No. 120

REPORT ON THE MASS KILLINGS OF THE SERBS IN THE VILLAGE OF KOLIMER AND OTHER SERB VILLAGES AROUND TUZLA ON MARCH 8, 1942, BY HADŽIEFENDIĆ’S LEGION.^[1]

20. IV 42^[2]

Transcript

Village report

Kolimer.

Kolimer is a village near Požarnica, 7 kilometers east of Tuzla. On 8. III. 1942, the Legionaries of Muhamed Hadžiefendić arrived with armed Mohammedans, with a force of 300 to 400 men, from the village of Seljuble,^[3] which is located near Požarnica and Kolimer.

They first broke into the house of Ilija Toromanović (38 years old). He is employed at the Kreka coal mine. They killed him as well as his brother Jovo, 35, and his uncle Miko (50), his uncle Miko’s wife was seriously wounded. After that, they went to the village of Potras^[4] and killed 2 men, Iko Tosić and Petar Sekolić, in one house. On the way back, they passed through the village of Kolimer again and found four children in Miko Vasiljević’s house and killed them all. They were 3 girls and 1 boy. All the children were about 10 years old. The house itself was completely looted. In the same village, they also broke into the houses of Gajo Janjić. Then, Boško Janjić, Mihajlo Janjić, Laka Lakić and Dušan Likić and all the houses were looted. Later, they looted Todor Simić’s house, and they robbed and drove away all the cattle. They further robbed Mitar Maksimović’s house and killed his wife. Then they broke into the house of Jovo Mihajlović, killed him and robbed his house. During their attack, they further looted Rade Tešić’s house, and severely wounded his wife. After this act, they slaughtered his two sheep and prepared them for dinner in this house. In the house of Jovo Đuvić, they tore the clothes of all women from the house, after they had previously looted the whole house. In the house of Toso^[5] Pajić, who was killed during one of their earlier attacks (8. II. 1942), they broke into his house again and robbed it completely.

In the village of Kolimer and the neighboring village of Potrase,^[6] they killed a total of 6 men, one woman and four children aged 8 to 10. The village of Kolimer itself was completely looted and the cattle were driven away with them. Because of this looting, the peasants no longer have anything to eat. At the same time, because their cattle were driven away and their grain seeds were looted, they are no longer able to carry out spring sowing. In the neighboring village, Posarnica,^[7] this militia killed 5 men and two children that day (8. 3. 42). In addition, they took many men ages between 14 and 70 from the villages of Posarnica^[8] and Kolimer, and their whereabouts are not known. There are rumors in Tuzla that it is planned to add more battalions to this militia. What benefits they will mean for the protection of the population can easily be determined on the basis of these descriptions.

For accuracy

Peinig^[9]
IV. 42.

^[1] АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 387-388.

^[2] Handwritten date.

^[3] Seljublje.

^[4] Potraš.

^[5] Tošo.

^[6] Potraš.

^[7] Požarnica.

^[8] Same as previous.

^[9] L. Peinigg.

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.