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Both the Chetniks under Mihailovic and the communist-dominated Partisans, who were led by Josip Broz Tito, resisted the occupying German forces, but political differences led to distrust and eventual armed conflict between them. Reports of Chetnik resistance in the early stages of occupation buoyed the Allies and made of Mihailović a heroic figure. Fearful, however, of further brutal Axis reprisals against Serbs, Mihailovic came to favour a restrained policy of resistance until the Allies could provide more assistance. The Partisans supported a more aggressive policy against the Germans. Favouring the latter policy and confronted with reports of Chetnik collaboration (particularly in Italian-held areas) directed against Partisan forces, the Allies switched their support from Mihailovic to Tito in 1944.

 

Many Chetnik groups committed crimes against civilians and acts of ethnic cleansing.  Muslim villages were destroyed in retribution against acts committed by Muslim militias. While Mihailovic apparently did not order such acts himself, and disapproved of them, he also failed to take any action against them, being dependent on various armed groups whose policy he could neither denounce nor condone. He also hid the situation from the British and the Royal Yugoslav government-in-exile. Many terror acts were committed by Chetnik groups against their various enemies, real or perceived, reaching a peak between October 1942 and February 1943.

 

After the war Mihailovic went into hiding. He was captured by the Partisans on March 13, 1946, and charged by the Yugoslav government with treason and collaboration with the Germans. Mihailovic was sentenced to death and was executed in Belgrade in 1946. Although a United States commission of inquiry cleared Mihailovic and those under his immediate command of the charge of collaboration, the issue is still disputed by some historians. Following the breakup of communist Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, his former refuge in the Ravna Gora region came to be a focus of royalist sentiment.