Letter: Slovenian Settlers on Massacres Near Vojnic
During his first meeting with Adolf Hitler, poglavnik Ante Pavelic agreed to permit thousands of Slovene settlers to move to territory in the NDH vacated by murdered or expelled Serbs. The Slovenes - who had no more stomach for leaving their own land than to settle in that of another - probably had little inkling that they were moving into a warzone. On August 2, 1941, after witnessing an especially bestial massacre of unarmed Serbian civilians by the Ustase, several representatives drafted this letter to the German Plenipotentiary in Zagreb, General Edmund Glaise von Horstenau, either because they viewed their welfare as his responsibility or - more likely - because they correctly presumed that what they had witnessed had been done with the official sanction of the Croat authorities.

 

...In Krnja, Vojnic, Krstinjak and Tusilovic, the people are entirely of the Orthodox religion. A few days ago the president of the municipality and the Ustase commissar of Krnjak ordered some peasants, whom he had marked on a list, to bring to the town hall a certain amount of various agricultural products for the newly arrived Slovene settlers.

When the men delivered these agricultural products, the Ustase arrested them and took them away. Many more people were brought from other places, then all of those who had been captured in this way, about 400 of them, were simply executed without any kind of due process...

The murder of those 400 victims happened on July 29th, between 16:00 and 19:00 hours.

 

:: filing information ::
Title: Letter: Slovenian Settlers on Massacres Near Vojnic
Source: Archive of the NDH. Translated by Sinisa Djuric.
Date: August 2, 1941 Added: December 2002