“Death to Fascism! Freedom to the People!”
In 1916, Stjepan Filipipovic, a Croatian, was born in what become Yugoslavia after World War I. He left home in his teens, became a metalworker, and joined the local workers’ movement, becoming a labor activist. He was arrested for political activity, and sentenced to a year in jail. When he was released in 1940, he joined the Communist Party.
Germany invaded and overran Yugoslavia the following year, and Filipovic volunteered to join the partisan resistance. He was posted to a guerrilla unit near Valjevo, in today’s Serbia, and given responsibility for recruitment and for securing arms. He showed considerable promise, and by year’s end he had risen to command an entire partisan battalion.
In February, 1942, he was captured by the Nazis and sentenced to be publicly hanged in Valjevo’s town square, but 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, Stjepan Filipovic 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 partisan slogan that Filipovic’s martyrdom helped popularize. After the war, he was named a national hero of Yugoslavia, and a statue was erected in Valjevo in his honor, replicating his Y shaped pose in an artistic rendition reminiscent of a Goya painting.
