Vladimir Vauhnik: The best spy of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia

Due to the youth of Crown Prince Peter, the regent of Yugoslavia was Prince Pavle Karađorđević, Prime Minister Dragiša Cvetković, Minister of Foreign Affairs Aleksandar Cincar-Marković, Ivo Andrić's predecessor as ambassador in Berlin. They led negotiations on Yugoslavia's accession to the Triple Pact established as an alliance of Germany, Italy and Japan. Before that, Hitler had made sure that Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria acceded to him.

Andrić only attended protocol events, he did not have access to the negotiations, nor, of course, did the military envoy of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in Berlin, Colonel Vladimir Vauhnik, but he knew everything thanks to his friendship with his Hungarian colleague, Colonel Homlok. He informed his Ministry of Defense and the General Staff through a special link that Prince Pavle and Cvetković seemed "very frightened", believed that joining the pact was the only way to maintain the existence of the state. The association of the charming Vauhnik with his colleagues and many prominent figures in Nazi Germany will also benefit him when he starts doing intelligence work from Ljubljana during the war. He remained especially close to the Swedish military envoy Juhlin Danfelt.

About the coup on March 27, 1941 due to Yugoslavia's accession to the Triple Pact, Vauhnik noted: "That day was the saddest day in my life, even more so because this accident was hidden by two of my comrades from the army." He announced which military formations, which aircraft squadrons attack Yugoslavia without declaring war on the exact day and hour, also information about the German "Barbarossa Plan", the attack on the Soviet Union, which will be postponed due to events in Belgrade.

Afterwards, during his intelligence work, he would often emphasize that he was trained as a general staff officer, that he should fight at the head of a corps, and not be a spy.

Prisoner of the Gestapo

As a diplomat of a defeated, torn country, he was returned to Belgrade only to be arrested there by the Gestapo and sent back to Berlin. If he is to be believed, he made good use of his military education during the numerous interrogations to which he was subjected: "Soon I no longer knew when I was a prisoner without any rights, at the mercy of the Gestapo, and when I was entering the role of a lecturer who teaches hollowheads about Gestapo." The Germans twisted it and announced that "...as a trusted friend, he made available to them very important information about the destructive activities of Soviet agents."

It was announced in Turkey and Switzerland that he was fighting on the Eastern Front as the commander of a German division, but he was actually sitting in solitary confinement in a Gestapo prison.

From time to time, one of Hitler's top security experts, Walter Schellenberg, invited Wauhnik more to collegial discussions than to a hearing. Schellenberg was the youngest SS general, head of the intelligence and counterintelligence department. Admittedly, already in December 1943 in Stockholm, he will have a meeting with Abram Hewitt, an agent of the American service OSS, which turned into the CIA. In his memoirs "In the Labyrinth of Espionage", he briefly mentions Vauhnik, who, as they found by intercepting his reports to Belgrade, accurately presented the data on the German production of war planes, which was presented to Hitler himself. The Führer was enraged and berated the counterintelligence agents for failing to prevent such leaks. Schellenberg claims that he was able to recruit Wauchnik into his service. It is difficult to say whether our officer skillfully managed to deceive the enemy or became a double agent.

A spy network with headquarters in Ljubljana    

However, he was released to Zagreb with the task of helping to organize the Ustasha army. He pretended that he agreed only to establish connections with many high-ranking Croatian officers and officials, which he would use when he founded an intelligence service in Ljubljana for the benefit of London. Pavelić's government appointed him colonel of the Home Guard, but he did not show up for duty, he never wore a Croatian uniform, he faked an illness so that he was finally allowed to go to Ljubljana for "treatment".

There he got a job in the sawmill of a distant relative as a scribe. The German and Italian intelligence services knew who he was, observed him, believed that he had "calmed down", and in front of their noses he wove a network of his collaborators across half of Europe.

The chapters of the book on the work of the BBZ are particularly interesting. BBZ was the name of Vauchnik's intelligence organization, but also his pseudonym. He invented that code by taking the initials of his name in Cyrillic BB and added Z as the first letter of Zagreb.

Perhaps nowhere has it been more precisely described how intelligence services should work in times of war, the difference between obtaining information legally through diplomats and illegally through espionage, as Wahnick did. He mentions some of his sources by their real names, first of all, A. A, Anta Anić, who before the war worked in the counter-intelligence service of the Yugoslav General Staff and who became an equal co-head of the BBZ, and then his cousin Melita Thaler from Zagreb, who was killed by the Germans towards the end war discovered and shot.

An enemy of both communists and fascists

Although he worked for the British, Vauhnik was often dissatisfied with Chechil's policy, criticizing him for "leaving" Draža Mihajlović in the lurch. He was most unhappy that the Western powers did not open a new front on the Yugoslav coast, but in France.

Vauchnik was equally an enemy of communists and fascists. In his texts it is clear that he is simply uncomfortable writing about the successes of the "insurgents", he does not like to say the word "partisan", he also writes about them as the "Third International", although Stalin called the "Third International", better known as the Comintern , dissolved on May 15, 1943.

Illegal spirits distillery and other tricks

One of Wauchnik's tricks was the construction of an underground distillery for the production of spirits and liqueurs, primarily whiskey and cognac. He bought cheap Slovenian wines and roasted them into a strong drink with his "machine", added some essence, poured his product into empty bottles of the original bottles. With that drink, he "paid" his couriers and informants, they gladly accepted them instead of German marks, and Wauchnik never had enough dollars. The recipients of the drink were not used to the taste of the original, so it was not difficult to fool them.

The most successful trick was performed by Wauchnik back in Berlin as a military envoy. The Gestapo followed him everywhere. He happened to meet a man, a traveling salesman, who looked a lot like him. He introduced himself to him, told him that he had a jealous wife, that the gentleman could help him, that with a decent reward, he could change places with him sometimes, take a ride in his car, go to the cinema, so that he could safely meet his lover. After they became close, Wauchnik hired him to fool the Gestapo. In the end, he even arranged a meeting of his doppelgänger with a Nazi agent at the mansion of a famous actor to find out what they would ask him, the doppelgänger was only supposed to listen and mutter: "Um, um... Yes, yes..." It worked.

Network of collaborators

BBZ had about 60 collaborators, 14 were discovered and killed, eight were sentenced to prison or sent to concentration camps. Wauchnik mourns that the dead insurgents, fighters against the occupiers, were celebrated as heroes after the war "...while our dead had to remain covered by a cloak of silence."

It is logical that if a craftsman like Wauchnik escaped arrest, on June 23, 1944, he managed to defect to Switzerland and report to the authorities there. In December 1947, he sailed to Argentina, died on March 30, 1955 in Buenos Aires and was buried there in the Xacarita cemetery. His brother Miloš managed to return his remains to his homeland, the great spy rests in the family tomb in Spodnji Jakobski Dol in the north-east of Slovenia.

Wauchnik concluded about his work during the war: "If at first the work irritated us, as time passed it became a pleasure for us." It eventually became a passion."

He started writing memoirs several times, and Vladimir Petrović studied all his published and some unpublished manuscripts and prepared them as one work published in the "Academic Book" in Novi Sad under the title "Among traitors, spies and heroes". Petrović is neither a political scientist nor an expert in military matters, the fact that he is a journalist and a successful author of short stories contributed to the freshness of the style in which he writes about General Staff Colonel Vladimir Vauhnik, the most successful spy from this area. This book is indispensable for experts, but also very interesting for lovers of crime and spy novels.