Montenegrin Federalist Party - Fascism

Fascism

With the April War and the fall of Yugoslavia to Axis forces, the Montenegrin Federalist Party offered to collaborate with the Italian Fascists of Benito Mussolini, demanding a Greater Montenegro from the river of Neretva in Herzegovina to Mata in Albania; it would also include Metohija and Sandžak. A much smaller in territorial size "Independent State of Montenegro" was proclaimed on Saint Peter's Congress in 12 July 1941, with the Ustaše and Albanians being much more favored by the Nazis. Nicholas' grandson and successor as heir to the throne Prince Michael of Montenegro was invited to be its King and head of state, but he vigorously refused claiming that he will never cooperate with Nazis, criminals and traitors of the Serbian people. The restored Montenegro lost Metohija and its eastern lands to a Greater Albania, but managed to gain the Serbian part of Sandžak. All other political parties were outlawed and a dictatorship of Sekula Drljević under Italian protection was proclaimed. The nominal ecclesiastical leader became the uncanonical Croatian Orthodox Church. It received a split on two wings, with a most extremist one opposing the current state borders of Montenegro, especially Albanian expansion and claimed the Bocca. That wing held links to an extent with the party's mortal enemies, the Partisans, to assist the rebellion against the Italians and the Ustashas in the Bay of Kotor, as well as when assistance was needed to fend off the royalists, who managed to get ever-more control over Montenegro, and to whom the Communist Partisans just opened civil war.

In 1941 the Partisans raised a rebellion and managed to liberate much of Montenegro, and the Montenegrin Federalist Army went to exile. It reorganized in Zagreb, the Independent State of Croatia's capital, a Montenegrin State Council aimed at eventually creating an independent and large national state of the Montenegrin people. Out of Chetniks it formed its own Montenegrin People's Army. It closely associated itself with the Ustashas and aided their regime greatly, with its prominent members became leading Nazi and genocide ideologues. Throughout the WWII the party would lead to the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people. With the impending Allied victory in 1945, the party dispersed retreating with other Axis collaborators in late 1945, after its own Montenegrin Army turned against itself.