No. 18

REPORT ON THE ATTACK OF INSURGENTS (CHETNIKS – COMMUNISTS) ON NOVEMBER 27, 1941 ON THE VILLAGE OF KORAJ IN THE BIJELJINA DISTRICT, WHEN THE VILLAGE WAS LOOTED AND BURNED, AND A LARGE NUMBER OF INHABITANTS WERE KILLED, AS WELL AS ON THE KILLING OF SERBS AS THE CAUSE OF THE ATTACK.^[1]

Transcript

Translation.

On November 27, 1941, at around 7 o’clock, about 3,000 Chetniks – Communists,^[2] approached the village of Koraj, District of Bijeljina, the seat of the station^[3] of the same name, among whom a large number of women and children were noticed. These insurgents surrounded the village of Koraj from all sides except that the road to the village of Čelić remained open. Of the mentioned number of insurgents, it is estimated that half of them were well armed, and according to the action of the machine guns, it was determined that they were armed with 4 heavy and 2 light machine guns. The combat started at 7 o’clock between the insurgents and the armed militia, as well as with the gendarmerie, and lasted for approximately two hours. As the militia and gendarmerie felt weak against the superiority of the insurgents, they began to leave, that is, to retreat in the direction of the village of Čelić. At about 11 o’clock on the same day, a company of Home Guards came from Čelić to help Koraj; they entered the combat with the insurgents and managed to drive them out of Koraj, and this company also had losses: 1 lieutenant and 10 Home Guards, who fell in the combat. In addition, they had the wounded, who were taken to the hospital in Brčko. This company – as early as on the way to Čelić – had been attacked and kept from rushing to Koraj’s aid in time, so the insurgents had enough time to kill many inhabitants and burn and destroy almost two thirds of the village of Koraj.

About 350 to 400 people were killed on the spot, including many women and children, but it should be assumed that this number of the dead is much higher, because many are among the ruins of burned houses. About 50 people were injured. About 50 people were captured, and among them, the commander of the gendarmerie station, Sergeant Sulejman Sjerčić. As far as the check could determine, Sergeant Sjerčić was wounded in the foot, then surrounded and captured.

The number of burned houses is about 200 and almost all the remaining houses, about 900, were demolished and almost all were looted. The damage is estimated at several million kunas^[4].

State institutions, the school and the town hall were torched and destroyed, while the gendarmerie station building was smashed and demolished, furniture was destroyed and the gendarmes’ state-provided and private foodstuffs were looted in such a way that it was not possible to use anything left, therefore the station was temporarily abandoned.

The gendarmes who survived were deployed in the platoon until the Koraj station gets re-established. All archives and documents were destroyed and burned in front of the station.

According to the statement of the present peasants from Koraj, there are both dead and wounded on the side of the insurgents, counting about 200 people, but the insurgents collected their dead and wounded and drove them away in carts.

It has been ascertained that other peasants and women and children from the villages of Tutnjevac, Puškovac, Tohuta,^[5] Mrtvice,^[6] Maleševac,^[7] Korenita, Bobetina Brda,^[8] Bukovice,^[9] from the area of Zabrđe, Districts of Bijeljina and Brčko, also took part in the attack on Koraj with Chetniks and Communists.

The insurgents did not use anything from weapons and ammunition, because the militiamen spent some and took some during their withdrawal to Čelić. The village of Koraj had about 150 armed militiamen; these militiamen offered very little resistance to the insurgents.

The villagers from the village of Koraj who survived the attack are still not able to give accurate information regarding the described attack, as they are horrified and upset.

The gendarmerie station in Koraj had 11 auxiliary and one gendarme in training, as well as the station commander.

The general opinion of the inhabitants of the village of Koraj is that this attack on the village of Koraj came about for the reason that on November 22, 1941, under the leadership of Commissar Burha Begic from the Municipality of Koraj, not far from the village of Koraj, about 25 Greek-Eastern hostages were killed during the clearing of the terrain, the army handed them over to the police in Koraj, and their commander Burhan Begić was the one who appropriated the command from the commander of the Koraj station, Sergeant Sjerčić.

At the same time, I report that after this attack on the village of Koraj, a large part of the inhabitants, who have saved their lives, moved to Čelić, as well as to Brčko and Bijeljina, since neither the army nor the gendarmerie have been stationed in Koraj, because there is currently no suitable building or room and that the village of Koraj is deserted.

On November 30, the County Administrator (veliki župan – Translator’s note) of the Posavje County arrived on the scene, saw the crimes of the Chetnik-communist gangs, and promised full help and protection to the surviving inhabitants.

Nr. 64633.

^[1] АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 211-213, translation from Croatian of the unidentified report no. 64633.

^[2] See: Z. Antonić, Ustanak u istočnoj i centralnoj Bosni, Tuzla: Univerzal, 1983, 332-334.

^[3] Probably: gendarmerie station.

^[4] Kuna was the official currency in the Independent State of Croatia. – Subeditor’s note.

^[5] Tobut.

^[6] Mrtvica.

^[7] Maleševci.

^[8] Bobetino Brdo.

^[9] Bukovica.

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.