Massacre in Foča and the surrounding area (1943)

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Report by the Chetnik leader Pavle Đurišić from February 13, 1943, in which he told Mihailović about the massacre: “The Chetniks killed over 1,200 Muslim fighters and over 8,000 old people, women and children; the losses of the Chetniks in battle were 22 killed and 32 wounded. "

The massacres in Foča and the surrounding area (1943) were mass killings of 9,200 Bosniaks , including 1,200 fighters and 8,000 civilians (mostly old people, women and children) by nationalist Serb Chetnik units in Foča and the surrounding communities and districts of Priboj , Čajniče , Bijelo Polje and Pljevlja . The war crimes took place in early January and early February 1943 in two raids by units of the so-called Yugoslav Army in the Homeland led by the Tschetnik- Province Governor Pavle Đurišić (1907-1945), Vojislav Lukačević (1908-1945) and Petar Baćović (1898-1945) to the Bosniak settlement areas of southeastern Bosnia and Sandžak . After the massacres of 1941 and 1942 , it was the third wave of massacres in and around Foča during World War II .

The minaret of the burned down mosque in Bukovica near Pljevlja , 1943.

A German report of February 10, 1943 describes the destruction of the Bosniak town of Bukovica near Pljevlja by Chetniks as follows:

" On 5.2. of the year have Četnici attacked the community Bukovica [...] and burned about 500 men, women and children [...] were girls found that one after rape impaled had [...] In the village Strazice the body of was Haji Tahirović found the the skin had been pulled from the hollows of the knees over the back and head to the chest. "

The murder action in February was made easier for Đurišić because the Italian troops allied with the Chetniks had previously disarmed the Bosniak militia in Sandžak.

swell

  • Tomislav Dulić: Utopias of nation: Local mass killing in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1941–42 (=  Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 218 ). Uppsala 2005, Foča — a Symbol of Suffering, p. 201-215 .
  • Vladimir Dedijer , Antun Miletić: Genocid nad Muslimanima 1941–1945 . Svjetlost, Sarajevo 1990.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Jozo Tomasevich: The Chetniks, War and Revolution in Jugoslavia, 1941–1945 . Stanford 1975, p. 258 f . ; Also BA / MA, RH 24-15 / 4 “The national uprising movement of the Cetniks in the independent state of Croatia, Slovenia and Montenegro” (May 5, 1943); Quoted from Klaus Schmider : Partisan War in Yugoslavia 1941–1944 . Mittler, Hamburg 2002, ISBN 3-8132-0794-3 , p. 196 .
  2. ↑ Dulić 2005, p. 215.
  3. ↑ Thomas Casagrande: The Volksdeutsche SS Division "Prinz Eugen" . Campus Verlag, Frankfurt 2003, ISBN 3-593-37234-7 , pp. 313 , fn. 105 .
  4. ↑ Various sources in the Federal Archives, quoted in Schmider 2002, p. 347.