52 Facts About Chetniks

Chetniks, formally the Chetnik Detachments of the Yugoslav Army, and the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland and the Ravna Gora Movement, was a Yugoslav royalist and Serbian nationalist movement and guerrilla force in Axis-occupied Yugoslavia.

Chetniks were active in the uprising in the German-occupied territory of Serbia from July to December 1941.

Chetniks were partners in the pattern of terror and counter-terror that developed in Yugoslavia during World War II.

Similar forces had been sent to Macedonia by Greece and Bulgaria, who wished to integrate the region into their own states, resulting in the Serbian Chetniks clashing with their rivals from Bulgaria as well as the Ottoman authorities.

Montenegrin Chetniks fought against the Austro-Hungarian occupation of that country.

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Chetniks presided over a great deal of dissension until that year when the organisation ceased to operate.

Bands of Chetniks, including one led by Jovan Babunski, were organised to terrorise the population, kill pro-Bulgarian resistance leaders and impress the local population into forced labour for the army.

Pecanac and his Chetniks were active in fighting Albanians resisting the Serb and Montenegrin colonisation of Kosovo.

Chetniks was replaced by Pecanac, who continued to lead the organisation until the invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941.

Chetniks's plan included large-scale population transfers, evicting the non-Serb population from within the borders of Greater Serbia, although he did not suggest any numbers.

Manual paid some lip service to Yugoslavism, but the Chetniks did not really wish to become an all-Yugoslav movement because that was inconsistent with their main objective of achieving a Greater Serbia within Greater Yugoslavia.

Chetniks concludes that this outcome was to be expected given the overwhelmingly Serb makeup of the congress, which included only two or three Croats, one Slovene and one Bosnian Muslim among its more than 300 attendees.

Chetniks were almost exclusively made up of Serbs except for a large number of Montenegrins who identified as Serbs, and consisted of "local defence units, marauding bands of Serb villagers, anti-partisan auxiliaries, forcibly mobilised peasants, and armed refugees, which small groups of uncaptured Yugoslav officers was attempting without success to mold into an organised fighting force".

The low status of female peasants in areas of Yugoslavia where Chetniks were strongest could have been utilized and advantageous in military, political, and psychological terms.

However, other Chetniks were engaged in collaboration with the Germans and the Chetnik name became again associated with Mihailovic.

The attack was driven back and a counterattack followed the next day, the Chetniks lost 1,000 men in these two battles and a large amount of weaponry.

The Chetniks participated with a significant, 20,000-strong, force providing assistance to the German and Italian encirclement from the east.

The conflict resulted in a near-total Partisan victory, after which the Chetniks were almost entirely incapacitated in the area west of the Drina river.

Gradually, the Chetniks ended up primarily fighting the Partisans instead of the occupation forces, and started cooperating with the Axis in a struggle to destroy the Partisans, receiving increasing amounts of logistical assistance.

Partisans considered all occupation forces to be "the fascist enemy", while the Chetniks hated the Ustase but balked at fighting the Italians, and had approached the Italian VI Army Corps as early as July and August 1941 for assistance, via a Serb politician from Lika, Stevo Radenovic.

The Chetniks noticed that Italy on occupied territories implemented a traditional policy of deceiving Croats with the help of Serbs and they believed that Italy, in case of victory of the Axis powers, would favor Serbs in Lika, northern Dalmatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina and that Serbian autonomy would be created in this area under Italian protectorate.

Chetniks outlined the four points of his policy in his report to the Italian Army General Staff:.

The Chetniks were extensively supplied with thousands of rifles, grenades, mortars and artillery pieces.

In return, it was promised that every Serbian village would receive weapons to fight the Partisans, that they would get state employment, and those Chetniks who stood out in the fight against the Partisans would receive decorations and awards.

The Chetniks recognized the sovereignty of the Independent State of Croatia and became a legalized movement in it.

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Chetniks who were wounded in such operations would be cared for in NDH hospitals, while the orphans and widows of Chetniks killed in action would be supported by the Ustase state.

