Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, also known as Paul Karađorđević (, English transliteration: Paul Karageorgevich; 27 April 1893 – 14 September 1976), was prince regent of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia during the minority of King Peter II. Paul was a first cousin of Peter's father, Alexander I.
Early life Prince Paul of Yugoslavia was the only son of Prince Arsen of Serbia, the younger brother of King Peter I, and of Princess Aurora Pavlovna Demidova. His mother was the eldest granddaughter on one side of the Swedish-speaking Finnish philanthropist Aurora Karamzin and her Russian husband, Prince Pavel Nikolaievich Demidov, and on the other side of the Russian Prince Peter Troubetzkoy and his wife, Elisabeth Esperovna, born Princess Belosselsky-Belozersky.
At the time of Paul's birth, the House of Karađorđević was in exile, as the Serbian throne was held by their rivals, the House of Obrenović. Paul spent his early years in Geneva, where he grew up a lonely and rather neglected child in the household of his uncle, King Peter Karađorđević. Among his relatives, he was affectionately known as “Toto.”
The long and violent feud between the Houses of Karađorđević and Obrenović, which had begun in 1817, came to an end in 1903 when a military coup overthrew and brutally killed King Alexander I and his wife, making the Obrenović line to be extinct. In the aftermath, Peter Karađorđević returned to Serbia to ascend the throne as King Peter I. That same year, young Paul accompanied his uncle to Serbia for the first time.
In 1912, he chose to attend the University of Oxford—a rare decision among the Serbian elite, who typically pursued their studies in either Paris or Saint Petersburg.
Paul was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, where he was a member of the exclusive Bullingdon Club – a dining club notorious for its wealthy members, grand banquets and boisterous rituals. CultivatedBradford, Sarah Elizabeth: A Biography of Britain's Queen, Riverhead Books 1997, p. 46 like his closest friends Prince George, Duke of Kent, and Sir Henry Channon,Channon, Paul Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967, p. 192 his outlook on life was said to be British. Paul often said that he "felt like an Englishman". Channon called Paul "the person I have loved most". For a time, Paul and Channon lived together in a house in London together with another of Channon's lovers Lord Gage. A cultured and easy-going bon vivant who inspired much affection from his friends, Paul when not associating with the British aristocracy collected paintings by Monet, Titian and van Gogh.
In World War I, despite the fact that it was Austria-Hungary that declared war on Serbia on 28 July 1914, Paul only joined the Royal Serbian Army in November 1914, serving for six months before returning to Britain in May 1915. Paul returned to service with the Royal Serbian Army, which was now in exile in Greece in January–April 1917 before again returning to Britain. His military record during both of his tours of duty was described as "undistinguished" as Paul found he was not cut out to be a soldier. Paul argued that he could be at most service to Serbia by being in London, where he served as a lobbyist for Serbia.
Paul lived in London from 1919 to 1924 and only infrequently visited Belgrade. During his time in London, he was the proverbial "life of the party" who enjoyed socialising with the British elite at parties in London or in various country houses. On October 22, 1923, he married Princess Olga of Greece and Denmark, a sister of Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent. The Duke of York (the future King George VI), was the best man at his wedding in Belgrade. In January 1924, he returned to Yugoslavia. Paul's cousin, King Alexander, seemed to have had in mind installing him in some sort of vice-regal position in Zagreb to govern the Croats; Alexander enjoyed Paul's company, finding him to be a witty conversationalist with a "breadth of vision" and a "cool intellect". However, the king decided that Paul was too sympathetic towards Croat complaints about the unitary state created by the 1921 Vidovdan Constitution, and decided not to give him the vice-regal position, much to Paul's frustration.
Though careful never to openly criticise the constitution, Paul sympathised with the Croat demand to turn Yugoslavia into a federation, and felt that many Serb politicians were being unrealistic in expecting that Croat discontent would just dissolve of its own accord if given enough time. Paul found his palace at Dedinje to be gloomy, causing him to relocate to a villa in Slovenia, where he felt more at home, and where he took up his time with his ever expanding art collection and raising his family. Besides collecting art, Paul's interests were reading, fishing and hunting. Whenever there was a major art show in London, Paris, Munich, Florence, Rome and Vienna, Paul almost invariably was present both to admire the art and purchase paintings for his collection.
Appointment as Regent of Yugoslavia
On 9 October 1934, a Bulgarian assassin named Vlado Chernozemski, a member of the IMRO and the Croatian fascist and ultranationalist Ustaše party, assassinated Paul's first-cousin, King Alexander I of Yugoslavia, in Marseille, France, and Prince Paul became the regent, as Alexander had stipulated in his will that on his death a regency council chaired by Paul should govern until Alexander's son, King Peter II came of age.Hoptner, J.B, , Columbia University Press, 1962, p. 25 Late on the afternoon of 9 October, Paul received a telephone call with the news that king had been assassinated, and that he was to go to the royal palace at once. Alexander had survived two previous assassination attempts, and had hinted that if he should die, that Paul was to serve as regent. Upon arriving at the royal palace, Paul was met by the prime minister, Nikola Uzunović, and the commander of the Royal Guard, General Petar Živković. The three men opened up the safe that contained the royal will whose terms stated that Paul was to serve as the regent until the new king Peter II came of age in September 1941.
