Genocide in Satellite Croatia Ustashi in the Free World

Genocide in Satellite Croatia Chapter X. Ustashi in the Free World — Nuns marching together with Croatian Nazi-legionnaires (Ustashi).

Table of Contents

Continued from Chapter IX. Silence at the Vatican.

It HAS already been previously pointed out that it was under the protection of the German army that the Ustashi government fled to Austria and Italy with several thousand executioners, torturers, militants, and functionaries who had been the most compromised. The Archbishop of Sarajevo, Ivan Saric, also belonged to the caravan, as well as the Bishop of Banja Luka, Jozo Garic, who were followed by some 500 priests and members of the Croatian Catholic religious orders.*

* The majority of the Croatian Ustashi priests and monks abroad changed their first or last names so they could not easily be identified. Saric died in 1960 in Madrid.

Trunks of gold and precious treasures, representing an immense fortune, were carried away in this gigantic exodus.

Ante Pavelic and Andrija Artukovic went into hiding at the convents of Saint-Gilgen, near Salzburg, and at Bad-Isch] not far from Linz, in Austria. Pavelic was arrested by the forces of the British occupation but, through a mysterious intervention, was released soon after. This news was explicitly confirmed at the time by Mitar Bakic, general secretary of the Yugoslav government in the following declaration: “In February 1946 the department dealing in war crimes of the American Supreme Command at Wiesbaden, informed our authorities that Pavelic had fallen into the hands of the British somewhere near Celovac (Klagenfurt). But the British authorities refused to allow our officers to take charge of Pavelic.” New York Herald Tribune, European Edition, Paris, August 16, 1945.

Feeling that his life was in danger in Austria because of the repeated efforts of the Yugoslav government to capture him, Pavelic reached Rome disguised as a priest. There he lived in a convent, enjoying the right of extratoriality (exemption from the application or jurisdiction of local law or tribunals), under the names of Pater Gomez and Pater Benarez. In 1948 he went to Argentina under the false name of Pablo Aranyos, equipped with a passport provided by the International Red Cross, which the priest, Krunoslav Draganovic, procured for him through the Commissione d’assistanza pontifica.

Andrija Artukovic, after being released by British occupation troops, lived in Austria until November 1946, when he escaped to Switzerland. Once there he was provided with a false passport bearing the name of Alois Anic, procured for him by the priest, Augustin Juretic, at Fribourg. From there he crossed over to Ireland and succeeded in reaching the United States, where he is now living (in Los Angeles, California).

The greater part of the other Ustashi, with the exception of the ecclesiastics, ended up in the camps for German troops. But the Vatican interceded, and the Ustashi were soon separated from the Germans and interned in special camps. Then one day, Krunoslav Draganovic, former Professor at the Faculty of Catholic theology in Zagreb, member of the Committee for the conversion of the Orthodox Serbs to Catholicism, and who had even received the military grade of Lieutenant-Colonel, as a chaplain of the concentration camp of Jasenovac, visited the camps. The Vatican had entrusted him with the direction of the information department for the Balkans, and had put him in charge of protecting the interned Croatian war criminals in the Anglo-American camps.

This work was greatly facilitated by an official pass, which he had been able to obtain, for circulating freely in the Austrian camps of Klagenfurt, Linz, Spital, Vajdmansdorf, Trifling, Volksberg, Trifajah, Glasenbach, Walbach, Tristach, Furnic and Swalbach. This pass also helped him to visit the Croatian priests who had sought refuge in the Franciscan convent of Klagenfurt and Santa Catholica (property owned by the Little Brothers of Klagenfurt), as well as enabling him to visit the Italian camps of Modene, Fermo, Banjoli, Forli, Capua, Rimini, Cento Cele, Comte Ferrata San Paulo di Regola, Grotamare, San GiovanniBaptist, et al.

A printing press had been set up in the Italian camp at Fermo which sent out propaganda tracts to the emigrants in the camps, and also to Catholic clerical centers in Europe and America. These publications were printed in several languages. The Franciscan monk, Dominik Mandic ^* had charge of buying the machines, the paper, etc. Cardinal Ruffini, accompanied by Croatian and Italian ecclesiastics, visited the camp at Ferno. In his presence, the Franciscan monk, Mandic, a minister of finance for the Yugoslav Catholic emigrants, distributed sums for financial aid, after which the Cardinal gave a speech.

