Mihailovich: A Post-Mortem

by ROBERT LEE WOLFF

1

THE death of General Mihailovich before a firing squad of the present Communist regime of Yugoslavia brought to a close one of the strangest cases of the twentieth century. The unsuccessful efforts of the State Department to persuade the Tito government to admit the testimony of American witnesses for the defense, and the eloquent full-page newspaper advertisements of the Committee for a Fair Trial for Draja Mihailovich, reflected widespread American suspicion of the Tito government, and the most strenuous doubts as to the actual guilt of Mihailovich himself.

Americans remember the Serb revolt of March, 1941, the first news of Yugoslav guerrilla opposition to the Germans, and the emergence of Mihailovich as the personification of indomitable resistance to the enemy. There was even a full-length Hollywood production, called Chetniks, with an alleged facsimile of the General as its hero.

How is it possible that Mihailovich should have collaborated with the enemy? Why did Britain and then the U.S. shift military support to Tito? Even after we abandoned him, Mihailovich rescued American aviators, didn’t he? Was not the trial, with his alleged confession, just another show like the Moscow purge trials or the Reichstag Fire trial, where tortured, tired, or defective defendants had been bludgeoned into confessing? And if he did collaborate, why should a committee of leading Americans be so warm in his defense? Such questions are still unanswered for most Americans.

The first question is, of course: Did Mihailovich collaborate with the enemy? There is no doubt in my mind that he did. The U.S. armies captured in Germany both the former chief Nazi political officer for Southeast Europe — Dr. Hermann Neubacher — and the SS Major General who was Himmler’s representative in Yugoslavia. Both these men told American interrogating officers in detail of their arrangements with Mihailovich. Their accounts contain evidence against Mihailovich at least as damning as any known to the Tito government when it tried him. Germany had been defeated; both officials were prisoners. It could have done them no good to claim Mihailovich as a wartime collaborator of theirs if he had not in fact been one.

Even without their testimony I should feel sure that Mihailovich had collaborated with the Germans and Italians. In 1943 an American officer, who was later killed in a plane crash in Yugoslavia, came back to Washington to report, after several months with Tito’s Partisans. With him he had a pack of tiny photographs — negatives of documents which he had seen and microfilmed at Partisan HQ. When developed and enlarged, these proved to contain detailed correspondence in Serbo-Croat and German between local German commanders and local Mihailovich commanders with regard to the day-to-day routine business which was carried on between them: operational plans for attacks on local Partisan groups, arrangements for passes enabling Chetniks to come and go freely in Germanheld territory, and, in one case, even a German warning that Mihailovich’s followers were not to be permitted to shout “Long live King Peter!" since Peter was an enemy of the German Reich.

These documents were only part of a large file which the Partisans had captured. Realizing the great value of these documents to his cause, Tito permitted the British representative at Partisan HQ — Brigadier MacLean, who could read both the languages — to make a detailed study of the file. This study convinced MacLean (who was a Conservative member of Parliament and a close personal friend of Winston Churchill) that Mihailovich and his subordinate commanders were working with the Germans; and it was his report to Churchill which determined the eventual shift in British policy. When I was in Yugoslavia in January, 1945, I asked Brigadier MacLean whether there was any possibility that these documents could have been forged. He explained that there were far too many of them, that their capture had been reliably attested, and that the Partisans had no equipment for so wholesale a forgery job. The Tito government has now published one large volume of them, and a second may already be in print.

We must also consider the information supplied incidentally by the experiences of U.S. and British liaison officers with the Chetniks. Colonel MacDowell, who was sent to Mihailovich in the late summer of 1944, found himself, within a very short time after his arrival at Mihailovich’s secret HQ, talking in person to Neubacher’s right-hand man, Staerker, who had come to the HQ for a discussion.

Captain Walter Mansfield, who repeatedly risked his life to secure vital intelligence for the U.S. government, told, in his first report after his return from Yugoslavia, how he was saved from capture and probable death at the hands of a German patrol encountered accidentally while he was on his way out of the country with a Chetnik escort. A Mihailovich officer in charge of the detachment identified himself as a Chetnik to the commander of the German patrol, and the whole detachment (including Mansfield, whom the Germans would have been delighted to capture) was permitted to pass without further scrutiny. Major Rootham, a British officer attached to Mihailovich, has concluded, in a book just published in England, that the forces of Mihailovich and those of Nedich, the Serb puppet Premier, shared the supplies of arms made available by the Germans, and that the Chetniks knew well in advance the details of the German operational plans against the Partisans.

