The Yugoslav National Movement (Serbo-Croatian: Југословенски народни покрет, romanized: Jugoslavenski narodni pokret), also known as the United Militant Labour Organization (Serbo-Croatian: Здружена борбена организација рада, romanized: Združena borbena organizacija rada, or Zbor / Збор[17]), was a Yugoslav fascist movement and organization led by politician Dimitrije Ljotić.
Following the Axis invasion and occupation of Yugoslavia in April 1941, the Germans selected several Zbor members to join the Serbian puppet government of Milan Nedić.
[22] He subsequently founded the Yugoslav National Movement (Serbo-Croatian: Jugoslovenski narodni pokret), which was also known as the United Active Labour Organization (Združena borbena organizacija rada, or Zbor).
[27] Zbor's official stated goal was the imposition of a planned economy and "the racial and biological defense of the national life force and the family".
[29] The limited amount of support received by Zbor itself stemmed from the fact that radical right-wing sentiment was not strong amongst the Serbian population.
[30] Zbor never had more than 10,000 active members at any given time, with most of its support coming from Smederevo and from the ethnic German (Volksdeutsche) minority in Vojvodina that had been exposed to Nazi propaganda since 1933.
[34] On 5 May, the Yugoslav government first announced the results of the elections, which showed that 72.6 percent of the eligible electorate had cast a total of 2,778,172 ballots.
[35] In 1937, Ljotić began attacking Stojadinović through Zbor publications and accused him of complicity in King Alexander's assassination three years earlier.
[37] Stojadinović used these revelations to his benefit in the following year's parliamentary elections, presenting his opponents, including Ljotić, as "disloyal agitators".
In September 1938, Ljotić was arrested after the Yugoslav gendarmerie opened fire on a crowd of Zbor supporters, killing at least one person.
Ljotić responded by publicly stating that Zbor supporters were being arrested in order to prevent them from participating in the forthcoming elections.
[37] Ljotić exploited the connections he had with Nedić to ensure that the banned Zbor-published journal Bilten (Bulletin) was distributed to members of the Royal Yugoslav Army.
Fifty-eight issues of Bilten were published from March 1939 until October 1940, in which Ljotić advocated a pro-Axis Yugoslav foreign policy and criticized Belgrade's tolerance of Jews.
[43] With the outbreak of World War II, Ljotić supported Yugoslavia's policy of neutrality in the conflict while promoting the position that Yugoslav diplomacy should focus on relations with Berlin.
[45] In these letters, he advocated an immediate re-organization of the government according to Zbor ideology, the abolishment of Croatian autonomy, the division of the Royal Yugoslav Army into contingents of ethnic Serbs and some Croat and Slovene volunteers, who would be armed, and contingents of most Croats and Slovenes in the armed forces, who would serve as labour units and would be unarmed.
[25] In July 1940, Ljotić expressed his bitter opposition to the diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union by Belgrade, which was meant to strengthen Yugoslavia internally in the case of war.
[47] The White Eagles members then threatened faculty and students with pistols and knives, stabbed some of them, hailed Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini as their heroes and shouted: "down with the Jews!
"[48] Members of Slovenski Jug (Slavic South), a Serbian nationalist movement, also participated in the riots, which were orchestrated by Ljotić in the hope that violence would provoke martial law and thus bring about a more centralized system of control in the university.
[25] One of the only public figures in Serbia to speak in favour of Ljotić during this period was Serbian Orthodox Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović, who praised his "faith in God" and "good character".
[51] Several dozen Royal Yugoslav Army officers affiliated with Zbor were captured by the Wehrmacht during the invasion but were quickly released.
[52] Not long after German forces entered Belgrade, Ljotić's followers were given the task of selecting an estimated 1,200 Jews from the city's non-Jewish population.
[50] He resorted to indirectly exerting his influence over the Serbian puppet government through two of his closest associates, Zbor members Stevan Ivanić and Miloslav Vasiljević, whom the Germans had selected as commissioners.
In need of a reliable collaborationist force to combat the Communist uprising that had erupted in the aftermath of the German occupation of Serbia, they gave him permission to form the Serbian Volunteer Detachments in September 1941.
[57] The exhibition sought to expose an alleged Judeo-Masonic and Communist conspiracy for world domination through several displays featuring antisemitic propaganda.
[65] Ljotić and the SDK arrived in Osijek by the end of October, where German official Hermann Neubacher agreed to arrange their safe passage towards the Slovenian coast.
[66] In early 1945, Chetnik leader Pavle Đurišić decided to move to the Ljubljana Gap independent of Mihailović and arranged for Ljotić's forces already in Slovenia to meet him near Bihać in western Bosnia to assist his movement.
Although the agreement was reached too late to be of any practical use, the forces of Ljotić and Mihailović came together under the command of Chetnik General Miodrag Damjanović on 27 March.
In 1974, Ljotić's brother was shot and killed by agents of the Yugoslav State Security Service (Uprava državne bezbednosti, UDBA).