Uroš M. Tešanović (Serbian: Урош М. Тешановић; Bosanska Krupa, Ottoman Empire, 31 January 1891 - Farlar, Coesfeld, then West Germany, 18 December 1965) was a Serbian officer and divisional general[1] of the Royal Yugoslav Army during the April War in 1941 when Nazi Germany attacked and invaded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.
After the end of the Battle of Kolubara on 28 February 1915 he was promoted to the rank of artillery Captain (second class) and transferred to the commander of a battery as an aid to the Montenegrin Army.
On 4 April 1925 he was appointed acting and then chief of staff of the Vrbas divisional area with headquarters in Banja Luka.
Upon his return to Serbia on 26 July 1931, he was deployed as Chief of Staff of the Bosnian Divisional Area based in Sarajevo.
On the king's birthday (Peter II on 6 September 1939 he was the recipient of the Order of the Yugoslav Crown of the third Class and on 31 October he was appointed commander of the Šumadija divisional area based in Kragujevac.
With the departure of the divisional general Marko Mihailović to the duty of the commander of the Drina division on 6 April 1941, he became the warden of the Military Academy in Belgrade.
[10] In that role on 18 March 1943 he was forced to sign a letter rejecting The Hague and the Geneva Convention on the grounds that all established rules of conduct were invalid since they were broken[11] Though he and other Serbian officers knew that the Nazi regime's days were numbered, however, all POWs vowed not to return to their homeland when the war ends unless Yugoslavia was freed of totalitarianism.
[7][12] This committee was subliminally influenced and forced to publicly renounce (and not without regret) the Government of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in Exile and Anti-Hitler Coalition and adhered to the positions of Nazi Germany.
Also, this association was not looked favourably in the camp by the warden if it was suspected that individual officers were agitating for Yugoslavia (the government in London) or the CPY in the homeland.
At the beginning of 1943, Tešanović handed over the functioning of his board and united with the Army General Dimitrije Živković who became the head of the Oflag IV-C camp in Osnabrück.
After the disbandment of the camp system in 1948, Tešanović settled with a group of 60 Serbian generals at Farlar Castle near Coesfeld.