Talk:Draža Mihailović/quotations/

Please create a section for a given work, and within the section, put in quotations and approximate date for the historical event. Please insert new sections in alphabetic order by author, and new entries by page number to make them easier to find, and sign a quote that you have added (so we'll know who to ask if there are questions). --Nuujinn (talk) 10:39, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Biber, Dusan

Reviewed work(s): Britain, Mihailovic, and the Chetniks, 1941-42 by Simon Trew The Journal of Military History, Vol. 62, No. 4 (Oct., 1998), pp. 950-951

This is ground that many other scholars have covered, among them William Deakin, Lucien Karchmar, Walter Roberts, Jozo Tomasevich, Matteo J. Milazzo, Jovan Marjanovic, MarkWheeler and Milan Deroc. Trew is careful to note their contributions, analyzing them and sometimes disputing their points of view in endnotes. Many of the problems he and his predecessors have discussed will continue to be scrutinised, e.g., British involvement in the coup d'état of 27 March 1941 which overthrew the Yugoslave king; the brief of Capt. Duane Tyrell Hudson; the recruitment of Bransilav Radojevic' (Robertson); the strategic importance of the Yugoslav railways in 1941-42; condoning of Italian-Chetnik collaboration, etc.

Dejan Djokić, James Ker-Lindsay, New Perspectives on Yugoslavia: Key Issues and Controversies

Routledge, 2011

• p.97, note 27

It has been argued that the cetniks with the term "cleansing" actually mean 'physical liquidation'...Even if euphemisms frequently were used, this appears to be an overly narrow interpretation of the documents, since it would mean that the cetniks also intended to kill those Serbs that were to be deported from Croatian areas. it is more likely that they meant forced expulsion by a method that also included the commission of massacres if and when that was thought to be necessary. Such as interpretation would better explain why they discussed deportations of Croats to Croatia and Muslims to Turkey or Albania; has 'cleansing' per se meant physical annihilation, such plans would have been unnecessary.

Helmuth Greiner, Percy Ernst Schramm: Kriegstagebuch des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht

Kriegstagebuch Des Oberkommandos Der Wehrmacht, Wehrmachtfuhrungsstab, 1940-1945, Bernard & Graefe, 1961

• Vol. III, book 6, p. 1304, November 23rd 1943

According to reliable source, Mihailovic issued an order to his commanders to collaborate with Germans; he personally could not act in this view because of the inclination of the people. ( Mihailovic hat nach sicherer Quelle seinen Unterführern den Befehl gegeben, mit den Deutschen zusammenarbeiten; er selbst könne mit Rücksicht auf die Stimmung der Bevolkerung nicht in diesem Sinne hervortreten. )

"Reliable source" (sichere Quelle) refers to intercepted radio-communication. --Gorran (talk) 08:07, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Hoare, Marko Attila Genocide and Resistance in Hitler's Bosnia: The Partisans and the Chetniks, 1941-1943

Oxford University Press, 2006, ISBN 0197263801 [1]

• p.143

The massacres of Muslims there [east Bosnia] were above all an expression of the genocidal policy and ideology of the Chetnik movement. As Draža Mihailović noted in his diary in the spring of 1942: 'The Muslim population has through its behaviour arrived at the situation where our people no longer wish to have them in our midst. It is necessary already now to prepare their exodus to Turkey or anywhere else outside our borders'.

• p.148

The Chetniks, unlike the Ustashas, did not possess their own 'state'; with that handicap taken into account, their readiness to kill members of other nationalities appears to have been as great. Nevertheless, the Chetniks did not aim at the biological extermination of every last Muslim or Croat man, woman, and child, any more than the Ustashas aimed to kill all Serbs - the Chetnik genocide was not the Nazi Holocaust. Rather, the Chetniks aimed to establish a purely Serb state in East Bosnia through a combination of massacres, forced expulsions, and forced assimilation.

Reviews

Slavic Review, Vol. 64, No. 2 (Summer, 2005), pp. 429-430 Published by: Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3650012 .

Partisans et Tchetniks en Yougoslavie durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale: Ideologie et mythogenese. By Antoine Sidoti. CNRS Histoire. Paris: CNRS Editions, 2004. 339 pp. Ap- pendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Glossary. Index. Illustrations. Plates. Photographs. Maps. C33.00, paper.

Nevertheless, Sidoti's work reads more like a first draft than a finished product. It is filled with large and barely digested quotations, often taking up entire pages or more, something that, the author admits, "canplease some and not please others" (14). There are two parallel systems of references-references in the text and in footnotes-that, combined with extensive use of ibid., makes for confusing reading. The Chetniks-supposedly half the subject of the book-essentially disappear from the narrative two-thirds of the way through, and are, in any case, dissected much less critically than are the Partisans. The book has no conclusion; the narrative simply ends abruptly. Most puzzling of all, the classic works on the Chetnik movement by English-language historians Jozo Tomasevich, Matteo J. Milazzo, and Lucien Karchmar do not appear in the bibliography and are not cited in the text, not to mention many equally important sources published in Serbo-Croatian.

Judah, Tim The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia

Yale University Press, 2009

• p. 120

In the Sandjak and Bosnia, then, the Chetniks were soon involved in bloody inter-ethnic strife with Muslims, many of whom had been enrolled into Italian and Ustasha units. The familiar cycle of massacres and village-burning began, becoming more bloody at every turn. Historians are divided over Mihailovic's own role here. There exists one document , for example, apparently signed by Mihailovic, in which he talks specificially about an 'ethnically pure' Greater Serbia and about the need for 'cleansing the Moslem population from Sandjak and the Moslem and Croat populations from Bosnia and Hercegovina'. Its authenticity is heavily disputed, though, and it may well have been forged by a local Chetnik leader in a bid to bolster his own authority.

Lampe, John R. Yugoslavia as history: twice there was a country

Cambridge University Press, 2000, ISBN 052177357 [2]

• p.217

The German field commanders took no notice of this division [between the Chetniks and Partisans] and pressed ahead with reinforcements sufficient to destroy all active resistance. In the process, they executed some 25,000 civilians. Mihailovic understandably concluded that his force of less than 20,000 men, ill-armed and in scattered units, could not survive against a larger, far better equipped German force. By November 11, 1941, he initiated talks with German representatives to negotiate a modus vivendi. But when the Germans demanded total surrender, he abandoned his headquarters and scattered his forces still further. This genuine weakness and the passive strategy it encouraged escaped British notice. So did the fact, then and later, that no British arms ever reached the Chetnik forces inside Serbia itself. Churchill's commanders were still ready to believe what the Yugoslav government-in-exile told them about Mihailovic and were eager to trumpet any evidence of resistance inside Hitler's Europe. Mihailovic was thus able to maintain the image, in Walter Robert's words, of Allied Hero through 1942. He was presumed to control the Chetnik forces in Hercegovina and Montenegro discussed above, and they were assumed to be fighting the Axis occupiers.

• p. 206

By this time, a leading Chetnik idelogue, Stevan Moljevic, had drafted a memorandum and an accompanying map that proposed a huge 'homogeneous Serbia.' Moljevic...did not rise to prominence in Mihailovic's Central National Committe, displacing Belgrade's Dragisa Vasic, until 1943....He admittedly reckoned that 1 million Croats would have to be expelled in order to create a Serbia covering two thirds of a reconstituted Yugoslavia.

• p. 207

Italian authorities stood by as roving Kosovar band targeted the interwar Serb of Montenegrin colonists. Some 20,000 managed to flee to Serbia, to be joined by 10,000 more by 1944. A majority of the 10,000 Serbs killed in Kosovo during the war died in these initial expulsions.

• p.208

The powerful Axis presence may have put the Pavelic regime in power, but it did not control it or set its agenda. From this regime sprang the most savage intolerance seen anywhere in Europe during the Second World War, outside of the Nazi regime itself. Its overriding purpose was to create an ethnically pure Croatian state from which Serbs, Jews, and gypies would be permanently cleansed.

• p. 209

On June 22, in Gospic, in the center of the Krajina killing fields, Pavelic's education minister, Mile Budak, open announced that one-third of the new state's 1.9 million Serbs would be deported to Serbia and another third converted to the Catholic faith and thereby Croatianized (or reconverted, given the wild Ustasa clam that 200,000 Croats had been forced into Orthodoxy under interwar Serb pressure). The other third, he added, would simply be killed.

• p.217

The German field commanders took no notice of this division [between the Chetniks and Partisans] and pressed ahead with reinforcements sufficient to destroy all active resistance. In the process, they executed some 25,000 civilians. Mihailovic understandably concluded that his force of less than 20,000 men, ill-armed and in scattered units, could not survive against a larger, far better equipped German force. By November 11, 1941, he initiated talks with German representatives to negotiate a modus vivendi. But when the Germans demanded total surrender, he abandoned his headquarters and scattered his forces still further. This genuine weakness and the passive strategy it encouraged escaped British notice. So did the fact, then and later, that no British arms ever reached the Chetnik forces inside Serbia itself. Churchill's commanders were still ready to believe what the Yugoslav government-in-exile told them about Mihailovic and were eager to trumpet any evidence of resistance inside Hitler's Europe. Mihailovic was thus able to maintain the image, in Walter Robert's words, of Allied Hero through 1942. He was presumed to control the Chetnik forces in Hercegovina and Montenegro discussed above, and they were assumed to be fighting the Axis occupiers.

• p. 217

The slaughter of so many Serbs reinforced Mihailovic's resistance to the Communist strategy of consciously provoking German reprisals in order to drive the survivors into the hills and into their ranks. Mihailovic's instructions from London and his own instincts were to husband his resources and Serbian lives until Germany had been defeated or at least until a new Slonika front was established, as it had been in the First World War.

The German field commanders took no notice of this division [between the Chetniks and Partisans] and pressed ahead with reinforcements sufficient to destroy all active resistance. In the process, they executed some 25,000 civilians. Mihailovic understandably concluded that his force of less than 20,000 men, ill-armed and in scattered units, could not survive against a larger, far better equipped German force. By November 11, 1941, he initiated talks with German representatives to negotiate a modus vivendi. But when the Germans demanded total surrender, he abandoned his headquarters and scattered his forces still further. This genuine weakness and the passive strategy it encouraged escaped British notice. So did the fact, then and later, that no British arms ever reached the Chetnik forces inside Serbia itself. Churchill's commanders were still ready to believe what the Yugoslav government-in-exile told them about Mihailovic and were eager to trumpet any evidence of resistance inside Hitler's Europe. Mihailovic was thus able to maintain the image, in Walter Robert's words, of Allied Hero through 1942. He was presumed to control the Chetnik forces in Hercegovina and Montenegro discussed above, and they were assumed to be fighting the Axis occupiers.

• p. 219

Ranking the several sources of Communist strength in Slovenia and elsewhere, the Churchill government's decision to abandon Mihailovic in favor of Tito was not high on the list. Some British studies of the Special Opertions Executive (SOE) have blamed its Cairo headquarters for Communist sympathies that denied Mihailovic a fair hearing. Others have argued that London Conservatives prevented earlier support to the more active Partisan units. Both biases existed, but neither one could eliminate the other nor overcome the evidence from both electronic intelligences and SOE missions on the ground--nearly twenty by the end of 1943--that the Partisans were doing more damage to the German war effort.

• p. 220

British disillusionment with Mihailovic first surfaced in February 1943. He berated British officers for London's failure to supply him with the arms he had requested or to understand his reasons for not attacking German targets more often. SOE mission chief S. W. Bailey, who had only reached Montenegrin headquarters two months before, radioed out a verbatim transcript that made it all the way to Churchill's desk. The Milhailovic tirade triggered a reaction that followed accumulating evidence of some Chetnik units collaborating with Italian or even German forces, and, more important, of almost no Chentik units disrupting them. It is doubtful, however, that these reports, many of them from Partisan sources passed on to the admitted British Communist, James Klugman, and other sympathizers in SOE, would have reversed British policy by the end of 1943 if not for three decisive events on the ground, all detailed for Anglo-American intelligence by Ultra intercepts." (first being the Partisans, 25000 men surviving Operation Weiss ann scattering the 12000 chetnik waiting for them). "From this point forward, the Partisan forces from Bosnia to Montenegro began to attract new member, some from the Chetnik side. (Had the Chetniks succeeded against the Partisans in that battle, they would have faced disarmament at German hands).

• p. 220-221

Three things lead to the reversal of support for M. the main partisan force of 25000 men survived Operation Weiss, "the largest of the seven German-led offensives against them during the war" Endured heavy losses, crossed the Neretva River and scatterd a Chetnik force of 12000 that awaited them. After this the partisan attracted new members including chetnik. 2nd, Operation Schwarz, in May German Bulgarian Italian and Ustasa units exceeding 100,000 men "tried to pin Tito's main force, barely 20,000 men, against the Zelengora mountain in southeastern Bosnia." They escaped, and F.W Deakin arrived in time to "witness it all, including some belated Chetnik aid to the offensive" 3rd, Italy left the war in sept 1943 "Italian commanders had already decided that summer to abandon their own alliance with the Chetniks, going so far as to disarm a number of units. This decision caused more Chetniks to defect to the Partisans and guaranteed that there would be no Italian effort to turn over arms and equipment to the Chetniks when their divisions departed in September.

• p. 221

By the end of 1943, Mihailovic had retreated to Serbia, where his total force of 50,000 had to strike a variety of arrangements with the German occupiers to remain in place.

• p. 224-225

The Serbia to which Draza Milhailovic returned in mid-1943 had seen less actual warfare, but suffered more at Nazi hands than any other part of the former Yugoslavia. Two German divisions, a large Gestapo complement, and the subordinate State Guards of General Nedic maintained order only by executing several hundred people every month under the OKW reprisal order of 1941.

• p. 225 (mid 1943)

The Neubacher mission did succeed by the end of 1943 in drawing Mihailovic's commanders in Serbia into negotiating with the Germans. They reached agreements for four zones where Chetnik forces could at least survive as long as they stayed isolated in rural areas. As 1944 began, the beleaguered Chetnik movement and a bewildered Mihailovic convened a large congress at Ba where he tried to stem the turn to collaboration. Still loyal to the monarchy, Mihailovic now advocated a federal and democratic Yugoslavia. He set aside the homogeneos Great Serbia which Moljevic had posited in 1941, but offered no detailed proposal for a federal alternative. Nor did M oppose the Chetnik truces with German forces that soon covered all of Serbia.

