Both police forces [Austrian and Yugoslav] viewed Communism as a common threat, and when the Austrian federal police received information from the Yugoslav or Romanian police about suspected Communists who had crossed into Austria or were living there, the Austrian police quickly arrested them, interrogated them, and, if they violated weapons or passport rules, prosecuted them in Austrian courts and/or expelled them.30
For the Austrian police, the investigation and prosecution of Croatian and Macedonian nationalists was trickier, because their activities were not directed toward the Austrian government, and sometimes the claims of the authorities in Zagreb and Belgrade did not pan out.
[…]
In response to a storm of Yugoslav press accusations, BPolDion [Austrian federal police] President Franz Brandl, a conservative Austrian nationalist, was asked by then Chancellor Schober in October to report on the Croatian political exiles in Austria.
Brandl’s report marks the beginning of a pattern: the BPolDion could find no evidence of any suspicious activity or wrongdoing on the part of individuals whom we now know were senior Ustaša leaders (Perčec and Perčević), but it had expelled certain lesser figures who lacked passports or failed to register with the police when they entered the country.48
[…]
On the surface, the BPolDion could claim that it was trying to protect the domestic peace: there should be no assassinations on its territory. Simultaneously, by protecting Perčec and prosecuting his alleged attackers, the police helped preserve a radical Croatian separatist to frustrate Yugoslav authorities and demonstrate that the latter’s efforts to enforce Yugoslavism could not spill over into Austria.
During the summer of 1931, while the suspects were being tried by the Viennese criminal court for attempted murder, the Austrian police delayed expelling Perčec so that he would be available for the trial. After the trial was over (and the men were only found guilty of weapons and passport violations, not attempted murder), the BPolDion misled the Yugoslav embassy about his whereabouts in Austria so that he would not be attacked again.53 He was allowed to travel “on holiday” to the Burgenland, where, according to Yugoslav authorities, he had a house in Klingenbach, near the Austrian–Hungarian border.
During this crucial period of July when there was a wave of bomb attacks on trains heading into Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav government asserted that Perčec stored explosives in Sopron, Hungary (on the other side of the border from Klingenbach) and took operatives there to retrieve explosives and timing devices. Allegedly they traveled by train back to the Burgenland in Austria, where the operatives then installed the bombs on trains carriages routed for Yugoslavia.54
Given that the BPolDion actually decided to grant Perčec a six‐month travel pass, valid for all European states, when he returned to Vienna on 16 July 1931, and only decided to bar him from Austria in early September, the BPolDion seems either to have intentionally protected him or moved with incompetent slowness.55
In October, the Yugoslav government made a formal complaint to the Austrian government, singling out Johann Presser, the head of the political police in the BPolDion, for failing to keep the train system safe after Yugoslav officials notified him on 31 August of an impending attack. In response, Brandl submitted a long, multipronged defense of the BPolDion’s actions to the BKA‐AA, which was supposed to show that the BPolDion was doing everything possible to investigate all possible leads and take action.
However, there were problems with Brandl’s explanations. Brandl claimed that Milićević’s information came from confidential Yugoslav reports, which had not been verified.56 This was quite possible, but it was also the case that the BPolDion never seemed able to find any evidence of bomb preparations, despite supposedly thorough surveillance of the suspects.
Although stating that there was no proof that Perčec was involved in bomb attacks, Brandl admitted that the BPolDion knew Perčec had had conversations in Vienna with one of two suspected Croatian train bombers in an August attack. The BPolDion had moved to prosecute both these suspects for passport and police registration violations, but one suspect had left Vienna, and the other could not be located. This did not speak well for strict control.
[…]
[N]ot only was Perčević a source of useful information; he had Heimwehr connections that the Austrian authorities did not want to reveal.61 Revelations about military ties among Croatian ultranationalists accused of terrorism, the Heimwehr, and the Austrian military would have been very damaging to Austria at this time, because the Schober government was trying to disarm the Heimwehr to secure international loans.62
[…]
The Yugoslav–Austrian political police relationship did not effectively repress the Ustaša in Austria and allowed many key figures to survive—Pavelić, Perčević, Jelić, Artuković, and Kvaternik. All of them went on to serve important functions in the genocidal Independent State of Croatia or the Croatian army during World War II.120 The first four figures at various points between 1929 and 1934 had been in Austrian police custody, but they were always expelled or not touched.
They were neither sentenced to long jail terms in Austria nor extradited to Yugoslavia, where they would have been tried and either sentenced to hard labor or executed. The Yugoslav police, Austrian police, and their relationship of friction, distrust, and concealment were responsible for this situation. The Yugoslav police could only request the arrest and investigation of Ustaša figures, but the Austrian police frequently did not trust their information, claiming that they could not find proof of wrongdoing, or protected higher‐level figures.
(Emphasis added.)
Click here for events that happened today (April 11).
