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(en) The Internet Anti-Fascist: Sun, 24 May 98--2:32 (#116)
From
Paul Kneisel <tallpaul@nyct.net>
Date
Thu, 28 May 1998 23:40:19 -0400
________________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
http://www.ainfos.ca/
________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________
The Internet Anti-Fascist: Sunday, 24 May 98
Vol. 2, Number 32 (#116)
______________________________________________________________________
PART II: WHAT IS THE VATICAN HIDING?
The Vatican's Complicity in Genocide in Fascist Croatia:
The Suppressed Chapter of Holocaust History
by Barry Lituchy
10 May 1998
[special to The Internet Anti-Fascist]
The so-called Ustasha Minister of Education, Dr. Mile Budak, summarized
the racial policy of Croatia in a speech on July 22, 1941 in Gospic
when he said:
"The movement of the Ustashi is based on religion. For the
minorities Serbs, Jews and Gypsies, we have three million bullets.
We shall kill one part of the Serbs. We shall deport another, and
the rest of them will be forced to embrace the Roman Catholic
religion. Thus, our new Croatia will get rid of all Serbs in our
midst in order to become one hundred percent Catholic within ten
years."(32)
Meanwhile the foreign minister of fascist Croatia, Mladen Lorkovic,
sent instructions to his diplomats and to the world: "... the Croatian
people annihilate all foreign elements, which weaken its powers; those
foreign elements are the Serbs and the Jews."(33)
How committed was the Catholic Church in Croatia to this ideology and
its racial laws? As has been mentioned already, priests were among the
intellectual godfathers of Croatian fascism and racism. Whereas anti-
Serbian racism had roots deeply connected to the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, anti-Semitism in Yugoslavia was almost entirely the product of
Catholic propaganda after World War I. Official church publications in
Croatia like Catholic List frequently published condemnations of Jews
during the 1930's as being the source of communism, free-masonry,
abortions and immorality.(34) It should not be surprising therefore
that the man appointed to be President of Ustasha Central Propaganda
Office (equivalent to the position held by Goebbels in Germany) was
none other a priest, Father Grga Peinovic. To claim that the Catholic
Church simply adapted to the fascist regime would be a whitewash of
their long-standing promotion of racism. They were the very leaders
responsible for articulating this ideology to the people and for the
regime itself.
But there were considerable obstacles blocking the creation a pure
Croat-Catholic state. The most serious of these was the fact that
Croats did not even constitute a majority of the population in their
own state, just 3.3 million out of around 6.7 million people. There
were 2.2 million Serbs, 60,000 Jews, 700,000 Muslims, 70,000
Protestants, not to mention hundreds of thousands of Romas and other
minorities. The Ustasha solution was clear: kill as many Serbs, Jews
and Romas as quickly as possible --and then sort the rest out later.
The Ustasha regime wasted no time at all commencing upon their
systematic policy of racial extermination of all Serbs, Jews and Romas
shortly after coming to power. If we are to adjudge that the Holocaust
began with the first mass murders of entire peoples, then it is clear
that the Holocaust began in Croatia in April 1941. The earliest
punitive actions against Serbs are believed to have taken place on the
evening of April 13, 1941 in Ogulin where Pavelic stopped to make a
speech on his way to Zagreb from Italy.(34) Mass killings began in
earnest on April 28, 1941 as Ustasha military units were dispatched to
towns and villages all across the fascist state. Thousands of Serbian
men, women and children were rounded up and killed that day, their
property confiscated, in cities like Vukovar and villages like Gudovac,
Tuke, Brezovac, Kokochevac, Bolch. Throughout May and June hundreds of
towns and villages throughout the Croatian state underwent these same
terrorist operations in which Serbs, Jews and Romas were either
murdered on the spot or led away to
concentration camps. By the beginning of July nearly 200,000 people,
the vast majority of them Serbs, already were killed.(35) As Holocaust
historian Jonathan Steinberg has pointed out, the Ustashi pioneered the
methods of genocidal terror and extermination only later perfected by
the Nazi SS Einsatzgruppen another fact "conveniently" overlooked in
conventional Holocaust studies.(36)
The Ustasha operations were carried out with incredible acts of sadism
and torture. In some cases entire villages were axed to death, in
others men and women were hanged, crucified, burned to death or buried
alive, body parts mutilated, decapitated, infants impaled or hammered.
