page_title: Yugoslav accession to the Tripartite Pact
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Yugoslav accession to the Tripartite Pact / Background
caption_attribution_description: Prince Paul of Yugoslavia
context_page_description: On 25 March 1941, Yugoslavia signed the Tripartite Pact with the Axis powers. The agreement was reached after months of negotiations between Germany and Yugoslavia and was signed at the Belvedere in Vienna by Joachim von Ribbentrop, German foreign minister, and Dragiša Cvetković, Yugoslav Prime Minister. Pursuant to the alliance, the parties agreed that the Axis powers would respect Yugoslav sovereignty and territorial integrity, including the Axis refraining from seeking permission to transport troops through Yugoslavia or requesting any military assistance.
  Yugoslav accession to the Tripartite Pact was short-lived, however. On 27 March 1941, two days after the agreement had been signed, the Yugoslav government was overthrown. On 6 April 1941, less than two weeks after Yugoslavia had signed onto the Tripartite Pact, the Axis invaded Yugoslavia. By 18 April, the country was conquered and occupied by the Axis powers.
context_section_description: After the French armistice in June 1940, only the United Kingdom seemed to have any chance of winning a fight against the Germans, with even it having a greater chance of negotiating a humiliating peace. Thus, the historian Vladislav Sotirović wrote that "no wonder British politicians and diplomats tried by all means, including military coups, to drag any neutral country into war on their side for a final victory against Hitler's Germany". Yugoslavia had been ruled as a dictatorship by the regent, Prince Paul, since the assassination of King Alexander I in 1934. After the 1938 Anschluss, the German annexation of Austria; the 1939 Italian occupation of Albania; and the accession of Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria to the Tripartite Pact from 20 November 1940 to 1 March 1941, Yugoslavia was bordered by Axis powers on all sides except the southern border with Greece. All of those factors, combined with traditional Croatian separatism, caused Paul to be in a great psychological, political and patriotic dilemma in March 1941 on how to resist Hitler's diplomatic pressures and concrete political offers to sign Yugoslavia's accession to the pact. He was unable to stall since Hitler was in a hurry to start the Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Also, the potential of Croatian betrayal during a German invasion was the Berlin's main argument during its negotiations with Belgrade.
  In the spring of 1941, Yugoslavia could rely only on Britain, which had more economic and population resources than Germany because of its colonies in the British Empire. Yugoslavia needed quick military aid, which Britain could offer, if the former rejected the pact.
  Paul was pro-British and himself a relative of British King George VI. Since Paul gave the impression that he would rather resign than turn his back on Britain, Hitler viewed him as a British puppet in the Balkans.
  There was also the perceived risk of a communist fifth column because of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which made General Milan Nedić prepare a plan in December 1940 to open six internment camps for communists if it was necessary. Nedić also proposed for the Yugoslav Army to take Thessaloniki before Italian troops could do so after the November 1940 Italian invasion of Greece since the loss of that port would make eventual British military aid impossible if Yugoslavia was invaded.
  The Greeks, however, held firm against the Italians and even entered Albania, where the Italian invasion had begun. Nedić's plan for the communists was uncovered by a spy, the young officer Živadin Simić, in the War Ministry; he copied the two-page document, which was then quickly handed out in Belgrade by the communists.
  It was crucial for Hitler to solve the questions of Yugoslavia and Greece before he attacked the Soviet Union since he believed that Britain, which was, along with France, at war with Germany, would accept peace only when the Soviets could no longer threaten Germany. (London held the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact as dishonest, volatile and forced by the foreign situation.)
  The invasion of the Soviet Union needed the Balkans to be pro-German, and the only unreliable countries in the region were Yugoslavia, the Serbs being traditional enemies of Germany, and Greece, which had been invaded by Italy on its own accord after the German annexation of Austria, but it became clear that Benito Mussolini could not manage in Greece on his own.
  The British Army in Continental Europe was successfully fighting only in Greece. The military and political elimination of Greece and Yugoslavia, as potential British allies, would thus be extremely serious for Britain.
  Seven German divisions were thus moved into Bulgaria, and permission for six divisions to cross Yugoslavia into Greece was sought by Paul. On 1 March 1941, Hitler compelled Paul to visit him personally in his favourite resort, in Berchtesgaden. They secretly met in Berghof, Hitler's residence, on 4 March. In an extremely uncomfortable discussion for Paul, Hitler said that after he would expel British troops from Greece, he wou
caption: Prince Paul of Yugoslavia.
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "1100", "Image ImageLength": "1099", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS6 (Windows)", "Image DateTime": "2016:04:02 03:00:31", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image ExifOffset": "244", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "406", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4545", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF SubSecTime": "62", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "546", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "909"}