European studies blog

8 May 2025 marks 80 years since the surrender of Nazi Germany to the Allied Forces and the celebration of victory in Europe. Jubilant crowds thronged the streets of cities across the continent, but the guns did not fall silent until 25 May, when the Partisans triumphed at the now forgotten Battle of Odžak. This last European battle of the Second World War took place in Yugoslavia, where victory over fascism came at a terrible cost: the country lost over ten percent of its population, and the material damage was on an equally vast scale. For Britain, VE Day was the culmination of a storied resistance to the Nazi juggernaut – its ‘finest hour’ – which saw the island as a beacon of freedom as the swastika cast its long shadow across occupied Europe. Yet four years earlier, while London burned in the Blitz, resistance was brewing in a remote southeastern corner of the continent, which would turn the tide of the war and persist until that final hard-won victory on 25 May.

A partisan girl from Kozara mountain, winter 1943. Illustration from Jelena Batinić, Women and Yugoslav partisans...(Cambridge, 2015) YC.2015.a.8652

The Axis powers (Nazi Germany, followed by Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria) invaded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia beginning in April 1941 and the country was plunged into crisis as rival factions took shape. In July 1941 Yugoslav Communist party leader Josip Broz ‘Tito’ called on Yugoslavians to unite irrespective of their ethnic and religious differences and mount a national war of liberation against the invaders, appealing to their historic tradition of opposing foreign occupation. Thus was born the Yugoslav Partisan movement, which grew from an irregular guerilla operation to become the most significant and successful anti-fascist resistance movement in wartime Europe.

The partition of Yugoslavia, 1941. Illustration from Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia...(Stanford, 2001) m02/11817

The success of the Partisans, who fought in desperate conditions and won victories against overwhelming odds, could not have been secured without the mass participation of women, one of the most remarkable phenomena of the Second World War. It is estimated that nearly two million women participated in the Partisan movement, including about 100,000 in combat roles, of whom 70 percent were under 20. 25,000 of these female soldiers were killed, and tens of thousands were wounded. Away from the front, women were active as underground fighters in occupied cities, as medical personnel and army suppliers, as political activists and as members of the national liberation committees. There are few, if any, instances in recent history where women were so deeply involved both politically and militarily in defeating an occupying enemy and establishing a new state.

A partizanka on the move. Illustration from Barbara Jancar-Webster, Women & Revolution in Yugoslavia...(Denver, 1990) 90/14790

The British Library contains key works exploring this astonishing yet undeservedly neglected aspect of the war. Jelena Batinić’s pioneering 2015 study, Women and Yugoslav partisans : a history of World War II resistance (Cambridge, 2015; YC.2015.a.8652) investigates female Partisan participation through the lens of gender, South Slavic culture, and its intersection with war. Batinić draws on primary sources and on the slim body of partizanka scholarship, including the first English-language study on the subject, Barbara Jancar-Webster’s Women & revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945 and the 2011 Serbian-language study Partizanke kao građanke : društvena emancipacija partizanki u Srbiji, 1945-1953 (‘Female partisans as citizens: social emancipation of partisan women in Serbia, 1945-1953’) by Ivana Pantelić (Belgrade, 2011; YF.2012.a.25362). The British Library holds other key Yugoslav-era sources on the subject, including Dušanka Kovačević’s Women of Yugoslavia in the National Liberation War (Belgrade, 1977; X.529/35030) and Žene Srbije u NOB (‘Women of Serbia in the National Liberation War’) (Belgrade, 1975; LB.31.b.20477).

