Peter II Karađorđević (; 6 September 1923 – 3 November 1970) was the last King of Yugoslavia, reigning from October 1934 until he was deposed in November 1945. He was the last reigning member of the Karađorđević dynasty.

The eldest child of King Alexander I and Maria of Romania, Peter acceded to the Yugoslav throne in 1934 at the age of 11 after his father was assassinated during a state visit to Marseille. A regency was set up under his cousin Prince Paul. After Paul declared Yugoslavia's accession to the Tripartite Pact in late March 1941, a pro-British coup d'état deposed the regent and declared the then 17-year-old Peter of legal ruling age.

In response, Axis forces invaded Yugoslavia ten days later and quickly overran the country, forcing the king and his ministers into exile in the United Kingdom. A government-in-exile was set up in June 1941 following Peter's arrival at London. In March 1944, he married Princess Alexandra of Greece and Denmark. Their only son, Alexander, was born a year later. In November 1945, the Yugoslav Constituent Assembly formally deposed Peter and proclaimed Yugoslavia a republic.

Peter settled in the United States after his deposition. Suffering from depression and alcoholism later in his life, he died of cirrhosis in November 1970, aged 47. His remains were buried at the Saint Sava Monastery Church in Libertyville, Illinois, before being transferred to the Royal Mausoleum of Oplenac in 2013.

Early life and education

Peter II was born on 6 September 1923 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (modern-day Serbia). He was the eldest son of Alexander I of Yugoslavia and Maria of Romania. His godparents were his maternal aunt Queen Elizabeth of Greece, his maternal grandfather King Ferdinand I of Romania and King George V of the United Kingdom, for whom his son, the Duke of York, stood proxy.

Prince Peter was initially tutored at the Royal Palace, Belgrade, before attending Sandroyd School then in Cobham, Surrey where Reed's School now stands. When he was 11 years old, Prince Peter succeeded to the Yugoslav throne on 9 October 1934 upon his father's assassination in Marseille during a state visit to France. In view of the new monarch's youth, a regency was set up under his father's cousin Prince Paul.

Prince Regent Paul took the view that he must not change the kingdom from the way that King Alexander had left it so that his son could take possession of it unaltered when he turned 18 in September 1941, and resisted any attempts to revise the 1931 constitution. On 20 August 1939, Paul permitted the prime minister, Dragiša Cvetković, to sign an agreement with Vladko Maček, the leader of the Croatian Peasant Party, which created a new Banovina of Croatia with substantial autonomy and a much greater size, covering much of what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina, and satisfying at least in part the long-standing demands of the Croats.

The agreement was very unpopular with the Serbs, especially when reports emerged that the prečani Serbs were being discriminated against by the authorities of the autonomous banovina. The tense international situation of August 1939 with the Danzig crisis pushing Europe to the brink of war meant Paul wanted to settle one of the more debilitating internal disputes in order to make Yugoslavia more capable of surviving the coming storm.

The agreement came at the cost of both Paul and Cvetković being condemned by Serbian public opinion for "selling out" to the Croats, all the more so as many Croats made it clear that they saw the banovina of Croatia as only a stepping stone towards independence. The unpopularity of the agreement and the Cvetković government, was one of the reasons for the coup d'état of 27 March 1941 as many Serbs believed that Peter, the son of King Alexander, would continue with his father's centralising policies when he reached his majority.

Second World War

Prince Regent Paul declared that the Kingdom of Yugoslavia would join the Tripartite Pact on 25 March 1941. Two days later, King Peter, at age 17, was proclaimed of age after a pro-British coup d'état. The initially bloodless coup was led by General Dušan Simović on 27 March 1941 in the name of Peter. As General Simović led his men toward the Royal Compound, which was surrounded by guards loyal to the Regent, Peter climbed down a drain-pipe to greet the rebels.

As the Regent's guards surrendered without fighting, Simović arrived to tell Peter: "Your Majesty, I salute you as King of Yugoslavia. From this moment you will exercise your full sovereign power". The coup was very popular in Belgrade and Peter was well received by the crowds. The people who had come out in Belgrade to show their support for the coup had a very pro-Allied character, many of the protesters waving British and French flags. The crowds in Belgrade cheered Peter wildly as the 17-year-old king drove his car down the streets without his bodyguards to be greeted by his subjects.

The new government that Peter swore in on 27 March 1941 was headed by General Simović and comprised members of the People's Radical Party, the Croatian Peasant Party, the Democratic Party, the Croatian Independent Democrats, the Slovene People's Party, the Yugoslav Muslim Organization, the Agrarian Party and the Yugoslav National Party. With the exception of the Yugoslav Radical Alliance and the banned Yugoslav Communist Party and the Ustashe, all of the main political parties were represented in the new government.

