Croatia explores mass grave of 4,500 WWII German soldiers

Apr 3, 2009, 11:20 GMT

Zagreb - Croatia is investigating a mass grave of German and local soldiers executed in the wake of World War II, the deputy president of the Croatian Helsinki Committee, Ivan Zvonimir Cicak, said Friday.

The site at Harmica, 50 kilometres north-west of Zagreb, on Croatia's border with Slovenia, presumably contains 4,500 bodies of German soldiers, including 450 officers, executed by Yugoslav president Tito's partisans, Cicak told the German Press Agency dpa.

The victims were a part of the 'Blue division,' established by the German command in Croatia in 1944. Commanded by German officers, the division was composed of Croats and German settlers to Yugoslavia.

Details and photographs from the site at Harmica are to be released at press conference next week, Cicak said.

Only a day earlier, Cicak had presented details from another newly-found mass grave, believed to contain some the remains of 1,500 Croat soldiers killed in June 1945.

The grave was accidentally exposed by construction work on the embankment of the Darava river in Gornji Hrascani, near Cakovec in the north-west. The site is slated for additional exploration as soon as authorities secure financing for the job, Cicak said.

During World War II, Croatia was considered an independent state, but was in effect run by Berlin and implemented Nazi laws.

The rest of the then Yugoslav Kingdom was dismembered and more or less directly governed by various occupational forces from the German camp, like Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria.

After claiming victory in Yugoslavia, Tito's Communist Partisan force took brutal revenge not only on German soldiers and the large German minority living mostly in northern Croatia and Serbia, but also on local members of wartime authorities.

Following the war, the new authorities brought ethnic Germans to concentration camps and eventually drove the survivors out. In the end, only a few thousand, out of several hundred thousands living in Yugoslavia, remained.

Last month a grave with hundreds of mummified corpses, also victims of the Partisans, was found in an abandoned mine in Slovenia.

Speaking recently in the wake of that discovery, Croatian Interior Minister Tomislav Karamarko estimated the number of mass graves from the era at more than 1,000.

According to Karamarko, there are 600 mass graves in Slovenia, 840 in Croatia, 90 in Bosnia and 'who knows how many more' strewn across the entire region.