Alexander I of Yugoslavia

Early life

Alexander Karađorđević was born on 16 December 1888 [O.S. 4 December] in the Principality of Montenegro as the fourth child and second son of Peter Karađorđević and his wife, Princess Zorka of Montenegro. His paternal grandfather, also named Alexander, had been forced to abdicate as prince of Serbia and surrender power to the rival House of Obrenović. Alexander's maternal grandfather was Nicholas I, Prince of Montenegro. Despite enjoying support from the Russian Empire, at the time of Alexander's birth and early childhood, the House of Karađorđević was in political exile, with family members scattered all over Europe, unable to return to Serbia, due to rivalry with the House of Obrenović.

Serbia had recently been transformed from a principality into a kingdom under the Obrenovićes, who ruled with strong support from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The antagonism between the two rival royal houses was such, that, after the assassination of Prince Mihailo Obrenović in 1868 (an event the Karađorđevićes were suspected of taking part in), the Obrenovićes resorted to making constitutional changes, specifically proclaiming the Karađorđevićes banned from entering Serbia and stripping them of their civic rights.

Alexander was two when his mother, Princess Zorka, died in 1890 from complications while giving birth to his younger brother, Andrej, who died 23 days later. Alexander spent his childhood in Montenegro. In 1894, his widower father took the four children, including Alexander, to Geneva, Switzerland, where the young man completed his elementary education. Alongside his older brother George, he continued his schooling at the imperial Page Corps in Petrograd, Russian Empire. The British historian Robert Seton-Watson described Alexander as becoming a Russophile during his time in Petrograd, feeling much gratitude for the willingness of the Russian emperor Nicholas II to give him a refuge, where he was treated with much honor and respect.

As a page, Alexander was described as hard-working and determined while also being a "loner" who kept to himself and rarely showed his feelings. Nicholas II invited Alexander to dinners at the Winter Palace, where he was the guest of honor at meals hosted by the Russian imperial family, which was a great honor for a prince from Serbia's deposed princely family. During his time in Petrograd, Alexander visited the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, where the abbot gave Alexander an icon of Prince Alexander Nevsky and guided him to the grave of Marshal Alexander Suvorov. After his visit to the monastery, Alexander expressed the wish to be a great general like Marshal Suvorov or Prince Alexander Nevsky, saying he wanted to command either a great army or a great armada when he was a man.

Becoming crown prince

In 1909, a scandal broke when Crown Prince George, Alexander's older brother, killed a servant by kicking him in the stomach. Following pressure from powerful figures such as Prime Minister Nikola Pašić and high-ranking officers Dragutin "Apis" Dimitrijević and Petar Živković, George publicly renounced his claim to the throne in March of that year in favour of Alexander.

In 1910, Alexander nearly died from stomach typhus and was left with stomach problems for the rest of his life. In the run-up to the First Balkan War, Alexander played the role of a diplomat, visiting Sofia to meet Tsar Ferdinand I of Bulgaria for secret talks for a Balkan League to drive the Ottoman Turks out of the Balkans. Both Bulgaria and Serbia had rival claims to the Ottoman region of Macedonia, so Alexander, along with Ferdinand's son Crown Prince Boris, traveled to Petrograd to see the Russian emperor Nicholas II to ask for Russian mediation. In March 1912, Serbia and Bulgaria signed a defensive alliance that was later joined by Greece in May 1912.

Balkan Wars

In March 1912, Alexander had a meeting with ten senior military commanders. They all agreed to end all internal conflicts in the Royal Serbian Army and fully commit to realizing national goals, which allowed space for consolidation before the two successive Balkan Wars.

In the First Balkan War in 1912, as commander of the First Army, Crown Prince Alexander fought victorious battles in Kumanovo and Bitola. One of Alexander's most cherished moments came when he drove the Ottoman Turks out of Kosovo and on 28 October 1912 led the Serbian army on a review on the Field of Blackbirds. The Field of Blackbirds was where the Serbs under Prince Lazar had been defeated in a legendary battle by the Ottoman sultan Murad I on 28 June 1389, and is regarded by the Serbs as holy ground. It was a great honor for him to pay his respects to the Serbs who had fallen in that earlier battle. In the aftermath of the First Balkan War, disputes emerged among the victors over control of Macedonia, and Serbia and Greece signed an alliance against the Kingdom of Bulgaria.