In the Orthodox church at Glina hundreds of Serbs were lured inside
only to be slaughtered. Nazi Wehrmacht units attached to the Ustasha
military were so impressed by the Ustashi's methods for carrying out
genocide that they established a commission to study the killings at
Bjelovar, exhume the bodies, take photographs and write a report, later
published under the title "Ustachenwerk bei Bjelovar."(37) However, the
top Nazi and Italian military authorities were concerned that they were
dealing with out of control psychopaths who would destabilize their own
regime, and thus Axis control of the Balkans. They were right. The Nazi
"Plenipotentiary" in Zagreb, General Edmund Glaise von Horstenau
reported back anxiously to Berlin in early June 1941 that "according to
reliable reports from countless German military and civil observers
during the last few weeks, in country and town, the Ustashi have gone
raging mad."(38)
As the noted historian of fascism Ernest Nolte has put it,
"Croatia became during the war a giant slaughterhouse." The operations
continued with only brief pauses throughout 1941 and 1942, then at a
slightly slower pace thereafter through 1945. No portion of territory
given to Ustasha rule was untouched by this terror. In those areas
where the Orthodox Serbs comprised a majority of the population, the
Ustashi committed the worst atrocities. Vast areas were emptied of
population and left a wasteland. Only a minority of those affected were
killed immediately, the rest were rounded up for deportation to death
camps.
Croatia became at this time, as Croatian historian Antun Miletic has
said, "a land of concentration camps." In order to execute the state's
racial laws, the Directorate for Public Security under Eugen Kvaternik
was ordered by Interior Minister Andrija Artukovic to create a series
of concentration camps throughout Croatia. From April to August 1941
Serbs, Jews, Romas and anti-fascists who were not killed outright were
relocated to collection camps, such as Danica, Kerestinec, Pag, Caprag,
Jadovno, Krushchica, Loborgrad, Gornja Rijeka, Djakovo, Tenj, Sisak,
Jastrebarsko and the Lepoglava Prison. Some of these, like Jadovno and
Djakovo were also major death camps. In other cases surviving inmates
were transported for extermination to the main concentration camp
system in Croatia which opened in August 1941, Jasenovac.
It was at Jasenovac that between 600,000 and 700,000 Serbs, at least
30,000 Romas and 25,000 Jews were systematically murdered between
August 1941 and April 1945. Of all of the death camps during the
Holocaust Jasenovac was the third largest overall in terms of victims.
In terms of size it was probably the largest, spread out over 240
square kilometers (150 sq. miles) and encompassing actually a series of
five major and three smaller "special" camps.(39) Jasenovac was
intended to serve as "the radical solution" to Croatia's racial problem
a factory of death. Indeed, it was built around a former brick factory.
Its first Commander was the notorious Maks Luburic, a man specifically
sent to the Third Reich for training at various Nazi concentration
camps prior to the opening of Jasenovac. Jasenovac holds a number of
ghastly distinctions for its cruelty. It possessed some of the largest
camps for women and children during the war - the names of some 20,000
children murdered there have been collected thus far. It was noted also
for its extreme brutality every known method of murder and torture was
employed there, as well as a few unknown anywhere else. There are very
few examples in human history that can compare with the scale of
murder, terror and barbarism conducted at Jasenovac. And yet it is not
even mentioned at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington DC Why?
The answer lies with the Catholic Church. What was the Church's
reaction to and role in all of this? How deeply involved in genocide in
fascist Croatia was the Catholic Church and the Vatican? In response to
the persecution of the Jews and Serbs the Croatian clergy rallied
around the regime and provided endless articles and pamphlets
justifying their extermination. Stepinac had the racial laws published
in his own publications. Writing in response to the publication of the
racial laws of April and May 1941 the Catholic weekly "Hrvatska
Strazha" in its editorial of May 11, 1941 welcomed the legislation as
necessary for "the survival and development of the Croatian nation."
