Chetnik war crimes in World War II

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Chetniks were a royalist Serbian nationalist guerrilla movement that took up arms in Yugoslavia after the German invasion of April 1941. In February 1943, one of their commanders wrote to a fellow officer in Zenica. He recalled how Muslims had once filled Serbia's mosques and minarets. He promised that in Bosnia and Herzegovina, just as in Serbia before, not a single Muslim grave stone would remain. Most historians who have studied the record agree that the Chetniks' actions against Muslims and Croats amounted to genocide. The movement began as scattered officers who refused to surrender after Yugoslavia's capitulation. It grew into a network of commanders who cleansed villages and burned mosques and churches. Its own leaders wrote of a Serbia emptied of Muslims and Croats. How did a resistance force built to fight the Axis turn its guns on its own neighbors? What did that campaign look like on the ground, from the hills of eastern Bosnia to the Dalmatian coast? And how, decades later, have historians weighed the evidence?

• 2. Blueprints For A Pure Serbia

  ›

  On the 30th of June 1941, Stevan Moljević, a lawyer and member of the Serbian Cultural Club, wrote a memorandum called Homogeneous Serbia. It called for a Greater Serbia purged of its non-Serb population. Two months later he joined the Chetnik National Committee, the movement's new advisory body. A similar plan reached the Yugoslav government-in-exile that September, divided into four parts. One article proposed marking out Serbian borders so that only Serbian inhabitants remained inside them. A map drawn from that plan projected that 2,675,000 people would have to be expelled, including 1,000,000 Croats and 500,000 Germans. No figure was given for Muslims.

  On the 20th of December 1941, a memorandum bearing Draža Mihailović's signature went out to two newly appointed commanders in Montenegro, Đorđije Lašić and Pavle Đurišić. It listed the movement's goals. Among them was a Great Serbia stretching from Bosnia and Herzegovina to Syrmia and Bačka, cleansed of national minorities. It called for removing the Muslim population from Sandžak, and the Muslim and Croat populations from Bosnia and Herzegovina. The document's exact link to Mihailović is disputed, but a March 1942 order from the Chetnik Dinara Division in northern Dalmatia closely echoed its language.

  In a letter that May, ideologue Dragiša Vasić called the idea of a homogeneous Serbia 'beyond discussion.' He argued that the population transfers should wait until after the war. Mihailović's own diary that spring recorded a plan to prepare the Muslim population for what he called an exodus to Turkey or beyond.

  These documents spanned from mid-1941 into 1942, on paper. On the ground, in the villages of Herzegovina and Bosnia, the killing had already begun that first summer.

• 3. The Summer Uprisings

  ›

  In June 1941, Serbs in eastern Herzegovina rose up against the Ustaše-led Independent State of Croatia. The revolt came in response to massacres the Ustaše had already carried out against Serbs. More uprisings followed that summer across Lika, northern Dalmatia, and southwestern Bosnia. On the 28th of June, rebels captured the village of Avtovac in eastern Herzegovina. They looted and burned it, and killed dozens of Muslim civilians.

  On the 27th of July, during the Drvar uprising, 350 Croats were killed after rebels took the town. That same day, more than 200 Croatian pilgrims were killed near Drvar in what became known as the Trubar massacre, including their priest, Waldemar Maximilian Nestor. In Bosansko Grahovo, a Catholic priest named Juraj Gospodnetić was tortured and burned alive in front of his mother. Over 250 Croat civilians died in the town and the nearby villages of Obljaj, Korita, Luka, Ugarci, and Crni Lug.

  That September, rebels captured the town of Kulen Vakuf, killing around 2,000 Muslims and about 100 Croats. Victims, among them hundreds of women and children, were shot, stabbed, hacked with axes and farm tools, or drowned in the river Una. Days later, on the 3rd of September, Chetniks killed 425 Muslims from villages in the Plana district near Bileća, and threw many of the bodies, some still alive, into a pit called Čavkarica. Around 50,000 Croats and Muslims fled the areas the rebels controlled.

  These early bands had barely any contact with Draža Mihailović's headquarters at Ravna Gora. That would soon change, as Mihailović moved to bring them under his command.

