Comparative Overview of Austrian and Yugoslav Political Policing

After World War I, the Austrian and Yugoslav police were different in their structures, technical competence, political outlook, and political reliability. The major difference between them was that the Austrian police, though it supported an authoritarian political system and actively repressed the political left, was not always a reliable servant of the federal government; whereas the Yugoslav police was much more involved in repressing nationalities (non-Serbian ones) and remained loyal to the Serbian royal dictatorship and nonparliamentary ministerial council system in the 1930s.

In Austria, the imperial police came over to the side of the republic after the end of World War I out of a personal sense of duty to the head of the Austrian police, Johannes Schober, an authoritarian conservative, rather than out of a commitment to republicanism. The police eliminated Socialist revolutionary uprisings and confiscated a large number of weapons from returning war veterans,Footnote ¹⁴ though many remained in private hands and were used by emerging Heimwehr (Home Guard) paramilitaries, which frequently clashed with the Schutzbund, a republican, Social Democratic paramilitary.Footnote ¹⁵ In July 1927 in Vienna, the police used deadly force to break up workers demonstrating against a Vienna court verdict that had found members of the right-wing Frontkämpfervereinigung not guilty of killing two people (including a child). In the ensuing clashes, workers barricaded police inside the Justizpalast and set fire to the building; police fired into the crowd, and after the demonstrators were dispersed, groups of policemen exacted vengeance on workers by shooting them in different areas of the city. This showed the police leadership's willingness to use extreme force against the population and Social Democrats; Footnote ¹⁶ it also represented a turning point for the police, which militarized its equipment and organization. In the late 1920s, the Heimwehr had close connections with the police, though this relationship disintegrated when Schober, as chancellor, refused to allow the group to form an authoritarian government.Footnote ¹⁷ During the 1930s, a portion of the police rank and file joined the Austrian Nazi Party, but the police also helped repress Nazi bomb attacks in 1933 and 1934 with arrests, searches, and seizures, which caused the Nazis to go underground. The Austrian Nazis attempted a putsch in July 1934 and assassinated Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß; nine police officers and inspectors were involved. Although the police were not the central planners of the putsch (and some policemen tried to prevent it), the police failed to pass on information about the plan to the Chancellery in the days preceding the putsch, and police's response time was slow on the day of the putsch.Footnote ¹⁸ As a result, the police chief at the time, Eugen Seydel, was replaced by Michael Skubl, who served under Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg's clerical-Fascist government. Skubl played a controversial role as security minister in 1938, easing the German Nazi takeover of the country, though Skubl himself was not a Nazi Party member and was later sent to a concentration camp. Overall, the BPolDion moved from loyalty to Schober, to conservative Austrian authoritarianism, and eventually to Nazism, with changes in leadership at each stage.

The senior police officials who dealt with the Croatian emigrés and Ustaša in Austria were right-wing Austrian nationalists; political Catholicism and anti-Serbianism (with its anti-Eastern Orthodox component) created a link between Austrian police and Ustaša members, not Fascist ideology. The argument that Austrian social scientists propagated the view in the nineteenth century that South Slavs were foreign and less civilized is difficult to connect to police attitudes, because there is no direct evidence that these views affected high-level police officials. It is more likely that high police officials had anti-Serbian prejudices because of their view (shared by Croatian ultranationalists) that Serbian nationalism was the cause of the Francis Ferdinand assassination and World War I.Footnote ¹⁹ It is also probable they resented the fact that the Austro-Hungarian monarchy had collapsed, while the new Serb-Croat-Slovene state gained many important Crownlands from it, creating what Austrian bureaucrats perceived as a Greater Serbia. Finally, it is possible that senior police officials after 1929 were sympathetic to Croatian separatism to counter Slovene irredentism (the demand on the part of Slovene supporters of Yugoslav nationalism to seize the region south of the Drava/Drau River that had voted to remain with Austria after World War I.)

The Yugoslav police were involved far more in the repression of nationalities than the Austrian police because the new state was made of disparate nationalities, none of which had an absolute majority, and various groups had separatist aspirations that were not fulfilled by the Paris Peace Conference. The Ministry of Internal Affairs, which supervised the police, faced several major tasks after the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was created in 1918. It had to create a centralized police and gendarmerie for Serbia, Croatia, the Banat, Macedonia, and other regions that had formerly been controlled by different governments before World War I. It struggled to disarm armed bands in Kosovo and Macedonia, which had been occupied during the war and did not want to accept Serbian control.Footnote ²⁰ During the 1920s, the police surveyed the population for Communists, infiltrating the Communist Party in response to the assassination of the former interior minister who banned the party.Footnote ²¹ It also watched the general population in Macedonia for signs of national separatist activity.Footnote ²² In Slovenia, the Ministry of Internal Affairs had difficulty shutting down the Yugoslav nationalist paramilitary, the Orjuna.Footnote ²³ In 1928 a Montenegrin parliamentarian assassinated the highly popular leader of the Croatian Peasant Party, Stjepan Radić, prompting Serbian King Aleksandar to establish a dictatorship in 1929. From this point, the police used torture and forced confessions against Croatian Peasant Party members and other Croatian nationalists.Footnote ²⁴ When Croatian ultranationalists fled abroad, Vladeta Milićević, a Serbian official from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, established a spy network to track Croatian separatists and ask other national police forces to make arrests and watch their borders.Footnote ²⁵ Besides surveillance and attempts at police cooperation, the Yugoslav police seem to have enlisted operatives and shadowy extra-legal groups to carry out assassinations against Ustaša members.

Limited Cooperation in Political Matters before 1929

During the 1920s and 1930s, the Austrian police led the International Criminal Police Commission (ICPC). Various European police forces joined the organization and submitted descriptions of suspects to the international police blotter. They worked on editing a dictionary about police techniques and discussed how to suppress “Schmutzliteratur” and “Schmutzfilms.”Footnote ²⁶ They were also highly interested in finding ways to assist each other in investigations without having to go through foreign ambassadors, which was time-consuming. Police claimed that criminals were taking advantage of expanded train networks, telegraph and telephone communications, and false passports to create cross-border crime rings, whereas police were constrained by territorial jurisdictions and diplomatic processes. Technically, the ICPC did not deal with political crimes because of the sensitivity around the issue and because states had their own internal legal processes to determine whether or not a person was entitled to political asylum. Instead, the ICPC was supposed to help police forces catch smugglers, forgers, and confidence men who crossed state lines in the course of their business or to escape detection.Footnote ²⁷ The Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and SlovenesFootnote ²⁸ was initially suspicious of the Vienna effort, preferring to exchange information on a reciprocal basis, claiming that this was appropriate for a small state that lacked major cities and had few international criminals.Footnote ²⁹ Later, however, it joined the ICPC and sent wanted notices for the ICPC to publish. Political mistrust on the Serbian side remained, because the two countries had been enemies during World War I, Serbs were bitter about the Austrian occupation during the war, and the government feared Habsburg restoration. Importantly, Milićević was officially posted to the Yugoslav embassy in Vienna to serve as Yugoslavia's special delegate to the ICPC, though it appears that most of his exchanges with Austrian police concerned political police matters.

