No. 154

REPORT OF NCO WENZL FROM MUŠIĆI, MAY 4, 1942, ON CROATIAN TROOPS KILLING AND LOOTING SERB CIVILIANS ON THE BANK OF THE DRINA RIVER.^[1]

Transcript!

Report of NCO Heinrich Wenzl from the 6th / Infantry Regiment 737

/ Mušići, 4 May 42 /.

I have the following to report on the events of May 1, 1942:

After I noticed the approach of Croatian units from my position about 150 m in front of Reznik,^[2] which was accompanied by fierce fire from rifles, I saw with my binoculars that their front was moving at a fast pace in a regular column. At the head was a German officer, some 150 m behind him was an Italian officer, and some 500-700 m behind this mass a unit of some 200-300 men who drove in front of it about 1000-1500 heads of mixed cattle and, on the road, about 50-80 people of different sexes.

All those who came along the way had their documents checked, so one part was let through and the other part was taken away. At the elevation of the company of Mr. Lieutenant Stoelben, I noticed that they pushed into the water two times 5 women. During the third time, 5-6 women were again pushed, and they fled into the Drina with their skirts up. When they were standing in the water up to their hips, a Croat shot at them with a machine gun, and the river swallowed and took them away. An old woman fled into the Drina with her child, drowned the child and then herself. One man, after he had already been lying on the ground, was kicked, and then thrown into the river, and when he tried to reach the bank, a Croat took him and shot him some 50 m farther.

Non-commissioned officer Miksch Otto from the 6th/Infantry Regiment 737 informed me that at the elevation of his position about 1 km downstream from Mušići he saw the following:

At 5.15 p.m., the Croats, coming from Višegrad, occupied the left bank of the Drina. The head passed Barimo, held and took over the security of the troops that were resting. After about 15 minutes, he saw a platoon breaking through the forest on the slopes of the hill, while a group drove all the cattle in the plain downstream along the river. At the same time, he heard fierce gunfire and screams from the canyon. After that, he saw some women running up the hill and behind them he noticed gunshots and machine gun fire. But the women escaped.

Meanwhile, his squad, Corporal Schmeyer, Corporal Kersting, Corporal Steller, First Class Sergeant Schaefer^[3] and Corporal Fuchs, noticed that Croatian soldiers had stabbed a Serb, who was hiding on the bank, and threw him into the water. The water immediately turned red. The Serb wanted to crawl up the bank once more, but Croatian soldiers shot him and he sank. With unbridled gunfire, the Croats continued on.

2. 5. 42 at 5 o’clock in the morning, the guard, First Class Sergeant Schäfer, noticed a severely wounded Serb on the left bank of the Drina, who was dragging himself downstream and who remained lying in the bush. After a while, he gestured that he was there and kept calling for help – and so he did all day long. He was hidden in the bushes overnight, and on May 3, 1942, at around 7 a.m., he dragged himself 150 m downstream on all fours, where he talked to a Serb woman. The woman walked away in the direction of Miloševići, and the man crawled farther in the direction of Barimo. Then the man disappeared from sight, because the terrain no longer allowed any view. After about 20 minutes, the guard heard a shot from the village of Barimo and assumed that the Serb was shot there.

For the accuracy of the transcript:

personal signature

Lieutenant

^[1] АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 543.

^[2] Resnik.

^[3] 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.