In the Balkans before World War II there were approximately 15,000 White Russian émigrés who had fled there in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution. On 6 April 1941, Axis forces invaded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Poorly equipped and poorly trained, the Royal Yugoslav Army was quickly defeated. The country was then dismembered, with Serbia being reduced to its pre-1912 borders and placed under German military occupation. General Milan Nedić, a pre-war politician who was known to have pro-Axis leanings, was then selected by the Germans to lead the collaborationist Government of National Salvation in the German occupied territory of Serbia. Over the course of the Uprising in Serbia in the summer of 1941, the communist-led Partisans killed approximately 300 Russian émigrés and injured many more, sometimes in acts of vengeance. In response, local Russians began to organize themselves into self-defense units. At the time, there were an estimated 10,000 Russian men within the borders of Yugoslavia, the majority of whom lived in occupied Serbia.