War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945: Occupation and Collaboration (review)

Dimitrije Ljotic, a Serbian collaborationist, died in a car crash in 1945. As Tomasevich describes the incident, it "happened because the driver did not see soon enough that a small bridge on the road was wrecked and the car plunged into a hole" (777). The incident could well stand as an image for the delusions, failures, and eventual bloody ends of all of the collaborationist forces that operated in Yugoslavia during World War II. They intended to go in one direction but went in another, and by the time they began entertaining the notion that they could turn back, the road was somewhere else entirely.

Tomasevich, an authority on Yugoslavia during the first half of the twentieth century, is well positioned to offer this judgment. His volume was intended as the second of a history—of which The Chetniks (Stanford, 1975) was the first—of World War II in Yugoslavia. (A projected third volume abut victorious Partisan forces, unfortunately, will never be seen because of Tomasevich's death in 1994.)

There is much to praise about Tomasevich's contribution. His ability to make exhaustive use of the military and diplomatic archives of themajor forces involved in this region is no small feat, considering the variety of languages required and the way in which these archives have been dispersed and destroyed. He offers the fullest and most objective account available of the activities of the occupiers and collaborators, together with an extensive account of the economic consequences of the occupation—in a context defined by "self-serving writing by the various parties" (xi).

His objectivity is crucially important in an area where World War II historiography and victimology continue to be treated as politics. Although this book has obvious bearing on the recent wars of Yugoslav succession, it is the product of a long dialogue involving official Yugoslav historians, emigre apologists for the quisling regimes, and the small group of independent historians, sociologists, and demographers who sought to produce reliable accounts. His familiarity with both the state of formal research and the propagandistic claims from the period allows him to compare them with one another usefully. Tomasevich describes, using a collage of military archives, memoirs, and personal reminiscences, the astounding degree to which the armed forces of the quisling Croatian state actually functioned as a reliable system to supply information, personnel, and equipment to the Partisans. It also leads him to the subtle revelation of how all of the collaborationist forces maintained the delusion that they could alter their fortunes by switching sides at the end of the war.

The value of Tomasevich's unique mix of source materials is most evident when he estimates how many people were killed by the major forces during the war. He marshals statistical evidence to show the range of what is possible and what cannot be reliably known, and provides rhetorical evidence to set out the motivations for high and low estimates. The combination leads him to a contextualized and reliable estimate of how many people were victims of genocide and deliberate killing.

But the tour de force comes in his review of the charges related to "Bleiburg" (Bleiburg is a village in Carinthia, but its name has become shorthand for all of the Partisan massacres of collaborationist forces around the Austrian border in 1945). Reviewing the propagandistic versions of Bleiburg as well as later memoirs that debunk them, and with reference to the laws of war and local topography, Tomasevich explains what can be known and why no more is possible. Then he draws two indirect but powerful conclusions: first, he argues, widespread summary executions of collaborationists clearly took place (official, otherwise detailed, Partisan histories strangely do not mention any). Second, these summary executions could not possibly have been on the scale described by later supporters of the collaborationists (their memoirs name no specific...