UDBA

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ID of an agent of the UDB-a (before 1963)

The State Security Administration ( Serbian - Cyrillic Управа државне безбедности , Bosnian Uprava državne bezbjednosti , Slovenian Uprava državne varnosti , Croatian Uprava državne sigurnosti , German authority of the State Security), short UDB or mostly grammatically UDBA or simplified UDBA or UDBA , was the secret police of Yugoslavia . A member of the UDB was called Serbo-Croatian udbaš or Slovenian udbovec .

The UDB emerged in 1946 from the Yugoslav secret police Odjeljenje za zaštitu naroda (OZN) after its military tasks were transferred to the also newly founded military intelligence service Kontraobaveštajna služba (KOS). After the fall of the secret service chief Aleksandar Ranković , the UDB was renamed Služba državne bezbednosti (Serbian-Cyrillic Служба државне безбедности, German State Security Service), SDB for short , in 1966 . In colloquial terms , however, the name UDBA remained in use.

In addition to settling accounts with the respective opponents, the organization of the UDB was directed primarily against actual and possible opponents of the communist regime of Yugoslavia, which meant above all internment or physical elimination . The UDB is believed to be responsible for around 200 murders and kidnappings . The orders to assassinate the dissidents were personally issued by the Yugoslav head of state, Tito . After his death in 1980, liquidation orders could only be issued by the political decision-makers within the respective executive committees of the communist party at republic level.

With the disintegration of Yugoslavia , the UDBA, officially now the SDB, was dissolved in 1991. The successor was the Yugoslav State Security Service RDB .

history

Josip Broz Tito with representatives of the UDB, 1951

In 1946 the Odjeljenje za zaštitu naroda (OZN) was dissolved as the Yugoslav secret service and the civilian secret police UDB and the military secret service Kontraobaveštajna služba (KOS; from 1955 Organ bezbednosti , OB) were formed.

Until his spectacular forced resignation in 1966, Aleksandar Ranković was head of the UDB and KOS . After his resignation, the UDB was renamed Služba državne bezbednosti (State Security Service), or SDB for short , in the same year . In colloquial language, however, the term "Udba" has been used to this day.

After the dissolution of the UDB in the 1990s, many of its functionaries were taken over in some high positions in the successor states of Yugoslavia.

organization

Until the reform in 1966, the UDB was managed centrally from the Yugoslav capital Belgrade . After the reform, the six Yugoslav republics each had their own security services, e.g. B. in Croatia the "Služba državne sigurnosti" (SDS), based in Zagreb . The UDB, under the name “Služba državne bezbednosti” (SDB), as a federal security service only had technical supervision of the services of the sub-republics and took on coordination functions. In principle, the services of the sub-republics do not require prior approval from the federal authorities to carry out actions. Approval had to be obtained for actions only if the interests of the Yugoslav Confederation, especially foreign policy, could be affected.

The SDB and the services of the republics (e.g. the SDS in Croatia) were affiliated with the respective interior ministries (“Savezni sekretariat unutrašnjih poslova”, SSUP) and were under their political leadership. The other organizational structures were also the same in the federal government and the sub-republics.

The politically responsible head of the respective security service was the respective undersecretary (deputy minister) in the interior ministry. The technical manager was the respective "secretary's assistant". There were nine departments; Department II dealt with "enemy emigration" in the respective services. The services of the republics maintained regional centers (“centar”) in larger cities, e.g. B. in Croatia in Rijeka, Split, Osijek and Zagreb.

The services had analytical departments attached to them, which were connected to the network of agents at home and abroad and filtered, processed and submitted individual information to the management of the service.

The link to the highest political leadership of the security apparatus, the respective state presidencies, has been the "Councils for the Defense of the Constitutional Order" since the beginning of the 1980s. The Council for the Defense of the Constitutional Order of the Socialist Republic of Croatia was established by resolution of the State Presidium of the Republic of Croatia launched on May 28, 1980.

Finally, the Federal State of Yugoslavia maintained the “Service for Information and Documentation” (SID), which was under the specialist department of the Foreign Ministry.

intelligence

In addition to the security services (e.g. SDS and SDB) that work on a legal basis and with official employees, there has been a network of people since the mid-1960s that exclusively on the political instructions of officials of the executive committee of the Communist Party responsible for public security Federal Government or the sub-republics.

