The last battles in Yugoslavia

On 25 May 1945, seventeen days after the surrender of the Third Reich, units of the Yugoslav Army took the last fortified villages around Odžak in the Bosnian part of the Sava valley. The local Ustaše garrison had been holding out there since 19 April, long after the German forces and the main forces of the Independent State of Croatia had gone west. Yugoslav military literature described the end of the fighting at Odžak as the last battle against organised fascist forces in Europe.

Odžak, however, was only an epilogue. The decisive events had taken place ten days earlier and several hundred kilometres away, on the Slovene–Austrian border. On 14 and 15 May, at Poljana and Bleiburg, huge columns were halted – soldiers of the NDH, Slovene, Serbian and Montenegrin collaborationist formations, and civilians – who wanted to surrender to the British. The British sent them back to the Yugoslavs. In the following weeks tens of thousands of prisoners were killed without trial – in the woods near Maribor, in the karst pits of Kočevski Rog, in mine shafts and along the routes of the marches that the Croats came to call the “Way of the Cross”.

The collapse of the Independent State of Croatia

The Independent State of Croatia (NDH), proclaimed in April 1941 under German and Italian protection, pursued a policy of exterminating Serbs, Jews and Roma from the very beginning. The Jasenovac camp became the symbol of its crimes. Two movements fought against the occupiers and their allies: the royalist Chetniks of Draža Mihailović, who over time collaborated ever more openly with the Italians and the Germans, and the communist Partisans of Josip Broz Tito. By the end of the war it was the Partisans, renamed the Yugoslav Army in March 1945, who were the only force capable of taking power throughout the country.

In the autumn of 1944 Belgrade was liberated, and in the spring of 1945 four Yugoslav armies moved west and north-west. General Alexander Löhr’s German Army Group E was withdrawing from the Balkans through Bosnia and Croatia towards Slovenia and Austria. Retreating with it were the Croatian Armed Forces – in which the Home Guard (Domobrani) and the Ustaše militia had been merged in November 1944 – as well as the Slovene Home Guard, the Serbian Volunteer Corps and the Chetniks of the Montenegrin National Army, who at the turn of March and April had fought their way through NDH territory after clashes with the Ustaše on the Lijevče field. All these formations had one thing in common: they knew they could expect no mercy from the Partisans, and they wanted to reach the British, who had entered Carinthia from Italy at the beginning of May.

On 5 May the NDH government repealed the racial laws in the hope of winning the Allies’ favour. The next day Ante Pavelić, the government and the high command left Zagreb. Tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians followed them. On 8 May Löhr handed over command of the Croatian units to Pavelić, and the Yugoslav 1st and 2nd Armies entered Zagreb. The same day the German instrument of surrender was signed in Berlin, requiring all German and allied forces to lay down their arms where they stood. On 9 May at Topolšica near Velenje, Löhr signed the surrender of Army Group E to the Yugoslavs. The Croatian columns, however, did not lay down their arms and pressed on to the north-west.

Pavelić himself broke away from his soldiers. With a small retinue he got through to Austria, where he hid under a false name, and later, disguised as a priest, reached Rome. In 1948 he sailed for Argentina. He never stood trial: he survived an assassination attempt in Buenos Aires in 1957 and died in Madrid on 28 December 1959.

Poljana, 14–15 May

Meanwhile the Yugoslav 3rd Army and Slovene Partisan units had closed the roads along the Drava and through the passes towards Austria. The last large engagement took place in the Meža valley, at the village of Poljana near Prevalje, a few kilometres from the border. Just before 9 a.m. on 14 May the head of a column of more than 30,000 people came up to the Yugoslav positions by the Šurnik farmstead and demanded free passage. The sources describe the column’s composition differently: Polish and Slovene studies point mainly to Croatian units with Montenegrin Chetniks and Slovene Home Guards, while some English-language works also mention remnants of German units. Civilians were travelling with them.

The Partisans refused. The Croats attacked with artillery support; the fighting went on all afternoon, through the evening and the night, and groups trying to get through to Austria on their own scattered across the fields and the surrounding hills. On the morning of 15 May some 20 British tanks arrived. The British officers declared that they would not accept a surrender and that the only way out was to surrender to the Yugoslavs. At around 4 p.m. the column hoisted white flags. According to Yugoslav estimates, at least 310 soldiers of the Croatian and other formations were killed and 250 wounded; the Partisans’ losses, killed and wounded, did not exceed a hundred. The Battle of Poljana began and ended after the war in Europe was already over.

