Yugoslavia’s Hidden History: Partisan-Ustashi Collaboration in the World War II (1941−1945)
The aim of this article is to give a significant contribution to both Balkan and South Slavic historiography in clarification of the question of direct and indirect military-political cooperation between the Partisans of Corporal and Marshal Josip Broz Tito and the Ustashi leader (Poglavnik) Ante Pavelić on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia during the World War II (1941−1945) and to highlight the ideological and political roots and objectives of this cooperation. The article is mainly based on the primary archival documents housed in Belgrade, but never used by the official state's Titoist historiography, and on the testimonies of participants in historical events from the Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland (the so-called Chetniks) who were after 1945 in exile.
Yugoslavia’s Hidden History: Partisan-Ustashi
Collaboration in the World War II (1941−1945)
Vladislav B. Sotirović
Mykolas Romeris University, Faculty of Politics and Management, Institute of Political Sciences, Vilnius, Lithuania
To cite this article:
Vladislav B. Sotirović. Yugoslavia’s Hidden History: Partisan-Ustashi Collaboration in the World War II (1941−1945). History Research.
Vol. 3, No. 1, 2015, pp. 9-24. doi: 10.11648/j.history.20150301.12
Revolutionary winners in the civil war, Tito's Partisans
(officially called by themselves as the People's
Liberation Army of Yugoslavia) and the Communist
Party of Yugoslavia, organized a deliberate and well-
orchestrated policy of removal, and even physical
destruction, of the archival material of both their own
documents and the documents of their political enemies.
The Titoists succeeded in short period of time after their
military occupation of Belgrade and Serbia in October-
November 1944 to eliminate almost all compromising
authentic and original documents, which could
challenge to a greater or lesser extent, politically
coloured Titoist propaganda within the framework of
the official (quasi)-historiography about the war years
of 1941−1945. Thus, for example, in the Yugoslav
archives the researcher can not find the key documents
of Tito's Partisans open cooperation and collaboration
with the Croat-Bosniak Ustashi, Albanian (Shquipetar)
Fascist detachments and the German Nazi occupation
forces, as well as an open anti-Serbian policy and
military actions by Tito's Supreme Command of his
revolutionary the People's Liberation Army of
Yugoslavia and its subordinated operational command
headquarters. Therefore, preserved German and Italian
documents (archival material) and the memoirs
(including and the diaries) of German and Italian
commanders (for instance, by the General Edmund
Glaise von Horstenau from Austria in service of the
Wehrmacht) 2 are essential for uncovering the truth
about the policies and real political objectives of Tito's
forces, fighting for overtaking a political power in
Yugoslavia in 1941−1945
