Co-editors: Seán Mac Mathúna • John Heathcote
Consulting editor: Themistocles Hoetis
Field Correspondent: Allen Hougland
What
are the charges against Archbishop
Stepinac? A
vow of silence: Did gold stolen by Croatian fascists reach
the Vatican?
The
Real Genocide in Yugoslavia: "Independent" Croatia of 1941
Revisited by Srdja Trifkovic During the
Second World War in Yugoslavia, Catholic priests and Muslim
clerics were willing accomplices in the genocide of the
nations Serbian, Jewish and Roma population. From 1941 until
1945, the Nazi-installed regime of Ante Pavelic in Croatia
carried out some of the most horrific crimes of the
Holocaust (known as the Porajmos by the Roma), killing over
800,000 Yugoslav citizens - 750,000 Serbs, 60,000 Jews and
26,000 Roma. In these crimes, the Croatian Ustasha
and Muslim fundamentalists were openly supported by the
Vatican, the Archbishop of Zagreb Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac
(1898-1960), and the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem,
Hajj
Amin al-Husseini.
Many of the victims of the Pavelic regime in Croatia were
killed in the war's third largest death camp - Jasenovac,
where over 200,000 people - mainly Orthodox Serbs met their
deaths. Some 240,000 were "rebaptized" into the Catholic
faith by fundamentalist Clerics in "the Catholic Kingdom of
Croatia" as part of the policy to "kill a third, deport a
third, convert a third" of Yugoslavia's Serbs, Jews and Roma
in wartime Bosnia and Croatia (The Yugoslav Auschwitz
and the Vatican, Vladimar Dedijer, Anriman-Verlag,
Freiburg, Germany, 1988). On April 6th
1941, Nazi Germany invaded Yugoslavia. By April 10th,
Croatian fascists led by Ante Pavelic were allowed by Hitler
and his ally Mussolini to set up a "independent" puppet
state of Croatia. Hitler granted "Aryan" status to Croatia
as his fascist allies carved up Yugoslavia. Pavelic had been
awaiting these developments whilst under the auspices of
Mussolini in Italy who had granted them the use of remote
training camps on a Aeolian island and access to a
propaganda station Radio Bari for broadcasts across the
Adriatic. As soon as the new fascist state of Croatia was
born, and campaign of cold-blooded terror began, as noted by
John Cornwell in his book Hitler's Pope: The Secret
History of Pius XII (Viking, London, UK,
1999): Furthermore, as
Cornwell notes, Pius XII had not only "warmly endorsed"
Croat nationalism, he had, before the war in November 1939,
described the Croats in a speech as an "the outpost of
Christianity" of whom "the hope of a better future seems to
be smiling on you". Pavelic and Pope Puis XII "frequently
exchanged cordial telegrams" according to Dedijer, one on
New Year's Day 1943, saw the Pope give his blessing to
Pavelic: On April 25th
1941, following his seizure of power, Pavelic decreed that
all publications, private and public, of the Cyrillic script
was banned. In May 1941, anti-Semitic legislation was
passed, defining Jews in racist terms, preventing them from
marrying "Aryans". One month later all Serb Orthodox primary
and preschools were closed. As soon as Pavelic had taken
power, the Catholic Church in Croatia began compelling
Orthodox Serbs to convert to the Catholic religion. But this
was, as pointed out by Cornwell, a highly-selective policy:
the fascists had no intention of allowing Orthodox priests
or members of the Serb intelligentsia into the religion -
they were to be exterminated along with their families.