"Defense from Judaism, from that destructive worm, was started by
the Fuhrer and Duce.... Our Poglavnik has also announced a
regulation on the protection and honor and blood, and we would add,
on the protection of the survival and development of the Croatian
nation, and with it the Poglavnik wants to prevent the dangerous
worm from eating away at the tree of our Croatian national life."40
Writing in response to new racial laws against the Jews the Archbishop
of Sarajevo Ivan Sharich declared: "There exists limits to love. The
movement for ridding the world of Jews is a movement for restoring
human dignity. All mighty God stands behind this movement." The
Catholic Bishops of Banja Luka and Djakovo made similar public
statements. The Croatian Academic Catholic Society also published a
brochure in 1941 entitled "Why Do They Persecute Jews In Germany?,"
explaining that Hitler was to be praised for eliminating the Jews
because he was defending the German people. Hitler was merely righting
the wrongs of the past.(41) By the time the Ustashi and Catholic Church
were done with their work they had killed approximately 30,000 of the
40,000 Jews living in the territories of the Independent State of
Croatia.(42)
Toward Serbs the rhetoric in favor racial extermination was even more
severe. The Franciscan Priest Shimich stated bluntly: "All Serbs must
be murdered within the shortest time. That is our program."(43) And the
actions of the Catholic clergy were not limited to words. Catholic
priests and members of orders were recruited into as many Ustasha
military commands as possible. As with the clerical fascist state, the
clerical fascist army was led by priests. Taking up arms as if in a
medieval crusade, the Catholic clergy were transformed, as Carlo
Falconi has said, "into thorough going butcher- leaders."(44) At the
very first punitive action against Serbs at Ogulin it was the parish
priest, Ivan Mikan, who addressed the Ustashi and said "Now there will
be some cleaning.... Scoot you dogs (Serbs) over the Drina."(45) It was
speeches such as these that gave the signal to launch massacres all
across the Independent State of Croatia. Sometimes priests gave less
than spiritual reasons for liquidating Serbs, such as Father Mate Mogus
in Udbina who told his congregation "Look, people, at these brave
Ustashi who have 16,000 bullets and who will kill 16,000 Serbs, after
which we will divide among us in a brotherly manner the fields.."
Meanwhile, Franciscan priests in dozens of villages attacked Serbian
and Roma settlements, tortured, killed and expropriated their victims.
Father Mogus explained in another sermon that "We Catholics until now
have worked for Catholicism with the cross and with the book of the
mass. The day has come however to work with the revolver and the
machine gun.(46) The Jesuit priest Dragutin Kamber, who was also the
Ustasha Commander for the district of Doboj, personally led numerous
raids and ordered the execution of 300 Serbs in Doboj. Father Peric of
the Gorica monastery participated in the massacres of 5,600 Serbs in
Livno. Father German Castimir, the Abbot of the Guntic monastery,
personally directed the massacres at Glina.(47)
The genocide of the Serbs was to be carried out in three ways:
extermination, deportation and forced conversion. There were simply too
many Serbs to kill them all. We have left this third part of the
genocide plan, forced conversion, for last because this phase of the
genocide was almost exclusively carried out by the Catholic Church
itself. At his trial for war crimes in 1986 Andrija Artukovic
emphasized that the management of forced conversions was entirely in
the hands of Archbishop Stepinac and the church leadership.(48) In June
1941 the Ustashi created an "Office of Religious Affairs" to handle the
conversion of Serbs to Catholicism. On July 18, 1941 the government
decreed that the Serbian Orthodox religion had ceased to exist. By
early September 1941 the government decreed the expropriation of all
Orthodox Church property. Across Croatia Priests were instructed to
inform the Serbian population that they had only one way out: become
Catholic or die. This was the ultimatum the Catholic clergy offered to
a lucky third of the Serbs in fascist Croatia.
The Ustashi kept particularly good records of this phase of genocide.
