No. 14

SERGEANT BUBLIK REPORTS TO THE INTELLIGENCE DEPARTMENT OF THE MILITARY COMMANDER IN SERBIA ON NOVEMBER 17, 1941, ABOUT THE MAIN ROLE OF THE SECRETARY OF STATE OF THE INDEPENDENT STATE OF CROATIA, EUGEN KVATERNIK, IN CARRYING OUT TERROR AGAINST SERBS.^[1]

Croatia^[2]

Transcript.

Sergeant Franz Bublik, translator with the Commander in Serbia
Command Staff, Department I c.

Belgrade, November 17, 1941

For Command Staff, Department I c

Report (Confidential)

Subject: Croatian Secretary of State Eugen Kvaternik and his influence on the persecution of Serbs.

I thank a German staff officer in Zagreb and some other sources from there for the following account of the situation in Croatia and the disastrous role that Police Minister Kvaternik has in the persecution of Serbs in Croatia:

And while the father, Marshal Kvaternik, portrays himself as a completely honorable man and an impeccable officer, who in no way should be associated with incomprehensible actions against that part of the Croatian population that is considered “Serb”, his son Eugen, as the head of Croatia’s security,^[3] is marked as personally responsible as an instigator, initiator, accomplice and patron of the terrible persecution of the Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia. If the elderly Marshal can be blamed for something, it is that he accepts that certain government services in Zagreb are covering up and tolerating bloody orgies of their subordinate military police and Ustasha organs, without using his authority for a reasonable and humane showdown between Croats and Serbs. Eugen Kvaternik, a man about 28 years old, masterfully knows how to distance himself from these events before the members of the German Wehrmacht, which of course does not prevent him from releasing his incomprehensible hatred and his incomprehensible efforts behind the scenes to destroy everything that smells of Serbian. He has a large share in the decimation of members of the Orthodox faith, as well as in their persecution and oppression. This also applies to his accomplices, the State Secretary for Croatia, for Reconstruction, Director Rožanković^[4] and further Colonel K. Jendrašić.^[5]

The Director for Reconstruction, Rožanković, has the task of confiscating all movable and immovable property of the Serbs living in the Croatian state and Orthodox Croats, as well as the property of the Jews without exception for the benefit of the state and to expell, intern or even imprison the former owners.

It seems that the task of Eugen Kvaternik is to forcibly destroy the class, which was thus deprived of its property, either in the camps^[6] or outside of these, and to make it disappear over time. He pursues this goal with such perseverance as would be worthy of some nobler thing. In the infamous camps and prisons, which are mostly subordinated to the Minister of Police K.[vaternik], the greatest misery, hunger and misfortune reign. Detainees of dungeons and camps are abused, tortured and tormented in the most brutal way by Ustashas who have been appointed as guards. A few examples: A 76-year-old man was thrown into a Zagreb prison, whose son escaped arrest by a timely, spontaneous escape. In order to extort a confession from the father about his son’s current place of residence, it was done in such a way that during the interrogation, the old man’s nails were pulled out by pliers, one by one, every day alternating toes and fingers. One mother had a tooth extracted every day in a camp on a similar occasion, despite the fact that neither in the first nor in the second case, the pitiful creatures were able to give any information about the place of the accidental last-minute escape of their children. There are also Jews in the camps, who live in special accommodation. The treatment of them, the accommodation and the nutrition of the Jews are far better than in the case of the Serbs, although those Jews who were brought to the concentration camp for alleged loaning money, dishonesty, fraud and similar crimes are mostly imprisoned in the camp. The remaining Jews move freely and unhindered in the cities of Croatia. They are prescribed to wear only one yellow badge on the left side of their chest marked “Ž”^[7] to identify themselves as Jews.

And while the relatives of the interned Serbs are not allowed to supply them in the camp with the most necessary things, while they are freezing, starving, poorly dressed and have inappropriate footwear, the Jewish camp inmates are allowed to receive everything.

There are two types of camps in Croatia. Those prisoners who were mostly without property came to the emigrant camp and are under the jurisdiction of the State Secretary Rožanković. Given that obviously not much could be taken from them, they are not taken into account for any possible role of complainants against the state and claimants for repossession of property.