Bleiburg and the handovers from Viktring

On the same day, 15 May, the fate of the main mass of fugitives was decided; they had gathered in the fields outside the Carinthian town of Bleiburg, just across the border. Their number is disputed: according to some studies, about 25,000 people reached the border itself, while the columns stretching for kilometres along the roads of Slovenia may have held several times as many. The Croatian side was represented by General Ivo Herenčić, the British by Brigadier Thomas P. D. Scott of the 38th (Irish) Infantry Brigade, and the Yugoslavs by Milan Basta, political commissar of the 51st Vojvodina Division. Scott refused to accept the surrender, citing the principle that Axis troops surrendered to the army they had been fighting. Basta gave assurances that the prisoners would be treated in accordance with the law and that only “political criminals” would be tried. In the afternoon white flags were raised. How many people were shot dead on the field at Bleiburg itself is unknown; the accounts conflict.

Some of the refugees who had crossed the border earlier were interned by the British in camps at Viktring and Krumpendorf near Klagenfurt. From 17–18 May the British began handing them over to the Yugoslavs. From 24 May Slovenes and Serbs were handed over too, including more than 10,000 Slovene Home Guards; many of them, according to survivors’ accounts, were assured that the trains were going to Italy. The handovers were halted only on 31 May, after protests by the commandant of the Viktring camp and the local Red Cross. At the same time, in East Tyrol near Lienz, the British were handing Cossacks over to the Soviets; their repatriation had been recommended by the British Minister Resident in the Mediterranean, Harold Macmillan. These decisions were taken at the headquarters of V Corps, under the pressure of Yugoslav claims to Carinthia and amid a crisis that, ever since the Yugoslav entry into Trieste, had threatened armed conflict between Tito and the Western Allies.

Mass executions

The prisoners, both those taken at Poljana and Bleiburg and those handed over from Austria, were driven into the interior of Slovenia and on across the whole of Yugoslavia. The weaker ones and those who fell behind were shot by the roadside; groups were picked out of the columns and led into the woods. Most people were killed in the first weeks, near the border. The executions were carried out by detachments of the Yugoslav Army and of the Corps of National Defence of Yugoslavia (KNOJ), usually on the orders or with the approval of the OZNA secret police. The extent of the responsibility of Tito himself, as supreme commander and head of state, remains a matter of dispute among historians; there is no doubt, however, that the scale and organisation of the killings rule out spontaneous revenge by individual soldiers.

In the Tezno woods near Maribor, between 19 and 26 May, prisoners brought from transit camps in the town were shot; the bodies were thrown into an anti-tank ditch several kilometres long. The grave was discovered only in 1999, during motorway construction; the number of victims is estimated at about 15,000, mostly Croats. At the turn of May and June, in the forests of Kočevski Rog near Kočevje, most of the Slovene Home Guards handed over from Viktring were killed, together with Croatian, Serbian and Montenegrin prisoners; the bodies were thrown into karst pits, which were then sealed by blowing up their mouths. In 2009 the walled-up remains of more than a thousand people were found in the disused Barbara mine in the village of Huda Jama. The Slovene government commission on concealed mass graves has registered several hundred such sites in the country, most of them dating from 1945. The victims also included German prisoners of war and ethnic Germans, who were held in camps in Vojvodina and Slovenia.

The total number of those killed cannot be established. The estimates vary widely: from 12,000–15,000 according to some authors (among them the former Yugoslav diplomat Cvijeto Job), through about 70,000 in the calculations of the Croatian economist and demographer Vladimir Žerjavić, which were adopted by the American historian of Croatian origin Jozo Tomasevich, to about 80,000 according to the Croatian historian Martina Grahek Ravančić, who takes account of more recent Slovene research. Vladimir Geiger considers 70,000–80,000 to be the minimum resulting from statistical estimates, while cautioning that these are uncertain. Most of the victims were Croats – soldiers, but also civilians – along with Slovenes, Serbs and Montenegrins from the collaborationist formations. Tomasevich described the killing of most of the collaborationist soldiers captured at the end of the war as “an act of mass terror and brutal political surgery”, similar to the methods the Ustaše and the Chetniks had used earlier. The crimes of the NDH do not justify executions without trial; yet it would be equally dishonest to tell the story of Bleiburg without remembering Jasenovac – and for decades both memories were exploited for political ends.

The stronghold in the Posavina

While the retreat was coming to an end on the Austrian border, the Battle of Odžak was still going on in northern Bosnia. The small town lies in the lowland valley of the Bosna, about ten kilometres from where it flows into the Sava. Its defenders were mostly local men – Ustaše of the 39th Ustaše Battalion and militia, commanded by Petar Rajkovačić and Ivo Čalušić. In December 1944 this same battalion had murdered several hundred Serb inhabitants of the surrounding villages, among them Trnjak, where women and children were killed as well; in January 1945 the Chetniks retaliated by attacking Catholic villages around Modriča and killing hundreds of civilians. The garrison is estimated at 2,000–4,000 men: the historian Gaj Trifković gives about 2,000, while Stipo Pilić and Blanka Matković consider about 3,000 more likely.