• p. 225

By September 1944, AngloAmerican planes had been bombing Belgrade for six months,and the Red Army entered Bulgaria unopposed. As Tito's main force of 80,000 approached from Bosnia, Milhailovic could now muster barely half that number. Most were from Serbia, in contrast to a Partisan force with disproportionate number of Montengrins, Bosnian Muslims, and Bosnian and Croatian Serbs in their ranks. Chetnik defectors were already joining the Partisans before Milhailovic's last surreal gamble, to greet the Red Army in Belgrade and join forces, failed in early October. King Peter had acceded to British demands the month before and broadcast a radio appeal for all Yugoslavs to support the Partisans. Also in September, President Roosevelt accepted Churchills' request that the ambiguous OSS mission led by Robert McDowell be withdrawn from Milhailovic's headquarters. It had arrived in July to evacuate US airmen who had bailed out over Serbia when their planes could not make it back from bombing the Ploesti (sp.?) oil refineries in Romania. This they did, but with enough sympathy for the Chetniks to convince Tito that the Americans were providing Milhailovic with weapons. While the Americans inadvertently stiffened Chetnik resolve, they did not augment the capacity of Milhailovic's units to offer….

• p. 226

….more than scattered resistance to the Partisan forces that entered Belgrade on October 20

• p. 227

The Tito regime made its first priority for 1945 the defeat of the domestic military forces still arrayed against it. The bulk of surviving Chetniks units from Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia were concentrated under Milhailovic's command in eastern Bosnia, but they split up in March. Montenegrin units under Pavle Djurisic headed for Slovenia to join the last stand that the fascist Dimitrije Ljotic and his small Serbian Volunteer Corps were organizing there with Slovenian Blue Guards and Croatian or Bosnian Serb Chetniks. Most never made it through German or Ustasa lines. Milhailovic and some 12,000 men headed south. But in May 1945, before they could reach Serbia, Partisan army and now air forces trapped them against the same Zelengora mouton from which Tito's troops had barely escaped less than two years before. Milhailovic and a few survivors eluded capture until March 1946, but his capacity for military resistance was finished.

Lee, Loyd E. and Higham, Robin D. World War 2 in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, with general sources

Greenwood Publishing

• p 294

The history of the Chetniks has received a good deal of recent attention. A full account can be found in Milazzo's The Chetnik Movement, while Karchmar's Draza Mihailovic surveyed their resistance activity and the reasons for the movement's downfall, pointing out that it was essentially Serbian and pre-modern in it's organisation. He also suggested that it's virulent anti-communism made any form of accommodation with the Partisans impossible. Also important is the extensive Chetniks by Tomasevich, which also provides an introduction to the period and the wider historical background.

Lerner, Natan Ethnic Cleansing

Israel Yearbook on Human Rights, Volume 24; Volume 1994, ISSN 03335925, isbn 9041100261 editor:Yoram Dinstein, [3]

• p 105

Already in 1942, a Chetnik military commander, attending a Chetnik assembly in Trebinje, stated that "the Serbian land must be cleansed from Catholics and Muslims. They will be populated by Serbs only." The commander showed his intentions, but was not original. The same phraseology goes back to a 1941 proclamation by General Draza Mihajlovic, the leader of the Royal Chetniks, who included among their war aims the following: "creation of a Great Yugoslavia with the Greater Serbia which ought to be ethnically pure..."; and "cleansing of the State territory of all national minorities and non-national elements...."

Karchmar, Lucien Draza Mihailović and the Rise of the Cetnik Movement, 1941-1945

Garland Publishing, 1987, isn 0824080270

• p. 243

On October 31 [1941], Vucko Ignjatovic, commander of the Pozega Cetnik Odred, and Capt. Milorad Mitic, Cetnik liaison officer in Uzice, traveled to Ravna Gora to confer with Mihailović. Mihailović was away, and Dragisa Vasic, as second-in-command, received them. They bitterly denounced the latest incident at Karan, and complained about Communist perfidy in general. Also, they had a plan. He could not afford, said Ignjatovic, to fritter away his detachment in these small scuffles; it was necessary to strike at the heart of the matter. He wanted permission to attack Uzice itself; everything was prepared, and only the assent of the High Command was needed. Vasic asked only, will it succeed? Yes, said Mitic, if we strike immediately. In Mihailović's name, Vasic gave permission.

• p. 246

In the past 30 years, a good many historians have considered the question of why the civil war broke out in Jugoslavia. The Jugoslavs themselves, although divided politically, have all been in favor of the theory that the rupture had been planned, and deliberately provoked; they differ only in their choice of villain. The Partisan school of historiography has elaborated a long and involved tale, full of double and triple-crosses and other complications, which postulates the "treason" of Mihailović, going back to a putative arrangement with Nedić in September, involving a lengthy patriotic masquerade by Mihailović and his movement, so as to undermine and destroy the liberation struggle from within; then, judging the moment right, Mihailović moves in for the kill, orders the attack on Uzice, and unleashes the civil war. The essential elements of this theory are that Mihailović was, all along, in the service of the enemy, that the attack on Uzice was made with his knowledge and at his express orders, that this attack was part of a deliberate plan, and that various anterior incidents, such as the agreement of Brajici, were merely camouflage to conceal his true intentions. inconvenient facts which conflict with this theory - for instance, the death of Mihailović's men in action, German executions of his followers, a German price on his head, German documents which show that he was considered an enemy, and, of course, the aforementioned agreement of Brajiéi -- are either ignored or explained away as more camouflage or as falling out among thieves. The …

• p. 247

…Cetnik theory has, at least, the merit of greater simplicity. Tito, a dedicated Communist, saw the war as an opportunity to impose revolution upon Jugoslavia, but Mihailović, with his greater popularity in the country, stood in his way, preventing him from achieving control of the resistance movement, and therefore had to be liquidated; judging the moment right, Tito ordered the attack on Pozega and unleashed the civil war. Inconvenient facts which conflict with this theory-- for instance that the Pozega Cetniks attacked Uzice, not vice versa, or the aforementioned agreement of Brajići -- are ignored, denied outright, or explained away as Communist camouflage. Non-Jugoslav historians tend to adopt one thesis or the other, depending on their political preferences, or construct ingenious theories of their own. Yet it seems evident, from the examination of the events of September and October, that by the end of the latter, both Mihailović and Tito were sincerely trying to swallow their personal prejudices and maintain cooperation between the movements. Mihailović still thought that the Partisans were dangerously mad, and Tito still thought that the Cetniks were unreliable reactionaries, but they both saw, Tito more clearly and Mihailović more dimly, that they were in the same boat. Of the two, Tito was the more eager to establish a close association; he obviously had a variety of motives: to conform to Moscow's directive on the united front, to disrupt a potential alliance between bourgeois Mihailović and bourgeois Nedic, and to subvert and swallow Mihailović organization when opportunity offered. Mihailović preferred a looser and more distant arrangement; he distrusted Partisan military theories, he was doubtful of their political intentions, and he had no wish to be swallowed, but he wanted to preserve some kind of unity among Serbs, he wanted to please…

• p. 248

…London, and he could not deny sympathy to people who were anti-German. But undoubtedly, by the end of October, the most powerful factor bringing them together was that they both understood the very serious military situation and realized that they could not afford disunity. Unfortunately, they were trying to build unity on three months' accumulation of distrust, dislike, bad faith, and continuous incidents. Whatever the leaders might think and plan, at the lower levels of command, where the burden of the incidents was really felt, the dislike and distrust dominated, and this produced ever more conflicts. Moreover, each movement contained a faction whose truculence appeared to grow in proportion to their leaders' attempts at conciliation. Mihailović was plagued by a surplus of callow junior officers, with all the prejudices of Balkan militarism, and no political sense. Tito was afflicted with young zealots who could not break out of the rigid categories of thought absorbed in the underground party and in the Mitrovica penitentiary. The ones were infuriated by denial of the monarchy, the others by the uniform of a gendarme. Even more unfortunately, both leaders were hampered in their dealings with the situation, because each shared to a degree the thoughts and prejudices of his more extreme followers. Mihailović was in many ways the typical Serbian officer, and Tito, the revolutionary zealot. When incidents occurred, they showed entirely too much sympathy and understanding for the errors of their followers. Mihailović refused to condemn an Ignjatović or an Ajdacić, but neither did Tito ever demote an odred commander or fire a politkom for disarming some Cetnik platoon.

• p. 256

Mihailović was now in a truly desperate situation. As he said to Christie Lawerence a few months later, "When (Hudson) told me that no more [british air drops] would come, I knew that for the time being I was finished.". Into this situation a new concept suddenly was intruded; the possibility that an accommodation could be reached with the Germans in such a meaner that the ammunition Mihailović was denied by his allies might be supplied by his enemies. The principal advocate, if not the originator, of this idea, was Branislav Pantić, one of Mihailović's chief agents in Belgrade. Pantić had for sec…

• p 258

…eral weeks maintained a friendship with Josef Matl, an officer in the Abwehr, although Matl was perfectly aware of Pantić's affiliation. Matl, who was one of the most dedicated members of the pro-Serbian clique in the office of the Military Governor, had been waiting for just such an opportunity. Some time in late October, in the period of the great mass executions, he apparently suggested to Pantić that now was the time to secure the pacification of Serbia, and the end of reprisals, by effecting a Pecanac-like legalization of Mihailović. Pantić then made his way to Ravna Gora; by the time he arrived, the struggle with the Partisans was in progress and Pantić was already feeling the pinch of the ammunition shortage. A conference of the top men of his staff convinced Pantić that a proposal should at least be made to the Germans. Pantić accordingly sent back word to Belgrade that he was now determined to fight the Communists to the hilt in the Western Morava area, and that he was willing to cooperate with the Germans in this task; in exchange, he asked for weapons and particularly for ammunition. Pantić took the proposal up to Belgrade around November 7 or 8; it is possible that Mihailović was promised that no German operation would be undertaken against his territory until it was examined and answered. On November 11, Mihailović met an official delegation from the head-quarters of the Military Govenor of Serbia at the village of Divci on the Kolubara river, which formed the front line between German and Cetnik-controlled territory. He came, it seems, reluctantly and suspecting a German trap; but this was his last-ditch chance to secure the all-im-portant ammunition. To his surprise, and apparently to that of Matl, the German command had no intention of accepting his cooperation or offering …

• p. 259

…him a single bullet. Mihailović, who explained that the only purpose of his movement was the preservation of the core of the Serbian people from destruction, was told that he was as much of a rebel as the Communists, and that only unconditional surrender would be accepted. The discouraged Mihailović returned to his headquarters. He tried to temporize, and stave off a German attack for a few days longer, by saying that he would have to consult his commanders before giving a reply; and he asked Matl to tell the German command that he was not "as much England's man as they believed." But it was obvious that nothing more could be expected from this quarter.

However, Mihailović had apparently decided to protect himself from unfavorable repercussions should his negotiations with the Germans be revealed. Before departing for Divci, he notified the British and the government-in-exile that he had already had a meeting with the Germans, at their initiative, and had refused their demands to surrender. The story was broadcast by the BBC the same evening, and published by the Western press. The angry Germans demanded that Nedić issue a story to discredit Mihailović, who was being made to appear the hero of the episode.

Nedić duly broadcast a story to the effect that Mihailović had asked to collaborate with the Germans, and had been taking Nedić money all along. This broadcast was picked up and quoted by the Partisans as evidence of Mihailović‘s "treason."

• p. 278

Despite the disruption of his intelligence network, Mihailović received word of the impending attack the day before it was to take place. His old contact, Aćimović now a minister in Nedić's cabinet, was in charge of re-establishing civil administration in the districts reconquered by the Germans. Aćimović and Col. Kosta Musicki, the commander of Ljotić's Volunteers, who was with the 113th Division as liaison officer, approached Mihailović on November 5, behind the backs of the Germans and of Nedić possibly they hoped, even at this last moment, to induce him to make an accomodation. Mihailović immediately ordered his headquarters and the Mountain Guards to evacuate Ravna Gora; they moved southward across the Western Morava river and into Dragacevo. Mihailović himself, however, was still in a neighbouring village when, on December 6, a German column broke into it. He barely escaped capture; his aides, Major Misić and Major Ivan Fregl, were taken, and later shot in Valjevo.

• p. 279

As the year ended, Mihailović, with a small staff, was hiding in villages in the foothills of Mt. Vujan, just south of Gornji Milanovac. The Germans had placed a price on his head: 200,000 dinars. The British radio had announced, on December 7, his promotion to brigadier general, and it was still reminding all Jugoslavia almost daily, that he was the chosen instrument of Great Britain and of the government-in-exile; but of the magnificent army which, according to the radio, he was leading to ever greater victories, little remained, apart from the legalized detachments, save a few scattered and fugitive platoons in the hills and the fragments of an intelligence and support network in the towns. In the rural districts,the organization, and the mobilization system, built up before the insurrection was a shambles; the officers appointed to organize and manage its local branches had been killed or had defected, or simply vanished.

• p. 376

It was a purely territorial system, in which the high morale of the troops was due to their serving in local units with their relatives, friends or neighbors, and in which leadership on the various levels was in the hands of local notables, and very often was hereditary. In 1941, the rebels almost instinctively returned to this pattern, with its tribal or clan basis, and leadership of the fighting Units almost always was placed in the hands of tribal members who were active or reserve officers.

• p. 377

Among the officers who took charge of major operations, three, in par-

ticular, were to play important roles in later developments. Col. Bajo Stanisić, of the Bjelopavlići tribe, was a well-known and highly respected career officer, who, at the time of the German invasion, had been commander of the Infantry NCO School in Bileća. Tall, thin, and pro-

fessorial-looking, he was known for his writings on military subjects, including a book on the moral training of troops. Even before the July uprising, he was reported by German Intelligence to be participating in the fighting against the Ustase in Herzegovina. Being the most eminent military leader among the Bjelopavlići, he was chosen to command the attack on Danilov Grad, in which most of the participants were from his tribe. Among the Vasojevici of northeastern Montenegro, Major Djordje Lasić, shortish, chunky, with a face not unlike Mussolini's had held, in April 1941, Mihailović's old job as Chief-of-Staff of the Drava Division in Slovenia. Avoiding capture by the Germans, he made his way home, and in July became the principal military leader of the Upper Vasojevići in Andrijevic Srez. The Lower Vasojevići of neighboring Berane Srez found a leader who, although not exactly a member of the tribe, was well known locally, his family having settled in Berane. A big, bearish, handsome man with a humorous face, Capt. Pavle Djurisić was probably the most interesting figure and certainly the best combat commander produced by the Cetnik Movement; impulsive, decisive, recklessly brave, charismatic, a born leader of men, he was in many ways the complete antithesis of Mihailović, but his many good qualities were marred by a blood-thirsty ruthlessness and a prejudiced narrowness of outlook which were extreme even for a Montenegrin. He was to lead a charmed life, and successfully squirm out of dozens of tight situations, until April 1965, when his luck finally deserted….

