Yugoslavia in World War II: invasion, occupation and Tito's partisans

A coup and an invasion

On 25 March 1941 Yugoslavia joined the Axis and agreed to let German troops pass through on their way to Greece. Two days later Serb officers overthrew the regency, put the seventeen-year-old King Peter on the throne and made Dušan Simović prime minister. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum records that Hitler was furious and ordered the invasion that same evening.²

It came on 6 April, from Germany, Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria at once. The war began with the bombing of Belgrade: the Historical Archives of Belgrade give about 600 tons of bombs between 6 and 12 April, an official count of 2,271 dead and 714 buildings destroyed, and the National Library burned with its medieval manuscripts. About eleven days after the invasion began, Yugoslavia surrendered. The king and the government had already fled, and they spent the war in London.³

A country carved up

The victors divided the kingdom. Germany annexed northern Slovenia, occupied the Banat and set up a military administration in Serbia, with a puppet Serb government under General Milan Nedić. Italy took southern Slovenia, the Adriatic coast and Montenegro, and attached Kosovo to Albania. Hungary and Bulgaria took slices in the north and the south. Croatia, enlarged with Bosnia and Herzegovina, became the Independent State of Croatia under Ante Pavelić and his Ustaša movement.⁴

The occupation was murderous from the start. The Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that the Croatian authorities killed between 320,000 and 340,000 Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia in 1941 and 1942, with the Jasenovac camps at the center of the killing. In Serbia, Jews, Roma and political prisoners were shot in reprisal for resistance; by the museum's count about 8,000 male Serbian Jews were shot in the autumn of 1941 alone.⁵

Two resistance movements

Two very different movements took up arms. Colonel Draža Mihailović and a group of officers formed the Chetniks, the Yugoslav Army of the Homeland, loyal to the king's government in London and inclined to strike only when circumstances favored it. The Communist Party, led since 1937 by Josip Broz, known as Tito, born in 1892 at Kumrovec in Croatia and wounded and taken prisoner by the Russians in 1915, called for open resistance and formed the partisans, with Tito as their military commander.⁶

In the late summer of 1941 a rising led by the partisans and the Chetniks inflicted serious losses on the Germans in Serbia. Hitler ordered a hundred hostages shot for every German killed. The two movements soon turned on each other, and as Germany's defeat became likely, the Holocaust Memorial Museum notes, some Chetnik leaders chose to fight the Communists rather than the occupiers.⁷

The great offensives of 1943

The Germans and their allies launched a series of offensives to destroy the partisans' main force. In January 1943, in Case White, they nearly trapped Tito on the Neretva; according to the Spomenik Database he escaped at the last moment. From 15 May to 16 June came Case Black, the Battle of the Sutjeska, in which the database counts 127,000 Axis troops against 22,000 partisans. The partisans broke out across the river and the mountains, but more than 7,000 of them were killed.⁸

Allied recognition

The survival of the main force convinced the Allies. At the Tehran Conference in November 1943, the Spomenik Database and the Gale Cold War Reference Library both note, the Big Three recognized the partisans, and Allied supplies were dropped to them by parachute. Aircraft also carried the wounded out: the Imperial War Museums record that some 50,000 sick and wounded partisans and civilians were evacuated to Italy between May 1944 and the spring of 1945.⁹

Liberation

The war in the Balkans turned when Romania left the Axis on 23 August 1944, making the German position untenable, and in the autumn the Germans began to pull out of Serbia. Belgrade had suffered again in April 1944, when Allied bombers raiding the city over Orthodox Easter killed 1,267 people, by the Historical Archives' count. In October partisan divisions and the Red Army closed in on the capital, and after street fighting the city was liberated on 20 October 1944. German and Croatian troops retreated into Austria at the end of April 1945.¹⁰

Tito's Yugoslavia

The partisans came out of the war as the masters of the country. A Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia was proclaimed in November 1945, with Tito at its head. In 1948 he broke with Stalin and Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform, the start of a separate path that lasted until his death in Ljubljana on 4 May 1980. The state he built broke apart in the wars of 1991 and 1992.¹¹