However, for those Serbs who were forced to convert, there
was no immunity or protection from the Catholic church when
the "crazed bloodletting" of the Ustashe began, as indicated
by the speech made by the Croatian Nazi Mile Budak, who was
a Minister in the Ustasha regime in Gospic, Bosnia during
July 1941: Budak was
talking about something that had already started: In an
example of savage butchery carried out in the village of
Glina on May 14th 1941, hundreds of Serbs were brought to a
church to attend an obligatory service of thanksgiving for
the fascist state of Croatia. Once the Serbs were inside,
the Ustashe entered the Church armed only with axes and
knives. They asked all present to produce their certificates
of conversion to Catholicism - but only two had the required
documents, and they were released. The doors of the church
were locked and the rest slaughtered. Like with the
Jews, who had to wear the Star of David in public, the Serbs
were forced to wear a blue band with the letter "P" (i.e.,
Orthodox) on their sleeve. The Nazi regime decreed that the
Roma were to be "treated as Jews" and they were forced to
wear yellow armbands. (A History of the Gypsies of
Eastern Europe and Russia, David M. Crowe, St.
Martin's Griffin, New York, USA, 1994). When the Nazi's
installed the puppet Ustashi regime in May 1941, Stepinac
immediately offered his congratulations to Pavelic, and held
a banquet to celebrate the founding of the new nation. After
the opening of the Ustasha Parliament, Pavelic attended
Zagreb cathedral, where Stepinac offered special prayers for
Pavelic and ordered a solemn "Te Deum" to be sung in thanks
to God for the establishment of the new regime. In May 1941,
Stepinac also arranged to have Pavelic received personally
by Pope Pius XII in Rome in the Vatican, where on the same
occasion, he signed a treaty with Mussolini. Once Pavelic
was in power, Stepinac issued a Pastoral Letter ordering the
Croatian clergy to support the new Ustasha State. Stepinac
alter recorded in his diary on 3rd August 1941 that "the
Holy See (the Vatican) recognized de facto the independent
State of Croatia". In the same year, Stepinac himself
declared: The involvement
of Catholic clergy either in active participation or in
blessing the Ustashi involvement in the Holocaust is
well-documented. Stepinac himself headed the committee which
was responsible for forcible "conversions" to Roman
Catholicism under threat of death, and was also the Supreme
Military Apostolic Vicar of the Ustashi Army, which effected
the slaughter of those who failed to convert. Stepinac was
known as the 'Father Confessor' to the Ustashi and
continually bestowed the blessing of Catholic Church upon
its members and actions. Right from the
very beginning, the Vatican knew what was happening in
Croatia, and certainly known to Pius XII when he greeted
Pavelic in Vatican - jus four days after the massacre at
Glina. On this visit, Pavelic had a "devotional" audience
with Pius XII, and the Vatican granted de-facto recognition
of fascist Croatia as a "bastion against communism" -
despite the fact that the Vatican still had diplomatic ties
with Yugoslavia. Cornwell observes that right from the start
it was known that Pavelic was a "totalitarian dictator", a
"puppet of Hitler and Mussolini", that he had passed racist
and anti-Semitic laws, and that he was "bent on enforced
conversions from Orthodox to Catholic Christianity".
Effectively, on behalf of Hitler and Mussolini, the Pope was
"holding Pavelic's hand and bestowing his papal blessing" to
the new puppet state of Croatia. Thus, it can argued, that
the Catholic Cardinals in the Vatican were accomplices of
the Holocaust in Yugoslavia and the extermination of the
countries Jews, Serbs and Roma citizens. Indeed, many of
members of Croatian Catholic clergy took a "leading part" in
the Holocaust. One leading
member of the Catholic church in Croatia was the Nazi
collaborator Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac.