• p. 378

…him decisively.

• p. 386

A second group was formed by the nationalists, such as Djurisić, Lasic, Leko Lelić, or Ljubo Minić, who, rejecting both surrender and subordination to the Communist-controlled committees, retired into the hills, where they continued to lead their tribal bands. Their principal concern was to protect the mountain villages by blocking possible Italian thrusts and fighting off the Moslem raiders, but otherwise they remained quiescent, undertaking no offensive operations which would provoke Italian counter-attacks.

• p. 392

Even worse from the Partisan viewpoint, a new factor, which might possibly provide a focus around which the fragmented and unorganized nationalists might coalesce, suddenly appeared on the Montenegrin horizon. Vague rumors of Mihailović and his Cetnik organization in Serbia had reached Montenegro, at least its northeastern part, before the end of summer, but a group sent out from Vasojevici to investigate these rumors merely returned with a confirmation that such a movement existed, without actually making contact with Mihailović. Another attempt was made at the end of September or beginning of October, but yielded no immediate results. Then, in the latter part of November, the London radio began to advertise far and wide the name of Mihailović, the newly-appointed royal commander of all resistance forces in Jugoslavia. This made a great impression upon the nationalists of Montenegro; at last there was an official locus, approved by the king and by the British, where they could turn for leadership and instructions. The Partisans responded to the threat with a decision to wipe out the potential competition. They were, of course, informed -- apparently better than the nationalists - about the rupture between Mihailović and the Partisans and about the civil war in Serbia; they had received Tito‘s denun-…

• p. 392

…citations of the Cetniks, and had decided that the Serbian comrades' experience with Mihailović "must be a lesson" to Montenegrins. The regional conference of the KPJ confirmed the decision not to allow any competitive military organization to be established. Even before December, the Montenegrin Partisans had become very free with death sentences for all kinds of suspected "spies" and "fifth-columnists"; but now a veritable reign of terror was unleashed. The intention seems to have been to wipe out all potential non-Communist leadership, that is former officials, officers, and village intelligentsia. People were condemned and killed for all kinds of "crimes against the uprising", however far-fetched; very soon they were being killed merely for being potentially dangerous. Any criticism, however slight, of the Communist leadership or of its deeds was likely to be followed by a visit from Partisan executioners. If the chosen prey was not available, his family was often murdered instead. Neither women, old men, nor youth were spared, and executions were often conducted with the utmost barbarity. The number of victims mounted into the hundreds. The situation became so scandalous that post-war Party historians have been unable to gloss it over, and even Tito was forced to condemn it publicly.

• p. 395

Back at the end of September or beginning of October, the nationalists of …

• p. 396

Lower Vasojevići, taking advantage of the cooperation which temporarily existed between the Cetniks and the Partisans in the Sandjak and Western Serbia, sent out another envoy to locate the mysterious Mihailović and discover what he was up to. The choice fell on Capt. Rudolf Perhinek, a Slovene who had taken up residence in Berane and had participated in the July uprising. Perhinek made his way to Ravna Cora, and gave Mihailović an ample report on the situation in northeastern Montenegro, including the names of the most important nationalist leaders. Mihailović probably did not know Djurisić, but he must have known Lasić, a fellow general staff officer, at least by reputation. On October 15, he gave Perhinek two rather laconic authorizations, one appointing Lasić to organize Cetnik formations in Montenegro, and making him the Regional Commander for that area, and the other giving Djurisić the command of the Cetnik odredi which he was to establish in the Lim river valley and the Sandjak. Perhinek did not depart Ravna Gora immediately, and a few days later, with the outbreak of the civil war in Serbia, he was cut off from Montenegro by a belt of hostile Partisan territory. He finally got away at the beginning of December, avoiding the advancing Germans, and on December 18 reached Mount Golija near the borders of the Sandjak.

Meanwhile, Djurisić became impatient at the lack of news from Serbia. The situation in Montenegro had deteriorated, and contact with Mihailović was now far more urgent: his official status, daily proclaimed on the London radio, made him the natural leader of all nationalists, enabling him to issue the directives which would unite them and tell them what to do. In early December, Djurisić gathered a large escort and made his way to the Sandjak, reaching Golija on December 20.

Around this journey, the Montenegrins later built a legend which today…

• p 397

…has become enshrined in Cetnik hagiography, and, for different reasons, in Partisan historiography. On his return, Djurisić claimed to have visited Mihailović at his headquarters. This version later acquired virtually the strength of dogma: Djurisić receiving from Mihailović's own hands anointment as the Cetnik prophet of Montenegro. But in reality Djurisić never reached Mihailović. The country north of Golija was saturated with German troops, Ravna Cora had been overrun by the enemy, and it was uncertain whether Mihailović was still alive. However, Djurisić was now intercepted by Penhinek, who handed over the brief authorizations, and also the news of the real situation in Serbia: the insurrection defeated, the Cetniks scattered, and Mihailović a fugitive in the hills, and possibly dead. It was not quite the cheering tidings which Djurisić had hoped to bring back to the Vasojevići.

The reconstruction of Djursić's next move is partially conjectural, but all indications point to its validity. It would appear that Djursić, a resourceful and enterprising man, now sat down and wrote himself a lengthy directive, the famous, or infamous, Order #370, to which he boldly signed Mihailović's name.(note 13) This forgery, whose putative authorship is generally accepted by Cetnik authors just as firmly as Djursić story of having received it from Mihailović's own hand, was later to become one of the prime pieces of Partisan propaganda against Mihailović. But in the meantime, Djurisić, who seems to have already decided that he was the man to smash the Communists and save Montenegro, had a detailed and well-defined political platform on which to unite the nationalists. The document, besides repeating the appointments of Djurisić and Lasić to the posts foreseen by the original authorizations, proclaimed loyalty to the dynasty, a struggle against the Partisans, and war to the hilt against the Moslems,…

Note 13. The reasons for assuming that Djursić forged Order #370 are the following:

a)No original of this document seems to have been found, but only a copy attested by Djursić as being genuine (Marjanovié, "Prilozi...", p. 181).

b) The order is firmly connected in Cetnik memorial literature with the presumed personal encounter between Mihailović and Djursić; but this encounter did not take place. This is attested not only by Perhinek's testimony in Zivanović, Vol. I, but also by various officers who were with or near Mihailović's headquarters during this period, and who aver that Djursić never came, and that Mihailović met him for the first time in June 1942. lt is symptomatic that the various stories do not agree on where the meeting took place; e.g. Joksimovid, in Njegos 1, p. 99, says that it was on Mt. Golija, whereas Minié (p. 124) chooses Ravna Gora.

c) The order is dated 20 December 1941, which makes it physically impossible that Djursić could have obtained it from Mihailović and brought it back with him to Montenegro. Djursić left Zaostro in the first half of December and took about 10 days to get to Golija, which he had barely reached on December 20. He took about the same length of time to return, since he was back in Zaostro on January l or 2. Had he continued with a round trip from Golija to Ravna Gora, his journey would have lasted at least two or three weeks longer; witness the time it took Perhinek to get from Ravna Gora to Golija. Not only would he have had to dodge German and Nedidise troops, but the problem of locating Mihailović would have consumed much time; the latter was in constant movement about the hills of Western Serbia, and his own staff was sometimes unable to contact him. The same time element makes it impossible that a courier bearing a document dated from December 20 could have caught up with Djursić before his return to Montenegro. There would have been, in any case, no reason for Mihailović to write the order and rush it off posthaste to Djursić (to whom he had already sent the authorization of October 15) unless he knew that Djursić was in Serbia; again, the time element makes this impossible. But Djursić had to date the forgery so that it would accord with his story of having been to visit Mihailović; i.e. to the midpoint of his journey.

d) The document refers at least twice to verbal instructions and explanations on various points given to Djursić by Mihailović. Since their meeting never took place, such instructions were impossible. Djursić obviously put in these bits to allow himself, later on, to manufacture "official" policy on any point he forgot to include in the order.

e) The tone and contents of the document are far more "Montenegrin" than "Serbian", and in particular seem to reflect the character of Djursić rather than that of Mihailović. The blood-thirsty intransigence, and especially the grim hatred of the Moslems, are essentially Montenegrin; to the srbijanci, unlike the Vasojevići, the Moslem problem was of secondary importance. The primary problem to Mihailović was NDH and the Ustase, and he would doubtless have wanted to turn the Montenegrins in that direction. The order hardly mentions the Croats, but goes on and on about action against the Moslems.

f) The fact that the document contains some genuine Mihailović ideas (e.g. the liberation of Istria, federation with Bulgaria, creation of a large Serbian unit within Jugoslavia) is easily explained. Perhinek, having spent several weeks at Mihailović's headquarters, would have been conversant with the ideas expressed by the latter and by his staff, and would have communicated them to Djursić. The inescapable conclusion is that the authorizations of October 15 are genuine, but that Order #370 and the other two authorizations dated December 20 were manufactured by Djursić after his meeting with Perhinek on Golija. Being a bold and decisive man, he doubtless felt that success would justify him and turn away Mihailović's wrath, whereas if he failed he would not be around to answer for it. He may also have assumed that Mihailović had perished; Mihailović's own staff had believed it for several days after the German attack on Ravna Gora, and it is possible that the rumor had been brought to Golija, by Perhinek or someone else.

• p. 398

….who were to be eliminated altogether from Jugoslavia; other than that, its expressed ideas came basically from Great Serbian ideology. To complete the job, Djurisić wrote two more authorizations: one to allow Lasić and himself to order the mobilization of all officers and other ex-Jugoslav military personnel under pain of death for failure to obey, and the other to permit the requisition of supplies under receipt.15 Djurisić, now clad in the mantle of the official representative of the official representative of the king, returned to his headquarters at Zaostro in the first days of January, and began energetically to organize the Lower Vasojevići. Within a few days, he had a thousand Cetniks assembled, and began to clear Berane "Srez" of Partisans. This task was successfully concluded by the end of January, and the Partisans suffered notable losses. By that time, the Montenegrin Partisan Command was informed of Djurisić's return with Mihailović's putative directives, and, well aware of the danger, had moved forces against the Lower Vasojevići from the north and northwest. Djurisić thrust at their left wing, captured Sahovići, and drove the disordered Partisans quite a distance northward along the road to Pljevlje; then, leaving them off balance, he suddenly retired to his home territory. The appeals for help from the Upper Vasojevići nationalists accorded with his own decision to strike at the main Partisan base in northeastern Montenegro, Kolasin. By mid-February, his forces had been shifted south to Bare, and on February 23 both Kolasin and Matesevo were in Cetnik hands. Djurisić now cleared the rest of Andrijevica Srez and a large part of Kolasin Srez of Partisans, and attempted to capture Mojkovac, but was unable to take it; he did, however, occupy Lijeva Rijeka. The Partisans were now in a very uncomfortable situation. After the first…

• p. 399

…defeat at Bare Kraljske, the Montenegrin High Command had quickly organized a special formation, the Radomir Mitrović Combined Odred, under the command of Sekulić and Brkovićz to liquidate the Vasojevići Cetniks. This odred had proved unable to break through at Bare despite several weeks of fighting, and then was badly defeated by Djurisić and pushed out of the Kolasin area. The territorial units from central Montenegro, of which it was composed, appear to have suffered from poor morale, resenting being dragged away from their home districts to fight fellow-Montenegrins. The local territorial units of the Kolasin area now began to disintegrate, the men going over to Djurisić; the effects of the Cetnik victory also became manifest among the Kuci and the Bratonofidi, who began to go over openly into the anti-Partisan camp. Geographically, the Partisans still firmly controlled the great spine of mountains between the Piva and Tara rivers, including the massifs of Durmitor and Sinjajevina, extending like a tongue from the northwestern corner of Montenegro towards the Albanian border. The three northeastern srezi, Andrijevica, Berane, and Bijelo Polje, were now in the hands of nationalists, but the tongue practically cut them off from the rest of Montenegro; the only connection was the narrow neck of land between the Sinjajevina and Albania, in which lay Kolasin and Matesevo. Throughout the civil war in Montenegro, the Partisans struck repeatedly at this connective passage, hoping to cut it and then to finish off Djurić's Cetniks. The first attempt occurred in the middle of March; on March 9, over 2000 Partisans appeared before Kolasin. The fighting lasted ten days, but on March 20, Djurisić counter-attacked with strong forces, and the Partisans were driven back towards Sinjajevina in defeat; among the many killed were two members of the Montenegrin High Command, Bajo Sekulić and Budo Tomović. In the aftermath, the Cetniks extended their control to all of Bratonozići, thus…

• p. 400

…acquiring a firm territorial connection with central Montenegro.

Review

• [4]

MacDonald, David Bruce Balkan holocausts? Serbian and Croatian victim-centred propaganda and the war in Yugoslavia

Manchester University Press, 2002, isbn 071906466 X

• p 140-42

For Croatian historians, the ambiguous nature of Cetnik history had been a worrying phenomenon. Presented equally in historical accounts as heroes and collaborators, the Cetniks still enjoyed a better reputation than the Ustasa. An important objective of Croatian propaganda was portraying the Cetniks as genocidal aggressors, who were every bit as evil, if not worse, than Croatia's Fascists. The basic argument was as follows: the Cetniks had little interest in liberating the country from the Germans and Italians. Rather, the Second World War was merely a backdrop for the continuing expansion of Greater Serbia, which was to include almost 90% of NDH territory. For this reason, Cetnik goals were obvious: "the destruction of the NDH and the cleansing of the Croatian and Muslim population from these territories in order to annex them to Greater Serbia". Phillip Cohen's analysis was little different...... That the Cetniks might be seeking revenge for atrocities committed in the NDH was simply not discussed. Rather the Cetniks were presented as genocidal fanatics, who were trying to exterminate the Croats in order to build their super-state. For them the war and the occupation of their country did nothing to change their expansionist strategies which were timeless, and infinitely flexible, since the Cetniks could seemingly side with both the Germans and the Allies at the same time.....The Cetniks were also accused of formulating a plan for genocide before the establishment of the Ustasa death-camp system. The Cetnik commander Stevan Moljevic's "Homogeneous Sebia", yet another essay on Greater Serbia, was frequently cited to balance out atrocity accusations levelled at the Croats. Draza Mihailovic's "Instructions" of December 1941 were also advanced as proof that the Cetniks were using the war as a means of creating an "ethnically cleansed" Greater Serbia. For Croatian writers, Mihailovic was little more than a genocidal lunatic....Croatian writers also stressed the enormous size of the Cetnik movement...Croatian historians also presented Mihailovic as a dangerous manipulator with direct communication with all his units in the field. This was a highly contested assumption, since many Cetnik groups operated in isolation, with a great deal of decentralisation of authority, and many were not even in radio communication with each other. However, what was important in the context of the war was to prove that the Cetniks were a unified cohesive force, all bent on the genocide of the Croats and the Moslems......Another popular argument held that the Cetniks had openly collaborated with the Italians and Germans, in order to exterminate Croats on NDH territory. Supposedly, Italian and German forces supplied the Cetniks with weapons, food and clothing, and even local currency when they agreed to exterminate Croatian and Moslems on behalf of the occupiers. Such claims seem to have been exaggerated by Croatian historians, who paradoxically argued that Cetnik unofficial collaboration was somehow worse than the official highly publicised Utasa variety. Tim Judah has argued that, by 1943, both the Cetniks and the Partisans had commenced dialogue with the Germans, each seeking an alliance against the other. As was clear from wartime accounts, the Cetniks were willing to side with the Germans if it could mean the destruction of the Partisans. ... It is also clear that in Montenegro they did accept help from the Italians during the Italian surrender in 1943. However, it is highly misleading to suggest that the Cetniks throughout the war collaborated with the Germans and Italians in order to carry out the genocide of Croats and Moslems.

