| Battle of Zvornik | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part ofWorld War II in Yugoslavia | |||||||
| |||||||
| Belligerents | |||||||
 Yugoslav Partisans |  Germany Independent State of Croatia | ||||||
| Commanders and leaders | |||||||
| Koča Popović(commander) Filip Kljajić †(political commissary) | Rudolf Lüters(general) | ||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||
| 3,500–5,000 | 450–2,000 | ||||||
TheBattle of Zvornik (Serbo-Croatian:Bitka u Zvorniku) was the 1943 capture by the1st Proletarian Brigade of the occupied Bosnian townZvornik from theWehrmacht and theUstasha troops of the occupyingIndependent State of Croatia.
Preparation for the offensive on the occupied town ofZvornik by the1st Proletarian Brigade began in June 1943.[2] On the order of the brigades commanderKoča Popović, the troops began their attack on the night of 4 July 1943.
The idea of the attack was that during the night the sudden, powerful onslaught could takeover theZvornik Fortress (Kula grad) on Mount Mlađevac. Mlađevac and Zmajevac were also successfully captured in the initial attack. The Ustasha troops, legionnaires and civilians fled across theDrina river into Serbia. Many people died crossing the Drina.
Filip Kljajić, thepolitical commissary of the 1st Proletarian Brigade, was shot accidentally on a hill on the outskirts of Zvornik during withdrawal.[3][4][5] His body was taken to theBosniak villageLiplje on a mountain near Zvornik and buried. Kljajić's body was later taken from that spot by his family and reburied in a family plot elsewhere. A memorial was erected on the spot where his corpse was originally buried. Following the ethnic cleansing of Liplje in 1992 at the start of theBosnian War, the memorial suffered and became overgrown with shrubbery.
Rodoljub Čolaković, who participated in the capture on the Partisan side, wrote in his 1962 memoirWinning Freedom: "We had reached a grand and most significant victory in eastern Bosnia. We had liberated Zvornik, an important junction of communications along theDrina."[6]