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Yugoslavia – Peter II: King: 9 October 1934 – 29 November 1945
1938 Silver 20 Dinara 27mm (8.96 grams) 0.750 Silver (0.2170 oz. ASW)
Reference: KM# 23
ПЕТАР II КРАЉ ЈУГОСЛАВНЈЕ, Head of King Peter II left.
Crowned heraldic double-headed eagle; Year across fields; 50 ДИНАРА below.
Edge Lettering:
БОГ ЧУВА ЈУГОСЛАВИЈУ ***
You are bidding on the exact item pictured, provided with a Certificate of Authenticity and Lifetime Guarantee of Authenticity.
 Peter II (Serbo-Croatian: Petar/Петар; 6 September 1923 – 3 November 1970) was the last King of Yugoslavia, and the last reigning member of the Karađorđević dynasty which came to prominence in the early 19th century.
Peter II was the eldest son of Alexander I of Yugoslavia and Maria of Romania. His godfather was the British king George VI.
Prince Peter was initially tutored at the Royal Palace, Belgrade, before attending Sandroyd School then in Cobham, Surrey where Reed’s School now stands. When he was 11 years old, Prince Peter succeeded to the Yugoslav throne in 1934 upon the assassination of his father King Alexander I in Marseille during a state visit to France. In view of the new monarch’s young age, a regency was set up under his father’s cousin Prince Paul.
World War II
Although King Peter II and his advisors were utterly opposed to Nazi Germany,[citation needed] Regent-Prince Paul declared that the kingdom of Yugoslavia would join the Tripartite Pact on 25 March 1941. Two days later, King Peter, at age 17, was proclaimed of age, after a British-supported coup d’état.
Postponing Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany simultaneously attacked Yugoslavia and Greece on 6 April 1941. Within a week, Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary and Italy invaded Yugoslavia, and the government was forced to surrender on 17 April. Parts of Yugoslavia were annexed by Italy, Bulgaria, Hungary and Germany. In the remaining parts of the kingdom of Yugoslavia, Croatia and Serbia, two Nazi-puppet governments were installed.
Peter left the country with the Royal Yugoslav Government’s ministers following the Axis invasion. Initially the Yugoslav king and his government ministers went to Greece en route to British-ruled Jerusalem in Palestine, and then Cairo in Egypt. In June 1941, King Peter arrived in London where he joined numerous other governments in exile from Nazi-occupied Europe.
The King completed his education at Cambridge University before being commissioned in the Royal Air Force. In 1942 he made a diplomatic visit to America and Canada, where he met American President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. The whirlwind tour was unsuccessful in securing Allied support for the exiled Yugoslav monarchist cause. Roosevelt and Churchill had already engaged the support of the Communist Yugoslav Government in the Allied effort to defeat Nazi Germany, with a view to ending the hostilities.
Marriage
The Chicago Tribunal reported on 1 August 1943 about the royal romance in London between King Peter and Princess Alexandra of Greece and Denmark that: “The princess, a pretty, dark-haired girl, used to serve waffles and coffee to American officers and nurses over a snack bar at the London Red Cross club. There she met King Peter, a slender young man in naval uniform who often dropped in to listen to the music of a United States infantry band”. Peter married his third cousin, Princess Alexandra of Greece and Denmark in London on 20 March 1944. They had one son, Crown Prince Alexander, who was born on 17 July 1945.
Yugoslavia (Serbo-Croatian: Jugoslavija/Југославија, Slovene: Jugoslavija, Macedonian: Југославија) was a country in Southeast Europe during most of the 20th century. It came into existence after World War I in 1918[i] under the name of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes by the merger of the provisional State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs (itself formed from territories of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire) with the formerly independent Kingdom of Serbia. The Serbian royal House of Karađorđević became the Yugoslav royal dynasty. Yugoslavia gained international recognition on 13 July 1922 at the Conference of Ambassadors in Paris.[2] The country was named after the South Slavic peoples and constituted their first union, following centuries in which the territories had been part of the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary.
Renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia on 3 October 1929, it was invaded by the Axis powers on 6 April 1941. In 1943, a Democratic Federal Yugoslavia was proclaimed by the Partisan resistance. In 1944, the king recognised it as the legitimate government, but in November 1945 the monarchy was abolished. Yugoslavia was renamed the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia in 1946, when a communist government was established. It acquired the territories of Istria, Rijeka, and Zadar from Italy. Partisan leader Josip Broz Tito ruled the country as president until his death in 1980. In 1963, the country was renamed again as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY).
The constituent six socialist republics that made up the country were the SR Bosnia and Herzegovina, SR Croatia, SR Macedonia, SR Montenegro, SR Serbia, and SR Slovenia. Serbia contained two Socialist Autonomous Provinces, Vojvodina and Kosovo, which after 1974 were largely equal to the other members of the federation. After an economic and political crisis in the 1980s and the rise of nationalism, Yugoslavia broke up along its republics’ borders, at first into five countries, leading to the Yugoslav Wars.
After the breakup, the republics of Serbia and Montenegro formed a reduced federation, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), which aspired to the status of sole legal successor to the SFRY, but those claims were opposed by the other former republics. Eventually, Serbia and Montenegro accepted the opinion of the Badinter Arbitration Committee about shared succession. Serbia and Montenegro themselves broke up in 2006 and became independent states, while Kosovo proclaimed independence in 2008.
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