The character of Colonel Dragan/Father Ladislaus is based on two or three real figures in the Ustaše. Peter Brzica was a student at a Franciscan college in Herzegovina and one of the guards at Jasenovac; he won a contest there for being the person who could dispatch the highest number of victims in one day with a Srbosjek, the curved reaping blade described in the book. His fate is unknown. Miroslav Filipovic was a Roman Catholic military chaplain of the Franciscan order and was a monk at the monastery described in the book. He excelled in sadism and was also known by inmates as “the devil of Jasenovac”; Croatian troops called him “the glorious one.” He was hanged wearing the robes of the Franciscan order after his conviction by a Yugoslavian civil court, in 1946. Though he was expelled from the Franciscan order, he was never excommunicated. Another Franciscan priest, Zvonimir Brekalo, helped Filipovic with the killings; on one occasion these two Catholic priests set about the murders of fifty-two young children. Between eighty thousand and one hundred thousand Jews, Serbs, and Gypsies were brutally murdered at Jasenovac. It was not a concentration camp, or a death camp like Auschwitz, but a murder camp where sadists like these three priests could refine their cruelty. Jasenovac is now a memorial open to the public with a visitor center. Of the camp there is nothing to see except the train that brought these poor people to their deaths. However, close to the border of Croatia and Bosnia Herzegovina is the site of the Stara Gradiška sub-camp where many people died, and which provides a much more atmospheric place of contemplation. I’m not sure if I should want to live in the block of flats that also exists there.
In Croatia I was patiently and bravely assisted by the indefatigable Zdenka Ivkovcic of whom I cannot speak highly enough as a guide and as a translator. The site of Zagreb’s mosque can still be seen today; it’s a Croatian cultural center. You can also visit the Petricevac Monastery of the Most Holy Trinity, in Banja Luka, although when I turned up they didn’t come out.
Kurt Waldheim became the United Nations secretary-general.
The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was a nasty piece of work. In February 1943, when an initiative of the Red Cross made possible the evacuation of five thousand Jewish children to Palestine, Haj Amin al-Husseini strongly advised Himmler against this; the children were taken to Auschwitz and gassed. The Grand Mufti held the rank of SS-Gruppenführer.
Regarding the Handschar — the 13th Mountain Division of the Waffen SS — I should like to mention the fact that most of these young men were from poor homes and were reluctant “volunteers,” and that many of them were not in the least anti-Semitic. In September 1943, at Villefranche-de-Rouergue in France, a group of Muslim officers and NCOs staged a mutiny against their German SS masters; the revolt was suppressed and as many as 150 shot or executed afterward. Eventually more than eight hundred Bosnians were removed from the division and sent to Germany as slave labor. Two hundred and sixty-five of these refused to work and were sent to the Neuengamme concentration camp, where many of them died. Not all Muslims hate Jews.
There really was an international crime commission conference held at the villa in the summer of 1942 — just a few months after the more famous conference presided over by Heydrich to decide the fate of Europe’s Jews.
Anyone wishing to visit the villa should take the S-Bahn to Wannsee Station. Better still, hire a bicycle and carry it onto the S-Bahn. From the villa I easily cycled to the house of the Grand Mufti on Goethestrasse, and to the studios at UFA-Babelsberg, which are still making excellent films. As always I stayed in Berlin at the superb Hotel Adlon and would like to take this opportunity to thank the wonderful Sabina Held from the Kempinski Hotel Group for all her continued kindness.
I also need to thank Ivan Held at Penguin Putnam for actively encouraging me to write The Lady from Zagreb. After ten “Bernies” I sometimes think that maybe people have had enough of this character, but Ivan was adamant that this is not the case and strongly persuaded me to pick up my pen once more. To him this book is dedicated for that reason. I should also like to thank my editors Marian Wood and Jane Wood (no relation), my resourceful and always genial publicist Michael Barson, my agents Caradoc King, Robert Bookman, and Linda Shaughnessy, and my excellent lawyer in Munich, Martin Diesbach. I should also like to thank my wife, the author Jane Thynne, for her help with the research.
For anyone who cares about such things, Bernie Gunther will return in 2016, with The Other Side of Silence.
Philip Kerr, London, October 2014