6 April 1941. The skies above Yugoslavia thunder as German aircraft bomb Belgrade and cities across the kingdom. Under the codename Operation Strafgericht meaning Operation Retribution, Nazi Germany launches its invasion, determined to secure the Balkans before turning east toward the Soviet Union.
Within days, Yugoslav resistance collapses, and the country is dismembered by occupation and collaboration. In the months that follow, terror becomes a tool of rule as Axis authorities and local allies answer resistance with collective punishment, branding entire communities as enemies. Villages are destroyed not for what they have done, but for where they exist.
In southern Yugoslavia, in the region of Herzegovina, the Serbian village of Prebilovci struggles to survive amid growing violence. Its inhabitants, isolated and defenceless, include families, women, children, and the elderly. In the summer of 1941, persecution reaches the village itself when armed units of the Ustaša regime descend on Prebilovci, moving through the village house by house.
Civilians are dragged from their homes, beaten, and herded together as panic spreads. Women and children are torn from their families and driven toward nearby pits, where they are murdered. In the end, more than 820 civilians lie dead, and the village is effectively erased.
However, this atrocity, which will become known as the Prebilovci massacre, will not remain unpunished, and the perpetrators will pay for their crimes with their own lives. The Second World War started on 1 September 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. When Germany’s ally Italy failed to conquer Greece in the late autumn and winter of 1940–1941, Germany became increasingly concerned about securing its southeastern flank in the Balkans.
Greece’s success in repelling Italian forces allowed its ally, Great Britain, to establish a foothold on the European continent. To conquer Greece and drive the British off the mainland, Nazi Germany sought to bring Yugoslavia and Bulgaria into the Axis alliance, which was the military coalition led by Germany, Italy, and Japan.
On 25 March 1941, Yugoslavia joined the Axis and agreed to permit German troops to transit through its territory en route to Greece. The announcement of the agreement was extremely unpopular in many parts of the country, particularly in Serbia and Montenegro.
The Yugoslav government soon declared that it would not honour its obligations under the pact. Adolf Hitler was furious. Although Prime Minister General Dušan Simović attempted to retract the statement within days, Hitler ordered the invasion of Yugoslavia on the evening of 27 March. In the wake of Yugoslavia’s collapse, the Independent State of Croatia was established under Axis patronage and placed under the rule of the Ustaša, a radical fascist movement led by Ante Pavelić. At the center of the regime’s system of terror stood Vjekoslav Luburić,
who headed the network of concentration camps in the Independent State of Croatia and personally oversaw—and actively drove—the genocidal campaigns against Serbs, Jews, and Roma people. The regime pursued an openly genocidal policy toward the Serbian population, viewing mass violence as a tool of state-building.
Across the Independent State of Croatia, Ustaša units carried out deportations and systematic killings, operating with near total impunity, particularly in rural regions of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Civilians were targeted not for resistance, but for their identity, and entire villages were marked for destruction as part of this campaign.
In the summer of 1941, this policy reached the village of Prebilovci. On 4 August 1941, hundreds of Ustaša fighters attacked Prebilovci from three directions. The village was inhabited mostly by women, children, and the elderly. Most adult men, fearing arrest or execution, had avoided sleeping in their homes, believing their absence might spare their families.
As Ustaša units entered Prebilovci, they moved through the village, searching houses one by one. Civilians were dragged outside, beaten, and herded together by force. Property was looted, livestock seized, and food taken. Women and girls were brutally raped, often in front of their families. The violence was open and deliberate, carried out without any attempt at concealment.
The villagers were then assembled in the centre of Prebilovci and driven into the primary school building. Inside, Ustaša fighters, many of them sexual deviants, subjected their victims to prolonged brutality. Their orgies of sadism and bestiality targeted mainly defenceless women and girls, particularly those between the ages of 12 and 15.
As the violence escalated, it spread to the youngest and most vulnerable. Around fifty babies were taken from their cradles, swung by their legs, and dashed against the school wall, as their mothers were forced to watch. Yet what happened inside the school was only the beginning. On 6 August 1941, the horror escalated dramatically as several hundred Ustaša under Ivan Jovanović, now joined by reinforcements from the nearby town of Čapljina, began the next and far more brutal phase of the operation. Prisoners were forced into cattle cars
and transported to a remote unloading point near the Golubinka pit, one of many near-vertical karst caves in the region. From there, the captives were taken in small groups toward the pit. Victims were brought to the edge family by family and pushed inside. The pit had an initial vertical drop of about twenty-seven meters, followed by a steep descent of roughly one hundred meters to the bottom. Small children were thrown into the air before being cast down.
