Sarajevo, 1941–1945

Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Hitler's Europe

Emily Greble

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780801449215
• eBook ISBN: 9780801461217
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

On April 15, 1941, Sarajevo fell to Germany's 16th Motorized Infantry Division. The city, along with the rest of Bosnia, was incorporated into the Independent State of Croatia, one of the most brutal of Nazi satellite states run by the ultranationalist Croat Ustasha regime. The occupation posed an extraordinary set of challenges to Sarajevo's famously cosmopolitan culture and its civic consciousness; these challenges included humanitarian and political crises and tensions of national identity. As detailed for the first time in Emily Greble's book, the city's complex mosaic of confessions (Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim, Jewish) and ethnicities (Croat, Serb, Jew, Bosnian Muslim, Roma, and various other national minorities) began to fracture under the Ustasha regime's violent assault on "Serbs, Jews, and Roma"—contested categories of identity in this multiconfessional space—tearing at the city's most basic traditions. Nor was there unanimity within the various ethnic and confessional groups: some Catholic Croats detested the Ustasha regime while others rode to power within it; Muslims quarreled about how best to position themselves for the postwar world, and some cast their lot with Hitler and joined the ill-fated Muslim Waffen SS.

In time, these centripetal forces were complicated by the Yugoslav civil war, a multisided civil conflict fought among Communist Partisans, Chetniks (Serb nationalists), Ustashas, and a host of other smaller groups. The absence of military conflict in Sarajevo allows Greble to explore the different sides of civil conflict, shedding light on the ways that humanitarian crises contributed to civil tensions and the ways that marginalized groups sought political power within the shifting political system. There is much drama in these pages: In the late days of the war, the Ustasha leaders, realizing that their game was up, turned the city into a slaughterhouse before fleeing abroad. The arrival of the Communist Partisans in April 1945 ushered in a new revolutionary era, one met with caution by the townspeople. Greble tells this complex story with remarkable clarity. Throughout, she emphasizes the measures that the city's leaders took to preserve against staggering odds the cultural and religious pluralism that had long enabled the city's diverse populations to thrive together.

1

PORTRAITS OF A CITY ON THE EVE OF WAR

“Sarajevo has a soul like a village, though it is a town,” a poet named Constantine relayed to Rebecca West during her visit in 1937. He continued,

Here Slavs, and a very fine kind of Slav, endowed with great powers of perception and speculation, were confronted with the Turkish Empire at its most magnificent, which is to say Islam at its most magnificent, which is to say Persia at its most magnificent. Its luxury we took, its militarism and its pride, and above all its conception of love. The luxury has gone. The militarism has gone…. But the conception of love is still in the city, and it is a wonderful conception, it refreshes and revivifies.

As the British novelist and her husband pressed him to elaborate—no doubt trying to determine whether the poet spoke nostalgically of a time long since passed—Constantine concluded, “How far this tradition exists today I cannot tell…but I am sure that the conception gives the town a special elegance.”1

Despite the nationalist tensions that were escalating across the region in 1937 and the looming specter of war, visitors were nonetheless struck by Sarajevo’s utterly special character. While the profusion of mosques, churches, and synagogues contributed to this character, as did as the blend of Ottoman, Habsburg, and Yugoslav signifiers, the town’s quiddity was not merely the product of its architecture and landscape. More important for this story, it was seen in citizens’ everyday interactions and institutionalized through the public and private spheres.

This happened in two distinct ways. First, a civic, social, and cultural concept of Sarajevo formed gradually between the Ottoman and Yugoslav eras, developing into an understanding of what it meant to be a member of Sarajevo society. This civic consciousness was on display in the public sphere and entrenched in the political and cultural institutions of the town. Complementing this civic identity was a rich confessional tradition, which had evolved through the interwar era to reflect a combination of religious and secular characteristics. Although the relationship between civic and confessional identity was always in flux, Sarajevo’s multicultural character depended upon the consistent presence of some degree of political plurality and a mutual respect for confessional traditions. Although Constantine’s poetic description of Sarajevo’s social fabric lacked this sociological nuance, it is clear that he, like most people in the city, understood that something about the town’s civic and social structure formed the essence of Sarajevo’s soul.

This chapter seeks to demonstrate through the portraits of local community leaders how these two central concepts of community and social organization were lived in Sarajevo on the eve of the Second World War. The four men chosen—two religious leaders and two representatives of the cultural milieu—are not intended to parallel one another or to serve as microcosms of the communities they represent in this story. Instead, by presenting the complex relationship of local, national, and international dynamics through their personal experiences, they provide a window into the world of interwar Sarajevo. These stories illuminate the city’s political and cultural dynamics, linking Yugoslav political events to broader European developments. In so doing, each portrait highlights the conflicting allegiances to one’s state, confessional community, national group, family, and city—conflicts that would carry through the war. Each man thus represents one of the four confessional pillars of Sarajevo’s society; yet his story simultaneously reveals the difficulties of using one person to represent an entire community. For when the war began on April 6, 1941, issues of identity, religion, and nationalism became so entangled with the politics of state building, world war, and ethnic cleansing that it is only by understanding the human stories that we can now grasp how the city responded to crisis and how the war changed the landscape of everyday life and society.

