Yugoslav Coup D'état

The Yugoslav coup d'état took place on 27 March 1941 in Belgrade, Kingdom of Yugoslavia, when the regency led by Prince Paul of Yugoslavia was overthrown and King Peter II fully assumed monarchical powers. The coup was planned and conducted by a group of pro-Western Serbian nationalist Royal Yugoslav Air Force officers formally led by the Air Force commander, General Dušan Simović, who had been associated with several putsch plots from 1938 onwards. Brigadier General of Military Aviation Borivoje Mirković, Major Živan Knežević of the Yugoslav Royal Guards, and his brother Radoje Knežević were the main organisers in the overthrow of the government. In addition to Radoje Knežević, some other civilian leaders were probably aware of the takeover before it was launched and moved to support it once it occurred, but they were not among the organisers. Peter II himself was surprised by the coup, and heard of the declaration of his coming-of-age for the first time on the radio.

The Communist Party of Yugoslavia played no part in the coup, although it made a significant contribution to the mass street-protests in many cities that signalled popular support for it once it had occurred. The putsch was successful and deposed the three-member Yugoslav regency (Prince Paul, Radenko Stanković and Ivo Perović) and the government of Prime Minister Dragiša Cvetković. Two days prior to its ousting, the Cvetković government had signed the Vienna Protocol on the Accession of Yugoslavia to the Tripartite Pact (Axis). The coup had been planned for several months, but the signing of the Tripartite Pact spurred the organisers to carry it out, encouraged by the British Special Operations Executive.

The military conspirators brought to power the 17-year-old King Peter II (whom they declared to be of-age to assume the throne) and formed a weak and divided national unity government with Simović as prime minister and Vladko Maček and Slobodan Jovanović as his vice-premiers. The coup led directly to the German-led Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941. The importance of the putsch and subsequent invasion in delaying Operation Barbarossa, the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union (which started on 22 June 1941), is still open to debate. In 1972 military historian Martin van Creveld dismissed the idea, affirming that the invasion of Yugoslavia actually assisted and hastened the overall Balkan campaign, and that other factors determined the start date for Operation Barbarossa. On the other hand, findings published in 2013 have led to assertions that the invasion of Yugoslavia did somewhat contribute to a delay in the launching of Operation Barbarossa.

Background

The Kingdom of Yugoslavia, formed in 1918 under the name Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, incorporated diverse national and religious groups with varied historical backgrounds. These included Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Montenegrins, Bosnian Muslims, Macedonians and Albanians, among others. Each of these national groups was strongly associated with one of the three dominant religions: the Serbian Orthodox Church (Serbs, Montenegrins and Macedonians); the Catholic Church (Croats and Slovenes); and Islam (Bosnian Muslims and Albanians). The religious diversity deepened the divisions within Yugoslav society. Serbs and Montenegrins made up 38.8 per cent of the population, Croats contributed 23.9 per cent, Slovenes 8.5 per cent, Bosnian Muslims 6.3 per cent, Macedonians 5.3 per cent, and Albanians 4 per cent.

According to economics professor and historian Jozo Tomasevich, Yugoslavia was politically weak from the moment of its creation and remained so during the interwar period mainly due to a "rigid system of centralism" imposed by the Serbian-friendly Vidovdan Constitution, the aforementioned strong association between each national group and its dominant religion, and uneven economic development. In particular, the religious primacy of the Serbian Orthodox Church in national affairs and discrimination against Catholics and Muslims compounded the dissatisfaction of the non-Serbian population with the Serbian-dominated ruling groups that controlled patronage and government appointments, and treated non-Serbs as second-class citizens. This centralised system arose from Serbian military strength and Croatian intransigence, and was sustained by Croatian disengagement, Serbian overrepresentation, corruption, and a lack of discipline within political parties. This state of affairs was initially maintained by subverting the democratic system of government through political bribery. The domination of the rest of Yugoslavia by Serbian ruling elites meant that the country was never consolidated in the political sense, and was therefore never able to address the social and economic challenges it faced.