* Now living in the U.S.A., and writing much of the clero-Ustashi propaganda in Croatian-American papers and periodicals, as well as in books.

Thus saved from extradition to Yugoslavia, and provided with false identity cards, the Ustashi began circulating freely all over the world, organizing committees in Germany, Spain, Austria, Italy, France, Belgium, Canada, the United States, and above all, in Argentina. (Note: They also went to Australia. See The Ustaša in Australia.)

With the death of Hitler and Mussolini the dogmas of extermination also disappeared among the German and Italian peoples. Some of the partisans, their hands stained with blood, expiated (atoned for) their crimes; others withdrew into the background, while an incalculable number took part in clandestine politics. The Croatian racists were, of course, an exception, just as they always had been throughout their racial and religious policy. Either the rest of the world didn’t know about their crimes or else it had forgotten them. A good number of the guilty are enjoying complete freedom in the Western world, publishing their newspapers, their reviews and memorandums and their books which are filled with Nazi poison and racist harangues.

The Archbishop Ivan Saric (now dead) and Andrija Artukovic (now in Los Angeles), with 500 priests, monks, and thousands of Nazi-Ustashi continue to spread their venom of racial and religious hatred. In Spain^* and the South American countries they are upheld by the dictatorial regimes, while in North America and Canada they pursue their work, thanks to the support of part of the Catholic hierarchy, whose dogma and traditions they had so seriously compromised.

*The government of General Franco gave its support to the Ustashi in their struggle against the Yugoslav state. In Spain there is a strong Ustashi organization, which was led by the late Archbishop Saric and now by Vjekoslav (Maks) Luburic, former commander of all the concentration camps in satellite Croatia. They are still editing a certain number of newspapers and reviews and have the radio of Madrid at their disposal. By special broadcasts in the Croat language they cultivate hate against the Serbs and the Orthodox Church.

The audacity and arrogance of these racists is such that they are not even aware of the limitations of the laws of the democratic countries upon whose liberality they have imposed. In a book used for Ustashi propaganda, they reproduced 24 different stamps issued under Pavelic and, at the same time the picture of His Eminence Samuel Cardinal Stritch,^* former Archbishop of Chicago, taken in the midst of a group of Ustashi at Chicago. In this way they hoped to conceal their crimes and subversive acts behind a well-known Catholic name. At this same moment, how ever, in Germany and in Italy no priest would have dared to be photographed among dictators and assassins.

* Basil and Stepben Pandzic, Croatian History (Chicago, 1954), p. 111-112.

A great thinker of the past, Zoroaster, wrote a “Prayer for the pardon of Sinners”:

It is not by repenting that the dead can be brought back to life. But at least the more there are of those who repent, the fewer dead there will be in the future. It is not by repenting that evil can be eliminated from the surface of the earth. But the more there are of those who repent the less evil there will be in the world. Archbishop Saric, instead of praying to the Lord for pardon, only continued committing his innumerable crimes. His “Martyrium Croatiae,” which he sent from Madrid, gave ample proof that he had not repented. His paper was the first to publish the Nazi harangues and the anti-Christian apostrophes to Hitler’s tanks and cannon. None of the Ustashi who once wore uniforms, and who are today in clerical robes, such as Dragutin Kamber, Ivo Omrcanin, Dragutin Kukolja, Dr. Oto Knezovic, Gracijan Brno Raspudic, Vlaho Rajic, T. Mesic, Ante Ciliga, Branimir Jelic, Dr. Buc, Prof. Lukas, Krunoslav Draganovic, Nikola Tojcic, Dr. Cesarich, Vilim Cecelja and others have repented. Instead of repenting, they have slipped into oblivion where they are still continuing their racial ideology in the free world, under the protection of complete freedom, just as they had done before in the Independent State of Croatia under the protection of Hitler and Mussolini.

Now that their racist masters have been forever silenced, a large number of Ustashi, with their priests and monks, are trying to persuade the free world that the Ustashi were not inspired by racism, but by democracy.(See for example Theodore Benkovich (priest), The Tragedy of a Nation (place and year unknown).) At a time when the Germans are showing the German youth traces of the frightful crimes that took place in Hitler’s concentration camps, a Croatian high priest is uttering threats of the future extermination of the Serbs. The threats of this Croatian prelate are expressed in a language which even Al Capone would have hardly dared to use.^*

*This refers to the Right Reverend Ivan Stipanovic, whose attacks against the Serbs were published and applauded in the newspaper Hrvatski Glas (The Croatian Voice), an organ of the Croatian Peasant Party (Winnipeg, Canada), Jan. 29, 1952.

