Niš in the First World War

Niš, a city in the south of Serbia on the Nišava, was its wartime capital in 1914–1915. The government and parliament sat here, the Austro-Hungarian declaration of war arrived here, and here in December 1914 Serbia announced that it was fighting for the unification of the South Slavs. It lay where the railways from Belgrade to Salonika and to Sofia met, and so in the autumn of 1915 it became one of the main objectives of the Central Powers. From November 1915 it was in Bulgarian hands, and it regained its freedom on 12 October 1918.

The wartime capital (1914–1915)

Belgrade lay right on the border, within range of the Austro-Hungarian guns. That is why on 25 July 1914 Regent Alexander decided to move to Niš the government, the Skupština, the ministries and the diplomatic corps. The city was far from the border and at the same time lay on the main railway line. On 28 July at about 12:30 the telegram by which Austria-Hungary declared war arrived here, and on 6 August the government of Nikola Pašić sent from here the note declaring war on Germany.

The provincial town changed beyond recognition. Besides the politicians and diplomats, war correspondents, doctors of foreign missions, thousands of refugees from all over the country and prisoners of war arrived. According to the city’s tourist organisation the population grew from about 25,000 to 147,000. In the autumn of 1914 the railway workshops of Niš reworked French shells that were too long for Serbian guns, and they reached the front before the Battle of the Kolubara.

In the darkest days of that campaign, on 5 December 1914, Pašić formed a coalition government in Niš that included the opposition. On 7 December he presented its programme in the Skupština; it later became known as the Niš Declaration. In it the government announced that the war had become a struggle for the liberation and unification of all Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.

Evacuation and fall (1915)

In October 1915 Germany, Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria attacked Serbia at the same time. The Bulgarians soon cut the railway from Niš to Salonika at Vranje, and their First Army came down the Nišava valley towards the city. According to the Serbian historian Dejan Antić, Red Cross hospital supplies and foreign medical missions were being moved out of Niš from the end of September, and in mid-October Pašić ordered the evacuation of the state archives, the most valuable book collections and the museum holdings. On 26 October about a thousand officials and diplomats left from the station, and the government moved to Kraljevo.

On 4 November the Bulgarians broke through the defences in front of the old fortress, and on the morning of 5 November they entered the abandoned city. Serbian works, among them Antić’s, give the date as 6 November. On 5 November the front of the Central Powers in Serbia closed into a single line, and the whole conquest of Serbia was nearing its end.

Under Bulgarian occupation (1915–1918)

The Bulgarians, who regarded the Morava valley as disputed land, made Niš the centre of a military district called Bulgarian Morava. Antić writes that in the first months of the occupation the inhabitants suffered many atrocities, committed above all by German soldiers passing through the city, and later by Bulgarian soldiers too. Requisitions of cattle, restrictions on movement, forced labour and arrests became part of daily life.

For the Central Powers the railway mattered most. The line from Belgrade to Sofia and Constantinople ran through Niš, and on 15 January 1916 the first Balkan Train left Berlin. In the same month the Tsar of Bulgaria, Ferdinand I, received Emperor Wilhelm II in the conquered city.

Liberation (1918)

After the breakthrough at Dobro Pole and Bulgaria’s capitulation, the Germans wanted to make Niš the main base of a new front and brought up reinforcements. But the Serbian First Army of Vojvoda Petar Bojović attacked the city on 10 October, and after three days of fighting against the German 11th Army its 1st Infantry Regiment “Knjaz Miloš” entered Niš on 12 October. The loss of the city cut the Central Powers’ land link with Turkey. On 1 November the Serbs were already in Belgrade, and in December the government that had left the capital in July 1914 returned.