Corporatist governments arise in Greece, under Prime Minister Metaxas, who models his regime on the fascist governments of Germany’s Adolf Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini, and in Romania, where King Carol, am admirer of Mussolini, proclaims a corporatist dictatorship to counter the growing political menace of the principal national Fascist group, the Iron Guard.

Carol eventually proclaims a royal dictatorship, similar to those already in place in Albania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia.

The Second World War, having as its dress rehearsal the Spanish Civil War, begins in earnest with the Russo-Soviet dismemberment of Poland and quickly engulfs the Balkans.

Resistance organizations soon appear in the Balkan countries, as elsewhere, but the resistance is by no means a unified movement.

Rival organizations form, and in several countries deep divisions exist between communist and noncommunist groups.

Initially, the communists take a pacifist line, but, after Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, they join the underground and in some areas become dominant in it.

In Yugoslavia, the Serbian nationalist Chetniks under Dragoljub Mihailovic and the communist Partisans under Josip Broz Tito fight each other as well as the Germans, and the two major Greek resistance organizations, one nationalist and one communist, are unable to cooperate militarily against the Germans.

The Allies expect in 1945 that a benign Soviet Union will continue the wartime alliance through the period of postwar East European realignment.

Continued fighting in Greece among rival resistance organizations after the end of the German occupation morphs into the Greek Civil War.