Status Updates From To Walk with the Devil: Slo...

The Yugoslav government-in-exile made its position very clear in a 22 July 1941 broadcast over the airwaves of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), urging ‘the Yugoslav people to avoid battles and to await the signal from London.’

Operation Barbarossa, however, destroyed this unanimity, as the Anti-Imperialist Front –now the Liberation Front –together with Communist resisters across Europe, rushed to defend the Communist motherland and embarked on a campaign of immediate armed resistance against the occupiers.

Resistance, like collaboration, was slow to develop in the chaotic conditions following the Axis invasion. In the spring of 1941, armed resistance appeared little short of suicidal in the face of the occupiers’ overwhelming military superiority.

April 29, 1941. With Buffarini I prepare a political map for the creation of the Province of Ljubljana. It is inspired by very liberal concepts. It will have the effect of attracting sympathies for us in Germanized Slovenia, in which the worst abuses are being reported. 48

‘Reluctant accommodation to overwhelming force’ was not unique to Slovenes, as the historian Rab Bennet submitted, but ‘was a Europe-wide response.’