks if not days away, and Neubacher wanted to know Ljotić's plans for withdrawing and surrendering the SDK. The next day, during the hours of darkness, Ljotić accidentally drove his car into a hole that had been blown in a bridge by Allied fighter-bombers. His neck was broken and he died shortly thereafter.

On 29 April, as Tito's forces were closing on the Trieste area, General Damjanović issued orders to the 1st and 5th Regiments to cross into Italy, where on 5 May in the town of Palmanova (50 km northwest of Trieste) between 2,400 and 2,800 SDK men surrendered to the British.

The men belonging to the other three regiments experienced a less agreeable fate. They moved north from the Ljubljana area into Austria and surrendered to the British at Unterbergen on the Drava River on 12 May 1945. 20 days later these 2,418 men were turned over to Tito's Partisans. Some were executed almost immediately in the Kočevski Rog massacre, while the others were carted off along with 10,000 Slovenian Domobranci to the infamous Šentvid camp, near Ljubljana. Subsequently, after a period of brutalization, these too were executed.

The group that surrendered in Italy was eventually transported to a camp at Münster, Germany, where they were released in July, 1947. These men made their way to various countries around the world, including the United States. General Mušicki was arrested by the Allied authorities, returned to Yugoslavia, and executed in 1946 as a result of sentences passed at the same war crimes trial that pronounced the death sentence on Draža Mihailović and a number of others.