Meeting of the Antifascist Front of Women, Dalmatia, 1943. Illustration from Dušanka Kovačević, Women of Yugoslavia in the National Liberation War

Batinić begins by surveying Yugoslavia in 1941, a patriarchal peasant society with the highest rates of female illiteracy and maternal mortality in Europe, and explores how young peasant women, who formed the bulk of partizankas, were recast as central actors in that most quintessentially masculine of activities, military combat. Following Tito’s landmark decision in February 1942 to admit women as frontline combatants – the first army of its day to officially do so - Partisan leaders recruited women through an unlikely combination of communist ideology about female emancipation and the rich tradition of freedom-fighting lore from South Slavic epic poetry, itself a product of local resistance to centuries of Ottoman occupation. This way, argued Batinić, Partisan leaders sanctioned women’s role as warriors and presented themselves as bearers of the ‘great heroic tradition of the Yugoslav peoples’. This tradition was by no means exclusively male – Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro had a long history of women participating in liberation struggles. Then there was the blunt reality that for many women, taking up arms and going ‘into the woods’ was, for all its hardships, preferable to living in terror in the occupied towns, because it offered the possibility of autonomy and of self-defense.

Fourth Montenegrin Proletarian Brigade, Bosnia, 1942. Illustration from Jelena Batinić, Women and Yugoslav partisans

Women’s dramatic entry into the political and military fray of Yugoslav society led to the formation in June 1942 of the Yugoslav Antifascist Front of Women (AFW), one of the largest and most active women’s mass movements in the region. The AFW undertook activities crucial to the war effort: supplying Partisan units on the move, providing care for orphans, and coordinating operations between the liberated and occupied territories. From 1944, partizankas were gradually withdrawn from the front line and transferred to political or administrative functions, although women remained active in most units until the final liberation.

Cover page, 1st edition of ‘The Vojvodina Woman at War’. Issued by the Vojvodina Antifascist Front of Women, January 1944. The slogan reads ‘death to fascism, freedom to the people!’. Illustration from Bosa Cvetić, Žene Srbije u Narodnooslobodilačkoj borbi (Belgrade, 1975) LB.31.b.20477

Partisan life was physically and mentally gruelling, testing the very limits of human endurance. A partizanka and doctor, Saša Božović, recalled typhus victims rolling in the snow to relieve their high fevers, before hauling supplies to their comrades up icy mountain paths. Detachments would come upon villages which had been burned to the ground, sometimes with the families locked inside the houses, and find themselves caring for children who emerged from the smouldering ruins. Wounded soldiers had to be rescued from the battlefield under enemy fire, children were murdered in front of their parents. Yet survivors above all recalled the sense of camaraderie, conviction and solidarity which pulled them through the horror.

A partisan column in the snow, Macedonia. Illustration from Dušanka Kovačević, Women of Yugoslavia in the National Liberation War

A makeshift partisan hospital in a peasant hut, Serbia. Illustration from Bosa Cvetić, Žene Srbije u Narodnooslobodilačkoj borbi

Pregnancy and motherhood were also part of the female Partisan experience, often in heart-rending circumstances. Saša Božović’s march through the mountains of Herzegovina in the winter of 1941 claimed the life of her three-month old daughter, who died of exposure and starvation. Partizanka Đina Vrbica was ordered to kill her own baby, after giving birth on the battlefield, as the infant’s crying was making an ambush impossible. The order was later withdrawn as the female officer charged with the task was too distraught to comply; this left Vrbica to struggle through the wilderness with a rifle in one arm and an infant in the other. She finally left the baby in the care of a local family but was killed in battle when she returned in search of her. Many partizanka casualties were reported to be pregnant when they were killed, despite a ban on Partisan marriages and penalties imposed for sexual relations among the rank and file.

