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Yugoslav partisans show courage: Moments before his death by hanging on June 22, 1942, Yugoslav partisan fighter Stjepan Filipovic shouts his defiance against his country's Nazi occupiers and his allegiance to the Yugoslav Communist Party. The Yugoslav partisans (officially the People's Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia) brought together an unlikely alliance of Balkan ethnic groups -- including Croats and Serbs -- through their commitment to communism. The partisans' cunning and courage (along with their sometimes savage brutality) and pressure from the advancing Red Army combined to free Yugoslavia from Nazi rule.
It included Croats, Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), Jews, Roma (‘Cigani’), Slovenes, Albanians (‘Siptari’) and Serbs. On the other hand, the Chetniks were a Serbian nationalist organization led by opportunistic Nazi-collaborator General Draza Mihailovich
Operation Halyard was one of the largest Allied airlift operation behind enemy lines of World War II. The Yugoslav Partisans played a major role in saving downed Allied airmen.
Serbian nationalists often claim that Chetniks saved over 500 downed airmed, but that figure is simply wrong. According to statistics compiled by the US Air Force Air Crew Rescue Unit, between 1 January and 15 October 1944, a total of 1,152 American airmen were airlifted from Yugoslavia, 795 with the assistance of the Yugoslav Partisans and 356 with the help of the Serbian Chetniks. In World War II, the Yugoslav Partisans were a multi-ethnic resistance force under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito (Josef Tito). It included Croats, Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), Jews, Roma (‘Cigani’), Slovenes, Albanians (‘Siptari’) and Serbs. On the other hand, the Chetniks were a Serbian nationalist organization led by opportunistic Nazi-collaborator General Draza Mihailovich (aka: Dragoljub Mihailovic).
He said Gen. Draza Mihailovic saved his life - and those of 500 of his fellow airmen - in the largest air rescue of Americans behind enemy lines during a war.
Mihailovic was not "a villain, but a hero," Friend said Thursday in an interview with The Associated Press.
Quazi-historians with obvious Serbian sympathies – like Lucien Karchmar – often cite the Operation Halyard as ‘evidence’ of the Chetnik’s anti-fascist ideology. After all, why would Serbian Nazi collaborators save 356 allied airmen? It is because Draza Mihailovic was going to great lengths to regain Allied support and to depict himself in a favorable light to the western Allies. With the Axis defeat in Europe a certainty and having lost all Allied support to the Partisans, Draza Mihailovic and his Nazi collaborationalist movement stood no chance of survival. The Allies were aware that Mihailovic’s Chetniks were at the same time also rescuing Nazi German and Nazi Ustasha aviators from Tito’s anti-fascist Partisans.
According to Yad Vashem,
Serbian Chetniks led by General Draza mihailovic killed Jews: “As the Chetniks increased their cooperation with the Germans, their attitude toward the Jews in the areas under their control deteriorated, and they identified the Jews with the hated Communists. There were many instances of Chetniks murdering Jews or handing them over to the Germans.”
General Draza Mihailovic was antisemite who hated Jewish people. his Chetniks movement despised Tito’s Partisans, because Partisan units were (according to Chetniks) largely ‘composed’ of “Jews, Gypsies and Muslims.” The Chetniks hated all national minorities in Yugoslavia. At the beginning of World War II, Draza Mihailovic’s movement demonstrated a full intent to commit genocide against Bosnian Muslims, Jews, and Croats.
From 1941-1943 Serbian Chetniks committed genocide by systematically rounding up and killing more than 50,000 Bosnian Muslims. In one of largest terrorist raids on Muslim villages from both sides of Drina, Chetniks rounded up and killed some 15,000 Muslims in February of 1943. Chetnik leader Pavle Djurisic provided a bit conservative figures, admitting his troops, in fact, killed 9,200 Bosnian Muslim “women, old people, and children” in a single military operation in February of 1943.
Having slaughtered more than 50,000 Muslims by 1943, Serb fascists also hunted down and killed Jews. However, the killing of Jews started much earlier and was, statistically speaking, devastating for the Jewish community. Ninety percent of Yugoslav Jews perished in World War II.
Banjica concentration camp was primarily operated by Serb Nazis who took sadistic pleasure in killing Jews. The camp was created by converting barracks of the Serbian SS 18th infantry division. The funding for this conversion came not from Germans, but from the municipal budget of Belgrade.
An overhelming majority of Bosnian Muslims (98%) joined Partisans in the Second World War and fought against the Germans and Serbian nazi collaborators, Chetniks. Handzar Division was relatively short lived. It was created in 1943 and it disintegrated mid-field in late 1944.
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