All this evidence is independent of information collected from Yugoslav sources, much of which is naturally suspect. But it should at least be noted that Mihailovich men themselves, Nedich men, Partisans, Germans, Italians, and simple Yugoslav peasants with no political axe to grind have reported in great number about the specific aspects of the collaboration known to them individually.

The confessions made by the General himself and by many of his aides at their trial cannot be dismissed, though some were later retracted and some were self-contradictory. Mihailovich was no old Bolshevik with a psychological urge to confess irrespective of his guilt. He was a Serb patriot, and therein lies the answer to a second and even more interesting question: How and why did he collaborate with the enemy?

2

IN the first place, there should be no doubt that Mihailovich hated the Germans. He was sincere in his initial opposition to them, and, like most Serbs, always hoped and confidently expected that they would eventually be expelled. But the Partisan movement rose only a little later than his own, headed by Tito, an experienced Communist organizer and agitator, who also happened to be a Croat.

As a professional soldier Mihailovich had no particular political program. But he was devoted to the Serb-dominated dictatorship established by King Alexander in 1929, which was dedicated to the maintenance of Serb supremacy over the other peoples in Yugoslavia, and had become widely unpopular within the country. The Serb nationalists formed a government-in-exile after the speedy collapse of the Yugoslav armies before the German advance. Mihailovich sealed his connection with them by accepting the post of Minister of War in the Cabinet in January, 1942.

Tito, on the other hand, made the widest appeal to non-Serbs as well as to Serbs by promising full democratic liberties after the war, and by conducting his recruiting drives in a manner likely to appeal to people who had for years been deprived of elementary freedoms. Orthodox and Roman Catholic priests, Moslems, women, youths, Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes appeared together on local platforms behind Partisan lines, and whipped up genuine enthusiasm for the movement, whose Communist core was minimized.

In any case, the dictatorship of Alexander had pinned the label Communist on any person or group which opposed it. The regime impartially imprisoned as Reds both old-line Marxist organizers and young students in the universities who were guilty of nothing but. political idealism. As a result the word Communist had lost much of its meaning in Yugoslavia. Non-Communists and anti-Communists, peasants who wanted to fight back, joined the Partisan movement in great numbers, in spite of the Communist Party membership of its leaders. Many of these early enthusiasts are no doubt bitterly disappointed now, since the establishment by Tito of Communist totalitarianism and a police regime of the left fully as repressive as those of the right.

Tito’s movement did not get under way until after the German attack on Russia, when it became the duty of Communists everywhere to cease collaborating with the Germans and to turn against them. But this attack (June 22, 1941) followed so soon upon the defeat of the Yugoslavs (mid-April, 1941) that Mihailovich’s opposition movement had not yet become effective. So the two groups started about even. During a short period they worked together, and conducted joint operations against the Germans. The rival leaders, however, soon developed differences in military theory at least as important as any of the political disagreements which separated them. To Tito, as a loyal Communist thinking always of relieving the pressure on the U.S.S.R. and of building up his own forces, it was imperative to offer sustained and continual opposition to the Germans. German massacres of civilians in reprisal were ignored, and young men encountered in the villages were frequently drafted and sent into combat untrained and ill-equipped. Although he too is frequently charged with drafting peasants in the same way, Mihailovich was more cautious; mindful of the terrible Serb losses in the First World War, and moved by the fear that the Serbs might become fewer in number than the Croats, he was anxious to husband his strength. He became inactive, and those Yugoslavs who wanted to fight the Germans joined Tito.

Mihailovich’s theory of inactivity was developed over the whole period of the war: he was waiting, he always said, for the day when Allied troops would land in Yugoslavia. Then he would muster 500,000 men, who, in one tremendous operation, would push the Germans out of the country. As time wore on, Mihailovich was faced with a dilemma. He had to try to persuade the Allies simultaneously both that he was so strong that he deserved their sole military assistance, and that he was so weak that he could do no fighting against the Germans until the Allies landed. In any case, this policy, together with his official position in the Government-in-Exile, and his violent diatribes against the Partisans, led to collaboration and to ruin.

