War Against Humanity
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“Leftist errors”, Nov 1941–May 1942 (dates differ among sources). Red terror by Yugoslav Partisans against actual or suspected royalist sympathizers in Montenegro and Serb-populated parts of Herzegovina, upwards of 1000 victims. Basically, the Communists decided to prepare for the inevitable power struggle against their perceived class enemies by liquidating a bunch of people in communities with divided loyalties. This included tactics such as blackmailing followers into killing their family members (or else you’re an “opportunist”), murdering people with sledgehammers at night to not alarm the population with gunshots, things like that. Did a lot to sour relations with the Četniks, as you may imagine. There were atrocities of this sort as early as summer '41 but they got going in earnest with the Soviet winter counteroffensive, which many Communists believed would be unstoppable. Among the chief agents of the terror was Milovan Đilas, then a top Communist commander, who later became somewhat of a celebrity due to his dissent against the authoritarian policies of the Party. He of course strenuously denied the accusations.
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Kozara Offensive, Jun–Aug 1942. In a joint operation, Germans, Ustaše, and Četniks surrounded Kozara Mountain and neighboring areas in NW Bosnia then held by the Partisans, and went on to kill pretty much everyone they found, captured fighters and (predominantly Serb) civilians alike. The estimate of victims murdered outside of combat is well over 20,000. This is IMV the single biggest omission on your part, both because of the scope of the crime, and because of the cultural importance of the battle in popular memory and in official post-war Yugoslav imaginary. It was literally impossible to grow up in Yugoslavia and not know about Kozara. Stories were told, poems were written, movies were filmed. And, fun fact – according to The Loves of Josip Broz, one of the soldiers killed in action on the German side was Hans Spuner, Austrian, a son of Tito’s from a 1913-14 affair with Liza Spuner, a lady from the Viennese high society.
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A useful WAH comparison could be made between the methods and aims of genocide in Ustaše-run puppet Croatia and German-occupied Serbia. Ustaše ran a few large death camps along with massacres in the countryside, and extended the Holocaust to non-Croats deemed undesirable, notably Serbs. They ended up murdering hundreds of thousands of people – the estimates were later both inflated and minimized to suit various political interests. In Serbia, meanwhile, although the camps were smaller, the murders and deportations were systematic enough that the territory was proclaimed “free” of Jews by summer '42. Meanwhile, the genocide against non-Serbs (Bosniaks and other Muslim Slavs, Albanians, Croats) was taken up by semi-independent, supposedly royalist Četniks.
I’m sure there’s more, but those are the major missing pieces in the WAH department I’m aware of. I was, indeed, quite surprised you missed out on Kozara. Yugoslavia barely appeared in your program between Operation Trio and the Prozor massacre in October '42, and while I hadn’t known about what happened in Prozor – I learned about it from TimeGhost, so a big thank you! – Kozara was an order of magnitude larger.