Vauhnik Vladimir: Među izdajnicima, špijunima i junacima

Vladimir Vauhnik: Among traitors, spies and heroes

Vladimir Vauhnik, a prominent Yugoslav officer and intelligence officer, came to Berlin in 1938. He will spend the next three years as a military attaché in the Yugoslav embassy during the mandate of Ivo Andrić. By creating an intelligence network in the territory of the Third Reich, he obtained a series of secret German military data, including plans to attack the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. At the same time, Wauchnik attends key historical events in Berlin. The Germans arrested him after April 6 and detained him in the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, after which he was sent to Zagreb with the task of organizing the work of the NDH army. Disgusted by Ustasha crimes, he takes the first opportunity and flees to Slovenia, where he and his associates found a secret intelligence organization. In the next three years, Vauhnik and a group of intelligence officers from all over Yugoslavia will deliver a lot of valuable information to the Western allies, primarily the British. Exhaustively describing all those years in his memoirs, Vauhnik creates an exceptional picture of the war years, talking about the center of Nazi evil, which he knew well, and about the Yugoslav conditions marked by great suffering, but also ideological conflicts that will determine the future. the fate of the country. This book also gives us the opportunity to reveal for the first time the structure of British intelligence in occupied Yugoslavia. The value of these memoirs is largely reflected in the detailed descriptions of the work of the intelligence service, especially during the occupation, but also in the overview of war strategies and operations. They are also a political chronicle of a terrible time combined with the story of the life of an extremely interesting man. And that of a man whose life paths crossed with an incredible number of personalities who marked the history of the twentieth century, not only in our region. Among these names are Ivo Andrić, Adolf Hitler, Prince Pavle Karađorđević, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Goering, Wilhelm Kanaris, Walter Šelenberg, Milan Stojadinović, Milan Nedić, Dušan Simović, Dragoljub Draža Mihailović, Herta Haas, the murderer of Rose Luxemburg, Zoran Mušić, a future Roman Catholic saint, the Ustasha elite, Chetnik and Partisan commanders, agents of the English intelligence service and the Gestapo.