These political and tactical differences of opinion split Mihailovich from Tito. It was not long before the Italians and Germans knew of the break and took advantage of it by offering aid against the “Communists” to some of Mihailovich’s field commanders. Collaboration was most intimate at first in Italian-occupied Dalmatia and Montenegro. It soon extended to the territory of the “independent” puppet state of Croatia, where the Axis had set up a regime of savage Croat extremists, the Ustashi. In areas under Ustashi control, they carried out fearful massacres of the Serbs; and some of the local Serb leaders who were in sympathy with Mihailovich may have turned to the Germans and Italians partly to secure protection against the Ustashi.

In Serbia proper the line of approach to Mihailovich at first was through the German-sponsored puppet regime of General Milan Nedich. Since it was to the advantage of the occupying powers to divide the potential Yugoslav opposition as much as possible, they had sponsored extreme nationalist regimes in both Croatia and Serbia, where the numerically insignificant Fascist Party of Dimitriye Lyotich shared with Nedich the confidence of the Germans. It is of great incidental interest that both Nedich and Lyotich were close relatives of Constantin Fotich, Ambassador of the Government-inExile to the United States, and still a leading figure in the mobilization of American opinion for Mihailovich. Mihailovich worked with Nedich, and both worked directly with the Germans.

Collaboration was probably always grudging in Mihailovich’s case, but it involved the acceptance of arms and supplies, the execution of concerted attacks on the Partisans, agreements whereby the Chetniks were allowed the unmolested use of certain roads during certain hours, and the like. Mihailovich was never so deeply involved with the Germans as were many of his subordinate commanders, over whose activities, in the later stages at least, it is doubtful whether he exercised any effective control. It was probably never a practicable idea to maintain a guerrilla army which had not fighting but waiting as its purpose; and the Chetnik armies were never a well-organized or cohesive force.

For some time the Chetniks’ growing weakness and the Partisans’ growing strength were successfully concealed from the outside world by Mihailovich’s extremely effective propaganda service. The diplomatic corps of the Government-in-Exile devoted itself to spreading accounts of the heroic resistance being carried on by its Minister of War, and intimating that the Partisans — by now more than half Serb in composition — were all Croats and Communists. American newspapers blossomed with press releases making the most extravagant claims; if Mihailovich had ever killed half as many Germans as Ambassador Fotich claimed for him, he would have beaten the Allied armies to Berlin by two years.

The so-called Woods and Mountains radio station, whose broadcasts allegedly emanated from General Mihailovich’s secret headquarters, regularly claimed for the Chetniks whatever military successes had actually been scored against the Germans by the Partisans. Not until Stoyan Pribichevich, then writing for Time, Life, and Fortune, Daniel DeLuce, and C. L. Sulzberger, Jr., of the Times, published the story of the true state of affairs did the American public have any inkling that the Partisans were a force to be reckoned with or that Mihailovich had not been fighting steadily.

3

BEFORE Mihailovich’s behavior can be fully understood, the origin and meaning of his political ideas must be taken into account. After the First World War the South Slavs had rushed to form a federal state in order to forestall Italian demands on Slavic territory. With far too little constitutional preparation, the Croats — with their Latin alphabet, Roman Catholic religion, and Western cultural tradition acquired under the Habsburgs — were tossed into a centralized state with the Serbs, Montenegrins, and Macedonians, who use the Cyrillic alphabet, are Orthodox or Moslem in religion, and have an Eastern cultural tradition acquired initially from Byzantium and maintained under Turkish occupation.

The Serbs were a relative majority of the population; the country’s capital and dynasty were Serb; moreover, it had been the Serbs who had fought on the Allied side for the creation of a Greater Serbia. The Serb political leaders assumed that the new state was to be that Greater Serbia; in general they tried to impose this idea on the Croats. For their part the Croats (many of whom regarded the Serbs as Eastern barbarians without culture, while many Serbs, in turn, regarded the Croats as effete intellectuals or as mere serfs) found their cities policed by Serb policemen and their taxes used for public improvements in Macedonia or South Serbia.

The twenty years between the wars were crowded by the incidents of the fight between the federalists, who wanted varying degrees of local autonomy, and the centralists, who wanted to preserve Serb domination, and are often called Pan-Serbs or Great Serbs. To this Great Serb tradition belonged King Alexander and his chief political advisers. To it belonged most of the top Yugoslav Army officers and most of the top clergy in the Orthodox Church. To it, for their own purposes, belonged the little group of powerful big business men, who profited ruthlessly by the exploitation of the country’s natural resources, and who were known as the charshiya, a sort of cross between Wall Street and Tammany Hall at their most unreconstructed. To it belonged most of the influential politicians in the successive cabinets of King Peter’s Government-in-Exile, so that the dynasty was associated with it in the popular mind.

