Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia (Jugoslavia in the Latin alphabet, Југославија in Cyrillic; English: the land of South Slavs) describes a new artificial state that was first established in 1919 on the Balkan Peninsula in Europe, and remained intact for 72 years. The six countries that were once part of Jugoslavia are Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia.

Foundation

Jugoslavia was effectively a Greater Serbia under the Serbian monarchy (who quickly dethroned the Montenegro Royal Family), and was first formed as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1919, following The Great War when the plutocratic Western Allies dismembered the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Apart from the Serbs, the constituent peoples had no say in the matter. (Unlike Bohemia, Poland, etc., there was no offer of self-determination here.) It was re-named as the Kingdom of Jugoslavia on 6 January 1929 by the soon to be assassinated Serbian King Alexander I of Yugoslavia.

World War II

Recipient of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross (26 December 1944) Colonel of the Reserves Dipl.-Ing. Carl (Karl) Hermann (b. 30 December 1896 in Wiesbaden), commander of the Grenadier Regiment 384 (Croatian), was one of the few senior officers who survived captivity in Yugoslavia. On 5 April 1947, after a show trial in Belgrade, he was convicted to 20 years of hard labour. He was presumably released in 1953 along with Rudolf Henrici and others. He was still living in Wuppertal-Elberfeld in the 1960s.

Following a Serbian Palace coup against the Regent, Prince Paul, Jugoslavia was invaded on 6 April 1941 by the Axis powers and capitulated eleven days later. The 'Royal' Family fled into exile. During this period Germany awarded Croatia independence from Jugoslavia, to great jubilation.

Massacres (WWII)

During the night of 9/10 May 1945, a bitter battle took place near and in the village of Raka. In the early morning hours, a large officers' conference, led by General Hans-Joachim Gravenstein, was held to discuss whether to attempt a breakthrough and reach safe ground in Austria or to surrender. The arrival of Colonel Knackfuß with the order to surrender ended the heated debate and, at the same time, the existence of the 373rd (Croatian) Infantry Division. During this conference, the fighting continued. A German police battalion was stationed nearby, which refused to surrender under any circumstances. Meanwhile, a Yugoslav major, driven by a German motorcyclist, had arrived for the conference and demanded an immediate, unconditional surrender. Naturally, the soldiers were promised free passage back to their own border after laying down their weapons. At around 12:00 noon on 10 May 1945, the soldiers of the division surrendered their weapons. First, they were led home for one more day, then the march into captivity began, with the officers and the general leading the way, toward Zagreb. In Steinbrück, Slovenia alone, 3,000 men—Ustasha, police, members of the 373rd Infantry Division and the 104th Jäger Division—were murdered by the bloodthirsty Serbian partisans during these days.

Over 10,000 victims of Tito's partisans, including Germans, lie in the largest known mass grave in the village of Mostec in Slovenia on the Croatian border. For two weeks, from 13 to 26 May 1945, the shots of the executions echoed through the night. The murdered Wehrmacht soldiers belonged to the so-called "Blue Division." Officially called the "392nd (Croatian) Infantry Division," this unit was an unusual formation in occupied Croatia: It consisted of German support personnel, ethnic Germans, and Croatian fighters. The soldiers wore Wehrmacht uniforms with the Croatian flag sewn onto them. Tito had been in nearby Zagreb from 13 to 23 May 1945. On 26 May, he delivered a speech to a large crowd in Congress Square in Ljubljana, declaring that "all traitors who had not yet been touched by the hand of revenge of our people" would never again see the mountains and fields of the country.

In May 1945 alone, over 60,000 Croats were executed. Several of them died in the "Bleiburg Massacre," when the British simply handed over Slovene and Croat prisoners of war to Tito's Yugoslav assassins. From May to October 1945, columns of prisoners of war and civilians were driven through Mostec in southeastern Slovenia, on the border with Croatia, toward the nearby anti-tank ditch on the banks of the Sava River. Machine gun fire was heard from there at night. Marko Strovs, head of the Slovenian Mass Graves Authority, estimates that up to 10,000 skeletons may lie in the 186-meter-long, four-meter-wide, and two-meter-deep trench dug by the German defenders after two weeks of exploration. It is the largest known mass grave in Slovenia from the Second World War and its subsequent months. The mass grave at Mostec is believed to contain primarily Croats and Slovenes. In addition to Ustaše soldiers, skeletons of civilians bound with wire were also found. The grave is also likely to contain soldiers from the 7th SS Mountain Division "Prinz Eugen." It consisted primarily of ethnic Germans recruited in southeastern Europe and committed numerous war crimes. The majority of the approximately 20,000-strong unit surrendered in May 1945 near the Austrian border—and disappeared. So far, all that is known is that approximately 2,000 of them were murdered in the Brežice area near Mostec.

Ethnic Germans were also "selected out and liquidated as traitors," says Professor Rolf-Dieter Müller of Humboldt University in Berlin. And of the approximately 175,000 to 200,000 German soldiers who were taken prisoner of war by Yugoslavia in 1945, less than half returned. They died on death marches, starved to death in camps, or were arbitrarily executed or sentenced to death en masse in show trials.

Communism

Yugoslavia under Communism

Following World War Two the communist terrorist and dictator Tito, patronised by the Allies, established the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (declared by him on 29 November 1943; broken up on 25 June 1991), a communist successor state to the Kingdom of Jugoslavia. During the war Tito's communists had fought the Royal Jugoslavian Army as well as the Germans and Croats, taking no prisoners. At the end of the war they exterminated vast numbers of Croats and other "traitors" in mass executions and burials. Tito's new state existed under various names, including the "Democratic Federation of Yugoslavia (DFY)" (1943), the "Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia (FPRY)" (1946), and the "Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY)" (1963).

Collapse

Starting in 1991, the SFRY disintegrated as the Yugoslav Wars of liberation commenced: the formerly oppressed and suppressed peoples of the various states the Serbs had incorporated into their 'Greater Serbia', without their consent, now fought for their freedom. Secession followed for most of the republic's constituent elements.

Serbia and Montenegro hold out

Refusing to give up, the Serbs established a Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) (April 27, 1992 – February 4, 2003), a quasi-federation on the territory of the two remaining republics of Serbia (including the autonomous provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo and Metohija) and Montenegro. The monarchy, however, was not restored.

Finally, the Union of Serbia and Montenegro was formed on February 4, 2003, and the name "Yugoslavia" formally abolished. This too did not last long and on June 3 and 5, 2006, Montenegro and Serbia respectively declared their independence from this Union, thereby ending the last remnants of the former bogus Yugoslav federation.