It was the task of the people working in this network

  • insofar as they worked abroad or were sent there for certain actions: to prepare or carry out operations abroad
  • insofar as they worked in Yugoslavia: to filter and process the information coming from the official services for their significance for the communist party and its retention of power and thus to create a basis for decision-making and / or assessment.

It was not uncommon for people who held a position in an official service (e.g. SDS and SDB) to also be members of this secret service. This was regularly the case with the political heads of the official services (undersecretaries).

You could not apply to work in this - officially non-existent - secret service. The persons working for the secret service were recruited according to their ability for the task to be assigned to them as well as their personal reliability and trust. Since they worked at logistically important switching points abroad that were initially unsuspicious for opposing defense services, but provided with a lot of external contact, managers or employees of consulates, travel agencies, hotels, newspapers and members of exiled Yugoslav organizations were often employees of this clandestine secret service. According to Roman Leljak , around every 15th citizen of Yugoslavia was in the service of the Udba, 54,000 in Slovenia and 75,000 in Croatia. According to Igor Omerza and Roman Leljak, 242 Austrian officers from the police, armed forces and diplomacy are also said to have been informants for the UDBA.

Domestic activities

SDB report on showing a nationalist symbol at that time: a candle with the Croatian coat of arms on the altar of a church in Humac near Ljubuški (1982)

Inside, the UDB or SDB was responsible for tracking down and detaining political opponents and suspects, many of whom were held on the island of Goli otok . The Security Act gave her almost unlimited scope for action.

Article 39, Paragraph 1 of the Yugoslav “Basic Law on Internal Affairs” from 1966 assigned the State Security Service the task of “collecting documents and other messages to discover organized and secret activities that undermine or eradicate those carried out by the The constitution aims at a certain order ”.

Activities abroad

Abroad, the UDB was completely secret. Her field of activity here mainly comprised the murder, extortion and kidnapping of anti-communist emigrants. Most of the victims were nationalist Croats, Serbs and Albanians. Article 92 of the Yugoslav Criminal Code allowed the state to pursue political opponents regardless of their citizenship or the place of their anti-Yugoslav activity, which legitimized the use of Yugoslav agents across national borders.

The respective "Department II" of the services had the task of taking action against emigrants abroad. The regional centers ran agents abroad who provided the service with information. If, from the point of view of the service, there was a particular danger from emigrants, attempts were made to use “operational means” to “passivate” these people. The range of "passivation" ranged from disinformation and character assassination campaigns to liquidation.

According to an expert in a trial at the Munich Higher Regional Court in 2008, the UDB murdered 67 dissidents in the Federal Republic of Germany between 1945 and 1989.

These included u. a. the following murders:

