The partition of Yugoslavia

On 8 July 1941, in Berlin, representatives of Germany and Italy signed a treaty fixing the border between the two states in the Slovene lands taken from defeated Yugoslavia three months earlier. The same instrument set up a German–Italian border commission to mark the line out on the ground. On the face of it, this was a technical agreement about a line a few hundred kilometres long running through the mountains and valleys of old Carniola. In reality it concluded a series of agreements by which the Axis powers and their allies parcelled out the territory of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia among themselves. In May Germany and Italy had settled their borders with the Independent State of Croatia; now the two principal Axis powers came to terms with each other. A state that as recently as March had been a party to the Tripartite Pact existed by July only as a government-in-exile in London, recognised by the Allies.

It is often said under this date that Yugoslavia, “a country created by the Treaty of Versailles”, was dissolved by the Axis into its constituent parts, among which pro-German Croatia was of particular importance. Two corrections are needed. Yugoslavia did not come into being under the Treaty of Versailles. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was proclaimed in Belgrade on 1 December 1918, before the peace conference had even convened. In Paris the new state was recognised by the Great Powers and signed the Treaty of Versailles as one of the victorious coalition, and its borders were drawn by subsequent treaties: Saint-Germain with Austria, Neuilly with Bulgaria, Trianon with Hungary, and the agreement with Italy signed at Rapallo in November 1920. Nor was there a single act “dissolving” Yugoslavia on 8 July. The partition went on from April into the autumn of 1941, and the Berlin treaty was only one link in it.

The state of 1918

The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, called Yugoslavia from 1929, joined the Kingdom of Serbia and Montenegro with the South Slav lands of the former Austria-Hungary: Croatia-Slavonia, Slovenia, Dalmatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Vojvodina. From the outset it was divided by a dispute over its constitution. The Serbs, the most numerous nation, wanted a centralised state, the Croats autonomy, while the Slovenes, Macedonians, Montenegrins, the Albanians of Kosovo and the Hungarians of the Bačka had grievances of their own. The neighbours, too, had never accepted the post-war borders. Italy remembered that it had been promised Dalmatia in 1915, Hungary regarded the Bačka and Baranja as lands taken from it at Trianon, and Bulgaria had never given up Macedonia.

For all these claims the coup of 27 March 1941 in Belgrade was the opportunity they had waited twenty years for. That very day Adolf Hitler resolved to destroy Yugoslavia “militarily and as a state”, and in Directive No. 25 he announced that Yugoslav territory would be used to satisfy the demands of the neighbouring countries. He sketched the lines of the future partition himself. On 3 and 12 April, while the Wehrmacht was advancing on Belgrade, he issued guidelines for the partition of Yugoslavia from his field headquarters at Mönichkirchen near Vienna. By the time the Yugoslav army capitulated on 17 April, the map was essentially ready.

Vienna and the doctrine of conquest

On 21 and 22 April the foreign ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Galeazzo Ciano met in Vienna to agree on the division of the spoils. The talks were unequal. Ciano pressed for the largest possible gains on the coast and in Slovenia, but according to Slovene historians the Italians could only comment on decisions Hitler had already taken. The Germans kept for themselves what mattered to them: northern Slovenia, which before 1918 had belonged to Austrian Styria and Carniola, and control of Serbia with its railways, the Danube and the copper mines at Bor. The rest was shared out among Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria and the new Croatian state.

The legal basis for these decisions was the conviction in Berlin and Rome that Yugoslavia had ceased to exist through conquest (debellatio), and that its territory was therefore at the victors’ free disposal. The first to say so openly was the Regent of Hungary, Miklós Horthy: on 10 April, the day the NDH was proclaimed, he and Prime Minister László Bárdossy announced that Yugoslavia had disintegrated, which was supposed to release Hungary from the treaty of eternal friendship concluded in December 1940. The Allies did not accept this doctrine. To Britain and its allies, King Peter II and the government of General Dušan Simović, who reached London in June, represented a state that still existed, temporarily occupied by the enemy.