1933: Imperial troops captured Lengkou Pass of the Great Wall in Hebei Province, China.
1934: The pocket battleship Deutschland sailed from Kiel as a part of the spring manoeuvres. On board were Adolf Schicklgruber and his leading army and navy commanders. Some suspect that during the voyage Minister of Defence Blomberg nominated his Chancellor as a candidate for the Presidency (and thus making him Supreme Commander of the Army).
1936: Germaniawerft laid down the keel of U‐23 in Kiel.
1938: Prince Kotohito, Chief of Imperial Japanese Army General Staff, signed Directive № 11 authorizing the use of poison gas in the Inner Mongolia region of China.
1940: In Norway, the Reich’s 196th Division moved north from Oslo up the Gudbrandsdal and Østerdal valleys in an attempt to link up with the Fascist forces in Trondheim. Meanwhile, Reich collaborator Vidkun Quisling sent a message to King Haakon VII of Norway, asking him to return to Oslo; seeing through his plot to use him as a puppet, the king chose to overlook the request. Seeing a lack of response from the king and his government, Fascist bombers attacked the village where they were hiding in a failed attempt to wipe out Norwegian leadership.
1941: As the Kingdoms of Italy and Hungary joined the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia, Berlin and Rome concluded each other’ four‐day meeting at Salzburg in occupied Austria, during which Berlin convinced Rome to remain in the war. As well, the Regio Esercito redoubled its efforts to link up with units in Albania, and Kvaternik announced the exclusion of ‘undesirables’ from the NDH’s military. In northern Greece, the Axis captured Vevi. In the evening, British and Oceanian troops engaged Wehrmacht troops in Greece for the first time just south of Vevi, stopping the advance of Leibstandarte SS Adolf Schicklgruber Regiment at Klidi Pass. Axis armored train Atlas arrived at Mönichkirchen (occupied Austria) to prepare the village for the Chancellor’s arrival on the following day, and Erwin Rommel performed a flanking movement in Libya, cutting the road east of Bardia at 1300 hours; all attacks on the city itself, however, were repulsed. On the same day, the Luftwaffe bombed Tobruk harbor, damaging British ship Draco.
1942: Axis bombers attacked La Valletta harbor, Malta, wrecking British destroyer HMS Kingston in the dry dock, and Ju 88 aircraft assaulted Allied convoy QP‐10, damaging ship Stone Street and sinking British ship Empire Cowper, massacring nineteen; a heavy snow storm prevented the Axis from launching another air attack on the Arctic convoy. Apart from that, Axis submarine U‐123 damaged a U.S. tanker within 5 kilometers of Jacksonville, Florida at 0422 hours, slaughtering nineteen of forty‐eight aboard. Axis submarine U‐203 damaged a U.S. tanker twenty kilometers southeast of Swansboro, North Carolina at 1320 hours, slaughtering ten of thirty‐six aboard. Twenty kilometers further east, U‐160 sank a British ship, but all 290 aboard survived. Axis submarine U‐103 sank Norwegian ship Grenanger in the middle of the Atlantic ocean at 1855 hours, but all 36 aboard survived. Lastly, off Brazil, Axis submarine Calvi sank Norwegian vessel Balkis.
1943: The Chelmno concentration camp in occupied Poland thankfully ceased operations, but SS doctors at concentration camps received orders to select prisoners to be sent to Hartheim Castle in Austria to be euthanized, and Berlin issued orders that the best armies, the best leaders and the best weapons were to be made available for employment in the ‘Encirclement of the enemy forces deployed in the Kursk area.’
1944: The SS decreed that prisoners who have committed sabotage face public executution. Likewise, U‐860 (a Type IX‐D Type submarine, under Fregattenkapitän Paul Büchel) set sail from Kiel. She carried, among others, 100 tons of mercury and 100 tons of lead for the Empire of Japan as well as location devices, test equipment, tools and consumables for four submarines in East Asia! She was to make a stop at Kristiansand, Norway before heading into the Atlantic Ocean.
1945: Naoto Kohiyama stepped down as the President of the South Manchuria Railway, and an Axis special attack aircraft crashed into the starboard side of USS Missouri, causing minor damage. The remains of the Axis pilot rceived a sea burial with military honors. That aside, the Axis lost an intact V‐weapon plant in Nordhausen as well as the prisoners of Buchenwald, who emancipated theirselves after most of the guards had fled. In the Buchenwald satellite camp of Langenstein, the U.S. 83rd Infantry Division arrived; it had about 1,100 prisoners at the time.
1947: Rudolf Höss wrote the last letters to his wife and children from his prison cell in Poland.
Important note: “Yugoslavia” here refers to the 1st Yugoslavia: the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes that existed from the end of WWI until 1941. It was renamed to Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929. It is not the 2nd Yugoslavia, the Socialist Federated Republic of Yugoslavia, that was established in 1945.