  • Sep. 13, 1967 - The Croatian innkeeper Marijan Šimundić is killed with eight shots in his car on the outskirts of Stuttgart. He was an important witness in a court case against the Croatian exile Franjo Goreta.
  • September 30, 1968 - The corpse of the Croat Hrvoje Ursa is recovered from the Fulda in Hutzdorf in Hesse . He had been kidnapped from his Frankfurt apartment three days earlier.
  • Oct. 26, 1968 - Mile Rukavina , Krešimir Tolj and Vid Maričić are killed in an attack on the office of the Union of United Croats in Germany. V. ( Ujedinjenih Hrvata Njemačke , UHNj for short) killed by pistol shots in Munich.
  • Apr. 09 , 1969 - The Croatian innkeeper Mirko Čurić is torn apart by a bomb that was hidden in a plastic bag in front of his restaurant in Munich.
  • Apr. 17, 1969 - The Serb Ratko Obradović (* 1919), editor of the Serbian émigré newspaper Iskra , is shot in the open street in Munich. Obradović was a former functionary of the fascist Zbor party and an officer of its armed arm, the Serbian Volunteer Corps , who had fled into exile in 1945.
  • Apr. 20, 1969 - The Croat Vjekoslav Luburić is probably stabbed to death by Ilija Stanić , one of his employees and an agent of the Yugoslav secret service , in his house in Carcaixent , Spain , where the Croatian exile magazines he edited were printed .
  • Jun . 28, 1969 - Nahid Kulenović , editor of a Croatian exile magazine, is found dead in the bathtub of his Munich apartment.
  • Jan. 07 , 1971 - The Croat Mirko Šimić dies under mysterious circumstances in West Berlin
  • March 9, 1972 - Josip Senić , the leader of the “ Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood ”, is killed in a hotel room in Wiesbach near Heidelberg with two shots in his sleep
  • September 14, 1973 - The Croatian Josip Buljan-Mikulić is shot in Kornwestheim .
  • July 8, 1974 - The 79-year-old owner, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Serbian émigré newspaper Iskra Jakov Ljotić , brother of Dimitrije Ljotić and editor-in-chief of Obradović, who was also murdered five years earlier, is strangled with his own tie in his Munich apartment. He had announced that he would write about Tito's prisons.
  • Mar. 05 , 1975 - The corpse of Mate Jozak , Croatian with Australian citizenship, was washed up on the banks of the Rhine near Cologne-Worringen. It was over three months ago that he died. Crime scene in Neuss.
  • June 6, 1975 - The Croat Ilija Vučić , who was involved in the attack on the Yugoslav mission in Bonn-Mehlem in 1962 , is struck down with three shots when leaving his apartment in Stuttgart. He succumbs to his serious injuries five days later.
  • April 19, 1979 - The corpse of the Croatian Jozo Miloš is discovered with two bullet holes in a wooded area in the Kerpen-Sindorf district, near the Cologne-Aachen motorway.
  • September 15, 1979 - the Serb Salih Mesinović is shot dead in a Frankfurt restaurant during a dispute.
  • January 13, 1980 - Nikola Miličević , a leading member of the “Union of United Croatians”, was killed with three shots in his own car on the banks of the Main in Frankfurt.
  • April 16, 1980 - Dušan Sedlar , the chairman of the “Serbian National Federation ”, is shot dead on a busy street in Düsseldorf.
  • October 9, 1981 - Ante Kostić , formerly an active member of the “Croatian National Committee”, dies in Munich as a result of gunshot wounds.
  • January 17, 1982 - The Kosovar Albanians Bardhosh and Jusuf Gërvalla as well as Kadri Zeka are shot with machine guns while driving their car out of a garage in Untergruppenbach near Heilbronn. One of them is not dead immediately and still accuses Yugoslav agents as perpetrators.
  • March 26, 1983 - Đuro Zagajski is found dead in Munich-Pheasant Garden.

The respective German government was well informed about the secret service activities, but could not or did not want to take any serious steps against it, considering the good relations with Yugoslavia. Some of the acts appeared to the German public as conflicts in the underworld.

On the other hand, Tomo Renac, the head of the consular department in the Yugoslav embassy in Bonn , reported to his superiors (the heads of the SID) in Belgrade:

“Some events indicate that the movements and activities of our services in the FRG are being followed very closely and analyzed by the German counterintelligence and intelligence services. [...] Such difficulties include criminal and propaganda measures with which one tries to make the activities of the Yugoslav state security in the FRG impossible. "

From the beginning of communist Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav secret service committed serious border violations in southern Austria, which ended in murder or kidnapping of fascist and anti-communist emigrants from Yugoslavia.

  • June 30, 1945 - Josef Krpan, a Ustasha refugee who was employed at the Trampushof in Bleiburg, is shot by an OZNA killing squad while harvesting .

The memorial event for the victims of the Bleiburg massacre was also targeted by the Yugoslav secret service. This was followed by several bomb attacks against anti-communist rallies and on February 17, 1975 the murder of the main organizer of Croatian graves and memorial care for Austria, 65-year-old Nikola Martinović. Martinović was also one of the founders of the Bleiburg parade of honor, which annually commemorates the dead on the Loibacher Feld near Bleiburg (Austria) - only three kilometers from the state border with Yugoslavia. Croatians from all over Europe and overseas have visited this memorial every year since 1952. Communist Yugoslavia always saw the event that the Croat Martinović organized, according to the reports of the work program of the State Security Service (AS 1931, TE 2232) from 1975 as a double provocation: First, because the dead in the Bleiburg massacre were commemorated there , and secondly because the symbols of the Independent State of Croatia , which were strictly forbidden in Yugoslavia at the time , were openly displayed. The Yugoslav rulers finally reacted by “passivating” Martinović. The UDBA was also responsible for a series of terrorist attacks in Carinthia during the 1970s , including on September 18, 1979 on the town hall of the city of Völkermarkt , which housed an exhibition about the Carinthian defensive battle . The two Slovenian UDB agents seriously injured themselves and a museum employee. The agent Luka Vidmar lost a leg. A hole was torn in the facade of the town hall. The two UDB agents were sentenced to four years in prison in 1980, but six months later they were exchanged for two agents from the Austrian Armed Forces.