Both police forces viewed Communism as a common threat, and when the Austrian federal police received information from the Yugoslav or Romanian police about suspected Communists who had crossed into Austria or were living there, the Austrian police quickly arrested them, interrogated them, and, if they violated weapons or passport rules, prosecuted them in Austrian courts and/or expelled them.Footnote ³⁰ For the Austrian police, the investigation and prosecution of Croatian and Macedonian nationalists was trickier, because their activities were not directed toward the Austrian government, and sometimes the claims of the authorities in Zagreb and Belgrade did not pan out. For example, in 1921—years before we typically think of Croatian nationalists using terrorism—the Zagreb public prosecutor asked the Vienna police to investigate a Croatian who allegedly planned to blow up a train and the constitutional assembly in Belgrade, using dynamite he may have obtained from a Croatian Committee in Vienna comprised of Ivo Frank (of the Croatian Party of State Right) and Stjepan Duić (a former Austro-Hungarian military officer later involved in Ustaša activities), and others. The Vienna police investigated the suspect and other Croatians who were living at a hotel where he had stayed in Vienna, but they could not confirm anything. They reported this to the Zagreb prosecutor and promised to keep watching the situation.Footnote ³¹

Concerning Macedonian nationalists, Milićević told Austrian police in 1928 that a group of Macedonian students was planning to murder six to seven people in Belgrade and Vienna in revenge for the murder in Sofia of General Aleksandŭr Protogerov (a factional leader of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization), but when Vienna police interrogated Macedonian students in a pro-independence group, they found no weapons or correspondence that indicated involvement in plans for an attack.Footnote ³² Thus, in two cases in the 1920s, one at the beginning and one near the end, the Austrian police were willing to investigate allegations on their soil and report the results, but they strongly exhibited a “by the book” attitude. This began a pattern in 1929 in which Milićević presented information, and the BPolDion investigated, shadowed suspects, sometimes arrested them for interrogation, but did not believe broader Yugoslav claims about criminal conspiracies and terror networks on Austrian soil. Milićević's cover story was that he was stationed in Vienna as Yugoslavia's delegate to the ICPC, but his relationship with the BPolDion was not really bureaucratized and fully reciprocal; he presented his information to Austrian police officials, who usually then reported the results of their investigations to the Austrian Chancellor's Office of Foreign Affairs (Bundeskanzleramt, Auswärtige Angelegenheiten (BKA-AA)), not directly to him. This shows a measure of police dependence on the political center, or at least an interest in keeping it informed, not bureaucratic autonomy.

Cooperation and Skepticism after the Establishment of the Yugoslav Dictatorship

In January 1929, King Aleksandar dissolved the parliamentary system and declared a dictatorship in the fatal belief that by redistricting the country, imposing a national ideology of “Yugoslavism,” and purging the military of non-Serbian officers, the country could be unified. Croatian autonomists, such as members of the Croatian Peasant Party, and far right-wing supporters of Croatian independence, such as Ante Pavelić, who came from the Croatian Party of Right, fled the country. Pavelić headed to Vienna because there was already a circle of Croatian legitimists there, including well-connected, former high-ranking officers in the Austro-Hungarian army, such as General Stefan Sarkotić and Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Perčević,Footnote ³³ and other radical Croatian nationalists, including Gustav Perčec, a former Zagreb city councilman, and Branimir Jelić, a medical doctor trained in Austria and a former leader of nationalist students in Zagreb. These figures were not unknown to the Austrian federal police in 1929: they were aware of Pavelić's arrival in Vienna in January 1929 (he claimed that he was taking a long vacation); they knew Perčević, who had intervened on behalf of Croatian emigrés with the police in the past;Footnote ³⁴ and they certainly knew Sarkotić, the anti-Serbian military governor of Bosnia during Habsburg occupation in World War I.

In 1929, before Pavelić officially founded the Ustaša organization, the Yugoslav police and Austrian police viewed him very differently. The Austrian police considered him a former lawyer, parliamentarian, “leader” of the Croatian Party of Right, and a political refugee from dictatorial Yugoslavia. They did not see his militant nationalism as a deformed, extremist nationalism, and apparently did not know about his early contact with Italian diplomats and his interest in Italian Fascism. The Yugoslav picture was more complex. Although the police opposed him as a separatist and knew he was in Vienna, they were not only concentrating on him, but on all the Croatian political exiles across the whole autonomist-legitimist-separatist spectrum, who might be working against the Yugoslav state, either by publishing information or preparing for armed activity. Thus, Milićević complained to the BPolDion in March that Sarkotić and Perčević were writing anti-Yugoslav articles in the Viennese press and wanted these articles suppressed, while he also had his agents shadow Ante Trumbić, one of the Croatian founders of Yugoslavia, during his visit to Vienna.Footnote ³⁵ By April, both the Yugoslav and Austrian police knew that Pavelić and Perčec had traveled to Bulgaria, where they were greeted with open arms by Macedonian nationalists and signed a pact to work together with them against the Yugoslav state. What this meant in real operational terms was not at all clear to the Yugoslav police. Milićević initially believed that Branimir Jelić was establishing a Croatian-Macedonian National Committee in Austria that aimed to overthrow the Yugoslav state, but when the BPolDion investigated, Jelić denied everything; moreover, the Austrian police could not find any information about this committee.Footnote ³⁶

Still, at this time in April, Police President Schober exerted his influence and decided that both Pavelić and Perčec should be expelled. He had information that an assassin was coming from Yugoslavia to Vienna to kill Pavelić and police would not be able to protect him; he was concerned that his internationally respected police force would appear derelict. There was another more important reason, however. Officially, persons who received asylum in Austria were not supposed to remain involved in politics in their home country. Schober feared Pavelić would, which would give the Yugoslav government and newspapers a basis for recriminations against the Austrian government.Footnote ³⁷ Austria's Foreign Ministry (the BKA-AA) therefore agreed with Schober and revoked Pavelić and Perčec's visas on 24 April.Footnote ³⁸ Pavelić was traveling outside Austria at the time and could not be located over the summer, though Yugoslav police claimed that he was seen with Perčević at a Gasthaus in Vienna in July.Footnote ³⁹

Ultimately, though, he was found in October with the help of information from the Yugoslav embassy. The embassy tipped off the BPolDion that Pavelić, Perčević, Jelić, and supposedly even Juraj Krnjević (the general secretary of the Croatian Peasant Party) were coming to Vienna to discuss the establishment of a provisional Croatian government abroad. On 26 October, the police arrested Pavelić, who claimed he had merely met Croatians in Vienna “accidentally.” His papers had expired and he was carrying a loaded revolver, so the BPolDion moved to expel him permanently.Footnote ⁴⁰ Yet, the BPolDion did not completely cooperate with Yugoslav authorities: it allowed the expelled Pavelić to travel to Germany, instead of extraditing him to Yugoslavia, where a special Tribunal for the Defense of the State had sentenced him and Perčec to death in July.Footnote ⁴¹ Perčec, however, who was also slated for expulsion, was allowed to stay in Austria. The exact reason is unknown. The Yugoslav ambassador to Austria believed Perčec was “strongly compromised” in a Zagreb police investigation that allegedly showed links between the Heimwehr and the Croatian emigrés in Austria, but the results of this investigation, which he promised to pass on to the Austrian ambassador, do not appear in the sources, if they were ever actually communicated.Footnote ⁴²

Antagonism in 1930–1931

During 1930–1931, antagonism and mistrust grew between the Austrian and Yugoslav police for several reasons. Pavelić, Perčec, and Perčević formed the Ustaša organization, a network of “revolutionary” nationalist Croatian “uprisers” who carried out political murders and bomb attacks in 1930 and then ten train bombings in June–July 1931, which led to the cessation of all rail traffic between Austria and Yugoslavia for two and half months in 1931–1932.Footnote ⁴³ The Austrian police did not believe Milićević's claims that a secret terrorist organization was operating out of Vienna and Graz, as Milićević had insisted in April 1929. One reason for distrust came from Yugoslav police methods. In January 1930, Austrian authorities learned about allegations that Yugoslav police beat, tortured, shot, and threw political suspects out of windows (claiming their deaths were suicide). The information came from two former parliamentarians from Croatia, August Kosutić (the son-in-law of slain Croatian Peasant Party leader Radić) and Krnjević, who wrote to the League of Nations and various governments asking for an international investigation.Footnote ⁴⁴ Furthermore, the Austrian government followed news about Yugoslavia's political trials against Croatian Peasant Party members. The dictatorship began a politically-motivated trial against party leader Vladmir Maćek in 1930; it also staged large-scale criminal trials in 1930–1931 of Croatian nationalists accused of the murder of newspaper editor Anton Schlegel in Zagreb, various bombings, and the murder of Andrija Berić, the mayor of a town in Slavonia.Footnote ⁴⁵ The criminal trials were complicated prosecutions against people who in some cases were innocent (or had limited involvement), as well as against figures that historians have later determined were indeed Ustaša members. The Yugoslav government used these trials to try to demonstrate that neighboring countries, especially Hungary, Italy, and Austria, were assisting nationalist terrorists in pursuit of revisionist goals. However, this turned out to be more accurate for Hungary and Italy than for Austria, which may have tolerated the presence of senior Ustaša leaders on its soil—without definitely knowing in 1930–1931 that they were members of the organization—because they provided police with information about what was occurring in “Croatian circles.”Footnote ⁴⁶