The map of partition

By July 1941 the partition had taken the shape that, with minor changes, lasted until Italy’s surrender in September 1943.

Germany took Lower Styria, with Maribor and Celje, and Upper Carniola, with Jesenice and Kranj. These lands were not formally incorporated into the Reich. They were placed under Chiefs of Civil Administration – the Gauleiters of neighbouring Styria and Carinthia – with the task Hitler had set out in Maribor at the end of April: “Make this land German again for me.” The announced annexation never took place, but Germanisation began at once: Slovene was banned in offices and schools, Slovene organisations were dissolved, and in the summer of 1941 mass deportations of Slovenes to Serbia, Croatia and the interior of the Reich began. Serbia, within roughly its borders from before the Balkan Wars, was placed by the Germans under military administration. It was the only area in occupied Europe under the direct rule of a German military commander, alongside whom an obedient Serbian administration of commissioners under Milan Aćimović operated. Formally the Banat also belonged to Serbia, but in practice it was run by the local Germans.

Italy took the most land. On 3 May 1941, by royal decree, it annexed southern Slovenia with Ljubljana as a new province of the Kingdom of Italy. Under the Treaties of Rome of 18 May, concluded with Ante Pavelić, it acquired most of central Dalmatia with Split and Šibenik, the islands and the Bay of Kotor, and on 7 June it formed these lands into the Governorate of Dalmatia, seated at Zadar. Montenegro it occupied and governed through a civil commissioner, while seeking a form of statehood for it linked to the House of Savoy – King Victor Emmanuel III, after all, was married to the Montenegrin Princess Elena. Most of Kosovo and the western fringes of Macedonia, with Tetovo, Gostivar and Debar, were placed under the administration of Italian-occupied Albania, fulfilling the Albanian nationalists’ dream of a Greater Albania.

Hungary occupied in April the Bačka, Baranja, Međimurje and Prekmurje – lands that before 1920 had belonged to the Crown of St Stephen. On 9 July, the day after the Berlin treaty was signed, the Hungarian military commandant in Čakovec announced that Međimurje would remain permanently under Hungarian rule, which Zagreb never accepted. All these lands were formally incorporated into Hungary in mid-December 1941. Bulgaria, Germany’s ally since March, sent its troops on 19 April into almost all of Yugoslav Macedonia, with Skopje, Bitola and Ohrid, and into fragments of south-eastern Serbia with Pirot and Vranje. Tsar Boris III and his government regarded these lands as recovered Bulgarian territory, although the Germans formally treated them as an area under Bulgarian administration until the end of the war.

The largest of the new creations was the Ustaše Independent State of Croatia, proclaimed on 10 April. It took in most of present-day Croatia, the whole of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Srem up to the outskirts of Belgrade, but not Dalmatia, which went to Italy. Across its territory ran the demarcation line between a German sphere of influence in the north-east and an Italian one in the south-west.

A border across Slovenia

Of all the Yugoslav lands, Slovenia was divided the most minutely, and the most brutally. Its territory went to three states, and a strip along the Croatian border fell to the NDH as well. The borders were fixed in interstate treaties: Germany concluded one with Croatia on 13 May 1941, Italy with Croatia on 18 May, and Germany with Italy on 8 July in Berlin. No treaty was signed between Germany and Hungary. Berlin had at first wanted to keep Prekmurje for itself but, for the sake of the alliance with Budapest, settled for four German villages in Goričko.