After the Ottoman defeat and withdrawal from Skopje, Prince Alexander was met with flowers by the local people. He stopped and asked a seven-year-old girl, Vaska Zoicheva, "What are you?" (Pa šta si ti?) When she replied "Bulgarian!" (Bugarka!), the prince slapped her. News of the event spread quickly around Bulgaria. In 1920 and 1921, Serbian authorities searched for the girl's father, Danail Zoichev, and offered him money to renounce the event as fictional, but he refused.

Later in 1913, during the Second Balkan War, Alexander commanded the Serbian army at the Battle of Bregalnica against the Bulgarians. In the aftermath of the war, the Treaty of Bucharest (1913) assigned the region of Vardar Macedonia to Serbia. Prince Alexander took sides in the complicated power struggle over how Macedonia should be administered. In this, Alexander bested Colonel Dragutin "Apis" Dimitrijević, and in the wake of this, Alexander's father, King Peter, agreed to hand over royal powers to his son. Although Colonel Dimitrijević had been the mastermind of the 1903 coup that restored the House of Karađorđević to the Serbian throne, Alexander distrusted him, regarding his attempts to set himself up as a "kingmaker" and to have the Serbian army be a "state within the state" existing outside of civilian control as a major threat.

Additionally, Alexander saw Dimitrijević as an irresponsible intriguer who having betrayed one king might always betray another. In January 1914, the Serbian prime minister Nikola Pašić sent a letter to the Russian emperor Nicholas II in which King Peter expressed a desire for his son to marry one of the daughters of Nicholas II. Nicholas II in his reply stated that his daughters would not be forced into arranged marriages, but noted Alexander on his most recent trips to Petrograd had during dinners at the Winter Palace kept giving loving looks to the Grand Duchess Tatiana, leading him to guess that it was her whom Alexander wanted to marry. On 24 June 1914, Alexander became regent of Serbia.

World War I

At the outbreak of World War I, he was the nominal supreme commander of the Serbian army; true command was in the hands of the Chief of Staff of Supreme Headquarters, a position held successively by Stepa Stepanović (during the mobilisation), Radomir Putnik (1914–1915), Petar Bojović (1916–1917) and Živojin Mišić (1918). The Serbian army distinguished itself in the battles at Cer and at the Drina (the Battle of Kolubara) in 1914, scoring victories against the invading Austro-Hungarian forces and evicting them from the country.

The British historian Max Hastings described the Serbian army in 1914 as the toughest army in Europe and also the most egalitarian, with none of the distinctions of rank that characterized the other European armies, exemplified by how the Serbian army was the only army in Europe where officers would shake hands with the other ranks. However, the Serbian army suffered major shortages of equipment, with a third of the men called up in August 1914 having no rifles or ammunition, and new recruits being advised to bring their own boots and clothing as there were no uniforms for them. Alexander ordered the Serbian police to conduct searches of houses all over Serbia to see if there were any rifles and ammunition to be seized for the army.

In 1915, the Serbian army was attacked on several fronts by the allied forces of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria, suffering heavy losses. On 7 October 1915 an Austro-German army group under the command of German Field Marshal August von Mackensen invaded Serbia and after encountering fierce resistance took Belgrade on 9 October. On 14 October 1915, Bulgaria invaded Serbia and on 16 October the Bulgarians took Niš, severing the railroad that linked Serbia to Thessalonika in Greece. Being attacked from the north by the Austrians and the Germans and from the south by the Bulgarians, the Serbs by 25 November 1915 had been forced into the Kosovo region.

The massacres committed by the Austrians when they invaded Serbia in 1914 twice caused enormous panic and hundreds of thousands of Serbs fled their homes to escape the Austrians, which greatly delayed the movement of the Serbian army. Field Marshal Putnik persuaded Crown Prince Alexander and King Peter that it was better to keep the Serbian army intact to one day liberate Serbia rather to stand and fight in Kosovo as many Serb officers wanted.

