Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Slovenia had a Quisling-like puppet dictator, and Montenegro was folded into Mussolini's
Italy.
Many Croat nationalists supported the Ustaše in the hopes that it would be their ticket
to long-term independence from Serbia. Emboldened by their genocide-minded Nazi over-
lords,Ustašeleadersuseddeathcampstoexterminatetheirenemies—specifically,theSerbs
who, they felt, had wronged them in the days of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Not only
were Jews, Roma, and other Nazi-decreed “undesirables” murdered in Ustaše concentration
camps, but also hundreds of thousands of Serbs living in Croatia and Bosnia. (Estimates
range from 800,000—the highball figure taught to Yugoslav schoolkids—to the offensively
low 40,000 posited by nationalistic Croatian leaders in the 1990s.) Other Serbs were forced
to flee the country or convert to Catholicism. Most historians consider the Ustaše camps to
be the first instance of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. Half a century later, the Serbs justi-
fiedtheirruthlesstreatment ofCroatsandBosniaksasretributionfortheseWWIIatrocities.
In the chaos of war, two distinct resistance movements arose, with the shared aim of re-
claiming an independent Yugoslavia, but starkly different ideas of what that nation would
look like.
First, in the eastern mountains of Yugoslavia rose the Č etniks—a fearsome paramilitary
band of mostly Serbian men fighting to re-establish a Serb-dominated monarchy. Wearing
long beards and traditional mountain garb, and embracing a skull-and-crossbones logo ad-
orned with the motto “Freedom or Death” in Cyrillic, the Č etniks were every bit as brutal
as their Ustaše enemies. In pursuit of their goal to create a purely Serb state, the Č etniks
expelled or massacred Croats and Muslims living in the territory they held. (To this day, if a
CroatwantstodeeplyinsultaSerb,he'llcallhima“ Č etnik,”andaSerbmightuse“Ustaše”
to really hit a Croat where it hurts.)
Thesecondresistancegroup—fightingagainstboththe Č etniksandtheUstaše—wasthe
ragtagPartisanArmy,ledbyJosipBroz,whowasbetterknownbyhiscodename,Tito.The
clever and determined Partisans had dual aims: to liberate Yugoslavia as a free nation on
its own terms, and to make that new state a communist one. Even while the war was still
underway, the Partisan leadership laid the foundations for what would become a postwar,
communist Yugoslavia.
After years of largely guerrilla fighting among these three groups, the Partisans emerged
victorious. And so, as the rest of Eastern Europe was being “liberated” by the Soviets, the
Yugoslavs regained their independence on their own. Soviet troops passed through, in pur-
suit of the Nazis, but were not allowed to stay. After the short but rocky Yugoslav union
between the World Wars, it seemed that no one could hold the southern Slavs together in a
single nation. But one man could, and did: Tito.
Search WWH ::




Custom Search