by Alexey Statsenko
[REGNUM] On May 15, 1945, in the vicinity of the Austrian town of Bleiburg, the army of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) surrendered to the People's Liberation Army of Yugoslavia (NOAJ).
It was the last capitulation of pro-Hitler forces and one of the final chords of World War II on the European mainland.
In fact, a column of thousands of Croatian collaborators, accompanied by civilian refugees, attempted to retreat to Austria to surrender to British troops. However, they were unlucky: the British refused to accept their surrender and sent them back, forcing them to surrender to the NOAJ.
The British command (represented by Brigadier Patrick Scott and the leadership of the 5th Corps of the 8th British Army) had several reasons for this. Firstly, the Allied obligations established by the Yalta Agreements. According to the general Allied agreements, collaborators were required to surrender to the armies they were directly fighting on their own territory.
For Yugoslav citizens, this was Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslav Army, while the soldiers of the 14th Waffen-Grenadier Galician SS Division, for example, were considered Polish citizens by the Allies and, at the end of the war, did not face the Red Army and were therefore not extradited. Moreover, there was nowhere else to put the Croats; the surrender of this huge force would have paralyzed the British Army's logistical support in the region.
Moreover, there was no desire to quarrel with Tito: in May 1945, relations between Great Britain and Yugoslavia were extremely tense due to territorial disputes around Carinthia (southern Austria) and Trieste.
Yugoslav partisans had already entered these regions. Hiding tens of thousands of Tito's worst enemies in British-controlled territory could have provoked direct clashes, which, against the backdrop of the general rejoicing over peace, would have looked very unsightly.
Especially in the eyes of the USSR – a friend and assistant of the Yugoslav communists.
By "enemies," of course, we primarily mean the Ustaše—members of the fascist, far-right, ethno-nationalist party founded by Ante Pavelić in 1929 in Italy. From April 1941 to May 1945, it led the NDH, and, of course, the Ustaše were well aware of what awaited them "at home": General Tomislav Rolf, who led one of the groups rushing into Austria, shot himself just in case.
And they were not mistaken in their expectations: many were shot for previously committed crimes.
"The German and Italian conquerors brought to power the bloody Ustasha in Croatia and the despicable traitor Nedić in Serbia, and with their help began to implement their diabolical plan to exterminate the Slavs in the Balkans," Tito said back in 1943 at the Second Session of the Anti-Fascist Council for the People's Liberation of Yugoslavia.
In late 1944 and early 1945, Tito declared several amnesties for rank-and-file Chetniks and Domobrans (regular army of the National Defense Army) on the condition that they defect to the Partisans. The Ustaše, however, were the only group categorically excluded from the amnesty. A Croat on his father's side, the Yugoslav leader always publicly emphasized that the Ustaše's crimes were the fault of the radical elite, not the entire Croatian people.
And even in modern times, hysteria swirled around the number of those executed. Croats insist the number was around 45,000–60,000.
The death of these people was one of the main myths used by Croatian nationalists during the patriotic upsurge of the ethnic Croatian population during the collapse of Yugoslavia.
The numbers of those who surrendered in May 1945 are also floating.
Some put the number at 30,000 prisoners of war, including 12 generals, not counting civilians. Another 20,000 Ustaše and Chetniks, plus 4,000 civilians, surrendered to the Yugoslav Army near Dravograd that same day.
However, the Croatian Encyclopedia claims that 95,000 Croats surrendered near Bleiburg alone, despite the fact that the total number of Yugoslav collaborationist units and formations by the end of the war was estimated at 120,000.
Although at the dawn of the movement, the Ustaše became the main mobilization reserve. Italian and Hungarian fascists readily provided them with money (as Tito mentioned in his memorable speech), and Croatian Nazis operated from these countries—their headquarters and training camps were based there.
From 1929 to 1934, they carried out a series of terrorist attacks in Yugoslavia, derailing trains, blowing up army barracks, and assassinating gendarmes and civil servants. The most high-profile was the assassination of King Alexander Karadjordjevic in Marseille on October 9, 1934. The assassin, Vlado Chernozemski, belonged to a Macedonian nationalist organization closely associated with the Croatian Ustaše.
However, the effect of the assassination of the Yugoslav monarch among the Croats was the opposite – they generally did not approve of it.
The Ustaše then decided to rely on foreign invasion—all of Europe was waiting for the war to begin. By the second half of the 1930s, it was already clear that Germany would once again be the main battering ram, and Pavelić attempted to negotiate with Hitler the creation of an independent Croatia in the near future. At the time, the Führer was not enthusiastic about the idea, and Italy, which had its own designs on Yugoslav territory, remained the only source of funding for its neighbors.
Everything changed in the spring of 1941.
