‘Slaughter All Serbs and Jews,’ Artukovic Quoted by Witness

A former police chief in wartime Croatia today testified that Andrija Artukovic told him, “Slaughter all Serbs and Jews, one after the other.”

Artukovic, 86, who served as interior minister in the Nazi puppet state of Croatia during World War II, has been on trial since April 14 on charges of involvement in four massacres of civilians and other crimes. He was extradited from the United States in February after a 35-year fight.

Today’s witness, Franjo Truhar, 85, was for six months the Ustasha fascist movement’s police chief in the Croatian town of Sremska Mitrovica.

Truhar testified that in 1941 he brought a message from the wife of lawyer Jevrem-Jesa Vidic to Artukovic, in which the woman offered half of Vidic’s arable land if Artukovic would let Vidic migrate to Serbia.

“I shall kill him (Vidic) and take all of his land,” Artukovic allegedly told Truhar. Vidic was taken to a concentration camp and killed.

Truhar also quoted Artukovic as saying on one occasion, “You see how I have resolved the Jewish question: I take everything from them and then I kill them, and in a few months the issue is over, not like with the Germans, who fuss around for years.”

Truhar said he was also told by Artukovic, “Slaughter Serbs and Jews but do it cleverly, not like the ones at Slavonski Brod, where they threw corpses into the Sava River.”

Artukovic said Truhar’s testimony is “a lie and a falsification.”