During much of 1931, the main focus of attention on both sides was Perčec. Zagreb police tried to link the murder of Berić to Perčec, claiming that he was the ultimate order-giver through a number of complicated intermediaries. It was a tenuous web, but Zagreb police, who may have concocted some of the confessions, claimed to have uncovered a massive terrorist conspiracy.Footnote ⁴⁷ They asserted that Perčec had allegedly offered a large monetary reward to various Croatians who allegedly bombed a government building in Zagreb and tried to bomb the office of Mlada Jugoslavija, a pro-Serbian centralist group, in January 1930. In response to a storm of Yugoslav press accusations, BPolDion President Franz Brandl, a conservative Austrian nationalist, was asked by then Chancellor Schober in October to report on the Croatian political exiles in Austria. Brandl's report marks the beginning of a pattern: the BPolDion could find no evidence of any suspicious activity or wrongdoing on the part of individuals whom we now know were senior Ustaša leaders (Perčec and Perčević), but it had expelled certain lesser figures who lacked passports or failed to register with the police when they entered the country.Footnote ⁴⁸

Brandl promised to keep Perčec under police surveillance, but this actually worked in Perčec's favor. In March 1931, after the BPolDion received confidential information from the Austrian consulate in Ljubljana (Laibach) that agents were being sent by “Belgrade” to use “underground means” against Croatian emigrés in Italy and Austria—with Perčec specifically named as a target—the BPolDion successfully foiled a plot to assassinate him in Vienna.Footnote ⁴⁹ While keeping watch on Perčec, the police saw two suspicious men waiting for him outside his residence. The police arrested and interrogated them, finding that they carried pistols, dum-dum bullets, and a photo of Perčec. They were staying with a Czech tailor in Vienna, where the police arrested a third man from Yugoslavia, who was also armed and possessing a photo of Perčec. Two of the men possessed false passports, and the police determined their real identities with the help of two of Perčec's associates—Ljubomir Krezmir, a young Ustaša member, and Petar Gruber, a Serb from Croatia who ran an exile newspaper and had contacts with Croatian and Macedonian nationalists. Krezmir and Gruber identified two of the suspects as former Orjuna members. Various sources of information, some of admittedly questionable authority, led the BPolDion to believe that the Zagreb police may have been behind the plot. The Croatian nationalist-separatist publication, Grič—in fact an Ustaša publication read by the Austrian police and treated by them as a legitimate opposition newsletter—claimed that two of the attackers were acting on behalf of the Zagreb police.Footnote ⁵⁰ Police President Brandl noted that a Croatian nationalist newspaper article claimed the would-be attackers of Perčec were employed by the Zagreb police, and that the Zagreb police provided them with a photo of Perčec. Perčec told Austrian police that this photo was seized during a search of his mother's house (in Yugoslavia) in 1929.Footnote ⁵¹ The Austrian police also saw an anonymous note sent by the “Hrvatska teroristička omladina” (Croatian terrorist youth) to the Austrian consulate in Zagreb, claiming that one of the attackers, who had been in jail in Zagreb, was released so that he could come to Vienna to kill Perčec.Footnote ⁵² On the surface, the BPolDion could claim that it was trying to protect the domestic peace: there should be no assassinations on its territory. Simultaneously, by protecting Perčec and prosecuting his alleged attackers, the police helped preserve a radical Croatian separatist to frustrate Yugoslav authorities and demonstrate that the latter's efforts to enforce Yugoslavism could not spill over into Austria.

During the summer of 1931, while the suspects were being tried by the Viennese criminal court for attempted murder, the Austrian police delayed expelling Perčec so that he would be available for the trial. After the trial was over (and the men were only found guilty of weapons and passport violations, not attempted murder), the BPolDion misled the Yugoslav embassy about his whereabouts in Austria so that he would not be attacked again.Footnote ⁵³ He was allowed to travel “on holiday” to the Burgenland, where, according to Yugoslav authorities, he had a house in Klingenbach, near the Austrian-Hungarian border. During this crucial period of July when there was a wave of bomb attacks on trains heading into Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav government asserted that Perčec stored explosives in Sopron, Hungary (on the other side of the border from Klingenbach) and took operatives there to retrieve explosives and timing devices. Allegedly they traveled by train back to the Burgenland in Austria, where the operatives then installed the bombs on trains carriages routed for Yugoslavia.Footnote ⁵⁴ Given that the BPolDion actually decided to grant Perčec a six-month travel pass, valid for all European states, when he returned to Vienna on 16 July 1931, and only decided to bar him from Austria in early September, the BPolDion seems either to have intentionally protected him or moved with incompetent slowness.Footnote ⁵⁵

In October, the Yugoslav government made a formal complaint to the Austrian government, singling out Johann Presser, the head of the political police in the BPolDion, for failing to keep the train system safe after Yugoslav officials notified him on 31 August of an impending attack. In response, Brandl submitted a long, multipronged defense of the BPolDion's actions to the BKA-AA, which was supposed to show that the BPolDion was doing everything possible to investigate all possible leads and take action. However, there were problems with Brandl's explanations. Brandl claimed that Milićević's information came from confidential Yugoslav reports, which had not been verified.Footnote ⁵⁶ This was quite possible, but it was also the case that the BPolDion never seemed able to find any evidence of bomb preparations, despite supposedly thorough surveillance of the suspects. Although stating that there was no proof that Perčec was involved in bomb attacks, Brandl admitted that the BPolDion knew Perčec had had conversations in Vienna with one of two suspected Croatian train bombers in an August attack. The BPolDion had moved to prosecute both these suspects for passport and police registration violations, but one suspect had left Vienna, and the other could not be located. This did not speak well for strict control.

Brandl's text also shows that the police trusted Perčec's word, not that of the Yugoslav police. The main witness used by the Yugoslav police to assert that Perčec was involved in bombings was a former Yugoslav gendarme named Ivan (Johann) Ljevaković, who had been tried in the Berić murder trial. There are valid reasons to doubt the validity of his confessions; he may have been used by Zagreb police in their attempt to weave a very large conspiracy involving many different figures. But the BPolDion seemed satisfied with Perčec's claim that Ljevaković's accusations were inventions pulled from “thin air.”

