No. 87

STATEMENT OF TWO REFUGEES FROM BOSANSKI BROD, ABOUT THE CRIMES OF THE INDEPENDENT STATE OF CROATIA IN BOSANSKI BROD AND SLAVONSKI BROD, FORCED CONVERSION TO CATHOLICISM AND DISSATISFACTION OF CROATS.^[1]

15/4 42^[2]

Two refugees state:

In April last year, the Ustashas arrested 70 Serbs from Bosanski Brod, including the two of us, but they released us again after 10 days.

By the end of June this year, there was a break in connection with this, whereafter arrests took place again. The following were arrested: Pantić Kosta, a merchant, Đureković Petar, Radovanović Stevo, all from the village of Brusnica, as well as Jelić Ignjo from Liješće. After a few days, they were taken from Bosanski Brod to the camp in Jasenovac, and their fate is completely unknown to this day. The arrests in Derventa District then continued. Serbs were taken en masse to court prisons in Bosanski Brod and to the warehouses of the Kostić brothers, traders from Bosanski Brod. All of them were taken to various concentration camps, and most of them to the camp in Slavonska Požega, where 480 people were killed from the Derventa District alone. As many as 48 Serbs were killed on the bridge connecting Bosanski Brod and Slavonski Brod, for no reason. The bodies of 28 Serbs floated along the Sava, and the other 20 were thrown into a pit next to the slaughterhouse in Bosanski Brod. These Serbs were mostly from the villages of Lužani and Žeravac.

We note that the Ustashas threw the lightly wounded Serbs tied up in a pit and would finish them off with a revolver. During these atrocities, Hanček Ferik from Bosanski Brod and Has Ivica, a bricklayer from Bosanski Brod, stood out, stating that he [Has – Subeditor’s note] himself killed 13 Serbs. A certain Miličević, a student of the 6^th grade of grammar school, and Ćumu Ivica, both from Bosanski Brod, also stood out. After these events, there was another break, after which the action of conversion to the Catholic Church began. After that, arrests of Serbs and Croats took place again. The latter were arrested because they did not want to be members of the Croatian army, thus announcing their dissatisfaction with the situation in Croatia. Serbs were threatened with concentration camps if they did not convert to the Catholic faith. This action was not a success. Serbian villages organized themselves and decided not to convert to the Catholic faith.

Today, it is reliably known that 700 Serbs from Bosanski Brod were partially killed and partially disappeared. In the District of Derventa, the villages of Podnovlje, Lužani, Barice, Žeravac and Višnjica were stricken very hard. All Serb men were taken from the village of Podnovlje, and they were killed by the Ustashas as soon as being on the road. Also, a lot of women and children fell as victims, so the dogs dragged parts of their corpses along the road.

Railway workers Vrdoljak and Šenk, both from Bosanski Brod, stood out especially in these atrocities, in addition to those already mentioned. Vrdoljak demanded 100,000 Dinars from the merchant Srećko Pantić from Brusnica, and when he was released, he arrested Papić Stevo from Gornji Klakar.

In Slavonski Brod, from January 1 to the end of February 1942, 300 Serbs, mostly peasants from Slavonski Brod, were arrested and taken to a camp in Jasenovac, while 100 Croatian peasants sought refuge in the forests. Certain Kavaj and Findrik, as well as student Babić, were killed by Croats.

We came to Serbia without any pass, no one controled us on the way, and that is because we paid the train conductors 1000 Kuna each.

^[1] АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 303.

^[2] Handwritten note 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.