• p 261

Even though there is clear indisputable evidence of Cetnik massacres of Croats and Moslems throughout the NDH, there was no concrete proof that the Cetniks aimed to exterminate the entire Croatian nation - nor would they have had the means to do so. The only letter to this effect, describing a plan to create an "ethnically pure Greater Serbia" was dismissed by impartial historians as a forgery, according to Tim Judah and others. The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia Yale University Press 1997 p. 120

Malcolm, Noel Bosnia: a short history

New York University Press, 1994, isbn 0814755208 [5]

• p.175 (bosnia, 1941)

Anti-semitism was of only secondary concern to the Ustasa ideologists, however. The main aim was to 'solve' the problem of the large Serb minority (1.9 million out of a total of 6.3 million) in the territory of the NDH. Widespread acts of terror against the Serbs began in May." Mass arrests of Serbs in Mostar, hundred shot, entire villages destroyed. "By July even the Germans were complaining about the brutality of these attack" "...in the Nevesinje region [the Serb peasants] rose up in June 1941, drove out the Ustasa militia and established, for a while, a 'liberated area', joined to a similar area of resistance in neighboring Montenegro." Then turned against local Croat and Muslim villagers, killing hundreds.

• p. 179

But on the other hand there is no definite evidence that Draza Mihailovic himself ever called for ethnic cleansing. The one document which has frequently been cited as evidence of this, a set of instructions addressed to two regional commanders in December of 1941, is probably a forgery--though it must be pointed out that is was forged not by enemies wanting to discredit Mihailovic but by the commanders themselves, who hoped it would be take for a genuine Cetnik document.

• p307 note 17 to above quote

Tomasevich accepts it as genuine (chetniks, p170); but Lucien Karchmar has presented detailed and convincing reasons for thinking it a forgery, contrived by the two commanders to give themselves stronger authorization for thei actions.(Draza Mihailovic, pp397, 428-30)

• p. 188

At least 2000 Muslims were killed [in the Foca-Cajnice region]] by forces under one local Cetnik commander, Zaharija Ostojic, in August 1942, and in February 1943 more than 9000 were massacred, including 8000 elderly people, women, and children. A terrible system of mutually fueled enmities was now at work. The more Muslims there were joining the Partisans, the more the Cetniks regarded Muslims as such as their foes; and the worse the killings of Muslims by the Cetniks became, the more likely local Muslims where to cooperate with Partisan, German, Italian, or NDH forces against the Cetniks.

Milazzo, Matteo J. The Chetnik Movement & The Yugoslav Resistance

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975

• p. 19

Mihailović knew that Pećanać still possessed some potential military significance in the southern parts of Serbia. ln mid-August he tried to form an alliance with the old Chetnik head on the basis of a division of Serbia into spheres of influence whereby Pecanac would conline his activities to southern Serbia, the Sandzak, and parts of Albania. In a letter to Pećanać of 15 August, Mihailović made clear that he opposed immediate action against the Axis occupation because "the time . . . is not yet ripe,” but he demonstrated that his long-range plans were anti-German, for Pecanać’s work in the south was explicitly designed to prevent the enemy from sending reinforcements into Serbia from Greece and Bulgaria. Already committed to a collaborationist line, Pećanac ignored this attempt to subordinate his units to the Ravna Gora leadership; a week later, he ordered a meeting of his detachment leaders to make plans for Operations against the recently launched Communist uprising. By the Grid of August, he had issued an appeal to civilians to return to order and cooperation with the Axis authorities. Shortly thereafter, he moved to Belgrade, where he set up a so-called Staff of All the Chetnik Units in the Homeland, which had the support of about three thousand armed, about the same number as those under Mihailović's direct command. Ultimately-and this was typical of several of the non-Communist guerrilla detachments in wartime Yugoslavia-the Pećanac movement was of little use to either Mihailović or the Germans, and it appears that his bands made their major ellort in skirmishes with Albanian Muslim armed groups near the Sandzak and Kosovo-Metohija. Pećanac's refusal to join the Ravna Gora organization showed the...

• p. 20

...lengths to which some unit leaders would go in order to retain at least nominally exclusive authority over their own detachments and probably reflected the growing tensions between the older World War I officers and the younger leaders of the Ravna Gora Ghetniks. The immediate and decisive issue, indicated by Pećanac's behavior in August, was the Partisan uprising which broke out in Serbia in early july. The revolt meant that German countermeasures were inevitable and forced each officer with a real or potential guerrilla following to take sides, either joining the Communist operations or giving tactical support to the occupation order. Mihailović tried to restrain the Communists through negotiations rather than compromise his movement and sacrifice the Chetniks' independence by collaborating with Belgrade. This middle course, however, failed, and the Chetniks did not succeed in taming the Communists' zeal for open revolt, in maintaining discipline over all the leading officers, or in dissuading the Germans from turning to a policy of mass reprisals.

• p. 21

By August rebel activities had spread all over western Serbia, and the Communist leaders were soon in a position to rival the Chetnik officers for predominant influence in the Chetniks' own sphere. Moreover, the Communists’ early success was due in large part to their raids against the local police and administrative authorities, who were the very groups the oflicers depended on for support and toleration. Neither the Acimovic gendarmerie nor the weak German occupation divisions were able to cope with the growing chaos in the western parts of rump Serbia. By early September, when Tito moved to Partisan head-quarters, normally at Uzice, to begin planning a political program to accompany the armed revolt, the Communist-led resistance was rapidly taking over the anti-German cause. Also, the Partisans' strategy of aggressive and immediate action naturally attracted the “activist" wing of the Officers and worked to undermine Mihailovic’s authority over the non-Communist armed bands. Some leaders of Chetnik groups began to break with Ravna Gora and to collaborate with the Partisans in joint operations. In the Valjevo area, Chetnik formations led by a local priest, Pop Vlada Sećević, and by Lieutenant Ratko Martinović agreed to work with the Communists and launched a joint attack in early September. Even more significant was the collaboration between the Partisans and the Cer Chetniks, commanded by Captain Dragoslav Raićić. ln this instance, a detachment leader, nominally under the authority of Mihailović, made a sharp break with the officers’ strategy. Raićić was something of a model Balkan revolutionary. Wearing a large beard and the local peasant dress, this former artillery captain represented the aggressively anti-German wing of the Chetnik officers. According to German information, he was also the son of the Montenegrin Serb fanatic who shot the Croat leader Radić in the Belgrade Skupstina in 1928. In late August he signed an agreement with a Partisan...

• p. 22

detachment and wrote Mihailović to praise the Communist rebels as “sons of our people who are filled with hatred of the enemy” and to warn that “it is the clear duty of your Chetnik organization to hold a meeting between the Chetnik command and the reresentatives of the Partisan units to approve joint actions for success in defeating the enemy.” The Partisans, he stressed, were “irrevocably committed to a struggle to the end, whether the Chetniks participate or not." Raićić's Clhetniks and the nearby Partisans carried out combined operations through September and most of October. They even succeeded in capturing a number of German troops and planned a full-scale assault on Sabac for 22 September. When the Germans decided to launch a cleaning-up action in the Cer region, however, Raićić, with about fifteen hundred Chetniks and a few thousand Partisans, drew back quickly to avoid a risky confrontation. Raićić was not the only officer whose aggressive patriotism seemed to be pulling the Chetnik movement toward increasingly open collaboration with the Partisans. Artillery General Ljubo Novaković, who had been smuggled out of a hospital by Chetnik sympathizers in May, not only advocated the same course of action as Raićić, although inconsistently, but also, as the only officer with the rank of general, posed a very serious threat to Mihailović’s leadership. When he arrived at Ravna Gora, Novaković was at first received rather coldly. When he proposed to the officers that they establish three Chetnik commands, in Montenegro, eastern Serbia, and near Skopje, for the purpose of waging immediate anti-Axis resistance, he was excluded altogether. Novaković stole away from Ravna Gora, began to disarm some of Mihailović’s nearby followers, and, in mid-]une, moved to the Sumadija in northern Serbia. There, like Novaković, he tried to make an alliance with the collaborationist Chetnik Kosta Pećanać.

• p. 24

To a large degree, the officers must have felt that this course of action would preserve at least one sanctuary in rump Serbia for the Yugoslav Serbs. They also thought that immediate action was safer and more justified in those parts of Yugoslavia under the control of the Croatian Ustasi. The anti-Serb massacres in the western parts of Yugoslavia were part of an open policy and took place for the most part in the villages rather than in concentration camps. The Serb officers knew about them in the summer of 1941 and were determined to prevent the policy of mass reprisals from being employed in Serbia. Moreover, the Chetnik officers must have perceived the situation in this way to some extent as a result of their experience in World War I, when Serbia lost about 20 percent of its population, many in a typhus epidemic in 1915, suffered terribly at the hands of the Austrian and especially the Bulgarian occupations, and was finally liberated by an Allied breakthrough at the Saloniki front.

• p 27

Only a few days before the Strnganik meeting, in fact, Mihailović had conferred with a Serb employee of the Belgrade Bankverein; he explained that he planned no operations against the German occupation troops and that he was opposed to the Communists, but he also implied that he would not attack the Partisans because he wanted to avoid a civil war. His long-range goal was "to be ready, when the German occupation troops are weakened or withdrawn, to maintain and restore order in the land with his own forces. The exact nature and extent of Chetnik-Partisan armed collaboration is extremely difficult to determine. Some unit leaders like Racic, who had begun working with the Communists on his own initiative, may have been completely out of Mihailović's control. However, by early October, it is clear that he did issue instructions to some of his subordinates to work with Partisan detachments.l The most important joint operations took place near Krupanj, Valjevo, and Kraljevo, and, in at least one instance Chetnik units reinforced the Partisans as a result of Tito’s personal request to the Ravna Cora headquarters. From the very beginning, though, the alliance of arms was severely strained. When, for instance, the Germans pulled out of Uzice and Poiega on 21 September, the nearby Chetnik unit leaders who moved in were immediately surrounded by local Partisans and were expelled from Uzice on 24 September.

• p 40

When the officers’ delegates failed to get the Communists to agree that all armed formations be placed under Mihailović’s command, Hudson reported to Cairo on 21 November that “Mihailović ... has all qualifications except strength” because “the Partisans are stronger and he must first liquidate them with British arms before turning seriously to the Germans. In the meantime, as Simovic radioed to Mihailović on the same day, the Chetnik leaders “must endeavor to smooth over disagreements [with the Partisans] and avoid any kind of retaliation. Without any substantial aid from the British, beaten badly by the Partisans, and exposed to raids by German troops now in Cacak and Uiice, Mihailovic had to concentrate on preserving what he could of his organization rather than settling accounts with Tito. At a meeting with the remaining unit leaders at Ravna Gora on 30 November the officers decided to go underground by attaching their troops to Nedié’s legalized formations in order to carry on the war against the Serbian Partisans under oliicial protection. They could thus avoid being captured by the Germans and continue fighting the Communist resistance without directly compromising Mihailovie's position with the Allies. What is more significant is that this transformation took place upon the initiative of the unit leaders: although Mihailović sanctioned it, he probably did not control it. This decision was only the beginning of a process whereby the Chetniks in Serbia ceased to be a fairly compact and autonomous resistance group and gradually became attached to collaborationist, "legalized" leaders, where they functioned as police detachments with at least some loyalty to the puppet regime in Belgrade as well as to Mihailović. Mihailović was losing control of some of his officers and had...

• p 41

...virtually no effective fighting force left under his immediate command. Toward the end of 1941 his remaining bands were repeatedly forced to give up operations against the Partisans because they lacked munitions and, in several instances, they dispersed into the hills. On 7 and 8 December units of the German 34211 division attacked Ravna Gora captured about four hundred Chetniks, and drove the remainder of the Mihailović movement underground for most of the winter. The Chetnik officers, having failed to remove the Partisans quickly in November, were now almost necessarily committed to a long struggle against Tito before they could resume their own resistance plans. Their military reverses, though, become more understandable when one recognizes that, unlike the Partisans, their primary and original objectives included just about everything but fighting. The Communist leaders, although they suffered even more serious defeats in Serbia, did succeed in compelling the British to demand open resistance on the part of all rebel groups if they were to qualify for material support. Without the efforts of the Partisans, London probably would have asked for no more resistance than it did of any other underground organization in occupied Europe. As a result of the revolt in Serbia, Captain Hudson found himself telling Mihailović in November that “if both sides turned against the Germans ... immediate aid would be at his disposal, and we could help to establish him as unconditional commander-in-chief." At this point, the demands of the British government and the image created by the Yugoslav émigré government propaganda had little relationship to what the ofiicers would or could attempt. With virtually no effective fighting units or equipment, with his organization in Serbia dispersed and routed, and with only rudimentary contacts with non-Communist resistance groups in other parts of former Yugoslavia, Mihailović was expected to turn against the Germans_ Accordingly, he was promoted to the rank of brigadier general and proclaimed commander of the “Yugoslav Army in the Homeland” on 7 December 1941 by King Peter II.

• p 84

In eastern Montenegro, where the Italians had relatively few collaboration units, Djurisić had even more freedom to combine collaboration with actions dictated by the Chetnik officers' most ambitious goals. Djurisić had the final say in the political affairs of the smaller villages, and at the request of the Italians he also appointed "nationalist com-...

