No. 142

ON APRIL 28, 1942, THE CHIEF OF THE ADMINISTRATION STAFF REPORTS TO THE COMMANDING GENERAL IN SERBIA THAT THE USTASHAS WERE OPENING FIRE ON BORDER GUARD TROOPS AND GERMAN SOLDIERS, THAT THEY WERE MASSACRING THE SERB POPULATION ON THE BANK OF THE DRINA RIVER, AND APPEALS ON HIM TO PUT AN END TO THOSE KILLINGS.^[1]

Transcript

Plenipotentiary and Commanding General in Serbia Belgrade, April 28, 42

/Commander in Serbia, Administration Staff/

Tg. Nr. 2151/42 i – II

Subject: Cross-border incidents.

For

Commanding General and Commander in Serbia

Dept. I c

Belgrade

I am submitting the following transcript of a letter from the Ministry of the Interior dated 22 April 1942 with a request to take note of and possibly undertake a further action:

“On the night of the 9th of this month, large groups of Ustasha units, which were moving along the Drina, suddenly and completely without reason opened fierce fire on the right bank of the Drina, that is, on the village of Uzovnica, which is located on the Serbian territory. The same thing happened at noon on the 9th of this month, during which mortars and automatic weapons were fired at the Serbian coast. The Commander of the Serbian state guard in the Šabac District, Major Mandriović, was with the border police commander, Captain Pavlović, on the road opposite to the Bosnian village of Bjelovac, to investigate the causes of this armed attack, when fierce fire was opened on them, as well as on German escort soldiers”.

Shortly afterwards, 4 trucks with Ustashas set off from Bjelovac in the direction of the village of Sikirić, where they opened fire on the Serb population from Sikirić and Tegar,^[2] who began to flee in the direction of the village of Faković.^[3] While still in Bjelovac, the Ustashas attacked hard the fugitives, mostly women and children, stabbed them with bayonets, and then threw the dead and wounded into the Drina. The road from Bjelovac to the village of Tegar^[4] was literally covered with the corpses of women and children.

One part of the women and girls on the run were surrounded by the Ustashas and raped there on the open road, mothers in front of their children, and girls before the eyes of their mothers, only to be slaughtered or thrown alive into the Drina immediately thereafter.

From the bank heretowards, the Ustashas mockingly shouted at the Serbian border guards, who had to watch all these atrocities: “Until St. George’s Day^[5], no Serbian mother in Bosnia and Serbia will be able to call her son, because there will be no more of them left!”

I have the honor to reiterate my repeatedly expressed request, that everything be done to finally put an end to these horrible killings of the peaceful and innocent Serb population on the other side of the Drina.

For the Commanding General and Commander in Serbia

Chief of Administration Staff

signed by order, signature

For accuracy^[6]

5. 42.

^[1] АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 537-538.

^[2] Tegare.

^[3] Fakovići.

^[4] Tegare.

^[5] The Serbian Orthodox believers celebrate St. George’s Day (Đurđevdan) on May 6, sticking to the Julian calendar. – Subeditor’s note.

^[6] Illegible.

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.