No. 63

ON FEBRUARY 16, 1942, THE NDH GENDARMERIE COMMAND IN DRINJAČA SUBMITS TO THE TUZLA COMMAND A REPORT ON THE CHETNIKS, THEIR TIES WITH SERBIA, ATTITUDE TO THE GERMANS AND THE NDH, ATTEMPTED NEGOTIATIONS, AS WELL AS THE SITUATION IN THE GENDARMERIE AND LEGION UNITS.^[1]

Transcript

Translation

Commander of the Military Gendarmerie

Number: official

February 16, 1942

Drinjača.

Information on the Chetniks on the territories of Vlasenica and Srebrenica.

For the Commander of the Tuzla Gendarmerie

I have received the following information from the refugees coming through the forests from the direction of Vlasenica and Srebrenica:

Chetniks gather in large masses in the districts of Vlasenica and Srebrenica. Many Chetniks come from Mt. Majevica, where actions are underway, and they use the mountains and forests to change their positions so that they do not come into contact with our forces anywhere. –

Apart from the Chetniks, there are also Communists in Mt. Majevica who are in the majority, so it could not be determined whether they are still on Mt. Majevica or have also changed their position.

The Chetniks from the direction of Selinja^[2] towards Srebrenica continue to come across the Drina river unhindered and maintain the closest connection with Serbia.

They receive weapons, ammunition, medical supplies, money and everything else that is necessary for guerrilla actions from Serbia. Each Chetnik has his daily income, 100 kuna^[3] a day.

Many Chetniks from Bosnia, who had gone to Serbia, returned to Bosnia and they have the same Chetnik identification documents as the Chetniks in Serbia, because they registered with Nedić’s Chetniks and with such identification documents they have free movement across Serbia, that is, Nedić’s men do not prevent them from moving around.

Whenever action is taken on our part, the Chetniks immediately cross to Serbia, where they find temporary refuge, and then they return again. It is so much easier for the Chetniks, considering that the river Drina was frozen until 3-4 days ago, so that it could be crossed by loaded carts. Now they are crossing with boats, which they have at their disposal in sufficient numbers, even though we have sunken all the boats on our side.

Strong propaganda material comes to the Chetniks from Serbia, which can be seen based on fact that the Bosnian Chetniks are fighting against the Communists they fear. However, there was a conflict between the Chetnik commander Major Dankić^[4] and the Communist commander “Čiča”,^[5] as well as between certain companies in Mt. Romanija and somewhere near Foča, but I cannot determine the exact place.

Yesterday around 5 p.m., one of their men was sent by the Chetniks with a letter from their leader, Captain Rista Čuković,^[6] to the commander of the 4^th Battalion of the Second Infantry Regiment, at Drinjača. They demand an urgent meeting from him for today at 12 o’clock. The battalion commander has refused this meeting because he could not do such a thing without the approval of his superior.

Čuković’s^[7] courier stated the same as stated above and added that they are not afraid of anything at all, as long as Serbia survives.

He further said that all Chetniks would surrender if they were guaranteed the security of their own, as well as the lives of their families, because their leaders said that wherever there were Croats and Mohammedans, they killed Serbs and raped their wives: He mentioned a Serb, who was allegedly skinned alive and then covered in salt somewhere near Paprača,^[8] and his three girls were raped, so that they are afraid for their own lives and for the honor of their family. He stated that they would then fight against the Communists on their own and that it would be easy for them, because they know everyone who belongs to the Communists and who belongs to the Chetniks.

In these actions directed against the Chetniks, the main thing was to prevent the Chetniks from crossing the Drina into Serbia, with the help of stronger border bunkers, and to supply them with enough ammunition and food, so that if the bunker was attacked, they could defend longer until a replacement arrives.

