Yugoslav Partisans - Composition

Composition

According to Tito, the national composition of the Partisan army in May 1944 was 44% Serb, 30% Croat, 10% Slovene, 5% Montenegrin, 2.5% Macedonian, and 2.5% Bosnian Muslim. According to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,

"In partitioned Yugoslavia, partisan resistance developed among the Slovenes in German-annexed Slovenia, engaging mostly in small-scale sabotage. In Serbia, a cetnik resistance organization developed under a former Yugoslav Army Colonel, Draža Mihailovic. After a disastrous defeat in an uprising in June 1941, this organization tended to withdraw from confrontation with the Axis occupying forces. The Communist-dominated Partisan organization under the leadership of Josef Tito was a multi-ethnic resistance force – including Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks (Serbo-Croatian speaking Muslims), Jews, and Slovenes. Based primarily in Bosnia and northwestern Serbia, Tito's Partisans fought the Germans and Italians most consistently and played a major role in driving the German forces out of Yugoslavia in 1945."

By April 1945, there were some 800,000 soldiers in the Partisan army. Composition by region from late 1941 to late 1944 was as follows:

The Chetniks, were a mainly Serb oriented group and their Serb nationalism resulted in an inability to recruit or appeal to many non-Serbs. The Partisans, on the other hand, learned to play down Communism in favour of a Popular Front approach which appealed to all Yugoslavs. In Bosnia, for example, the Partisan rallying cry was for a country which was to be neither Serbian nor Croatian nor Muslim, but instead to be free and brotherly in which full equality of all groups would be ensured. Nevertheless, Serbs remained the dominant ethnic group in the Yugoslav Partisans throughout the war. Chetnik ethnic cleansing policies against the Muslims in Eastern Bosnia, and Dalmatia alienated Croats and Muslims from joining the Chetniks. Italian repression and ambitions of taking Dalmatia did not appeal to the Croats. Italian collaboration with Chetniks in Northern Dalmatia resulting in atrocities which further galvanizing support for the Partisans among Dalmatian Croats. For example, Chetnik attacks on Gala, near Split, resulted in the slaughter of 200 Croatian civilians. In particular, Mussolini's policy of forced Italianization ensured the first significant number of Croats joining the Partisans in late 1941.

In other areas, recruitment of Croats was hindered by some Serbian Partisans tendency to view the organisation as exclusively Serb, rejecting non-Serb members and raiding the villages of their Croat neighbours. A group of Jewish youths from Sarajevo attempted to join a Partisan detachment in Kalinovnik, but the Serbian Partisans turned them back to Sarajevo, where many were captured by the Axis forces and perished. Attacks from Croatian Ustaše on the Serbian population was considered to be one of the important reasons for the rise of guerrilla activities, thus aiding an ever growing Partisan resistance.

As an allied victory became increasingly apparent, non-Serb communities opted for the Partisans as providing a more palatable future than the Serbianization policies of the royalist government in the first Yugoslavia. By contrast, the dynamic in Serbia was influenced by the allies' support of the Partisan governmental institutions over that of the royal government and the need to be part of the Partisans to have a say in the future structure of a Socialist Yugoslavia.