ABSTRACT
By looking for documents about Yugoslav inmates of Nazi-German concentration camps in the Archive of Yugoslavia in Belgrade, the Croatian State Archives in Zagreb and the Slovenian State Archives in Ljubljana, the dossiers of the Statute Control Commission of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (Državna kontrolno-statutarna komisija Centralnog komiteta Saveza komunista Jugoslavije) present a copious collection of reports about the clandestine political activities of Yugoslav political inmates during their imprisonment in Germany. In almost all of them it is reported that the inmates created committees in the camps in order to establish political networks among Yugoslav inmates. 1 These reports were written by members of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (Komunistička partija Jugoslavije—KPJ), as well as former inmates, and list the names of the committee members. One report on Mauthausen describes how difficult political activities in the camp were due to the camp’s grueling conditions and the inmates’ struggle for survival. 2 On the other hand, the reports of the Yugoslav committees in Dachau and Buchenwald mention widespread inmate activities during their detention and after the camps’ liberation. In the fonds of Rudi Supek, a former inmate of Buchenwald and head of its Yugoslav Committee, several documents are collected on the activities of this committee including a list of its 402 members. 3 By analyzing these prisoner files, it results that the majority of the Yugoslav prisoners, and subsequent members of the Buchenwald Yugoslav Committee, had been labeled as “Yugoslavs” by the Gestapo. Only a few prisoners were labeled as “Slovenes,” “Croats,” “Italians” and “Serbs.” The latter labels link clearly to the inmates’ origin of an administrative territory (Croatia, Serbia, former territories incorporated by Italy) after the disintegration of Yugoslavia or their ethnic origin (Slovenes, since Slovenia was not recognized as an administrative unit).
