World War II in Yugoslavia

• 1. Introduction

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  World War II in Yugoslavia was not one war but several, all happening at the same time. On the 6th of April 1941, the German Luftwaffe bombed Belgrade, and within little more than ten days the Royal Yugoslav Army surrendered unconditionally. But the country that fell apart so fast did not simply submit to occupation. What followed was a brutal tangle of liberation struggle, civil war, genocide, and foreign conquest that would claim around one million lives, roughly half of them civilians. Who were the factions fighting each other inside Yugoslavia, and why could they not unite? Why did the Western Allies switch sides midway through, abandoning the force they had backed from the beginning? And how did a small, poorly armed communist movement become the largest resistance force in occupied Europe, with 800,000 fighters organised into four field armies? This documentary traces how a country invaded in ten days spent four more years tearing itself apart, and what emerged from the wreckage.

• 2. A Kingdom Already Cracking

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  Milan Stojadinovic, Yugoslavia's prime minister from 1935 to 1939, tried to keep the kingdom neutral by signing a non-aggression pact with Italy and extending a friendship treaty with France simultaneously. That balancing act collapsed when Germany's rapid conquest of France in May 1940 removed the Western European powers as credible allies. Regent Prince Paul and his government concluded they had no choice but to accommodate the Axis. On the 25th of March 1941, Yugoslavia formally joined the Tripartite Pact.

  The domestic fractures were as dangerous as the external pressure. Croatian leaders had spent years demanding autonomy, and in 1939 Prime Minister Dragisa Cvetkovic negotiated a compromise with Croatian leader Vladko Macek that created the Banovina of Croatia. The agreement did not reduce tensions. Pro-fascist Ustashe wanted a fully independent Croatia allied with the Axis. Serbian military and public circles wanted alignment with the Western empires. The then-banned Communist Party of Yugoslavia looked to Moscow. These three constituencies could not coexist in the same state.

  The secret mission of Captain David Albala, a Serbian-Jewish officer, to the United States to obtain funding for arms purchases went nowhere. Joseph Stalin expelled Yugoslav ambassador Milan Gavrilovic just one month after agreeing a friendship treaty, prioritising the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact that had been in force since August 1939. Yugoslavia's diplomatic room had effectively closed. Senior Serbian air force officers staged a coup against the government that signed the Pact, but the move only accelerated the invasion timeline.

• 3. Ten Days, Then Dismemberment

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  On the 17th of April 1941, eleven days after the invasion began, the Royal Yugoslav Army surrendered unconditionally. The Yugoslav force was not simply outmatched. It attempted to defend all borders simultaneously, spreading its scarce resources too thin, and much of the non-Serbian population did not fight, with some welcoming German forces as liberators from a government they associated with Serbian dominance. On the eve of the invasion, 161 of the 165 generals on the active Yugoslav list were ethnic Serbs.

  What followed was a systematic carving of the country among the victors. Germany annexed northern Slovenia and held direct occupation over a rump Serbian state. Italy took the rest of Slovenia, Kosovo, large portions of the Dalmatian coast, nearly all of the Adriatic islands, and the Bay of Kotor, while being granted nominal kingship over the newly proclaimed Independent State of Croatia, the NDH, though wielding little real power there. Hungary dispatched its Third Army to occupy Vojvodina. The Bulgarian army moved into North Macedonia on the 19th of April and Bulgaria formally annexed that territory along with Greek Thrace and parts of eastern Serbia on the 14th of May. The NDH itself, proclaimed on the 10th of April, extended over much of today's Croatia and all of modern Bosnia-Herzegovina.

  The government in exile, recognised only by the Allied powers, now governed nothing but a diplomatic address in London. The speed of the collapse created the conditions for the struggle that would follow: multiple armed factions, a country partitioned among enemies, and competing visions of what Yugoslavia should become.

• 4. Partisans Against Everyone

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  On the 22nd of June 1941, the day Germany attacked the Soviet Union, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia received orders from the Comintern in Moscow to begin active resistance. That same day, Croatian communists formed the 1st Sisak Partisan Detachment, the first armed anti-fascist resistance unit in occupied Yugoslavia. The detachment launched sabotage attacks on railway lines, destroyed telegraph poles, and attacked municipal buildings the next day.

  The Partisans had two structural advantages that most other armed groups lacked. First, a nucleus of Spanish Civil War veterans who had fought in conditions recognisably similar to wartime Yugoslavia and could pass that experience to new recruits. Second, and more decisive over time, the Partisans organised around communist ideology rather than ethnicity. This meant they could find at least some support in almost any corner of the country, while the Chetniks drew almost exclusively from the Serbian population and the Ustashe relied on Croat loyalists.

  The Chetnik movement under Colonel Draza Mihailovic organised in western Serbia's Ravna Gora district in mid-May 1941. From the start until 1943, the Chetniks enjoyed recognition from the Western Allies as the legitimate Yugoslav resistance and held a bounty of 100,000 Reichsmarks on Mihailovic's head alongside Tito's. But the two movements could not sustain cooperation. After the Partisans established the short-lived "Republic of Uzice" in western Serbia in autumn 1941 and German forces reoccupied it in November, Mihailovic concluded the Partisans were his primary enemy. Chetnik units attacked the Partisans in November 1941 while simultaneously receiving supplies from the Germans and Italians. A British liaison adviser recommended stopping supplies to the Chetniks after this, but Britain continued providing them.

  The Partisans formed the 1st Proletarian Assault Brigade on the 22nd of December 1941, the first Partisan unit capable of operating outside its local area. That date later became the "Day of the Yugoslav People's Army".