Exacerbated by what they regarded as Croat cowardice in the face of the German advance in 1941, driven to fury by the savage Ustashi massacres of the Serbs, and outraged that a Croat and a Communist led the Partisans, the Great Serbs during the war became more intransigent than ever. Hating Hitler, they hated Tito more. They hoped they might return to expel the Croats altogether; and most of them wanted not to re-create any kind of Yugoslavia but to establish a Greater Serbia. Fotich’s military attaché in Washington during the war, Major Zhivan Knezhevich, a Great Serb tried in absentia with Mihailovich, was frequently heard to remark that the massacre of two million Croats after the war would be the only way by which peace and order could be restored. He was regarded as a moderate in some Great Serb circles.

To the Great Serb group Mihailovich by background and training belonged. In many respects he seems to have been the type of army officer called by the Serbs a “boot,” to indicate a narrow professionalism of outlook. Never politically-minded, he was caught up in a swirl of violent political crosscurrents. His character was full of contradictions. So brave that he refused to be evacuated before the Partisans caught up with him, he is reported, while awaiting the outcome of his appeal, to have urged his guards to “Shoot the others,”meaning the defendants who were tried with him. One day he admitted collaboration, the next he denied it. A peasant stolidity, a strong sense of honor, and a certain constancy — despite his confusion he certainly had. Unpredictable and quixotic, he almost defies analysis by a Western mind. The only frame into which his character can be fitted is that supplied by the limited and outworn ideas of Pan-Serbism.

Before a moral judgment is passed on Mihailovich, it should be remembered that collaboration itself is in the Balkan tradition. Peoples accustomed to oppressive foreign occupiers generally develop techniques of rendering such limited assistance to the oppressor as may enable them to live to fight another day. During their long centuries under the Turks, the Serbs developed such a technique of collaboration, and the practice has never been looked upon with the opprobrium with which it was viewed in the West, especially during this last war. The greatest Serb hero, the fourteenth-century Kralyevich Marko, center of the famous ballad cycle, helped his enemy, the Turk, kill his people, the Serbs, in this way. Viewed in this light, the whole relationship of Mihailovich to the Germans takes on moral aspects usually not thought of in the West.

4

FROM the moment of its outbreak, the civil war in Yugoslavia between Tito and Mihailovich had international implications. It would have been natural to expect the Soviet Union to favor the Partisans and to manifest suspicion of the Government-in-Exile and Mihailovich; and to expect the Western Allies to support King Peter and the legal government of the country — of which Mihailovich was a member — and to view with disfavor the Communist tendencies of the Partisan movement.

As things worked out, however, the powers did not behave according to the pattern. The U.S.S.R. gave the Partisans no material support (probably largely because of its own desperate military situation and the difficulties of transport) and limited its moral support to denunciations of Mihailovich on the Moscow Radio. It maintained diplomatic relations with the Government-in-Exile until a Partisan victory was certain and a formula had been found for making Tito’s regime the constitutional successor of past governments. Thus the grave international complications which might have resulted if each of the parties to the Yugoslav domestic struggle had found a great Ally to support it were at least postponed until such inter-Allied disagreements could no longer benefit the Germans.

Britain, for its part, in November, 1943, received Brigadier MacLean’s report on Mihailovich’s collaboration and on the probable great value of the military assistance to be expected of the Partisans; and, although it took some months for his recommendations to be followed, the British government eventually made its decision on the basis of purely military considerations. Tito was killing Germans; he was interested in killing more Germans; Mihailovich was not interested in killing Germans until he could obtain massive Allied support, which Britain and the U.S. could not supply; meanwhile he was killing only Partisans. Tito’s forces were far larger, far better organized, and far more effective. So the British withdrew their support and their liaison officers from Mihailovich and decided to give Tito whatever military support could be spared for Yugoslavia. At the same time they continued to recognize King Peter’s Government-in-Exile, and to work to bring Peter and Tito together. But the differences between Peter’s Great Serbs and Tito’s Communists were too deep-seated for reconciliation; moreover the Communists were on the ground and had the power; they were not disposed to share it with their helpless old enemies in exile.