Finally, Brandl's defensive reply summarized the status of many different figures whom we now know belonged to the Ustaša, showing who was expelled, who left at the request of the police, who left before their expulsion proceedings were complete, and whose expulsion proceedings were in progress. However, Sarkotić and Perčević, two highly regarded former Austrian military officers, remained untouchable, because, in Brandl's eyes, Sarkotić had Austrian citizenship and had lived in Vienna for more than fifteen years, and Perčević had maintained a permanent residence in Vienna for approximately ten years and was kept under secret surveillance. Brandl asserted that “the Yugoslav government is directing its campaign above all against Perčević.”Footnote ⁵⁷

The Protection of Perčević: Intelligence Value and Fear of Revelations about Heimwehr Connections

One reason why the Austrian government did not want to move against Perčević is that even though he was retired, he had value as an intelligence asset about Serbia. He had joined the Austrian General Staff in 1906 and was mainly active in the intelligence service. During World War I, he was general chief of staff of the Croatian 42nd Landwehrinfanterie Division and also was chief of the Balkan Group of the Higher Army Command in Baden by Vienna.Footnote ⁵⁸ He had many military contacts and was also connected to the Hungarian diplomatic service through his brother-in-law, who was a Hungarian legation councillor and lived in Vienna. A second, more important reason is that Perčević had connections to the Heimwehr in Steiermark and was providing information about Yugoslavia to them. Revelations about this might have embarrassed the Austrian military, which also had intelligence contacts with the Heimwehr. This in turn might have exacerbated the Austrian government's tense relationship with the Yugoslav government.

The clearest evidence of this comes from information that Count Rudolf von Marogna Redwitz, of the German Abwehr (military intelligence), delivered to a member of the Austrian Bundesministerium für Heereswesen (the Ministry of Military Affairs) on 25 January 1930. In March 1929, a large cache of Heimwehr documents had been stolen from the chancellery of the Heimatschutzverband in Graz. A portion was sold to the Social Democratic newspaper Vorwärts in Berlin, which used them to expose Heimwehr activities. Marogna said he learned from a trusted source that a large quantity of these stolen documents had been photographed and were also in the hands of the Yugoslav embassy in Vienna. Multiple copies had been made and his source himself had a set. According to the report of the Bundesministerium für Heereswesen, von Marogna stated that:

Von Marogna speculated that the Yugoslav government was saving the material and would publish it in case of a war between Yugoslavia and Italy. He believed that at an opportune moment Yugoslavia would show the Heimwehr's connections to the former Austrian Chancellor Ignaz Seipel. This would theoretically prevent him from becoming chancellor again and supporting Italy in the war. Marogna's motive for transmitting the information was to help the Austrian military with damage control: “He only wanted that the Bundesministerium for Heereswesen quickly orient [itself]” in case an embarrassing document came to light, though he did not know whether Austrian military intelligence was still working with the Heimwehr.Footnote ⁶⁰ Therefore, not only was Perčević a source of useful information; he had Heimwehr connections that the Austrian authorities did not want to reveal.Footnote ⁶¹ Revelations about military ties among Croatian ultranationalists accused of terrorism, the Heimwehr, and the Austrian military would have been very damaging to Austria at this time, because the Schober government was trying to disarm the Heimwehr to secure international loans.Footnote ⁶²

The Beleaguered Bundes-Polizeidirektion, 1932

In late 1931–32, the relationship between the Austrian and Yugoslav police worsened. The Yugoslav police were upset that Perčević was still active in Austria, and that Grič was allowed to keep publishing, despite possible terrorist links. On the Yugoslav side, police and prosecutors believed that Perčević provided Hungarian passports with fake Yugoslav seals (to bolster their validity) to Croatian terrorist operatives.Footnote ⁶³ In the Yugoslav political trial of Dragutin Toth, a Croatian Peasant Party leader who was prosecuted with thirteen other party members in December 1931 for terrorism, the prosecutor claimed that the Croatian who set off the bombs in Zagreb in January 1930 (see above) sent a postcard to the Vienna office of Grič with the coded message, “A male child is born,” to confirm that the job had been done.Footnote ⁶⁴ (The editor was a close contact of Perčević, who was involved in the publication.) The Yugoslav government had demanded repeatedly that the Austrian police shut down Grič, but the Austrian police delayed, at first deciding that the Croatian version was not published in Austria, then asking Perčević to voluntarily use his influence to stop its circulation in Austria.Footnote ⁶⁵

The Austrian police became beleaguered, repeatedly having to explain its performance to the BKA-AA and to defend itself. Certainly, there were new reasons to doubt the information the BPolDion received from Milićević. One involved a controversy over whether Petar Gruber, the Croatian Serb who ran an anti-Yugoslav newspaper and established contacts with Croatian and Macedonian ultranationalists, had turned into an informer working for Yugoslav police, or whether his confessions (made after he was arrested by Yugoslav police) that Pavelić and his associates were involved in terrorism and counterfeiting were true.Footnote ⁶⁶ In late October 1931, Milićević told Austrian police that Gruber had obtained counterfeit Yugoslav currency from Pavelić when the two had met in Munich on 14 October. Supposedly Perčević was in possession of counterfeit money as well, but a house search of Perčević's apartment in Vienna turned up with nothing. As for the currency Gruber had allegedly received, the Berlin Polizeipräsidium said that a representative of the Yugoslav embassy had shown them a counterfeit 1,000-dinar note but did not let them keep it, so Berlin had been unable to conduct a technical analysis of the bill. The BPolDion, which had its own renowned counterfeiting department, asked Milićević for a counterfeit bill so it could investigate, but he was unable to produce one.Footnote ⁶⁷

Brandl was far more inclined to believe Pavelić's version of what happened in Munich, which Pavelić published in Grič and submitted in a statement to Munich police.Footnote ⁶⁸ He claimed that Gruber had lured him to Munich with the promise of meeting Svetozar Pribićević, the leader of the Serbian Independent Democratic Party; Gruber allegedly tried to kill Pavelić in a hotel suite. Pavelić supposedly disarmed Gruber, who then psychologically broke down and said the Yugoslav government had hired him to kill Pavelić—and he had agreed because he had a terminal lung disease and needed the money. Pavelić claimed he let Gruber go because he thought turning him over to the Munich police would not result in successful prosecution of those behind the plot, “just as the order-givers behind the men who had tried to assassinate Perčec in Vienna had not been exposed.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Neither story—Gruber's (which he “confessed” to Yugoslav police) nor Pavelić's—was particularly credible. Rather than go into all the contradictions and unexplained elements, suffice it to say that the BPolDion was sympathetic to Pavelić's side of the story and believed the claim that the Yugoslav police were disseminating disinformation to pressure Austria into eliminating the Croatian emigrés.

When the Yugoslav government then turned around and prosecuted Gruber for terrorism in May 1932, he made a series of explosive accusations against the BPolDion, claiming that Ludwig Weiser, head of the state police department (the political police), always informed Perčec in advance before police conducted house searches of Croatian emigrés in 1931. When the searches were done, they were “light” and “friendly,” Gruber testified. Brandl staunchly denied this in June 1932, claiming that Gruber (whom police had once thought reliable in the Perčec assassination investigation) was now “untrustworthy,” “an agent provocateur,” and a terrorist who had been wanted by Yugoslav police since 1930.Footnote ⁷⁰ Gruber's accusation may well have been false, because the Yugoslav government had set up the trial to embarrass foreign governments who gave political asylum to Croatian refugees and were helping their terrorist exploits. Nevertheless, the affair demonstrates how fractured and unreliable the police relationship had become.

