and Chetniks if they chose to defect to the Partisan side by 15 September. After 15 September, all who had not defected were to be brought to "people's courts". Similar calls were repeated several times after the deadline. In some cases, Croatian Home Guards were killed despite defecting to the Partisans. On the day when the amnesty expired, Tito instructed his subordinates to continue accepting late defectors. A day earlier, King Peter II issued a call to the Chetniks to put themselves under the command of the Partisans. Large-scale defections of Chetniks to the Partisans followed. The Armed Forces of the Independent State of Croatia (HOS) were reorganized in November 1944 to combine the units of the Ustaše and Croatian Home Guard. Throughout the war, the treatment of Croatian Home Guard prisoners was relatively benign Partisans would ridicule the captured domobran soldiers and send them home if they did not want to join the uprising. But, on 13 January 1945, Pavelić ordered the domobrani to merge with the Ustaša military, creating a force estimated at 280,000. Some Chetniks, such as those of Momčilo Đujić's Dinara Division, continued collaborating with the Axis. Đujić's forces fought alongside the Germans and HOS in late 1944 in the battle of Knin against the Partisan 8th Dalmatian Corps. The battle ended in Partisan victory, and the Dinara Division began withdrawing to Slovenia. Pavelić issued an order to provide safe passage to Đujić's troops, and gave them directions of movement. As the path led to Partisan-held territory, and Đujić did not trust Pavelić due to earlier examples of the Ustaše killing Chetniks passing through the NDH, he took an alternate route in agreement with the local Wehrmacht commanders. By 1944 SS General Rösner turned the Slovene Home Guard into an effective fighting force, and together they launched major offensives against the Partisans, to keep vital German supply and withdrawal routes open. Slovene casualties skyrocketed, with Slovene Partisans suffering by far the most, over 20,000 Partisans killed in 1944–45, alone. In September 1944, at the urging of Western Allies, Slovene members of the Yugoslav government-in-exile in London, called on the Slovene Home Guard to transfer its allegiance to the Partisans Despite this and Partisan amnesty offers, most Home Guards continued fighting on the German side. In March 1945, Slovene collaborationist leaders, Leon Rupnik and Bishop Rožman, proposed a military-political alliance to the Ustaše leader Ante Pavelić and