The treaty of 8 July essentially confirmed the line Hitler had drawn in April. The mixed border commission, chaired on the German side by the diplomat Kurt von Kamphoevener, could make only minor adjustments. It worked in the field until the autumn of 1941. The border cut across Slovenia roughly along the Sava, from the Julian Alps and the Karawanks past the outskirts of Ljubljana, which ended up on the Italian side close to German outposts, to the Croatian border. The Germans quickly fortified it: in the border strip buildings were demolished, forests were cleared to a width of several tens of metres, and barbed-wire entanglements, bunkers and minefields were built, the work being done by local people as forced labour. One story from the Polhov Gradec Hills passed into history: there the commission ran the border through a farmyard. During the night the farmers moved the boundary markers below the buildings, and so saved their house from demolition.

The people of a divided country

For the inhabitants, partition meant more than a change of passport. Almost every one of the occupiers tried to “cleanse” the conquered lands of the population it regarded as alien. The Germans planned to deport more than two hundred thousand Slovenes from Lower Styria and Upper Carniola, above all the intelligentsia, the clergy and settlers who had arrived after 1918. In the end tens of thousands of people were removed, and Germans from other parts of Europe were brought in to take their place. In the first weeks of the occupation the Hungarians drove some 10,000 Serbs out of the Bačka, and by the end of the war, according to various estimates, between 25,000 and 60,000, mainly settlers from the interwar period. Between about a thousand and several thousand civilians were killed as the Hungarian troops marched in. In Kosovo Albanian bands, with the Italians looking on passively, drove out Serb and Montenegrin settlers. In Bulgarian Macedonia Serbian schools and churches were closed, and teachers and officials were sent back to Serbia.

It was worst in Croatia. From April the Ustaše were building a state without Serbs, Jews and Roma. Racial laws, a ban on the Cyrillic alphabet, the first massacres at Gudovac, Veljun and Glina, and in the summer of 1941 further mass killings in Lika, Herzegovina and Bosnia drove thousands of Serbs to flee to the Italian occupation zone, to Serbia and Montenegro, or into the mountains. Refugees, deportees and prisoners of war returning home spread hatred of the occupiers and their helpers throughout the country.

Of all the parts of shattered Yugoslavia, war chronologies usually single out Croatia, and rightly so. The NDH, which joined the Tripartite Pact on 15 June 1941, sent volunteers to the Eastern Front and was to supply Germany with bauxite, timber and food, was the Axis’s most important acquisition. It was also the most unstable, because its authorities were waging war on a third of their own population.

Its place in the war

The partition, formally completed by the Berlin treaty of 8 July, proved an illusory victory for the Axis. A few days earlier, on 7 July, communist partisans in western Serbia had fired the first shots of the uprising to which Josip Broz Tito’s party had called after Germany attacked the Soviet Union. On 12 July the Italians had an assembly at Cetinje proclaim the restoration of the Kingdom of Montenegro, and the next day an uprising broke out there which within a few days drove the Italian garrisons out of most of the country. Together with the revolt of the Serbs in the NDH, which had been going on in Herzegovina since June, this meant that in the summer of 1941 fighting was under way in almost every part of former Yugoslavia. The Germans had to bring into the Balkans divisions needed elsewhere, and on 29 August they installed in Belgrade a collaborationist government under General Milan Nedić. On 12 August 1941 a decree of Victor Emmanuel III formally joined Kosovo and western Macedonia to Albania.

The division of the country into the spheres of several states, each pursuing its own policy, also made the resistance movements’ work easier. The Chetniks of Dragoljub (Draža) Mihailović and Tito’s Partisans soon began fighting not only the occupiers but each other as well. National war, civil war and war against the occupier became entwined in one of the bloodiest conflicts of occupied Europe, in which, according to demographic estimates, around a million inhabitants of Yugoslavia lost their lives. After Italy’s surrender in 1943 the Germans took over most of the Italian zones, and in 1945 Tito’s victorious Partisans rebuilt Yugoslavia, this time as a communist federation, with borders enlarged by part of Istria and the coastal towns that had belonged to Italy since 1920. The borders German and Italian diplomats had argued over in Berlin in July 1941 vanished after four years. The break-up of Yugoslavia – this time from within – came half a century later.