rounded up on suspicion they were smuggling provisions to interned communists. The bodies of 19 of the executed men were hung at the Užice railway station. At the end of August, the Salonika-based 164th Infantry Division's 433rd Infantry Regiment was ordered to detach a battalion to Bader's command. During August, there were 242 attacks on the Serbian administration and gendarmerie, as well as railway lines, telephone wires, mines and factories. The Belgrade-Užice-Ćuprija-Paraćin-Zaječar railway line was hardest hit. A sign of the rapid escalation of the revolt was that 135 of the attacks occurred in the last 10 days of the month. The German troops themselves had lost 22 killed and 17 wounded. By the end of the month, the number of communists and Jews shot or hanged had reached 1,000. The number of Partisans in the territory had grown to around 14,000 by August. To strengthen the puppet government, Danckelmann wanted to find a Serb who was both well-known and highly regarded by the population who could raise some sort of Serbian armed force and who would be willing to use it ruthlessly against the rebels whilst remaining under full German control. These ideas ultimately resulted in the replacement of the entire Aćimović administration at the end of August 1941. Formation of the Government of National Salvation In response to a request from Benzler, the Foreign Office sent SS-Standartenführer Edmund Veesenmayer to provide assistance in establishing a new puppet government that would meet German requirements. Five months earlier, Veesenmayer had engineered the proclamation of the NDH. Veesenmayer engaged in a series of consultations with German commanders and officials in Belgrade, interviewed a number of possible candidates to lead the new puppet government, then selected former Yugoslav Minister of the Army and Navy General Milan Nedić as the best available. The Germans had to apply significant pressure to Nedić to encourage him to accept the position, including threats to bring Bulgarian and Hungarian troops into the occupied territory and to send him to Germany as a prisoner of war. Unlike most Yugoslav generals, Nedić had not been interned in Germany after the capitulation, but instead had been placed under house arrest in Belgrade. On 27 August 1941, about seventy-five prominent Serbs convened a meeting in Belgrade where they resolved that Nedić should form a Government of National Salvation (, ) to replace the Commissioner Government, and on the same day, Nedić