Italian governorate of Montenegro

Governorate of Montenegro Italian: Governatorato del Montenegro
Part of Yugoslavia occupied by Italy
Occupation and partition of Yugoslavia in 1941. The Italian governorate of Montenegro is shown in pale aqua in the southern coastal region.
Country	Yugoslavia
Occupied by Italy	17 April 1941
Occupied by Germany	26 September 1943

The Italian governorate of Montenegro (Italian: Governatorato del Montenegro) existed from October 1941 to September 1943 as an occupied territory under military government of Fascist Italy during World War II. Although the Italians had intended to establish a quasi-independent Montenegrin kingdom, these plans were permanently shelved after a popular uprising in July 1941. Following the Italian surrender in September 1943, the territory of Montenegro was occupied by German forces which withdrew in December 1944.

Prior to the creation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (KSCS, later renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia), Montenegro had been recognised as an independent state for forty years. Immediately prior to the creation of the KSCS in December 1918, the Kingdom of Montenegro was unified with the Kingdom of Serbia and ceased to exist as an independent state. From 1922 onward, as part of the KSCS and then Yugoslavia, Montenegro was not a subdivision of the state. In the period immediately after the First World War, agrarian reform resulted in some transfer of population from mountainous areas of Montenegro to other areas of Yugoslavia, including the Macedonian and Kosovo regions. This population movement also achieved a political goal of increasing the Serb population in those areas.

After 1929, the Zeta Banovina (province) of Yugoslavia included all of modern-day Montenegro, as well as adjacent parts of modern-day Serbia, Kosovo, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. As in former Montenegrin states, the capital of the Zeta Banovina was Cetinje. In August 1939, ethnic Croat areas of the Zeta Banovina from the Bay of Kotor to Pelješac including Dubrovnik were merged with a new Banovina of Croatia. The last Ban of Zeta Banovina was Blažo Đukanović, a former brigadier general in the Royal Yugoslav Army. In May 1940, as a means of opposing the government, the Montenegrin branch of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (Serbo-Croatian: Komunistička partija Jugoslavije, KPJ) advocated that Royal Yugoslav Army reservists demobilise, refuse military discipline, and even desert. In October of that year, the KPJ national conference heavily criticised this action by the Montenegrin branch of the party, and re-oriented the KPJ toward defending the country against "imperialist attackers".

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