World War II & Axis Occupation

In April 1941, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy invaded and dismembered Yugoslavia. Bosnia and Herzegovina was annexed into the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), a brutal Axis puppet state governed by the ultra-nationalist Ustaše regime led by Ante Pavelić. The NDH launched a systematic, genocidal campaign of extermination against Serbs, Jews, and Roma, resulting in massive massacres, forced conversions, and detention camp networks.

In response, Bosnia became the geographic heartland of the anti-fascist resistance movement in Europe. Josip Broz Tito's multi-ethnic Partisans waged a highly effective guerrilla campaign from Bosnia's mountainous terrain, fighting grueling engagements such as the Battle of the Neretva and the Battle of the Sutjeska against combined German, Italian, Ustaše, and Serbian royalist Chetnik forces. The political rebirth of Bosnia occurred on November 25, 1943, during the first session of the State Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ZAVNOBiH) in Mrkonjić Grad.

The delegates adopted a historic resolution that rejected partition, declaring Bosnia as an equal federal republic within the future Yugoslav federation, in the resolution's words, 'neither Serb, nor Croat, nor Muslim, but Serb and Muslim and Croat', restoring its medieval geographic state boundaries.