The tense, increasingly uncooperative relationship, however, did not mean that Austrian police completely turned a blind eye to possible Croatian terrorist activity and rejected all information from the Yugoslav side. In two cases, different Austrian police forces took information from the Yugoslav side and disrupted Croatian terrorist activities. In April 1932, the Yugoslav embassy in Vienna called the city's criminal police when a suspicious man entered the embassy; he was arrested and appeared to be a man who had previously tried to bring a bomb into the Yugoslav embassy in Budapest. A subsequent BPolDion investigation showed that the man, a Croatian named Marko Simac, may have been working for Hungarian intelligence and was in Vienna with two other Croatians who were part of a terrorist organization from Hlebine (Croatia) and intended to blow up a gendarmerie in northern Croatia and murder police officials in the Koprovnica district.Footnote ⁷¹

In a second case, the Yugoslav consulate in Salzburg in April 1932 informed the Salzburg police that Croatian terrorists were in contact with a certain Mia Nisch in Salzburg and might be planning bomb attacks on railway lines. Mia Nisch turned out to be Mia Hisch, a fourteen-year-old Austrian girl who had been befriended by Anton Wurster, a Croatian theology student in Salzburg. Wurster gave her a coded list of addressees, including several Ustaša figures, among them Perčević and Mladen Lorković, and sent her packets of mail, which she forwarded to ultranationalist Croatians in Vienna and Berlin (apparently without knowing who they were). Salzburg police had intercepted some of the mail, learning about a Croatian cultural gathering in Zagreb that resulted in a clash with the police there—but did not learn about specific terrorist actions. Austrian police never revealed the existence of the mailing system or the addressees to the Yugoslav consulate or to Milićević in Vienna. Apparently they wanted to protect the girl (who did not know the recipients or their political struggle) and her family.Footnote ⁷² They may have also wanted to watch for new mail traffic so that they could take advantage of any intelligence information themselves without having to share it with Yugoslav police.

Attention on Training Camps outside Austria, 1933

Pavelić's expulsion from Vienna in 1929, plus Italian political and financial support, eventually led him to establish his base in Italy. Meanwhile, Perčec, who had left Austria in 1931, decided to set up operations in Budapest, where Hungarian military intelligence was interested in building up paramilitaries of Croatian and Slovak ultranationalists to use as a vanguard fighting force in a future revisionist war with Yugoslavia.Footnote ⁷³ During 1933, both the Austrian and Yugoslav sides launched fewer investigations into Croatian terrorism on Austrian soil, as their attention moved to the establishment of Ustaša training camps in Trieste and Jankapuzsta, Hungary. In February 1933, the Austrian ambassador in Trieste reported that Pavelić, financed by the Italian Fascist government, was building a military unit of 500 men in Trieste. He did not believe there were immediate plans for a putsch against the Yugoslav government, but he thought Pavelić's “Freikorps” would respond with force if “provoked” by the Serbs.Footnote ⁷⁴

Milićević submitted a detailed confidential status report about all the Croatian separatist activities to the Yugoslav Ministry of Internal Affairs on 30 May 1933, explaining that at Jankapuzsta, Perčec and his helpers were building groups of fighting units (čete), “training with weapons, learning karate, and ready to carry out action on command.” This was a step beyond terrorist activities, he warned. According to Milićević, Ustaša figures in Berlin, who had political asylum and contact with prominent Hitler supporters, traveled to the economically depressed Rhine region on the Belgian and French side, looking for unemployed Croatians to recruit for the training camps and for terrorist actions.Footnote ⁷⁵ Meanwhile, the BPolDion claimed in March 1933 that everything in Austria was under control: the Grič publication had not appeared in Austria for several months; supposedly all the politically active Croatians since 1931 had been expelled except for two (who were being watched); and Sarkotić, Perčević, and Alfred Neumann-Furijaković, considered by Austrian police to be merely a former Yugoslav military officer who then obtained Polish citizenship, had shown no cause for alarm over the previous year.Footnote ⁷⁶ In October 1931, Furijaković had spent two months in Bulgaria working with the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (whether or not he was training terrorists there is unclear).Footnote ⁷⁷ The BPolDion did not accept this, claiming that he was just taking a vacation in the countryside.Footnote ⁷⁸

BPolDion Conceals Perčević's Ustaša Activities, 1934

New tension between Austrian and Yugoslav police emerged over the investigation of an assassination attempt on King Aleksandar in December 1933 and a train bombing near Brežice the following January. This changed the police relationship; the BPolDion and local Austrian police went further in their efforts to determine whether there was an Austrian connection with the events, while the Yugoslav police and the Yugoslav embassy sought the arrest and extradition of Perčević, whom the BPolDion protected. For the first time, the BPolDion found absolutely clear evidence that Perčević was involved with the Ustaša; yet, top police officials later denied this and concealed the truth.

On 16 December 1933, Ustaša assassin Petar Oreb, who had trained at an Ustaša camp in Italy, approached King Aleksandar's car in Zagreb, intending to kill him but deciding against it at the last minute.Footnote ⁷⁹ When police came to arrest him the next day, he killed one policeman, wounded another, and then escaped. Police arrested his two roommates, Josip Begović and Antun Podgorelec, then later apprehended Oreb. They interrogated Oreb and Begović, and the latter implicated several other Ustaša members who had allegedly been in Austria, Vladimir Singer and Ivo Herenčić. During the investigation and interrogation period, a bomb exploded on the Vienna-Zagreb railway line near Brežice on 22 January 1934, engulfing a carriage in flames and killing several passengers. The diplomatic exchange that followed conformed to a familiar pattern: a Yugoslav request for the expulsion of Perčević, alleged to be both the commander of the bomb attack and a key link in providing transportation for the assassination operatives, followed by a BPolDion investigation, a denial that any nefarious activity occurred on Austrian soil, and a request to see the statements of the operatives arrested by Yugoslav police. The Yugoslav side did not provide this information, claiming that Austria should take Yugoslavia's word that the Croatians were involved, just as Yugoslavia had expelled Austrian “undesirable agitators” (probably Austrian Nazis) at Austria's request.Footnote ⁸⁰

There was no movement in the investigation until the Yugoslav government began the high-profile trial of Oreb, Begović, and Podgorelec in Belgrade in March 1934, producing major information about the Ustaša camp in Trieste and the names of persons involved. As the trial was in progress, Milićević informed the BPolDion that Singer was in Vienna. In Milićević's view, Singer was an essential connecting figure in the December attack. He was allegedly in Klagenfurt in November and December under a false name (Vilmosch Seeman), along with Oreb and Herenčić. He had allegedly brought them over the border to Zagreb to carry out the assassination. Milićević also said that two other Croatians had arrived in Vienna in February and were preparing new attacks against Yugoslavia: Eugen Kvaternik and Dr. Andrija Artuković. Milićević told the BPolDion the address of the apartment where they were living, the men's descriptions, and the false names they were using: Vilmosch Hammer (Singer), Janc Koatzernik (Kvaternik), and David Arnaut (Artuković).Footnote ⁸¹

The BPolDion responded in several ways, expending considerable investigative and bureaucratic energy, but ultimately following its old pattern of taking action against lower- to mid-level figures while leaving a senior person (Perčević) untouched, despite very clear evidence of Ustaša involvement. Police determined that the three men—Singer, Kvaternik, and Artuković—were living under the false names at the address Milićević provided. After staking out the place, they arrested Singer and a Croatian student, Wilhelm Pečnikar, who had returned to the flat with him. Singer was found to have loaded weapons, a hand grenade, and a packet of strychnine, but he denied being Singer (his Hungarian passport read Vilmos Hammer). A day later at the same flat, police arrested Artuković, who was carrying two Hungarian passports, one under his real name and one under the Arnaut name, and a loaded revolver. During interrogations, all three denied any connections to the December attack on King Aleksandar in Zagreb or the train attack in January near Brežice; they also denied involvement in the Ustaša, though Singer and Artuković admitted to belonging to the Hrvatski Domobran, the Croatian separatist “Home Guard” organization. Everyone had his story: Singer was in Austria to learn German and go to business school; Pečnikar knew about Singer from a common friend, but had met him on the street by chance; and Artuković, a lawyer, said he fled to Austria to escape political repression by the Serbian authorities. He claimed he was conducting library research in Austria and Hungary on historical topics such as the Croatian national origin of Bosnia and the Hungarian origin of the Banat—appropriate topics for a Croatian nationalist. They all claimed to have Hungarian passports to escape detection by the Serbian authorities, but they refused to explain how they obtained them. No one could reasonably explain his weapons either. (Singer claimed he was keeping the grenade for a friend and it was inactive, but an exam by an explosives expert proved otherwise.)Footnote ⁸² Pečnikar possessed correspondence from Branimir Jelić, which mentioned a certain Dido (probably Eugen Kvaternik) who was traveling from Italy to Vienna, and then together with Branimir Jelić to Berlin. Overall, all that could really be established was that the suspects in custody had traveled to various places in Hungary, Austria, and Italy.Footnote ⁸³

