During the German-Soviet invasion of Poland, which started World War II in 1939, Yugoslavia declared neutrality. Despite this, some of the escape routes of Poles who fled from occupied Poland to Hungary and Romania led through Yugoslavia.[1] Local citizens and the Yugoslav Red Cross aided the Polish refugees.[1] The Poles then further escaped via Italy and Greece to Polish-alliedFrance, where the Polish Army was reconstituted to continue the fight against Germany.[1] Eventually, Yugoslavia, fearing Germany, became reluctant to further allow Poles to evacuate through its territory, causing the escape route to be diverted to Bulgaria.[2] In 1941, Yugoslavia was eventually also invaded by Germany. Citizens of Yugoslavia were among the prisoners of German prisoner-of-war camps, concentration camps and forced labour camps in German-occupied Poland. During the war both countries suffered heavy casualties and developed the Polish resistance movement and the Yugoslav Partisans movement.
After the war, over 15,000 Poles were repatriated from Yugoslavia to Poland.
Post-war period
President Tito in Warsaw (1964).
After the end of the war until the 1948 two countries were in the Soviet sphere of influence. In 1946 two countries signed the Agreement on Friendship and Mutual Assistance.[3] While the Polish Workers' Party needed a couple of years and Soviet support to gain the power in the country, Communist Party of Yugoslavia was able to establish control over the country already in 1945 without any significant Soviet support.[4] This led new Yugoslav authorities to expect the status of an ally instead of a satellite state within the Eastern Bloc. Situation escalated in 1948 Tito–Stalin split after which Yugoslav relations with all Eastern Bloc countries, including Poland, were either suspended or significantly strained.[5] Situation improved following the 1955 Belgrade declaration yet at this stage Yugoslavia was on the course of development of its Cold Warnon-aligned foreign policy. Relations of Poland normalized with significant number of Polish tourists spending their summer holidays on the Adriatic coast primarily in the Socialist Republic of Croatia. Formal cultural cooperation was reinitiated on the basis of the agreement signed in Belgrade on July 6, 1956.[6] The relations were once again broken for some time during the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia when two countries were on the opposite sides in the conflict.[6]
^ abcWróbel, Janusz (2020). "Odbudowa Armii Polskiej u boku sojuszników (1939–1940)". Biuletyn IPN (in Polish). No. 1–2 (170–171). IPN. p. 104. ISSN1641-9561.
_general_Danilo_Kalafatovi%C4%87_and_Brigadier_(later_Army)_general_%C5%BDivko_Stanisavljevi%C4%87_with_Polish_military_delegation_1928.jpg)