The Serbian army withdrew through the gorges of Montenegro and northern Albania to the Greek island of Corfu, where it was reorganized. The march across the Accursed Mountains was a harrowing one as the Serbian army together with a mass of refugees had to cross mountains that rose to 3,000 feet high in the middle of winter, with the average daily temperature being −20° while battling the hostile Albanian tribes with the armies of Austria, Germany, and Bulgaria in pursuit. Many Serbs died along the way. Alexander repeatedly exposed himself to danger during the march to the sea while his health declined. Upon reaching the sea, the surviving Serbs, who numbered about 140,000, were rescued by British and French ships, which took them to Corfu.

Regency

On 1 December 1918, in a prearranged set piece, Alexander, as Prince Regent, received a delegation of the People's Council of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs; an address was read out by a member of the delegation, and Alexander made an address in acceptance. This was considered to be the birth of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. One of Alexander's first acts as Prince Regent of the new kingdom was to declare his support for the widespread demand for land reform, stating: "In our free state there can and will be only free landowners".

On 25 February 1919, Alexander signed a land reform decree breaking up all feudal estates over the size of 100 cadastral yokes with compensation to be paid to the former landowners except for those who belonged to the House of Habsburg and the other ruling families of enemy states in the Great War. Under the land reform decree, some two million hectares of land was handed over to half a million peasant households, though the implementation was very slow, taking 15 years before land reform was complete.

In both Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the majority of the landlords who lost land were Muslims while the majority of their former tenants who received the land were Christians, and in both places land reform was seen as an attack on the political and economic power of the Muslim gentry. In Croatia, Slovenia, and Vojvodina, the majority of the landlords who lost their land were Austrian or Hungarian nobility who usually did not reside in those places, meaning that however much they might have resented the loss of their land it did not have the sort of political repercussions it did in Macedonia and in Bosnia where the Albanian and Bosnian Muslim landlords lived.

In June 1921, a war veteran and communist, Spasoje Stejić Baćo, attempted to assassinate regent Alexander by throwing a bomb at his carriage. The bomb was thrown from a balcony and got stuck in telephone wires, wounding several bystanders.

King of Yugoslavia

On 16 August 1921, upon the death of his father, Alexander ascended to the throne of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which from its inception was colloquially known both in the Kingdom and the rest of Europe alike as Yugoslavia. The historian Brigit Farley described Alexander as something of a cipher to historians as he was a taciturn and reserved man who loathed to express his feelings either in person or in writing. He kept no diary and wrote no memoirs.

The British historian R. W. Seton-Watson, who knew Alexander well, called him a soldierly man most comfortable in a military milieu who was very quiet and surprisingly modest for a king. Seton-Watson described Alexander as having an "autocratic" personality, a man who was first and foremost a soldier who spent "six of his formative years" in the Serbian army, which left him with a "military outlook which unfitted him to deal with the delicate problems of constitutional government and which made compromise hard for him". Seton-Watson wrote that Alexander "...was very courageous, though not ever a man of strong physique or robust health. He had a strong fixity of purpose, great devotion to duty, powers of sustained work. He had great charm and simplicity of manner. He was accessible and very open to opinions—though he rarely acted on them, and though occasionally he reacted with positive violence, as in the case of the Slovene Zerjav who fainted in his presence."

Alexander was consistent in his belief in maintaining Yugoslavia as a unitary state and his opposition to federalism, which he believed would lead to the break-up of Yugoslavia and perhaps his own assassination. In turn, Alexander's opposition to federalism related to his belief that in a federalised Yugoslavia, the Serbs living in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina would be discriminated against by the Croats and Bosnian Muslims, once telling a Serb Orthodox priest that federalism would be "stabbing the Serbs in the back".

As a Karađorđević, Alexander was very conscious of the long blood-feud between the Houses of Obrenović and Karađorđević that had disfigured Serb politics in the 19th century and that the 1903 coup d'état that finally brought down the Obrenovićes had happened because the last Obrenović king, Alexander, was widely viewed as too subservient to Austria-Hungary and as having betrayed Serb interests. Because of the frequent changes in loyalty in the Serbian army in the 19th century between the feuding royal families, Alexander was never entirely convinced that the Serb-dominated officer corps of the Royal Yugoslav Army were completely loyal to him, and he always had the fear that if he was seen to be betraying Serb interests as the last Obrenović king was, he too might be overthrown and killed.