Separately, the Klagenfurt police did a lot of legwork to determine if Singer, Herenčić, and Begović had been in Klagenfurt and were involved in the plot against King Aleksandar. Police were able to determine that these three men had been there and had met with each other in the fall of 1933, and Herenčić had been in Klagenfurt right before the attack on Aleksandar was supposed to happen and right after it failed. This corresponded with Milićević's claims. However, it did not prove a conspiracy to murder the king, and police could not confirm that Singer stored weapons and explosives in Klagenfurt.Footnote ⁸⁴ This only left the BPolDion the opportunity to deal with the lesser charges. Ultimately, Singer was prosecuted and sentenced to six months by an Austrian court for the grenade, then expelled in October 1934. Artuković was punished by the police for nine days total for weapons violations and falsely reporting his registration information as a visitor—then expelled. Pečnikar was not prosecuted for any crime, but was expelled “in the interest of public security” in April 1934.Footnote ⁸⁵ Kvaternik, who had never been arrested, disappeared.

Three days after Singer, Pečnikar, and Artuković were arrested, the BPolDion searched Perčević's apartment on 28 March 1934 and found a trove of evidence showing Perčević's involvement in the Ustaša, including his coordination of the travel missions of its operatives. BPolDion Vice President Michael Skubl signed the report, and like all these reports, it was sent to all the top officials in government, including the chancellor, vice chancellor, state secretary for security, the BKA-AA, and the office in charge of public security, the Generaldirektion für die öffentliche Sicherheit. Furthermore, this was the first time that police referred to Perčević's “leading role in the Ustaša,” rather than referring to him merely as a retired military officer or leader of the Croatian émigrés. Although Skubl would later claim that no evidence connecting Perčević to the Ustaša had ever been found (a claim that the Generaldirektion für die öffentliche Sicherheit would also reiterate, and that the BKA-AA would make to the Yugoslav and French governments), this section of his report of 29 March demonstrates that this was not true:

Perčević was not present during the search, and according to his wife, he had gone on a trip and she did not know when he would be back. Skubl had told the political bureaucracy that Perčević would be interrogated upon his return with the intention to expel him. Yet, he was not expelled, nor did the BPolDion or the BKA tell Milićević or Yugoslav Ambassador Djordje Nastasijević about the evidence. Nastasijević strongly lobbied for the extradition of Artuković and Singer, but an Austrian court denied the request.Footnote ⁸⁷ Italian and Hungarian diplomats had contacted their Austrian counterparts, asking the Austrian government not to crack down on the Croatians, with Hungary specifically asking that Perčević be allowed to remain in Vienna. According to an internal memo from the BKA, the Hungarian charge d'affaires “was also informed of our [Austrian] view in a very clear way, that we are not inclined to tolerate such a misuse of the law of asylum, which could cause the most severe complications for Austria, especially since a direct Austrian interest in the activities of the Croatian terrorists could not be seen by us.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Despite this denial, the Austrian police and government were misusing asylum. The BPolDion held evidence about his Ustaša activities and allowed Perčević to remain in Austria. Internally, the BKA denied that it was under any pressure from Italy and Hungary, and it rationalized an Austrian court's decision in May to reject the extradition of Artuković and Singer with the claim “that up to this point no sort of valid proof or even a useful basis for the pursuit of alleged Croatian terrorists has ever been given to us by the Yugoslav government.”Footnote ⁸⁹ As this article has shown, this was far too sweeping. Furthermore, it was not the case that Hungary “forced” the BKA to protect Perčević. He was valuable to the BPolDion because he provided information about other Croatian emigrés, had connections to Austrian military intelligence, and had transmitted information about Yugoslavia in the past to the Steiermark Heimwehr.

Equally, one must consider Yugoslav policing in a clear-eyed way, taking into account several factors. First, because of the changing nature of police investigations and the difficulties in obtaining information, the Yugoslav picture of who was responsible for terrorist actions planned inside Austria frequently changed, depending on available information from informants, hunches, and rumors. For example, on the same day that the BPolDion searched Perčević's apartment, Milićević provided new information to the BPolDion, stating that Artuković (not Perčević) was the main leader of terrorist actions planned in Austria. Singer was said to be the connection point, operating out of Carinthia, and this was the trajectory that the Klagenfurt police thoroughly investigated (with the results outlined above). There were also several other groups and figures that Milićević wanted the BPolDion to investigate.Footnote ⁹⁰ This required a commitment of Austrian police resources right after Austria had experienced a brief civil war and then suffered an all-time high of Nazi and Communist bombings. Between the end of March and the end of July 1934, the criminal police arrested more than 30,000 people and conducted 90,000 house searches in Vienna.Footnote ⁹¹ Thus, we have to balance Milićević's demands versus the rest of the Austrian police's commitments. Milićević could only urge that the BPolDion investigate its Croatian suspects and take action, and as previously described, the BPolDion had prejudices against him, mistrusted Yugoslav policing in general, and did not have a favorable view of the Yugoslav dictatorship.

Second, the Yugoslav police only made cooperation with the Austrian police more difficult when Yugoslavs showed up in Austria trying to kill Croatians, even if they were Ustaša. This had certainly been true with the alleged plot against Perčec in 1931; even if we accept the claim that hard evidence showing a direct link between the conspirators and the Zagreb police was lacking, it served as a justification for the Austrian police to protect Perčec during the critical summer months of 1931 when a bombing campaign was in full swing. A second assassination plot, this time against Duić in Graz, also did not help Yugoslav credibility. In June 1934, a secret, pro-Serbian extra-legal organization, the Legion of Yugoslav Avengers (Legija jugoslavenskih osvetnika), ordered the assassination of Duić.Footnote ⁹² The group drew lots and chose a mechanic from Zagreb, Ivan Jagarčeć [Jagarčec],Footnote ⁹³ to carry out the murder. He received instructions, a gun, and travel papers from Ljuba Lukatella, who allegedly worked for the state police in Zagreb, and was introduced to Milan Kolar, allegedly a former Yugoslav detective in Susak. Kolar met Jagarčec in Graz and showed him who Duić was, but Jagarčec got cold feet and refused to pull the trigger. He informed the police in Graz, which led to Kolar's arrest and the discovery of the plot.Footnote ⁹⁴ In depositions leading up to the trial of Kolar and Jagarčec, Jagarčec and Duić claimed that the Legion was an unofficial, terrorist wing of the Serbian nationalist Četnik organization.