So, in deciding to support Tito, the British let political considerations go, presumably hoping that Tito’s democratic protestations were sincere, or that the Communists in the Partisan movement, always a minority, would not be able to retain control over the movement after hostilities had ceased. Churchill has since publicly declared this to have been his greatest mistake: the Communists, though relatively few in number, proved to be entrenched in the top positions of the movement. They were able successfully to accomplish the transition from leadership of a wartime guerrilla movement to political control of a state freed from enemy occupation, and to resist all compromise with Peter.

It is difficult to see, however, even in the light of hindsight, how the British could have made any other decision: they had always to consider the prospect that, if they continued to support Mihailovich, whom both they and the Russians knew to be collaborating with the enemy, and if Mihailovich then used British arms against the Yugoslav Communists, the Anglo-Soviet alliance, which, of course, it was essential to preserve and strengthen, would be subjected to severe strain. At the time, the British perhaps still expected that eventually they would make landings in force in the Balkans, and may well have reasoned that, if they liberated Yugoslavia at some time in the future, they could exercise sufficient political influence to keep the country from going Communist. As things turned out, of course, it was the Red Army which liberated Yugoslavia, and this act was to put the final seal of success on the operations of the Partisans. It is probably true that the British did not try early enough or hard enough to arrange a truce in the Yugoslav civil war.

5

THE policy of our government in the MihailovichTito dispute was determined initially by the fact that Yugoslavia lay within a British military theater, in which the British were primarily responsible for military decisions. The decision to withdraw support from Mihailovich and to give it to Tito and his Partisans was in essence a military decision, in which the U.S. acquiesced.

But our acceptance of the decision was complicated by several other factors. A legitimate and indeed compelling reason for the U.S. to maintain relations with Mihailovich after the British had severed them was provided by the fact that the U.S. Army Air Forces were taking off every day from Italy to bomb installations in the Balkans and Central Europe. Many plane crews whose machines had been shot up parachuted to safety in Chetnik territory and were given good treatment by Mihailovich and his men until they could be evacuated to Italy. These men, grateful to Mihailovich, have been among the foremost to testify in his behalf at the hearings of the Committee for a Fair Trial for Draja Mihailovich. One of them summarized the evidence and views of them all when he said, in effect: “Mihailovich was so good to us that he could not have collaborated with the Germans.”

Obviously, this is a complete non sequitur: Mihailovich was perfectly capable of treating Americans well, and collaborating with the Germans at the same time; it was to his interest, as he understood it, to do both; and, in fact, he did both. It was always his hope that Yugoslavia would be rescued by the British and Americans, from what he regarded as the menace of Communism and Russian occupation. He hoped that we would restore the legitimate government and permit it to dispose of Tito.

A second factor complicating the U.S. attitude toward Mihailovich was the reluctance of our Intelligence services to accept the British decision that all liaison officers at his HQ were to be withdrawn. Acting on the sound principle that our government was entitled to independent information from any place in the world, the OSS succeeded in getting an American mission to Mihailovich approved as late as the summer of 1944. By then the military position of the Chetniks was hopeless, but the arrival of U.S. officers long after the last Englishman had left bolstered Mihailovich’s morale and aroused Tito’s keenest suspicions. The Partisans’ eventual victory had already been assured by their own efforts and by the advance of the Red Army almost to the Yugoslav frontiers. It was too late to reverse the basic decision which had already been made, that the Western Allies would not invade the Balkans. It was only by such an invasion that Mihailovich’s (mostly potential) forces could have been activated, Tito kept out of power, and the country kept — probably only temporarily — out of the Soviet sphere.

We were not prepared to take these steps, but the late arrival of a U.S. mission to Mihailovich aroused in him the hope, and in the Partisans the fear, that we were. So, although the principle behind the U.S. mission to Mihailovich was sound, and although at one moment during its course it seemed possible that the German surrender in the whole of the Balkans might be secured, the effect was unfortunate. Cause for suspecting the U.S. of favoring forces friendly to the enemy had been given the already suspicious Partisans, who acted in a most unfriendly manner. It should hastily be said, however, that — to judge from developments since the war — no Communist regime is willing to exhibit friendliness to the U.S. anyhow.

