Throughout history, people have been fascinated by last words. The way most folk shuffle off the mortal coil, few of us will have the presence of mind or ability to say something memorable as we exit this world. Some, though, manage to pull it off, even in extreme circumstance. Few circumstances were more extreme than those facing Stjepan Filipovic on May 22nd, 1942. He was on a public gallows, about to be executed by the Nazis. With a noose around his neck, he managed to shout words of defiance that became an antifascist rallying cry.
An Original Antifascist
Stjepan Filipovic was a Croatian born in 1916 in what became Yugoslavia after World War I. He left home when he was sixteen years old, and became a metalworker. In 1937, he joined the local workers’ movement and became an activist member. Filipovic was arrested for his political activism in 1939, and sentenced to a year in jail. His time behind bars only served to radicalize him even more. When he was released from prison in 1940, he promptly joined the Communist Party.
World War II reached Yugoslavia in the spring of 1941, when the Germans and their Axis partners invaded and overran the country. Filipovic volunteered to join the partisan resistance against the Nazi occupiers and their collaborators. He was posted to a guerrilla unit near Valjevo, in today’s Serbia, and given responsibility for recruitment and for securing arms. Filipovic excelled in his duties. He showed such promise, that by year’s end he had risen to command an entire partisan battalion.
“Death to Fascism, Freedom to the People!”
Stjepan Filipovic was captured by the German occupiers’ local collaborators, the Chetniks, on December 24th, 1941, who handed him over to the Nazis. After months of brutal imprisonment and interrogation, he was sentenced to be publicly hanged in Valjevo’s town square. On May 22nd, 1942, at death’s door, 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.
Filipovic urged the assembled 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!” It was a preexisting partisan slogan, but Filipovic’s defiant martyrdom popularized it and made it go viral. After the war, Filipovic was designated a national hero of Yugoslavia. A monumental statue was erected in Valjevo in his honor, that replicated his Y shaped pose in an artistically classic rendition reminiscent of a Goya painting.
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Some Sources & Further Reading
Libcom – Stjepan Filipovic: Everlasting Symbol of Anti Fascism
Nonument – Stjepan Filipovic Monument
