Partisans And The Occupying Forces example essay topic

Looking at the remnants of what was once Yugoslavia it is hard to understand the hatred and violence that has ripped that nation apart, engendering mass atrocities and policies of genocide not seen in Europe since the days of Adolph Hitler. First Slovenia, Croatia and now Bosnia-Herzegovina have sunk into a brutal civil war, which defies every effort to end the violence. While some causes of this war are as ancient as the centuries-old split between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, one need only travel as far back as the Second World War to find more recent and vivid reasons for the peoples of the former Yugoslavia to wish death and destruction upon each other. The Second World War came to Yugoslavia on April 6, 1941; two weeks after a group of anti-German military officers overthrew the pro-Axis government of the royal regent Prince Paul and placed the seventeen-year-old King Peter upon the throne.

A massive invasion by powerful Nazi German armored and air forces supported by infantry overran the entirety of Yugoslavia in only eleven days. An ominous sign of the fratricidal days to come were the cheers of the pro-German Croatians that greeted the men and tanks of the Fourteenth Panzer Division as they arrived virtually unopposed in the Croatian capital of Zagreb. Yugoslavia was immediately dismembered and its territory and the task of governing it was divided among Germany, Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria and the newly independent fascist state of Croatia. The occupation of Yugoslavia, which was to last in some areas until the end of the war, can only be described as on of the most brutal of the entire war. Drawing upon centuries of traditions as guerilla fighters the people of Yugoslavia fought an unceasing war against the occupiers and often each other with little outside assistance from either the Western Allies or the Soviet Union. In areas controlled by the Germans brutal measures were taken in a vain effort to stamp out the resistance that was offered to German rule.

Frustrated with Chetnik and Partisan resistance they could engage and hurt in combat but never destroy, German commanders resorted to a policy of reprisals against civilian hostages. For every German soldier killed, one hundred Yugoslavs were to be slain. While for the most part ineffective, it would occasionally convince some Yugoslavs to engage local rather than German enemies in combat. Three important indigenous military forces came into existence almost as soon as the dust from the invasion had settled.

The Serbian Chetniks, the Communist Partisans of Tito and the Croatian Ustashi would each carve their marks into Yugoslavian collective history. The first to organize were the Chetniks. They were a force of Serbian irregulars loyal to King Peter and under the command of Colonel Drazha Mihailovich, a Serbian army officer who had escaped to the hills in traditional Balkan fashion to continue the war. His overall goal was the return of the Serbian King Peter at any cost. Seeing the communists of Tito as a threat to be feared as much as the occupiers, Mihailovich was not above occasional collaboration with the Germans and the Italians if it presented a chance to strike a blow against the Partisan forces. The Chetniks were involved in constant series of atrocities with the Croatian Ustashi involving tit for tat massacres often accompanied with torture and mutilation of the dead.

Not limited to war upon Croatians, Partisans and the occupying forces, the Chetniks were also responsible for systematic killing of 9,200 Moslems in Bosnia-Herzegovina, sinking into frenzies of rape and torture of the local inhabitants. The anti-partisan policy of Mihailovich could only have one inevitable conclusion as the partisan continued to grow in strength. By the end of the war they had been all but destroyed and Colonel Mihailovich was captured, tried for collaboration with the Germans and the Italians and sentenced to death. The Communist Partisans would emerge as the victories during the war in Yugoslavia and shape its history in the decades to come. Under the leadership of Tito they were the only truly Yugoslavian force of the war.

By the end of the war they had liberated the majority of pre-war Yugoslavia from Axis hands and had grown to peak strength of 800,000 men and women under arms. While showing little mercy to German, Italian, Ustashi or Chetnik foes, the Partisans at times enforced draconian discipline of the harshest kind upon their soldiers where civilians were concerned. In one instance a peasant woman complained to the local Partisan commander that two of his men had entered her house and forcibly took some bread for their meal. Upon questioning the two men admitted committing the act and were summarily sentenced to death, taken outside and shot. The end of the war sow one final act of revenge as the Partisans firmly in control of Yugoslavia exacted payment in the form of the execution of 20,000 Chetniks, Ustashi and any other Yugoslavs deemed guilty of collaboration with the Germans. Tito's post-war communist government was a direct outgrowth of the Partisan movement and for forty-five years would rule Yugoslavia through a combination of brutal repression of dissent and an appeal for loyalty to the ideals of a fraternal communist state superseding loyalty to the traditional states such as Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia.

The Ustashi were a fanatical organization of ultra-national Croats and by far the most vicious and bloodthirsty of all the participants in the warfare in Yugoslavia. A "good Ustashi" as described by their commander, Ante Pavelich, "is he who can use his knife to cut a child from the womb of his mother". Servants of the newly independent state of Croatia, the Ustashi besides fighting the Partisans and the Chetniks carried out a genocidal "final solution" on such a large scale and with such sadistic intensity that it even shocked their Nazi allies. The wars end in 1945 had systematically liquidated 60,000 Jews, 26,000 Gypsies and an estimated 750,000 Eastern Orthodox Serbs. Such was the extent of the killing and torture accompanying it, that an Italian correspondent during an interview with the Ustashi leader Pavelich, reported being shown a wicker basket upon the Ustashi's desk, the contents, "forty pounds of eyes gouged out from the victims of the Ustashi".

In reflection the Partisan reprisals following the end of the war against the Ustashi were inevitable. The Ustashi, Chetniks, Partisans and the Germans between the years of 1941 and 1945 fought a war in which no quarter was asked for or given. In a period of four years 1.7 million Yugoslavians lost their lives and the complete disregard for human decency with which the war was carried out assured a legacy of hatred and discontent that the communist regime of Tito could restrain for only so long. The disintegration of Yugoslavia as a political entity, leaving sizable minorities in territories, which within memory had seen genocide, rape and torture on a national scale generated a situation in which civil war was waiting to happen. A civil war, which like its predecessor, would show little regard for the humane treatment of perceived enemy forces and their civilian populations in general.