Bosnian Serb Minister Taunts Overseer by Sending SS Helmet

Trade Minister Stasa Kosarac sent High Representative Christian Schmidt an SS helmet along with a letter calling him the 'embodiment of evil', escalating the Serb entity’s confrontation with Bosnia's international overseer.

Azem Kurtic, November 20, 2025

The SS helmet sent to the Office of the High Representative. Photo: Stasa Kosarac/Instagram

The Bosnian Minister of Foreign Trade and Economic Relations, Stasa Kosarac, sparked a scandal on Thursday by sending an insulting letter and a Nazi-era paramilitary SS unit helmet to Bosnia’s international peace overseer, the High Representative, Christian Schmidt, a German politician.

Kosarac, a member of Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik’s Alliance of Independent Social Democrats, SNSD, wrote on his Instagram account that he had “sent the occupier Schmidt the Nazi helmet, together with an accompanying ‘Letter to the Occupier’, in which I stated that it was not a gift but an heirloom of Schmidt’s ancestors, whose values this occupier upholds.”

The helmet had the markings of the SS unit from Nazi Germany. Kosarac did not explain how he obtained it.

Dodik and his associates have disputed Schmidt’s mandate in Bosnia and Herzegovina on the grounds that it was not approved by the United Nations Security Council and that he is therefore operating in the country illegally.

Kosarac said Schmidt’s “unconstitutional manipulations” had devastated democracy in Bosnia and had orchestrated a politically motivated trial of Dodik “in an attempt to weaken [the Bosnian Serb entity] Republika Srpska and nullify the free will of the Serb people in Bosnia and Herzegovina”.

A second-instance verdict in August sentenced Dodik to one year in prison with a six-year ban on holding the office of the Republika Srpska President for not complying with the decisions of the High Representative. Soon after, his presidential mandate was revoked.

Dodik and his coalition partners contested the verdict, calling for a boycott of early presidential elections. But in the end, Dodik accepted the verdict and opted to exchange his jail time for a monetary fine.

In the letter, Kosarac described Schmidt as “the embodiment of political evil and ill intent towards Republika Srpska” and suggested that he “faces a Nuremberg trial,” referring to the post–Second World War trials of former Nazi officials and collaborators. He also claimed Schmidt would “soon leave the country” and alleged that he came to Bosnia as an “illegal entrant.”

Neither the Office of the High Representative nor Kosarac replied to requests to comment by the time of publication.

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