88 World War Two and the Partisan Struggle
for Hebrang, after his release from Sremska Mitrovica prison in 1941, had
become one of the leaders of the Communist Party in Croatia and, as such, was
in contact with all the most important personalities of the National Liberation
Movement. During a clash with the police, he was seriously wounded in his
right eye and admitted to the hospital. Released from hospital, he was sent to
jail, where he found himself in the hands of those who, only a short while before,
had been his cellmates and with whom he had planned a common fight against
the hated Belgrade regime. Because they respected him, the Ustaša leaders,
according to his account, did not torture him (according to other sources, he
was tortured violently). In any case, on 20 July 1942, he revealed Tito’s identity,
until then unknown to the occupiers, confessing that his name was Josip Broz.
As the British historian William Deakin writes, Eugen Kvaternik, the interior
minister of NDH, immediately informed Pavelić and together with the Ger-
mans they began plotting an audacious project: to infiltrate the CC CPY with
their undercover agent. Hebrang was an ideal candidate, since he did not hide
from his jailers his Croat patriotism or his critical attitude toward Tito’s Com-
munist Party, which was too “Yugoslav” for his taste. It is important to add,
however, that Vladimir Velebit did not believe the story of Hebrang’s treachery.
If it were true, he wrote, “the police would have arrested both me and Kopinič,
since we were both linked to the Comintern radio station. Hebrang was one of
the few who knew about this activity.”^211
The right moment to establish a link between the Ustaša-German and the
Partisan camps came on 3 August 1942, when Tito’s units occupied the town of
Livno in western Bosnia, valuable because of its bauxite mines (bauxite is an
aluminum ore used almost exclusively in the military industry). They took pris-
oner, among others, a German technician named Hans Ott who worked for
the Hansa Leichtmetall mining company, but who was also an agent of the
German secret services.^212 When, after heavy fighting, the Partisans entered
Livno, Ott lost no time in offering himself as a go-between with the Germans
in order to arrange an exchange of prisoners. In mid-August he went to Zagreb
where he started negotiations, moving in the next weeks between the Partisan
Supreme Staff and the Croat capital. His most important interlocutors were
Edmund Glaise von Horstenau, the Plenipotentiary General of the Wehr-
macht in Croatia, and Siegfried Kasche, the ambassador of the Third Reich to
Pavelić’s government.^213
After long negotiations, Andrija Hebrang was freed from the infamous
Stara Gradiška concentration camp on 23 September 1942 with thirty other
comrades in exchange for two Ustaša officers. Once in Partisan territory, he was
neither “interrogated” by a special Party Commission, as would have been usual,
nor debriefed about his experience in prison, but automatically reinstalled in