No. 76

TRANSLATION OF THE LETTER WRITTEN BY A CROAT, SENT FROM ZEMUN ON FEBRUARY 8, 1942, TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF ZAGREB, STEPINAC.^[1]

Mister

Dr. Alojzije Stepinac, Archbishop^[2]

Zagreb

I address these lines to you as man to man, as a Christian to a Christian! For months, I have been deciding on all this in the expectation full of hope that the terrible news from Croatia will really come to an end now and that I could gather myself and write peacefully.

For 10 whole months now, the Serbs have been abused and killed in the most horrible ways, their goods worth billions are being destroyed, shame, resentment and anger are on the face of every honorable Croat!

The killings of the Serbs began in the first period of the establishment of the wretched Independent State of Croatia (Gospić, Glina, Gudovac, Bosanska Krajina, etc.), which continues today without any interruption.

All the horror is not just in the murders. Old men, women and children are first terribly serially abused and then killed. These innocent Serbs were nailed to stumps, flames of fire wrapped around their bare breasts, they were burned alive and burned in their homes and churches, poured with boiling water, they were skinned and open wounds were then sprinkled with sand and salt, their eyes were plucked out, their ears, noses and tongues were cut off; the Serbian clergy had their beards and mustaches cut off along with their skin, their genitals were pushed into their mouths, they were further tied to a truck, which would then run at full speed, their arms and legs were broken, nails were hammered into their heads, they were thrown alive into wells and abysses and then bombs were thrown at them, their heads were smashed with iron mallets, children were thrown into fire, boiling water and lime pits, their legs were stretched, their heads were driven into the wall with nails, their backs were broken with stones and wooden hammers – and much more terrible inquisitions carried out, which cultured humanity can not even imagine.

Thousands and thousands of Serbian corpses floated down the Sava, Drava and Danube rivers, as well as down their tributaries. The corpses bore the inscription: “Direction Belgrade – travels to King Peter!”^[3] In one boat on the Sava river, children’s heads were found with one woman’s head between them (maybe it was the head of the mother of these children!) With the following inscription: “Meat for Jovan’s Market in Belgrade!”^[4] The case of MILEVA BOŽINIĆ from Stabandža, whose child was removed from her womb with a knife, is horrible. Roasted heads were found in Bosnia, pots full of Serbian blood, Serbs were forced to drink the warm blood of their brothers, and more such cases! A huge number of women and girls were raped, women in front of daughters and daughters in front of mothers. Also, these unfortunates were taken to Ustasha camps where they served as prostitutes, rapes were even committed in Serbian churches. There was one terrible incident in Petrinja: the son had to rape his own mother. The mass murders – 3,000 Serbs in the Orthodox church in Glina and the murders of hundreds and hundreds of Serbs in the church at Kladuša – with iron mallets to the head – have not yet been recorded in world history. For all these horrible and unheard-of abuses, there are details in the certified minutes.

The atrocities of these unheard-of abuses horrified even the German and Italian military forces. Such atrocities were committed by Croats during the Thirty Years’ War, the Germans note. Since that time, the following saying has taken root in Germany: “God save us from plague, famine and Croats!” The Germans in Srem also despise them, and their treatment of Serbs is humane. As evidence of these atrocities, the Italians took photographs: a pot of Serbian eyes, weighing 3 1/2 kg, a picture of a Croat with a necklace made from Serbian eyes, and again another Croat from Dubrovnik, who had a belt made of 2 rows of Serbian tongues.

Thousands and thousands of Serbs are still disappearing in the concentration camp in Jasenovac, those who are staying in half-demolished barracks without enough straw and cover, exposed to hunger and harsh winter, and thus meet their death.

As food, they are given two pieces of potatoes a day. In one camp in Lika, the Germans found an empty camp soaked in blood and only bloody rags from clothes and underclothes. Thousands and thousands of Serbs have been killed here. Such cases are not recorded in the world history of Europe! In order to find such cases, one must look for these in Asia in the time of Timur-Lenk and Genghis Khan, or in Africa, with savage, bloodthirsty rulers. Nothing can clear us anymore! We will not be allowed to mention our thousand-year-old culture to the last Gypsy in the Balkans, because Gypsies have never committed such atrocities.

