OCCUPIED EUROPE: Massacre in Zagreb

On market day in Zagreb’s sun-washed Yelachich Square townspeople used to haggle with bright-costumed peasants who had spread out their wares. From sidewalk cafés men would banter with the pretty peasant girls. One day last week the shadow of hated Major Helm, Gestapo chief for the puppet state of Croatia, swaggered in the sun across the Square. Somewhere a rifle’s muzzle nosed from a window. A shot clapped. Gestapo Chief Helm flopped down on his shadow, dead. Enraged and terrified, his bodyguard swung their pistols on the crowd, hurled hand grenades among the tables of a close-packed sidewalk cafe. When screams and explosions died out, the wounded lay moaning all around the Square and some 700 were dead.

Before World War II Zagreb had been the center of Croat resistance to Yugoslavia’s dominant Serbs. Croats had clamored for autonomy, had got a measure of it in 1939. They got a different kind from the Nazis, who set up a separate Croat state. Ante Pavelich became its puppet premier and its army grew to one-and-a half divisions of quisling Croatian troops, plus enough Italian regulars and Black Shirts to control it. But, as Ante Pavelich soon found out, this was not what some Croats wanted. He dared not go out in the streets without a shield of burly bodyguards. “Communist bands” became the terror of his troops, and General Draja Mihailovich, whose forces are concentrated in western Croatia, had won thousands of new adherents. What happened last week in Zagreb taught more Croats a lesson: that Serb dominance was to Gestapo dominance as an itch is to a cancer.

Near Lublin, Poland, guerrillas killed Franz Wald, local Gestapo chief, and four of his men. A fortnight ago another Gestapo chief, “Little Butcher” Erich Guttart, had been killed in the same district. The assassination of Reinhard Heydrich two months ago had started an epidemic.