While the Germans are trying to make amends to the Jews by granting millions in war damages to the State of Israel, the Ustashi newspaper in Chicago, Danica, is filled with praise for the deceased Pavelic “who, for four years led a glorious battle against his enemies at home and abroad.”

The enemies abroad are in the Western democracies, those at home are the Serbs.

In West Germany the American authorities prohibited, in 1948, a Shakespearean production of “The Merchant of Venice” because of the “pound of flesh” while, at the same time, the Ustashi racists in the U.S.A. are not only demanding a “pound of flesh” but the heads of all the Serbs that did not fall in the death camps.

Although Pope Pius XII protested against the rape of 5 million women by Soviet soldiers in Eastern Germany, he never seems to have worried about protecting the heads and the honor of the Serbs and Jews in Croatia. Even Soviet troops and the hordes of Genghis Khan seldom killed the women who were raped, whereas in Croatia nearly all the Serbian and Jewish women who fell into Ustashi hands were raped, tortured and massacred. The champions of this sinister human history have never denied the past, while in their press and other publications they report that they are ready to pursue any “unfinished business” at the first occasion.

USTASHI PROPAGANDA ABROAD

In order to justify their crimes, and show that betraying Yugoslavia in April 1941 was their duty, the Croatian chauvinists, in their propaganda, give an account of what happened in their own way.

One of the first things the Catholic Croatian ecclesiastics did, on fleeing abroad after the debacle of Pavelic’s satellite state, was to send a booklet entitled Martyrium Croatiae to the princes of the Catholic church all over the world, just when the consistory was being held at Rome (1946). In this booklet they tried to justify their collaboration with the Ustashi. In this plea, the atrocious regime, which had resorted to bloodshed throughout Croatia between 1941-1945, was explained in a most unpredictable fashion and in a most favorable light. According to these priests and monks, the state was motivated by popular and public desires, “unanimously applauded by the Croats,” and not prompted by Hitler and Mussolini, protectors of Ante Pavelic.

As for the killings in which these ecclesiastics had participated, as well as approved, there was only the slightest allusion: “It is clear that the mistakes and errors committed by the Independent State of Croatia, were due to lack of experience.”

And by these words they justified four years of frightful mnassacre,

As for the fanatical clerics, atrocities did not matter just so long as, under a regime of bloodshed, Croatia continued to follow in the path of the traditional “Catholic” states of Europe. It was the dissolution of this “Catholic” state which they deplored. In their opinion, it should have been preserved by changing only “the form of government,” for it was the rampart of Catholicism. They believed that existence of the state of Croatia was necessary if the spiritual frontiers of the West were to extend from the Alps to the Bosporus (an unequivocal declaration of political clericalism) .

His Grace Rupp, co-adjutator of the Archbishop of Paris, meant exactly that when he stressed “the strategic importance of Croatia in the struggle for Christian unity.” ^*

* In his preface to the book, Le Dossier du Cardinal Stepinac, by R. P. Theodore Dragun (Paris, 1958).

That 750,000 Orthodox Serbs were systematically massacred to safeguard this “strategic” position of the Roman Church was evidently of no importance to those who held high positions.

On the other hand, the authors of Martyrium Croatiae, and the Ustashi Ivo Omrcanin (who was inspired by it when he wrote his German booklet) ^* found it somewhat reprehensible that a number of Catholic Croatian priests had been killed during the struggle between the Ustashi and the resistance forces or the Yugoslav army. Yet when it is understood what part the Catholic Croatian clergy played in the extermination of the Orthodox and the Jews, there is little reason to be astonished at the reprisals.

* Kroatische Priester ermordert von Tschetniken und Kommunisten (Munchen, 1959).

The same exclusivism, the same prejudices, are obvious in the memorandum concerning the persecution of which the Roman Church is a victim in Communist countries. On reading the numerous lamentations of the “Church of Silence,” one might be led to think that the atheistic governments were only using Catholicism as their target, whereas the Communists are known to make no distinction between religions, considering them all as “opiates of the people.” No religion enjoys any special privilege. The Orthodox Church was put in the same basket as the Roman Church, yet the latter refused to acknowledge this fact.