• p 85

...mittees” in the larger cities, like Kolasin, Berane, Andrijevica, and Prijepolje. This did not mean that his troops were interested mainly in pacification, for, unlike Stanisic, whose main activity was carrying out reprisals against suspect civilians, Djurisić concentrated on an aggressive policy toward the whole neighboring Muslim population, for the most part in the Sandzak. To some degree, the atrocities perpetrated by the pro-Mihailovic officers were an extreme reflection of the anti-Muslim component ot Serb nationalism represented by the Chetniks. Also, it should be recalled that both the Germans and the Ustasi had made appeals to the Muslims' anti-Serb sentiments in 1941 and that the Italians had employed Albanian Muslim auxiliary formations to aid in the suppression of the Montenegrin revolt. The Muslims of the Saudiak, Kosovo-Metohija, and Albania were the traditional and immediate enemies of the Montenegrin Serb nationalists. Probably even more iMportant, unlike the Chetniks’ other domestic opponents, the Croatian Ustasi and the Partisans, these Muslims were vulnerable.

Mulaj, Klejda Politics of ethnic cleansing: nation-state building and provision of in/security in twentieth-century balkans

Lexington Books, 2008 [6]

• p 42

In the summer of 1941, the Belgrade Cetnik Committee proposed that in order to make Greater Serbia purely Serbian in composition, large-scale population "shifts" would be necessary--specifically: some 2,675,000 people would have to be expelled (including one million Croats and half a million Germans), and that 1,310,000 Serbs would be brought into the newly annexed areas....A Cetnik directive of 20 December 1941 specified their goal to create an "ethnically pure" Greater Serbia, consisting of Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Vojvodina, "cleansed...of all national minorities and non-national elements." This directive provided also for the "cleansing [of] the Muslim population from the Sandzak and the Muslim and Croatian populations from Bosnia and Herzegovina."

Pavlowitch, Stevan K. Hitler's new disorder: the Second World War in Yugoslavia

Columbia University Press, 2008

• p47-49

The Muslims JMO leader Dzafer Kulenovic, who had been a minister..., had not gone into exile. Although the party had spent almost as many years in government as in opposition ,the formerly landowning Muslim class had it's grudges against the the pre-war regime....The ustashas recruited a sizeable number of Muslims who willingly helped with the persecution of Serbs....The JMO leader and other Muslim personalities from various walks of life who had previously identified themselves as Croats did initially side with the new regime. However, most Muslims were lukewarm, neutral, even opposed, as they sought to protect their group interests. Many turned against the ustasha's policy of using Muslims against Serbs; they became worried about their own situation in the general lawlessness of Bosnia. In the summer, under the initiative of Muslim clergy, notables.....(condemned) the participation of muslim "scum" that invited retribution from the Serbs....The resolutiions came as an unwelcome surprise to the ustashas but did not stop the persecutions.....Things had gone badly wrong for the NDH by the end of 1941....Even though only a small number of Croats and even fewer Muslims had taken a direct part in the massacre of Serbs, they had started a fratricidal struggle in the mixed regions. Extreme Croat nationalism had set up a pan-Croat state in the ruins of Yugoslavia, and attempted to croatise it by terror. In return, Serb insurgents had started to repay atrocity for atrocity. Catholics, Orthodox and Muslims in the mixed regions became locked in a vicious struggle, each willing to eradicate the others from it's territory, and forced to turn to foreign conquerors for protection.

• p.65-66

In late October, the idea of a "legalisation" on the model of Pecanac's chetniks, which would secure an end to the reprisals and a source of arms to fight communists, was put to Mihalovic. It is impossible to ascertain how much of it came from an officer of Mihailović's organisation in Belgrade, how much from within the Abwehr, how much from Mihailović himself, and exactly what each of the three had in mind. Did the Germans want to sound out Mihailović, or talk him into capitulating, or entrap him? In spite of opposition, the Abwehr did go ahead, and Mihailović did, however reluctantly, come to a meeting with the Belgrade head of German military intelligence, on 11 November, at Divci, on the frontline between German-controlled and chetnik-controlled territory. To the surprise of all who had been involved in the preliminaries, it turned out that the german command, who were about to quell the uprising, merely wanted to see if it could not get Mihailovic to conform to the capitulation that had put an end to military operations seven months earlier. There was talk of arresting him,before he was allowed toleave. Three weeks later,orders were issued for an operation to destroy his headquarters and detachments in the Ravna Gora area. Although he had ordered his detachments to disperse,on 6-7 December Mihailovic barely escaped capture as some 500 of his combatants were taken.

• p.66-67

If he had not personally come to a Pecanac-type arrangement, 2-3,000 of his men did enlist in a new category of auxiliary "legal" chetniks created by Nedic to help maintain order. There is no relaible evidence that the order came from Mihailovic, even though it seems he approved. ....Legalisation had it's advantages. It provided Nedic with more men to act against the remaining partisans. It offered Mihailovic a way for part of his chetniks to survive the winter with a minimum salary and an alibi provided by Nedics administration. The disadvantages were numerous. There was more confusion than ever over who and what the chetniks were. Although Mihailovic increasingly avoided the term, his men were popularly called chetniks. ... With his legalised chetniks, Nedic had acquired auxiliaries, but also worms within the administration, as Mihailovic increasingly sought to infiltrate it.

• p. 79-80

Meanwhile, the situation there [Montenegro] had deteriorated. Civil strife had indeed started, and Italian repressive measures stepped up again with the death penalty for armed insurrection and sabotage according to to the Wartime Military Code. An impatient Djurišić, had set out himself in early December to meet Mihailović. Winter conditions prevented him from getting through an area saturated with German troops. He returned without having seen Mihailović, but after having encountered Perhinek, who transmitted the gist of Mihailovic's instructions. He was also told that the rising in Serbia had been put down and that Mihailovic was possibly dead. Not satisfied with Perhinek signing on behalf of Mihailović, Djurišić had the latter's signature transferred to a formal order of appointment so as to make it more legitimate. He thereafter claimed to have visited Mihailović at his headquarters, to have been appointed and given instructions by Mihailović personally. He also appears to have forged the lengthy order of 20 December, allegedly signed by Mihailović, directing him to eliminate both communists and Muslims.(note 25). 25. The authenticity of the order, of which there is no original, has generally been accepted by most authors, Yugoslavs of all persuasions and others. The reconstruction of Djurišić's move and the convincing case for the forgeries is made by the Canadian historian Lucien Karchmar, Draza Mihailović and the Rise of the Chetnik Movement, 1941-1942, New York, 1987: 396-8 and 427-30. Perhinek's role and testimony according to author's correspondence and interviews with him December 1978-July 1980.

• p. 94

'His' [Mihailovic's] commanders, even the regular army officers nearer at hand, generally had a proprietary attitude to their respective districts. They were loath to operate outside their patch., difficult to remove, insubordinate, and at loggerheads. Mihailovic did not have much choice, for there was a shortage of abailable officers.....The further they were from Milhailovic's headquarters, the more local commanders became warlords who paid lip service to the King's representative, but took orders only when it suited them.

• p. 111

There was great dislike between officers on Mihailovic's staff and the Montenegrins. The relationship with Djurišic was particularly odd. Mihailovic pretended not to know of Djurišic's forgeries, and Djurišic pretended not to know that Mihailovic knew. Mihailovic lived a few miles away from his nominal subordinate and under his protection, with the Italians pretending not to know he was there. He needed Djurišic's loyalty, and helped him in return by providing him with legitimacy, and with Yugoslav government and British cash. Their superficial show of mutual loyalty has left a legend of presumed close relations, whereas Djurišic was loyal to himself only.(note 14) He was a dominant personality who inspired popular loyalty, who managed to instil [sic] some military discipline into guerilla tactics, and whom the communists respected as an opponent. 14. In the summer of 1942 he told Hudson that he was available to act independently and in defiance of Mihailovic. (F.W.D Deakin, The Embattled Mountain, London, 1971:151-2).

• p. 112

A 'youth conference of chetnik units of the Yugoslav Army on the territory of Montenegro, Boka, ... and Sandzak' met at the village of Sahovici near Bijelo Polje, well attended by teachers, journalists, lawyers, and other small-town 'intellectuals', mainly from Djurišic's and Stanisics' units. Representatives from Djukanovic's and from Mihailovic's staff were in attendance, but the show was entirely dominated by Djurišic. The debates and resolutions expressed extremism and intolerance....The Sahovici resolutions have since gone down as some sort of a chetnik credo. However, Mihailovic had had no hand in the congress, even though he had done nothing to counter it.

• pp. 192-193

General Giovanni Battista Oxilia, of the 'Venezia' Division in Berane, had argued that he could use his contacts with chetniks and their British liaison officer, to ask the British to bomb Podgorica airport, already a German base, and to call on all anti-German factions to organise common action. In the circumstances, pressed on all sides, he tried to keep a delicate balance, as he attempted to establish a radio link with the Italian Supreme Command. Perhinek arrived to discuss joint action, but Oxilia did not want to extend it against the partisans, and the chetniks started to take Italian arms. Bailey, who had also come from Serbia to assist with the parley, managed to obtain an agreement: the JVO would take over the civil administration of the area; ‘Venezia’ would hand over some weapons to the chetniks, and fight the Germans. At the end of the month, the partisan corps of former Spanish Civil War veteran and NOV General Peko Dapčević crossed into Montenegro from Bosnia, avoiding the Germans, to disperse the chetniks and take over Italian equipment. It first blocked Kolašin to force the Italian garrison there to hand over and break with Lašić, the chetniks’ commander who was himself trying to take over. After a five-day battle, the Italian garrison withdrew, the partisans took over, and Lašić went to Berane, to disarm the Italians there and prevent the town from falling to the partisans. General Djukanović came to berate Oxilia for having a foot in each camp.

In the end, Dapčević won the day, after alternating negotiations and ultimatums with accusations of breaking the armistice. The reported presence of unidentified British officers helped Oxilia realize that the partisans, rather than the chetniks, were the Allies’ preferred Yugoslav force. He agreed that his division would join Dapčević’s corps to fight with the partisans against the Germans. The partisans entered Berane, but not before 4,000 chetniks had left with a quantity of arms given to them by the Italians.

Reviews

Le Monténégro et l'Italie durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale: Histoire, mythes et réalités by Antoine Sidoti, The English Historical Review, Vol. 120, No. 487 (Jun., 2005), p. 863

The author quotes, from an official Italian military history, the ‘instructions’ allegedly given by General Mihailovic ́ on 30 December 1941 to Captain Pavle Djurišic ́, a Montenegrin chetnik commander, about the creation of a ‘greater Serbia’ within a ‘greater Yugoslavia’ by eliminating the interfering Muslim population in the Sanjak region between Serbia and Montenegro. The document, generally accepted by pro-chetnik authors and by Sidoti himself, was one of the prime pieces of propaganda against Mihailovic ́. But the Canadian military historian, Lucien Karchmar, showed conclusively as far back as 1973 (in his Stanford Ph.D. thesis, and later in his book, Draža Mihailovi ́c and the Rise of the Chetnik Movement, New York, 1987) that it was a forgery, written by Djurišic ́ himself, probably assuming Mihailovic ́ to have perished. Impatient to meet Mihailovic ́, Djurišic ́ had tried but failed to reach him, and then claimed to have visited him at his headquarters. He had returned with the alleged instructions that suited him, clad in the mantle of representative of the King’s representative.

Ramet, Sabrina P., The Three Yugoslavias

Indiana University Press, 2006, ISBN 0253346568

• pp.145-146

Both the Chetniks political program and the extent of their collaboration have been amply, even voluminously, documented; it is more than a bit disappointing, thus, that people can still be found who believe that the Chetniks were doing anything besides attempting to realize a vision of an ethnically homogenous Greater Serbian state, which they intended to advance, in the short run, by a policy of collaboration with the Axis forces. The Chetniks collaborated extensively and systematically with the Italian occupation forces until the Italian capitulation in September 1943, and beginning in 1944, portions of the Chetnik movement of Draža Mihailović collaborated openly with the Germans and Ustaša forces in Serbia and Croatia. Moreover, as already mentioned, the Chetniks loyal to Kosta Pećanac collaborated with the Germans from early in the war. (...)

For the Chetniks the war provided an excellent opportunity to put their program into effect, and between autumn 1942 and spring 1943 the Chetniks carried out slaughters of Croatian [and Muslim] civilians in a wave of terror (...) Roatta [General Mario Roatta], commander of the Second Army, protested these "massive slaughters" and threatened to cut off Italian supplies and money if Chetnik depredations against noncombatant civilians did not end..

• pp.147-148

But, even as the Chetnik organization in Serbia atrophied, it gained a new center of gravity in western Yugoslavia in the course of 1942. The Italians wanted to extend their sphere of influence in Croatia and to pacify the rebellion and, perhaps giving in to wishful thinking, "tended to see the Chetniks as a fairly well-coordinated which was ready to join the Axis powers and the Serb collaborators in a struggle aimed exclusively at the Partisan rebellion." In January 1942, General Renzo Dalmazzo, commander of the Italian Sixth Army Corps, met with [Stevo] Rađenović, Trifunović-Birčanin, Jevđević, and Major Jezdimir Dangić, a free agent whose small force had carried out some sorties against NDH [Independent State of Croatia] troops, hoping to use the Chetniks in a joint operation against the Partisans. For the time being, however, the Germans vetoed any use of the Chetniks in such a capacity. In spite of that, the Nevesinje Chetniks were working together with the Italians in anti-Partisan operations as early as April 1942. Indeed, by mid-1942, the Italians had acquired a vested interest in arming and using the Chetniks against the Partisans. In addition to the aforementioned Chetnik collaborators, one should also mention Pop Đujić, an Orthodox priest in his late 30s, who led an armed band of about 3,000 men and who was, by mid April, launching anti-Partisan raids in coordination with the Italians. By early summer, the Italians were arming and supplying about 10,000 "legal" Chetniks in the Italian zoene in the NDH.

Mihailović was aware of and condoned the collaborationist agreements into which Jevđević and Trifunović-Birčanin entered. Meanwhile, the NDH government had already initiated talks with the Chetnik groups in Herzegovina and was open to expanding cooperative links with Chetniks against the shared communist foe. On 19 June 1942, Zagreb and the Italian high command agreed to set up a Voluntary Anti-Communist Militia (MVAC) into which Chetnik volunteers would enter. The agreement reached in Zagreb foresaw that these de facto reorganized Chetniks would be under the firm control of the Ustaše and the Italians. Mihailović himself was drawn into this collaborative web, and by late August, was he was sanctioning the use of these units in anti-Partisan campaign with Ustaša and Italian troops.

