World War II (1941–45)
Once the kingdom of Yugoslavia was conquered by Nazi forces in World War II, all of Bosnia was ceded to the Nazi puppet regime, Independent State of Croatia (NDH). The NDH leaders embarked on a campaign of extermination of Serbs, Jews,Romani, Croats who opposed the regime, communists and large numbers of Josip Broz Tito's Partisans by setting up a number of death camps. The Ustaše recognized both Roman Catholicism and Islam as the national religions, but held the position that Eastern Orthodoxy, as a symbol of Serbian identity, was their greatest foe. Between 197,000 and 580,000 Serbs were killed. The United States Holocaust Museum puts the figure at 320,000-340,000 Serb victims in Croatia and Bosnia, while the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum and Research Center concludes that "More than 500,000 Serbs were murdered in horribly sadistic ways, 250,000 were expelled, and another 200,000 were forced to convert". Although Croatians were by far the largest ethnic group to constitute the Ustashe, the Vice President of the NDH and leader of the Yugoslav Muslim Organization Džafer Kulenović was a Muslim, and Muslims (Bosniaks) in total comprised nearly 12% of the Ustashe military and civil service authority.
Many Serbs themselves took up arms and joined the Chetniks, a Serb nationalist movement with the aim of establishing an ethnically homogeneous 'Greater Serbian' state. The Chetniks were responsible for widespread persecution and murder of non-Serbs and communist sympathizers, with the Muslim population of Bosnia, Herzegovina and Sandžak being a primary target. Once captured, Muslim villages were systematically massacred by the Chetniks. The total estimate of Muslims killed by Chetniks is between 80,000 and 100,000, most likely about 86,000 or 6.7 percent of their population (8.1 percent in Bosnia and Herzegovina alone). Later, a number of Bosnian Muslims served in the Nazi Waffen-SS units.
On 12 October 1941 a group of 108 notable Muslim citizens of Sarajevo signed the Resolution of Sarajevo Muslims by which they condemned the persecution of Serbs organized by Ustaše, made distinction between Muslims who participated in such persecutions and whole Muslim population, presented information about the persecutions of Muslims by Serbs and requested security for all citizens of the country, regardless of their identity.
Starting in 1941, Yugoslav communists under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito organized their own multi-ethnic resistance group, the partisans, who fought against both Axis and Chetnik forces. On 29 November 1943 the Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia with Tito at its helm held a founding conference inJajce where Bosnia and Herzegovina was reestablished as a republic within the Yugoslavian federation in its Habsburg borders.
Military success eventually prompted the Allies to support the Partisans, but Tito declined their offer to help and relied on his own forces instead. All the major military offensives by the antifascist movement of Yugoslavia against Nazis and their local supporters were conducted in Bosnia-Herzegovina and its peoples bore the brunt of fighting. More than 300,000 people died in Bosnia and Herzegovina in World War II.[58] At the end of the war the establishment of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, with the constitution of 1946, officially made Bosnia and Herzegovina one of six constituent republics in the new state.
