Within a couple of weeks of the Nazis and their collaborating forces invading and occupying Yugoslavia in April 1941, things were never going to be the same again. This is a photograph taken on 19 April 1941 of Yugoslav volksdeutsche, ethnic Germans, shown in white shirts, handing over a memorial plaque, erected in 1930, to Gavrilo Princip, who had shot dead Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, to two German officers. The Gavrilo Princip plaque was then sent to Hitler's special HQ train in Monichkirchen in eastern Austria in time for his 52nd birthday on 20th April 1941. After that, the plaque stayed in the German Military Museum in Berlin until 1945, when it disappeared after the war. Such an action should be put into context in that Hitler had served as a Lance Corporal in the German Army and, by the time of the Second World War, the seizing of the Princip memorial plaque would have been a gloating gesture against the Serbs who he would soon single out for special treatment for punishment during the Yugoslavian occupation where 100 Serbian 'hostages' would be shot for every German killed in ambush and 50 'hostages' to be shot for every German soldier wounded in ambush. The removal and theft of the Princip memorial plaque was a war trophy for Hitler.
Photograph of ethnic Germans giving a memorial plaque to the Nazis, in Sarajevo, 19 April 1941.