No. 24

MINUTES WITH THE STATEMENT BY ĐORĐE VUJNOVIĆ FROM OBUDOVAC, DECEMBER 22, 1941, ABOUT THE FORCED CONVERSION TO CATHOLICISM AND KILLING OF SERBS IN BRČKO, ABOUT THE MASS KILLINGS OF SERB CIVILIANS IN THE VILLAGES BETWEEN TUZLA AND BRČKO AND ABOUT THE KILLING OF ALL JEWS IN BRČKO.^[1]

Minutes

of December 22, 1941

made at the Commissariat for Refugees and Migrants in Belgrade.

Present VUJNOVIĆ Đorđe, a native of Brlog, Otočac District, 33 years old, now escaped from Obudovac, where he was the municipal treasurer, states:

“On the night of December 2, all Serb men were arrested in Brčko and taken to Gunja. There, they were requested to convert to the Catholic faith. About 300 of them were brought in, where they were physically abused by the Ustasha authorities who were sent from Zagreb to Brčko. All those who did not consent to the conversion were detained in Gunja Prison, and the rest were taken back to Brčko. Representatives of these 200 arrested Serbs went to the district chief and reported to him that they were ready to convert to Catholicism, after which they could return to their homes.

The same night, that is, on December 2, 1941, a five-member family of Luka Gojković was slaughtered on the pontoon bridge between Brčko and Gunja, and the bodies were thrown into the Sava river. Three days later, the Orthodox church was demolished by the Ustasha authorities and the Muslim scum and Gypsies, the Orthodox cemetery was also devastated, and all the gravestones were smashed.

In late November, all Serb villages on the road between Tuzla and Brčko were set on fire by the Croatian army, allegedly because the population provided refuge to Chetniks operating in Mount Majevica and farther inland in Bosnia. On this occasion, a large number of inhabitants were deprived of life, mostly children and weak old people, who were no longer able to escape to the forests in time. The Serbian church in the village of Brezovo Polje was also destroyed.

In connection with what has been said above, I would also like to add that all Serbs who did not give their consent to convert to Catholicism were taken from Brčko to the unknown, and nothing more is known about their fate.

On December 17 of this year, Mr. Većeslav Montani, the district chief, summoned to Brčko 20 people from each Serbian village in the Municipality of Obudovac and told them that they had to decide within 8 days whether they wanted to convert to the Catholic faith or not. On this occasion, the gendarmerie commander, whose name I do not know, informed the people present that they had to choose between three things: either to convert to Catholicism, or to be expelled, or to flee to the forests, but in case they fled to the forest, their villages would be torched and all the people found in the houses would be killed.

I know that all these people are determined not to accept the Catholic faith, even at the cost of their lives.

In all these persecutions and acts of terror against the Serbs, both in Brčko and in the whole district, the following men stood out: Marko Tubić, the warden of the camp^[2] in Brčko, who had lived there before, Rašif, a Muslim from Brčko, a postal clerk named Dane Babić, Bačić Ante, senior district clerk, the lawyer Dr. Cebalo, the merchant Ilija Reba.

These were the main ringleaders and perpetrators of the persecution of the Serbs.

In addition, I would like to add that on December 12, 1941, 300 Jews from Brčko, i.e. all the Hebrews in Brčko, were slaughtered and thrown into the Sava river. They were all killed with knives.^[3]

As the municipal treasurer in Obudovac, I had to flee, because I found out that I had been denounced to the authorities in Brčko that I was carrying out propaganda among the people so that no one would convert to the Catholic faith.

Based on the municipal pass – permit, I reached Zemun unhindered, and from there by boat to Belgrade.

Please consider me a refugee.

Completed:

Interview conducted by: Minute taker

Branko Vukdragović Stana Tepavac Đorđe M. Vujnović

place for the stamp place for the stamp place for the stamp

^[1] АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 70-71; translation from Serbian.

^[2] Head of the district (kotar) Ustasha organization, logornik.

^[3] See: E. Tauber, Holokaust u Bosni i Hercegovini, Sarajevo: Institut za istraživanje zločina protiv čovječnosti i međunarodnog prava, 2014, 217-220.

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.