MAGNET - DRAZA MIHAILOVIC

Dragoljub "Draža" Mihailović was a Yugoslav Serb general during World War II. A staunch royalist, he retreated to the mountains near Belgrade when the Germans overran Yugoslavia in April 1941 and there he organized bands of guerrillas known as the Chetnik Detachments of the Yugoslav Army.

The organisation is commonly known as the Chetniks, although the name of the organisation was later changed to the Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland (JVUO, ЈВУО).[6] Founded as the first Yugoslav resistance movement, it was royalist and nationalist, as opposed to the other, Josip Broz Tito's Partisans who were communist. Initially, the two groups operated in parallel, but by late 1941 began fighting each other in the attempt to gain control of post-war Yugoslavia. Many Chetnik groups collaborated or established modus vivendi with the Axis powers. Mihailović himself collaborated with Milan Nedić and Dimitrije Ljotić at the end of the war. After the war, Mihailović was captured by the communists. He was tried and convicted of high treason and war crimes by the communist authorities of the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia, and executed by firing squad in Belgrade. The nature and extent of his responsibility for collaboration and ethnic massacres remains controversial. On 14 May 2015, Mihailović's verdict was overturned on appeal with the ruling showing that his trial amounted to a communist kangaroo court. The Supreme Court of Cassation, and appellate court handed out the rulings. While some see this as a rehabilitation, the courts did not go that far, and only ruled on the previous trial without offering to retry the case. This was done to satisfy his offspring's legal rights to property which the ruling at his trial stripped from them.