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Yugoslavia during the Second World War At 05:15 on April 6, 1941, German, Italian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian forces attacked Yugoslavia. The Luftwaffe bombed Belgrade and other major Yugoslav cities. On April 17, representatives of Yugoslavia's various regions signed an armistice with Germany at Belgrade, ending eleven days of resistance against the invading German Wehrmacht. More than three hundred thousand Yugoslav officers and soldiers were taken prisoner. In the Independent State of Croatia, Serbs, Jews and Gypsies were marched to the Jasenovac concentration campThe Axis Powers occupied Yugoslavia and split it up. The Independent State of Croatia was established as a Nazi puppet-state, ruled by the Catholic fascist militia known as the Ustaše which actually came into existence in 1929, but was relatively limited in its activities until 1941. German troops occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as part of Serbia and Slovenia, while other parts of the country were occupied by Bulgaria, Hungary and Italy. Yugoslavs opposing the Nazis organized resistance movements. Those inclined towards supporting the old Kingdom of Yugoslavia joined the Chetniks, a mostly Serb-composed nationalistic royalist guerilla army led by Colonel Draža Mihajlović. Those inclined towards supporting the Communist Party (and against the King) joined the Yugoslav National Liberation Army, led by Josip Broz Tito, a Croat-Slovenian member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. The NLA initiated a guerrilla campaign which was developed into the largest resistance army in occupied Western and Central Europe. The Chetniks initially made notable incursions and were supported by the exiled royal government as well as the Allies, but soon started to collaborate with axis powers against NLA. After the allies realised that the Chetniks were helping the Germans they ceased to support them. |
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The German response to the resistance movement was to punish the civilian population by carrying out reprisal killings and by giving a free hand to the quisling forces of the Independent State of Croatia. Italian occupying forces also committed many atrocities (cf. Italian war crimes). This led to great civilian loss of life in most regions of Yugoslavia. The estimated demographic loss was 1,700,000 individuals or 10% of the population of Yugoslavia. Very high losses were among Serbs of Bosnia and Croatia, and members of
non-aryan (according to the German racist theory: Jews, Gypsies) minorities, high also among all other non-collaborating population. During the war, the communist-led partisans were de facto rulers on the liberated territories, and the NLA organized people's committees to act as civilian government. In Autumn of 1941, the partisans established the Republic of Užice in the liberated territory of western Serbia. In November 1941, the German troops occupied this territory again, while the majority of partisan forces escaped towards Bosnia. On November 25, 1942, the Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia was convened in Bihać. The council reconvened on November 29, 1943 in Jajce and established the basis for post-war organisation of the country, establishing a federation (this date was celebrated as Republic Day after the war). The NLA was able to expel the Axis from Serbia in 1944 and the rest of Yugoslavia in 1945. The Red Army aided in liberating Belgrade as well as some other territories, but withdrew after the war was over. In May 1945, NLA met with allied forces outside former Yugoslav borders, after taking over also Trieste and parts of Austrian southern provinces Styria and Carinthia. This was the territory populated predominantly by Slovenians (and Croats in Istria). However, the NLA withdrew from Trieste in June of the same year. Westerner attempts to reunite the partisans, who denied supremacy of the old government of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and the emigration loyal to the king, led to the Tito-Šubašić Agreement in June 1944, however Tito was seen as a national hero by the citizens and so he gained the power in post-war independent communist state, starting as a prime minister. |
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The
Second Yugoslavia Breakup Federal Republic of Yugoslavia |