No. 148

ON MAY 1, 1942, THE COMMANDER OF THE POLICE IN BELGRADE REPORTS TO THE PLENIPOTENTIARY OF THE MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS ABOUT THE MASS USTASHA SLAUGHTERS OF THE SERBS IN EASTERN BOSNIA, AND THE DISAPPOINTMENT WITH GERMAN POLICY, WHICH IS BENEFICIAL TO THE SPREAD OF ITALIAN INFLUENCE.^[1]

SENIOR LEADER OF SS AND POLICE

In the area of the Plenipotentiary Commanding General in Serbia

Commander of the Security Police and Security Service

in Belgrade

III Rx/Fli B.Nr. [illegible]

Belgrade, May 1, 1942

Telephone 22-103

CONFIDENTIAL

For

Plenipotentiary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs

with the Commanding General and Commander in Serbia

Mr. Minister Benzler,^[2]

Belgrade.

Subject: Report on the situation in eastern Bosnia, Croatian atrocities and Serb refugees.

Reference: Current

Attachments: 2

The terrible situation on the eastern Bosnian insurgent territory, which took on the greatest proportions again in April, due to the attacks of Communist Partisans and Croatian Ustasha formations against the national Serb Dangić’s Chetniks, led to countless massacres of peaceful Serb villagers, mostly women and children, and the entire Serb population between the Bosna and the Drina rivers is in fear and horror (see eyewitness reports so far).

The Serb population fled, where there was still time for that, to the forests and in the direction of the Serbian border on the Drina, where they arrived in a state of exhaustion. Even on the Drina, the German troops (as already reported) near Ljubovija and elsewhere noticed the bestially heinous acts of the Croatian Ustashas – and under their Commander Francetić. Women and girls from the stream of refugees were raped, and after that a part of them would be killed and thrown into the Drina.

There was even an exchange of fire on the bridge in Ljubovija between Croatian Ustashas and the German soldiers who wanted to protect the Serbian refugees from the atrocities of the Ustashas.

Resentment over these heinous acts has grown immensely not only among the Serb population, but has also struck the German officials, as evidenced by the report of the Chief Medical Corps Officer to the Commanding General in Serbia, whose transcript is attached.

The Chief Medical Corps Officer visited Šabac, Loznica, Zvornik, Culine, Ljubovija and in the accompanying letter with his report to the Commanding General he wrote the following:

“In the main centers for the streams of Serb refugees in Western Serbia there are thousands of Serb refugees from the Croatian territory; members of their families were slaughtered by the Croatian Ustashas in the cruellest ways, they themselves had to flee across the Drina at night before the hordes that killed and burned, while the Partisans, Ustashas and armed Muslims continued to shoot at them. The road Culine – Ljubovija was still under enemy fire on April 17.

The number of refugees can only be approximated, considering that there is no official documentation, and many refugees have already gone far into the interior of Serbian territory. There could be about 12,000, more or less. The exiles were housed in four large groups on the Serbian bank of the Drina and were mostly encamped in the open. Their diet was extremely poor and consisted of some cooked corn flour and nettle soup. The main mass of the people was in Ljubovija and Culine (north of Ljubovija) as well as in the neighboring villages, and a smaller part in Koviljača and Bajina Bašta.”

The number of refugees, which cannot be precisely controlled, is estimated at around 20,000. The fact that due to the constant influx of unfortunate Serb refugees is always adversely affected by public opinion in Serbia, and the belief in just leadership of the Reich suffers because of this, it is quite understandable. This worse than medieval situation in Bosnia and the slaughtering of the people by the Communist-Catholic Ustashas and Partisans has had a particularly unfavorable effect on the reliable members of the Zbor inclined to the German and Ljotić’s volunteers who have proven themselves in combat against the Communists and Draža Mihajlović, whose one unit is under the command of a certain Miloš Lautner (based on a change of surname, Vojinović, of Slovenian-German origin from Maribor on the Drava, residing in Užice, married to a Serbian woman, closer personal data are still unknown).

Lautner-Vojinović, who speaks excellent German, is extremely well informed about the situation on the other side of the Drina, and he not only described the current situation to the leading medical corps officer, but also gave the attached report to the local service.

The places in the report of the medical corps officer as well as Lautner- Vojinović, which inform on the cooperation between the Croatian Ustashas and the Communists, that is, the Ustashas with the red Soviet five-pointed star, are especially pointed out. In the eyes of Ljotić’s pro-German volunteers on the Drina, the Ustashas, with their inhumanity and bestial murders and arsons, were hated as much as the brutal Partisans. The fact is that no difference can be established in their actions against the peaceful Serb population, mostly women and children in Eastern Bosnia. On the contrary, the rage of the Ustashas and Muslim legionaries is even more horrible than the rage of the Communist Partisans. Therefore, “the disappointment of Ljotić’s pro-German volunteers that the policy of the Reich is still on the side of the inquisitorial state of Croatia” is more understanddable. In addition, Ljotić’s volunteers, due to their inclination towards the Germans and despite their reliability in the combat against the Communists and the rebels of Draža Mihajlović, are barely supplied with weapons by the Serbian government services, and their reliability and value in battle should be respected all the more.

Despite the incursion of the Montenegrin Red Brigades and Ustashas all the way to the Drina and the destruction of many Serb villages along routes of the Ustasha advance from Tuzla to Zvornik, as well as on the Drina bend, the resistance of the male Serb population who fled to the forests against the Partisans and Ustashas, although weakened, is still there.

The cause of this lies in the inability of Croats to make a decent governance and to keep Muslim and Ustasha inhumanity under control. On the contrary, there is even a danger that this inhumanity will eventually become a danger to the policy of the Axis Powers that crosses the borders of Croatia, and especially to see a clear direction of Italian policy to expand its influence all the way to the Hungarian border and take hold of the whole of Bosnia and Slavonia.

SS Lieutenant Colonel^[3]

^[1] АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 459-463.

^[2] Felix Benzler.

^[3] Belgrade Police Commander (BdS), Schäfer.

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.