Postponing Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany simultaneously attacked Yugoslavia and Greece on 6 April 1941, Orthodox Easter Sunday. The Luftwaffe bombed Belgrade, killing between 3,000 and 4,000 people. Within a week, Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary and Italy invaded Yugoslavia, and the government was forced to surrender on 17 April. Parts of Yugoslavia were annexed by Italy, Bulgaria, Hungary and Germany. The remaining parts were governed by two German-controlled puppet governments, the Independent State of Croatia and the Serbian Government of National Salvation.

Peter left the country with the Royal Yugoslav Government's ministers following the Axis invasion. Initially the Yugoslav king and his government ministers went to Greece where they refuelled at a British airfield in rural Greece where locals did not at first believe that he was king of Yugoslavia. They then went to British-ruled Jerusalem in Mandatory Palestine, and Cairo in Egypt. In Athens on 16 April 1941, Peter issued a press statement saying he would fight until victory before fleeing Greece.

In Jerusalem on 4 May 1941, Peter affirmed in a press statement the Cvetković–Maček agreement of 23 August 1939, which turned Yugoslavia into a semi-federation as the basis of the post-war political system he was planning to introduce once his nation was liberated. Of the 22 men Peter had sworn in as ministers on 27 March 1941, two were killed during the German invasion and another five chose not to go into exile.

Džafer Kulenović of the Yugoslav Muslim Organization switched sides and went over to the Ustashe, urging Bosnian Muslims to join the Croats in killing Serbs; Father Franc Kulovec of the Slovene People's Party was killed during the bombing of Belgrade; and Vladko Maček of the Croatian Peasant Party decided not to go into exile. As a result, the Yugoslav government-in-exile was dominated by Serb ministers.

The constitutional basis of the government-in-exile was always murky, as the government had come into power as a result of a coup d'état. Regardless, it professed to be based on the 1931 constitution, which made the king the chief executive officer of the state and ministers only responsible to the Crown. The politicians took the view that the 1941 coup d'état had been a popular revolution which had restored democracy, but as long as the 1931 constitution was technically still in effect, King Peter had very broad executive powers.

Government-in-exile

In June 1941, King Peter arrived in London, where he joined other governments in exile from Nazi-occupied Europe. When Peter and his government landed in London they were greeted as heroes by the British media. The British press presented what the Serbian historian Stevan K. Pavlowitch called a "romanticized" picture of the young Peter, who became a "symbol of his country's struggle to keep its freedom in alliance with Great Britain". He was supplied with a Lendrum & Hartman Limited Buick delivered to his exile home near Cambridge.

A sign of the initial high regard for Peter in the neutral United States, he was featured as a hero in October 1941 edition of the comic book Military Comics: Stories of the Army and Navy, which presented a somewhat fictionalized version of the 27 March 1941 coup d'état in Belgrade in which a group of secondary school students who are upset by Yugoslavia's signing of the Tripartite Pact rally for the king and overthrow the regent. Peter quickly learned that the degree of attention the British were willing to give to the government-in-exile was directly related to what assets the government-in-exile could bring to the Allied cause. As only a few hundred Yugoslav soldiers had escaped to Egypt, the Yugoslav government-in-exile did not have much to contribute.

Initially, the government-in-exile planned to make good its losses by recruiting an army from Yugoslav immigrants in the neutral United States, but the American government objected to this plan, and instead the government-in-exile had to recruit from the ethnic Slovene POWs captured while fighting with the Royal Italian Army. From the British POW camps, enough ethnic Slovenes volunteered to provide one infantry battalion, who were reluctant to fight against the Italians as they would be executed for treason if captured. In terms of military forces available in the Middle East, Yugoslavia was as Pavlowitch put it the "least important of the allies". The Yugoslav officer corps in Egypt was prone to feuding between younger officers who blamed the senior officers for Yugoslavia's swift defeat in April 1941, and such was the extent of the in-fighting that the government-in-exile had to ask the British military police to impose its will on its own army.

In this context, when King Peter and the rest of the government-in-exile heard reports in mid-1941 that a guerrilla movement called the Chetniks led by Colonel Draža Mihailović were fighting the Germans, he triumphantly seized upon these reports as proving that he did have an asset to the Allied cause that was tying down German forces that otherwise would be fighting on the other fronts. It was not until October 1941 that the government-in-exile was finally able to establish contact with General Mihailović. In September 1941, a liaison mission from the Special Operations Executive (SOE) parachuted into Yugoslavia to meet Mihailović, and afterwards, became the main means which Mihailović communicated with the Allies. It was through the SOE mission attached with the Chetniks that King Peter and the rest of government-in-exile communicated with Mihailović.

The news that the Croat fascists of the Ustashe had started a campaign to exterminate one-third of the prečani Serbs in the Krajina region and in Bosnia, expel another one-third and force the rest to convert to Roman Catholicism brought tensions in the government-in-exile between the Serb ministers and the few remaining Croat ministers to the boiling point and by October–November 1941, the cabinet almost collapsed. Adding to the tension was that the Croatian ministers refused to believe the reports about Ustashe atrocities, dismissing them as anti-Croat "Serb propaganda", which infuriated the Serbian ministers.