In attempting to account for the growth of American sympathy for Mihailovich, one should remember that the U.S. has a large number of citizens of Yugoslav origin, many of whom are still interested in the politics of the old country; so that there are, for example, American counterparts of all the numerous Yugoslav political factions, including Great Serbs, Ustashi, and, of course, Communists. This fact vitally affected the recruitment of our Intelligence services. The British, who have had a trained Intelligence service for centuries, were able to use for work in Yugoslavia British subjects with no Yugoslav connections, who knew the language and had suitable training and background. The U.S., on the other hand, which was painfully beginning to recruit and train Intelligence and operations officers for special missions, naturally found itself, in the case of Yugoslavia, turning to Yugoslav-Americans.

Although these men were loyal citizens of the United States, they sometimes had a bias one way or another in their attitude toward Yugoslav politics. This resulted, for example, in our sending to Mihailovich some U.S. officers and enlisted men of Yugoslav origin who had Great Serb sympathies. These young men spoke Serbo-Croat; they fell into the adventurous spirit of guerrillas; as Americans, they got a royal welcome; they became deep sympathizers of Mihailovich and haters of the Partisans. One of them, for example, made a propaganda speech over the Chetnik Radio, which seemed to local listeners to lend the whole prestige of the U.S. to Mihailovich, and which went down as another black mark against us in Tito’s book. Naturally enough, some of these men are to be found among the supporters of the Mihailovich Committee.

6

THERE are other reasons why U.S. opinion has continued to support Mihailovich. For one thing, Southeast Europe is still so little known to the average American or Briton that quite often, on being introduced to the area, he will feel a great sense of discovery. Here, after all, he says to himself, are charming, intelligent people, sophisticated, but with a disconcerting and exciting streak of primitiveness. Unfortunately what usually happens is that the discoverer falls in Jove with the first Balkan people he meets. Since each of the Balkan peoples more or less hates all the others, the American or English writer who adopts one as a favorite often adopts all its prejudices. His writing is often delightful reading; it rarely contributes much to the sober solution of pressing political problems.

The outstanding example of recent years is the extraordinary book by Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. Miss West has written what in many ways is a literary masterpiece, but what amounts, politically, to little more than a glorification of the Serbs. Rebecca West was, as might have been expected, one of the most vigorous British supporters of Mihailovich. There are also certain American Serbophiles who will hear no evil of Mihailovich, and who repudiate as Communist-inspired any suggestion that he ever collaborated with the enemy. Ruth Mitchell, author of The Serbs Choose War, is one of these. Ray Brock, former New York Times reporter, is another. Both were members of the Committee for a Fair Trial for Mihailovich.

Moreover, some officers of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the U.S., like some in the Church of England, are much interested in the possibility of securing some sort of ecclesiastical unity with the Orthodox Church — which is, among other things, the traditional official state church of the Serbs, and whose priests in this country were largely proSerb and pro-Mihailovich. Presumably because of sympathy with them, the American Episcopal clergymen in question have adopted a Great Serb position. This may help explain the appearance of Bishop Manning of New York (who also sponsored an anti-Croat, anti-Catholic book called The Martyrdom of the Serbs, a collection of atrocity stories with photographs) as a member of the Mihailovich Committee.

Then too, it has been a frequent and natural phenomenon that officers and men who were assigned to the resistance forces in Europe should in some measure have come to sympathize with the groups with whom they risked their lives. This may account for the recent activity in behalf of Mihailovich of such men as Captain Mansfield. The presence on the Committee of such staunchly convinced anti-Stalinists as Eugene Lyons, Louis Waldman, and Isaac Don Levine is even easier to understand.

The Mihailovich Committee, I think, was made up in part of Serbophiles, who, despite their affirmation that “we do not presume to declare General Mihailovich either guilty or innocent,” had already persuaded themselves that he was innocent. But the Committee also included such Americans as Sumner Welles, Dean Gildersleeve, Dorothy Thompson, and others, among whom was a sizable group of those, like Roger Baldwin and Oswald Garrison Villard, who have in the past been most concerned with guarding our own civil liberties.

It may be presumed that, in signing a petition urging the Secretary of State to demand that Mihailovich be turned over for trial to an international tribunal, these citizens did not have any great hope that Tito could be made to comply with any such request if it were made. Despite the contention of those who maintain that, as an international figure fighting under the Allied High Command, Mihailovich was entitled to an international trial, he was, after all, a Yugoslav charged with treason against Yugoslavia. If we should, for example, ever find ourselves trying an American Communist for treason to the United States, we should hardly be likely to welcome a Soviet suggestion that we turn over evidence and defendant to an international tribunal. So presumably these Americans simply hoped to call attention to Tito’s plans for conducting a trial which they felt was sure to be unfair.