Fehim Spaho: The Grand Mufti’s Last Letter to Belgrade

When Sarajevo’s grand mufti, Fehim Spaho, awoke on Saturday, April 5, 1941, the future looked grim. War loomed just around the corner, Sarajevo’s four religious communities had fallen into discord, and Yugoslav military preparations threatened the integrity of Islamic institutions. As there was nothing he could do about the war and as Sarajevo’s divisions were too great for one man to resolve, Spaho concentrated on one of his principal duties as Reis-ul-ulema, the leader of Yugoslavia’s Muslims: managing relations between the Muslim community and the Yugoslav government. He sat down that morning and penned a letter to the Yugoslav Ministry of the Army and Navy in Belgrade, complaining that too many of Sarajevo’s Muslim clergy had been drafted into the military. Religious and educational institutions were short-staffed, and Muslim students were idly “wandering around with nothing to do.”2

Spaho was not ignorant of national security concerns. Like the rest of his countrymen, he had watched with dismay as the Belgrade government had nearly collapsed the week before. Nevertheless, he felt it his religious duty to reject Belgrade’s efforts to draft men who were vital to the sustenance of Islamic life in Sarajevo. To Spaho, the military draft of Muslim clergy was another grievance in a long list of affronts to Islam. Since 1918, the government had steadily usurped the autonomy of the Islamic Religious Community and restricted the jurisdiction of Islamic law (Sharia) and the Islamic religious courts. The Yugoslav king, Aleksandar, was said to be staunchly anti-Muslim. In addition to stripping Muslim landowners of property, under his watch the government had offended Muslims by shutting down mosques, turning some Islamic religious institutions into military warehouses, and curtailing Muslim marriage laws. After the establishment of a royal dictatorship in 1929, matters had further deteriorated. Since 1909, the Islamic Religious Community had had autonomy over Muslim religious life, religious endowments (Vakuf, Bosnian; Waqf, Arabic), educational institutions, and the administration of the Islamic Religious Community itself. Now the Belgrade government planned to take over these functions, reorganizing the internal structure of the community and transforming some of its customs. Most insultingly, the government had moved the seat of the Reis-ul-ulema from Sarajevo to Belgrade.3 In 1930, the highly respected Reis-ul-ulema Džemaludin Čaušević had resigned to protest the government’s intrusions into the affairs of the Muslim community, especially the administration of the Vakuf.4 Furious, members of the Muslim elite fought to have their leader returned to Sarajevo, finally succeeding in 1936. They nevertheless remained wary of the government’s intentions.

Before becoming Reis-ul-ulema in 1938, Fehim Spaho had been the president of the High Sharia Court in Sarajevo. He was thus intimately acquainted with the tensions between religious and secular law and worked closely with political leaders and religious advisers to try to reach a compromise that would preserve the fundamental laws and values of his religion while accommodating the state. The threat of war and the enthronement of a new king, however, gave Belgrade new excuses to infringe on Spaho’s authority. He had to react now if he hoped to retain any influence under the new Yugoslav government. As a precautionary measure, he maintained good relations with the local German consulate and with advocates of Croat autonomy.5 Spaho knew that no matter who ruled Yugoslavia, he would be burdened with the difficult task of synchronizing the expectations of the Islamic Religious Community with the demands of the state.

Such a task would have been easier if Muslims had stood as a united front. Spaho’s brother, Mehmed Spaho, had attempted to achieve Muslim unity through the political system, leading the nonnational Yugoslav Muslim Organization (Jugoslavenska Muslimanska Organizacija, or JMO) throughout most of the interwar era. Initially a collection of meetings held by Muslim civic and religious leaders voicing the community’s grievances and asserting collective demands, the JMO gradually emerged as a formal organization, assuming the character of a political party in its demands for Muslim representation in the state government. The movement underwent numerous political transformations throughout the interwar era as it sought to mitigate the state’s agrarian policies, integrate Muslim voices into the political system, and demand autonomy. Zlatko Hasanbegović argues that because of its “confessional features” and “agenda of autonomy,” Serbs believed that the organization was a conservative religious group that represented only Muslim landowners deprived of their property by the new agrarian reform. In reality, the organization had all the characteristics of a secular, civic political movement.6 While it succeeded in creating a fairly unified voice of Muslims in Belgrade during the 1930s, it failed to prevent secularism and nationalism from further fragmenting local Muslim communities throughout the state. Indeed, the schism widened within the Muslim community as religious leaders and politicians struggled to assert control over the administration of the Islamic Religious Community.

In Sarajevo, certain groups of progressive, Western-oriented Muslims hoped to transform Islam into a religion that was compatible with a secular state by reducing the autonomy of Muslim religious leaders and relaxing Islamic laws. Others strove to protect the Sharia and even strengthen Islam as a system of life, law, and politics. Fehim Spaho’s election as Reis-ul-ulema in 1938 was deeply controversial because the fact that he was Mehmed Spaho’s brother suggested to religious Muslims that the community’s political and religious spheres were merging in an uncomfortable manner.7 After the death of Mehmed Spaho in 1939, a political crisis plagued the Yugoslav Muslim Organization and left Muslim leaders deeply divided over the best political solution for the community.

Reis-ul-ulema Spaho tried to use his religious position to unite the different parties through the central religious administration, but neither the progressives nor the Islamists—as I will refer to them—were pleased with this balancing act. The former viewed him as too conservative, the latter as compromising the faith. The rift within the Muslim community steadily widened, a continual problem for Spaho’s administration. To complicate matters, by 1941 the...

Table of contents

• List of Maps and Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Major Archives
• Note on Language and Foreign Terms
• City Lines: Multiculturalism and Sarajevo
• 1. Portraits of a City on the Eve of War
• 2. Autonomy Compromised: Nazi Occupation and the Ustasha Regime
• 3. Conversion and Complicity: Ethnically Cleansing the Nation
• 4. Between Identities: The Fragile Bonds of Community
• 5. Dilemmas of the New European Order: The Muslim Question and the Yugoslav Civil War
• 6. An Uprising in the Making
• 7. The Final Months: From Total War to Communist Victory
• The Sympathetic City: Community and Identity in Wartime Sarajevo
• Bibliography