No. 74

ACCORDING TO THE COMMISSIONER’S REPORT OF MAY 9, 1942, THE SERBS IN SLAVONIA ARE EXPOSED TO USTASHA ATROCITIES AND FORCED CONVERSION TO CATHOLICISM, SO THEY HAVE FLED TO THE MOUNTAINS, CROATS ARE DESERTING MASSIVELY, HUNGARIAN TROOPS WILL BE BROUGHT IN, AND ITALIANS HAVE ALREADY BEEN SENT TO OSIJEK.^[1]

III C Translate 1 + 2 WV L III^[2]

The Serbs from Slavonia were forced to retreat to Mt. Papuk, Mt. Krndija and other mountains before the Ustasha atrocities in order to save their bare lives. Along with these unheard-of atrocities, the Serbian masses were forcibly converted to Catholicism, so that entire regions were forced to abandon the faith of their fathers. This process began with the establishment of the Independent State of Croatia and is still ongoing.

Croatian elements from those parts behaved passively and did not even try to protect the Serbs with whom they had lived in friendship for centuries.

However, when the Croatian military authorities began to call Home Guards and refer them to various military services – the Croatian masses – who had been raised in anarchist spirit by their leading figures for years, began to flee into the forests, so that some areas around Slatinski Drenovac, Orahovica, Podravska Slatina, Slavonska Požega, etc. are full of Croats – military deserters.

Croatian political authorities have lost control over these areas and are unable to prevent outbursts of “green recruits”.^[3] It is known that municipal office buildings were burned in some places, etc.

In order to restore order and return to normal life, Hungarian troops were to come to Osijek and other parts of Slavonia, however, due to the existing disagreements and intolerance between Hungarians and Croats, the arrival of Hungarian troops was prevented. It is said that the leading figures of the Ustasha movement from Slavonia believed that there could be an open armed conflict with those Hungarian troops, if the Hungarians tried to exercise any police power on the territory of Croatia. However, as the Croatian military and civilian authorities are not able to bring order to Slavonia, a few days ago Italian troops were sent to Osijek, which will ensure peace and order in that province through a planned action.

V. 942.^[4]

B 700-701^[5]

^[1] АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 518, original in Serbian, in Cyrillic; АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 516-517, copy translated into German.

^[2] Handwritten marks for the document to be translated, processed in section III C, for head L (abbreviated, Leiter, ‘head’) of the third Department of the Police Commander (BdS) in Belgrade.

^[3] Zelenokadrovci, ‘Green Recruits’ (Muslim soldiers).

^[4] Date handwritten on the German translation.

^[5] Commissioner’s code name.

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.