One of the most sensational actions attributed to the UDBA was the assassination attempt on former NDH head of state Ante Pavelić in Argentina in 1957 , from whose aftermath he died in Madrid in 1959 , and the murder of the former NDH general and politician Vjekoslav Luburić in 1969 in Spain , the Croatian author Bruno Bušić in 1978 in Paris and the Albanian emigrants Jusuf (author) and Bardhosh Gërvalla as well as Kadri Zeka (journalist / lawyer) in 1982 in Untergruppenbach .

Work-up

The Udba murders belong to one of the darkest chapters in Yugoslavia. They question the narrative of the relatively free multi-ethnic state, which was considered less repressive than other states in communist Eastern Europe. In fact, there was a tight and dense network of the Udba secret service in Yugoslavia, in which tens of thousands of citizens worked.

In 2003, the former Slovenian honorary consul in New Zealand, Dušan Lajovic , published extensive information on people who had worked with the secret police of Yugoslavia at www.udba.net .

Lajovic later published his research results as a book entitled Med svobodo in rdečo zvezdo (Between Freedom and the Red Star). It was an abridged version as the entire political leadership of Slovenia was left out.

So far, in none of the successor states of Yugoslavia has an authority been set up to deal with the processing of the activities of the secret service, nor has an official list of employees been made available to the public.

Since Croatia became a member of the EU on July 1, 2013, it has been obliged to extradite suspects wanted with an international arrest warrant; this also happened in some cases and a hearing was scheduled in Germany in 2014. Josip Perković was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Stephen Đurekvića .

