Stjepan Filipovic
“Death to fascism! Freedom to the people!”
Stjepan Filipovic was a Croatian born in 1916 in what became Yugoslavia after World War I. He left home at 16, became a metalworker, and in 1937, joined the local workers’ movement and became an activist member. Arrested for political activity, Filipovic was sentenced to a year in jail, and when released in 1940, joined the Communist Party.
In 1941, Germany invaded and overran Yugoslavia. Filipovic volunteered to join the partisan resistance against the Nazi occupiers and was posted to a guerrilla unit near Valjevo, in today’s Serbia. Given responsibility for recruitment and for securing arms, he excelled in his duties and showed considerable promise, such that by year’s end he had risen to command an entire partisan battalion.
He was captured by the Nazis in February, 1942, and sentenced to be publicly hanged in Valjevo’s town square. At death’s door, Stjepan Filipovic had the courage and presence of mind to seize the moment and defy his captors during his last seconds on earth. Mounting the gallows and with the hangman’s noose around his neck, he defiantly thrust his hands in the air and struck a dramatic pose that was captured on camera. Urging the gathered crowd to continue the struggle against the Nazi oppressors and their Yugoslav collaborators, he cried out just before he was hanged: “Death to fascism, freedom to the people!” – a preexisting partisan slogan that Filipovic’s martyrdom helped popularize.
After the war, Filipovic was designated a national hero of Yugoslavia. A monumental statue was erected in Valjevo in his honor, replicating his Y-shaped pose in an artistically classic rendition reminiscent of a Goya painting.
