The worst battle of World War II, apart from the Soviet Union, was Yugoslavia, which in turn was the bloodiest in Croatia, where in 1941-1945 the Croatian armed militia ustaše, which cooperated with the Nazis, killed about 700,000 Serbs, Jews, gypsies, and Tito's partisans. Most of the victims were executed with daggers, axes, and saws, and in April 1945 the fascists ran out and 800,000 Yugoslav Partisans led by Tito pounced on them (Tito was Croatian, but most of the officers and men were Serbs).
Ustasha executed the guerrillas
The Croatian independent government fled to Austria with the Ustaše, along the way a large number of old and weak women and children as human shields, they knew that Tito's troops would not open fire on civilians, at this time the British army was approaching the Austrian border, Ustasha calculated that they might be able to join the British army, together against the Bolsheviks, on May 16, spread a hundred kilometers of fleeing army to the Austrian border town of Breisborg, on the outskirts of the city they encountered the British tank troops, just when they thought they were saved, found Tito's vanguard troops in the town.
Ustasha on the run
A wonderful negotiation unfolded, the Croatian independent government and the British army, Tito guerrillas at the same time negotiations, the strategy of the British army is to send civilian representatives to complain about the atrocities of the Soviet Red Army and tito guerrillas, hoping to get asylum, for the Yugoslav partisans are all kinds of reasons to delay time, in the afternoon some people in the fleeing crowd can't wait to wave the white flag to the British positions, the British soldiers fired warning shots, an officer said to them: "You have joined the Geneva Convention in 1943, I believe you will be treated humanely, I order you to surrender to the Partisans." The crowd rioted, some people tried to escape around the British positions, and several British tanks blocked them.
Guerrilla and British tankers
At the same time, the Yugoslav Partisans issued an ultimatum restricting them to surrender unconditionally within an hour or they would fire, followed by an additional 15 minutes to give the onlookers face, at 3:27 p.m., light and heavy machine guns and mortars fired at the crowd together, Ustasha had weapons in hand but no one returned fire, the shooting lasted for 20 minutes, the guerrillas claimed 16 deaths, according to eyewitness recollections the death toll was much larger than this, at 4 p.m., Ustasha promised to surrender to the guerrillas.
Guerrilla and British officers
Hundreds of thousands of prisoners lined up in four columns, escorted by guerrillas, towards Yugoslavian territory, after leaving the sight of the British they had no food and water supply, and those who tried to escape were immediately shot, more and more corpses floating on the river along the way, the procession reached Maribor (a city in northwestern Yugoslavia) stopped, the guerrillas began to sort according to rank, unit number, and length of service, and some of them continued to walk inland, leaving them to be dragged by trucks to the side of the anti-tank trench and shot, according to one guerrilla: " The prisoners stood at the edge of the trench full of corpses, I stood a hundred meters away from them, machine guns opened and they fell into the ditch, some pretended to be dead, our men went down one by one with bayonets to "check", the air was filled with screams, and new bodies fell on top of the old ones until the trenches were filled." In 1999, when Maribor built a highway, a 70-meter-long corpse pit was found, containing 1179 bones, divided into 7 layers, an average of 17 corpses per meter, and then 8 such "pits" were found.
The scene of the prisoners arriving in Maribor
Revenge was also underway in other areas, with 1,500 executions in the Kani area, the firing of prisoners who could not walk and stop drinking water in the ranks of the Celje, and the receipt of 30,000 prisoners by the commander of the Yugoslav 11th Division in late May, who disappeared from the records, some of whom were taken to anti-tank trenches, some of whom were imprisoned and sunk to the bottom of the water, and just as the flames of revenge were burning in the Yugoslav land, news of amnesty came.
A place to decide
On August 3, 1945, the Central Committee led by Tito issued an order announcing the pardon of the Chetnikites, Serbs, Croatians, and Slovene nationalists, except for those who committed the most heinous crimes, and by February of the following year a total of 41,320 people had been released, and many of the guerrillas who had a blood feud in many wars were very incomprehensible, but for forty-two years there was no bloodshed in Yugoslavia, and Tito ruthlessly suppressed anyone with nationalist tendencies on the one hand, and on the other hand, achieved equality among all ethnic groups. The above-mentioned executions were not allowed to be mentioned in Tito's time, and the execution sites became military control zones.
Tito in World War II (left)
By the early 1980s, one in seven Yugoslav families consisted of interracial marriages, and it was said that if Tito lived forever, the Yugoslav peoples would be completely integrated, and he died in 1980, and seven years later Milosevic clearly fell to serbia's side when dealing with Kosovo, thus triggering the domino effect and the national wounds being torn open again.