©Gedenkstätte Buchenwald
Sergije Dimitrijević was born in Pirot, Serbia on 19 March 1912. As a law student at Belgrade University, he became a member of the illegal Communist Party of Yugoslavia in 1933. He graduated in 1934. In 1935, he contributed to the Yugoslav Committee in the French Communist Party, including participation in activities in Belgium. From September 1936 to mid 1937, he recruited Yugoslav volunteers to fight on the republican side in the Spanish Civil War.
On 23 October 1939, Dimitrijević was arrested in Paris and kept prisoner in different French camps until his internment in Buchenwald Concentration Camp.
Following liberation, Dimitrijević was treated for tuberculosis in the hospital in Blankenhain and then returned to Yugoslavia. The disease defined his life from then into the fifties. In 1946, he started teaching in the law faculty at Belgrade University and at the same time was director of the Economic Institute for the Government of the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia. From 1954 to 1965, he worked at the Historical Institute of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and then, until his retirement, at the Institute for Contemporary History in Belgrade. His publications are largely about the history of the workers’ movement in Serbia, especially in Leskovac, about questions of numismatics in medieval Serbia and Bosnia, as well as about problems of economic history in Yugoslavia during the first half of the twentieth century.
Sergije Dimitrijević died in Belgrade in 1987. He left behind a unique collection of medieval coins from Serbia and Bosnia (today held by the Serbian Academy of Sciences) and a collection of historical photographs of Belgrade.
