The Second World War has been a vital aspect of the memory culture in Serbia, and in Yugoslavia, ever since it ended. The war also represents a crucial aspect of memory politics and a subject for debate and revision, particularly in the postsocialist period. The regime of Slobodan Milošević appropriated the communist-led Yugoslav Partisans in combination with ethno-nationalism for its own legitimation purposes. The period immediately after the fall of Milošević in 2000 was marked by historical revisionism motivated by the anticommunist political consensus of the political parties in power. Nowadays, memory politics of the Second World War resemble the narratives of the 1990s, with military parades celebrating the Yugoslav Partisans a Serbian-only army.

In Serbia, not many voices exist in the historiography of the Second World War that critically engage with the hegemonic historical narratives, and history writing often serves, or at least suits, the dominant memory politics. Still, most of the existing scholarship on occupation, collaboration, and resistance in wartime Serbia has been published in the Serbian language.

Alexander Prusin's book remedies this gap by examining the complexities and effects of the Second World War in Serbia and combines approaches from political and social history. The book explores the interaction “between German occupation policies, the forces of resistance and collaboration, and the population at large” (2).

The book is an important contribution to scholarship as one of the rare books in English that engage with Serbia's Second World War history in such detail. The book provides a nuanced image based on primary sources from multiple archives, including Yad Vashem, the National Archives and the Holocaust Memorial Museum in the United States, and the Historical Archives and Military History Archive in Belgrade, Serbia. Regarding secondary sources, the author gives preference to communist historiography rather than the pro-Chetnik, pro-collaborationist, and revisionist authors of the post-1991 period who, in his view, distort facts. The author acknowledges Yugoslav historiography as valuable for its factuality and accurate reconstruction of facts and events, and as a fruitful source when combined with archival sources and more recent scholarship.

The book comprises nine chapters. The first three introduce the historical background, the invasion of Serbia in 1941, and the complex occupation system and its relationship with the collaborationist administration of Milan Nedić that evolved into a repressive authoritarian regime. Chapter 4 examines direct collaboration, which is what the author calls collaboration replicating Nazi ideology. Chapter 5 deals with the relationship between the Chetniks and the Partisans in 1941, which is further explored in chapter 7. Chapters 6, 8, and 9 examine the German terror policies, collaboration in the Holocaust, and the life and attitudes of Serbia's general population in the context of occupation, shortages, and repression.

Several topics stand out at the book's heart. First, a brief sedate period followed the beginning of the occupation in April 1941, but this was also a period of instability caused by tensions and rivalries among numerous agencies of the German occupation system. Second, Prusin discusses the complex issue of collaboration in occupied Serbia. (He also addresses its contestation in Yugoslav historiography, especially in the context of postsocialist historical revisionism that denies the role of the collaborationist administration and police in the repressive system and the Holocaust in Serbia.) The book suggests that the collaborationist administration, both the Council of Commissars and the subsequent Government of National Salvation under Milan Nedić, “fully subordinated themselves to Nazi ideological principles and policies and combated the regime's real and imaginary enemies with considerable zeal and ferocity” (3). Finally, the German occupation served as a catalyst for the civil war between Serbs of different ideological positions—between the forces of resistance and collaboration as well as between the Chetniks and the Partisans.

The book represents a sober account of Serbia's experience of Second World War occupation. The book illuminates the complexities of the German occupation system, the competing power structures within it, and the lack of organization and coordination. The occupation involved extreme economic and labor exploitation of Serbia that resulted in structural destruction and enormous damage to both people and property. At the same time, the occupation system was brutal in anti-resistance reprisals.

The author outlines different types of and motivations behind collaboration, the most contested issue in the present-day debates about the Second World War. The collaborationist administration reinforced the German rule, although it was not an effective executive organization. The Holocaust served the authorities' visions of a Serbia without ethnic minorities, and the Serbian collaborationist administration persecuted political enemies, particularly communists, with zeal. The book underlines the claim, which goes against current Serbian discussions and evaluations of domestic collaboration, that collaboration did not have a moderating effect on German policies in Serbia. Reprisals continued, and the temporary pacification of Serbia was not thanks to the collaborationist administration but to weakened resistance after the end of 1941.

Although the author portrays the ambiguous image of the Chetniks very well, without downplaying their collaboration, he also places them in the wider context of the two main resistance movements in Serbia. The nature of the Chetniks’ nominal and passive resistance after 1941 and their road to finding themselves on the defeated side at the end of the war, a road that included collaboration, crimes against civilians, and abandonment by the Allies, comes quite late in the book. A clearer outline of these issues in the introduction would help the reader understand the complex nature of the Chetnik movement better.

The book is a good overview of the Second World War in Serbia, discussing the convolutions of occupation, collaboration, and resistance and their actors in a succinct manner and with a deep understanding of the controversies about the period. It will appeal to anyone interested in the Second World War, not only in the Serbian context, and can also serve as a very good teaching resource.