One woman gave birth as she fell and the newborn died with her beneath the crush of bodies. The scale of the killings was later described by Alojzije Mišić, the Catholic Bishop of the city of Mostar, in a letter dated 7 November 1941. He wrote of the horrific scale of the killings across Herzegovina, describing atrocities in nearby towns.
He stated: “People were captured like animals, slaughtered and thrown alive into the abyss. Women, mothers with children, adult girls, and entire families were cast into the pits.” Before the war, the village of Prebilovci had more than one thousand inhabitants. More than 820 were killed by the Ustaša in the summer of 1941.
Of those thrown into the pits, 45 survived the fall and later escaped to tell of the disaster. 300 children and infants were murdered that day alone. After the last victims were thrown inside, the Ustaša sat nearby drinking and celebrating. One month after the massacre, Ustaša authorities resettled between sixty and seventy Croatian families from the districts of Ljubuški and Čapljina into the emptied village. Prebilovci was renamed Novo Selo, meaning New Village.
When Italian forces later occupied Herzegovina, the Ustaša garrison and settlers abandoned the village. News of what had happened in Prebilovci soon reached Italian military authorities stationed in Herzegovina. Italian General Alessandro Luzano compiled a detailed report and sent it to Benito Mussolini – the Italian Dictator.
In his letter, he described mass murder and systematic sexual violence carried out by Ustaša units and also expressed horror at learning that a Roman Catholic priest had taken part in the crimes. The Second World War in Europe ended on 8 May 1945 and the full extent of what had taken place in Prebilovci became known only after the war.
In July 1946, investigators of a Yugoslav state war crimes commission recorded survivor testimonies that documented the massacre in detail. The most important testimony came from Mara Bulut, the only woman to survive the killings in the village school. Her testimony, and others, described sexual violence carried out deliberately as a form of terror and humiliation.
She testified that the Ustaša, many of them sexual deviants, forced a 22-year-old man, Maksim Bulut, to rape his cousin, which he refused, and as a result he was subjected to brutal torture by the Ustaša. On a different occasion, an Ustaša member, Nikola Merđan, first raped a teacher named Stana Arnaut and then handed her over to her own students, who were forced under threat to gang-rape her for a week. After the teacher went insane, she was murdered and buried in the schoolyard.
During her testimony, Mara Bulut confirmed that the violence was systematically ritualized. The girls who resisted being raped were stripped naked and then executed. In the years after the war, justice did eventually catch up with some of the perpetrators. One of the main perpetrators, Ivan Jovanović, fled after the war and in May 1945 joined Tito’s Partisans. He later hid near the town of Subotica but did not escape justice.
He was arrested in 1956 and two years later, he was executed. Five more participants were sentenced to death and executed as well. Vjekoslav Luburić, who personally oversaw and spearheaded the contemporaneous genocides of Serbs, Jews and Roma people in the Independent State of Croatia, was murdered in his home in Spain in April 1969.
The Golubinka pit, in which victims of the Prebilovci massacre lost their lives, remained sealed for decades. It was opened only in 1990, when Serbian Orthodox priests led by Patriarch Pavle descended into the pit and held a memorial service over the remains of the victims. From the depths, the remains of approximately 1,550 people were recovered.
In 1991, on the fiftieth anniversary of the massacre, the remains of nearly 4,000 victims, taken from the Golubinka pit and from fifteen surrounding pits, were laid to rest in the crypt of the Church of the Synaxis of Serbian Saints and Martyrs of Prebilovci. One year later, in June 1992, during the civil war that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia, the village of Prebilovci was burned.
The destruction was carried out by units of the Army of the Republic of Croatia, who demolished the church and destroyed its crypt. It is estimated that during the Second World War, around 1.2 million people were killed in Yugoslavia, of whom approximately 581,000 were civilians. Thanks for watching the World History Channel.
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