No. 6

THE REQUEST OF DUŠAN GROZDIĆ, A MERCHANT FROM BJELOVAR, TO THE GERMAN COMMANDER OF BELGRADE ON SEPTEMBER 24, 1941, FOR THE RECOVERY OF HIS VALUABLES AND THE MONEY TAKEN BY THE COMMANDER OF THE CAMP IN BJELOVAR, FROM WHERE HE AND HIS WIFE HAD BEEN EXPELLED TO SERBIA.^[1]

To Mister

COMMANDER of the German Armed Forces

BELGRADE.

I, Grozdić Dušan, a merchant from Bjelovar (Croatia), signed below, ran my fashion manufactory shop there for 33 years with exemplary behavior, where, as an honest citizen, I was elected for 16 years as a city representative, and for 20 years I was entrusted with an honorable position of a sworn assessor at the Court Table in Bjelovar.

On 12. VII of this year, at midnight, the Ustashas and a guard with bayonets on their rifles came and banged on my door to open it. I opened it, they came inside and with pointed rifles, one Ustasha said: “In the name of the Independent Croatian State, you are arrested”, and he took out his watch and said: “Within 30 minutes, you have to take money, the value paper, and gold, and you go with us.” While my wife and I got dressed, took the money and picked up the jewelry and with some clothes we went to the Bjelovar camp,^[2] where we were greeted by other Ustashas as their victims, where they completely stripped us and stole our money, jewelry and two bank books, all in total value of 135,545 dinars, as I specify exactly below whatever they took from us.

I asked Captain Panava Dragutin, who was the commander of the camp, and I hear that he is still there today as commander – to return my money, jewelry and bank books, because I am close to 60 years old, and I can’t make a living today, and support myself and my sick wife, property, store, three houses, the value paper, furniture, and everything else that amounts to a total of Din. 4,500,000. – four million five hundred thousand, the state of Croatia took away from me in its entirety.-

Captain Panava Dragutin, Commander, told me that my money, bank books, as well as jewelry were sent through the First Croatian Savings Bank to the National Bank in Belgrade, and when I come by the transport, I am to go to the National Bank, and my money, bank books, as well as jewelry would await me and that I would pick up everything there.-

On 8. VIII, of this year when I arrived in Belgrade with the transport, I went to the National Bank in Belgrade, showed the certificate, which had been given to me by Captain Panava, Dragutin, Com. of the Bjelovar camp and asked if my money, bank books and jewelry had arrived from the Bjelovar camp, they started laughing at me and said that I was robbed, that no money, jewelry and bank books will come: they appropriated yours, and they instructed me that this looted money, jewelry as well as deposits could only be obtained through the German Command, because the German Command does not allow the people to be robbed in this way.

Therefore, I am so free, Mr. Commander of Belgrade, to address a very polite request to you to be kind, so that the money, bank books and jewelry specified below, be returned to me through your mediation and your help, because I have been left completely without funds to live on, my wife is bedridden with a broken leg, and I am already old and cannot make earning, and the Croat Brothers took everything away from me and I am driven to the wall.

I hope, Mr. Commander, that you will take this matter into your fatherly hands and try to get my confiscated cash, bank books and jewelry back, so that my wife and I can survive, because we are in this way in despair.

IN BELGRADE, on the 24^th day of September, 1941 [year]

Dušan Grozdić personal signature

SPECIFICATION

In the cash they took …………………………………………………………… Din. 46.230.-

one bank book in the name of Milena at the Gradska

štedionica^[3] in Bjelovar ……………………………………………………….. ″ 12,100.-

one bank book at the Gradska štedionica^[4] in the name

of D. M. Grozdić Bjelovar ……………………………………………………. ″ 14.915.-

Total …………………………………………. Din. 73.245.-

Jewelry:

one gold men’s watch with a gold chain worth. Din. 12.000.-

one gold women’s watch with a long chain ″ ″ 18,000.-

one women’s watch bracelet with diamonds ………………………. ″ 8,000.-

one men’s Tula watch with a gold chain worth …………………… ″ 8,000.-

one women’s pearl necklace ………………………………………………… ″ 4,000.-

one women’s gold ring with a diamond worth …………………… ″ 8,000.-

one pair of women’s earrings with diamonds …………………….. ″ 4,000.-

one silver women’s wallet ……………………………………………………. ″ 300.-

Total Din. 62.300.-

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.