Peter II of Yugoslavia

Early life and education

Peter II was born on 6 September 1923 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (modern-day Serbia). He was the eldest son of Alexander I of Yugoslavia and Maria of Romania. His godparents were his maternal aunt Queen Elizabeth of Greece, his maternal grandfather King Ferdinand I of Romania and King George V of the United Kingdom, for whom his son, the Duke of York, stood proxy.

Prince Peter was initially tutored at the Royal Palace, Belgrade, before attending Sandroyd School then in Cobham, Surrey where Reed's School now stands. When he was 11 years old, Prince Peter succeeded to the Yugoslav throne on 9 October 1934 upon his father's assassination in Marseille during a state visit to France. In view of the new monarch's youth, a regency was set up under his father's cousin Prince Paul.

Prince Regent Paul took the view that he must not change the kingdom from the way that King Alexander had left it so that his son could take possession of it unaltered when he turned 18 in September 1941, and resisted any attempts to revise the 1931 constitution. On 20 August 1939, Paul permitted the prime minister, Dragiša Cvetković, to sign an agreement with Vladko Maček, the leader of the Croatian Peasant Party, which created a new Banovina of Croatia with substantial autonomy and a much greater size, covering much of what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina, and satisfying at least in part the long-standing demands of the Croats.

The agreement was very unpopular with the Serbs, especially when reports emerged that the prečani Serbs were being discriminated against by the authorities of the autonomous banovina. The tense international situation of August 1939 with the Danzig crisis pushing Europe to the brink of war meant Paul wanted to settle one of the more debilitating internal disputes in order to make Yugoslavia more capable of surviving the coming storm.

The agreement came at the cost of both Paul and Cvetković being condemned by Serbian public opinion for "selling out" to the Croats, all the more so as many Croats made it clear that they saw the banovina of Croatia as only a stepping stone towards independence. The unpopularity of the agreement and the Cvetković government, was one of the reasons for the coup d'état of 27 March 1941 as many Serbs believed that Peter, the son of King Alexander, would continue with his father's centralising policies when he reached his majority.

Second World War

Prince Regent Paul declared that the Kingdom of Yugoslavia would join the Tripartite Pact on 25 March 1941. Two days later, King Peter, at age 17, was proclaimed of age after a pro-British coup d'état. The initially bloodless coup was led by General Dušan Simović on 27 March 1941 in the name of Peter. As General Simović led his men toward the Royal Compound, which was surrounded by guards loyal to the Regent, Peter climbed down a drain-pipe to greet the rebels.

As the Regent's guards surrendered without fighting, Simović arrived to tell Peter: "Your Majesty, I salute you as King of Yugoslavia. From this moment you will exercise your full sovereign power". The coup was very popular in Belgrade and Peter was well received by the crowds. The people who had come out in Belgrade to show their support for the coup had a very pro-Allied character, many of the protesters waving British and French flags. The crowds in Belgrade cheered Peter wildly as the 17-year-old king drove his car down the streets without his bodyguards to be greeted by his subjects.

The new government that Peter swore in on 27 March 1941 was headed by General Simović and comprised members of the People's Radical Party, the Croatian Peasant Party, the Democratic Party, the Croatian Independent Democrats, the Slovene People's Party, the Yugoslav Muslim Organization, the Agrarian Party and the Yugoslav National Party. With the exception of the Yugoslav Radical Alliance and the banned Yugoslav Communist Party and the Ustashe, all of the main political parties were represented in the new government.

Postponing Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany simultaneously attacked Yugoslavia and Greece on 6 April 1941, Orthodox Easter Sunday. The Luftwaffe bombed Belgrade, killing between 3,000 and 4,000 people. Within a week, Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary and Italy invaded Yugoslavia, and the government was forced to surrender on 17 April. Parts of Yugoslavia were annexed by Italy, Bulgaria, Hungary and Germany. The remaining parts were governed by two German-controlled puppet governments, the Independent State of Croatia and the Serbian Government of National Salvation.

Peter left the country with the Royal Yugoslav Government's ministers following the Axis invasion. Initially the Yugoslav king and his government ministers went to Greece where they refuelled at a British airfield in rural Greece where locals did not at first believe that he was king of Yugoslavia. They then went to British-ruled Jerusalem in Mandatory Palestine, and Cairo in Egypt. In Athens on 16 April 1941, Peter issued a press statement saying he would fight until victory before fleeing Greece.

Government-in-exile

In June 1941, King Peter arrived in London, where he joined other governments in exile from Nazi-occupied Europe. When Peter and his government landed in London they were greeted as heroes by the British media. The British press presented what the Serbian historian Stevan K. Pavlowitch called a "romanticized" picture of the young Peter, who became a "symbol of his country's struggle to keep its freedom in alliance with Great Britain". He was supplied with a Lendrum & Hartman Limited Buick delivered to his exile home near Cambridge.

