The Commissioner Government (Serbian: Комесарска влада, Komesarska vlada) was a short-lived Serbian collaborationistpuppet government established in the German-occupied territory of Serbia within the Axis-partitioned Kingdom of Yugoslavia during World War II. It operated from 30 April to 29 August 1941, was headed by Milan Aćimović, and is also referred to as the Commissars Government or Council of Commissars. Of the ten commissioners, four had previously been ministers in various Yugoslav governments, and two had been assistant ministers. The members were pro-German, anti-semitic and anti-communist, and believed that Germany would win the war. The Aćimović government lacked any semblance of power, and was merely an instrument of the German occupation regime, carrying out its orders within the occupied territory. Under the overall control of the German Military Commander in Serbia, supervision of its day-to-day operations was the responsibility of the chief of the German administrative staff, SS-Brigadeführer and State Councillor Harald Turner. One of its early tasks was the implementation of German orders regarding the registration of Jews and Romani people living in the territory, and the placing of severe restrictions on their liberty.
In early July, a few days after a communist-led mass uprising commenced, Aćimović reshuffled his government, replacing three commissioners and appointing deputies for most of the portfolios. By mid-July, the Germans had decided that the Aćimović regime was incompetent and unable to deal with the uprising, and began looking for a replacement. This resulted in the resignation of the Commissioner Government at the end of August, and the appointment of the Government of National Salvation led by former Minister of the Army and Navy, Armijski đeneralMilan Nedić, in which Aćimović initially retained the interior portfolio. The members of the Commissioner Government collaborated with the occupiers as a means to spare Serbs from political influences that they considered more dangerous than the Germans, such as democracy, communism and multiculturalism. They actively assisted the Germans in exploiting the population and the economy, and took an "extremely opportunistic" view of the Jewish question, regarding their own participation in the Holocaust as "unpleasant but unavoidable". There is no evidence that the collaboration of the Commissioner Government moderated German occupation policies in any way. (Full article...)
Tomić belonged to the first class of six Serbian pilots trained in France in 1912. In August 1914, he participated in the first aerial dogfight of the war, when he exchanged gunfire with an Austro-Hungarian plane over western Serbia. In the winter of 1915, during the Serbian Army's retreat across Albania to the Greek island of Corfu, he evacuated General Petar Bojović from Scutari by plane, delivered mail by air and transported the Serbian Government's gold and hard currency reserves from Niš to keep them from falling into enemy hands. Following the occupation of Serbia by the Central Powers, Tomić went to France and flew over the Western Front, where he had one confirmed kill. He returned to the Balkans in late 1916, conducted combat missions over Bulgarian-occupied Macedonia and shot down one enemy plane. (Full article...)