Indeed, the Martyrium Croatiae, in its attempt to clear the Croatian Catholic clergy of any guilt concerning the crimes committed under the Ustashi regime, constitutes a manifesto of Croatian separatism, based on politico-clerical motives, and an appeal for the disintegration of the Yugoslav state. The priests who signed it were not afraid of appealing to President Eisenhower to try to obtain his support. Through the intermediary of Cardinals Stritch and Spellman, a delegation of these priests were received at the White House June 15, 1959. In this memorandum we can read this bizarre phrase which aims to deceive even President Eisenhower: “We take the opportunity to correct the prevailing erroneous opinion that the Axis Powers brought the Independent State of Croatia into existence.”

One of the signers of this memorandum was the Franciscan Gracijan, alias Brno Raspudic. In his book Djevojka Drina (Drina Girl),^* he revealed the psychology of these ecclesiastics by writing: “The enemy should be made to retreat into the shadows of darkness where there could be no hope for resurrection. You must become dangerous; that is the only solution.” (see pp. 99-155).

* Gracijan Raspudic, Djevojka Drina (Madrid, 1951), “‘cum licentia Superiorum.”

“The crusaders with their faith in God and in the machine guns were on the march.” (P. 185.)

The Croatian emigre paper, Hrvatska Zora (The Croatian Dawn) described the signatories of this memorandum as “victims of passion and hate,” and as a conclusion wrote: “The priests who signed the memorandum are infected right to the marrow with a modern disease called “blind ego-centric nationalism, an exclusive nationalism. This malady is leading Europe to the edge of the precipice… .” Hrvatska Zora (Munich), September 1, 1954.

But any lucidity, any attempt at moderation and charity could hardly be expected of these ecclesiastics, capable only of hate and pursuing an objective which would only widen the abyss between the people of the same race.

By such action they will not only offend God and man, but dangerously expose all the Croatian people, of whom they claim to be the qualified representatives.

In Germany, the name of Hitler has become a symbol of evil, whereas these people maintain that the name of Ante Pavelic should be glorified throughout the free world “as the personification of resolution and heroism,” (Danica (organ of Croatian Franciscans) (Chicago), January 6, 1960.) whose example the Croatian people should follow wherever they may be living. In Europe the racist movement seems to have been stifled, yet in the meanwhile, the Ustashi press sings the praises of Pavelic for having founded the Ustashi Croatian Movement for Freedom. Ibid. According to the statutes of the United Nations and the criminal laws of the free world, great criminals should be held responsible for their crimes, yet the Ustashi press in the free world glorifies Ante Pavelic, whom the Croatian people (according to this press) judge worthy to be interred “in the Croatian Pantheon to immortalize his fame.” Ibid.

No one knows where the graves of the great criminals of Nuremberg are today; their ashes have been doubtless scattered to the four winds so they will not contaminate the country, but the body of Ante Pavelic, the worst assassin of them all, will have an honored place in the Croatian Pantheon. In Europe, at the beginning of the year 1960, all those who painted the swastikas on the walls and the doors of the synagogues were condemned to prison. Yet hundreds and thousands of living Ustashi swastikas, most of them in clerical robes, are haranguing and writing freely about staining their habits once again with the blood of the innocent. Neither the law concerning the press in the U.S.A., nor the forbidding of totalitarian terrorist activities on one side, nor the fact that the Serbs are far more numerous and much stronger than the Croats, whose provocation they might eventually incite, had any influence whatsoever on this criminal and subversive people. The Croats’ provocations have no end, and their propaganda has no beginning and no end. Such is the state of spirit of all incorrigibles.

The Ustashi propaganda is aimed, above all, at the Orthodox Church. George W. Cesarich (Croatia and Serbia (Chicago, 1954), p. 59.) writes that “the Serbian Orthodox Church educates her people in the worship of assassins, patricides and conquerors,” although this church never practiced forced conversions, nor did it massacre members of other faiths. John Clinton Adams, an American scholar, examining the Ustashi propaganda, commented on the book of Cesarich by saying: “The author does not even mention the fact that the ‘Independent Kingdom of Croatia’ was created by Hitler and Mussolini after their conquest of Yugoslavia and was a fascist dictatorship allied with the Axis against us. The book has no value except as a specimen of propaganda of the worst Balkan tradition. As a sort of final impudence the bibliography lists four works by that fugitive from a war-crime tribunal, the former Fuhrer of Croatia, Ante Pavelich himself.” Journal of Central European Affairs, XVI (April, 1956), p. 100.

