Svetolik Dragačevac

Svetolik Dragačevac (; 15 April 1883 – 9 July 1942) was a Serbian law enforcement official who sent a threatening typewritten letter to German dictator Adolf Hitler on the eve of the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in late March 1941.

A veteran of World War I, Dragačevac served as the police chief of several towns in interwar Yugoslavia. At the time of his retirement in 1933, he had been posted to the town of Paraćin, in central Serbia. On 25 March 1941, at a time of heightened tensions between Yugoslavia and the Axis powers, which would eventually culminate in the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia, Dragačevac typed a threatening letter addressed to Hitler. Following the Axis invasion, occupation and dismemberment of Yugoslavia, Dragačevac was arrested by the Gestapo and taken to Belgrade, where he was interrogated. During his interrogation, Dragačevac attributed his authorship of the letter to Serbian nationalist zeal and excessive alcohol consumption. He was subsequently imprisoned in Graz and then deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp, where he died of peritonitis in July 1942.

Dragačevac's memory fell into obscurity after the war and he remained forgotten for decades hence. The rediscovery of his defiant letter in the early 2000s led to renewed public interest in his case. Several Serbian-language documentaries chronicling his life, and the circumstances leading to his imprisonment and death, have been released, and a street in Paraćin bears his name.

Biography Early life Svetolik Dragačevac was born in the town of Požega, in central Serbia, on 15 April 1883. He was the third child of the merchant Maksim Dragačevac. After completing his primary education, Dragačevac spent several years working for his father's business. At the age of fifteen, he joined the local police force as a trainee. After passing the required examinations, he was employed as a full-time police officer. Following Macedonia's annexation by Serbia as a result of the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, Dragačevac was posted to Skopje, where he remained until the city's evacuation in late 1915 as a consequence of Austria-Hungary, Germany and Bulgaria's combined invasion of Serbia during World War I. Unwilling to surrender to the Central Powers, he evacuated along with the Royal Serbian Army to the Greek island of Corfu, enduring a harsh winter ordeal across the mountains of Albania on the way. While at Corfu, Dragačevac was served with enlistment papers, but illness prevented him from joining the Royal Serbian Army. He was instead transported to the French island of Corsica, where he spent the remainder of the war recuperating. The letter read as follows:

Нит правде прекинут је. Зацарила обест и сила. Велики тлаче мале и у својој осионости не познају Бога; немају душу. Крвожедни Хитлер хита да ни једна њива на ово земаљској кугли не остане засејана јадом и чемером. Ни наша напаћена Отаџбина није поштеђена. Пружамо ти своју поштену руку али ти хоћеш и срце. У жељи да освајаш и тлачиш ти нам газиш оно што нам је кроз сва робовања и кроз векове било најсветије газиш нам слободу и част газиш нам понос. Теби Хитлере; кајинов сине ми деца великих отаца и дедова узвикујемо доста. Не слушаш ли наићићеш на бодре мишиће наше. Пролићемо ти крв и ногом ти аждајо стати на врат да се не дигнеш. Упамти да нас је можда Господ Бог одредио да код нас добијеш одмазду за сва недела. Упамти.

Dragačevac was unable to send the letter in the form of a telegram as he had originally intended because the local post office refused to dispatch such an incendiary message, fearing reprisal in the event of a German invasion. Instead, the historians Tamara Ćirić-Danilović and Ljubomir Zečević note, he celebrated the dispatch of the letter with music and marching songs.

Arrest, captivity and death The German-language translation of Dragačevac's letter was soon sent from the Office of the Führer to the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the intelligence wing of the Nazi Party and the Schutzstaffel (SS). On 16 May, the SD circulated an internal memorandum denouncing Dragačevac for levelling "the most brutal insults and accusations against the Führer," and further ordering that he be arrested. He thus became the first resident of Paraćin to be taken captive by the Germans. Following his arrest, Dragačevac was denounced by local Volksdeutsche community leader Jozef Paulus, who had been appointed mayor of Paraćin by the German occupational authorities. The scholars Nataša Milićević and Ljubinka Škodrić have described the case of Dragačevac as, "Perhaps the best, and at the same time the most unusual, example of civil servants' anti-German attitude."