Dobroslav Jevđević

Dobroslav Jevđević

Dobroslav Jevđević was a Bosnian Serb politician and self-appointed Chetnik commander in the Herzegovina region of the Axis-occupied Kingdom of Yugoslavia. He collaborated with the Italians and later the Germans in actions against the Yugoslav Partisans. He fled to Italy in the spring of 1945, where he was arrested by Allied military authorities and detained at a camp in Grottaglie. He was eventually set free, having received considerable Allied support. He moved to Rome and lived under an assumed name. He died in Rome in October 1962, aged 83.

About Dobroslav Jevđević in brief

Summary Dobroslav JevđevićDobroslav Jevđević was a Bosnian Serb politician and self-appointed Chetnik commander in the Herzegovina region of the Axis-occupied Kingdom of Yugoslavia during World War II. He collaborated with the Italians and later the Germans in actions against the Yugoslav Partisans. He fled to Italy in the spring of 1945, where he was arrested by Allied military authorities and detained at a camp in Grottaglie. He was eventually set free, having received considerable Allied support. He moved to Rome and lived under an assumed name. He died in Rome in October 1962, aged 83. He is remembered for his work as a writer, poet and as a member of the Yugoslav National Party. His father was a Serbian Orthodox priest, and the family was of Montenegrin Serb origin. He studied law at the universities of Zagreb, Belgrade, and Vienna and spoke Serbian, Italian, German and French. He also was a friend of Gavrilo Princip, the assassin who killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria on 28 June 1914. The day of the assassination, his father was arrested for his connections with the Serb revolutionary organisation Narodna Odbrana and sentenced to death by hanging in April 1916 and executed in Banja Luka. During the interwar period, he was one of the most influential Serb politicians in Bosnia. His tendency to cooperate with various political factions earned him the reputation of being willing to sell himself in return for personal favours.

He later became a parliamentary candidate of the opposition Yugoslav National Party in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. He served as an opposition leader during King Alexander’s dictatorship of 1929–34, and was elected to Parliament a total of four times, representing the district of Novi Rogatica in Bosnia and Croatia. He became the propaganda chief for the Yugoslav government in 1934, the following year, when he became the leader of the Opposition to King Alexander. In the 1940s, he became a leader in the Organisation of Yugoslav Nationalists, which was headed by Kosta Pejanac. In 1941, he joined the Chetnik Association, an aggressively Serb movement of over 500,000 members led by Kosta Pechauvinac, which terrorised those Serbs who refused to join the party. His Chetniks later merged with other collaborationist forces that had withdrawn towards the west, and were put under the command of SS-Obergruppenführer Odilo Globocnik of the Operational Zone of the Adriatic Littoral. In 1945, he moved to Italy and lived in Rome until his death in 1962. He wrote anti-communist publications and collected reports for various western intelligence services and printed anti-Communist publications in the years following the war. He had a son, Dimitrije, who was a well-known writer and poet in his youth, and a daughter, Angela.