“The case of General Mihailovich,” their manifesto says, “has already been prejudged by the Yugoslav Government, which announced long ago that the General, when captured, would be ‘executed after a fair trial.’” In point of fact, the Yugoslav government never made any such announcement; former Premier Subasich, a member of the Croat Peasant Party, and now out of the government and opposed to Tito, made this remark informally to reporters at the San Francisco Conference, where, as Foreign Minister, he was chairman of the Yugoslav delegation. This makes it somewhat less offensive than the Mihailovich Committee implies. The fact that the Yugoslav government had such overwhelming evidence against Mihailovich, most of which, before the trial at least, was apparently not known to the American members of the Committee, but was known to Subasich, makes it seem likely that he was speaking loosely — much as some U.S. official conceivably might have said, for instance, of Goring before he was captured: “When we get hold of that man, we’ll try him and execute him.”

While these arguments soften the force of the Mihailovich Committee’s point, they by no means answer its basic contention, which was also supported even by many of those who were aware that Mihailovich was guilty: that Mihailovich would not receive a fair trial. Now that he has been tried, it can be seen that they were right.

7

SINCE the Tito regime had all the evidence it needed to condemn Mihailovich in a fair trial, it is difficult to see why it failed to disarm future critics by exercising great caro that the procedure should be above reproach. However, defense counsel were muzzled in a variety of ways: Mihailovich was allowed no communication with his lawyers before the trial, and the indictment — a document of over 300 pages — was not shown to Mihailovich or to his lawyers until it was sprung on them in the courtroom. Mihailovich was not allowed access to his own materials. The lawyers for the defense were limited to final speeches, and were not permitted to interrogate the state’s witnesses.

Moreover, the courtroom was deliberately turned into a claque, with tickets given out to carefully selected supporters of the regime, who frequently demonstrated more or less noisily against the defendants. The judges appeared to play into the hands of the claque in remarks from the bench. When a former member of the Tito government, Milan Grol (a Serb Democrat who resigned in protest at Tito’s authoritarian methods, and whose opposition newspaper, Demokratiya, was given short shrift), testified, the courtroom rang with shouts of “Death to Grol!” Charges that Mihailovich was tortured, however, have not been substantiated. Finally, of course, the testimony of the Americans, for which the State Department had asked admission, was excluded.

The explanation for this performance may lie in part at least in the shortage of trained lawyers and judges from which the regime is suffering. It is frequently not realized abroad that new and revolutionary governments have grave difficulty in finding loyal replacements for civil servants, diplomats, and other trained personnel generally, and that this problem is made even more acute by their need to establish a large bureaucracy in a hurry. The result at best is inefficiency, of a type still encountered by anyone dealing with Russian officials. This can only be a small part of the explanation, however, since the Mihailovich trial was planned for months in advance and was conducted in the full light of international publicity.

Another part of the explanation lies in the extreme rancor and vindictiveness with which grudges are nurtured in the Balkans. During the war, both parties in the Yugoslav civil conflict committed bloodthirsty atrocities on civilians, and Mihailovich was held responsible by the present regime for the part his followers played in such brutalities. All through the later years of the war Mihailovich was held up to the Yugoslav people by Partisan propaganda as the personification of treachery. It was perhaps psychologically impossible that his trial should have been conducted fairly. Putting this another way, one might say that nobody need have any illusions as to what Tito’s fate would have been had Mihailovich captured him during the war, or had the Great Serbs been returned to power. In a cutthroat game, Mihailovich guessed wrong; his wrong guess led him to what he regarded as justified collaboration with the Germans in defense of causes which turned out to be lost. He has suffered the inevitable consequences.

Therefore the case of Mihailovich, when examined, turns out not to be that of a martyr in the cause of democracy. And the Tito regime, which could well have afforded to give him a scrupulously fair trial — and even to have displayed a little magnanimity by commuting his sentence to life imprisonment, after a conclusive demonstration of his guilt — lost an opportunity to improve its reputation in the eyes of a world already disappointed by its failure to keep its wartime promises, and by its totalitarian record of suppression of liberty.