Svetolik Dragačevac

Svetolik Dragačevac was born in the town of Požega, in central Serbia, on 15 April 1883.^[1][2] 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.^[2]

After World War I, Dragačevac returned to Serbia and resumed his career in the police, serving as the police chief of several towns, namely Orahovac, Vranje and Preševo. At the time of his retirement in 1933, he was serving as the police chief of the town of Paraćin, where he had been stationed since 1930.^[1] Between 1919 and 1935, Dragačevac had been a member of Yugoslavia's Democratic Party, after which he joined the ruling Yugoslav Radical Union, which appointed him as a member of its executive committee for the Paraćin area. Dragačevac campaigned and agitated fervently on behalf of the Yugoslav Radical Union. He retired from political life in 1939.^[2]

On 25 March 1941, as the Government of Yugoslavia stood on the cusp of signing the Tripartite Pact and becoming an associate of the Axis powers, Dragačevac typed a threatening letter addressed toward German dictator Adolf Hitler.^[2] He did so even though he was legally obliged to protect the reputation of the civil service and the state.^[3] The letter read as follows:

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.^[2] As the letter was written before the Axis invasion, occupation and dismemberment of Yugoslavia, the historian Krešimir Erdelja writes, "[Dragačevac] could not have been fully aware of the danger he was courting."^[5] Instead, the historians Tamara Ćirić-Danilović and Ljubomir Zečević note, he celebrated the dispatch of the letter with music and marching songs.^[2]

On 27 March, in response to its signing of the Tripartite Pact, the Government of Yugoslavia was deposed in a bloodless coup d'état by a group of high-ranking pro-Western, Serbian nationalist military officers. Dragačevac's letter arrived in Berlin on 1 April and was subsequently translated into German. On 6 April, in direct response to the Yugoslav coup d'état, Germany and Italy invaded and quickly occupied the country.^[2] The Wehrmacht entered Paraćin on 9 April.^[6]

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.^[2] Dragačevac was arrested by the Gestapo on 9 June 1941, more than two months after sending his letter.^[7] 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.^[2]

Dragačevac was taken to Belgrade and interrogated by the Gestapo, who inquired as to whether he was part of an anti-fascist organization and whether he was the letter's sole author. He denied being part of any anti-fascist organization and stated that he had written the letter himself.^[2] Dragačevac attributed his writing of the letter to a combination of Serbian nationalist zeal and excessive alcohol consumption.^[7] Following his interrogation, the SD and the Sicherheitspolizei (SiPO) recommended that Dragačevac be deported to a concentration camp in the Third Reich.^[2]

On 4 July, Dragačevac arrived at a prison in Graz, where he spent the following six months. On 23 January 1942, he arrived at the Mauthausen concentration camp and was assigned prisoner number 3,109. He died of peritonitis at Mauthausen on 9 July 1942; his remains were cremated. His death went largely unnoticed, save for a telegram sent by the Mauthausen camp administration to the SD and SiPo headquarters in Belgrade requesting that Dragačevac's wife Jelena be informed of his demise.^[2]

Dragačevac and his wife had no children.^[7] Following World War II, Dragačevac's memory faded into obscurity, but public interest in his unique case was revived in the early 2000s by the rediscovery of his defiant letter to Hitler. A Serbian-language documentary chronicling Dragačevac's life, and the circumstances that led to his imprisonment and death, was released in 2013. A street in Paraćin also bears his name. Dragačevac's letter and its subsequent German-language translation are stored at the Historical Archive of Belgrade.^[2] In March 2021, Radio Television of Serbia released a documentary about Dragačevac, titled Čovek koji je Hitleru rekao Ne (The Man Who Said "No" to Hitler).^[8] 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."^[3]