When he met Pavelic on
April 16th 1941, he later noted that he had promised that he
would "not show tolerance" to the Orthodox Serbian church -
which gave Stepinac the impression that Pavelic "was a
sincere Catholic". By June 1941, when German army units were
reporting that the "Ustashe have gone raging mad" killing
Serbs, Jews and Roma, Catholic priests, notably Franciscans
took a leading part in the massacres, as pointed out by
Cornwell: It is clear now, that other
members of the Catholic Cardinals in Europe also knew about
the massacres. On March 6th 1942, a French Cardinal
Eugène Tisserant, a close confident of the Pope to
the Croatian representative to the Vatican: The Catholic Church took full
advantage of Yugoslavia's defeat in 1941 to increase the
power and outreach of Catholicism in the Balkans - Stepinac
had shown contempt for religious freedom in way that even
Cornwell says was "tantamount to complicity with the
violence" against Yugoslavia's Jews, Serbs and Roma. For his
part, the Pope "was never but benevolent" to the leaders and
representatives of fascist Croatia - in July 1941 he greeted
a hundred members of the Croatian police force headed by the
Zagreb chief of police; in February 1942, he gave gave an
audience for Ustashe youth group visiting Rome, and he also
greeted another representation of Ustashe youth in December
of that year. The Pope showed his true colours when in 1943
he told a Croatian papal representative that he
was: Stepinac for one, appears to
have been a full supporter of forced conversions - along
with many of his bishops, one of whom described the advent
of fascist Croatia as "a good occasion for us to help
Croatia save the countless souls" - i.e., Yugoslavia's
non-Catholic majority. Throughout the war, Croatian bishops
not only endorsed forced conversions, they never, at any
point, dissociated themselves from Pavelic's regime, let
alone denounce it or threaten to excommunicate him or any
other senior member of the regime. In fact, before
Yugoslavia was invaded, Stepinac had told Regent Prince Paul
of Yugoslavia in April 1940: The Pope was better informed of
the situation inside Yugoslavia than he was about any other
area of Europe. His apostolic delegate, Marcone, was a
regular visitor to Croatia, travelling on military planes
between Rome and Zagreb. Cornwell describes Marcone - who
was the Popes personal representative in Croatia - as "an
amateur who appeared to sleepwalk through the entire
bloodthirsty era" (p 257). The Vatican would also have
been aware of frequent BBC broadcasts on Croatia, of which
the following (which were monitored by the Vatican State),
on February 16th 1942, was typical: And, according to
to
Dedijer: Many
Roman Catholic priests served the Ustasha state in high
positions. The pope appointed the highest military vicar
for Croatia. The latter had a field chaplain in every
unit of the Ustasha army. The task of this field chaplain
consisted among other things of repeatedly goading the
Ustasha units in their mass murders of the peasant
population. High dignitaries of the Roman Catholic Church
and of the Ustasha state together organized the mass
conversion of the Orthodox Serbian population. Hundreds
of Orthodox churches in Serbia were plundered and
destroyed; the three highest dignitaries and two hundred
clerics were murdered in cold blood; the remainder of the
clergy were driven into exile. In the concentration camp
of Jasenovac, hundreds of thousands of Serbs were
murdered under the command of Roman Catholic
priests. The papal
emissary Marcone was in Croatia during this entire time.
He sanctioned silently all the gory deeds and permitted
pictures of himself with Pavelic and the German
commanders to be published in the newspapers. After the
visit to Pope Pius XII, Ante Pavelic exchanged Christmas
and New Year's greetings with him that were published in
the Ustasha press. The Catholic
Church was not only closely involved with the Ustasha
movement in wartime Croatia, it helped many Nazi war
criminals escape at the end of the war, including Ante
Pavelic, who fled to Argentina via the Vatican and the
"ratlines" of the Vatican. In mid-year 1986 the U.S.
government released documents of their counter-espionage
agency, the OSS. These reveal that the Vatican had organized
a safe-flight route from Europe to Argentina for Pavelic and
two hundred of his advisors known by name. The fascists hid
frequently during their flight in cloisters and in many
instances disguised themselves as Franciscan monks (Pavelic
himself escaped disguised as a Catholic priest). Also, at the
end of the war, the Ustashe looted some $80 million from
Yugoslavia, much of which was composed of gold coins. Here
again, they had the total collaboration of Vatican, which
according to Cornwell included not only hospitality of a
pontifical Croatian religious institution (the College of
San Girolamo degli Illirici in Rome), but also provision of
storage facilities and safe-deposit services for the Ustashe
treasury. During the war, the College of San Girolamo became
a home for Croatian priests receiving Vatican-sponsored
theological education - after the war, it became the
headquarters for the postwar Ustashe underground, providing
Croatian war criminals with escape routes to Latin America.
