Dimitrovac – Newspaper of the Dimitrov Battalion

Dimitrovac was the multilingual newspaper of the Dimitrov Battalion, formed in January 1937 and assigned to the XV International Brigade under the command of the veteran Croatian communist Vladimir Ćopić. Along with the Djaković (Đaković) Battalion (part of the XII IB), the Dimitrov Battalion consisted primarily of Yugoslav volunteers along with Bulgarians, Czechs, Romanians, and Greeks. Published in Madrid, the newspaper carried numerous articles about political developments in Spain and Yugoslavia, reports from the battlefield, and biographies of fallen volunteers. A particularly interesting article was about the formation of the Matija Gubec Company, named after the leader of 16th century peasant uprising in Croatia. Naming the unit after Gubec served a useful propaganda purpose as a symbol which could be accepted by even non-communist Croats, but more practically the unit’s involvement in numerous crucial battles in the Spanish Civil War provided invaluable combat experience for future Croatian and other Yugoslav Partisan leaders such as Ivan Gošnjak, Peko Dapčević, and Kosta Nađ. 

The total number of Yugoslavs in Spain is difficult to calculate precisely because of the conspiratorial nature of getting into the country, the incomplete records of the Republican army, and various pseudonyms used by the volunteers. French historian Herve Lemesle compiled the most comprehensive database of Yugoslavs in the Spanish Civil War, which provides information on 1,995 volunteers who fought on the Republican side. Based on the existing data, it is possible to calculate that just under half of the Yugoslav contingent was born in present-day Croatia. When analyzing the nationality of the volunteers, the greatest number (also just under half) were Croats, followed by Slovenes and Serbs. According to the available statistics, many of the volunteers arrived in Spain during the first year of the war; of the 1,185 volunteers whose date of arrival is known, nearly 800 (or 67 percent) arrived in Spain by July 1937. While the majority of Yugoslavs were part of the Dimitrov or Djaković Battalions (later combined into the 129th International Brigade), many were part of other national units (such as the Balkan Company of the Dombrowski Battalion (XI IB) or the Canadian Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion) as well as the medical corps and intelligence services (SIM). The Dimitrovac newspaper gives us insight into the lives of soldiers in the trenches during the war, and efforts by the Yugoslav communist leadership in keeping the volunteers informed and ideologically focused. 

Like the International Brigades in general, Yugoslav units suffered high casualty rates, especially among officers, although they were higher than most other national groups. It has been estimated that approximately half of the Yugoslav volunteers were killed in Spain, compared to 16.7 percent killed for all the International Brigades, while another three hundred were wounded.