No. 115

STATEMENT OF DRAGO MILENKOVIĆ, GIVEN ON APRIL 13, 1942 IN TUZLA, HE SURVIVED THE MASSACRE OF THE INHABITANTS OF THE VILLAGE OF JEGIN LUG, WHICH HAD BEEN CARRIED OUT BY HADŽIEFENDIĆ’S LEGION TWO DAYS EARLIER.^[1]

Transcript!

For the City Command

Tuzla.

Statement of Milenković Drago – Refugee from Jegin – Lug.

On April 11, 1942, Hadžiefendić’s Legion came from Tupković and set fire to the village of Jegin-Lug. The Legionnaires told the people in the village that they should go with them to defend the Spreča valley. “You take the axes, and we’ll take the rifles.” All the men from the village came. Then the Legionaries put all the people in one line and shot them all with two machine guns. After this, they gathered all the women and shot them in the same way. In the end, they gathered the children and shot them with a machine gun.

They killed at least 250-300 men, women and children. Entire families have been wiped out, for example from these families:

Tadić 60 persons, men, women and children,

Jovanović around 150 family members

Tomić around 30 persons

Marković around 30 persons

Tešić around 9 persons

Ilić 1 person

Vidović – several persons, etc.

In the families Mirković, Kadrić, Tešić – 4 persons, etc.

It can be said that about 300 men, women and children were killed. Entire large families were destroyed. The rest of the population escaped into the municipal office building, from where the gendarmes took them to Tuzla. On the way to Tuzla, in the Muslim village of Dubrave, they were once again attacked by Mohammedan peasant-Legionaries and, although there were gendarmes present, 4 men were taken away to be missing. They are: Petko Ilić (37 years old), Božo Savić (60 years old), Jovan Kojić (57 years old) and Marko Tomić (50 years old). They wanted to kill the others on the way through the village, but since the women were crying and the gendarmerie opposed them, they let us go.

The village was looted, the cattle were driven away, and food and furniture are gone. The looted stuff was taken to the Muslim village of Vukovije, and that municipality kept everything to itself.

Milenković Drago.

Present workers of the Kreka coal mine,

from the same village where these families were killed.

Tadić Ratko and Milenković Petar

IV. 1942.^[2]

Tuzla.

Appendix.

During the execution of the rest of the women and children, who were naked and barefoot, the Legionaries attacked them once again in the Muslim village of Dubrave and wanted to kill them all. They cursed their Serbian mothers, and the four men whose names I have already mentioned were separated from the column, taken away and certainly killed. I hid between women and children and I escaped so unnoticed. After that, all the women were searched and the one who had some money with her, her money was robbed. Since there was not much money, they took away pieces of clothing and things the women had taken with them, and threw them in the mud.

And so we passed. We said that the authorities were sending us, but they nevertheless cursed the authorities and those who sent us, but also those we were going to.

One-year-old children were also killed in the village.

There was one gendarmerie patrol of 12 men in the village, but it was too weak to confront that force.

Milenković Drago.

^[1] АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 281.

^[2] Handwritten note.

Subeditor’s Note

This – English – edition of the book is a translation of the one in the Serbian language, published in 2022 under the title Ustaška zverstva: Zbornik dokumenata (1941–1942). As far as the corpus of the Dossier from the personal fonds of Slavko Odić is concerned – and it makes the essential body of this book – the translation team worked from its Serbian version given in the said book and not from the German original.

The Serbian edition, with the documents translated from German, was printed in the Cyrillic alphabet, which necessitated some explanations provided by the Editor, Dr. Milan Koljanin, with regard to the linguistic traits, orthography and punctuation resorted to by the translators from German into Serbian (Tatjana Janićijević, Akademija Oxford) and the Editor. Naturally enough, numerous clarifications referring to the Serbian edition do not apply on the English one in most of the aspects of translation work. Hence the need to write this Note.

To begin with, the translators basically opted for the varieties of the American English rather than British English.

Personal names in the officially processed documents are most often written in what is today considered inverse order: family name/surname first, followed by one’s first/Christian name, without a comma in between.

Originally, the documents (letters, reports, statements etc.) were written (typed) in bureaucratic style and with a page layout practised by German offices, so these traits have been retained herein, and so have the obvious spelling and/or typing errors (personal names, toponyms); the latter have been corrected in the footnotes. The parts of text/sentences which are underlined or written with spaces between letters as means of emphasis correspond to the German original and its Serbian/Croat counterpart. The same applies to whole words or lines written in capital letters.

Punctuation has been kept almost completely, except when the meaning demanded comma (usually related to the rules of word order in an English sentence). Some marks, such as hyphens, dashes or slashes may impress the Reader as outdated or misplaced. Earlier typewriters did not have buttons with parentheses, and the slash was used instead of them.

Dates are written with differing uses or omissions of period (full stop), whereby month is written in three ways: fully in letters (20 January), in Arabic numerals (e.g. 20.1.) or Roman numerals (e.g. 20.I.). In rare cases, the slash can be found in dates (e.g. 12./X. 1941), but not as a regular separator between their constituents. Years are occasionaly written without the first digit, e.g. 942 instead of 1942, which is a frequent occurrence in oral communication.

Abbreviations, other than official identification means for offices, titles or codenames (VB, MA, RSHA etc.), have been translated (e.g. ’etc.’). The translators chose to retain the Croat/Serbian abbreviation for the name of the wartime ’state’, that is, ’NDH’ is standing for Nezavisna Država Hrvatska (Independent State of Croatia) instead of the less known English name (ISC). Some words were written in a shortened form for the reason of economy of expression, and the habit has been transferred to the translation, including the Editor’s intervention in the Serbian edition: Reg.[ister], Gend.[armerie], Gor[nja] Tuzla.

Footnotes in the English edition partially differ from those in the Serbian version. Some proved to be unnecessary (those that provided original names which were transliterated into the phonetical Cyrillic alphabet). New footnotes have been added by the Subeditor in order to explain/clarify the specific, locally used, words or phrases with which the Reader may not be familiar (such as slava, din, sokolski dom), or to indicate some nuances in the meaning (student, profesor). Here and there, the Reader will find notes in brackets inserted into the main body of the text by translators or the Editor where immediate understanding was needed.

Finally, it is noteworthy that the above-mentioned bureaucratic style of the presented documents mirrors the established conventions of communication in Central Europe and the Balkans of the first half of the 20th century, particularly in state and military affairs, yet also illustrates the specific ’hierarchy’ of various authorities on the occupied territories during World War Two, accentuating the relations between the German organs/institutions in power and the various offices subordinated to the administrative and military system of the Third Reich. As to the information, facts and accounts of events recorded in these documents, they are the subject of the history science and studies related thereto.

A. Č. P.