• 4. Eastern Bosnia Under Chetnik Rule

  ›

  In mid-August 1941, Mihailović sent commanders Boško Todorović and Jezdimir Dangić into eastern Bosnia to bring the local fighters under his command. By November, Todorović had struck a deal with the Italians, who forced the Croatian authorities to hand over the districts of Foča, Goražde, and Višegrad. The Chetniks set up their own government there, called the Provisional Administration of East Bosnia.

  Life under that administration was harsh for Muslims and Croats in Foča. Shops were looted, houses had to stay unlocked at all times, and everyone between 16 and 60 had to report in. Those given permission to leave their homes were required to wear a badge, much like the Jewish yellow badge used elsewhere. More than 2,000 civilians were massacred in Foča between December 1941 and January 1942.

  Goražde fell to the Chetniks on the 1st of December after a long siege. Dangić gave a speech there invoking Greater Serbia, then his men went on a looting, raping, and killing spree. Bodies were dumped from the town bridge into the Drina River. Estimates of the dead in Goražde during this period vary widely. Historian Paul Mojzes cites 1,370. Others put the toll as high as 2,050, about a fifth of the town's population. Five Catholic nuns were abducted and murdered during the same killings.

  Further massacres followed in Čajniče, Divin, Žepa, Vlasenica, and Srebrenica, where Chetniks killed around a thousand Muslim civilians in January 1942. An eyewitness in Višegrad, where thousands more died, described the Drina River carrying bodies downstream, tied together in twos and fours, throats slit. Todorović himself, reporting to Mihailović that January, called for the 'evacuation, eradication and forced relocation' of Muslims and Catholics.

• 5. Herzegovina And The Dalmatian Coast

  ›

  Independent Chetnik bands were already active in Lika, western Bosnia, and northern Dalmatia by the time Mihailović's emissary reached them in January 1942. One leader, Momčilo Đujić, a Serbian Orthodox priest, had his men killing Croat civilians as early as April. In Bosansko Grahovo, local commander Branko Bogunović turned the town into a Chetnik stronghold under Italian protection. Visiting the village of Kninsko Polje, he told residents there was no salvation for the Croats and that all of them needed to be slaughtered.

  In August 1942, with Italian approval, the Chetniks captured the Ustaše-held town of Foča and killed around 3,000 Muslim civilians. Commander Dobroslav Jevđević followed the massacre with a proclamation. He told the Muslims of the region that the land they lived on would become part of the Serb state. Nearby, forces under Petar Baćović and Zaharije Ostojić massacred about 2,500 Muslims in a field near Ustikolina and Jahorina, burning villages as they went.

  That same month, Baćović's men joined the Italian Operation Albia around Biokovo, killing around 160 Croats in the Cetina region. Baćović later described the operation openly. He wrote that his Chetniks 'have killed all men aged fifteen years or above.' He added that three Catholic priests were skinned alive in northern Dalmatia. In September, near Makarska, his forces destroyed 17 more Croatian villages and killed 900 Croats.

  In October, Chetniks under Baćović and Jevđević joined the Italian Operation Alfa near Prozor. Estimates of the dead vary from over five hundred, by historian Jozo Tomasevich, to 2,500, by historians Antun Miletić and Vladimir Dedijer. Baćović reported to Mihailović that his soldiers had killed over 2,000 Croats and Muslims there and 'returned delighted.'

• 6. The Sandžak Offensive

  ›

  By November 1942, Mihailović was pushing commander Zaharije Ostojić to wage a campaign of terror against Muslims along the borders of Montenegro and Sandžak. Ostojić later reported that his men had destroyed 21 villages and killed about 1,300 people. A planned offensive called the 'March on Bosnia' was postponed that December, but the campaign against Muslims went ahead in January and February 1943 under commander Pavle Đurišić.

  In January, Đurišić reported that his men had burned 33 Muslim villages and killed 1,000 women and children. In February, he reported around 8,000 more deaths among women, children, and the elderly, adding that the destruction of the Muslim population had been carried out 'regardless of sex and age.' Between the 4th and the 7th of February, 576 Muslim civilians, 443 of them minors, were killed in Bukovica, near Pljevlja. Mihailović himself later listed the Sandžak operation among his successes, saying the Chetniks had 'liquidated all Muslims in the villages except those in the small towns.'

