No. 2

ON JANUARY 30, 1942, THE FIELD COMMAND ZAGREB REPORTS ON MASS CRIMES AGAINST THE SERBS IN GLINA, AROUND GLINA AND IN VRGINMOST FROM MAY TO SEPTEMBER 1941, AS WELL AS ON THE REACTION OF THE MINISTER OF THE INTERIOR ARTUKOVIĆ.^[1]

Transcript!

Attachment 2^[2]

Zagreb, 30 Jan. 42

Field Command Zagreb

I c 33/42 conf.[idential]

Ustasha atrocities^[3]

Confidential!

Subject: Incidents in Glina and its vicinity.

Glina

On May 11, first 400 and then another 200 people, were taken away from Glina, mostly intellectuals and craftsmen, all those people who owned money.

Nothing more can be found about these people since then, it is not known whether they are still alive or dead.

This action was carried out, among others, by the following persons from Glina:

2 Vidaković brothers^[4]

Mison^[5]

Tiljak^[6] (merchant)

2 Krestelica brothers^[7]

Lipek^[8] (executed by shooting later)

District Chief Imper^[9]

The Ustashas were called from Zagreb, among others those under the command of Ivan Sarić,^[10] who is currently in a commanding position with the Ustashas in Zagreb.

Gornji – Grabovac railway station^[11]

Trains were searched there in July/August 1941, the Orthodox were pulled out of the trains and sentenced by a court martial right in front of the train station and then shot immediately. In many cases, the following were present:

Verovski Božo^[12]

Eugen Kvaternik (Dido)^[13]

People from Glina were brought by trucks to this railway station, too, and also shot there.

About 5-6000 people were buried in the vicinity of the train station.

Vrginmost

An Ustasha man in charge made it known in the village of Cenernica^[14] that people (Orthodox) should go to Vrginmost, convert to the Roman Catholic faith in the church there, and then return home unhindered.

After that, on July 30, 1941, at around 11 am, a mass of about 1500 people left Cemercica^[15] for Vrginmost with Croatian flags, with music and shouts: “Long live Pavelić.” There was even a celebration in Vrginmost. At around 3 pm, three trucks, loaded with Ustashas, came from Glina, under the command of 2 brothers Vidaković (Stipo and Nikica), and then under the command of Micon.^[16]

These Ustashas surrounded the place of celebration and then separated men and women.

Women and children were sent home and men were locked up in several houses. During the night, the men were driven to Glina and killed there, one group near the Grabovac^[17] railway station near Glina, and another 300 people were even forced into the church in Glina and slaughtered in this church.

The corpses were loaded on trucks and buried near the Grabovac^[18] railway station (in a forest).

There are people who saw this incident in the church in Glina with their own eyes and who could testify about this. However, no one dares to put his signature, because then he would be lost.

There are several places around Glina where many people are buried.

Among others, 3 km from Glina in the direction of Petrinja to the left and right of the village road near a mill.
In Bucica,^[19] 8 km east of Glina, near a church on a hill. About 1000 people are believed to have been buried there.
In the field of the Ustasha Lipak (near Glina), where about 200 corpses are also thought to have been buried.

Obiljaj, Mali-Gradec,^[20] Perna and others.

In these villages, men, women and children were killed (slaughtered) and houses were set on fire.

23 people were brought to the hospital in Glina, among them children aged 4, 6 and 14, as well as several pregnant women.

It must be possible to determine the accuracy of these allegations in the hospital there.

During this incident, a large amount of grain was destroyed, and numerous cattle that were not driven away died. The taken cattle, which were not driven away, were sold out at the lowest prices, and the Ustashas kept the money for themselves.

The Field Command was informed about these incidents from various sides.

The Field Command knows one person in Zagreb who personally saw the last mentioned incidents and can bring reliable witnesses for the first mentioned incidents.

These incidents were also reported in August and September 1941. Mr. Artuković, Minister of the Interior, was reported to in detail. The Minister of the Interior even promised help, but he probably does not have the strength to overcome. Because in the following period, since then, there have been regular shootings of Orthodox people, although not on such a large scale.

Signed by

Knehe

Major

Confirming the accuracy of the transcript

Kalmar

Captain

^[1] АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 107-109.

^[2] Handwritten note.

^[3] Handwritten note.

^[4] Nikola Nikica and Stjepan Stipo Vidaković. About the crimes in Glina, see: Đ. Aralica, Ustaški pokolji Srba u glinskoj crkvi, second edition, Beograd: Muzej žrtava genocida, 2011.

^[5] Josip Mison.

^[6] Mate Tiljak.

^[7] The executioners of the Serbs were the three Kreštalica brothers, Nikola, Pavao and Stjepan.

^[8] Nikola Lipak.

^[9] Dragutin Imper.

^[10] It is most likely Ivan Šarić, one of the organizers of the massacre of the Serbs in Kordun in May 1941; D. Korać, Kordun i Banija u Narodnooslobodilačkoj borbi i socijalističkoj revoluciji, Zagreb: Školska knjiga 1986, 107-108.

^[11] Banski Grabovac; D. Korać, Kordun i Banija, 118, 163, 169, 535.

^[12] Božidar Cerovski, head of the Ustasha Police Directorate (Ravnateljstvo ustaškog redarstva), was sentenced to death in 1947; Tko je tko u NDH, (G. A. Blažeković and Z. Dizdar).

^[13] Eugen Dido Kvaternik, head of the NDH police service, the Directorate for Public Order and Security and the Ustasha Surveillance Service, until October 1942; emigrated and died in an accident; Tko je tko u NDH, 223-225 (Z. Dizdar).

^[14] Čemernica.

^[15] Same as previous.

^[16] Mison.

^[17] Banski Grabovac.

^[18] Same as previous.

^[19] Bučica.

^[20] Mali Gradac.

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.