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The Yugoslav coup d'état took place on 27 March 1941 in Belgrade, Kingdom of Yugoslavia, when the regency led by Prince Paul of Yugoslavia was overthrown and King Peter II fully assumed monarchical powers.
The new Yugoslav government, under Prime Minister and General Dušan Simović, refused to ratify Yugoslavia's signing of the Tripartite Pact and started negotiations with the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union. The enraged Hitler issued Directive 25 as an answer to the coup and attacked both Yugoslavia and Greece on April 6.
The Communist Party of Yugoslavia played no part in the coup, although it made a significant contribution to the mass street protests in many cities that signalled popular support for the coup after it occurred. The coup was successful and overthrew the three-member regency as well as the government of Cvetković.
The German bombing of Belgrade, codenamed Operation Retribution (German: Unternehmen Strafgericht) or Operation Punishment, [a] was the April 1941 German bombing of Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia, in retaliation for the coup d'état that overthrew the government that had signed the Tripartite Pact.
Following the Belgrade Coup on 27 March 1941, the Yugoslav armed forces were put on alert, although the army was not fully mobilised for fear of provoking Hitler. The VVKJ command decided to disperse its forces away from their main bases to a system of 50 auxiliary airfields that had previously been prepared.
Yugoslavia was rich in deposits of coal, iron, copper, gold, silver, lead, zinc, chrome, manganese and bauxite, and mining was one of the most important industries in the kingdom. The backwardness of Yugoslavia prevented the mining industry from becoming the basis of an industrial society. The lack of electricity was a major problem.
Radoje Knežević (Serbian Cyrillic: Радоје Кнежевић; 20 August 1901 – 22 June 1983) was a key member of the group that organised the Yugoslav coup d'état of 27 March 1941 that deposed the regency of Prince Paul, Dr. Radenko Stanković and Dr. Ivo Perović, along with the government of Prime Minister Dragiša Cvetković.
After a period of political and economic crisis in the 1980s, the constituent republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia split apart in the early 1990s. . Unresolved issues from the breakup caused a series of inter-ethnic Yugoslav Wars from 1991 to 2001 which primarily affected Bosnia and Herzegovina, neighbouring parts of Croatia and, some years later, K