  By March 1943, the Partisans routed Chetnik forces at the Battle of the Neretva, largely ending this phase of killing. German wartime records for ten districts in eastern and central Bosnia counted 8,400 Croats and 24,400 Muslims killed by Chetnik forces, a combined total of 32,800 people.

  In October 1943, Chetniks massacred 2,000 Muslim civilians after capturing Višegrad. That summer, during the Case Black operation, they had already caught and killed a group of wounded Partisans, among them the Croatian poet Ivan Goran Kovačić.

• 7. Crimes Against Partisans And Jews

  ›

  During the November 1941 uprising in Serbia, Draža Mihailović's own staff surrendered 350 captured Partisans to the Nazis, who executed them. Around the 13th of November, Chetniks marched a group of 365 prisoners to Mionica and then on to Valjevo. Of that group, 263 were executed by the Nazis at Krušik on the 27th of November 1941.

  Between the 4th and the 5th of November 1941, Chetniks attacked a Partisan hospital in Gornja Gorevnica, captured eleven Partisans, and killed a nurse; the prisoners were later sentenced to death by a Chetnik court-martial. In May 1944, commander Dragutin Keserović found a Partisan hospital in Jastrebac and shot 24 patients and four nurses. That same month, Chetniks found another hospital in Semberija and killed about 300 seriously wounded patients. At Krčan, southeast of Udbina, Chetniks guided by an informant named Jovo Popović found ninety wounded Partisans hiding with fifteen nurses. On the 2nd of June 1944 they killed 36 of the wounded, including two of the camp's doctors.

  According to Yad Vashem, Jews initially served in Chetnik ranks alongside Serb fighters, since the movement began as resistance to Nazi occupation. As the Chetniks grew more collaborationist after 1942, Jewish members switched to the Partisans, and Chetnik propaganda turned openly antisemitic. Survivors later testified that Mihailović's men hunted down Jews hiding in Serbia, killing some directly and handing others to the Germans.

• 8. The Final Reckoning

  ›

  Estimates of how many Muslims and Croats the Chetniks killed vary enormously, and the topic remains politically sensitive, according to historian Vladimir Geiger of the Croatian Institute of History in Zagreb. Demographer Vladimir Žerjavić first put the toll in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina at 65,000, evenly split between roughly 33,000 Muslims and 32,000 Croats. He later revised this to 68,000 in 1994, and to 47,000 in a 1995 paper that excluded Partisan casualties. Historian Šemso Tucaković, by contrast, estimated in his book on crimes against Bosnian Muslims that around 100,000 were killed, and separately suggested the Podrinje region alone may have lost up to 20,000 Muslims in the 1943 massacres. Researcher Rudolph Rummel offered a much wider range, from a low of 50,000 to a high of 500,000, with a middle estimate of 100,000. Historian Tomislav Dulić judged Rummel's figures too high, saying they clashed with Yugoslav demographic research.

  The first public postwar trial opened in Belgrade in August 1945, when prosecutor Miloš Minić accused commander Vojislav Lukačević of a massacre in Foča and of collaborating with the Nazis; Lukačević was convicted and executed that same month. Very few Chetnik commanders faced any trial at all. Draža Mihailović was captured on the 13th of March 1946 and indicted on 47 counts. Convicted on eight, including war crimes and high treason, he was sentenced to death on the 15th of July and executed with nine other Chetnik commanders three days later.

  Historian Jozo Tomasevich wrote that a 'widespread practice of genocide' explains the high casualty numbers of the Second World War in Yugoslavia, with Serbs the main victims of the Ustaše and Croats and Muslims the main victims of the Chetniks. Historian Marko Attila Hoare wrote that the Chetniks pursued their genocide against Muslims and Croats 'under the Italian umbrella.' Historian David Bruce MacDonald disagreed, writing that there was 'no concrete evidence that the Chetniks intended to exterminate the Croatian population.' British historian Jovan Byford concluded that Chetnik violence against Muslim civilians in eastern Bosnia in 1942 and 1943, though 'more localized and smaller in scale' than Ustaše crimes against Serbs, matched it in 'its aims, calculated cruelty, and devastating impact on the victim community.'