One of the reasons for this is that the Ustashi were so awfully proud
of their accomplishments in this regard, that they filmed dozens of
such forced conversions for Croatian newsreels. Another is that each
Catholic diocese published weekly and sometimes daily reports of new
conversions. Children were especially targeted for conversion,
especially orphans. No doubt, today there are tens of thousands of
people living in Croatia, if not more, who do not know that they had
Serbian or Jewish parents or grand-parents, nor what happened to them.
In a letter to the Vatican dated May 8, 1944 Stepinac informed the Holy
Father that to date 244,000 Orthodox Serbs had been "converted to the
Church of God."(49)
As the Serbs were marked for genocide, it was desired that no trace of
their cultural heritage should remain. 299 Orthodox churches were
destroyed. Some 300 Orthodox priests and five bishops were murdered. As
this was a clerical-fascist crusade, the Orthodox clergy were marked
for especially cruel torture, usually ending with the gouging out of
their eyes or other forms of bodily mutilation. In one case the eighty-
one year old Bishop of Banja Luka was shod like a horse and forced to
walk until he collapsed, at which point his heart was cut out and he
was set on fire. In Zagreb the Orthodox Bishop was tortured until he
went insane. Some 400 Orthodox priests were killed in concentration
camps.(50)
The Croatian Catholic clergy saw the rise of fascism as the beginning
of an international Catholic-fascist crusade that would convert the
world for Catholicism and the Papacy, as the following statement in
Katholicki Tjednik of August 31, 1941 makes clear. This was the time to
destroy the enemies of Catholicism: Communism, Judaism, Eastern
Orthodoxy.
"Until now, God spoke through papal encyclicals....And? They
closed their ears... Now God has decided to use other methods. He
will prepare missions. European missions. World missions. They will
be upheld, not by priests, but by army commanders, led by Hitler.
The sermons will be heard, with the help of cannons, machine guns,
tanks, and bombers. The language of these sermons will be
international."(51)
The clergy had to be ready to take on a military role if that was God's
will. Indeed, it had to be prepared for death and destruction. Perhaps
this explains the scale of the Catholic clergy's participation in
running concentration camps. The exact number of Catholic priests who
worked as commanders or guards at these camps in Croatia is unknown.
However, there is no question that there were hundreds, if not
thousands. In a surprising number of cases Catholic priests were named
commanders or staff officers of concentration camps. These appointments
were reported in the Catholic press during the war. Thus, we read in
Novi List in 1941 that Father Stepan Lukic was named camp adjutant of
the Zepce concentration camp, Priest Ante Djuric Commander of all camps
in the Drvar district, and Father Dragan Petranovic commander of the
camp in Ogulin. The active participation of clergy in running
concentration camps in Croatia was known by the German, Italian,
British and American intelligence services, as well as the Vatican. The
U.S. intelligence report of February 23, 1943 entitled "Massacres of
Serbs in Croatia" speaks bluntly of "the bloody hands of the Catholic
clergy in the camps."(52)
The scene of some of the most barbaric killings of all time was the
concentration camp complex known as Jasenovac. German, Italian, British
and American intelligence reports (as well as Croatian accounts)
suggest that between 600,000 and 700,000 were killed there. Aside from
intelligence reports, we have the testimony of survivors and of a few
of the perpetrators as to the crimes committed there by the Catholic
clergy. Testimony was collected by a Yugoslav War Crimes Commission and
obtained during the trials of various Ustashi. A key witness was the
parish priest of Jasenovac, Juraj Parshich, who along with survivors
testified to the barbaric murders committed at Jasenovac by numerous
priests, among whom the most infamous were Zvonko Brekalo, Pero Brzica,
Anzelmo Chulina, Father Brkljanic, and the Jesuits Zvonko Lipovac and
Father Cvitan. However, there was one priest who has carved out a
special place for himself in the annals of sadism, barbarism and
genocide. His name before the war was Vjekoslav Filipovich, a
Franciscan priest who some say was excommunicated. During the war he
went from wearing priestly robes to an Ustasha officer's uniform, and
bore the name Miroslav Majstorovich. He directed numerous actions
against Serbian villages in which he played a conspicuous part in the
killings. Before one such attack in the town of Drakulic he strangled a
Serbian baby in his hands. Then he went to Jasenovac where he served as
Commander for four months, from September 1942 to the beginning of
January 1943. At the War Crimes investigation prior to his trial,
Filipovich testified that during the four months of his command
"according to my own calculations between twenty and thirty thousand
were liquidated in the Jasenovac."(53)
It is beyond the scope of this author's comprehension to explain the
psycho- pathology of clerical-fascism. However, I do know that they
killed a million with clear consciences for their belief in God, the
Catholic Church and the Aryan race. This is nowhere more eloquently
expressed than in the comment made by Father Srecko Peric of the Gorica
Monastery who reassured his fellow Ustashi prior to a massacre by
saying: "Kill all Serbs. And when you finish come here, to the Church,
and I will confess you and free you from sin."(54) In other words, they
were not responsible for their actions for they killed in the name of
God, on behalf of God's vicar on earth, Pope Pius XII.