Roberts, Tito, Mihailović, and the allies, 1941-1945

Duke University Press, 1987, ISBN 0822307731 [7]

• p.21

The leader of the Cetnik organization at the time war broke out was Kosta Pecanac. He did not share Mihailovic’s interest in resisting the occupying powers, and thus the Cetnik organization was split in two.

... The situation in Cetnik territory was further complicated by different groups of irregulars in Serbia. In addition to the Pecanac Cetniks and the Mihailovié Cetniks there were local commanders who fought against both as well as against one another. And of course there were those who openly collaborated with the occupying forces. They were the followers of Nedié, who' also called themselves Cetniks, and the adherents of the Serbian Fascist, Dimitrije Ljotié. Christie Lawrence, a British oflicer who was captured by the Germans on Crete in June 1941 and who escaped from a prisoner-of-war train, while it headed north through Yugoslavia, was able to observe the utter 'confusion, backbiting, antagonism and bloody hostility that prevailed between the divergent groups in Serbia. During his year there, he talked to Pecanac and also to Mihailovic. In June 1942, he was turned over to the Germans by a Cetnik officer who originally belonged to the Pecanac organization but later changed allegiance to Nedié and finally operated independently under the Germans.

In Order to dissociate himself from the Cetniks who collaborated with 6 Germans, Mihailovic at first called his movement the "Ravna Gora Movement.” However, as the other Cetniks became mere adjuncts of...

• p.22

...the occupying forces, the name Cetnik was once again associated with Milhailovic.

• p.35

Assuming that he would not receive further supplies from the British, seeing his forces unsuccessful in their battles with the Partisans, and deeply perturbed by the German offensive into Serbia with its attendant massacres, Mihailovic allowed himself to be persuaded by the German Intelligence Service to meet with representatives of the German commanding General. The initiative came from the German Captain, Josef Matl, with a Cetnik colonel, Bransilav Pantic, acting as a go-between. The German Intelligence Service had become aware of the deep split between the Cetniks and the Communist-led guerilllas and was anxious to exploit it. Believing that if the enemy is divided, one tries to neutralize at least one of the enemy factions, Captain Matl, who had already established contacts with some of the supporters of Mihailovic, made his move. His idea was to establish a modus vivendi between the German occupation authorities and Mihailovic's resistance forces.

• p.37 (1941)

Appeals by Telephone from Tito to Mihailovic on November 27 and 28 did not move the Cetnik leader to take joint action.

• p. 38 (1941)

page 38

staff. On December 5, he closed down his radio transmitter in order not to give the Germans hints about his whereabouts. (He did not resume radio transmissions until January 1942.) But the Germans were nevertheless closing in on him. On the morning of December 6, he was almost captured, and only by jumping out of a window in the nick of time was he able to save himself. During the whole day he lay in a small trench covered with leaves and shrubbery while the Germans looked for him occasionally even jumping over him.

Having finally thrown off his pursuers and reestablished communication with his staff, Mihailovié went into hiding. Only three guards Blagoje Kovaéevié, Nikola Mandié and Franja Senicar), one radio operator (Slobodan Likié) and a personal aide (Zvonimir Vuékovié) were with him as they moved about in the area of Rudnik Mountain for the next three months, until Mihailovié went south and eventually to Montenegro. At the same time, Cetnik headquarters was divided into two parts. The larger one, under the direction of Lieutenant Colonel Dragoslav Pavlovié, stayed close to Ravna Gora, while the smaller one (mainly G-2) under Major Ostojié kept near Mihailovié.

After Hudson returned to Ravna Gora on December 7, he remained close to Pavlovic and since nobody could go to Mihailovic without Ostojié's approval, Hudson was unable to see the Cetnik leader throughout this period. On December 1, Mihailovic had ratlioed that Hudson had not returned from Uzice, and that was the last the British heard of their liaison officer for four months.

• p.40 (1941)

After the successful uprising of Montenegrin "Whites" and Communists against the Italian Occupiers in July 1941, the Communists had taken charge of the situation. There is no doubt that their rule was bloody and antagonized many. When the Italians counter-attacked in the summer, they discovered that determined opposition came only from the Communists and that the other elements of the population simply stood aside. The Italian military governor.....put out secret feelers to local nationalists (Cetnik) leaders to the effect that the Italian occupation forces

• p 41 (1941)

would leave them and their men undisturbed in the countryside provided they would in turn leave the Italian garrisons and communications in peace. The Montenegrin Cetnik leaders accepted, and this was the beginning of Italian-Cetnik co-operation. However, it should be pointed out that this cooperation started at a time when Mihailovic was still in Serbia and had no control over events in Montenegro, where local Cetnlk leaders like Bajo Stqnisic and Pavle Djurisic decided matters without reference to Mihailovic, even though there was some courier contact, and Djurisié himself actually came to Ravna Gora in December 1941.

• p. 45 (1941)

On December 7, while Mihailovic was in hiding and no longer in radio contact, the Yugoslav Goverment-in-Exile promoted him to the rank of brigadier general.

• p. 53

The King assented, appointing Jovanovic as Prime Minister on January 11, 1942. At the same time, Mihailovic, who since December 7 had the rank of brigadier general, was named Minister of the Army, Navy and Air Force (a new ministry), succeeding General Bogoljub Ilié, who had been Minister of the Army, and Simovic, who had held the post of Minister of the Navy and Air Force. This appointment came at a time when Mihailovic was in hiding in the Rudnik Mountain area. He had resumed his radio transmissions on January 6 but shortly thereafter closed them down again because the Germans intensified their search for him. Mihailovic did not come back the air until March 22. Hudson was with, or more accurately near, but Mihailovic was deeply annoyed not only because Hudson had, November, recommended the suspension of British supply flights but so because he had "defected" to the Partisans, albeit for a short time only Until April 1942, contact between the two was nonexistent. Hudson as denied access to Mihailovié’s headquarters....

• p. 67 (1942)

We know now that after Mihailovic had established headquarters in Montenegro in June and after his command had been raised by royal decree to Supreme Command of the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland, of which he was appointed Chief of Staff on June 10, he became so absorbed by his domestic foes that he concentrated almost his entire attention on them. Mihailovic appeared convinced that the Germans and Italians were passing phenomena which the Allies would take care of, but he wanted his forces to be in control of Yugoslavia when the day of liberation came. His primary attention was, of course, directed at the Partisans, but he also fought the Croatian Ustashe and the followers of the Serbian Fascist Ljotic, allies of the Germans and Italians. Early in September 1942 he began to take on Nedic, too. On September 9, Mihailovic called, through leaflets and clandestine radio transmitters, for civil disobedience to the Nedic regime. Bloody fighting broke out between Cetniks and Nedic followers and as a result, the German High Command became actively involved in the persecution of Cetniks, many of whom were captured and executed. There is evidence that particularly during November and December 1942, German troops were fighting Cetniks if for no other reason than to bolster the Nedic regime.

• p. 68 (1942)

The relationship of the Cetniks with the Italian occupation troops was, however, a different matter. There was, as we have seen, convincing evidence that "cooperation" between the Italians and the Montenegrin Cetniks started as early as the autumn of 1941 when Mihailovic was in Serbia. In 1942 this "cooperation" had grown to such an extent that Italian and Cetnik troops joined forces during the Third Offensive against the Partisans in Montenegro. Also in other parts of Yugoslavia occupied by the Italians, particularly in Dalmatia and Hercegovina, which were part of the Independent State of Croatia, accommodations were reached between local Cetnik commanders and the Italian Army. ....The two Cetniks who played a particular role were Dobroslav Jevdjevic in Hercegovina and Pop Momcilo Djujic farther to the north. How much control Mihailovic actually had over them is not clear. That their agreements with Italian commanders in 1942 were reached without Mihailovic's prior knowledge is very likely. Actually these agreements, which provided for Italian arms, clothing and food for local Cetnik units on condition that the Italians be not attacked were denounced by Mihailovic later. He was particularly incensed when he learned that Jevdjedic participated in early January 1943 in an Axis military conference prior to the Fourth Offensive against the Partisans......Another reason why Mihalilovic may have opposed the award (to Jevdjevic) was his knowledge that, in Jevdjevic's Hercegovina territory, the Cetniks took terrible revenge against the population for Ustashe atrocities committed in Croatia. Moslems and Croats were killed in large numbers.......In pursuing his fight against his internal enemies, Mihailovic was in short quite prepared to accept arms for this purpose from the Italians; but he opposed actual agreements with them as compromising his position as a fighter on the Allied side.

p*. 101

That there was a mutually advantageousCetnik-Italian relationship is beyond doubt. But it as not the kind of collaboration characteristic of the relationship between the Germans and the Croatian Ustase. There was was never any doubt as to who was the master in German-occupied Croatia, but in Italian- Occupied Cetnik territory, the occupier-occupied relationship became very fuzzy. Colonel Bailey has told the author that often the Cetniks protected the Italians from the Partisans rather than the other way around.
Cetnik collaboration with the Germans, however, was another matter. What the Cetniks were doing was to attempt to prevent the Partisans from entering "their" territory, and in that respect their and the Germans' aims coincided. But any direct collaboration between the Cetniks and the Germans must be excluded, simply because the objective of the German High Command was the destruction of the Cetniks.
Actually, a most peculiar situation arose during the Fourth Offensive: The Germans and Italians attacked the Partisans, and in that undertaking, the Italians used Cetnik troops as allied forces. Yet the Germans, allies of the Italians, told the latter repeatedly that if they discovered...

p*. 102

...Cetnik forces fighting alongside them they would not hesitate to attack the Cetniks, who they regarded as Germany's enemy.

p*. 106

Mussolini then pointed out that, in view of the failure of Operation Weiss, the Partisans had succeeded in fleeing to Montenegro, and thus "the necessary precondition for the disarming of the Cetnik formations established by the Rome accords did not supervene." Mussolini complained that the German commander in chief, Löhr, and General Robotti met on May 5 in Zagreb, but Lohr failed to mention anything about a new German offensive (the Fifth Offensive, code-named Schwarz [Black] which started on May 15 and was directed against both Partisans and Cetniks) On the contrary," he wrote, "the German action against the Cetniks and the Montenegrin nationalists was initiated without the slightest prior notice to the Italian side. Obviously, the German High Command adopted a new assessment, according to which it was considered indispensable to move up the timetable for the elimination of the Cetnik danger. But of this, the Italian Supreme Command was not informed...." (This was quite true. The Germans, in view of their experience during the Fourth Offensive, distrusted Italian motives, particularly their collaboration with the Cetniks.)"

p*. 157

The Germans realized that the Partisan danger was increasing every day and that the Cetniks were equally perturbed by Tito's growing strength. Pointing to the unnecessary burden of trying to take on the Partisans and the Cetniks at the same time, those German who believed that some sort of German-Cetnik arrangement was advantageous for Germany finally prevailed, even though they were aware that M. was as anti-German as ever and that he hoped for and believed in an Allied victory.

Several proposals for arrangement with Cetnik units, thought not with Mihailovic, were worked out in the first two weeks of November [1943] and on November 19 the first nonaggression agreement was concluded between the German commander in Serbia and Cetnik Staff 148. This was followed by other similar pacts with individual Cetnik commanders, so that by the end of November three important Cetnik leaders, Nikola Kalabiec Dragutin Keserovic and Voja Lukacevic had been "neutralized" by the Germans. (Lukacevic was the same Cetnik officer who went south with Bailey in January l944.) The agreements also called for cessation of all Cetnik action against the Nedic regime.

Neither the British nor the American liaison olhcers had any inkling of these understandings between local Cetnik commanders and the Ger- man authorities.
There is little doubt that Mihailoviec knew about these arrangements, that he regarded them as the lesser of two evils and that he stayed in the background in order to openly to maintain his anti-German attitude while tacitly hoping to gain an advantage in his primary aim of defeating the Partisans.

Sindaek, Tea, The Fall and Rise of a National Hero: Interpretations of Drazˇa Mihailovic ́ and the Chetniks in Yugoslavia and Serbia since 1945

Journal of Contemporary European Studies Vol. 17, No. 1, 47–59, April 2009

While Yugoslav Communists presented Mihailovic ́ and the Chetniks as national traitors, war criminals and representatives of Serbia’s pro-Fascist and degenerate bourgeoisie in the first decades after the Second World War, from the 1980s onwards the Chetniks were gradually rehabilitated in the Serbian socialist republic. This process of rehabilitation continued apace in the Republic of Serbia after the breakdown of socialist Yugoslavia. In Bosnia and Croatia, however, the image of the Chetniks as traitorous and genocidal criminals remained or gained even sharper focus, as war crimes committed by Serbian paramilitaries in Bosnia and Croatia re-actualised the issue of Chetnik Second World War crimes. The images of Mihailovic ́ and the Chetnik movement thus differed widely among the post-Yugoslav republics. Drazˇa Mihailovic ́ is now a national hero in Serbia, but a nationalist and Fascist war criminal in Croatia and Bosnia. These very diverse interpretations of Mihailovic ́ and the Chetniks in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia are a consequence of the following. Firstly, the Chetniks were a very heterogeneous group: they were an amalgamation of anti- Communists, patriotic freedom fighters, collaborators, traitors, war criminals and perpetrators of genocidal violence. Furthermore, not all were under Mihailovic ́’s command. Secondly, the Communists’ utterly one-sided interpretation and instrumental use of the history of the Chetniks undermined and delegitimised all communist period historiography. This paved the way for wholesale reinterpretations, which would inevitably be anti-Communist. Yet, by leaving the massacres and war crimes out of the Chetnik narrative, a new flawed and one-sided picture of Mihailovic ́ and his movement was created. Finally, the current understandings of Mihailovic ́ and the Chetniks are also the products of efforts to construct usable national histories in the post-Yugoslav republics. These histories are often simplistic or non-reflective, and they are often characterised by a lack of sensitivity towards other national histories. Then again, was not national history ever thus?

Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia 1941-1945

Reviews

The American Historical Review, American Historical Association [8] The first book of this study, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: The Chetniks (1975), revealed Jozo Tomasevich (1908–1994) to be a first-rate researcher, and even a quarter of a century after it first appeared, it is still the most complete and best book about the Chetniks to be published either abroad or in former Yugoslavia. Tomasevich combined the distanced objectivity of a scholar from another country with an active level of knowledge about a subject that can often be had only by a scholar from the land whose history is being studied. The book under review is Tomasevich's second book of the series, almost completed before his death. His daughter Neda edited the whole text to make it stylistically consistent and easy to read. All the distinguishing features Tomasevich showed in writing the first volume are also expressed in this book, which describes how the occupying forces (Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria) ruled some parts of Yugoslavia, and how their collaborators adapted under such circumstances. Tomasevich also describes the position of the churches during occupation and revolution, the destruction of the Jewish community in Yugoslavia, Axis exploitation of the Yugoslav economy, the economic consequences of war and exploitation, and some other subjects. ...All the distinguishing features Tomasevich showed in writing the first volume are also expressed in this book, which describes how the occupying forces ruled some parts of Yugoslavia, and how their collaborators adapted under such circumstances. . . . This book, together with its predecessor, is an invaluable foundation that no new research into World War II on the territory of former Yugoslavia will be able to bypass. It promises to remain for a long time to come. — The American Historical Review, 2001 (reviewing Volume II and commenting on Volume I) The English Historical Review, Oxford University (translated, "Foreword from the publishers" [9]) The events in Yugoslavia following the dissolution of the multinational state in 1941. . . were so complex, that up until now not a single adequately complete and objective history about that period has been written. With the book The Chetniks. . . as the first part of the announced three-part study, promises to bring such complete and complex history into view. . . Professor Tomasevich deserves the highest commendation for a thorough and objective scientific approach to such a very complex subject, because of which this book will remain essential reading for a long time.. — Prof. Stephen Clissold, The English Historical Review, January 1977 (reviewing Volume I) The Historical Journal, Cambridge University (translated, "Foreword from the publishers" [10]) A book with deep historic insight, only to be expected from the author of the classical work Peasants, Politics, and Economic Changes in Yugoslavia, published 20 years ago... — Prof. D. Wilson, The Historical Journal, Vol. 19/1, March 1976 (reviewing Volume I) The Times Higher Education Supplement (translated, "Foreword from the publishers" [11]) Professor Tomasevich, a noted American historian of Dalmatian roots, wrote a work of great scientific worth, with a far wider application than even the title itself suggests.. — F. B. Singleton, The Times Higher Education Supplement, August 22, 1975 (reviewing Volume I) Yale University [12] This is a magnificent work of superb scholarship. No other book in any language so clearly presents and analyzes the aims and policies of the Axis in occupied Yugoslavia, as well as those of the various collaborators. . . . The need for such a book is greater than ever, as controversies over the past rage in the post-Yugoslav states. — Prof. Ivo Banac, Yale University Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries [13] There is plenty of significance in this truly monumental work of scholarship. Tomasevich's exhaustive mining of German and Italian government documents opens a fascinating window on the wartime exploitation of Yugoslavia’s economic and human resources. — Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries History: Reviews of New Books [14] The present work is the long-awaited sequel to [Tomasevich's] equally monumental War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945: The Chetniks. . . . War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945: Occupation and Collaboration aims at an academic audience, but it would be valuable to anyone interested in understanding the Yugoslav past and present. It is a must for any college library and desirable for larger public ones. — History: Reviews of New Books The Canadian Slavonic Papers [15] War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945 will almost certainly be considered the definitive work on the . . . .controversial topic of occupation and collaboration regimes in wartime Yugoslavia . . . .Tomasevich covered in meticulous and awe-inspiring detail the activities and experiences of those parts of Yugoslavia occupied by or in active collaboration with the various axis regimes during te Second World War . . . .What Tomasevich has done is certainly deserving of our highest praise. This volume, like his first, is an indispensable addition in the library of every serious scholar of Yugoslavia or the Second World War. — The Canadian Slavonic Papers Royal Military Academy Sandhurst The scholarly standard achieved by Jozo Tomasevich in his two volumes of 'War and Revolution in Yugoslavia' and the thought of what he would have made of volume three of the series make his death a tragedy keenly felt even by those who never knew him. — Klaus Schmider, Royal Military Academy Sandhurst Clark University There is much to praise about Tomasevich's contribution. His ability to make exhaustive use of the military and diplomatic archives of the major forces involved in this region is no small feat, considering the variety of languages required and the way in which these archives have been dispersed and destroyed. He offers the fullest and most objective account available of the activities of the occupiers and collaborators, together with an extensive account of the economic consequences of the occupation... ...Tomasevich succeeds again, in his final major work, in making solidly supported and reasonable claims in an environment that has long been defined by the instrumentalization and manipulation of historical claims. He restores faith in the enterprise of history by reviving a long-absent figure—the modest professional researcher hard at work. — Dr Eric Gordy, Clark University (currently Senior Lecturer in South East European Politics, University College London [16]) The Slavic Review One cannot fail to be impressed by the remarkable command of research materials demonstrated throughout this study. . . . Tomasevich never shirks the need to tackle honestly the most sensitive and contentious areas of historical debate, and in this respect he has done a particular service to scholarship through his meticulous and balanced attempts to marshal the available evidence concerning Yugoslavia’s losses between 1941 and 1945. — The Slavic Review The one "notable" negative review I could find comes from Karapandžić, an ex-Ljotićevac, i.e. ex-member/supporter of the quisling Serbian Volunteer Corps of Dimitrije Ljotić. In his (non-peer review) magazine Amerikanski Srbobran ("The American Serb-Defender"), Karapandžić berates the scholar denying many Chetnik-related aspects of the work. The only basis for the denial is, as the author puts it: ...jedan Amerikanac hrvatskog porijekla ne bi smio tako samopouzdano izricati svoje sudove o jednom srbijanskom političkom i vojnom pokretu i o historijskoj epizodi koja je prvenstveno srpska. ...an American of Croatian origins should not be so brazenly stating his judgements on a Serbian political and military movement, and a historical episode which is first and foremost Serbian. — Karapandžić, Amerikanski Srbobran ("The American Serb-Defender"), Serbian Orthodox Society "Srbobran", Pittsburgh July 1976 The work was also thoroughly denounced by members of the Croatian Ustaše emigration such as Alex N. Dragnich, and Bogdan Radić in the Hrvatska revija ("Croatian Magazine"). According to the publishers, the remaining reviews, such as those from Clark and Yale universities and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, are virtually universally positive (see the collapsible box below). I could not find any more reviews. If someone manages to unearth any more reviews, negative or otherwise, please post them here. --DIREKTOR (TALK) 11:53, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

Volume I The Chetniks

Stanford University Press, 1975, ISBN 0804736154 [17]

• p. 169

Moljević [Stevan Moljević] believed that the Serbian statesmen had made a serious mistake in not carefully defining the frontiers of new Serbia 1n the newly established Yugoslav state in 1918, and he was insisting on the idea that the Serbs at the end of the Second World War should avoid that mistake and should seize all areas that they claimed and present the other nations of Yugoslavia with a fait accompli, and from that position talk about a federally organized Yugoslavia. His plan envisaged large-scale evictions of non-Serb population from various areas as well as large population exchanges, but he did not suggest any figures.

Moljevic had definite ideas about the socioeconomic organization of the new Great Serbia. He conceived it as a nation in which work was "the basic goal and sense of life of every man” with just rewards; but to be permitted to operate but only under state control. All citizens were to be guaranteed a chance to work, and provided with medical care and old age benefits. Freedoms of person, personal initiative, and private property, as well as of thought, religion, and the press, were to be guaranteed but could not be abused at the expense of others; the primary function of the press would be to serve the cause of the people and the state and to further public morality. The church was to be recognized and supported only if it were completely independent toward the outside world and had its head in the country itself; there could be no political parties formed on religious foundations. All this was to combine in a “people’s renaissance,” in which all segments of the Serbian population, divided into the various professions and inspired by the example of the intelligentsia and youth, would live and work in harmony.

Very similar to the territorial proposals of Dr. Moljevic were those formulated by the Belgrade Chetnik Committee in the summer of 1941 and in September 1941 taken out of the country and later delivered to

• p. 170

the government-in-exile in London by Dr. Miloš Sekulić. A map reportedly worked out on the basis of this document goes beyond Moljević, however, in setting forth the details of the large-scale population shifts that would be necessary to make the Serbian unit purely Serbian in terms of population. Specifically: from the projected Great Serbia not less than 2,675,000 people would have to be expelled, including 1,000,000 Croats and 500,000 Germans; 1,310,000 would then be brought into the newly defined Serbia, 300,000 of them Serbs from Croatia. Some 200,000 Croats would be permitted to remain in the new Great Serbia. No figures are suggested for shifts of Moslems—Moslems are, in fact, only briefly mentioned: "In the Serbian unit the Moslems [i.e. Moslems by nationality, the modern Bosniaks] present a grave problem and if possible it should be solved in this phase" (meaning, apparently, in the final stages of the war and the early postwar period). We can assume that Mihailović endorsed all or most of the above proposals having to do with the territory of a Great Serbia. He alludes to them in a proclamation issued to the Serbian people the following December, and in a set of detailed instructions given on December 20 to his newly appointed commanders in Montenegro, Major [Đorđe] Lašić and Captain Đurišić, he makes specific references to them as part of the Chetnik program. The objectives are, the directive says:

(1) The struggle for the liberty of our whole nation under the scepter of His Majesty King Peter II; (2) the creation of a Great Yugoslavia and within it of a Great Serbia which is to be ethnically pure and is to include Serbia [meaning also Vardar Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Srijem, the Banat, and Bačka]; (3) the struggle for the inclusion into Yugoslavia of all still unliberated Slovene territories under the Italians and Germans (Trieste, Gorizia, Istria, and Carinthia) as well as [of areas now under] Bulgaria, and northern Albania with Scutari; (4) the cleansing of the state territory of all national minorities and a-national elements [i.e. the Partisans and their supporters]; (5) the creation of contiguous frontiers between Serbia and Montenegro, as well as between Serbia and Slovenia by cleansing [removing?] the Moslem population from Sandžak and the Moslem and Croat populations from Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The instructions also note that with "the Communist Partisans there can be no cooperation because they are fighting against the dynasty and for social revolution, which can never be our objective, because we are only and exclusively soldiers and lighters for the King, Fatherland, and the freedom of the people."

• pp.232-233

The high point of Chetnik collaboration with the Axis powers was reached during the Battle of the Neretva in the winter of 1943, which was the final phase of Fall Weiss or, in Yugoslav terminology, the Fourth Enemy Offensive. The battle of the Neretva River had a long and complicated background on the Chetnik and Axis side and, for the Chetniks, a fateful aftermath. During the first six months of 1942 the Partisans suffered great losses... owing to the successful Chetnik subversion of many Partisan detachments and to some serious mistakes of the Communist leaders, especially the so called "left deviation"... At the same time the Chetniks in these areas have been building-up their strength partly by subverting Partisan detachments, and partly by collaborating with the Italians, and in certain areas to some extent with the Croatian quisling forces, and thus indirectly with the Germans.

Since September [1942] they [the Chetniks] had been trying to persuade the Italians to undertake "a large operation" against the Partisans in their domain [western areas of Bosnia] - knowing that unaided they were incapable of defeating them. Vojvoda [Chetnik leader] Trifunović-Birčanin met with General Roatta on September 10 and 21 to urge him to undertake "as soon as possible" a large operation to chase the Partisans from the Prozor-Livno area offering 7,500 Chetniks as aid on the condition they were furnished with the necessary arms and supplies. He was successful in obtaining some arms and promises of action.

Early in October the Italians launched an operation called Alfa... in which about 3,000 Herzegovinian and southeast-Bosnian Chetniks under the leadership of Lt. Colonel Baćović and Vojvoda Jevđević participated. In this operation the town of Prozor and some smaller towns in the same area were taken. But the Chetnik forces, acting on their own, burned villages and carried-out mass killings of the civilian Moslem and Croatian population. Their behavior quite naturally aroused the anger of the Croatian quisling government, and the Italians had to order the Chetniks to withdraw. Some Chetniks were discharged altogether, while others were sent later to northern Dalmatia to aid the forces of Vojvoda Đujić.

• p.236

For the execution of Operation Weiss the Germans employed from the beginning the 717th and 718th divisions, parts of the 714th division, the 7th SS Divison Prinz Eugen, the 187th Infantry Reserve Division, several Croatian quisling brigades, as well as about ninety German and Croatian aircraft, and from February 27 on, the 369th Infantry Division (Croatian Legionnaries). The Italians used the Lombardia, Re, and Sassari divisions from the beginning, as well as about 6,000 Chetnik auxiliaries from Lika and northern Dalmatia. Later they used also parts of the Bergamo, Marche, and Murge divisions. In the final phase, the Battle of the Neretva River, the total number of Chetnik auxiliaries and other Chetnik formations closely working together with the Italians was between 12,000 and 15,000 men...

• p.239

...Konjic proved to be another matter. This town was jointly held by Italians and Chetniks, and in the course of the battle for its control it was reinforced by some German and Croatian and additional Chetnik troops.

• p.241

Apparently to make sure that the crucial operation on the Neretva would be carried out successfully, and also to be present at the scene of the kill, Mihailović himself moved from Montenegro to Kalinovik where he joined Ostojić, who had up to this point been in command of operations in Herzegovina. On March 9 Mihailović wrote to Colonel Stanišić:

"I manage the whole operation through Branko [i.e. Ostojić, Mihailović's Chief of Operations]. No action is ordered without my approval. Branko is keeping me informed of even the smallest details. All his proposals are reviewed, studied, approved or corrected..."

Note 122: But at his trial Mihailović stated that "there the operations were led by Ostojić, because I had no time to occupy myself with these matters, since I had really come to visit my troops and get acquainted with the real state of affairs."

• pp.256-261

No study of the Chetniks and their policies during the Second World War would be complete without a discussion of the Chetnik use of mass terror against their various enemies. The Chetniks were by no means the only offenders in Yugoslavia: the use of terror on a large scale and in innumerable forms was practiced by all parties engaged in war in Yugoslavia and was a ubiquitous phenomenon in all parts of the country. I bring up the Chetniks as perpetrators here because some of the most outrageous incidents of Chetnik terror took place in the time period covered in this chapter, that is between October 1942 and February 1943, and also because it was practiced on the largest scale in areas under Italian control and thus, one might say, under the Italian security umbrella.

In Yugoslavia, as in all the Balkan countries, there was a certain traditional inclination to the use of terror as a political tool. Living for centuries under foreign rule, frustrated in their repeated attempts to gain freedom, their rewards as a rule being only increased oppression, the peoples of the South Slav nations grew accustomed to the use of terror as a means of dealing with an enemy. By 1941, several more recent grievances had been added to the long-standing antagonism between the Christians (especially Orthodox) and the Moslems who, rightly or not, were reminders of the hated Turkish rule; there were mutual grievances between the Croats and the Serbs especially, and after the invasion, the Serbs had fresh grievances in the treasonable activities of some Croats and the subsequent persecution of Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia by the Ustashas.

