Fight the Nazis or fight your countrymen? From Marshal Tito’s Partisans in Yugoslavia to the ELAS fighters in Greece, that is the animating question among the Balkans resistance movements. For many, the question is already answered. It is Mihailović and his Chetniks and EDES, EKKA, and the Greek royalist government who must be out-maneuvered first. British foreign policy has so far failed to change this state of affairs, can Churchill get his SOE officers to stop these civil wars?
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Hosted by: Spartacus Olsson
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Marek Kamiński
Community Management: Ian Sowden
Written by: Francis van Berkel
Research by: Francis van Berkel
Map animations by: Daniel Weiss
Map research by: Sietse Kenter
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Artwork and color grading by: Mikołaj Uchman
Sound design by: Marek Kamiński
Colorizations by:
Mikołaj Uchman
Carlos Ortega Pereira, BlauColorizations, https://www.instagram.com/blaucolorizations/
Source literature list: http://bit.ly/WW2sources
Archive footage: Screenocean/Reuters – https://www.screenocean.com
Image sources:
National Portrait Gallery
IWM: NA 16313, NAM 144
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Good luck to our community managers dealing with the comment section on this one! But, more seriously, this story forces us to look at the war from a different angle. Here, in the Balkans, we have a civil war built on centuries of ethnic, religious, and political tensions. A civil war which is nested within a world war. Add in the Allied and Axis powers battling friend and foe for influence and you have a cauldron that’s just waiting to boil over. If you know your Balkan history, you’ll know that this story is far from over and that the legacy of this war will contribute to much more bloodshed in the future. Never forget.
Thank you.
Great video!
Btw, would you make a video for the rest of the Balkan countries?
Romania and Bulgaria are very interesting stories.
In Serbia even today no one knows what is going on same as back then, beating the messenger to say mind your own business
😂
Great video.
All the best, Francis! ❤
I hope that you guys will eventually cover all the atrocities commited inside the Independent State of Croatia by Ustashe. Forgive me if I am wrong, but I haven't seen that you guys have covered extensively these crimes against humanity, and according to my research there were a lot of crimes against humanity throughout 1941-1945. I would love to see a special about this. Thank you for everything that you are doing on this channel.
One of those cases where it becomes really hard to make sense of things and all parties seem to be of a variety of shades of grey other than the Nazi's, seemingly hell-bent on remaining almost cartoonishly evil. Thanks for trying to educate us and accepting the consequences of doing so.
A great video.
I wonder if your last line was spoken as a historian addressing the extremists of the past or directed at the present day extremists who have been on the march against democracy in many places in the world?
Great Video as always ❤
Hi Sparty
So much details covered.
This information I couldn't find anywhere.
Never forget
Smrt fašizmu – sloboda narodu!
Great show, Sparty. I am really glad that you jump into what is happening in the Balkans because these actions continue to effect the region even today(.i.e. Kosovo, Bosnia)
By far, this is the worst episode of any Time Ghost production.
Classic case of reading history backwards. Sparty, I am really sorry that the communists around Europe and not some social-liberal guerillas of 2023. internet, were the most fierce anti-nazi fighters, but you will have to accept it. In the name of intellectual honesty. None of the brave Partisans in Yugoslavia, USSR or France are responsible for what Putin is doing today.
Chetniks were full nazi collaborators, paid, fed and equiped by the Nazis to crush insurgence against them. People joined Tito because all the rest were nationalist gangs of killers and rapists, killing "wrong" nations for the Hitler's war effort.
Serbia was not invaded but LIBERATED by the Partisans with the aid of Red Army. Tito's forces liberated Yugoslavia by themselves, with Allied help!
We don't need Madeline Albright's school of historical revisionism here.
Story about "two totalitarisms" is a complete BS in this case.
It's better when you write these episodes.
Apparently Bulgaria did not exist during WWII😂
Stay strong Spartacus and the team, and keep bringing us unbiased content, because the war is coming to an end and you´re going to be fiercefully attacked by the brainwashed internet commies militia for speaking the truth!
Why was this part of WaH? Is it because of the British purge of the Greek navy? Or was it because of British support for the nationalist groups?
The name is pronounced Shu-bash-ich. We actually have two "ch" sounds — a shorter, chirpier "ch" and a more pronounced "tsch". The chirpy one is with the acute diacritic, the more pronounced one is with the caron diacritic.
Thank you for all your hard work, and you're balanced delivery. Truth is complicated, war involves evil. few emerge with "clean hands".
Tito accepts the Terms of Service with no intention whatsoever of sticking to them; a tale as old as time.
War Against Humanity should do an episode on Operation Deer. The CIA operation with Ho Chi Minh in 1945 at the end of WW2. Including the interviews with Archemdes Patti the OSS agent that worked with Ho Chi Minh. Good stuff.
