How long will Australia continue to honour SS-led Nazi thugs?

On April 25, 2021, Australia once again dishonoured its war heroes by allowing the Serbian Chetniks, a World War 2 Nazi collaborationist militia to march alongside legitimate Allied veterans on ANZAC Day, a day reserved for giving thanks to those who served and suffered for the Allied cause.

Serbian Chetniks (right) marching in ANZAC Day, Sydney, 2021.

During the course of World War 2, Serbia’s Chetnik movement agreed to a number of collaboration agreements: first with the Serb collaborationist Milan Nedić forces  in Serbia, then with the Italians in occupied Dalmatia and Montenegro, with Ustaše forces in northern Bosnia, and after the Italian capitulation, also with the Germans directly as of September 1943.

As Yad Vashem has publicly stated: “As the Chetniks increased their cooperation with the Germans, their attitude toward the Jews in the areas under their control deteriorated, and they identified the Jews with the hated Communists. There were many instances of Chetniks murdering Jews or handing them over to the Germans.”

When they weren’t murdering Jews, they were slaughtering Bosnian Muslims and Croatian Catholics, as was the case in January 1943 when Chetnik units murdered up to 10,000 men, women and children in the Sandzak region of Serbia or the 1942 Gata massacre, where nearly 100 Croats were butchered and burned to death.

These atrocities were repeated by modern-day Chetnik units in Srebrenica in 1995. 

Between 1942 and 1943, most Chetnik forces in the Italian-controlled areas of occupied Yugoslavia were organized under fascist Italian command, in the form of the Anti-Communist Volunteer Militia (Milizia volontaria anti comunista, MVAC).  

After the Italian capitulation on 8 September 1943, all Chetnik detachments in the Italian-controlled parts of Yugoslavia switched to supporting the German Nazis. They came under direct command for the last 18 months of the war of Otto Globočnik, Higher SS and Police Leader of the Operational Zone of the Adriatic Littoral of Italy.

In a report prepared in April 1944, the U.S. Office of Strategic Services commented that Chetnik leader “… Mihailović should be viewed in the same light as Nedić, Ljotić, and the Bulgarian occupation forces.”

Chetnik leader Momcilo Djujic with Italian Fascist general & Chetniks at ANZAC Day celebrations, Sydney, 2018.

As for the Germans, they were under no illusions about their new Serbian allies.

“Though he himself [Draža Mihailović] shrewdly refrained from giving his personal view in public, no doubt to have a free hand for every eventuality (e.g. Allied landing on the Balkans), he allowed his commanders to negotiate with Germans and to co-operate with them. And they did so, more and more,” wrote Field Marshal Maximilian von Weichs in spring, 1945.

All this collaboration pushed the Allies – including Australia – to dump their alliance with the Chetniks and throw their support behind Yugoslavia’s Communist-led Partizans. Fed up with their constant collaboration, Winston Churchill finally decided to break all ties with Mihailovic and back Tito on December 10, 1943.

In mid-May 1945, the entire Chetnik army surrendered en masse to Allied forces in Italy and Austria. Because of his collaboration and other war crimes, Chetnik leader Draza Mihajlovic was executed by Yugoslavia in March 1946. 

Chetnik SEPS’s or ‘Surrendered Enemy Personnel’

The Chetniks that were handed back to the Yugoslav Partizans were shot as collaborators.

Those the Allies did not hand back to Yugoslavia were arrested and put into camps as SEPS’s or ‘Surrendered Enemy Personnel’. By 1950, all SEPs were released and allowed to travel abroad.

Fast forward to 1980 and Australia’s Returned and Services League (RSL) made the fateful decision to allow these ‘Surrendered Enemy Personnel’ i.e. Chetniks, to march as ANZAC ‘allies’.  

Just how the RSL was convinced that Nazi collaborators could march shoulder-to-shoulder with Australian veterans remains unclear, but it is thought the late Bruce Ruxton, President of the Victorian branch of the RSL from 1979 to 2002 was a key supporter of the Chetnik inclusion into the annual march.

However, in what is an ironic twist, the Chetniks are not allowed to march as allies in Serbia itself, yet can do so with official approval in faraway Australia.

To make matters even worse, reports have come out that some of those marching have formed alliances with modern day neo-Nazi groups such as Greece’s Golden Dawn, nationalist Russian Cossacks on ASIO watchlists and well-known local far-right extremists and allegedly even Christchurch mass murderer, Brenton Tarrant.

Chetniks with Germans & Chetniks marching in ANZAC Day Melbourne, 2016.

Over this time, the RSL has been repeatedly warned that they are enabling SS-led Nazi collaborators to march alongside legitimate Allied veterans. So has just about every federal Veteran’s Affair’s minister and most State Premiers as well. 

Sadly, the response from all these institutions is always stone-cold silence and a refusal to even the discuss the matter.

In fact, the RSL goes out of its way to pretend it knows nothing about the Chetniks, or WW2 history or the Nazis and participates in a schoolboy-like farce of denial, one that is also perpetuated by sections of Australia’s mainstream media. 

So, the question that needs to be asked is: ‘How long will Australia continue to honour SS-led Nazi thugs?’

Written by Jason Katz (Toronto, Canada, May 2021.)