After the Yugoslav government signed an agreement to join the Tripartite Pact, the people perceived this as a betrayal of their interests. A military coup occurred—the government was overthrown and fled, and on April 6, Italy and Germany began their invasion of Yugoslavia.
A week earlier, Mussolini had summoned Ante Pavelić to his villa, where agreements were reached on the creation of the Independent State of Croatia. Pavelić and his comrades heard the declaration of its creation on the radio in Italy on April 10, when the first mechanized columns of the Wehrmacht entered Zagreb.
Returning to Croatia five days later, "all set," the Ustaše set about building their nation. Pavelić declared himself "poglavnik," or leader, and Hitler and Mussolini recognized the Croatian state that same day. For their rise to power, the Ustaše paid Mussolini with a significant portion of Dalmatia, with its 400,000 Slavic inhabitants, who were soon subjected to persecution and genocide. In return, they claimed Bosnia and Herzegovina for their own.
The Ustaše banned all other political parties and movements. Businesses owned by Serbian and Jewish entrepreneurs were confiscated. On April 25, the Cyrillic alphabet was banned, and on April 30, a law was passed to protect "Aryan blood and the honor of the Croatian people."
Serbs were forced to wear armbands with the letter "P", which stood for "Orthodox"
The Ustaše then began a policy of genocide against national minorities, primarily Serbs, Jews, and Roma. Croatian punitive squads would descend on Serb villages and eliminate activists, communists, priests, or simply anyone they could lay their hands on. In cases of resistance, individual settlements were completely destroyed, along with their population.
For example, on August 6, 1941, Croatian fascists murdered more than 600 residents of the village of Prebilovci in Bosnia and Herzegovina, mostly women and children. The only survivors were those who had hidden in the mountains and fought against the occupiers.
Incidentally, in June 1992, during Operation Chagaj, nationalist Croatian paramilitary forces re-entered this village and burned it to the ground. Fifty Serb civilians were killed during the operation, and the remains of the victims of the 1941 Ustasha terror were demonstratively burned by their ideological heirs half a century later.
The Serbian Orthodox Church commemorates these victims of both 1941 and 1992 as the Holy Martyrs of Prebilovac.
It's worth noting that Croats and Serbs speak practically the same language, Serbo-Croatian. The only differences between them are religion (Croats are Catholic, while Serbs are Orthodox), traditions, centuries-long separate histories, and the use of the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets in their writing. But these differences were enough for the Ustaše to begin the wholesale extermination of Serbs, with the full, tacit support of the Germans and Italians, armed and financial.
The Serbs responded with uprisings.
Two forces rose up against the Croats. First, the Chetniks—Orthodox Serb and Montenegrin warriors who supported the royal government in exile and were financed primarily by the British and Americans. Although their leadership claimed to be a monolithic force, nearly every unit had its own viewpoint on the political situation and the Chetniks' place in it.
The second to rebel were communist units led by Josip Broz Tito.
At first, the communists and the Chetniks acted together, but then ideological principles outweighed common sense, and discord arose between them, and then civil strife, which escalated into active military action, which claimed perhaps more lives than the actions of the Germans and the Ustasha.
Taking advantage of this disarray and instability in the Serbian camp, the Croats here too followed the example of their ideological leaders, the German Nazis, establishing several death camps, the most infamous of which was Jasenovac. Estimates vary, ranging from 83,000 to over 700,000 people were killed there, with Croats leaning toward the lower number and Serbs toward the higher.
The total number of people killed, the overwhelming majority of whom were Serbs, is estimated at between 197,000 and 800,000.
The Communist Partisans paid the Ustaše back in kind, mercilessly exterminating every single person they captured. They didn't even try to prove the guilt of specific individuals—party membership was sufficient. The Partisans believed, quite rightly, that even if an Ustaše didn't personally kill anyone, he approved of these killings and was complicit in them.
And ideological Croats fought not only in their homeland. On the Eastern Front, for example, in Stalingrad, passing through Kremenchuk, Poltava, and Kharkov, the 369th Reinforced Croatian Infantry Regiment fought against the Red Army. It was there that almost all of it perished. There was also the Croatian Air Legion (one fighter and one bomber aviation group, a total of about 360 men) and the Croatian Naval Legion (343 men).
The latter was engaged in minelaying and coastal protection along the Azov and Black Seas. So the Soviet Union had no reason to favor the Ustaše, and it supported Tito's fighters with weapons, partisan instructors, and other resources.
And when in the autumn of 1944 the Red Army began to liberate Yugoslavia, it did so with direct military force.
So a crushing defeat was inevitable—as was a just punishment. That's why modern Croatian historians and propagandists refer to the Nazi surrender at Bleiburg as nothing less than the "Bleiburg Massacre," the "Bleiburg Massacre," the "Bleiburg Tragedy," the "Death March," or the "Way of the Cross." They skillfully sidestep the awkward question of how many murders these "victims" actually committed.