The Verdict: The Vatican is Guilty of Genocide
Today Pope John Paul II claims Pius XII was innocent, the Vatican was
innocent, the Church was innocent. For all these years it has kept its
archives closed, claiming it has nothing to hide. But we know
otherwise. Even without the Vatican's archives we have sufficient
evidence to find not only Pius XII, but Pope Paul VI (then Cardinal
Montini, Pius XII's closest advisor) and the entire Vatican guilty of
crimes of genocide. We cannot convict or punish them because the United
States is their protector today in the same way the Habsburg Empire
once was in centuries past. But we know enough of the details to reach
a verdict.
We know that the Vatican met with and supported the Ustashi before they
ever came to power. We know that on April 7, 1941, the day after the
Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia, the British Ambassador to the Vatican,
D'Arcy Osborne, implored the Pope to condemn the invasion, but that he
refused to do so.(55) We know that Pius XII met with and embraced
Pavelic on May 17, 1941, exactly one month to the day Pavelic arrived
in Zagreb to take power, and in the very weeks in which most of the
racial laws calling for a triple genocide of Serbs, Jews and Roma were
being issued.
We know the Pope also met with dozens of the Ustasha leadership and
blessed them all. Pavelic made another state visit in 1943, this one
more friendly and loving than the first, at which point his regime had
killed upwards of 400,000 people. No doubt, the Pope probably met with
Pavelic after the war too when he was a wanted war criminal hiding in
the Vatican before escaping with the Vatican's help to Argentina. The
Vatican cannot claim that it was too far removed from events in Croatia
or too poorly informed. Croatia was on the Italian border and Vatican
and Ustasha officials traveled regularly back and forth. The Vatican
had its ambassadorial Legate Ramiro Marcone in Zagreb throughout the
war and his Secretary Guiseppe Masucci who spoke Serbo- Croatian
fluently. Both of them visited concentration camps in Croatia and met
directly with those most responsible for the Holocaust there:
Artukovic, Kvartnik, etc. Meanwhile, the Italian military and
government officials in Zagreb were protesting the Ustashi's massacres
and the Italian press was writing about them regularly. We also have
dozens of acknowledgments of receipt from the Vatican of detailed
descriptions of the Holocaust in Croatia, including those from the very
few Croatian clergy who actually did protest the genocides, like the
Bishop of Mostar. His protest is incriminating on several levels: on
one it shows that Pius XII knew exactly what was going on; secondly, it
shows that clergy could oppose the Holocaust if they wanted to and not
be punished, though almost all supported it; thirdly, it offers a
sickening justification for stopping the killings, namely that more
Serbs and Jews would convert to Catholicism.(56)
We know that the Vatican was very enthusiastic about the thousands of
forced conversions of persecuted people who converted to Catholicism in
order to stay alive and that the Vatican sent notes of encouragement to
the Croatian clergy, though warning them that they should not accept
conversions of adults who were not sincere. We know that the Pope
personally met with Archbishop Stepinac in May 1943 to discuss the
persecution of the Jews. This is in the report of the Ustasha
ambassador to the Vatican, Lobkowicz, to the Croatian Foreign Ministry
where it is explained that Stepinac "spoke very much ...about the crime
of abortion, which was very well received in the Vatican. On the basis
of these laws the archbishop partly also justified the treatment of the
Jews, who were the greatest advocates and the most frequent
perpetrators of such crimes."(57) We know from his diary that Stepinac
was an arch
anti-Semite. And we know how staunchly Pius XII defended Stepinac after
the war, even after his trial and conviction for war crimes in 1946,
rewarding him with the robes of a Cardinal, calling him a martyr.
