Summary
Vojislav Jovanović Marambo: Stolen history: Austrian looting of Yugoslav archives in the Second World War
When we know Orwell's saying "Who controls the past, controls the future", then the importance of archives and archival material becomes clearer, as well as how organized and ready our enemies were for anything. Among them are many names of distinguished university professors - Germans and Austrians - as well as writers, journalists and writers of various profiles, several former Austro-Hungarian generals and diplomats, as well as archive directors and officials. From this book we also learn that archival emissaries from Vienna and Berlin, in search of hidden documents from the Serbian court archives, subjected people to severe beatings, without even killing them. The basic motive for which the Austrians and Germans embarked on the organized looting of Serbian archives was of a political nature. Burdened with the responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War and all the suffering that resulted from it, they believed that they would find documents in the Serbian archives that would make Serbia and Russia, as well as their allies, responsible for the war and all its misfortunes, and that they would thereby remove responsibility for the enormous human sacrifices and material destruction.
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