He joined the Serbian Army with the outbreak of the Balkan Wars, fought on the Serbian side during World War I and remained in active service until 1920, when he decided to pursue a career in politics. He joined the People's Radical Party that year and became regional deputy for the Smederevo District in 1930. In 1931, he was appointed to the position of Yugoslav Minister of Justice by King Alexander I but resigned following a disagreement between him and the king over the layout of the Yugoslav political system. Ljotić founded Zbor in 1935. The party received little support from the largely anti-German Serbian public and never won more than 1 percent of the vote in the 1935 and 1938 Yugoslav parliamentary elections. Ljotić was arrested in the run-up to the latter elections and briefly sent to an insane asylum after the authorities accused him of having a "religious mania". He voiced his opposition to the Cvetković–Maček Agreement in 1939 and his supporters reacted to it violently. Zbor was soon outlawed by the Yugoslav government, forcing Ljotić into hiding. He remained in hiding until April 1941, when the Axis powersinvaded Yugoslavia. Ljotić was later invited by the Germans to join the Serbian puppet government of Milan Aćimović and was offered the position of economic commissioner. He never took office, partly because he disliked the idea of playing a secondary role in the administration and partly because of his unpopularity. He resorted to indirectly exerting his influence over the Serbian puppet government through two of his closest associates whom the Germans had selected as commissioners. In September 1941, the Germans gave Ljotić permission to form the Serbian Volunteer Detachments, which were later renamed the Serbian Volunteer Corps (SDK).
Ljotić was publicly denounced as a traitor by the Yugoslav government-in-exile and Chetnik leader Draža Mihailović in July 1942. He and other Serbian collaborationist officials left Belgrade in October 1944 and made their way to Slovenia, from where they intended to launch an assault against the Independent State of Croatia (NDH). Between March and April, Ljotić and Mihailović agreed to a last-ditch alliance against the Communist-led Yugoslav Partisans and their forces came together under the command of Chetnik General Miodrag Damjanović on 27 March. Ljotić was killed in an automobile accident on 23 April and was buried in Šempeter pri Gorici. His funeral service was jointly conducted by Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović and Serbian Orthodox Patriarch Gavrilo Dožić, whose release from the Dachau concentration camp Ljotić had secured the previous December. In early May, Damjanović led the SDK–Chetnik formations under his command into northwestern Italy, where they surrendered to the British and were placed in detainment camps. Many were later extradited to Yugoslavia, where several thousand were executed by the Partisans and buried in mass graves in the Kočevski Rog plateau. Others immigrated to the west, where they established émigré organizations intended to promote Zbor's political agenda. The antagonism between these groups and those affiliated with the Chetniks continued in exile.
Dimitrije Ljotić was born in Belgrade on 12 August 1891 to Vladimir Ljotić and his wife Ljubica (née Stanojević).[3][4] His father was a prominent politician in the port town of Smederevo[5] and served as the Serbian government consul to Greece.[6]
The Ljotić family was descended from two brothers, Đorđe and Tomislav Dimitrijević, who hailed from the village of Blace, in Greek Macedonia. The origin of the surname Ljotić rests with Đorđe, who often went by the nickname "Ljota". The two brothers settled in the village of Krnjevo in or around 1750 and relocated to Smederevo in the latter half of the 18th century.[7] The Ljotićs were closely connected with the Karađorđević dynasty, which had ruled Serbia several times throughout the 19th century.[8]
In 1858, the rival Obrenović dynasty seized power in the country and forced Prince Alexander Karađorđević into exile. Ljotić's father was forced out of the country in 1868 after being implicated in a conspiracy against the Obrenović dynasty and its head, Prince Milan. He did not return to Serbia until Milan's abdication on 6 March 1889.[9] Apart from being a close friend of Serbia's future king, Peter I, Ljotić's father was also the first person to translate The Communist Manifesto into Serbian.[10] Ljotić's maternal great-grandfather, knez Stanoje, was an outlaw who was killed in the Slaughter of the Knezes in January 1804.[3]
Ljotić finished primary school in Smederevo. He attended gymnasium in Salonika, where his family had relocated in 1907.[9] Ljotić was religiously devoted in his youth and even contemplated a career in the Serbian Orthodox Church.[5] He was greatly influenced by Leo Tolstoy's doctrine of Christian non-violence, but later rejected this doctrine during World War I.[6] Following his father's advice, he went on to study law[5] and graduated from the Law School of the University of Belgrade.[8] With the outbreak of the Balkan Wars, Ljotić joined the Serbian Army.[11]