A leading
figure at the College of San Girolamo was the Croatian
priest and Nazi war criminal Father Krunoslav Draganavic -
described once by U.S. intelligence officials as Pavelic's
"alter ego". His arrival in Rome in 1943 was to coordinate
Italian-Ustashe activities, and after the war, he was a
central figure in the organising escape routes for Nazi's to
Argentina. It was later claimed that members of the CIA had
said that he had been allowed to store the archives of the
Croatian legation inside the Vatican, as well as valuables
brought out of Yugoslavia by fleeing Ustashe in 1945.
The most famous
Nazi mass-murderer who passed through the College of San
Girolamo was Klaus Barbie, known as the Butcher of Lyons,
the Gestapo police chief in that French city between 1942
and 1944, who had tortured and murdered Jews and members of
the French resistance. Barbie lived under Draganavic's
protection at San Girolamo from early 1946 until late 1947,
when the US Counter Intelligence Corp helped him escape to
Latin America. Another Nazi war criminal, Franz Stangl, the
commandant of the Treblinka death camp was assisted with
false papers and hiding places in Rome by the Nazi
sympathizer Bishop Alois Hudal. Draganavic was expelled from
San Girolamo a few days after Pope Pius XII death in October
1958. While it may be
true that individual Catholics risked their lives to save
the Jews, Roma and Serbs from the Holocaust, the Catholic
Church, as an entity, did not. The Vatican also assisted
thousands of Nazi war criminals such as Adolph Eichmann,
Franz Stangl (the commandant of Treblinka), Walter Rauf (the
inventor of the "mobile" gas chamber), and Klaus Barbie (the
"Butcher of Lyons"). Pope Pius XII personally authorized the
smuggling of Nazi war criminals, which was directed by his
political advisor Giovanni Montini (who later became Pope
Paul VI). Shortly before his death in Madrid in
1959, Pope John XXIII granted Pavelic his special blessing.
On his death bed, Pavelic held a wreath that was a personal
gift from Pope Pius XII from the year 1941. After the war
Stepinac was arrested by the Yugoslav government and
sentenced to 17 years in prison for war crimes. A parade of
prosecution witnesses at his trial in Zagreb testified on
October 5, 1946, that Catholic priests armed with pistols
went out to convert Orthodox Serbs and massacred them. In
one instance, one witness said 650 Serbs were taken into a
church under false pretenses, and then were stabbed and
beaten to death by Ustashi members after the doors were
locked. Stepinac was convicted on all principal counts of
aiding the Axis, the Nazi puppet of Ante Pavelic, and of
glorifying the Ustashi in the Catholic press, pastoral
letters, and speeches. He eventually died under house arrest
in 1960 after being sentenced to life imprisonment for
collaboration by the postwar communist government in
Yugoslavia. The
Investigation by the Yugoslav War Crimes Commission
established that Stepinac had played a leading part in the
conspiracy that led to the conquest and breakdown of the
Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1941. It was furthermore
established that he had played a role in governing the Nazi
puppet state of Croatia, that many members of his clergy
participated actively in atrocities and mass murders, and,
finally, that they collaborated with the enemy down to the
last day of the Nazi rule, and continued after the
liberation to conspire against the newly created Federal
Peoples Republic of Yugoslavia. Stepinac only
served a few years in prison because of the Vatican's
anti-Communist propaganda of the "suffering martyr" and
their organizing of "Cardinal Stepinac Associations" which
lobbied for his release. Jews and Serbs
say that Stepinac was a Nazi collaborator. Catholic
supporters claim he initially backed the regime, but later
withdrew his support because of the mass executions and
forced conversions of Orthodox Christians to Catholicism -
although little credible evidence is presented of
this. Archbishop
Stepinac was beatified by Pope John Paul II in Croatia on
October 1998. Following the
countries succession from Yugoslavia in 1991,
the
ultra-Nationlist Tudjman regime in Croatia renamed a village
in Krajina
after him. The late
President Tudjman himself is on record as having said that
he is "proud that his wife has no Jewish or Serbian blood in
her". Ironically, unlike Pavelic himself, whose wife seems
to have been Jewish (Pavelic's mother-in law, Ivana Herzfeld
was said to be was Jewish) Like the French Nazi Jean-Marie
Le Pen (who described the Holocaust as a "mere detail of
history"), Tudjman also become a Holocaust revisionist. In
his book Wastelands of History, he questioned the
truth behind the Holocaust and moved to cover up the role of
Ustashe regime in the darkest period of Croatia's
history. Worse, Tudjman rehabilitated fascist war criminals
and gave them medals, and, as in the case of Stepinac, had
streets named after them. On two occasions in 1970 and
1994, attempts were made to the Yad Vashem Holocaust to get
Stepinac added to the "List of the Righteous" - which
includes people like Oskar Schindler, but this was turned
down. Interestingly, the request was sent by private Jewish
citizens from Croatia and not the official Jewish
organization in Croatia, which has never sent such a request
Explaining the refusal, an official of the Yad Vashem
explained that: The Franciscan
order has always denied the evidence of its wartime ties to
the Ustasha regime in Croatia. They acted as facilitators
and middlemen in moving the contents of the Ustasha Treasury
from Croatia to Austria, Italy and finally South America
after the war. During the Nazi occupation of Bosnia, the
Franciscans were closely involved with the Ustashe regime.
