A COLD WAR

At the second session of AVNOJ, 29 November 1943, the delegates became a legislative assembly under the Presidency of Tito, who was proclaimed Marshal. But this momentous occasion was followed with tragedy. During the winter of 1943–4 the Germans carried out ‘Operation Kugelblitz’ (‘Thunderbolt’), which the Partisans called the Sixth Offensive. In January 1944 Fitzroy Maclean came back to Bosnia with two remarkable proofs of Winston Churchill’s regard for Tito. One of them was Winston’s son Randolph Churchill, “a flabby bully”, who was now an officer in the British military mission. The head of the Soviet Mission was the Red Army’s General Korneyev, "an incurable drunkard", according to Stalin. The Americans weren't really interested. Their main target was the British Empire.

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Churchill sends Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean, one of the founders of the SAS, to Tito as his official representative. Churchilll’s decision to support Tito and Partisans - ie communists - over the Chetnik royalists has been the subject of much debate and anger for decades.

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In November 1942 Tito set up his first form of Communist government, the Anti-Fascist Council for Yugoslavia (AVNOJ). Hitler asks Mussolini to send all of the Croatian Jews to German camps - Mussolini agrees, but his troops, lead by General Mario Roatta, refused to obey. Hitler's next attack on the Partisans, 'Operation Weiss’, began on 20 January 1943, with 90,000 Germans, Italians and Croats versus 20,000 Partisans. Tito was trapped but had a cunning plan - he did a peace deal with the Nazis to buy himself some time.

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Tito barely gets out of Užice alive before the Germans arrive. Then he gets betrayed by Stalin, narrowly escapes capture again, tries to resign as party secretary, and finally sets up his new HQ at the Bosnian town of Bihać.

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Tito started his campaigning in the middle of 1941, after Operation Barbarossa had distracted the Nazis away from Yugoslavia. He met with the Chetnik leader Draza Mihajlovic to try to form a unified front. In Užice, a town of some 12,000 inhabitants, Tito proclaimed a symbolic ‘Red Republic’ boasting its own hotel, bank, factories, newspaper and prison.

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The Jasenovac concentration camp, established in Slavonia, aka "the Auschwitz of the Balkans", "specialized in one-on-one violence of a particularly brutal kind" and prisoners were primarily murdered manually with the use of blunt objects such as knives, hammers and axes. In the words of the Nazi general, von Horstenau, "The greatest of all evils must be Jasenovac, which no ordinary mortal can glimpse." It was run by Catholics.

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In 1941, after the creation of the NDH, Ante Pavelić, the leader of the Catholic fascist Ustasha, went to Rome to receive the blessing of Pope Pius XII - while his administration was publicly saying they were going to kill a third of the Croatian Orthodox. Throughout the spring and early summer of 1941 Roman Catholic priests, attended by armed Ustasha, carried out mass baptisms in Orthodox villages. But the ones who were only baptised were lucky. This is when the mass slaughter of Orthodox Christians, by Catholics, began. The German Plenipotentiary General to the NDH, the historian Glaise von Horstenau, wrote in June that ‘according to reliable reports from countless German military and civilian observers during the last few weeks, in country and town, the Ustasha have gone raging mad’. WARNING: Gird your loins for this episode. It gets pretty graphic.

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As caretaker secretary of the Yugoslav Party from 1937 to 1940, Tito first moved the Central Committee from Paris to Zagreb, then built up a new, young leadership loyal to him. These guys would be his inner circle for decades to come. When, in February 1941, the Yugoslav regent Prince Paul did a deal with Hitler to avoid an invasion of Yugoslavia, the Serbian Orthodox went nuts and overthrew Paul's government, installed 18 year old King Peter, tore up the pact with Germany, and destroyed the Gestapo HQ in Belgrade. Hitler, unsurprisingly, did not take this well.

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Back to Tito and Yugoslavia. In 1934, the Croat Catholics rose up against the Serb King Alexander, leading to his assassination by a Ustasha agent while visiting France. Meanwhile Stalin purged the leadership of the Yugoslav Communist Party, opening the door to a new generation of younger, more radical leadership, with Tito becoming the General Secretary. While living in Paris, he loved to visit to graves of the original "dictatorship of the proletariat" - the Paris Communards, who took power briefly in 1871, before being executed en masse by the French government.

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