No. 16

SERGEANT BUBLIK’S REPORT TO THE COMMAND HEADQUARTERS IN SERBIA ON NOVEMBER 26, 1941, ABOUT THE PERSECUTIONS OF THE SERBS IN PAKRAC, THAT THESE ARE LED BY FORMER COMMUNIST OFFICIALS WITH THE HELP OF CATHOLIC CLERGY, THAT LOCAL USTASHA LEADERS ARE GETTING RICH BY LOOTING, AND THAT MEASURES AGAINST JEWS ARE MILDER THAN THOSE AGAINST SERBS.^[1]

XI. 41.

Transcript.

Sergeant Franz Bublik, translator

at the Commander in Serbia, Department I c

Confidential.

For the Command Staff of Department I c.

Subject: Communists in the ranks of the Ustashas.

In Pakrac, about 140 km southeast of Zagreb, the fact is that former radical communist officials, now on a different side, manage the fate of the district and at their own discretion can decide on life and death, but also on the property and existence of relatives who are Orthodox, has caused the greatest dissatisfaction. And indeed, in the distortion of rights and arbitrary measures, the Pakrac District has surpassed all others. Executions, killings, murders, expulsions from property, confiscation of property, deprivation of livelihoods, imprisonment of innocents, persecutions and harassment of all kinds were on the agenda until recently. It is interesting to note that there are young Catholic priests in all the official premises of the Ustashas in Pakrac, but also elsewhere, at any time of the day or night, who seemingly provided spy services to the local authorities and helped them with their advice. One view of this, which is also held by Croatian circles of the population, is that the Catholic clergy, as informants of the Ustashas, must be considered co-responsible for many bloody incidents.

Day laborers, shirker-shoemakers, tailors, auxiliary workers, lower clerks and others, who in normal life did not bear any proof of special abilities, were suddenly promoted – from the current of the coup – to high official and administrative positions and are now convinced that by rage and horrific persecutions of the Serb population they can compensate for the lack of material and professional knowledge. The bloodthirstiness of these local Ustasha leaders was joined by the urge to use the unique opportunity for personal enrichment. Other people’s property, which was confiscated on behalf of the independent Croatian state, largely ended up in the pockets or apartments of the confiscating authorities, who themselves occasionally did not refrain from looting, in order to preempt similar actions by their own friends.

Considering that in the first months of its existence, the Zagreb government gave its subordinate bodies freedom in every respect and let them do what they wanted, tolerating and covering up their attacks, the Ustashas inevitably developed into a state-recognized “robbing and a murderous organ of authority” to whom all state means of force were at disposal. It was only later that some insignificant restrictions were ordered in this regard, which were not respected, and which did not carry any systemic change worth mentioning.

The Jews^[2] were mistreated only with hesitation, and they were pushed out of their economic and social positions slowly and gradually, which justifies the assumption that they met only small tactical requirements in this matter in order to later provide them with an alibi, by referring to the simultaneous acting against the Jews. In reality, Croatia’s measures, in relation to the freedom of movement of the Jews, lag far behind the measures of other partners among the Axis powers. Of course, Jews were arrested, convicted and taken to concentration camps, but they had mostly come into conflict with some paragraph of the law earlier and deserved their punishment themselves. No city in Croatia can see so many marked Jews moving freely on the streets as in Zagreb. Contrariwise, every passer-by suspected of being a “Serb” is immediately arrested.

While the communist Ustasha authorities in Pakrac imposed a commissioner manager on all Jewish and Serbian businessmen and companies, these measures were mitigated against the Jews to such an extent that they referred to the commissioner and left the vacated jobs to the Jews again, while on the contrary, Serbs were imposed further harsher measures if some other business enterprises were still owned by Serbs.

The Communists, who joined the Ustashas in the days of the Croatian coup in Pakrac, and who were entrusted with administrative functions, brought Bolshevik tendencies to these formations, which were conceived as a people’s militia, and contributed to an outstanding degree to the shedding of innocent blood.

The names of the former communists and the current Ustasha rulers are: Grčić, Nemeth and Kovačević.

Photographic documents can be easily found in Pakrac, where those named were photographed with a red flag several years ago as members of the CPY^[3] on the occasion of May 1 celebration.

Signed by Bublik

Sergeant.

For accuracy:

transcript:

Marschal^[4]

Stenotypist

^[1] АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 37-39.

^[2] See: I. Goldstein, S. Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu, Zagreb: Židovska općina Zagreb, Novi Liber, 2001.

^[3] Communist Party of Yugoslavia (Komunistička partija Jugoslavije – KPJ). – Subeditor’s note.

^[4] Marschall.

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.