Not far from Medjugorje in Bosnia (where the Virgin Mary is
said to put in nightly appearances for the tens of thousands
of Roman Catholic pilgrims), is the Franciscan monastery at
Sirkoi Brijeg which has become the centre of allegations
linking it to disappearance of the Ustashe treasury after
the war. In San
Francisco Federal Court in November 1999, in what was
described as "tangible proof" of the Nazi Franciscan
connection, was obtained when cameramen working for Phillip
Kronzer (who has helped expose the Medjugorje myth) obtained
entry to the Monastery and filmed a secret shrine honouring
the Ustashe. A plaque dedicated to Franciscan monks who were
Ustasha members was filmed along with a massive shrine
lining the walls complete with photographs of Ustasha
soldiers some in Nazi uniforms. The admonition, "Recognize
us, We are yours" can clearly be seen in the video footage.
On a later visit to the monastery the shrine had been
dismantled but the videotape preserved the evidence and has
now been made available by the Kronzer Foundation.
A Freedom of
Information Act lawsuit was filed in August 2000 in San
Francisco, USA by California attorneys Jonathan Levy and Tom
Easton against the U.S. Army and the CIA. Easton and Levy
are also pursuing a Holocaust era lawsuit against the
Vatican Bank and Franciscan Order regarding the
disappearance of the World War II Nazi Croatian treasury
including gold, silver, and jewels plundered from
concentration camp victims in Croatia and Bosnia, mainly
Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies. The lawyers are
seeking the release of over 250 documents from the files of
Draganavic. He is now regarded as one of the of the
principal operators of the so-called Vatican "ratline" that
smuggled Nazis and their loot to South America between 1945
and the late 1950's. Beneficiaries of the ratline included
Adolf Eichman, Klaus Barbie "the butcher of Lyons" and the
notorious Croatian mass murderer Ante Pavelic as well as
thousands of lesser known Nazis and collaborators.
While file
releases on the ratline date from as early as the 1983
Barbie case, a core of documents remain withheld on grounds
of "national security." It is these documents the attorneys
want from the Army and CIA. They describe him as a "sinister
priest" who is alleged to have worked at various times for
the secret services of Croatia, the Vatican, the Soviet
Union, and Yugoslavia as well as British and American
intelligence. The attorneys
have suggested that the withheld documents, most well over
40 years old are highly embarrassing to the Americans, the
British, and Vatican and hold the key to a multinational
money laundering scheme that used Holocaust victim loot to
finance covert Cold War era operations against the Soviet
Union and its allies. The lawsuit was
filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco. For more
information see: http://www.vaticanbankclaims.com
Contact:
JONATHAN LEVY, LAW OFFICE OF EASTON & LEVY at
resistk@yahoo.com
Restitution & justice for concentration camp survivors
of Serb, Jewish, and Ukrainian background and their
relatives
The
Nazi collaborator Archbishop Stepinac (right) and the
Vatican representative to fascist Croatia, Abbot
Marcone (left). Croatia has recently renamed a village
in Krajina after Stepinac. Marcone was Pavelic's
confessor and Stepinac was convicted of war crimes
after the war. Several members of his clergy were
involved in the genocide at Jasenovac - notably the
Franciscan priest, Pater Miroslav Filipovic, who was
one of the commandants of the camp.