The report on German-Chetnik collaboration of the XV Army Corps on 19 November 1943 to the 2nd Panzer Army states that the Chetniks were "leaning on the German forces" for close to a year.

Consequently, they significantly liberalized their policy towards the Chetniks and mobilized all Serb nationalist forces against the Partisans.

The first formal and direct agreement between the German occupation forces and the Chetniks took place in early October 1943 between the German-led 373rd Infantry Division and a detachment of Chetniks under Mane Rokvic operating in western Bosnia and Lika.

Mihailovic and the Chetniks refused to follow the order and abide by the agreement and continued to engage the Partisans.

Collaboration between the Government of National Salvation and Mihailovic's Chetniks began in fall of 1941 and lasted until the end of German occupation.

In late autumn of 1941 the Italians handed over the towns of Visegrad, Gorazde, Foca and the surrounding areas, in south-east Bosnia to the Chetniks to run as a puppet administration and NDH forces were compelled by the Italians to withdraw from there.

On 5 December 1941, the Chetniks received the town of Foca from the Italians and proceeded to massacre around five hundred Muslims.

Around the same time the Chetniks made their way to Visegrad where deaths were reportedly in the thousands.

Chetniks's report included the results of these "cleansing operations", which according to Tomasevich, were that "thirty-three Muslim villages had been burned down, and 400 Muslim fighters and about 1,000 women and children had been killed, as against 14 Chetnik dead and 26 wounded".

The Chetniks created lists of individuals that were to be liquidated and special units known as "black trojkas" were trained to carry out these acts of terror.

Over time British support moved away from the Chetniks, who refused to stop collaborating with the Italians and Germans instead of fighting them, towards the Partisans, who were eager to increase their anti-Axis activity.

In February 1944, Mihailovic's Chetniks failed to fulfill British demands to demolish key bridges over the Morava and Ibar rivers, causing the British to withdraw their liaisons and halt supplying the Chetniks.

Mihailovic and the Chetniks refused to accept the Royal Government's agreement and continued to engage the Partisans, by now the official Yugoslav Allied force.

The Chetniks were not unprepared for this, and throughout the war their propaganda strove to harness the pro-Russian and pan-Slavic sympathies of the majority of the Serb population.

Finally, in April and May 1945, as the victorious Partisans took possession of the country's territory, many Chetniks retreated toward Italy and a smaller group toward Austria.

The main part of the Chetniks was located in the area of Lapac while in the winter of 1946 actions were organized against them which testifies about the seriousness of the Chetnik threat.

Chetniks was accused of being responsible for the deaths of 1,500 people during the war.

In 1957, Blagoje Jovovic along with other former Chetniks living in Argentina received a tip off from an ex-Italian general as to the whereabouts of Ante Pavelic, former Poglavnik of the NDH who was hiding in Argentina.

Jovovic and other Chetniks put into action an assassination plan and on 10 April 1957, Jovovic was able to track down Pavelic.

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The SRS's military wing was known as "Chetniks" and received weaponry from the Yugoslav People's Army and Serbian police.

In September–October 1991, the Ozren Chetniks were established to "carry on the 'best' Chetnik traditions of the Second World War".

In September 1992, Chetniks attempted to force Sandzak Muslims in Pljevlja to flee by demolishing their stores and houses whilst shouting "Turks leave" and "this is Serbia".

Chetniks vowed to pursue a Greater Serbia "through peaceful means".

Chetniks that killed individuals who cooperated with communists were said to have been renegades.

The Chetniks were referred to as "the core of the Serb civic resistance" and "contrary to the communists, who wanted to split up the Serb ethnic space, sought to expand Serbia by incorporating Montenegro, the whole of Bosnia-Herzegovina, part of Dalmatia including Dubrovnik and Zadar, the whole Srem, including Vukovar, Vinkovi, and Dalj, Kosovo and Metohija, and South Serbia ", and were portrayed as betrayed by the Western Allies.

In March 2014, Serb volunteers calling themselves Chetniks, led by Serbian ultra-nationalist Bratislav Zivkovic, travelled to Sevastopol in Crimea to support the pro-Russian side in the Crimean crisis.