With a Hangman’s Noose Around His Neck, Stjepan Filipovic Continued Defying the Nazis
Stjepan Filipovic (1916 – 1942) was a Croatian born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in territory that would become part of Yugoslavia after World War I. Hailing from a working class family, he left home at 16 to become a metalworker, and in 1937, he joined the local workers’ movement and became an activist member. Workers’ rights did not sit well with the powers that be, so Stjepan was arrested for prohibited political activity. He was sentenced to a year in jail, but prison only hardened his resolve, and when he was released in 1940, he joined the Communist Party.
In 1941, Germany invaded and overran Yugoslavia. Stjepan volunteered to join the partisan resistance against the Nazi occupiers, and was posted to a guerrilla unit near Valjevo, in today’s Serbia. He was tasked with recruitment and with securing arms, and he did such a great job at both, that by year’s end he had risen in the ranks to command an entire partisan battalion.
In February of 1942, Stjepan was captured by the Nazis, and after an interrogation, was sentenced to be publicly hanged in Valjevo’s town square. That was when Stjepan Filipovic stepped into the history books. At death’s door, he found the courage and presence of mind to seize the moment and defy his captors during his last seconds on earth. Mounting the gallows, with the hangman’s noose around his neck, Stjepan defiantly thrust his hands in the air in a “V” shape, 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.
Stjepan’s courageous and defiant death transformed him from a promising but otherwise unexceptional partisan, and into a national legend. After the war, Stjepan Filipovic was designated a national hero of Yugoslavia. A monumental statue was erected in the city of Valjevo in his honor, replicating his Y shaped pose in an artistic rendition reminiscent of a Goya painting.