Some outlandish things were penned in the (for Yugoslavia) shitty 90s – that Tito was a son of Winston Churchill and a Polish countess – to explain why UK backed his communist partisans (IRL it was agreed with Stalin in 1943. due to war necessities) and perhaps why the communist Yugoslavia had an almost identical anthem as Poland.
Long before the Allies, the Germans and Italians realized that the partisans represent a military factor of first-rate importance, before which the modern army is helpless in many ways. In the course of three years, they launched no less than seven large-scale offensives against them, each employing more than ten divisions with all the supporting branches of the army. Once or twice larger partisan forces were close to being surrounded and exterminated. The enemy's aviation, against which they had no protection, played a significant role here by discovering their positions and tying them up until the ground army units arrived to deal with them. But every time they managed to get away, disappear and reappear in another place, attacking the enemy where he least expected it. During each of these offensives, extensive troop movements exposed the enemy, more than ever before, to partisan attacks and ambushes. Because of this, all these offensives failed and the partisans, although exhausted, hungry and poorly equipped, continued their resistance undisturbed.[1]“
(Fitzroy MacLean)
I love your channel and never comment on it, but you guys have seriously dropped the ball when it comes to the Titos partisan war against the Axis in Yugoslavia.
The 7 Enemy Offensives as they are called in yugoslav historiography are not even mentioned let alone the front lines and units.
The Partisan campaign is on par if not even bigger than the Allied offensive in italy when it comes to troop numbers on both sides and scale of operations, even well before the Drvar Offensive which happens this year.
I am very dissapointed with you guys, the scale and context of this conflict is completely lost to western audiences and also post communist yugoslav states where the anticommunist revisionist politics are misleading new generations of the true History.
People of all beliefs and socioeconomic backgrounds joined the Communist Partisans because that is what every normal human being did at that time.
My grandfather was one of them, so were many other family members who never thought about communism nor did they think of themselves as hardline Stalinist (or otherwise) communists as the American narrative suggests.
Life in communist yugoslavia was also very different and quite egalitarian in terms of people not thinking about themselves in nationalistic terms, which is a very special rarity in world terms.
Normal people from all walks of life were joining the only organized super effective resistance against the Black Death.
P.S. I am not a communist symphatizer, I am a honest classically Liberal croatian expat living in Ireland.
Cheers.
Fitzroy McClain: Why do we support the partisans? They are sworn communists and will turn to the Soviet Union.
Winston Churchill: Do you intend to live in Yugoslavia after the war?
Fitzroy McClain : No, sir.
Winston Churchill: Me neither.
I got no dog in this fight. But I gotta say that one thing that always boggles me is the amount of time and energy the different partisan groups spent fighting and undermining each other for control when they could’ve been devoting all those resources towards expelling the Germans. It’s a fight that’s only understandable at the political level since whoever wins that fight will ultimately become that country’s new government, but it’s also sort of like fighting for a control of a sinking ship (or a ship that would be sinking if not for Allied aid).
I can just feel the raw frustration of the Allied command, who could only have seen these petty squabbles for the impediment they were to the ultimate goal of defeating Germany and liberating Europe, even though they (ie the Soviets and Western Allies) are in large part responsible for inserting their own great power games into so many local struggles.
To say nothing of the civilian populace; caught between a brutal occupation and these squabbling “freedom fighters” who sometimes behave just as badly or whose actions invite the retribution of the Axis.
Will there be something about Jasenovac concentration camp and Ustashe genocide?
Beware anyone at any time who gets involved in the Balkans! The closest to lasting peace was with Tito and it's not any better now! It is always a simmering pot! I wonder why. If it is all based on the different then it just goes to show that religion has no place anywhere in government! As for Churchill, I read his 3 volume biography and he is on my top 3 list of most admired people-not just for his WWII leadership. But, I must admit, he had total blinders on when it came to 'reading the room' when it came to Monarchies and Empires. He insisted on telling himself that the British Empire and all the Monarchies that had existed pre-war would just take up the same the minute the war ended. He failed to realize that all those men and women who served in all the world's military regardless of Ally or Axis were about to demand a much louder voice in their government and Colonies were not about to be used as cannon fodder for the Bwana any longer. Thanks Sparty!
Good luck and Congratulations Francis. This was an excellent and well-written episode! Are we getting a preview of a probable Doctoral Thesis?!!
Good luck with the PhD, Francis! It's not every day that you see this level of masochism.
Ay Carmela!
When Churchill had a meeting with the senior British officer in Yugoslavia, he was informed that the Partisans were a Communist movement and intended to impose it after the War. Churchill replied, "Do you intend to settle in Yugoslavia after the war?". The officer, stunned, replied, "No, of course not!" "Neither do I, so I suggest we let the Yugoslavs settle their political matters themselves"
You mean, when UK and USA bombed us in '45,
And murdering more people than Germans in '41…