Marriage and foreign relations

The lavish royal wedding to Princess Maria of Romania was intended to cement the alliance with Romania, a fellow "victor nation" in World War I which like Yugoslavia had territorial disputes with the defeated nations like Hungary and Bulgaria. For Alexander, the royal wedding was especially satisfactory as most of the royal families of Europe attended, which showed that the House of Karađorđević, a family of peasant origins who were disliked for slaughtering the rival House of Obrenović in 1903, were finally accepted by the rest of European royalty.

In foreign policy, Alexander favored maintaining the international system created in 1918–19, and in 1921 Yugoslavia joined the Little Entente with Czechoslovakia and Romania to guard against Hungary. Hungary refused to accept the Treaty of Trianon and made territorial claims against all three states of the Little Entente.

The principal enemy of Yugoslavia in the 1920s was Fascist Italy, which wanted much of what is now modern Slovenia and Croatia. The origins of the Italo-Yugoslav dispute concerned the Italian contention that they had been "cheated" out of what they had been promised in the secret Treaty of London in 1915 at the Paris peace conference in 1919. It was largely out of the fear of Italy that Alexander in 1927 signed a treaty of alliance with France, which therefore became Yugoslavia's principal ally.

Crisis and dictatorship

Starting in 1926, an alliance of the Serb Democrats led by Svetozar Pribićević and the Croatian Peasant Party led by Stjepan Radić had systematically obstructed the Yugoslav parliament to press for federalism for Yugoslavia, filibustering and filing nonsensical motions to prevent the government from passing any bills. In June 1928, the disputes between the opposition and the government deputies escalated when Puniša Račić from Montenegro took out his handgun and shot Radić on the floor of the parliament. The charismatic Radić, the "uncrowned king of Croatia", had inspired intense devotion in Croatia and his assassination was seen as a sort of Serb declaration of war. The assassination pushed Yugoslavia to the brink of civil war and led Alexander to consider the "amputation" of Croatia as preferable to federalism. Alexander mused to Pribićević: "We cannot stay together with the Croats. Since we cannot, it would be better to separate. The best way would be to effect a peaceful separation like Sweden and Norway did". When Pribićević protested that this would be an act of "treason", Alexander told him he would think some more about what to do. Alexander appointed as prime minister Father Anton Korošec, a Slovene Catholic priest, with a mandate to stop the slide towards civil war. On 1 December 1928, the lavish celebrations of the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes that the government organized led to rioting that left 10 dead in Zagreb.

In response to the political crisis triggered by the assassination of Stjepan Radić, King Alexander abolished the Vidovdan Constitution on 6 January 1929, prorogued the Parliament, and introduced a personal dictatorship (the so-called "January 6th Dictatorship", Šestojanuarska diktatura). One of the first acts of the new regime was to carry out a purge of the civil service with one-third of the civil service being fired by May 1929 in an attempt to address popular complaints about rampant corruption in the bureaucracy. He also changed the name of the country to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and changed the internal divisions from the 33 oblasts to nine new banovinas on 3 October. Of the banovinas, only one had a Slovene majority, two had Croat majorities and the rest had Serb majorities, which especially angered the Bosnian Muslims, who were in a minority in every banovina.

The way in which the banovinas were based on new borders that did not correspond to the historical regional borders led to much resentment, especially in Bosnia and Croatia. The banovinas were named after the topography of Yugoslavia rather than the historical names in a bid to weaken regional loyalties, being governed by bans appointed by the King. In the same month, he tried to banish by decree the use of Serbian Cyrillic to promote the exclusive use of the Latin alphabet in Yugoslavia.

Restoration of constitution

In 1931, Alexander decreed a new Constitution which transferred executive power to the King. Elections were to be by universal male suffrage. The provision for a secret ballot was dropped and pressure on public employees to vote for the governing party was to be a feature of all elections held under Alexander's constitution. Furthermore, the King would appoint half of the upper house directly, and legislation could become law with the approval of one of the houses alone if it were also approved by the King. The 1931 constitution kept Yugoslavia as a unitary state, which enraged the non-Serbian peoples who demanded a federation and saw Alexander's royal dictatorship as thinly disguised Serbian domination. In the parliamentary elections of December 1931 – January 1932, the call of the opposition parties to boycott the vote was widely heeded, a sign of popular dissatisfaction with the new constitution.