"(It
was) an act of 'ethnic cleansing' before that hideous
term came into vogue, it was an attempt to create a
'pure' Catholic Croatia by enforced conversions,
deportations, and mass exterminations. So dreadful were
the acts of torture and murder that even hardened German
troops registered their horror. Even by comparison with
the recent bloodshed in Yugoslavia at the time of
writing, Pavelic's onslaught against the Orthodox Serbs
remains one of the most appalling civilian massacres
known to history" (p 249)
Everything
that you have expressed so warmly in your name and in the
name of the Croatian Catholics we return gracefully and
give you and the whole Croatian people our apostolic
blessing (Dedijer, p 115).
We
will kill one part of the Serbs, the other part we will
resettle, and the remaining ones we will convert to the
Catholic faith, and thus make Croats of them (Dedijer, p
130).
Stepinac
blesses the puppet Nazi regime in Croatia
"God,
who directs the destiny of nations and controls the
hearts of Kings, has given us Ante Pavelic and moved the
leader of a friendly and allied people, Adolf Hitler, to
use his victorious troops to disperse our oppressors...
Glory be to God, our gratitude to Adolf Hitler and
loyalty to our Poglavnik, Ante Pavelic."
"Priests,
invariably Franciscans, took a leading part in the
massacres. Many, went around routinely armed and
performed their murderous acts with zeal. A Father
Bozidar Bralow, known for the machine gun that was his
constant companion, was accused of performing a dance
around the bodies of 180 massacred Serbs at
Alipasin-Most. Individual Franciscans killed, set fire to
homes, sacked villages, and laid waste the Bosnian
countryside at the head of Ustashe bands. In September of
1941, an Italian reporter wrote of a Franciscan he had
witnessed south of Banja Luka urging on a band of Ustashe
with his crucifix." (p 254).
"I know for a fact,
that it is the Franciscans themselves, as for example
Father Simic of Knin, who have taken part in attacks
against the Orthodox populations so as to destroy, the
Orthodox Church. In the same way, you destroyed the
Orthodox Church in Banja Luka. I know for sure that the
Franciscans in Bosnia and Herzegovina have acted
abominably, and this pains me. Such acts should not be
committed by educated, cultured, civilized people, let
alone by priests". (p 259)
"Disappointed that,
in spite of everything, no one wants to acknowledge the
one, real and principal enemy of Europe; no true,
communal military crusade against Bolshevism has been
initiated" (p 260)
"The most ideal
thing would be for the Serbs to return to the faith of
their fathers, that is, to bow the head before Christ's
representative (the Pope). Then we could at last breathe
in this part of Europe, for Byzantinism has played a
frightful role in the history this part of the world" (p
265).
"The worst
atrocities are being committed in the environs of the
archbishop of Zagreb [Stepinac]. The blood of
brothers is flowing in (the) streams. The Orthodox are
being forcibly converted to Catholicism and we do not
hear the archbishop's voice preaching revolt. Instead it
is reported that he is taking part in Nazi and Fascist
parades" (p 256).
Throughout
the whole war in more than 150 newspapers and magazines,
the church justified the fascist state under Pavelic as
the work of God.
Pavelic
escapes to Argentina disguised as a Catholic
priest
Stepinac found
guilty of collaboration
"Persons who
assisted Jews but simultaneously collaborated or were
linked with a Fascist regime which took part in the Nazi
orchestrated persecution of Jews, may be disqualified for
the Righteous title".
Nazi
connection to Franciscan Order uncovered near Medjugorje,
Bosnia
Cold War Era
Files May Hold the Key to Holocaust Lawsuit