In Yugoslavia, more than one resistance group existed. One group was led by General Dragoljub “Draza” Mihailovich. His fighters were called the Chetniks. They were very effective at guerilla warfare, and disrupted Nazi activity.
A second group was led by Josip “Tito” Broz, a communist. Tito was not very effective in military action against the Nazis, but he was politically astute: he worked to create conditions which would allow him to seize power once the war was over and the Nazis had left.
Draza worked continually to styme the Nazis. He also worked to link his Chetniks to the Allies, i.e., to England, France, and the United States. They could supply his group with materials and equipment; he could supply the Allies with information.
Tito’s communists worked with the USSR. They received support to set up Tito as a dictator after the war’s end; in return, Tito would rule Yugoslavia in a way that was favorable to the Soviet Socialists. Tito left Yugoslavia in May 1944, and spent the last year of the war hiding: his communist group gave little resistance to the Nazis.
Draza continued to fight against the Nazis until the end of the war, and he helped to liberate Yugoslavia.
The Allies were naturally inclined to support Draza. But the Soviets had a spy planted within the British intelligence agencies, specifically, in an office in Cairo, Egypt. James Klugmann worked for British intelligence, but was actually an agent for the USSR. For the British, he compiled reports about how the resistance movements were working in Yugoslavia. For the Soviets, he gave those reports a certain slant or bias.
Klugmann’s reports gave the impression that Tito was a brave hero, fighting the Nazis, and that Draza was ineffective in trying to liberate Yugoslavia.
Misled by Klugmann’s descriptions of the situation, the Allies gave less support to Draza and more to Tito. This slowed the eventual liberation of Yugoslavia, and meant that more people died in the fighting. As historians Stan Evans and Herbert Romerstein write,
Based on a steady stream of such reports, London turned decisively toward Tito. By the end of 1943, the British Foreign Office concluded that “There is no evidence of any effective anti-Nazi action initiated by Mihailovich,” and that “since he is doing nothing from a military point of view to justify our continued assistance,” a cutoff of material to the Chetniks was in order. A few months later, this would in fact be the policy adopted by the Western allies.
The war finally ended in May 1945. The Soviet army had large numbers of troops in Yugoslavia. More importantly, the Soviet espionage network was working to ensure that Tito could seize power without any meaningful resistance.
Before the end of 1945, the Soviet Socialists had staged a rigged election - the Communist Party was the only party on the ballot - and Tito was installed as dictator. Communists would oppress Yugoslavia for the next four decades.
Once in power, the communists moved quickly to arrest Draza. By July 1946, a show trial had convicted Draza of alleged crimes and executed him. In 2015, after documents from communist intelligence agencies revealed that the charges against Draza had been fabricated, a court in Serbia examined the documents, made them public for the first time, and declared that Draza was innocent.