Why am I writing, of all of them, to you, when you are not a political figure and you cannot take any responsibility for this ?! I am writing because:

In all these horrible cases of sanguinary crimes, our Catholic Church has also participated, in two ways:

/ In all these cases, a large number of clergy and organized Catholic youth had an ACTIVE share. Many Catholic priests acted as commanders of Ustasha camps and personally ordered this horrific abuse and killing of Serbs. A Catholic priest killed a Serbian priest with his own hand. They were not allowed to do this without the prior approval of their bishops; since they stained their hands with innocent Serbian blood, they had to come forward and stand trial.

However, since no punishment has been imposed on them, I assume that the bishops gave permission or consent for these murders and abuses.

/ These atrocities were committed in order to force the surviving Serbs to convert to the Catholic faith. Even while the country was soaked in the blood of these martyrs, even while the surviving Serbs were breathing their last breath, priests, friars and nuns brought them an Ustasha knife in one hand and a prayer book and the Our Father in the other. The whole of Srem is flooded with leaflets of Bishop AKŠAMOVIĆ,^[5] which he had made in his printing house in Đakovo, and in which he warns the Serbs to convert to the Catholic Church in order to save their property. In this way, our Church wanted to prove that it can kill the souls of believers in the same way the Ustasha can kill their bodies. At the same time, the Catholic Church is suspected of destroying numerous Serbian churches and monasteries and robbing all church items of value. Even the cathedral church in Sremski Karlovci was not spared. The Catholic Church has all these atrocities on its conscience, and the Croatian name is now forever disgraced!

Although we the Croats can NEVER wash away our shame, we can reduce our responsibility and our conscience before the cultured world by raising our voice against all of the above.

The last hour is ticking for this. After all these atrocities, huge punishments follow in world history! What will happen to us Croats now if only the impression remains that we pushed our evil game further to the very end.

In the first place, it is the duty of the Catholic Church to raise its voice, it is holy and strong. In Germany, Catholic bishops raised their voices in favor of the exiled Jews, but in our country, not a single bishop raised his voice, while innocent Serbs are persecuted even worse than the Jews in Germany. Therefore, the greatest responsibility for both God’s and man’s punishment will fall on the Catholic Church. The latter will surely affect the Croatian people, if we do not repent of our sins in time.

I am informing you about this in order to save my soul, and I, however, leave you the freedom to find a way to the salvation of your soul!

One of the many who is a human and a Catholic first,

and then an honorable Croat. –

Zemun, February 8, 1942

^[1] АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 218-219.

^[2] See: Lj. Boban, Hrvatska u arhivima izbjegličke vlade, Zagreb: Globus, 1986, 284-303; M. Bulajić, Misija Vatikana u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj. ’Politika Stepinac’ razbijanja jugoslovenske države i pokatoličavanja pravoslavnih Srba po cijenu genocida; stvaranje Civitas Dei – Antemurale Christianitatis, section „Kontroverze u vezi s pismom bivšeg ministra dr Prvislava Grizogona nadbiskupu Stepincu o odgovornosti hijerarhije Katoličke crkve za ustaške zločine genocida nad pravoslavnim Srbima u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj (1942)”, Vol. II, Beograd: Politika 1992, 993-1005; Bulajić accepted Boban’s interpretation that the letter was not written by former Minister Dr. Prvislav Grizogono, which was often stated in sources and literature. Grizogono spent the war in occupied Belgrade and was detained twice in the Banjica camp. Bulajić considered that the authorship of the letter was of lesser importance compared to the fact that the content of the letter was authentic and that it was widely known in various versions not only in occupied Serbia and the Independent State of Croatia, but also to the Yugoslav government in exile and the British.

^[3] Original: „Pravac Beograd – putuje kralju Petru!” – Subeditor’s note.

^[4] Original: „Meso za Jovanovu pijacu u Beogradu!” – Subeditor’s note.

^[5] Antun Akšamović, the Bishop of Đakovica.

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.