Indeed, every Pope since Pius XII has called Stepinac a martyr
including the current Pope who hints at Stepinac's beatification, and
who has worshipped at his tomb. John Paul II will travel once again to
Croatia this October to celebrate the Ustasha clergy. But the only real
martyrs were those who died at the hands of the Catholic gangsters.
Pius XII and Stepinac as far as we know never personally murdered
anyone, but what they did was far worse than any single murder: they
supported a triple genocide of Serbs, Jews and Romas in fascist Croatia
that cost a million lives.
We know that the Vatican aided in the escape of thousands of war
criminals from Croatia and all other parts of Yugoslavia. Although
Vatican representatives and Stepinac's representatives visited
Jasenovac several times, they did nothing to rescue the victims.
However, when it was the turn of the fascists to face defeat and
punishment at the end of the war, the Vatican stepped forward to rescue
every single one of the millions of fascists it could, funneling tens
of thousands of fascists from Austrian POW camps to the Vatican with
false International Red Cross identity papers and the like. As early as
1943 the Vatican intervened with Allied military leaders on behalf of
Nazi and other fascist POWs in Italy "to exercise that mission of
charity proper to the Church." Where was that mission of charity proper
to the Church for the one million Serbs, Jews and Romas killed by the
Church's Catholic-fascist gangsters!?(58)
It is interesting to note that the Vatican ratlines, organized by the
Vatican and Croatian-Ustasha clergy, would probably have never become
widely known if not for the discovery and trial of Klaus Barbie who
escaped through them. Because of the Barbie trial, slowly the truth
about the ratlines emerged.(59) And so too did the protection by the
Vatican and U.S. and British intelligence of thousands of war criminals
involved in crimes of genocide in Croatia and Serbia emerge, hidden for
the entirety of the Cold War. They were hidden for two reasons: because
the United States and its imperialist allies were committed to the
destruction of socialist Yugoslavia and therefore did all they could to
prevent the extradition for trial of any of them; and secondly because
of the importance of the Catholic Church to the West in the Cold War.
Indeed, this is why a war criminal could become Secretary General of
the United Nations: had Kurt Waldheim committed his crimes of genocide
in a non-Communist country he at least would have been exposed after
the war, if not also punished. Such is the human rights record of the
United States and Britain concerning crimes of genocide. But should not
we who do oppose fascism and do seek justice for its victims be at
least as vigilant in pursuing these criminals as the Vatican has been
vigilant in protecting them?
Incredibly, details now are even leaking out of the Vatican's stealing
of plundered property of murdered Serbs, Jews and Romas in Croatia.(60)
This story emerged in June 1997 when a memo dated October 21, 1946
written by OSS agent Emerson Bigelow was discovered in the U.S.
Treasury Department's archives stating that the Vatican was holding
around $170 million worth of Ustasha gold plundered from Holocaust
victims in Croatia. President Clinton personally promised a full State
Department investigation and report that was to be issued in December,
then January, then February, then March.... Clinton will never keep his
promise because the Vatican is not only hiding the fact that it stole
the property of the people it murdered, but that it shared the loot
with America's allies, like Argentina, who were paid off to accept Nazi
and Ustashi war criminals. Besides, the American government will never
assist in the payment of war reparations to Serbs, or even Yugoslav
Jews and Romas. America is currently in an undeclared war with the
Serbs and with Yugoslavia. And who would pay?
