prime minister, although he refused to take a government position himself. Nedić once told Turner that Ljotić would make a good successor in the event of his departure. The SDK was at first not part of the SS or the Wehrmacht, instead, it was nominally directed by the puppet government, and was paid for by the government. In 1944, it officially became part of the Waffen-SS, and since the end of the war was nearing, there was neither enough time nor supplies to equip it with SS uniforms, so the SDK stayed with mainly Italian/Yugoslav uniforms. Relations between the Serbian government and the Bulgarian occupation forces in Serbia were strained. A colonel in the Bulgarian 6th Division noted that the local population hated the Bulgarians as much as they hated the Germans. Nedić frequently complained about their presence to the Germans and demanded that the Bulgarians withdraw from Serbia. In the Banat, a special regime was established, administered by the local German minority. The Serbian puppet government recognized it as the civilian administration of the region, under Belgrade's nominal control. A detachment of the SDS was created there, the Banat State Guard, which recruited its members from the local ethnic Germans. It had 94 officers and 846 privates as of March 1942. In March 1942, in the face of the government's growing unpopularity, Nedić sent a memorandum to the Germans with suggestions to improve its standing. They included having elections for a head of state, forming a single national political party, giving the head of state command of the SDS, only interfering with the higher levels of the Serbian government to give them more freedom to work with the Serbian people, and withdrawing Bulgarian forces from Serbia. General Paul Bader, the new Military Commander in Serbia, had Turner speak with Nedić, pressuring the prime minister to withdraw the memorandum. Backed by the entire cabinet, Nedić refused to withdraw it and asked for the memorandum to be sent to Berlin for consideration. It was sent, where the German high command ignored it. Nedić tried again in September 1942, this time threatening to resign for greater effect. The Germans declined it but persuaded him to remain in office. German Wehrmacht officers in Serbia nonetheless still considered Nedić to be loyal and praised him for being a dependable man. Relations with the Chetniks Cooperation between the Serbian puppet government and the Chetniks began