No. 122

REPORT ON THE MASS KILLINGS AND TORTURES OF THE SERB INHABITANTS OF THE VILLAGES ALONG THE DRINA WHILE FLEEING TO SERBIA BY THE USTASHAS AND MUSLIMS IN APRIL 1942.^[1]

S.[ource] Kostić, 25 April 42^[2]

Croats’ campaign of terror

On April 5, 1942, when the Germans withdrew from the village of Drinjača, the Ustashas came to the village together with the Muslims and on the same day they slaughtered Savić Stanko from the village of Lešnja. He was slaughtered by the son of Ibro Hedemović, a native of Kosirovo.

In the forest across the Drina, near the village of Čitluk, the Ustashas raped three women from the house of Ostojić from Drinjača.

Across the Drina, near the village of Budišić, the rape was committed in such a way that it could be seen from the opposite right bank.

On April 5 this year, the Ustashas, who were guarding the bridge near Zvornik, penetrated Drinjača and began looting Serbs. On this occasion, they publicly raped several women and girls.

On April 8 this year, the Ustashas arrived in the village of Pokom.^[3] During the march through the Serbian settlements, they set these on fire.

As said by the refugees, the Ustashas killed all Serbs in Vlasenica.

On April 9, 1942, the Ustashas captured a Serb woman in the village of Polom, tortured her, cut off both her arms and legs, and then cut her body.

The Ustashas set fire to all Serbian villages in a row, so that on the night of April 8-9 this year, a huge fire could be seen across the Drina, rising high above the Polom Hill in the village of Kravić.^[4]

On April 9, 1942, the Ustashas captured women and children near Grabovica, at the crossing over the Drina, killed them and threw them into the Drina. In that way about 50 people lost their lives. The same thing happened near Drinjača on the Drina, where about 50 people also lost their lives.

On April 9, 1942, an Ustasha unit, together with Muslims, reached the town of Bjelovac in Bosnia, located at the height of the settlement of Grabovica in Serbia. There were about 30 women and children by the Drina, who wanted to move to Serbia, and who were slaughtered by the Ustashas and thrown into the Drina.

On the road from Bjelovac to Tegar,^[5] an even larger number of women and children were killed and thrown into the Drina.

On April 8, 1942, the Ustashas and Muslims penetrated Drinjača at around 2 p.m., and at approximately 6 p.m. they arrived near the village of Uzovnica, where they slaughtered about 30 women and children on the bank of the Drina.

On April 9 and 10 this year, the Ustashas slaughtered 5 prominent Serbs from the area on the Drina opposite the village of Trišić,^[6] Jadar District.

On April 10, 1942, the Ustashas killed many women and children near the village of Bjelovac and threw them into the Drina.

The Ustashas especially torture girls and little girls, raping them, mutilating them with a knife and then hanging them on a tree.

On April 11, 1942, a woman, frantic, while running away from the Ustashas across the Drina with her five children, threw her 6-month-old child into the Drina, while she managed to escape with the remaining four children.

^[1] АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 410.

^[2] Handwritten note.

^[3] Polom.

^[4] Kravica.

^[5] Tegare.

^[6] Tršić.

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.