WWII Mass Grave Discovered in Former Yugoslavia

A mass grave containing the remains of 4,500 soldiers has been found in Croatia, according to a report in the Hungarian Népszava newspaper.

The newspaper reported the remains of German officers and their Croatian allies were found in six caves near Harmica, 20 kilometres west of the country’s capital, according to Ivan Zvonomir Cicak of the Helsinki Human Rights Committee. Cicak said the remains were of German officers of the 39th Wehrmacht Division and Croatian Ustasha soldiers serving under them. They surrendered to Marshall Tito’s Communist Partisans near Rijeka in early 1945, but were massacred almost immediately. Croatian Interior Minister Tomislav Karamarko said there could be as many as 840 mass graves in Croatia alone. He estimated another 600 in neighbouring Slovenia and around 90 in Bosnia-Herzegovina. New discoveries of mass graves in former Communist countries are not uncommon. In January, a grave containing the remains of 1,800 German civilians forensics experts believed were murdered by the Red Army in 1945 was discovered in Malbork, Poland and in March ”hundreds” of mummified corpses shot by Tito’s Partisans were found near Lasko in Slovenia. The Ustashe movement, which the murdered Croatian troops belonged to, was renowned for its brutality. It is believed to have murdered some 600 000 people during the war and even had its own concentration camp at Jasenovac. However, Serb royalist Chetniks, Tito’s Communist Partisans and other factions were also known for committing atrocities. Once Marshall Tito came to power at the end of World War Two, he took revenge on his former enemies as well as political opponents of the time. Political murders by the dictator — once admired in the West — are estimated at around a million, although none of these numbers are totally reliable.