No. 78

VOLKSDEUTSCHER KARL HEGER REPORTS ON APRIL 9, 1942, ON THE CROATIAN CONCENTRATION CAMPS IN LOBORGRAD AND GORNJA RIJEKA, WHICH HE MANAGED, ON THE ĐAKOVO CAMP AND, IN UTMOST DETAIL, ON THE JASENOVAC CAMP.^[1]

VB^[2]

K III Rx / Fli Belgrade, April 9, 1942

Note to the file.

Subject: Croatian Concentration Camps.

A Volksdeutscher, member of the German Team^[3] of Croatia, Karl Heger, born in Osijek, appeared and reported the following about the Croatian concentration camps:

Near Zagreb, in Zagorje, there are two women’s concentration camps: Loborgrad^[4] near Zlatar in Zagorje. It includes 1,040 Jewish women and children, as well as 360 Orthodox and Catholics. Another camp is located in Gornja Rijeka near Križevci, Varaždin District. This camp includes 200 women and children, both Jewish and Orthodox. Yet one more camp is located in Žakovo^[5] near Osijek. There are only Jewish women and children from Bosnia in it. It currently has 3,000 prisoners.

The main concentration camp is located in Jasenovac. According to Karl Heger, who is employed as the warden of the camps in Loborgrad and Gornja Rijeka, at least 7,000 people were killed in this camp over the past year. There are only men in Jasenovac. There are currently about 800 people in Jasenovac. He does not know how many of them have died or been killed in recent weeks.

Heger first ran a camp for male prisoners in Zagreb for a month and a half. In September, he then took over the wardenship of both women’s concentration camps in Loborgrad and Gornja Rijeka, and has been managing them ever since.^[6]

Heger reports about the Jasenovac camp that detainees are beaten and executed for a slightest offense. Many of the bodies of those killed were crammed into one embankment that the detainees had to build. Wooden beds are set on several levels and there is so little space between them that the detainees can only be forcibly pushed into these. When new detainees are brought in, everything is taken away from them, down to one pair of shoes, one pair of trousers and one shirt. Whatever the weather outside, the detainees have to do hard work and eat completely inadequate food. Every day in the previous year, an average of up to 80 people died.

The guard is made up of Ustashas, who are completely bestial. They do what they want; last year, Heger had to deliver a new transport of prisoners from Zagreb to Jasenovac. During the delivery of the prisoners, one man did not want to have everything taken away from him, after which he, as well as another prisoner, was immediately knocked down by the blows and remained lying covered in blood. Nothing was heard about either of them anymore, it is obvious that they were killed.

The nutrition of the detainees in both women’s camps was not bad at first. The Jewish religious community in Zagreb is in charge of caring for Jewish and Orthodox female prisoners in both women’s camps. At the same time, the Orthodox naturally fared worse. In recent months, one million Pengö^[7] has been paid as a donation from Hungary to the Jewish religious community in Zagreb.

A portion of this money was apparently used to pay bribes, as Jewish prisoners have been looking forward to minor freedom since about a month ago.

The health condition in both camps is poor. There is currently typhoid fever brought by detainees from Bosnia.

108 people have already died of typhus, and about 400 of them have fallen ill.

Lately, detainees are given rotten meat and sausages.

Personal signature^[8]

SS Captain

To be sent to:

1) VB^[9] ^[10]11/4

^[1] АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 227-229.

^[2] Weinmann’s handwritten mark; illegible abbreviations.

^[3] Deutsche Mannschaft, an organization to which all male members of the German national minority (Volksdeutscher) in the NDH aged 18 to 60 belonged. The leadership of the Volksdeutscher was based in Osijek, and headed by Branimir Altgayer.

^[4] M. Peršen, Ustaški logori, Zagreb: Globus, 1990, 279-282.

^[5] Đakovo; see: Z. Vasiljević, Sabirni logor Đakovo, Slavonski Brod: Centar za povijest Slavonije i Baranje, Spomen-рodručje Jasenovac, 1988.

^[6] See also: Dnevnik Diane Budisavljević 1941-1945, 15-39.

^[7] Pengö (peng in Croat or Serbian) was the Hungarian currency between January 1927 and July 1946; it was subdivided into 100 fillér. – Subeditor’s note.

^[8] Illegible.

^[9] Weinmann’s official code.

^[10] Handwritten date and initials.

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.