The German services make a strict distinction between Chetniks and Communists, because German troops do not shoot at Chetniks, and where Germans pass, there is rarely a conflict between Germans and Chetniks, while Communists attack both our people and Germans. During the capture of Drinjača, posters were found on one building, which every Chetnik has, and which say that the Chetniks should not offer any resistance to the Germans and that they should fight against the Croats (Croatian army) to the last drop of their blood.

It is very difficult to get any information about Chetniks from Serbian peasants or any Serb, because they are all bound by a common Chetnik oath, according to which anyone who violates this oath will face the most severe punishment.

However, the Chetniks themselves, through their people, have a very good intelligence service and know everything that is happening here, and they are also interested in all the events on the territory of the entire state. They show the greatest interest in the strength and movements of our troops and use all the tricks to find this out. They even go so far as to disguise their men as women and send them for the purpose of espionage. The condition of the gendarmes and the Legion is pretty bad. The gendarmes are quite tired and exhausted due to the hard work, and insufficient nutrition and great cold have a great impact on all this.

The Legionaries are poorly dressed, and they perform their service in this cold with difficulty, especially those in forward positions. Their diet is very bad because they do not get meat at all during the whole week. It is urgently necessary to grant a loan for the purchase of additional food for the Legionnaires, which cannot be requested from the Army, i.e. which the Army does not have.

There are a number of cases of frost bites with the Legionnaires.

In Drinjača, there is typhus, which is present among the civilian population as well as among the Home Guards and the Legion.

It is inevitable and necessary to replace the gendarmes with others and to give them an easier sector so they can rest, to supply the Legionnaires with warm clothes and shoes and to make necessary medical materials available to them.

The looting of the legionaries was to some extent suppressed by influence and strict control by the gendarmes as well as by the Army.

I am submitting the above with an urgent request for further official action.

Delivered to: Commander Commander

of the Military Frontier^[9] First Lieutenant Anton Posavat

Commander of the Tuzla Gendarmerie.

Confirming the accuracy of the transcript:

Commander Lieutenant Colonel

Mašek

———————-

Independent State of Croatia

Command of the Gend.[armerie] Tuzla

No. 576 secret

February 18, 1942

County of Usora and Solin^[10] Tuzla.

Based on the order of the Commander of the 4^th Gendarmerie Regiment, secretly J. S. No. 405 of September 25, 1941 and the orders of the Commander of the 8^th Infantry Regiment No. 1170, secretly, dated 12 February 42, the above notice is sent for information and further official action. During the 17^th and in the night from the 17^th to the 18^th of February of this year nothing else can be learned about this subject.

As to the nutrition of the Legionnaires, I ask that measures be taken so that food for them is regularly obtained from the Army and the garrison. Occurrence of the typhus epidemic: it would be necessary to urgently establish an infirmary in Drinjača with the necessary medical staff and medical supplies, as previously requested. The substitution of the gendarmes cannot be done for now because there is no one like that available, and as soon the possibility occurs, that will be done immediately.

Communicated to:

Commander of the 4^th Infantry Division Doboj

Commander of the 8^th Infantry Regiment

Commander of the 4^th Gendarmerie Regiment

Ustasha Stožer^[11] in Tuzla

Translation: Tinto, Osijek, III. 3. 42.

Commander

Lieutenant Colonel

signature Mašek.

^[1] AВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 206-208, translation from Croatian (into German).

^[2] Zelinja.

^[3] Kuna (Pl. kune) was the official currency in the Independent State of Croatia (1941–45). It consisted of 100 lipa (Pl. lipe).

^[4] Jezdimir Dangić.

^[5] Slaviša Vajner Čiča, Commander of the Romanija Partisan Detachment; Z. Antonić, Ustanak u istočnoj i centralnoj Bosni, passim.

^[6] Risto Ćuković.

^[7] Ćuković.

^[8] Papraća.

^[9] Vojna Krajina (‘Military Frontier’), an organizational formation of the NDH army on its eastern borders.

^[10] Soli.

^[11] To the Ustasha Headquarters. In the German translation, the Croatian word for the headquarters (stožer) was retained.

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.