This brings us back to the question with which we began: What is the
Vatican hiding? Obviously, quite a lot. One might say that the answer
is "simply" complicity in the murders of tens of millions of Jews,
Serbs, Romas, Russians and others during the Holocaust. But this would
not be sufficient, for the true answer goes far beyond this. The full
answer to this question is that the Vatican is hiding its true
historical identity and legacy, an identity that, were it to be widely
recognized by historians, would bring the entire edifice of the
Catholic Church crashing down. Indeed, the answer to this question is
one that historians are not yet ready to acknowledge, for when one
considers the crimes of the Vatican during the Holocaust alongside
those committed during the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Counter-
Reformation, and through thousands of years of anti-Jewish, anti-
science, anti-democratic and anti-labor hatred, then what one must
recognize is that it was not in Hitler's Nazi Reich nor in Stalin's
gulags that the worst crimes against humanity of torture, oppression
and murder in all of history were committed. Rather, that dubious
distinction belongs to none other than the Roman Catholic Church and
its "infallible" leaders, the Papacy, the most criminal institution the
world has ever known.
- - - - -
ENDNOTES
32. Kostic, p. 272.
33. Ibid., p. 80.
34. Manhattan, p. 62.
35. This figure was cited by several German intelligence reports
compiled by Abwehrand other Nazi officers in Croatia in July 1941.
Quoted in Kostic, pp. 36-37. Carlo Falconi, who had extensive and
perhaps better access to archival materials than most historians,
argues that by July 1941 350,000 people had been killed by the Ustashi,
Falconi, p. 291.
36. Jonathan Steinberg, "The Roman Catholic Church and Genocide in
Croatia, 1941-1945," unpublished essay marking the fiftieth anniversary
of the Wannsee Conference, January 1992.
37. Manhattan, p. 52.
38. Jonathan Steinberg, All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust,
1941-1943,(New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 57.
39. German, Italian and Croatian primary sources collectively support
these numbers as base figures. The works by Kostic and Bulajic cited
above provide abundant information on and from these sources. The Roma
historian Dragljub Ackovic argues that the number of Roma victims was
much higher in Dragoljub Ackovic, Roma Suffering in Jasenovac Camp,
(Belgrade: Struchna, 1995). The names of the camps (logors) within
Jasenovac were Versajev, Krapije, Ciglana, Kozhara, Stara Gradishka,
Ciganski (Gypsy), Mlaka, and Jablanac. The current regime in Croatia
today carries on a constant propaganda war of denial about Jasenovac
and has desecrated the site itself.
The Tudjman regime to date has not acknowledged that crimes of genocide
were even committed by fascist Croatia during World War II and holds to
the view that it represented a positive chapter in Croatian history.
40. Bulajic, pp. 129-130.
41. Ibid.
42. The Independent State of Croatia comprised the provinces of
Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Srem, and Slavonia. In these territories
there were about 40,000 Jews, out of a total of 82,242 in pre-war
Yugoslavia. About 35,000 Yugoslav Jews from other parts of Yugoslavia
which were under German, Italian, Bulgarian, Albanian and Hungarian
rule, died, most of them in German death camps. Thus, altogether 65,525
Yugoslav Jews were killed.
43. Kostic, p. 80.
44. Falconi, p. 298.
45. Bulajic, p. 73.
46. Manhattan, pp. 61-67.
47. Ibid., p. 102.
48. Bulajic, p. 88. Bulajic was present at the trial.
49. Ibid., p. 99.
50. Falconi, pp. 287-293.
51. Manhattan, p. 83.
52. Bulajic, pp. 159-161.
53. Bulajic, pp. 148-161; Falconi, pp. 297-298.
54. Manhattan, p. 68.
55. Bulajic, p. 100.
56. Falconi, p. 294.
57. Bulajic, p. 115.
58. Aarons and Loftus, pp. 35-36.
59. The best account is Christopher Simpson's Blowback, (New York:
Collier, 1988).
60. See "A Vow of Silence. Did Gold Stolen by Croatian Fascists Reach
the Vatican?," U.S. News & World Report, March 30, 1998. The Bigelow
document is listed as PG 226, Entry 183, Box 29, (copy in possession of
the author).
_____________________________________________________________________
FASCISM:
We have no ethical right to forgive, no historical right to forget.
(No permission required for noncommercial reproduction)
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