In response to the impoverishment of the countryside caused by the Great Depression, Alexander reaffirmed in a speech the right of every peasant family to a minimum amount of land that could not be seized by a bank in the event of a debt default. In 1932, he issued a decree suspending all debt payments by farmers to the banks for six months and forbade any more foreclosures by the banks against farmers. Alexander's measures preventing the banks from foreclosing on farmers who were unable to pay their loans saved many peasants from being ruined and prevented economic distress in the countryside from turning political, but in the long run, his policies did not solve the economic problems of the rural areas. The losses taken by the banks and their inability to foreclose on farmers who had delinquent loans made the banks unwilling to make new loans to the farmers. As Yugoslav agriculture, especially in the southern parts of the country was backward, the farmers needed loans to modernise their farms, but the unwillingness of the banks to lend to the farmers made modernisation of the farms impossible in the 1930s.

In September 1932, Ante Trumbić gave an interview to The Manchester Guardian newspaper, in which he stated that life for ordinary Croats was better when they were part of the Austrian empire and stated that perhaps the Croats would be better off if they broke away from Yugoslavia to form their own state. This public expression of scepticism towards the unitary arrangement of Yugoslavia was a hard pill to swallow for Alexander, who always respected and liked Trumbić. On 7 November 1932, Trumbić and Vladko Maček of the Croatian Peasant Party issued the so-called Zagreb Points, which demanded a new constitution which would turn Yugoslavia into a federation, and stated that the Croats would otherwise demand independence.

Foreign policy

Starting in 1933, Alexander became worried about Nazi Germany. In March 1933, the French minister in Belgrade, Paul-Émile Naggiar, told Alexander that France was seriously worried about the stability of Yugoslavia and warned that the King could not continue to rule in face of opposition from the majority of his subjects and that Paris was starting to view Alexander as a liability for France. Naggiar predicted that the new regime in Germany was going to challenge the international order created by the Treaty of Versailles sooner or later and that France needed Yugoslavia to be stable and strong, which led Naggiar to advise the King to adopt federalism for his realm.

One point of agreement of Alexander with Mussolini was his fear of the unification of Germany and Austria, which would make Germany a direct neighbour of Yugoslavia. Alexander had no desire to have Germany as a neighbour, which led him to support the continuation of Austrian independence. Despite his distaste for communism, the King gave support, albeit in a very cautious and hesitant way, to the plans of French foreign minister Louis Barthou to bring the Soviet Union into a front meant to contain Germany. In 1933–34, Alexander became a proponent of an alliance between Yugoslavia, Greece, Romania and Turkey, which was achieved in 1934 with the creation of the Balkan Pact.

Although the Balkan Pact was directed primarily against Italy and its allies (Hungary, Albania and Bulgaria), Alexander hoped the pact might provide some protection against Germany. After the coup d'état in May 1934 in Sofia, Alexander hoped that Bulgaria would also join the pact. The new Bulgarian government had started repression against the IMRO. In September 1934, Alexander visited Sofia to improve relations with Bulgaria. The Bulgarian organisation which had taken power in the 1934 coup, Zveno, supported the unification of Bulgaria and Albania into Yugoslavia, which agreed with Alexander's policy, Balkans for the Balkan peoples.

Assassination

After an attack by the Ustaše on a gendarmerie station in Velebit in November 1932, Alexander said through an intermediary to the Italian government, "If you want to have serious riots in Yugoslavia or cause a regime change, you need to kill me. Shoot at me and be sure you have finished me off, because that's the only way to make changes in Yugoslavia."

The French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou had attempted in 1934 to build an alliance meant to contain Germany, consisting of France's allies in Eastern Europe like Yugoslavia, together with Italy and the Soviet Union. The long-standing rivalry between Benito Mussolini and King Alexander had complicated Barthou's work as Alexander complained about Italian territorial claims against his country and Italian support for Hungarian revisionism and the Croat Ustaše.

As long as the French ally Yugoslavia continued to have disputes with Italy, Barthou's plans for an Italo-French rapprochement would be stillborn. During a visit to Belgrade in June 1934, Barthou promised the king that France would pressure Mussolini into signing a treaty under which he would renounce his claims against Yugoslavia. Alexander was sceptical of Barthou's plan, noting that there were hundreds of Ustaše being sheltered in Italy and it was rumoured that Mussolini had financed an unsuccessful attempt by the Ustaše to assassinate him in December 1933.

