Draža Mihailović in the context of "Serbian State Guard"

Živan Knežević (Serbian Cyrillic: Живан Кнежевић; 28 July 1906 – 1 December 1984) was a major in the Yugoslav Royal Guards who was a key conspirator in the Yugoslav coup d'état of 27 March 1941 that deposed the regency of Prince Paul, Dr. Radenko Stanković and Dr. Ivo Perović, as well as the government of Prime Minister Dragiša Cvetković.

Knežević and his fellow plotters declared the 17-year-old King Peter to be of age and brought to power a government of national unity led by Air Force General Dušan Simović. The coup resulted in the German-led Axis invasion of Yugoslavia during which the armed forces of Yugoslavia were defeated within 11 days. Fleeing the country by air, Knežević was based in Alexandria for a period, where he briefly commanded a battalion of Yugoslav Royal Guards formed with British assistance. He subsequently served as a military liaison officer between the Chetniks of Draža Mihailović and the Yugoslav government-in-exile then after promotion to lieutenant colonel he served as a military attaché in the United States until the end of the war, by which time he had achieved the rank of colonel. He remained in the US after the war and died in 1984.

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. Following the coup he was appointed as the Minister of the Royal Court, and after the resulting invasion of Yugoslavia, he accompanied the King and government into exile in Cairo then London. Along with his brother Živan Knežević, he was a member of the so-called "League of Majors", which was at the centre of the ill-fated Greater Serbian agenda of the Yugoslav government-in-exile and who was instrumental in having Draža Mihailović appointed as Chief of Staff of the Yugoslav Supreme Command. He was sidelined in June 1943 when he was appointed to the Yugoslav legation in Portugal. He remained in exile after the war, was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment with hard labour in absentia during the Belgrade Process conducted by the country's newly-established communist authorities, and emigrated to Canada where he lived until his death in 1983.

In 1941 when the Axis invaded Yugoslavia, King Peter II formed a Government in exile in London, and in January 1942 the royalist Draža Mihailović became the Minister of War with British backing. But by June or July 1943, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had decided to withdraw support from Mihailović and the Chetniks he led, and support the Partisans headed by Josip Broz Tito, even though this would result in "complete communist control of Serbia". The main reason for the change was not the reports by Fitzroy Maclean or William Deakin, or as later alleged the influence of James Klugmann in Special Operations Executive (SOE) headquarters in Cairo or even Randolph Churchill, but the evidence of Ultra decrypts from the Government Code and Cipher School in Bletchley Park that Tito's Partisans were a "much more effective and reliable ally in the war against Germany". Nor was it due to claims that the Chetniks were collaborating with the enemy, though there was some evidence from decrypts of collaboration with Italian and sometimes German forces.

The Chetniks, formally the Chetnik Detachments of the Yugoslav Army, and also the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland and informally colloquially the Ravna Gora Movement, was a Yugoslav royalist and Serbian nationalist movement and guerrilla force in Axis-occupied Yugoslavia. Although it was not a homogeneous movement, it was led by Draža Mihailović. While it was anti-Axis in its long-term goals and engaged in marginal resistance activities for limited periods, it also engaged in tactical or selective collaboration with Axis forces for almost all of the war. The Chetnik movement adopted a policy of collaboration with regard to the Axis, and engaged in cooperation to one degree or another by both establishing a modus vivendi and operating as "legalised" auxiliary forces under Axis control. Over a period of time, and in different parts of the country, the movement was progressively drawn into collaboration agreements: first with the puppet Government of National Salvation in the German-occupied territory of Serbia, then with the Italians in occupied Dalmatia and Montenegro, with some of the Ustaše forces in northern Bosnia, and, after the Italian capitulation in September 1943, with the Germans directly.

The Chetniks were active in the uprising in the German-occupied territory of Serbia from July to December 1941. Following the initial success of the uprising, the German occupiers enacted Adolf Hitler's formula for suppressing anti-Nazi resistance in Eastern Europe, a ratio of 100 hostages executed for every German soldier killed and 50 hostages executed for every soldier wounded. In October 1941, German soldiers and Serbian collaborators perpetrated two massacres against civilians in Kraljevo and Kragujevac, with a combined death toll reaching over 4,500 civilians, most of whom were Serbs. This convinced Mihailović that killing German troops would only result in further unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of Serbs. As a result, he decided to scale back Chetnik guerrilla attacks and wait for an Allied landing in the Balkans. While Chetnik collaboration reached "extensive and systematic" proportions, the Chetniks themselves referred to their policy of collaboration as "using the enemy". The political scientist Sabrina Ramet has observed, "[b]oth the Chetniks' political program and the extent of their collaboration have been amply, even voluminously, documented; it is more than a bit disappointing, thus, that people can still be found who believe that the Chetniks were doing anything besides attempting to realize a vision of an ethnically homogeneous Greater Serbian state, which they intended to advance, in the short run, by a policy of collaboration with the Axis forces".