This is the second volume of my three-volume study on war and revolution in Yugoslavia from I94I to I945• It is organized around the complementary themes of occupation and collaboration, and comes after the first volume, which dealt with the Chetniks, and before the third volume, which will be devoted to the Partisans. All the actors and events described here shared three common circumstances. First, all events took place within Yugoslav territory during the Second World War. Second, all the

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... ces discussed here-foreign and domestic-were opposed to Yugoslavia as a common state of South Slavic peoples, or at least accepted its partition. As I noted in the preface to the first volume, the attitude of various domestic forces toward the existence of the Yugoslav state has provided the organizing rationale for this entire study. And third, everything described here occurred against the backdrop of Nazi Germany, which held sway over the whole of southeast Europe and directed, shielded, and exploited it. Fascist Italy was an additional element of the foreign backdrop until its surrender in September I943, when Germany stepped into the breach and took over all earlier Italian-controlled areas in the Balkans and that part of Italy not yet in Allied hands. Occupation by conquering peoples and collaboration (or cooperation) with them have been a familiar part of the history of all South Slavic nations for centuries. This is because of their small size in comparison to their neighbors, and because of their geopolitical location on the Balkan Peninsula, astride the paths of expansion of large empires, great religions, and competing cultures and ideologies. There were always strong and weak forces, victors and vanquished, and collaboration under conditions of occupation was a way for those who were conquered to survive in, adjust to, or even profit from the given circumstances. The principal reasons for collaboration in Yugoslavia from I94I to I945 can be traced to the national and religious composition of the first Yugoslav state in I 9 I 8 and the way it was governed in the interwar period. Because of the new state's eminently multinational and multiconfessional character-it consisted of historically well-defined national units with different backgrounds