A sign of the initial high regard for Peter in the neutral United States, he was featured as a hero in October 1941 edition of the comic book Military Comics: Stories of the Army and Navy, which presented a somewhat fictionalized version of the 27 March 1941 coup d'état in Belgrade in which a group of secondary school students who are upset by Yugoslavia's signing of the Tripartite Pact rally for the king and overthrow the regent.

Peter quickly learned that the degree of attention the British were willing to give to the government-in-exile was directly related to what assets the government-in-exile could bring to the Allied cause. As only a few hundred Yugoslav soldiers had escaped to Egypt, the Yugoslav government-in-exile did not have much to contribute.

Initially, the government-in-exile planned to make good its losses by recruiting an army from Yugoslav immigrants in the neutral United States, but the American government objected to this plan, and instead the government-in-exile had to recruit from the ethnic Slovene POWs captured while fighting with the Royal Italian Army. From the British POW camps, enough ethnic Slovenes volunteered to provide one infantry battalion, who were reluctant to fight against the Italians as they would be executed for treason if captured. In terms of military forces available in the Middle East, Yugoslavia was as Pavlowitch put it the "least important of the allies". The Yugoslav officer corps in Egypt was prone to feuding between younger officers who blamed the senior officers for Yugoslavia's swift defeat in April 1941, and such was the extent of the in-fighting that the government-in-exile had to ask the British military police to impose its will on its own army.

In this context, when King Peter and the rest of the government-in-exile heard reports in mid-1941 that a guerrilla movement called the Chetniks led by Colonel Draža Mihailović were fighting the Germans, he triumphantly seized upon these reports as proving that he did have an asset to the Allied cause that was tying down German forces that otherwise would be fighting on the other fronts. It was not until October 1941 that the government-in-exile was finally able to establish contact with General Mihailović. In September 1941, a liaison mission from the Special Operations Executive (SOE) parachuted into Yugoslavia to meet Mihailović, and afterwards, became the main means which Mihailović communicated with the Allies. It was through the SOE mission attached with the Chetniks that King Peter and the rest of government-in-exile communicated with Mihailović.

Marriage

The Chicago Tribune reported on 1 August 1943 about the royal romance in London between King Peter and Princess Alexandra of Greece and Denmark that: "The princess, a pretty, dark-haired girl, used to serve waffles and coffee to American officers and nurses over a snack bar at the London Red Cross club. There she met King Peter, a slender young man in naval uniform who often dropped in to listen to the music of a United States infantry band". In April 1942, Peter proposed marriage to Princess Alexandra after a few weeks of courtship and she accepted.

While the Western media portrayed a "fairy tale romance" across the backdrop of wartime London between the young Yugoslav king and a Greek princess, the announcement of Peter's engagement to Alexandra in July 1943 caused immense controversy in his homeland. According to Serbian tradition, a leader must not marry during a national emergency, and the news that Peter had become engaged while his homeland was torn by war caused a backlash against him.

Starting in April 1941, Yugoslavia had experienced involvement in the Second World War, The Holocaust, and a civil war due to the efforts of the Yugoslav Partisans. All of this led to a collapse in living standards in a country which was already one of the least wealthy in Europe. Consequently, Peter's engagement and wedding in the relative comfort of London was seen as a break with Serbian traditions and out of touch with the conditions faced by the general public.

The cabinet in a rare show of unity had all objected to Peter's plans for a wedding in wartime when the issue was first discussed in April 1942, and the issue was not raised again until April 1943. Again, when the matter was discussed in early 1943 the Serb ministers had objected while from Serbia itself General Mihailović reported that public opinion strongly disapproved. The Prime Minister, Slobodan Jovanović, was opposed to announcing the engagement while Yugoslavia was still occupied, predicting that the news would discredit the monarchy in Serbia, and rather than postpone the engagement, which was announced in July 1943, Peter dismissed Jovanović on 26 June 1943.

In early 1944, the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill applied strong pressure on Peter to dismiss his prime minister, Božidar Purić, whom almost everybody viewed as incompetent, and to sever his links with General Mihailović, whom Churchill was convinced by this point was a collaborator. At the same time, the British threatened to stop arms shipments to Josip Broz Tito's Partisans unless he recognized King Peter as the rightful king of Yugoslavia. Churchill wanted to preserve the Yugoslav monarchy to keep the country in the western sphere of influence after the war while incorporating the Partisans into the royalist government-in-exile.

Deposition and exile

Although the war was over, Peter was not allowed to return home. Prime Minister Šubašić arrived in Belgrade in November 1944 and shortly afterwards, went to Moscow to negotiate an agreement with Stalin; that Peter would not be allowed to return until a plebiscite was held on if Yugoslavia should become a republic or remain a monarchy. Šubašić also agreed to Stalin's demand for a three-man regency council to govern until the plebiscite, which enraged Peter who noted that he was 21 years old and did not require a regent anymore.

