A teenage girl who fought the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia with a rifle in her hands and died refusing to betray her comrades was hanged from a tree in a public execution that has come to symbolize the ferocious resistance mounted by the Partisan movement during the darkest years of the Second World War.
Lepa Radić was seventeen years old when German soldiers placed a noose around her neck in the town of Bosanska Krupa on February 8, 1943. She had been captured after firing every round she had at SS troops rather than surrender, and she went to her death shouting defiance at her executioners and urging the crowd that had gathered to keep fighting for their freedom.
Her story, preserved in Partisan records and German military reports, has endured for more than eight decades as one of the most searing examples of youthful resistance against the Third Reich. It is a story that begins not on the battlefield but in a small village in northwestern Bosnia, where a hard-working Serb family raised a daughter whose political awakening would cost her everything.
Radić was born on December 19, 1925, into a Bosnian Serb family living near Bosanska Gradiška, a small town in what is today Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her family was poor but industrious, and her household was steeped in leftist politics. Her uncle had strong ties to the workers’ movement, and the conversations that filled the family home left a deep impression on the girl from an early age.
She attended elementary school and later enrolled at the women’s school of crafts in nearby Bosanska Krupa. Teachers remembered her as diligent and conscientious, a student who read at a level well above that of her peers and who devoured political texts that most children her age could not have understood. By fifteen, she had already joined the League of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia, known as SKOJ, and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia itself.
The year was 1941, and Europe was in flames. Adolf Hitler had turned his eyes eastward toward the Balkans as a prelude to his invasion of the Soviet Union, and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia found itself caught in the path of the German war machine. On March 25, 1941, the Yugoslav government signed the Tripartite Pact, effectively aligning the country with the Axis powers.
Two days later, the Yugoslav military staged a coup with British backing, installing seventeen-year-old King Peter II at the head of a government many believed would keep the country out of the war. Hitler responded with fury, issuing Führer Directive 25, which declared the new government hostile and ordered the German army to invade.
The invasion began on April 6, 1941, and ended eleven days later with Yugoslavia’s surrender. The Nazis annexed vast swaths of territory and carved Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina into the Independent State of Croatia, a puppet regime ruled by the Ustaše, a fascist organization led by Ante Pavelić that carried out horrific acts of persecution and genocide across the Balkans.
The Ustaše aimed to create an ethnically pure Croatia and viewed Serbs living in their territory as their greatest obstacle. Their stated policy was that one-third of all Serbs would be killed, one-third expelled, and one-third forced to convert to Catholicism. Acts of cold-blooded murder were commonplace, including one atrocity near Radić’s hometown in which a young ethnic Serb was beheaded by Ustaše soldiers using a saw.
Their racial laws echoed those of the Nazis, mirroring the persecution that would culminate in the Holocaust. German propaganda declared the invasion of Yugoslavia a success, but the Nazis failed to seize control of the mountainous regions, where local fighters knew the terrain far too well. That failure allowed two resistance movements to emerge: the Partisans and the Chetniks.
The two groups opposed Nazi rule but differed profoundly in strategy. Some Chetniks defied the occupiers, while others feared the spread of communism within Yugoslavia. The Chetniks were more hesitant to carry out acts of resistance because for every act of defiance, the Germans retaliated with horrific reprisals, massacring thousands of civilians.
They preferred to wait for an Allied invasion, a caution that brought them into conflict with the Partisans, who demanded immediate action.
The Radić family stood firmly against the new regime. In July 1941, Lepa’s father and her two uncles joined the Partisans. In November 1941, the Ustaše arrested them, but weeks later the Partisans stormed the prison and freed the entire Radić family, including Lepa.
That rescue marked a turning point in the young girl’s life.
After her liberation, Lepa and her sister Dara threw themselves into the Partisan cause. Lepa took up arms and joined the Seventh Partisan Company of the Second Krajiški Detachment. She initially served as a nurse, but her superiors quickly recognized her value as a recruiter who could connect with young people and draw them into the movement.
She also participated in military operations. In one action, she led a group of young Partisans to harvest grain near a German army encampment, a dangerous mission carried out under the noses of the enemy. Her courage and composure under pressure set her apart, even among fighters many years her senior.
In January 1943, the Nazis and their allies launched Operation Case White, a massive offensive against the Partisans that devastated the resistance movement and nearly destroyed it. During the Battle of Neretva, Radić was assigned to transport wounded soldiers to a shelter and hospital in Grmec. Partisan leader Josip Broz Tito had decreed that the wounded must never be left on the battlefield, because the Axis forces would simply execute them.
Her work was vital.
In February 1943, while the resistance fought against the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division Prinz Eugen, Radić was captured by a German detachment. She had been attempting to save roughly one hundred women and children from the area when the Germans closed in. She refused to surrender quietly.
Facing the SS division, she fought back, firing at the Nazi soldiers and emptying her rifle at the enemy. She simply did not have enough ammunition. Overwhelmed, she was taken prisoner.
The Germans imprisoned her and subjected her to isolation and torture in an attempt to extract information that could help them crush the Partisans.
She stood firm. Despite the torture, the Nazis could not break her. They deemed her nothing more than a partisan enemy who had fired upon their soldiers, and for that she was sentenced to death.
On February 8, 1943, in Bosanska Krupa, German soldiers led her from her prison cell to the place of execution.
A gallows had been hastily constructed, consisting of what appeared to be a piece of rope tied to a tree with a box placed underneath. Radić was helped up onto the box, and a noose was placed around her neck. As the rope was fitted, she screamed out to the crowd: “Long live the Communist Party and the Partisans!
Fight, people, for your freedom! Do not surrender to the evildoers! I will be killed, but there are those who will avenge me!”
The Nazi commander leading the execution gave her one final offer to spare her life. She was told she could live if she gave up the names of Partisans. Her answer was unwavering: “I am not a traitor of my people.
Those whom you are asking about will reveal themselves when they have succeeded in wiping out all you evildoers, to the last man.”
With that, the box was kicked out from under her, and Lepa Radić was hanged in front of a small crowd that had gathered to witness the killing. She was seventeen years old.
The report written by the Nazis about her execution read: “The bandit girl hanging in Bosanska Krupa has shown unprecedented defiance.” Her spirit encapsulated the Partisan movement, and after the war the Yugoslav Communist Party, led by Tito, recognized her bravery by awarding her the Order of the People’s Hero.
She remains one of the youngest recipients of that honor, a girl who stood up to the tyranny of one of history’s most evil regimes. But beneath the medals and the memorials lies the story of a teenage girl who took up arms against Hitler’s Third Reich and was brutally executed before she had a chance to live the life she had fought to defend.
Today, streets and schools across the former Yugoslavia still bear her name. Her final words, shouted from beneath a tree with a noose around her neck, continue to echo through the history of a region that suffered enormously under occupation and fought back with everything it had. Lepa Radić was only seventeen, and she is remembered as a figure of inspiration in the face of tyranny.