Impact of the Dollfuß and Aleksandar Assassinations, 1934

Following the clash over Singer, Artuković, and Perčević, police relations were reshaped by the Austrian Nazis' assassination of Dollfuß in July 1934 and the Ustaša assassination of King Aleksandar and French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou in Marseilles in October 1934. The original Nazi plan was to take Dollfuß hostage and force to him to accept an Austrian Nazi government, but after the putsch in Vienna failed, Austrian SA and SS in Carinthia fled across the Yugoslav border. Around 2,000 of them were disarmed and put into camps.Footnote ⁹⁵ The Yugoslav secret police thought it now had a bargaining chip in its discussions with the Austrian political police, insisting that the Austrian police keep up its surveillance of the Ustaša and other Croatian political exiles. In September 1934, Živojin Simonović, an official with the Yugoslav Ministry of Internal Affairs, had a long conversation in Vienna with Ludwig Weiser, head of the Austrian state police, about both the “Austrian émigrés” (Nazis) in Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav “separatist-émigrés” (Ustaša) in Austria. Weiser wanted the Yugoslav government to move the Austrian Nazis further into the interior of the country, away from the border, fearing they might be preparing “unauthorized action” against Austria. Simonović said the Yugoslav government strictly controlled the movements of all the Austrians and had files on them all. He then brought up the “Yugoslav émigrés” (the Croatians) and emphasized that Austria treated them differently, giving them freedom of movement, which made it possible for them to embark on new actions against Yugoslavia. Weiser tried to convince him that this was not the case: the Austrian police had suppressed Grič and had taken measures to make the activities of the Croatians “impossible.” This led to a lengthy discussion about all the cultural and educational groups that Simonović wanted repressed, the status of various Croatian exiles (such as Perčević, whom Weiser said was under surveillance), the status of Soviet-backed Communist activity in Vienna, and various Macedonian nationalists that Simonović believed were active in Austria. In his confidential conclusions to his superiors, Simonović contended, “I don't consider it too excessive to say freely that as long as there will be Austrian emigrants in our country, then Austria will be compelled to put the brakes on the work of our emigrants out of fear that their emigrants will begin some activity.” Thus, he thought that Austrian Nazis in Yugoslavia essentially balanced out the Croatian Ustaša in Austria. Furthermore, he underestimated the Ustaša in Austria: “As a conclusion to everything reported thus far, it can be said that our emigrants in Austria do not appear especially active right now, and that they are informed in all sorts of ways about the Austrian emigrants in our country, whose eventual action Austria fears.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Given that only two weeks later, the Ustaša assassinated the Yugoslav king, his evaluation of the Austrian situation—and other Ustaša centers in Europe—was off the mark.

The Ustaša's assassination of King Aleksandar on 9 October 1934 changed the Austrian-Yugoslav policing relationship in several ways. First, the stakes on both sides became much higher because the success of the assassination called the Yugoslav Ministry of Internal Affairs' antiterrorist surveillance into question, while the BPolDion could not afford to admit that it had known Perčević was the Ustaša's travel coordinator and organizer in Austria. Information had to be controlled and disseminated to protect the reputations of the police institutions in their home countries and abroad. Second, in Vienna, the BPolDion had to deal with a senior French police official sent by France's investigating magistrate, who led the inquiry because the crime occurred in France. This turned the matter into an Austrian-French policing relationship, and the Austrian police allowed the French police commissioner to sit in during interviews with Perčević, something Milićević had not been allowed to do. Third, because the affair quickly took on major diplomatic proportions, with the Yugoslav government accusing the Italian and Hungarian governments of instigating the murder, the Austrian-Yugoslav-French police relationships were ultimately superseded by diplomatic negotiations and legal procedures concerning the extradition of Perčević, whom the French wanted. The Austrian court ultimately refused to deliver him, which became a political controversy. Political power asserted itself over police power, typical during a time of international crisis.

Initial Austrian Investigation into Aleksandar's Assassination

Following the Aleksandar assassination, there were two lines of inquiry into figures in Austria, both of which show how various police forces wanted to shape and control information. One was a minor inquiry into a Slovenian named Alois Novak, whom the head of the political police from Zagreb claimed was connected to the Ustaša and was supposedly in France right before the Marseille attack.Footnote ⁹⁷ As the Austrian police chief in Villach (Carinthia, Austria) correctly ascertained, Novak actually was not involved in the Ustaša; he was a swindler who got money from Slovenians all over Europe, using the story that he was building a Slovenian independence movement. His only Ustaša connection was that he knew the editor of Grič in Vienna and had written him asking him for money (which the editor refused to send). His name got dragged into the Marseille investigation because he had published a Legitimist proclamation in the months before the assassination, and an anonymous person told the police in Villach that he was spying for Yugoslavia. All the records dealing with his case, which go through 1937, show that he was nothing more than a confidence man.Footnote ⁹⁸

The second line of inquiry concerned Perčević, whom Milićević believed had a decisive role in planning the assassination.Footnote ⁹⁹ Significantly, the BPolDion could not arrest and interrogate Perčević until 23 October because he was out of the country until that time. Perčević's alibi for this period was that he was traveling in Italy with his wife, a trip that he had delayed until 7 October (two days before the assassination) because he had attended the funeral in Graz of his friend Duić, who was mysteriously found dead in Karlovy Vary, Czechoslovakia, on 28 September.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ After the Austrian foreign minister denied Perčević's involvement in the Aleksandar assassination, the Yugoslav embassy asked for all the information the Austrian authorities had about Artuković and Perčević. Skubl, named BPolDion president after the putsch against Dollfuß, prepared an internal report for the State Police Bureau. After citing Perčević's former Austrian military service (including his work in the intelligence service) and his “good relations with Croatian circles, [and] official personalities in Austria and abroad,” Skubl claimed there was no proof for any of the Yugoslav government's accusations, and nothing incriminating was found during several house searches.Footnote ¹⁰¹ As shown above, Skubl's own report of 29 March contradicted this. Therefore, at this critical juncture, Skubl concealed his own prior conclusion that Perčević played a leading role in the Ustaša and coordinated the travel of Ustaša agents. The Austrian government used Skubl's absolving information when it replied to the Yugoslav embassy, and because all the major political offices had also received Skubl's report, they too must have known that this information was not true.

The French Police Inquiry in Austria

The French government submitted an extradition request for Perčević, but the Austrian government stalled, privately claiming that the proof submitted was insufficient.Footnote ¹⁰² The French police, however, were allowed to begin an investigation in Austria in November. One thinks here of the reversal of fortune from the summer of 1914, when the Austrian government demanded that its officials be allowed to come to Serbia and freely investigate the background of the Francis Ferdinand assassination, the one part of the Austrian ultimatum that Serbia refused. Here, however, the Austrian government, attempting to defuse the situation and deflect criticism that it had tolerated the Croatian terrorists, told Skubl of the BPolDion that he should fully cooperate with the French police commissioner, Roger Barthelet.Footnote ¹⁰³ Barthelet initially possessed limited information about Ustaša figures in Austria: he had some Croatian nationalist periodicals whose correspondence address was in Vienna, and he had some correspondence seized from Pavelić's mailbox in Lugano that showed a correspondent in Vienna. He wanted all possible information about Croatian nationalists who had visited Austria or were still there, and who might be connected to the Marseilles assassination. The BPolDion gave him photographs and capsule reports on most of the Croatian political exiles who had been expelled from Austria since 1929; however, the results of the house search of Perčević on 28 March, the discovery of the conspirators from Hlebine, and the mail network involving the fourteen-year-old girl were not mentioned. Instead, the BPolDion enumerated the cases of those people who had been prosecuted or expelled for invalid passports, weapons violations, or being dangerous to public security. The point was to show that the BPolDion had been dutiful and had not tolerated terrorist activity on its soil.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