In the autumn of 1913, he accepted a state scholarship to study in Paris. He stayed in the city for nearly a year,[5] and while studying at the Institute of Agriculture he was exposed to the right-wing, proto-fascist ideas of writer Charles Maurras.[6] Maurras was a French counter-revolutionary who founded the far-right political movement known as Action Française and whose writings went on to influence European fascists and the ideologues of the Vichy Regime during World War II.[12] Ljotić described Maurras as a "rare shining spirit" and cited him as one of his greatest intellectual influences.[8]
Ljotić returned from Paris on 1 September 1914, and rejoined the Serbian Army. He attained the rank of corporal by year's end and was wounded during the Ovče Pole Offensive. During the winter of 1915–16, he participated in the Serbian Army's retreat through Albania.[9] Ljotić remained on active service after the war ended, with a unit guarding the border between the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and the Kingdom of Italy near the town of Bakar.[13] During this time, he also worked for the intelligence service of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.[14] In 1919, he helped break a railway strike meant to disrupt the flow of munitions intended for anti-Communist forces fighting against Béla Kun in Hungary.[15] In 1920, he ordered troops under his command to arrest striking railway workers, convinced that all were complicit in a Communist conspiracy.[16] Ljotić was demobilized on 17 June 1920.[17] He subsequently married Ivka Mavrinac, a Roman Catholic Croat from the village of Krasica on the Croatian Littoral.[3][18] The couple had two sons, Vladimir and Nikola, and a daughter, Ljubica.[9] Ljotić and his wife relocated to Belgrade not long after their marriage. Ljotić passed his bar examination on 22 September 1921, and began practicing law.[19] He later became vice-president of the diocesan council of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the town of Požarevac, and represented the Požarevac diocese in the church's patriarchal council.[20]
Interwar political career
People's Radical Party and Ministry of Justice
Ljotić joined the People's Radical Party (Serbo-Croatian: Narodna radikalna stranka, NRS) of Nikola Pašić in 1920, stating that it was "God's will".[21] He ran for public office in the 1927 parliamentary elections, and received 5,614 votes. This accounted for 19.7 percent of votes cast in the Smederevo District and was not enough to see him win the seat in parliament, and it was won by Democratic Party politician Kosta Timotijević. Ljotić left the NRS shortly after these elections.[9]
In 1929, Ljotić was granted the first of several audiences with Alexander.[21] He became regional deputy for the Smederevo District in 1930.[24] On 16 February 1931, he was appointed to the position of Yugoslav Minister of Justice in King Alexander's royal dictatorship as a result of his unwavering loyalty to the Karađorđević dynasty.[21] In June of that year, Ljotić suggested to Alexander that the Yugoslav political system be structured on the Italian fascist model.[25] He presented him with a draft constitution that proposed "an organic constitutional hereditary monarchy, undemocratic and non-parliamentary, based on the mobilization of popular forces, gathered around economic, professional, cultural and charity organizations, that would be politically accountable to the king."[16] The king rejected Ljotić's constitution as being too authoritarian.[26] On 17 August, Ljotić resigned from his post after the government decided to create a single government-backed political party in Yugoslavia.[21]
Zbor
In 1934, Alexander was assassinated in Marseille by a Bulgarian mercenary working for the Ustaše.[16] That year, Ljotić made contact with three pro-fascist movements and the publishers of their respective newspapers—Otadžbina (Fatherland), published in Belgrade; the monthly Zbor (Rally), published in Herzegovina; and the weekly Buđenje (Awakening), published in Petrovgrad (modern Zrenjanin). Ljotić contributed to all three publications and became most influential with the Otadžbina movement.[21] 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).[16]
Zbor was created by the merger of three fascist movements—Yugoslav Action from Zagreb, the "Fighters" from Ljubljana, and Buđenje from Petrovgrad. It was officially established in Belgrade on 6 January 1935, the sixth anniversary of King Alexander's dictatorship proclamation. Its members elected Ljotić its president, the Croat Juraj Korenić its vice-president, the Slovene Fran Kandare as second vice-president and the Serb Velibor Jonić as its secretary-general. 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". Otadžbina became its official newspaper.[27]