That is the way that the Ustashi and Croatian chauvinists write “their history.”

And thus the Ustashi writers and their protectors of the free world invented the story “that there were no forced conversions in Croatia, and that the Orthodox had asked to be converted to Catholicism,^* and also that no pogroms took place because it was a war between equals, or, better yet, a war in self-defense to which the Croats had every right.” An armed nation in “self-defense” against empty handed children, women and old men?

*His Grace Stepinac estimates that 240,000 of those converted to Catholicism returned to the Orthodox Church, thus proving the pressure that had been brought to bear.

Dr. Krunoslav Draganovich, professor of theology, also mentions “legal self-defense.”^* The way in which Croatian “historians” interpret “legal self-defense” has been shown throughout this volume. But every scholar can find the documents in the archives of the trial at Nuremberg, where the great war criminals were convicted, and see for himself how Croatians look upon “self-defense.”

* Krunoslav Draganovich, The Croatian Nation, p. 293-296.

All Ustashi publications abound with the same logic. The naive pretext about “legitimate self-defense” is usually the theme adopted by those who are well armed for pogroms and massacres that have been well prepared in advance. The public has already been informed by the press, the government, and by the Church, with accompanying songs of praise, promotions and decorations. The vestiges of destroyed villages, the vast cemeteries, and the testimonies of those who are still living are an obvious proof. All these vestiges can be found on the Serbian and Jewish sides but not on the side of the Croats.

Another argument which the Ustashi and even some other Croats uphold abroad is that “General Mihailovich had ordered the extermination of the Croats and had stirred up vengeance and collective massacres in Croatia.” ^*

* Pavle Ostovic, The Truth about Yugoslavia (New York, 1952), p. 215.

But during his trial by Tito’s government no such insinuation was even pronounced in the accusation, and the Communists would not be apt to leave such a thing out if there was even any suspicion of such a thing. Moreover, at General Mihailovic’s headquarters there was also a Croatian corps with a Croatian general, Matija Parac, at the head. And Croats and Serbs have been living mingled together for centuries in Croatia, and they have never in their whole history been at war with each other. The hate that has spread amid the population was sown and cultivated by the spiritual and lay racists of Rome and Berlin. Even during the most terrible massacres in satellite Croatia, the great, majority of Croatian peasants did not participate in the crimes. It is estimated that a small percentage of the peasants were compromised during the Ustashi regime, while the percentage among the clergy rose, to the disgrace of Christianity, to more than 50%. Consequently, the Serbs never even thought of the collective responsibility of the Croats. General Milhailovic, in an address in the village of Ba (January 27, 1944) , clearly emphasized that the official courts of Yugoslavia would judge the crimes committed during the pogroms, and not seek vengeance. General Mihailovic expressed this same idea before 270 American flyers in his headquarters at Ravna Gora.^* These flyers he rescued and sent to their homes in America, while Pavelic’s Croatia was in a state of war with the U.S.A.

* For General Mihailovic’s speech see Knjiga o Drazi (The book about Draza) by Radoje Knezevich, (Windsor, Canada, 1957), Vol. 2, pp. 8-9.

The thesis of collective responsibility and vengeance was invented by the Croatian Catholic ecclesiastics and racists in order to keep Serbs and Croats in permanent hostility, through hate and fear. The Serbs, on the contrary, harbor no hard feelings concerning collective vengeance against the innocent, nor do they harbor vengeance against the members of the Croatian Catholic Church.

Consequently responsibility and collective vengeance are not terms used by the Serbs. On the contrary, they are terms found in the tactical propaganda of the Croatian Ustashi wearing robes of black and of brown.

In Ustashi propaganda abroad can be read the following paragraph: “The Croatian people magnificently conspired to aid the Jews, and it is estimated that the Jews were able to save 80% of all their property and goods. . . . While there were Jews in the concentration camps, more for their own protection . . . the Croatians were absolutely against any persecution measures against their Jewish brethren. Perhaps no Catholic bishop so energetically and vehemently denounced German anti-semitism as did Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac of Zagreb.” Theodore Benkovich, op. cit., pp. 29-30.