• 5. The Battles That Nearly Ended It

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  In early 1943, the Axis came close to destroying the Partisan movement entirely. Two offensives known by their German code names, Fall Weiss and Fall Schwarz, and called the Battle of Neretva and the Battle of Sutjeska in former Yugoslav historiography, very nearly achieved what seven major anti-Partisan campaigns had failed to accomplish.

  Negotiations between Germans and Partisans had briefly opened on the 11th of March 1943 in Gornji Vakuf, with Tito's key officers Vladimir Velebit, Koca Popovic, and Milovan Djilas putting forward three proposals: a prisoner exchange, implementation of international law on prisoner treatment, and discussion of political questions. The Partisans used the talks partly to assert their independence from both the Soviet Union and Britain. Neither side reached an agreement.

  Fall Schwarz in May and June 1943 encircled Partisan forces in southeastern Bosnia and northern Montenegro. British liaison officer F.W.D. Deakin was sent during that offensive to gather information. His reports documented that the Partisans were fighting courageously against the German 1st Mountain Division and 104th Light Division, had suffered significant casualties, and needed support. Deakin also reported that the entire German 1st Mountain Division had transited from the Soviet Union through Chetnik-controlled territory without obstruction. British ULTRA intercepts of German communications confirmed the Chetnik pattern.

  At the Tehran Conference of the 28th of November to the 1st of December 1943, the National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia was recognised as an Allied army by all three major Allied powers, including for the first time the United States. In September 1943, at Winston Churchill's request, Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean had been parachuted to Tito's headquarters near Drvar as a permanent formal liaison. The RAF Balkan Air Force was established, at Maclean's suggestion, to increase supplies and air support for Tito's forces. Italian capitulation in September 1943 had already handed the Partisans seventeen stranded Italian divisions to absorb or strip for weapons, with two Italian infantry divisions joining the Montenegrin Partisans as complete units.

• 6. Crimes Across the Lines

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  On the 28th of April 1941, in the village of Gudovac, nearly 200 Serbs were rounded up and executed. This was the first massacre carried out by the Ustashe, and it opened a campaign of systematic killing that ran throughout the NDH's existence. The Ustashe strategy was stated openly: kill one-third of Serbs, expel one-third, and forcibly convert the remaining third to Catholicism. Their main target group numbered about two million people.

  The largest Ustashe killing site was the Jasenovac concentration camp complex, five subcamps located roughly 100 kilometres southeast of Zagreb. Serbs, Jews, and Roma were killed there in numbers that researchers still dispute. By the end of 1941, NDH authorities had also incarcerated the majority of the country's Jewish population in camps including Jadovno, Kruščica, Loborgrad, Đakovo, Tenja, and Jasenovac. Nearly the entire Romani population of the NDH was killed.

  The German forces applied a formula: 100 civilian hostages shot for every German soldier killed, 50 for every German soldier wounded. Jews and Serbian communists were the primary targets for execution. The Kragujevac massacre and Kraljevo massacre in October 1941 were among the most documented examples. The Wehrmacht's SS Division Prinz Eugen massacred large numbers of civilians and prisoners of war.

  The Chetniks pursued their own campaign of ethnic cleansing, systematically massacring Muslims in towns across eastern Bosnia including Gorazde, Foca, Srebrenica, and Visegrad, and later conducting similar actions in Sandzak. The Partisans were not exempt. Toward the end of the war and into the postwar period, Partisan units carried out mass killings of captured soldiers and perceived collaborators. The Bleiburg repatriations, the Kocevski Rog massacre, and the foibe killings in Istria became part of a reckoning that would continue for decades.

• 7. The Final Accounting

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  By the 20th of March 1945, when the Partisans launched their general offensive in the Mostar-Višegrad-Drina sector, Marshal Tito commanded roughly 800,000 men organised into four armies, against German General Alexander Lohr's Army Group E with seven corps and seventeen weakened divisions. Yugoslav forces beat the western Allies to Trieste by one day on the 1st of May. On the 9th of May 1945, at Topolšica near Velenje in Slovenia, Lohr signed the total surrender of Army Group E. The Battle of Odžak, which began on the 19th of April and ended on the 25th of May 1945, was the last World War II battle in Europe, finishing seventeen days after the war in Europe officially ended.

  The human toll resisted accurate measurement for decades. Yugoslavia's government submitted a figure of 1,704,000 war deaths to the International Reparations Commission in 1946 without documentation. The figure originated with Vladeta Vucković, an employee of the Yugoslav Federal Statistical Office who later explained he had been ordered to estimate demographic loss, not actual deaths. His estimate counted expected population growth, unborn children, and emigration losses as casualties. Foreign Minister Edvard Kardelj used it as the real death toll in reparations negotiations. Tito had already cited a figure of 1.7 million in May 1945, aiming to maximise war compensation from Germany and demonstrate Yugoslav suffering second only to the USSR and perhaps Poland.

  A nationwide survey conducted by the Yugoslav Federal Bureau of Statistics in 1964 found 597,323 documented deaths. That list remained a state secret until 1989. Independent researchers Vladimir Žerjavić and Bogoljub Kočović later produced estimates of 1,027,000 and 1,014,000 respectively, figures that Professor Jozo Tomasevich of San Francisco State University described as seeming "free of bias". Draza Mihailovic was captured by Yugoslav security agents on the 13th of March 1946, tried for high treason and war crimes from the 10th of June to the 15th of July 1946, found guilty, and executed by firing squad at Lisičji Potok on the 18th of July. The United States posthumously awarded him the Legion of Merit for helping save 500 downed Allied pilots in 1944.