Communists Exploit Partisan Movement in Yugoslavia After the War

The axis did that everywhere. Not a surprise from nazis.

 

Just for the robbery part of nazis:

During WWII, the Germans assessed "occupation costs" against the countries they had conquered. Basically the German occupation administrations told the conquered countries each year how much they owed, and then the occupation administrations proceeded to collect it. To keep their own costs low (and to provide opportunities for corrupt personal enrichment), the German occupiers also speculated in the "black markets" of some of the conquered countries. This interesting report provides a great deal of information on the "occupation costs," the scale of the "black market" speculation, and currency rates in Nazi-occupied Europe during the 1940-1944 period. These activities later formed the basis for "Plunder and Spoiliation" war crimes charges against some of German administrators.

http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=62936

http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/imt/tgmwc/tgmwc-05/tgmwc-05-39-06.shtml

 

I would agree a lot of the rank and file were non political, but unless completely ingenuous, they knew what Tito's ideology was, but my post was mostly against the idea the communists took over the partisan movement post war, in 1945 they were already in control and had "removed" all internal opposition as that is the way they usually operated.

I'm a bit suspicious about "too exact" figures for illegal/underground organisations, it's not exactly as if the communists wanted to be counted. A 75% death rate in the pre-war cadre, if real, is impressive, very few organisations would survive that.

 

I agree with this statement completely. Fundamental aim of comunists was to elliminate all oposition in order to establish dictatorship. This is something that existed even before the war has started. Communists are subversive by their definition and by their own ideology. Ellections after the war were just a farce - they rulled the country even before the end of the war. Hitler has stated very clearly subversive element in both Nazi and Communist ideology in his 1932 speech "Ich bin intollerant" In this regard Communists and Nazis are equal.

 

Were they really a complete farce? Wouldn't Tito have been elected in a free election as well? In this regard I have sort of viewed him like Ho Chi Minh, a communist certainly but also a national hero who fought the invaders both intelligently and with dedication. The same must have been true of a fair number of the lower ranked elected as well. Considering at that point most of the people would have quite reasonably been interested in the peace the Communist promised (and delivered) how much rigging of the election(s) was required?

 

Elections weren't ordinary farce - they swept opposition. Probably they could have won but communists take no chances, they do not want to have free elections every few years. Their elections are internal purges. They recognize dictatorship only. For them, just a remote thought about free elections is an ultimate heresy.

 

Interesting. I had thought they would have at least paid lip service to free elections. If you are going to win easily anyway it's so much easier to manipulate the situation afterwards.

 

There are strong reasons to believe the results if the Italian post WW2 referendum for the republic were manipulated, and the British were involved in that, the republic would likely still have gotten the majority,but not by that margin. So such things happened on both sides of the "iron curtain".

 

I guess it depends on what you mean by "manipulation". We see it in elections here all the time but "manipulation" is a bit different from "election fraud". Or at least the way it's used here. Manipulation can run from completely legitimate to the wrong side of questionable. What form did the British manipulation take or what form do people think it took? For that matter how were the elections in Yugoslavia rigged? Some combination of ballot box stuffing, intimidation, and media access would be my guess but I have no real idea. Perhaps some examples?

 

Not exactly sure what exactly "ballot stuffing" is, the story or should I say conspiracy theory as there are dozens of different versions some of which contain some pretty unbelievable stuff, is the occupation commission and the "reds" in the government rigged the election (both wanted the monarchy to lose though for different reasons), One extreme one is that initial counts favoured the monarchy, then a flood of votes for the republic mysteriously appeared in the last batches that had arrived at the Ministry of the interior and upturned the result. More reliable studies did show the total number of counted votes as not consistent with the number of voters. Some of boxes of ballots that never made it to Rome were discovered and promptly destroyed without being counted but that doesn't impress me much as ministry of the interior officers I worked with, though in much more recent times, told me some of that does happen but is much more likely due to an attempt to cover up administrative mistakes by "muddying the evidence" from local election officials than to affect the final results in any way. .

Quite a number of people from that generation I talked to described the voting as heavily influenced and the results as unconvincing. the north eastern areas were not able to vote as still under military occupation though what they would have voted is anybody's guess, given a chance Sud Tirol would likely have voted to be part. of Austria, which possibly they were at the time as Hitler had annexed the area, but not that sure they would have considered the monarchy the lesser evil given just those two options.

After a republican government had been created, the king went into voluntary exile, the monarchists to this day affirm he didn't contest the result to avoid a possible civil war. for sure there were a number of violent disorders resulting in several deaths.

On a link with the main subject of this thread there is also a story that Tito's forces were ready to invade in case the monarchy had won, given the state of Italian armed forces at the time this doesn't look as far fetched as it would today, the "Yugoslav scare" continued to exist in Italy well into the sixties.

 

Litterally it is adding a bunch of unauthorized ballots to the box. It's come to mean similar activities that involve outright election fraud (i.e. disappearing ballots or boxes, altering ballots, deliberate miscounting, etc.).

Being under military occupation wouldn't necessarily mean that illegal manipulation took place but it almost guarantees some outside influences are present and if the occupation authorities are inclined to do so it makes it easy for them to put in fixes or ignore the efforts of one side or another to "influence" or "fix" the election while possibly preventing similar actions by the other side.

Like much in this area it becomes difficult to draw a hard line. A rumor of a threat isn't necessarily illegal and indeed sometimes rumored threats are used to increase resistance to the threatening party. An attributable threat by an official is another matter but again just what the threat and especially how believable it is can make a difference at least to some. That's one of the reasons I was interested in both the Yugoslav and Italian elections. A communist party official saying "vote for us or you will regret it" for instance could be referring to the polices the opposition will put in place or he could be referring to reprisals the party would make. In one case it falls within common practice (at least in the US) while in the other it's an actionable offense. Obviously there is room between and things can be implied rather than clearly stated.