No. 136

ON APRIL 20, 1942, SS LIEUTENANT COLONEL SCHÄFER SUBMITS TO THE GESTAPO CHIEF MÜLLER INFORMATION ABOUT THE MASS KILLINGS OF THE SERBS IN EASTERN BOSNIA BY THE MUSLIM LEGION AS THE CAUSE OF THE UNREST AND ABOUT THE QUESTION OF THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE GERMANS.^[1]

20. IV. 1942

K III RX/LP B. Nr. 2874/42

Sent 22. IV. 1942^[2]

Letter

For

Reich Security Main Office – Department IV –

SS Lieutenant General and Lieutenant General of the Police

Müller^[3]

-o.V.i.A.-

Berlin.

Subject: New atrocities of Croats and Muslims in the area of Tuzla,
eastern Bosnia.

Reference: Known.

Attachments: 11

A reliable notification has just arrived from the VM^[4] from eastern Bosnia, which contains eyewitness statements, which were partly taken from the City Command in Tuzla. They describe the horrific savagery of the so-called Muslim Legion under their intimidator Hadžiefendić from Tupković, which attacked the Serb villages of Jegin Lug, Rajinci^[5], Kalesija Municipality, Požarnica, insidiously killed peaceful civilians, mostly women and children, and robbed the villages. The eyewitnesses escaped machine gun fire outbursts by mere chance.

Muhamed Hadžiefendić, the leader of the Muslim Legion from Tuzla, is known to be a 54-year-old man who works in his father’s shop. He used to be an Austro-Hungarian reserve ensign, then reached the rank of a reserve major in the Yugoslav army, he was a member of the Sokol Society^[6] and during Yugoslavia he pretended to be a great fiery patriot. He participated in many Sokol events and festivals in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Poland, and even was a delegate of the Sokol Society in Paris once.

During Cvetković’s government, he was provided concessions for mining explosives in the vicinity of Tuzla.

He is considered a Hochstapler^[7]. His shop with manufactured goods is full of Jewish goods, which he received from the Jews by agreement. For a long time, his neighbor, who is Jewish, was employed in his shop. Last year, he founded the so-called Muslim Legion of the People’s Uprising against Communism in Zagreb and Tupković. Allegedly, the entire wealth of many rich Jews in Tuzla was promised to him. He goes to Zagreb very often and it seems that he has strong connections there.

Apart from reporting on atrocities in the Tuzla area, other reports have arrived about those against Požarnica and the village of Kolimer, and they follow as a transcript. Among these reports, there are several that contain data on the damage caused by the criminal murder committed by the Ustashas, that is, the Muslim Legionaries.

Such incomprehensible atrocities are constantly repeated in those parts which have just been liberated by the insurgents or have shown no tendency to revolt at all. Thus, the Serb population in Bosnia is increasingly convinced that their eradication is in line with a resolute intention, and therefore the insurgents always have a new influx of the frightened and the desperate as well as ready for anything Serbs, who essentially follow no political or Communist tendencies, but only defend their bare life and the bare life of their closest family members and, if possible, their property. The refugees, who fled to Serbia from the medieval-style murdering arson, always bring unrest to the local areas and disrupt the calming trend in the Serb-settled territories, as well as trust in the German administration.

It cannot be ignored that not only the entire Serbian population, but also other peoples living there, ultimately hold the Reich responsible for this barbarism, because everyone says that Croatia would never dare to continue committing such atrocities, if the Reich did not tolerate them. Such thoughts can hardly be opposed even by completely pro-German-oriented people, especially since the indication of some possible inability of the Reich would not be recommendable or credible. The pacification of Bosnia is becoming an increasingly key issue for achieving peace in the Balkans.

Signed

Dr. Schäfer

SS Lieutenant Colonel

For accuracy^[8]

2.) G III m. d. B. u. deliver with^[9] 23/4 K III

3.) L

4.) VB

5.) VHK

6.) IV

7.) VI for information^[10]

^[1] АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 384-386.

^[2] Stamp of dispatch.

^[3] SS-Gruppenführer, SS-Lieutenant General Heinrich Müller, Head of the Gestapo, i.e. Department IV within the Reich Security Main Office, also had the title of the Police Lieutenant General (Generalleutnant der Polizei).

^[4] Code for representative: VM, Vertrauеnsmann.

^[5] Rainci.

^[6] Sokoli (‘Falcons’) were athletes, members of the pan-Slavic Soko(l) Movement (founded in Prague, in 1862) as an all-age gymnastics organization, following the principle of “a strong mind in a sound body”; their sports halls/gymnasiums (sokolski domovi) were built in numerous towns where local organizations (sokolska društva) existed, especially in the Slav-settled lands of Austro-Hungary. – Subeditor’s note.

^[7] Hochstapler is German word for a nice-mannered fraud, role player. – Subeditor’s note.

^[8] Illegible signature.

^[9] Illegible, initials and date.

^[10] Codes of Police departments and persons to receive the document.

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.