No. 146

AN INTELLIGENCE REPORT OF APRIL 24, 1942, ACCORDING TO WHICH THERE ARE NO MORE SERB SETTLEMENTS LEFT IN THE AREA OCCUPIED BY FRANCETIĆ’S USTASHAS, WITH A REQUEST TO SEND A COMMISSION TO DETERMINE THE USTASHA ATROCITIES.^[1]

Transcript!

Notification of own intelligence outpost at Tuzla^[2] of 24 April 42:

Intelligence-aimed trip from 23rd to 24th April in the area of Zvornik – Drinjača – Nova Kasaba – Milići – Vlasenica – Han Pijesak – Žljebovi:

The entire territory has been occupied by Francetić’s Ustashas. Not a single Serbian village right and left of the road exists anymore. Their inhabitants cannot be found. All the houses have been completely destroyed, the cattle were driven away. All the construction work in the last 100 years has been destroyed without a trace. In the purely Serb village of Milići, there are only 2 men left, 1 invalid and one 80-year-old man. To the question where the inhabitants were, put to an Ustasha first lieutenant, the answer was that they were in the woods. The new question, that it was not possible for the whole village to be in the woods, was answered with a shrug and the words: “You know, I am not an officer, I am a postal clerk from Sarajevo, I was a little bit exposed politically, so I registered with Francetić. I’m already disgusted by all that.”

As we drove on to Ploče,^[3] Francetić’s deputy asked how the pacification of Bosnia was conceived. In response to the fact that there are two possibilities, either by establishing peace or eradication, Francetić’s deputy said face to face: “We make peace by eradicating.”^[4]

The Croatian captain in Han Pijesak said that the Muslims were settling towards Vlasenica, and that the remaining area would be abandoned.

Croatian troops shoot men who surrender together with weapons, even without combat operations. On the evening of the 23rd, 100 women and children, who had fled from the Ustashas, were taken to Žljebovi, among them children aged two months and older. One man spoke with pleasure how he had shot one from this group who hung a rifle and who had a small child in his arms, and how that child flew away in a big arch. The women and children have been without food for days and now, as a scene of horror, they are near the place for food supply in Žljebovi.

There can be no question of any concentration of the enemy, in fact of any enemy whatsoever, in this state of affairs, and also of the fact that real, terrible circumstances can be concretely described in one radio report.

The leader of the intelligence outpost is asking that a commission be sent to this area as soon as possible, so that the said atrocities and the atrocities of the Ustashas that took place over the last two days can be established with complete objectivity.

^[1] АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 514.

^[2] Abwehr Intelligence outpost (Ast. – Abwehrstelle) in Tuzla.

^[3] Ploče, a mountain pass on the Javor mountain, on the road from Vlasenica to Han Pesak.

^[4] In the original: „Wir befrieden durch Ausrottung”.

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.