No. 20

REPORT OF THE VOLKSDEUTSCHER LOCAL GROUP OF BRČKO, TO THE DISTRICT LEADERSHIP ON DECEMBER 7, 1941, ON THE USTASHA REVENGE FOR THE INSURGENTS’ ATTACK ON KORAJ, THE BURNING OF SEVERAL SERBIAN VILLAGES, MASSIVE KILLINGS AND LOOTING, AS WELL AS THE ANNOYANCE OF THE POPULATION DUE TO INSECURITY.^[1]

Transcript

German ethnic group

in Croatia

Local group Brčko.^[2]

Report.

The local service reports the following on the situation in Brčko and its surroundings on December 1:

“After the insurgents had burned the village of Koraj, the Ustashas took revenge measures and burned several Serb villages, namely Mrtvica, Ratkovici^[3] and partly Pukič.^[4] Shortly afterwards, a unit of foreign Ustashas (allegedly from Zagreb) appeared in Brčko, who together with the District Chief Montani and the local Ustashas, without being selective, arrested the Serbian^[5] people, imprisoned them, horribly abused them, shot about 10 of them or beat and threw them into Sava river. Due to this act, many prominent Croats, including the former mayor Dr. Marić, filed an objection, and the last-mentioned man was even arrested for that.

About 60 Serbs were expelled to Gunja at night, locked in a train car, and only the following evening – after they had made a statement after severe abuse that they wanted to convert to the Catholic faith voluntarily – were they released. The next night, the Serbian church, after boards were nailed on it the day before, was looted and burned. The Serbs were given a deadline after which all of them had to declare themselves as members of the Catholic faith or they would have to hang a written statement on the windows that they are Orthodox and that they want to remain Orthodox. Without exception, under these circumstances, all Serbs declared that they were ready to convert, and handed over all the icons and oil cups, that is, the symbols of the Orthodox faith, to the district administration.”

Yesterday, on the 6th of this month, a unit of Ustashas from elsewhere, together with domestic Ustashas, started a new “cleansing action” towards the village of Čelić. Today at dawn, rumors arrived here that the farm of our compatriot Adam Friedrich, which is located near Čelić, was attacked and set on fire. After that, comrades Schnepf, Scheinost, Knebl and Münz drove to the scene to make sure of the facts.

Thereby, they determined the following:

“The farm of our compatriot was not damaged, combats took place in its immediate vicinity, without it being possible to establish whether the insurgents were really nearby. Comrade Friedrich explicitly claims that he has never seen any Chetniks before, but he could only state that the surrounding farms – even of the Ruthenians living there – are being looted and burned, and that piles of bodies are marking their path. He himself buried about 28 bodies near his farm. The men sent there were able to establish that about 30 to 40 more bodies lay near his farm, and that indeed all the rural estates and settlements in the direction of Koraj were burning. An individual shot was also heard this morning.

Tonight, we have received a notification from the District Chief that the “Stolin” factory has been attacked, with a request to alert our people.

After we investigated the matter in full haste, it turned out that there was no talk of any attack, but that the Ustashas on their way back shot around the neighbourhood and caused confusion. It seems that these alarming news were staged on purpose, so that one planned action against the said factory could be carried out more easily later.

The fact that only one reason has been decisive in all these actions is clearly shown by the loot brought from all these places to Čelić and even to Brčko, where the “seized” goods, such as brandy, wine, foodstuffs, etc. could be shared among the population, that is, sold at very low prices.

Here in Brčko, an unusual whisper appears among Croats, as well as among Muslims, which puts the blame for these conditions, unrest and misfortune on the Germans. It is heard: “Is this the famous German order?”, “We expected something better”, etc. Also, after the “Matejček” scandal, questions are heard more often, emphasizing, “why don’t the Germans do something here and help the man in his rights” and “are such conditions desirable for the Germans”, etc. These same circles are increasingly appearing before our local leadership with demands “to do something to get either the German Wehrmacht or a Volksdeutscher unit here, in order to finally put an end to these conditions.”

We hope that the above text has given a clear picture of the situation here, and now we leave it to the district leadership to undertake what it deems appropriate.

Brčko, December 7, 1941

WK.

^[1] АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 209-210.

^[2] The towns/villages settled by members of the German national minority in the Independent State of Croatia were distributed in five regions. Brčko belonged to the Sava region – the Danube river; A. Miletić, “The Volksdeutschers of Bosnia, Slavonia and Srem regions in the struggle against the People’s Liberation Movement (1941-1945)”, in: The Third Reich and Yugoslavia 1933-1945, Belgrade: The Institute for Contemporary History, 1977, 564.

^[3] Ratkovići.

^[4] Pukiš.

^[5] Većeslav; see: Z. Antonić, Ustanak u istočnoj i centralnoj Bosni, 86, 130.

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.