The Political scientist Sabrina P. Ramet sees the dysfunctionality and lack of legitimacy of the regime as the reasons why the kingdom's internal politics became ethnically polarised, a phenomenon that has been referred to as the "national question" in Yugoslavia. Failures to establish the rule of law, to protect individual rights, to build tolerance and equality, and to guarantee the neutrality of the state in matters relating to religion, language and culture contributed to this illegitimacy and the resulting instability.

In 1929, democracy was abandoned and a royal dictatorship was established by King Alexander, who attempted to break down the ethnic divisions in the country through various means, including creating administrative divisions ( hbs-Latn, banovine) based on rivers rather than traditional regions. There was significant opposition to this move, with Serbian and Slovene opposition parties and figures advocating the division of Yugoslavia into six ethnically based administrative units. By 1933, discontent in the largely Croatian-populated Sava Banovina had developed into full-blown civil disorder, which the regime countered with a series of assassinations, attempted assassinations and arrests of key Croatian opposition figures including the leader of the Croatian Peasant Party ( hbs-Latn, Hrvatska seljačka stranka, links=no, HSS) Vladko Maček. When Alexander was assassinated in Marseilles in 1934 by a Bulgarian assassin with links to the Croatian ultranationalists, the ''Ustaše'', his cousin Prince Paul headed a triumvirate regency whose other members were the senator Radenko Stanković and the governor of the Sava Banovina, Ivo Perović. The regency ruled on behalf of Alexander's 11-year-old son, King Peter, but the important member of the regency was Prince Paul. Although Prince Paul was more liberal than his cousin, the dictatorship continued uninterrupted. The dictatorship had allowed the country to follow a consistent foreign policy, but Yugoslavia needed peace at home in order to assure peace with its neighbours, all of whom had irredentist designs on its territory.

Yugoslav foreign policy during the interwar period

From 1921, the country had negotiated the Little Entente with Romania and Czechoslovakia in the face of Hungarian designs on its territory, and after a decade of bilateral treaties, had formalised the arrangements in 1933. This had been followed the next year by the Balkan Pact of Yugoslavia, Greece, Romania and Turkey, aimed at thwarting Bulgarian aspirations. Throughout this period, the Yugoslav government had sought to remain good friends with France, seeing her as a guarantor of European peace treaties. This was formalised through a treaty of friendship signed in 1927. With these arrangements in place, Italy posed the biggest problem for Yugoslavia, funding the anti-Yugoslav Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation which promoted Bulgarian irredentism. Attempts by King Alexander to negotiate with Benito Mussolini fell on deaf ears, and after Alexander's assassination, nothing of note happened on that front until 1937. In the aftermath of Alexander's assassination, Yugoslavia was isolated both militarily and diplomatically, and reached out to France to assist its bilateral relationship with Italy. With the appointment of Milan Stojadinović as prime minister in 1935, Germany and Yugoslavia became more closely aligned. The trade relationship between the two countries also developed considerably, and Germany became Yugoslavia's most important trading partner.

Cvetković–Maček Agreement

Prince Paul recognised the lack of national solidarity and political weakness of his country, and after he assumed power he made repeated attempts to negotiate a political settlement with Maček, the leader of the dominant Croatian political party in Yugoslavia, the HSS. In January 1937, Stojadinović met with Maček at Prince Paul's request, but Stojadinović was unwilling or unable to grapple with the issue of Croatian dissatisfaction with a Yugoslavia dominated by the Serbian ruling class. In 1938, the ''Anschluss'' brought the Third Reich to the borders of Yugoslavia, and early elections were held in December. In this background, the Royal Yugoslav Air Force (VVKJ) commander, General Dušan Simović, had been involved in two coup plots in early 1938 driven by Serbian opposition to the ''Concordat

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