Word: mihailovich
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Died. General Draja Mihailovich, 53, leader of Chetnik resistance to Axis armies, former Minister of War in King Peter II's Government in Exile, and its chief representative in Yugoslavia up to March 1944; before a firing squad, after conviction by a Tito court of "treason and collaboration with the enemy...
Nothing that Mihailovich could say would wipe out abundant evidence that some of his Chetnik troops collaborated with the Germans. His tale was of how and why they came to do so, the tale of a victim and a failure, but not that of a traitor. He said...
...pitch dark when Mihailovich laid down his notes and wound up his four hour plea. "I wanted nothing for myself. The French revolution gave the world the rights of man and the Russian revolution also gave us something new, but I did not want to start today where they had started in 1917. I never wanted the old Yugoslavia. ... I was caught in a whirlpool of events. . . . Believing that the world would take the course of the Russian revolution I was caught by the [policy of] the Western democracies. They [the democracies] are for our peoples' good...
...Then Mihailovich spoke his epitaph: "I wanted much, I started much, but the gale of the world carried away me and my work...
Five days later the court sentenced (but did not silence) Draja Mihailovich: "To be shot by a firing squad...