Kosovar women bringing medical herbs for a hospital. Illustration from Dušanka Kovačević, Women of Yugoslavia in the National Liberation War

A children’s care centre in liberated Croatia, 1942. Illustration from Dušanka Kovačević, Women of Yugoslavia in the National Liberation War

For most of the war, Hitler and his collaborators refused to recognise the Partisans as legitimate belligerents, and their troops acted accordingly, shooting hostages and treating combatants, prisoners and civilians alike with brutality. Partizankas were not spared the atrocities inflicted on their male counterparts and suffered additional indignities, including sexual violence. 17-year-old Lepa Radić, who was hanged by the Nazis in 1943, and many other young women who were tortured and executed became celebrated martyrs and icons of partizanka fortitude and defiance, with many achieving the status of National Hero. They were dragged to death behind vehicles, thrown into disused wells, stretched on the rack, and worse. Survivors later recalled the virtually unprintable details of the tortures they withstood at the hands of their captors. Žene Srbije u NOB, a haunting Yugoslav-era compendium about women in the war, features short biographies and portraits of fresh-faced smiling teenagers, their hair set in victory rolls, with details of their war activities, and if known, their fate. The same girls sometimes appear a page later, as corpses hanging from lampposts, or with features mutilated beyond recognition.

Milka Travar, company commander and machine gunner of the First Proletarian Brigade. Illustration from Dušanka Kovačević, Women of Yugoslavia in the National Liberation War (Belgrade, 1977) X.529/35030

The partizanka story has a personal resonance. My grandmother, Savka Korov (1926-2004), fled her occupied home village in northern Serbia as a 16-year-old and followed her elder brother into the Partisan ranks in 1942, enlisting in the Second Proletarian Brigade and changing her name to Slavica to conceal her identity and prevent reprisals against her family. She endured bitter winters in the rugged mountains of Herzegovina, surviving bouts of typhus and frostbite, and saw active combat at the Battle of Sutjeska (May-June 1943), one of the region’s deadliest battles, where over 15 percent of troops were female. Sutjeska was a crucial moment for the Partisans, whose success in thwarting better-equipped Axis forces with over six times as many troops and losing nearly one third of their own troops, turned the tide of the war in Yugoslavia and won them unconditional support from Churchill and the Western Allies. It marked the last major Axis offensive against the Partisans and saw British Special Operations Executive (SOE) soldiers parachuted into Montenegro at the height of hostilities at Churchill’s behest to make official contact with Tito. The only trace of this carnage in my grandmother’s later years was a scar on her forehead where a bullet had whistled past, separating her from death by mere millimetres. Like her, many had endured the same hardships; unlike her, not all had the fortune to witness the defeat of fascism and to rebuild their lives. She christened her firstborn son after the war Slobodan, meaning ‘free’, symbolic of the collective sense of hard-won liberation which defined her generation.

Women’s meeting in Montenegro, with the Yugoslav flag. Illustration from Dušanka Kovačević, Women of Yugoslavia in the National Liberation War

Batinić goes on to explore the changing fortunes of the partizanka in the (ex)-Yugoslav collective memory – from her iconic status in the early post-war era to virtual oblivion and trivialisation from the 1990s onwards. The demise of socialism and the collapse of Yugoslavia condemned many of its founding icons, including the partizanka, to the proverbial scrap-bin of history, victims of the collective identity crisis which plagued post-Yugoslav society. In the West, as an historical figure, she is obscure and unacknowledged. Yet the partizanka deserves a different and better fate. Irrespective of her ideology, religion or ethnicity, the resilience, sacrifice and extraordinary contribution of a lost generation of young women, many of whom paid the ultimate price to halt the fascist juggernaut, deserves recognition, celebration and most of all, respect.

Partizankas and organisers of the AFW in Macedonia. Illustration from Dušanka Kovačević, Women of Yugoslavia in the National Liberation War

Savka Andic, Acquisitions South

Further reading:

Vladimir Dedijer, The war diaries of Vladimir Dedijer. (Ann Arbor, 1990). YC.1991.b.425

Ben Shepherd, Terror in the Balkans: German armies and partisan warfare. (Cambridge, Mass, 2012). YC.2012.a.9950

Lydia Sklevicky, Konji, žene, ratovi. (Zagreb, 1996). AFŽ Arhiv, https://afzarhiv.org/items/show/720.

Heather Williams, Parachutes, patriots and partisans: the Special Operations Executive and Yugoslavia 1941-1945. (London, 2002). m04/17827