Vladimir Dedijer

Vladimir Dedijer (4 February 1914 – 30 November 1990) was a Yugoslav partisan fighter, politician, human rights activist, and historian.

Vladimir Dedijer was born in Belgrade, in the Kingdom of Serbia. His family originated from Čepelica, Bileća in Bosnia and Herzegovina. His father Jevto was a professor of geography at Belgrade University and his mother Milica a social worker. They had three sons: Borivoje (Boro), Vladimir, and Stevan. Before World War II, Vladimir married Olga Popovic. Their daughter Milica was born in the eve of the war. After Olga's death in 1943, Vladimir married Vera Krizman, an actress, in 1944. He and Vera had four children: daughter Bojana and three sons, Borivoje (Boro), Branimir (Branko), and Marko. Branko committed suicide at 13, after being interrogated about his father's activities, then sent home where he hanged himself. Boro committed suicide by jumping off a cliff just over his father's house in 1966. His father Vladimir believes that Boro was killed by Slovenian police.

In his youth he attended the Conference for Reconciliation in Poland in 1929 as a delegate of Yugoslav high school youth. after, in 1931, he attended the XX World Congress of the Young Men's Christian Association in Cleveland, Ohio. After finishing high school, Dedijer worked for the daily newspaper Politika while studying law. As a journalist he was a foreign correspondent in Poland, Denmark, Norway (1935), England (1935-1936), and Spain (1936). For his support of the Republican government in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, he was fired from Politika in 1937 by order of the Yugoslav government.

During the 1930s Dedijer collaborated with the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY). Dedijer, as a journalist before and after the war, was, in the spirit of his Serbian ancestors, an independent thinker himself. "It is hard to be a Serb," he said once, "But how beautiful!"

Dedijer joined Yugoslav partisans in 1941 in their struggle against the Nazi Germany occupiers and served as Lieutenant Colonel in Tito's headquarters. During the war he was a political commissar with the rank of lieutenant colonel. In that capacity he carried out torture and murder of prisoners, including disillusioned former Communists like Živojin Pavlović ().

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