Antifascists Resistance 
in Yugoslavia
In January 1944, Major Frank Thompson parachuted to serve as liaison officer to the Bulgarian partisans. In June 1944 he was wounded in a clash with the Bulgarian gendarmerie; he was captured and executed. In a letter home to his family, he remembered the first anti-fascist fighters who died in 1936 in Spain, defending the Republic: 'Those of us who came afterwards merely adopted the idea that freedom and Nazism can't live in the same world, and that the free man, one who understands this, will always win'.
That was the essence of the ideology shared by the different WWII resistance movements.
The Yugoslav armed resistance movement was one of the earliest and became the strongest in WWII Europe.
Stjepan-Stevo Filipović, 26-year-old commander of the Pocerski battalion of the Partisan unit of Machva, was captured, tortured for months, and hanged in Valjevo, Serbia, on 22 May 1942. With the rope placed around his neck, Filipović defiantly thrust out his hands and shouted: "Death to fascism, freedom to the people!" At that moment, a photograph was taken that became famous, and Stjepan Filipovic became a symbol of the Yugoslav resistance.
This page of our website is dedicated to the people who still can witness what Nazism was and how they won their generation’s fight for freedom.
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