Though the Serbs resisted Germany’s invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941, they were surrounded and alone. The Axis forces attacked Serbia from north, south, east and west: via Hungary, Albania, Bulgaria and Croatia. Bulgaria had already joined the Axis powers — signing Hitler’s Tripartite Pact in March 1941 — and Romania soon followed suit. Serbia surrendered within weeks.

Map Courtesy of the National Geographic Society Map B.7: World War II and Its Aftermath (click to enlarge)

Yugoslavia was destroyed during World War II. Its territory was partitioned between Germany, Hungary, Italy, and Bulgaria — except for Croatia, which turned fascist and was awarded nominal sovereignty, and the whole of Slavonia and Bosnia & Herzegovina.

Croatia also lost Dalmatia and the Adriatic islands to Italy, which annexed parts of Kosovo and Montenegro to Albania, and turned the rest of Montenegro into an Italian protectorate. Germany occupied the Banat, Hungary took Vojvodina, and Bulgaria took Macedonia and parts of Southern Serbia.

By the third year of the war, the Balkans lay divided as never before. Bulgaria, Romania and Croatia were allied to Germany, but there were scattered communist resistance groups in Bulgaria. Greece, Serbia and Albania were under Axis occupation, but there were fierce resistance movements in each.

Yet each resistance movement was also internally riven — especially in Yugoslavia, where resistance groups fought on two fronts for the bulk of the war: to defeat Germany, and to establish their rival political authority on the ground.

This internecine warfare extracted an even greater toll than in World War I. In the western Balkans, the fascist movement that ruled Croatia during the war, the Ustasa, adopted Hitler’s pogrom against the Jews and extended it to include Serbs. Most of the Jews in Croatia and Bosnia & Herzegovina, and close to a quarter of a million Serbs, died.

At the same time, the emergence of rival resistance movements accelerated internal fragmentation, most of all in Serbia.

With Croatia turned fascist and Bosnia under Croatian control, resistance was concentrated in Serbia, led by two ideologically opposed groups: Serbia’s royalist soldiers, known as Cetnici (Chetniks), and the Communist Partisans led by Josip Broz Tito, which included Serbs, Croats and Muslims.

The Allies initially supported the Chetniks, but the Chetniks’ strategy was to build up a resident force that would await the Allied armies’ approach. Tito’s Partisans, on the other hand, created a standing army to wage guerrilla warfare against German and Italian troops, and in 1943 the Allies transferred support to the Partisans.

The Chetniks turned to German and Italian forces for assistance, and both Serbia and Bosnia & Herzegovina soon resembled a checkerboard of rival territories. Central Serbia, the Sandzak and parts of Montenegro were controlled by the Chetniks, as were eastern Bosnia and the southern tip of Croatia.

The Partisans controlled north and central Bosnia, and provided an important bulwark against the spread of conflict from Chetnik controlled territories, where Serbian troops had turned to ethnically cleansing Bosnian Muslim territories, and some Bosnian Muslims had joined the Nazis. Even so, Yugoslavia lost over a million people during the war, roughly 7 % of its population.

Eventually, it was the Soviet army that liberated the Balkans rather than the resistance groups. Serbian royalists, as well as Axis allies, had hoped that the U.S.-British led offensive would liberate the Balkans; but after Italy surrendered in September 1943, the Allies decided to push on to Normandy, France, and leave the Balkans to the Soviets. By late 1944, the Red Army had swept into most of the Balkans’ countries.

The Allies ratified the Soviet presence in the Balkans at a conference in Yalta in 1945, which led to the establishment of an “Iron Curtain” between communist Eastern Europe and democratic Western Europe.

The Yalta Pact expanded a private agreement between Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, made in October 1944, which divided the Balkans into Western and Soviet spheres of influence. The Soviet Union would dominate in Romania and Bulgaria, and the U.S. and Britain in Greece. Yugoslavia and Hungary were to be shared equally, and Albania was not even mentioned.

The Churchill-Stalin Agreement on Dominance in the Balkans Romania: Russia 90 %, Others 10 %. Greece: Great Britain & U.S.: 90 %, Russia 10%. Yugoslavia: 50-50. Hungary: 50-50. Bulgaria: Russia 75 %, Others 25 %. Source: Misha Glenny, The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, 1804-1990, p.522.

In the event, Western influence in Yugoslavia was preempted by the victory of Tito’s Partisans, aided by Soviet forces. The Partisans had mobilized wide public support during the war years, through sweeping social reforms in areas under their control. This, more than the physical damage they inflicted on German and Italian troops, was what turned them into a potent guerrilla force. After they liberated Sarajevo in April 1945, the Partisans recreated Yugoslavia, this time as a socialist federation.

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