However, Barthelet was apparently allowed to be present during new interrogations of Perčević in November, and he was given copies of Perčević's statements from these sessions.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ At this point, French police had arrested Artuković, who had signed a statement accusing Perčević of being the chief of terrorist operations in Austria, arranging for Singer and Kvaternik to stay with Artuković in Vienna, and meeting Pavelić, Perčec, Jelić, and Duić at an Ustaša camp outside of Bardi, Italy. When presented with this information, Perčević denied everything. He was also accused by Mijo Kralj, one of the members of the Aleksandar assassination team arrested in France, of having attended a September 1934 meeting in Nagy-Kanisza, Hungary, where Ustaša members were divided into three teams for the assassination. Perčević also denied this and claimed that witnesses could support his alibi that he was in Vienna at the time.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ (Historian Bogdan Krizman maintains that Perčević met the man assigned by Pavelić to work out the operational plan, Mijo Bzik, in Vienna, and the two traveled to Budapest; then Bzik went on to Nagy-Kanisza for this meeting. Historian Mario Jareb, however, argues that Bzik only worked on publicity for the Ustaša, while Vjekoslav Servatzy, who was more involved with terrorist actions, selected the assassins for the job.)Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Despite Perčević's total denials of being involved in the Ustaša or the Aleksandar assassination, his continuing interrogations raised many questions and indicated that he was more deeply implicated than he admitted. For example, he admitted to visiting Jankapuszta four times between 1931 and 1934, though he denied he was aware that military training was occurring there.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Additionally, he had to contend with the fact that correspondence seized from other Ustaša figures showed that he had sent them money. He claimed that Croatians from around the world sent him donations to help the “freedom movement,” and he was just doing them a favor by forwarding the money for this purpose. He denied being a functionary in charge of the Croatian emigrés' mail network, claiming that if he had, copies would have been found when his house was searched again in October 1934. He did not mention the cache of correspondence that was discovered in March 1934, nor did Austrian police. Finally, Perčević had to explain why he discussed train attacks in his letters to Branimir Jelić and why a letter on Grič letterhead with Perčević's signature was found in Jelić's possession. All Perčević could say in these matters was that he had merely discussed the train attacks because, as a Croatian, he was interested, and he was outraged that Austrian authorities blamed him for them. As for the letter, he claimed his signature had been forged but could not explain who did it or why.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Austria Refused to Extradite Perčević to Present the Image of Clean Hands

Ultimately, however, the Austrian government refused to extradite Perčević and eventually released him from custody,Footnote ¹¹⁰ a move that hurt French-Austrian police relations (in addition to diplomatic relations among Austria, Yugoslavia, and France). Milićević claimed in his 1959 memoir that Austria simply protected Perčević because Austria relied on Italian support to maintain its independence, but he offers no documentary evidence.Footnote ¹¹¹ BPolDion President Skubl knew Perčević was involved in the Ustaša, as did the BKA and various security organs that received Skubl's March 1934 report. Their intent was to conceal Perčević's involvement so that it would not appear that the Austrian government and police had tolerated Perčević's terrorist activities, and so that he would not fall into French or Yugoslav hands and possibly reveal compromising political or intelligence information. At this point in late 1934, when the BPolDion had its own clear information that Perčević was deeply involved in a leadership position, it could not afford to appear to have unclean hands at a time when the European political situation was extremely unstable.

There was another way that the Austrian government, not the police, tried to present this image of clean hands. To counter Yugoslavia's accusations at the League of Nations that revisionist states in the region had supported the Ustaša for political ends, the BKA-AA advised its ambassadors to work with the Italian ambassador in Geneva in December to create a unified diplomatic front against Yugoslav charges.Footnote ¹¹² The BKA-AA thought that if it could prove that Duić's death in Czechoslovakia was a political assassination at the hands of Yugoslav agents, it could use this information to expose the dark methods of the Yugoslav police—claiming that because the Legion of Yugoslav Avengers had tried to kill Duić in Graz, a similar group was probably responsible for the attempt in Karlovy Vary. However, from a legal point of view, the problem with Duić's death was that it was not clear whether it was a political murder or suicide: he was found strangled with a rope around his neck on a hotel balcony. Czechoslovak police initially declared it suicide, but several months after Duić's burial, his wife in Graz began to suspect that her husband was the victim of a plot and wanted his body exhumed and autopsied.Footnote ¹¹³ The Austrian Bundesministerium für Justiz finally agreed in December, seeing the political opportunity to show that Yugoslav state agents had been behind his murder. However, when the autopsy report came back in January 1935, medical examiners said they could not determine for certain whether Duić had hung himself or whether an attacker had asphyxiated him with a rope, then positioned his body to make it look like suicide.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Austria therefore could not use the Duić case to attack the Yugoslav government as a supporter of state terrorism.

Consequences of Ineffective Policing

Following the Aleksandar/Barthou assassination, Yugoslavia blamed Hungary and Italy for the attack and began mobilizing troops on the Hungarian border. French and British diplomats wanted to prevent the incident from sparking another world war, so they cautioned the Yugoslav government and persuaded it to take its complaint to the League of Nations. However, French diplomats did not want to see Italian support for the Ustaša exposed in an open League session, fearing that this would alienate the Mussolini government and hurt France's diplomatic efforts to secure a French-Italian security pact against Nazi Germany. As a concession to Yugoslavia, the Western European powers allowed Yugoslavia to concentrate its charges against the Hungarian government, whose officials had provided passports to the assassins and knew they were training at Jankapuzsta. In the end, Hungary was allowed to conduct its own investigation and report the results without any further consequences in 1935.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Though Austria was not charged with coddling terrorists, the BPolDion's position in the International Criminal Police Commission (ICPC) was damaged. Part of the diplomatic deal to pacify Yugoslavia in the League of Nations was the promise of an antiterrorism convention that would prevent states from giving asylum to figures accused of political murder and would also facilitate greater police cooperation to repress terrorists who crossed state borders.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Skubl, then president of the ICPC, wanted the group to have a seat at the table in hammering out the details of this convention; he also wanted the League to appoint the ICPC as the central police body that would disseminate information about terrorist suspects.Footnote ¹¹⁷ One French member of the ICPC (probably Pierre Mondanel, the French inspector general who had led the investigation into the Aleksandar/Barthou assassination) did not want the ICPC under Austrian leadership to consolidate its position. The French view was supported by the legal director of the secretariat of the League of Nations, who also opposed the ICPC. “The Vienna Police has an axe to grind in this matter,” wrote Hugh McKinnon Wood, interim legal director. “It is extremely anxious to strengthen its position as the officially recognised international bureau for police collaboration—a position which [it] at present enjoys provisionally in regard to counterfeiting of currency but which some of the members of the international police commission (in particular one of the French members) are not prepared to consolidate, being of the opinion that such a bureau should be created by the League.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ As a result, the ICPC did not win a spot on the drafting committee, and the final convention of 1937 did not specify that it would become a clearinghouse for information on terrorism. Instead, all signatory states were supposed to create their own national bureaus and cooperate in a voluntary way.Footnote ¹¹⁹

The Yugoslav-Austrian political police relationship did not effectively repress the Ustaša in Austria and allowed many key figures to survive—Pavelić, Perčević, Jelić, Artuković, and Kvaternik. All of them went on to serve important functions in the genocidal Independent State of Croatia or the Croatian army during World War II.Footnote ¹²⁰ The first four figures at various points between 1929 and 1934 had been in Austrian police custody, but they were always expelled or not touched. They were neither sentenced to long jail terms in Austria nor extradited to Yugoslavia, where they would have been tried and either sentenced to hard labor or executed. The Yugoslav police, Austrian police, and their relationship of friction, distrust, and concealment were responsible for this situation. The Yugoslav police could only request the arrest and investigation of Ustaša figures, but the Austrian police frequently did not trust their information, claiming that they could not find proof of wrongdoing, or protected higher-level figures. When bilateral police cooperation proved ineffective, shadowy extra-legal groups from Yugoslavia, probably with Yugoslav police support, attempted political assassinations in Austria. This only further alienated the Austrian police. Though there were episodes of temporary police collaboration and some examples of independent Austrian investigation into Croatian terrorism, the relationship overall was fraught with accusations that worked at cross-purposes. Though cultural and historical memories were probably in the background—Austrian mistrust of Greater Serbian ambitions and Serbian fears that Austria wanted to destroy the successor states—the dynamic was largely influenced by police perceptions of the other side. The Austrian police had information that Yugoslav policing was based on intimidation, torture, and extra-legal assassination, whereas the Yugoslav police believed the Austrian police were closing their eyes to the Ustaša or protecting them. Thus, police perceptions, political determinations, and the complexities of police investigations created a multiphased Austrian-Yugoslav police relationship. These factors were more influential than any trend toward police professionalization and bureaucratization.