Prince Paul, far more than Alexander, was Yugoslav rather than Serb in outlook, and unlike Alexander, he was inclined much more toward democracy. In its broadest outline, his domestic policy worked to eliminate the heritage of the Alexandrine dictatorship's centralism, censorship, and military control, and to pacify the country by solving the Serb-Croat problem.Hoptner, p. 26 Paul wanted to achieve a Serb-Croat reconciliation, but also felt for a considerable period of time that he had the duty to hand over the kingdom to Peter more or less unchanged when he reached his maturity, and thus was unwilling to entertain constitutional changes. Trifković wrote that: "By both instinct and personal development, Pavle was averse both to autocratic rule and militarism."
As Prince Regent, Paul possessed very broad powers, but he was much less inclined to exercise these powers, leading Yugoslavia in the years 1934–41 to be labelled "a dictatorship without a dictator". Paul had been thrust into a position of power that he did not want by Alexander's assassination (which was why Alexander had chosen him in his will to serve as a regent, knowing he would never try to seize the throne from his son), and throughout his regency he gave the impression that ruling Yugoslavia was a burden to him.
A French diplomat described Paul as a man whose "incontestable qualities of character, balance, and taste... Oxonian dilettantism and charm, which he exercised on his visitors, were useless in the present circumstances and in a country where arguments of might are the only ones which count". British historian D. C. Watt noted that Paul's "nerves tended to betray him under stress and that he was by nature inclined to yield to pressure rather than withstand it". Married to a Greek princess and intensely Anglophile and Hellenophile, Paul distrusted Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
The heavy losses taken by Serbia in World War I made Paul very averse to engaging in another war and led him to favoring neutralist policies despite Yugoslavia's alliance with France. During the First World War, Serbia had proportionally taken the heaviest losses; one out of five Serbs who were alive in 1914 were dead by 1918. The French police investigation of King Alexander's assassination had established firm evidence that the assassins had been armed by the governments of Italy and Hungary, which was shared with Yugoslavia. Furthermore, the forged Czechoslovak passports that had allowed the assassins to travel to France had come from Hungary, and the assassins had telephoned Ante Pavelić, who was living in Rome at the time. However, the French premier Pierre Laval-who was seeking an alliance with Italy-made it very clear to Paul that France would not support Yugoslavia if it chose to make an issue of Italian involvement in the assassination of the king, saying that the most Yugoslavia could do was to blame Hungary. The way that the French were prepared to disregard Yugoslav concerns about the regicide for the sake of better relations with Italy soured Paul on the French alliance.
Stojadinović years On 24 June 1935, Paul appointed Milan Stojadinović as prime minister, with a mandate to deal with the Great Depression and find a solution to the "Croat question". Stojadinović believed that the solution to the Great Depression were closer economic ties with Germany, which had more people than what it could feed and lacked many of the raw materials necessary for a modern industrial economy. As Germany needed both food and raw materials such as iron, bauxite, copper and manganese, Yugoslav exports of both agricultural products and of minerals to the Reich bloomed from 1935 onward, leading to an economic revival and to placing Yugoslavia in the German economic sphere of influence.
Yugoslavia had signed a treaty of alliance with France in 1927, while the Rhineland was still occupied by France, and during Franco-Yugoslav staff talks, it was promised that France would take the offensive into western Germany if Germany should start another war. As long as the Rhineland remained a demilitarized zone, there was always the possibility of the French launching an offensive into western Germany, which reassured Yugoslavia. The American historian Gerhard Weinberg wrote that the demilitarized status of the Rhineland the Treaty of Versailles had imposed was "the single most important guarantee of peace in Europe" for as long as the Rhineland was demilitarized, it was impossible for Germany to attack any of France's allies in Eastern Europe without exposing itself to the risk of a devastating French offensive into western Germany.
The remilitarization of the Rhineland on 7 March 1936 meant that Germany started building the West Wall along its border with France, which ended any hope of a French offensive into western Germany. On 15–20 June 1936, the chiefs of staff of the Little Entente (Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia) met in Bucharest to discuss their plans now that the Rhineland was re-militarized. The gloomy conclusion of the Bucharest meeting was that France was not a factor in Eastern Europe, and henceforward there were only two great powers in Eastern Europe, namely the Soviet Union and Germany, and the victory of either in another war would mean the end of their independence.