Peter also objected to the regents who numbered 1 Croat, 1 Slovene and 1 Serb as they were all nominated by Tito, complaining the regents were biased against him. In March 1945, the regency council started to govern in Belgrade while a cabinet was formed what was now called the Democratic Federation of Yugoslavia numbering 28 men, of whom 23 were Partisans. The National Liberation Front government was in theory a coalition, but in fact it was a Communist-dominated regime with the non-Communist ministers there only as a "window dressing" to disguise the extent of Communist dominance.

The new government attempted to freeze Peter's assets abroad, claiming that they were stolen. Peter and Tito took to denouncing each other with Tito telling the press that he was creating a democracy in Yugoslavia while Peter accused him of creating a Communist dictatorship. In the elections for the constituent assembly on 11 November 1945, there was widespread voting fraud and intimidation; with opposition newspapers prevented from having the truth published by the government denying them a voice.

Peter was deposed by Yugoslavia's Communist Constituent Assembly on 29 November 1945 with Yugoslavia proclaimed a republic. After this declaration, he settled in the United States. In 1948, Peter visited Chicago, staying at the Drake Hotel, visited the Inland Steel works and Armour stockyards "where many Yugoslavs work" and spent much time at the Serbian Orthodox Seminary of St. Sava.

As a living former king of a European country, Peter was something of a novelty for Americans, and addressed various civic groups in the Midwest, for example in 1949 it was reported that the "young, modern, democratic monarch who refused to accept the situation in his country" spoke to the Kohler Woman's club in Sheboygan on the subject of "My kingdom for freedom". In 1951, Peter went on the Ford Festival TV show, where he was described as a "sad-eyed youth" who was "a flop as a TV personality" as he was noticeably nervous in front of the TV cameras and was quickly dismissed by the host, James Melton.

Final years and death

From 1964 to his death Peter served as the Royal Patron of the Sovereign Military Order of the Temple of Jerusalem in the United States. In 1963, Alexandra, who was suffering from severe depression, tried to commit suicide. Peter himself suffered from depression and alcoholism, and his heavy drinking caused him to suffer from cirrhosis of the liver. As the Chicago area had a substantial Yugoslav immigrant population, Peter spent much of his exile in Chicago, where he maintained ties with anti-communist Serbian emigres, especially with the Serbian National Defense Council.

The Non-Aligned Movement of the Third World nations, which had as one of its leaders Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, was felt to be useful for American foreign policy in the Cold War as being disruptive to the Soviet bloc, creating the example of a communist regime in eastern Europe that was independent of the Soviet Union. The United States did not wish to push Tito towards the Kremlin by supporting the Serb royalist movement.

In 1963, Peter told the Chicago Tribune: "The State Department has told me that I am a guest in your country, and so I must not discuss American foreign policy towards Yugoslavia." Instead, Peter frequently attended various civic events in the Chicago area, speaking at a fundraiser for the Knights of Malta in 1964, hosting the local meeting of the Alliance Francaise in 1965, attending a memorial for General Mihailović at the Milhailovich Memorial Home in 1966 and in 1967 attending an event for the Knights of Malta where he knighted "50 persons from Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin". In 1967, Peter took on a job for the first time in his life, working for the Sterling Savings & Loan Association in Los Angeles. When asked by the press if working for a living would hurt his image as a king, Peter replied: "I think it raises my stature a little."

After many years of suffering from cirrhosis, he died in Denver, Colorado, at Denver Health Medical Center on 3 November 1970, after a failed liver transplant. He was interred in Saint Sava Monastery Church at Libertyville, Illinois, the only European monarch so far to have been buried in the United States.

In the 1980s, the American soap opera Dynasty was shown on Yugoslav television. As one of the stars of Dynasty, the actress Catherine Oxenberg, is descended from the House of Karađorđević, being the granddaughter of the Prince Regent Paul, this sparked immense national pride in Serbia and by 1990 led to a major revival of popular interest in the House of Karađorđević, which was exploited by the regime of Slobodan Milošević to burnish its nationalist line. The revival of Karađorđević nostalgia led to something of a popular rehabilitation of King Peter, whose death in 1970 had been barely noticed in his homeland.

Return of remains and state funeral

On 4 March 2007, former Crown Prince Alexander announced plans to have his father's remains repatriated to Serbia. Peter II had chosen St. Sava Serbian Orthodox Monastery as his interim resting place because of the extenuating circumstances that afflicted his homeland. After talks with the Serbian government, the move was confirmed in January 2013 with the burial place being the Royal Family Mausoleum in Oplenac.

On 22 January 2013, Peter's remains were returned to Belgrade. He was laid in state in the Royal Chapel in Dedinje before being buried in the Royal Family Mausoleum at Oplenac on 26 May 2013 along with his wife, Queen Alexandra. His mother, Queen Maria, and his brother, Prince Andrej, lie nearby. The Serbian Royal Regalia were placed over Peter's coffin. Present at the return ceremony were the Prime Minister Ivica Dačić, Peter's son Alexander with his family, and Serbian Patriarch Irinej. The latter openly advocated for the restoration of the Serbian monarchy.