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Genocide and Resistance in

Hitler's Bosnia: The Partisans
and the Chetniks, 1941–1943
a
Nick Miller
a
Boise State University
Published online: 03 Jun 2008.

To cite this article: Nick Miller (2008) Genocide and Resistance in Hitler's Bosnia: The
Partisans and the Chetniks, 1941–1943, The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 21:2,
479-480

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13518040802067466

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 Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 21: 479–480, 2008
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN 1351-8046 print
DOI: 10.1080/13518040802067466

1556-3006
1351-8046
FSLV
Journal of Slavic Military Studies,
Studies Vol. 21, No. 2, March 2008: pp. 1–3

BOOK REVIEW

Genocide and Resistance in Hitler’s Bosnia: The Partisans and the

Book Review

Chetniks, 1941–1943, Marko Attila Hoare (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2006 (A British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship Monograph).
Downloaded by [Boise State University] at 23:13 28 March 2015

Pp. xiv, 386.

Book Review

Nick Miller
Boise State University

Considering how important it is in the history of the peoples of the former

Yugoslavia, the Second World War has received too little attention from
historians outside the region. Marko Attila Hoare makes an excellent con-
tribution to the subject with his new book, Genocide and Resistance in
Hitler’s Bosnia. The study is based on archival research in Sarajevo,
Zagreb, and Belgrade, and on a thorough reading of memoir and second-
ary literature. It joins, in English, a scant but impressive literature on its
topic that includes Milovan Djilas’ memoirs and studies by Jozo
Tomasevich and Walter Roberts.
Hoare’s subject is the relationship of the communist and Serbian resistance
movements. This has been a contentious topic in the past, but Hoare unravels
it in convincing fashion. His book contributes to our understanding of the
resistance in Bosnia during the Second World War in the following ways:

1. on the most general level, it elucidates the complicated relation-

ship of the Chetniks and the Partisans during the first three
years of the war;
2. Hoare brilliantly dissects local conditions across Bosnia and
their affect on the resistance movements;
3. he clarifies how and where conditions in Serbia affected the
Chetnik-Partisan relationship; and
4. by use of well-chosen examples from across Bosnia, he explains
the internal dynamics of the resistance movements.

Hoare argues throughout his book that “the clash between the Partisans
and Chetniks in Bosnia-Hercegovina was not simply a clash between two
 480 Book Review

rival ideologies, but a product of the social, economic, and political fis-
sures in the country” (p. 7). The Partisans were the movement of the Bos-
nian urbanites, not necessarily Serbs; the Chetniks were rural and nearly
always Serbs. The resistance movements emerged in three separate
regions of Bosnia-Hercegovinia, each of which lent its own special set of
conditions to the relationship: Eastern Bosnia, where the Chetniks were
strongest and most affected by their own relationship with Serbia across
the Drina River; the Bosanska Krajina, in northern and western Bosnia,
where the Partisans were stronger and less enmeshed with the Chetniks;
and Hercegovina, where the Partisans and Chetniks were both affected by
Montenegrin conditions and the particular relationship of the various eth-
Downloaded by [Boise State University] at 23:13 28 March 2015

nic groups in this poor and isolated part of Bosnia-Hercegovina. If one

were to try to establish a sort of trendline for the Partisan/Chetnik rela-
tionship during this period, it would show the two resistances emerging in
Eastern Bosnia almost simultaneously, as the uprising of Serbian peas-
antry captured the early dynamic of the resistance, with the Partisans
along for the ride—and making compromises every step of the way.
Thereafter, as the Partisans evolve into a more coherent force, and follow-
ing their struggle for ideological and political self-definition, the two
movements inevitably split.
Hoare uses numerous individual stories to help explain the tortuous
changes that took place as the Chetniks and Partisans evolved. It is these
stories, as well as a few well-chosen examinations of particular events,
that give the book its bite. His examination of the Kulen Vakuf Massacre,
in which Partisans and Serbian peasants killed hundreds of Muslims from
the village of Kulen Vakuf in September 1941, illuminates the fact that
the Partisans had, at this point, become little more than an ethnic Serbian
insurgency. Hoare’s discussion of the Chetnik genocide of Muslims in
Eastern Bosnia is also quite detailed and convincing. Ultimately, though,
it is his judgment that while the Chetniks had a huge propaganda and
political advantage over the Partisans, their power was limited, while the
Partisans were worse off politically but had a superior organization and an
army that grew on a regional basis rather than as a series of local units.
Hoare’s is an excellent book, and, to its credit, one that will render our
understanding of the Second World War in Bosnia and Yugoslavia as a
whole more complex. It reminds us that there is much basic historical
spadework left to be done on the history of the region. Maybe historians
should follow Hoare’s lead: more archival research on critical topics, less
synthesis and summation.