The defence was based on a chain of fortified villages – above all Vlaška Mala and Prud – linked by trenches and protected by barbed wire and reinforced-concrete bunkers. The attacking infantry had to cross an open plain. On the night of 18/19 April the Serbian 25th Division of the Yugoslav 2nd Army crossed the Bosna; on 20 April it took Odžak itself, but stalled before the surrounding villages. On 23 April an Ustaše counter-attack cut off one of its battalions and captured four guns. At the end of April the 25th Division moved off towards Zagreb, and its place was taken by the 16th Muslim Brigade of Miloš Zekić’s 27th East Bosnian Division. On 29 April the Ustaše retook Odžak. Further attacks, including a major assault on 9 May, broke down under fire from the bunkers and in the face of counter-attacks. The command of the 27th Division switched to a blockade, and units were posted on the opposite banks of the Sava and the Bosna to guard the crossings.

In the second half of May reinforcements arrived from the 53rd Central Bosnian Division, along with air support. From 21 May Il-2 ground-attack aircraft of the Yugoslav 421st Assault Aviation Regiment bombed the fortifications; the tanks that had been hoped for could not be brought up. The decisive attack began on 22 May. The 18th Central Bosnian Brigade broke through along the Sava into the rear of the defences and took Prud, and on the night of 24/25 May the 19th Birač Brigade, with part of the 20th Romanija Brigade, took Odžak. The same night some of the Ustaše tried to break out of Vlaška Mala towards the Vučjak hills; small groups, reportedly including Rajkovačić, succeeded. On 25 May the 14th Central Bosnian Brigade forced its way into Vlaška Mala, firing on the bunkers with guns brought up to fire over open sights. The organised defence collapsed. Pursuits and the combing of the area went on through 26 and 27 May, which is why Pilić and Matković date the end of the battle to 27 or 28 May; Trifković and the Yugoslav divisional histories date it to 25 May.

Trifković estimates the losses of the three Yugoslav divisions at about 430 killed and missing and 1,123 wounded. At least 562 defenders were taken prisoner. A report by the 27th Division dated 5 June spoke of 881 enemy killed in the second half of May, without distinguishing between those who fell in combat and those who were shot. Trifković and the Croatian historian Nikica Barić regard as credible the testimony that prisoners were killed in the days after the battle; Pilić and Matković list nine sites of execution and burial with more than a thousand victims, soldiers and civilians. At the same time Barić criticises the romantic picture of the defence of Odžak as a struggle for national survival, which passes over the earlier crimes of the local Ustaše.

The last battle in Europe?

The claim that the fighting at Odžak ended all the conflicts of the Second World War in Yugoslavia and in Europe comes from Yugoslav military historiography and needs to be qualified. Trifković calls Odžak the last battle of the war in Yugoslavia and treats 25 May as the military end of the war in that country, but even this date is disputed. Clashes after 8 May also took place elsewhere – in Bohemia up to the Battle of Slivice on 11–12 May, during the Prague offensive, while on the Dutch island of Texel the Georgian uprising was extinguished on 20 May. Odžak was thus the last large battle against a regularly organised enemy, but not the last shot: in the forests of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia scattered groups of Ustaše – the so-called Crusaders (Križari) – and of Chetniks remained active for more than a year, and a similar underground fought on after the war in Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine. In Asia the war went on until August.

Aftermath

Victory on the Austrian border and in the Posavina gave Tito full power. His armed opponents had been killed or sent to camps, and the OZNA dealt with “enemies of the people” at home. In the elections of 11 November 1945, in which only the People’s Front list was put forward, the communists won an overwhelming majority, and on 29 November the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia was proclaimed and the monarchy abolished. Mihailović was captured in March 1946 and shot on 17 July after a trial in Belgrade. Löhr was tried and executed in Belgrade in February 1947.

In socialist Yugoslavia it was forbidden to speak of Bleiburg, Tezno and Kočevski Rog. The memory survived among Croatian and Slovene émigrés, often in a version that exaggerated the number of victims and passed over the crimes of the Ustaše. After the break-up of Yugoslavia, Slovenia and Croatia began searching for graves, exhuming remains and commemorating the victims; a memorial park was laid out at Tezno in 2012. The annual commemorations on the field at Bleiburg remain controversial because Ustaše symbols appear at them – in 2019 the Diocese of Gurk-Klagenfurt refused permission for a mass to be held there. The last battles in Yugoslavia show that in this part of Europe the end of the war brought not peace but a reckoning without trials, whose shadow still divides the memory of the peoples of the former Yugoslavia.