Chetnik mass terror was directed primarily against three groups. First, these are the Croats in the areas where Serbs and Croats lived in mixed communities and where the Ustashas were implementing mass terror against the Serbs and the Chetniks against the Croats. Both were drawing on strong religious and national differences, so that terror and counter-terror had their ideological aspects in the thosand-year-old antagonism between Orthodoxy and Catholicism. The second group, the Moslem population in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Sandjak was one of the primary victims of Chetnik terror. Here, the centuries-old religious and political Christian-Moslem antagonism had been aggravated during the First World War when many Bosnian Moslems joined the Austro-Hungarian Schutz-korps, which engaged in anti-Serb activities, and again after April 1941 when a great many Moslems joined the Ustashas and participated in atrocities against the Serbs. The Moslems were thus a traditional enemy, and it was only after mid-1943, when the potential political value of the Moslem population of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Sandžak took on importance for the Chetniks, that they suspended their acts of terror against the Moslems. The third group against whom the Chetniks used mass terror was, of course, their principal enemy the Partisans. Against them, whatever their nationality or religion, from the late fall of 1941 the Chetniks used terrorist methods at every opportunity. Thus a terrible pattern of terror and counterterror emerged in various parts of the country during the Second World War may be found in the explanation of the verdict of the Military Tribunal that tried General Mihailović and his codefendants in the summer of 1946. One of the earliest incidents was the series of massacres of Moslems in southeastern Bosnia which took place in December 1941 and January 1942, especially in the area of the town of Foča, in which probably over two thousand people perished. Eastern and southeastern Bosnia were, in fact, severely hit both by Ustaša terror against the Serbs and by Chetnik terror against the Moslem and Croatian population. Additional Chetnik terrorist outbursts against the Moslems in the area of Foča took place in August 1942. The worst of the Chetnik terror against the Moslems occurred in Sandjak and southeastern Bosnia in January and February 1943. According to a statement originating with the Chetnik Supreme Command dated February 24, 1943, these were punitive countermeasures prompted by the "aggressive actions of the Moslems who had attacked Serbian villages and killed some Serbian people." Chetnik units which had been mobilized in December 1942 in Montenegro and readied for the planned, but delayed, "March on Bosnia" were ordered early in January and again early in February to undertake what were known as "cleansing actions" against the Moslems, first in the county of Bijelo Polje in Sandžak and in February in the county of Čajniče and part of the county of Foča in southeastern Bosnia, and in part of the county of Pljevlja in Sandžak. Chetnik losses were nominal; Moslem losses were estimated at about 10,000 persons. More details are revealed in the reports that Major [Pavle] Đurišić, the officer in charge of these operations, submitted to the Chief of Staff of the Supreme Command (Mihailović). According to Đurišić's report of January 10, thirty-three Moslem villages had been burned down, and 400 Moslem fighters (members of the Moslem self-protection militia supported by the Italians) and about 1,000 women and children had been killed, against 14 Chetnik dead and 26 wounded. The cleansing action carried out in early February took an even more staggering toll: according to Đurišić's report of February 13, in this action the Chetniks killed about 1,200 Moslem fighters and about 8,000 old people, women, and children; Chetnik losses in the action were 22 killed and 32 wounded. In addition, the Chetniks destroyed all property except livestock, grain, and hay, which they seized. It may be observed that Moslem casualties would certainly have been even greater had not a great number of Moslems already fled the area, mostly to Sarajevo; and all who could escape to safety of course did so as soon as the February action started. Although "cleansing actions" in Sandžak and southeastern Bosnia were represented by the Chetniks as countermeasures against Moslem aggressive activities, all circumstances indicate that the operations were a partial implementation of the Chetnik plans mentioned specifically in Mihailović's directive of December 20, 1941, to Đurišić and [Đorđije] Lašić about the cleansing of Sandžak of Moslem and of Bosnia of Moslem and Croatian populations.

One of the worst Chetnik outbursts against the Croatian population in Dalmatia took place in the first days of October 1942 at the village of Gata south of Split, in reprisal against the people of this village and other villages nearby for destroying some roads in the area; the reprisals were, in fact, taken by the Chetniks for Italian account. In all, about one hundred people were killed, and many homes were burned.

Mention has already been made of the behavior of Chetnik formations under Lt. Colonel Baćović and vojvoda Jevdjević who were participating in the Italian Operation Alfa in the area of Prozor that same October. The Chetniks burned many villages and massacred over live hundred Croats and Moslems until being ordered out of the area at the insistance of the Croatian quisling regime.

In terms of the number of victims and the cruelty of dispatching them, the Croatian Ustashas Were, of course, far more guilty of crimes against humanity than were the Chetniks, though the Chetnik massacres of Moslem people in Sandjak and southeastern Bosnia were in essence of the same kind. It should also be pointed out that the Ustasha atrocities were undertaken first, and that at least to some extent the Chetnik terrorist activities against the Croatian and Moslem populations were in the nature of a reaction.

In Serbia, aside from some terrorist acts against Nedić’s and Ljotić's men, and in Montenegro against the separatists, Chetnik terror was directed exclusively against the Partisans and their families and sympa-thizers, and it was based solely on ideological grounds. The goal, as Chetnik documents prove again and again in general and specific orders, was nothing less than the complete destruction of the Partisans. Total figures of Partisan dead will never be known. Indiscriminate terror being impossible because Partisans and their sympathizers lived together with other Serbian and Montenegrin people, lists of individuals marked for liquidation were compiled, and occasionally specific individuals were singled out by the Chetnik officers, as for example by Colonel Jevrem Slmić, the Inspector of all Chetnik forces. To carry out these acts of terror special units, known as “black trojkas," were trained. The standard method employed in these liquidations, especially in rural areas, was slaughter by knife-the Chetniks, like the Ustašas, being followers of the "cult of the knife." (The Partisans and other adversaries gave them the sobriquet koljači, the slaughterers.)

For a few months in the summer of 1942 even the BBC was used as a means of implementing one of the Chetnik terror schemes. This was the period of tl1e “Z” lists. These lists, broadcast over the BBC in the news program in the Serbo-Croatian language, which was fully under the control of the Yugoslav government-in-exile, were lists of Nedić and Ljotić supporters (the names were supplied by Mihailović) who were marked for liquidation or at least were to be scared into compliance with Chetnik wishes. No Partisans were included in the lists, since they were outside the “Chetnik” law and apparently the Chetnik leadership did not bother to publicize their liquidations. The broadcasting of the “Z” lists was quickly stopped when the British authorities discovered their sinister purpose, but the Chetniks continued the selective terror practice, singling out their targets one by one. In this way a number of prominent Serbs were assassinated: Vojko Cvrkić, a former member of parliament (who had supposedly organized an assassination attempt against Mihailović) in the summer of 1942; Colonel Miloš Masalović, chef de cabinet of General Nedić, in March 1944; Deputy Minister of the Interior Ceka Đorđević in May 1944; and Kosta Pećanac in June 1944.

It will be apparent that the German and Italian occupation authorities would have been able to put a halt to mass terror practiced by the Ustashas and the Chetniks and would not have tolerated it had they not considered it to be to their advantage. Obviously, as long as the various groups in Yugoslavia were busy killing one another, they were not going to form a united front against the occupying powers, and so their terror and counterterror made the task of the Axis in Yugoslavia all the easier. Besides, both Axis powers practiced terror on a large scale themselves in all Yugoslav territories under their control in order to enforce their rule or to retaliate against the rebellious activities of the population against the occupying powers.

The Chetnik manual of December 1942, previously referred to, makes it clear that the Chetniks were prepared to use terror during the concluding stages of the war and for some time after. One section entitled “The Problem of Revenge" discusses revenge as the sacred duty of the Serbian people against those who had wronged them during the war and occupation. This of course assumed that the Chetniks were going to emerge as the controlling power at the end of the war. The manual gpposed disorderly and unsystematic retributions by individuals and groups; it advocated collective retribution, that is, by the state on the basis of proper legislation and carried out according to sentences of special people’s courts by special troops. Aside from the Communists, who were of course the Chetniks’ chief enemy, the main targets of post-war retribution were to be the Croatian Ustashas and their followers and backers, and a portion of the Croatian intelligentsia (presumably the extreme nationalist and Catholic intelligentsia). The authors of the manual opined that the elimination of these segments of the Croatian population would be as much in the interest of the Croatian people as of the Serbian people and that it would strengthen the unity of the two nations. They also thought that the elimination of these groups would break down any remnants of pro-Austrian sentiment among the Croats and in that way help the Croats to rediscover their national soul. Although the manual does not say specifically how many Croats were to be liquidated, the order of magnitude is stated obliquely as follows:

“One should not fear that the retribution executed in this manner would not be complete as far as the number of executed is concerned. If there are not more, then there are at least as many Frankovci and members of a certain intelligentsia, as there were Serbs who were killed.” (Chetnik estimates of the Serbs killed by tl1e Ustashas run to between 600,000 and 800,000.) For the punishing of Serbs who as government oliicials acted against other Serbs special administrative courts were to be established. Finally, the manual says that the legal and orderly administration of the retribution will strengthen rather than diminish the cultural and moral prestige of the Serbian nation, which is an important consideration because the Serbs desire to be the leading nation among the Balkan peoples whether they are combined into a common state or not.

• Chapter 7

The Chetnik command had already dispatched to Belgrade Colonel Branislav Pantić and Captain Nenad Mitrović, two of Mihailović's aides, where they contacted German intelligence officer Captain Josef Matl on October 28. They informed the Abwehr that they have been empowered by Colonel Mihailović to establish contact with Prime Minister Milan Nedić and the appropriate Wehrmacht command posts to inform them that the Colonel was willing to "place himself and his men at their disposal for fighting communism". The two representatives further gave the Germans their commander's guarantee for the "definitive clearing of communist bands in Serbian territory" and requested aid from the occupation forces in the form of "about 5,000 rifles, 350 machine guns, and 20 heavy machine guns."

• p.329

On 20 November 1944 the Germans intercepted a radio message from Mihailović to Vojvoda ["duke"] Đujić, his commander in northern Dalmatia, instructing him to cooperate with the German forces. He himself, he says, "cannot go along because of public opinion" (Microcopy No. T-311, Roll 196, Frame 225). This refusal to have any personal dealings with the enemy is a policy that Mihailović departed from only on five occasions: the Divci conference in mid-November 1941, two conferences with Envoy Neuerbacher's representative [Hermann Neubacher, chief Envoy of Nazi Germany in the Balkans], Rudolf Stärker, in the autumn of 1944, and again with Stärker on Vučjak Mountain in 1945.

Volume II Occupation and Collaboration

Stanford University Press, 2001, ISBN 0804736154 [18]

• Preface

Two important issues are not dealt with fully here, though they were an integral part of the Axis presence in Yugoslavia and of the collaborationist regimes, are wartime military operations and, as a complement to them, the systematic use of mass terror against the civilian population. They are reserved for fuller discussion in the volume on the Partisans. This is because most military operations in Yugoslavia during the war were undertaken by the Partisans or directed against them, and because a great deal of mass terror was used against the Partisans and their sympathizers or practiced by the Partisans themselves... (Tomasevich, Vol II, x).

All the historical literature on the Second World War, both from Yugoslavia and from Yugoslav political emigres, shows distinctive biases and, on certain topics, gross omissions. Mass terror is a good example. In Yugoslavia until the early 1980s, almost nothing was written about Partisan terror, while a great deal was written about German, Ustasha and Chetnik terror... The collaboration of various domestic groups with the occupation forces is another delicate issue that has produced very biased writing. While self-serving writing by the various parties is quite understandable, it does not help establish historical truth, but only distorts it for ulterior purposes ((Tomasevich, Vol II, xi).

Von Weichs, Maximilian

Interrogation Reports, fold3.com

• Annex A - Partisan Warfare

c. GERMAN COUNTER-MEASURES

(1) Groups Aiding Germany

"MIHAILOVIC 's troops once fought against our occupation troops out of loyalty to their King. At the same time they fought against TITO, because of anti—Communist convictions. This two front war could not last long, particularly when British support favored TITO. Consequently MIHAILOVIC showed pro-German leanings. There were engagements during which Serbian Chetniks fought TITO alongside German troops. On the other hand, hostile Chetnik groups were known to attack German supply trains in order to replenish their own stocks."

"MIHAILOVIC liked to remain in the background, and leave such affairs up to his subordinates. He hoped to bide his time with this play of power until an Anglo—American landing would provide sufficient support against TITO. Germany welcomed his support, however temporary. Chetnik reconnaissance activities were valued highly by our commanders. (page 24)

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Gorran (talk • contribs) 07:31, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Williams, Heather Parachutes, Patriots, and Partisans: The Special Operations Executive and Yugoslavia, 1941 - 1945

• p174-175

At about the same time Bailey set out for Montenegro with Lukacevic, one of Mihailovic's commanders, to negotiate with the Venezia Division. At Prijepolje Lukacevic's forces fought with and defeated the Germans who had already disarmed the Italians there. On reaching Berane, the Venezia Division's headquarters, Bailey -- following instructions from Cairo -- had a private discussion with the commander, General Oxilia, who agreed to co-ordinate his division's actions with those of the resistance:namely, to come over lock stock and barrel to the Allied side. Bailey had to dissuade Mihailovic forces from disarming the Italians, but eventually an agreement was reached whereby the administration of the area would be taken over by the Yugoslavs and the Venezia Division would fight against the Germans.

The arrangement reached in Berane was the optimum outcome from the Allied point of view; unfortunately this mutually beneficial arrangement was not destined to last. While the Split and Berane discussions were still proceeding, Deakin and bailey were informed of the imminent arrival of their new heads of mission and hastened back to their respective headquarters to meet the brigadiers. The Lim Valley around Berane was Mihailovic territory, with no Partisans in the area: before Bailey departed to meet Armstrong, he contacted Cairo and told them to inform Tito of the position there, and ask him to restrain his troops from moving into the Sandjak and Montenegro. It seems that Cairo was unable to secure such co-operation from Tito. Partisans in large numbers, under Peko Dapcevic, commander of the Second Proletarian Division, were rushed to the Lim valley, where they attempted by both force of arms and persuasion to win General Oxilia and the Venezia Division away from the already-concluded agreement with Mihailovic’s forces. General Oxilia, after attempting to unite the two opposing forces, finally succumbed to Partisan pressure but did manage to arrange safe passage out of the area for the Mihailovic men. — Preceding unsigned comment added by IWTH (talk • contribs) 13:39, 25 October 2011 (UTC)