Known employees

See also

literature

in order of appearance

  • Hans-Peter Rullmann : murder order from Belgrade. Documentation about the Belgrade murder machine . Ost-Dienst, Hamburg 1980.
  • Ante Beljo: YU-genocide. Bleiburg, death marches, Udba (Yugoslav Secret Police) . Northern Tribune Publication, Toronto 1995, ISBN 953-6058-05-7 .
  • Bože Vukušić: Tajni rat Udbe protiv hrvatskoga iseljeništva . 3rd increased edition. Club hrvatskih povratnika iz iseljeništva, Zagreb 2001, ISBN 953-97963-2-6 ( hrvatskoobrambenostivo.com [PDF]).
  • Ivan Bešlić: Čuvari Jugoslavije. Suradnici UDBE u Bosni i Hercegovini [The Guardians of Yugoslavia. UDBA employee in Bosnia and Herzegovina] . tape 1 : Hrvati [Croats], Vol. 2: Srbi [Serbs], Vol. 3: Muslimani [Muslims]. Samizdat, Posušje 2003 ( archive.org - uncommented directory of employees in Bosnia and Herzegovina).
  • Tamara Griesser-Pečar: The torn people. Slovenia 1941-1946. Occupation, collaboration, civil war, revolution (=  volume 86 of studies on politics and administration ). Böhlau, Vienna 2003, ISBN 978-3-205-77062-6 , pp. 410–424 (Structure of the UDB-a and its crimes in Slovenia).
  • Dušan S. Lajovic: Med svobodo in rdečo zvezdo . Nova obzorja, Ljubljana 2003, ISBN 961-238-206-9 (Slovenian).
  • Jože Dežman, Hanzi Filipič (ed.): Hot traces of the Cold War. The border between Slovenia and Carinthia from 1945 to 1991 . Hermagoras Verlag, Klagenfurt / Celovec 2013.
  • Florian Thomas Rulitz : The UDBA terror against Croatian political emigration (Bleiburger Ehrenzug) in Austrian Carinthia . In: Jože Dežman, Hanzi Filipič (ed.): Hot traces of the Cold War. The border between Slovenia and Carinthia from 1945 to 1991 . Hermagoras Verlag, Klagenfurt / Celovec 2013 (exhibition catalog).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Tibor Várady: World history and everyday life in the Banat: cases from a lawyers archive from the monarchy to communism . Böhlau Verlag, Vienna 2016, ISBN 978-3-205-20338-4 , pp. 125 : “You can even disrespectfully ask why the letter“ A ”was added to the end of the OZNA and UDBA, where the abbreviations OZN and UDB actually already indicated complete words. (The abbreviation of Uprava državne bezbednosti, for example, would have to be UDB and not UDBA.) Everyone spoke of OZNA and UDBA, and these abbreviations were also used officially. Now that I am investigating - with very belated courage - the only thing that occurs to me is that in traditional Serbian pronunciation one does not put small substitute vowels between the consonants of an abbreviation, an "u / d e / b e " or "o / zett / e n “cannot make the possible tongue twister easier. However, pronouncing OZN and UDB should not have been easy even for the hard-hitting secret police - and it would not have been elegant either. Adding the "A" made the secret police abbreviations easier to pronounce and more melodious, and so this letter cuckoo received its full legitimation. "
  2. ↑ a b c d e f OLG Munich, judgment of July 16, 2008, AZ: 6 St 005/05 (2), p. 9 ff.
  3. ↑ a b Josef Hufelschulte: Grand Cross for Murderers . In: FOCUS , No. 3/2012 from January 16, 2012, p. 47.
  4. ↑ a b derStandard.at - The legacy of the Udba. Retrieved December 25, 2017 .
  5. ↑ Kaernten ORF.at - Study: Officials as Yugoslav informants. Retrieved December 25, 2017 .
  6. ^ Underground war: 40 dead since 1967 . In: Die Zeit , No. 19/1982 of May 7, 1982, p. 35.
  7. ^ Hans-Peter Rullmann: Murder Order from Belgrade. Documentation about the Belgrade murder machine . Ost-Dienst, Hamburg 1980, p. 26.
  8. ↑ Ruth Wenger: When Yugoslavia's secret service had murder in Bavaria. welt.de, October 12, 2014, accessed on October 14, 2014
  9. ^ Hans-Peter Rullmann: Murder Order from Belgrade. Documentation about the Belgrade murder machine . Ost-Dienst, Hamburg 1980, p. 21.
  10. ↑ Florian T. Rulitz: The tragedy of Bleiburg and Viktring. Partisan violence in Carinthia using the example of the anti-communist refugees in May 1945 . Hermagoras Verlag, Klagenfurt / Ljubljana / Vienna 2011. ISBN 978-3-7086-0616-3 , p. 294.
  11. ↑ Florian T. Rulitz: The tragedy of Bleiburg and Viktring. Partisan violence in Carinthia using the example of the anti-communist refugees in May 1945 . Hermagoras Verlag, Klagenfurt / Ljubljana / Vienna 2011. ISBN 978-3-7086-0616-3 , p. 284.
  12. ^ Hans-Peter Rullmann: Murder Order from Belgrade. Documentation about the Belgrade murder machine . Ost-Dienst, Hamburg 1980, p. 1.
  13. ↑ Florian T. Rulitz: The tragedy of Bleiburg and Viktring. Partisan violence in Carinthia using the example of the anti-communist refugees in May 1945 . Hermagoras Verlag, Klagenfurt / Ljubljana / Vienna 2011. ISBN 978-3-7086-0616-3
  14. ↑ Rulitz Florian Thomas: The UDBA-terror against the Croatian political emigration (Bleiburger Ehrenzug) in Austrian Carinthia . In: Jože Dežman / Hanzi Filipič (ed.): Hot traces of the Cold War . The border between Slovenia and Carinthia from 1945 to 1991. Hermagoras Verlag, Klagenfurt / Celovec 2013, ISBN 978-3-7086-0736-8 . /
  15. ↑ The goal was: Split Carinthia ( Memento from September 27, 2014 in the Internet Archive ). In: Kleine Zeitung , August 14, 2009
  16. ↑ Florian Hassel, Frederik Obermair: Murders in the Dark. sueddeutsche.de, 23 August 2013, accessed on 14 October 2014
  17. ↑ Josip Perkovic izgubio na Hrvatskom sudu . In: Hrvatska radiotelevizija . ( hrt.hr [accessed on February 23, 2018]).