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The Journal of Military History 67.3 (2003) 972-974



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War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945: Occupation and Collaboration. By Jozo Tomasevich. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8047-3615-4. Notes. Maps. Tables. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xvii, 842. No price given.

In 1975, Professor Tomasevich presented the first volume of what he intended to become a trilogy on the events of World War II in occupied Yugoslavia. War and Revolution in Yugoslavia: The Chetniks was to be followed in due course by one volume each on the collaborators and the Partisans respectively. Even though The Chetniks followed the travails of the Serb Royalist resistance throughout the entire war, it had a largely thematic, as opposed to a chronological structure. This, as well as the fact that a history of any of the factions in a civil war cannot be written without almost constant reference to the others, certainly seemed to guarantee that future volumes would be burdened with a great deal of built-in redundancy and probably be delayed by a needlessly laborious and time-consuming writing process. Now that volume two has finally been published by Prof. Tomasevich's daughter, to whom a great debt is owed for this (Professor Tomasevich passed away in October 1994), it is obvious that these premonitions were all [End Page 972] too justified. It is also equally obvious that the twenty-six-year long waiting period has been worth it.

Following a thematic structure even more closely than the The Chetniks did, Occupation and Collaboration starts by devoting close to fifty pages to the history of prewar Yugoslavia. After a brief account of the country's partition in 1941, the wartime years in Slovenia and Serbia get about fifty pages each. The next six chapters (pp. 233-511), which deal with the domestic politics, foreign relations, and armed forces of the "Independent State of Croatia" (also known by its Croat acronym NDH) form the core of the book, which is followed by treatises of different length on the impact of the Holocaust, the role of the churches, the controversial issue of Yugoslav human losses, and the end of the war; three massive chapters comprising more than a hundred pages (pp. 611-717) deal with the economic exploitation of the country by the Axis occupiers and the long-term consequences this had for Yugoslavia's recovery. The almost manic thoroughness with which Tomasevich has covered this ground betrays his academic origins as an economic historian. Readers without a degree in economics—such as the reviewer—will find the going pretty hard at times. The post-April 1941 military operations by the occupying powers are almost completely absent. Since the majority of them had Partisan formations as their target, it was the author's intention to discuss them in volume three.

The author's grasp of his source material in five languages is nothing short of stupendous and is especially in evidence on the Yugoslav side of things, where even sources of such a notoriously poor yield as émigrés' accounts are relentlessly mined for even the smallest fragment of historical fact. On the Axis side, there are just a few unaccountable gaps (the first two volumes on Italian operations in Croatia by Odonne Talpo and the Peter Broucek edition of the diaries kept by the German plenipotentiary general in Croatia) in an otherwise all-encompassing bibliography.

The author relentlessly castigates the ultra-Fascist Ustasha state that comprised both Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina and even takes the time to make a detailed case against its legal birthright (over and above the crimes it was to perpetrate); at the same time, he is more sympathetic towards the unfortunate administration of General Nedic in German-occupied Serbia, mainly on account of its efforts to aid the Serb refugees fleeing Croat-, Hungarian-, or Bulgarian-induced ethnic cleansing. In view of the fact that since the end of the war Nedic has been the subject of numerous publications written with the politically motivated intention of either damning him beyond redemption or exonerating...

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