Mussolini had come to believe that it was only the personality of Alexander that was holding Yugoslavia together and that if the king were assassinated, Yugoslavia would descend into civil war, which would allow Italy to annex certain regions of Yugoslavia without fear of reprisal from France. However, France was Yugoslavia's closest ally, and Barthou invited Alexander for a visit to France to sign a Franco-Yugoslav agreement that would allow Barthou to "go to Rome with the certainty of success". As a result of the previous deaths of three family members on Tuesdays, Alexander refused to undertake any public functions on that day of the week. On Tuesday, 9 October 1934, however, he had no choice, as he was arriving in Marseille to begin a state visit to France to strengthen both countries' alliance in the Little Entente.

While Alexander was being slowly driven in a car through the streets along with Barthou, a Bulgarian assassin, Vlado Chernozemski, stepped into the street and shot the King twice and the chauffeur with a Mauser C96 semiautomatic pistol. Alexander died in the car and was slumped backwards in the seat with his eyes open. Barthou was also killed by a stray bullet mistakenly fired by French police during the scuffle following the attack. Lieutenant-Colonel Jules Piollet struck the assailant with his sword. Ten people in the procession were wounded, including General Alphonse Georges who was hit by two bullets as he tried to intervene. Nine people in the crowd that came to see the king were wounded, four of them fatally.

In literature and popular culture

The song "Don Juan" by British synth duo Pet Shop Boys (the B-side to their 1988 single "Domino Dancing") contains the phrase "King Zog's back from holiday, Marie Lupescu's grey and King Alexander is dead in Marseille".

Rebecca West's travel book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon opens with the author's anxiety over the assassination, which she hears about as she is recovering from surgery and then discusses with an ignorant nurse. This opens up a meditation on the impacts (manifest and latent) of prior assassinations on world events. Later she describes a newsreel of the assassination in detail.

In Upton Sinclair's historical novel, Wide Is The Gate (novel 4 in the Lanny Budd series published 1941) the assassination is attributed to the Nazi German government. The novel claims funds and a forged passport were obtained by the Croatian assassin from the head of German foreign policy department.

A heavily fictionalized version of the assassination serves as the opening to the book The Second Assassin by Christopher Hyde. The gunman is changed to a Croatian, while an Irish hitman kills both him and Barthou using a rifle, undetected in the confusion. It is described as masterminded by Nazi Germany to get rid of both Alexander and Barthou while they are together.

In Ivan Vazov's poem "Па ща си ти?" ("What are you?") is depicted a case when crown prince Alexander asks the question to a little girl from Skopje and when she answers 'I'm Bulgarian' he slaps her in the face. The poem emphasizes the suffering of the Macedonian Bulgarians under Serbian rule.

TV series Alexander of Yugoslavia directed by Zdravko Šotra

References and notes

Bibliography

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Farley, Brigit (2007). "King Aleksandar and the Royal Dictatorship in Yugoslavia". In Bernd J. Fischer (ed.). Balkan Strongmen: Dictators and Authoritarian Rulers of Southeastern Europe. Central European Studies. West Lafayette, IN. pp. 51–86.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)

Gligorijević, Branislav (2010). Kralj Aleksandar I Karađorđević. Beograd: Zavod za udžbenike i nastavna sredstva. 3 vols.

Crampton, Richard (1997). Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century – And After. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0415164238.

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Hastings, Max (2013). Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914. London: William Collins.

Kovrig, Bennett (January 1976). "Mediation by Obfuscation: The Resolution of the Marseille Crisis, October 1934 to May 1935". The Historical Journal. 19 (1): 191–221. doi:10.1017/S0018246X00018367. S2CID 153681564.

Seton-Watson, Robert (January 1935). "King Alexander's Assassination: Its Background and Effects". International Affairs. 14 (1): 20–47.

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Passmore, Kevin (2003). Women, Gender, and Fascism in Europe, 1919–45. Manchester University Press. ISBN 0719060834.

Strachan, Hew (2006). The First World War – A New Illustrated History. Pocket Books. ISBN 074323961X.