Zbor was declared illegal upon establishment, since virtually all political parties in Yugoslavia had been banned since the declaration of King Alexander's dictatorship in 1929. On 2 September 1935, Jonić and attorney Milan Aćimović petitioned the Yugoslav Ministry of the Interior to legalize Zbor. On 8 November, the Ministry of the Interior conceded and recognized Zbor as an official political party.[28] German officials in Yugoslavia quickly took notice of the movement, with the German envoy to Yugoslavia, Viktor von Heeren, providing it with financial assistance and infiltrating it with German agents.[12] A German observer noted: "The movement Zbor represents a kind of national socialist party. Its principles are the struggle against Freemasons, against Jews, against Communists and against western capitalism."[28] German industrial firms provided Zbor with further financial aid, as did German intelligence services.[28]
Since 1935, Ljotić was a member of the Braničevo Diocese Council whose vice-president was a member of the Patriarchal Council of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Belgrade. Through these connections, Ljotić developed strong relations with bishop Nikolaj Velimirović, under whose influence some members of his clerical organization Bogomoljci became part of the Zbor movement.[29]
Most of the support that Zbor received in Serbia came from members of the urban middle class, as well as right-wing students and members of the armed forces. The majority of Zbor's members were ethnic Serbs, though some Croats and Slovenes also joined. Its membership fluctuated often, primarily due to disagreements over Ljotić's authoritarianism and his lack of popularity and political power in Serbia.[16] Ljotić was an unpopular figure in Serbia due to his pro-German sympathies and religious fanaticism.[30] 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. The reason for this was that right-wing politics were associated with Germany. Being extremely anti-German, the majority of ethnic Serbs rejected fascist and Nazi ideas outright.[31] 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.[30]
During Milan Stojadinović's premiership, many members of Zbor left the party and joined Stojadinović's Yugoslav Radical Union (Serbo-Croatian: Jugoslovenska radikalna zajednica, JRZ).[16] Nevertheless, the movement continued to advocate the abandonment of individualism and parliamentary democracy. Ljotić called for Yugoslavia to unite around a single ruler and return to its religious and cultural traditions, embracing the teachings of Christianity, traditional values and corporatism. He advocated a centrally organized state, stating that the unification of South Slavs was a historical and political inevitability and that Serbs, Croats and Slovenes shared "blood kinship and feeling of common fate." At the same time, the Yugoslavia that Ljotić envisioned was one that was to be dominated by Serbia.[32] Zbor openly promoted antisemitism,[33] being the only party in Yugoslavia to openly do so,[34] as well as xenophobia.[33]
Elections
Despite its opposition to parliamentary democracy, Zbor participated in the 1935 Yugoslav parliamentary elections.[32] It offered 8,100 candidates throughout Yugoslavia.[35] 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. The party of Bogoljub Jevtić had received 1,738,390 (62.6%) votes and 320 seats in parliament and the Opposition Bloc led by Vladko Maček had received 983,248 (35.4%) votes and 48 seats. Zbor finished last in the polls, with 23,814 (0.8%) votes, and had acquired no seats in parliament.[36] Of all the votes it had received, 13,635 came from the Danube Banovina, in which Ljotić's home district of Smederevo was located.[37] The election results initially published by authorities caused an upheaval amongst the public, forcing the government to publish the results of a recount on 22 May. The recount showed that 100,000 additional ballots that had not been recorded on 5 May had been cast and that Jevtić's party had received 1,746,982 (60.6%) votes and 303 seats, the Opposition Bloc had received 1,076,345 (37.4%) and 67 seats, and that Zbor had received 24,008 (0.8%) votes and again no seats.[36]
In 1937, Ljotić began attacking Stojadinović through Zbor publications and accused him of complicity in King Alexander's assassination three years earlier.[35] Stojadinović's government responded by exposing Ljotić as having been funded by the Germans and provided with financial resources by them to spread Nazi propaganda and promote German economic interests in Serbia.[30] The incriminating material linking Ljotić with the Germans was given to Yugoslav authorities by German Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring, a supporter of Stojadinović.[38] Stojadinović used these revelations to his benefit in the following year's parliamentary elections, presenting his opponents, including Ljotić, as "disloyal agitators".[39] Ljotić responded by attacking Stojadinović through issues of Otadžbina, many of which were subsequently banned. The Stojadinović government went on to prohibit all Zbor rallies and newspapers, confiscated Zbor propaganda material, and arrested Zbor leaders. In September 1938, Ljotić was arrested after the Yugoslav gendarmerie opened fire on a crowd of Zbor supporters, killing at least one person.[38] A frequent churchgoer, he was charged with religious mania and briefly sent to an insane asylum before being released.[40]
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