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The Yugoslav communists promoted a simple understanding of the war as a struggle of the Partisans on the one side, representing all Yugoslavia’s peoples and “patriotic forces”, and the occupiers, collaborators and other enemies on the other. Among the main issues of Tito’s initial post-war speeches were the Partisans’ brilliant victories, their struggle for “Brotherhood and unity” among Yugoslavia’s different ethnic groups and the great sacrifices borne by the Yugoslav peoples. The speeches drew extensively on Partisan rhetoric and values – for example by finishing with the Partisans’ war motto “Death to fascism – freedom to the people!”⁵

The heavy burdens borne by the Yugoslav peoples were repeatedly emphasised, sometimes in connection with negotiations with the allies. In a speech given at a public meeting on the 27^th March 1945 in Ljubljana, Tito, while criticising the allies’ approach to the disputes on the Yugoslav-Italian border, stated:

Our peoples, all jointly, Slovenes, Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, Macedonians – have suffered together and together given enormous sacrifices in this great struggle of the freedom-loving nations” … “here are peoples who have given a million and seven hundred thousands victims in this war.⁶

This number of 1.7 million Yugoslav victims was to stay the official estimate throughout the history of socialist Yugoslavia. In 1946, when international reparations were discussed in Paris, the Yugoslavs declared that their country’s losses amounted to 1,706,000 persons.⁷ Decades later, the mathematician Vladeta Vučković revealed that as a young student shortly after the war he was employed in the Department of Statistics to supply Kardelj, then foreign minister and vice-president of the federal government, with scientific statistical support for a significant number of victims.⁸ The number of 1,706,000 was also stated in a report from the Yugoslav reparations commission, from 1946. This number, according to the report, equalled 10.8% of Yugoslavia’s population. It was underlined that the number of Yugoslav victims was surpassed only by the losses suffered by Poland and the Soviet Union, and when excluding these two, the Yugoslav war losses constituted 34% of all casualties on the allied side.⁹

Ill. 3.1. This table, titled “Allied losses in human lives”, graphically illustrates for everyone the enormous sacrifice of the Yugoslav peoples, compared to India, France, Greece, Great Britain, Czechoslovakia, Holland, the USA and others. The losses of the USSR and Poland are conveniently left out, allowing those of Yugoslavia to constitute 34 % of allied losses. From Ljudske i materijalne žrtve Jugoslavije u ratnom naporu 1941-1945, 7.

The internal massacres were not main themes of Tito’s initial speeches after the war. Yet they were regularly, if superficially, mentioned as well-known elements of the war. While the single most important enemy and aggressor in Tito’s accounts were the Germans, the planning and responsibility for war crimes were ascribed to foreign occupiers and internal, now dead or exiled, traitors and enemies. By presenting the war in this way, Tito laid the basis for a narrative that could rally all Yugoslav peoples together against external enemies. On 21^st May 1945, in his first public speech held in Zagreb after the war, Tito stated:

Did you see how the German conqueror in that terrible year of 1941, with the help of his servant Pavelić, and later also with the help of the traitors of the Serbian people, Nedić and Mihailović, and the traitor of the Slovene people, Rupnik, did everything to deepen the chasm not only between the Croatian and Serbian peoples, but also between all the peoples of Yugoslavia?¹⁰

Yet, according to Tito’s account, the Partisans erased this chasm when their fighters consisting of all Yugoslav nationalities fought together for brotherhood and unity.¹¹ While this way of describing the war crimes served to externalise guilt and responsibility from the Yugoslav peoples, care was also taken to ‘balance’ the blame and guilt for betrayal among the different ethnic groups. In this case Tito mentions Pavelić of the Croatian Ustasha, Serbian Chetnik leader Mihailović, Nedić of the Serbian puppet government, and next to them Leon Rupnik, leader of the marionette administration in Ljubljana under Italian and German occupation and instigator of a Slovenian collaborative militia, the Slovene home guards (Slovensko domobranstvo). Tito thus includes main representatives of Yugoslavia’s three largest nations.¹²

While the ethnic aspects of the wartime crimes were not foregrounded in Tito’s speeches, they were not ignored or denied either. The word for people, narod, was mostly used in plural, probably in order to emphasise that the communists recognised the several individual ethnic groups or nations that constituted the population of Yugoslavia, and that, in line with the establishment of the formally federalised state, national oppression was not to be tolerated.¹³

That Serbs were the prime victims of Ustasha slaughtering was regularly mentioned. On the other hand, it was emphasised in Tito’s accounts that war guilt should not be ascribed to any of the Yugoslav peoples as such. In Tito’s speech in Zagreb, Ante Pavelić was openly identified as a Croat, “the greatest criminal who was ever born … by a Croatian mother”, who had thrown shame on the Croat people. But luckily the shame was washed of, claimed Tito, by the Croat sons and daughters, who went into fighting together with the other Yugoslav nations.¹⁴ Speaking at two public gatherings in Serbia on the 7^th July 1945, Tito praised the Serbian Partisans, calling them “true bearers of unity and brotherhood”. Though nationalist propaganda had thrown responsibility for the slaughtering of Serbs in Croatia on innocent Croats, the Partisans did not carry any hint of hatred towards them, he declared:

For them it was obvious that the Croatian people were not guilty because the Ustasha criminals committed such crimes; that the Slovenian people were not guilty for what the domobran criminals did; and that the Serbian people were not guilty for the crimes of various criminals belonging to Nedić or Draža.¹⁵

Thus war guilt was not attached to the peoples, only to the Yugoslav traitors and collaborators. These traitors were often mentioned en bloc, as a common unity, probably with the aim of underlining that they should be seen as similar phenomena, and that every nation had its share. Thereby guilt was distributed equally among the Yugoslav peoples.

To further remove causes for regret and mutual incrimination, Tito claimed that all these traitors had received their punishment and were now dead or, very few of them, in refuge. Thus, according to Tito, the internal enemies and collaborators were now “a matter of the past” and were therefore no longer of any concern.¹⁶ This also meant that there would be no further reasons to discuss guilt and responsibility among the Yugoslav peoples.

With the aim of securing brotherhood and unity and the internal coherence of the Yugoslav state, Tito’s version of the war externalised all the worst brutalities and ignored the co-responsibility of the peoples of post-war Yugoslavia for the crimes committed during the war. While this strategy obviously simplified the reconstruction and stabilisation of the state under communist authority, it also left aside any chance to properly examine and condemn the radical nationalist policies and practices of wartime Yugoslavia.