If, after all, they remained alive and survived not small difficulties in the camps, from time to time in a legal or some other way, they were expelled across the borders of Serbia.

The second group of camps are concentration camps, which are within the jurisdiction and power of the Minister of Police. The very choice of camp guards, as a tool of the highest instance, is worth paying attention to. Even the most brutal Ustasha leaders with sadistic tendencies and dogsbodies find themselves in great harmony and cooperation here. One seemingly harmless wink from above, and it has already been decided about the life of a Serb there. Shooting “while fleeing” or “for rebellion, resistance, incitement” and the like, are the reasons that are then stated for the death of the victim. Former landowners and Orthodox intelligentsia have been gathered in these concentration camps. They are imputed communist or some other activity detrimental to the state, and a slightest excuse is resorted to in order to shoot a bullet at a prisoner for whom a foreign organ of authority has happened to show interest in, thus ending his life.

Indeed, lists of names are kept in these concentration camps, yet among the prisoners there are those whose names do not appear on any list or card index. Those are the people whose death sentence has already been pronounced in advance. They change camps several times, until one day they leave the last one and no longer appear in any other. To someone on the other side, any research where the unfortunate person is with this practice seems completely impossible, especially since the perpetrators and those who know something about it, erase every trace.

Before the capture of the broader coastal area of Croatia by Italian troops, there were concentration camps in Gospić^[8] and on the island of Pag, one at each of the two places, which held well-to-do Serbs and their intelligentsia. There was a constant exchange of prisoners between these camps and others. The commander of the Gospić camp was a particularly notorious executioner, whose cruelty and lack of appraisal for human life will remain in the horrible memory of all those who were lucky enough to get out of this hell alive.

His arbitrariness and autonomy during the execution of the victims who were delivered to him, seems to have been experienced as a great burden from the highest Croatian instances, because he was put before the Ustasha court, which sentenced him to death, whereby a witness of a future charge, who had rich knowledge and insights about the then-current order in Croatia, was removed from this world. In any case, Gospić or Pag were the final stops in the lives of many wretched and innocent people. This commander of the camp in Gospić, who was personally known to the compiler of this report, one day assembled a railway transport of about 1,700 prisoners. Men, children and women were crammed into the closed cattle cars – 80 or more people per car and sent under strong security escort in the direction of the island of Pag. The entire transport never arrived to Pag, or to any other camp. The whole transport was stopped somewhere on the railroad, the cars were emptied and somewhere in a remote area, the people were done away with by machine guns.

Tens of thousands of people disappeared without a trace, on the Adriatic coast and the island of Pag in just a few months. After capturing the area, the Italian military authorities disbanded the camps set up there by the Croatian administration, and released the prisoners.

Reasonable Croats, as well as other objective people, leave room for a doubt that it cannot only be a matter of fierce hatred which inspires today’s rulers in Croatia and encourages the complete destruction of the Serbdom in the country, but that other motives must play a crucial role here. Doubts are expressed that the Croatian state is trying to repair its insufficient finances by appropriating Serbian property.

If we take into account in this sense the fact that on the territory of today’s state of Croatia 2 to 2½ million people of the Orthodox faith lived, of whom several hundred thousand were well off, and whose property was completely confiscated and who were expelled or interned and deprived of life, it is difficult to reject this version without further consideration.

Signed: Bublik

Sergeant

^[1] АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 22-25.

^[2] Handwritten note, the second word is illegible.

^[3] See: D. Kovačić, Redаrstveno-obavještajni sustav Nezavisne Države Hrvatske od 1941. do 1945. godine, Zagreb: Hrvatski institut za povijest, 2009.

^[4] Josip Rožanković, State Director of the National Bureau for Reconstruction.

^[5] Stjepan Jendrašić, since June 1941, president of the Povjerenstvo za preuzimanje ratnog materijala (Commissariat for Taking over War Material); Tko je tko u NDH, 171 (М. Рojić).

^[6] See: M. Koljanin, “The Role of Concentration Camps in the Policies of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) in 1941”, Balсanica, XLVI, Belgrade 2015, 315-337.

^[7] From the first letter of the word ‘Židov’ (Jew).

^[8] See: Đ. Zatezalo, Jadovno. Kompleks ustaških logora 1941, Vol. 1, Beograd: Muzej žrtava genocida, 2007.

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.