The author of this statement relates this story in referring to “a servant of the God of Truth . . . whom God in his Infinite Wisdom has ordered to be the witness.” (Idem., Introduction.) But in all totalitarian countries there were Jews who survived; even in Germany where they were treated as slaves, as things, not human beings. Yet in totalitarian Croatia not one of the 60,000 who remained under the Pavelic government survived, save those who fled to the forests or those who went to join Mihailovic’s or Tito’s forces. Of the others, no Jew was spared, but each one killed according to the law of November 1942.^*

*This law was signed by Andrija Artukovic, who is now living in freedom in Los Angeles.

This was the true state of affairs in satellite Croatia between 1941-1945 when it was governed by executioners in clerical robes and the Ustashi. The Vatican complained that the Cardinal of Vienna, Dr. Innitzer, made the fascist salute with a “Heil Hitler.” Cardinal Tisserant complained against Father Simic and the Franciscans of Bosnia for setting fire to the churches and massacring the innocent. His Grace Stepinac, however, kept silent and stigmatized none. The blood of the innocent was shed and it stained the hands of the priests who co-operated with the apocalyptic executioners during the reign of terror and the conversions to Catholicism. Hundreds of them became officers and were cited and decorated and were assigned positions with the executioners and made commanders in the concentration camps. Reports were published by the government organizations and the hierarchy. Dozens of reviews and branches of the archbishopric sang the praises of Hitler, Mussolini, Pavelic, and the New Europe.

The roll of this sinister thunder, reported and broadcast by the radio, could not possibly have reached the ears of Cardinal Tisserant without also being heard by His Grace Stepinac at Zagreb. It is strange that he could look on quietly while hundreds and thousands of innocent victims, babies included, were massacred by people who blasphemed God, Christ, Justice, and Liberty.

“Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God,” said Jefferson. Yet His Grace Stepinac, along with the majority of his priests, paid no heed to this statement. All contemplated the crimes calmly or could be seen in the clerical robes of the Order of St. Francis as leaders of the cutthroats whose crimes Cardinal Tisserant was so well acquainted with. Recalling the words of this Cardinal, we should compare it with the prayer of St. Francis of Assissi, who would certainly have denied such disciples:

What a difference between this holy saint of heaven and his Croatian disciples! And what a misfortune for him and for humanity that his order is associated with the frightful cutthroats of the twentieth century to the shame of Croatia, to the great sin of the Croatian Catholic clergy, and to the great misery of the Serbs.

The Jesuit, Dr. Dragutin Kamber, with whom we are now well acquainted, protesting against the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, which recognized the Yugoslavia formed in 1918, in a letter to his “American friends,” wrote: “Dear American friends, may you be sure that we prefer harmony and peace in the world and we disdain greatly to be any kind of troublemakers. But we must continue the fight against the killers and destroyers of our people, and therefore we cannot drop our claims for a Croatian state, on the beautiful eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea, at the doorstep of the Balkans, near the Danube River. . . . It should not be forgotten so fast that the mistakes committed in dealing with that area in the first half of our century have had catastrophic consequences for the entire world.”^*

* Dr. Dragutin Kamber, “To our American friends—Why a Croatian Independent State,” published in his The Croatian Nation (Chicago, 1955), p. 418.

Reading between the lines, it would appear that they were all as gentle as lambs, Rev. Dr. Kamber included, for it was he, who in times gone by, sowed Death and Terror throughout Bosnia under Pavelic’s Ustashi, representing the Prefect of Police at Doboj and the Ustashi Colonel. Furthermore, he threatened that the pogroms of 1941-1945 might be repeated if the U.S.A. did not uphold the “Just Cause” of these persecutors. Considering American ethics and laws, this is indeed a strange turn of affairs.

It should be remembered that in 1941 Dr. Dragutin (Charles) Kamber never wrote letters to “American Friends” but to the Hitlerian hordes.

USTASHI SUBVERSIVE ACTIVITIES
AND COLLUSION WITH THE REVISIONISTS

The center of their activities in Germany in Munich was called “Hrvatski Narod ni Odbor” (The Croatian National Committee) Branimir Jelic and Stjepan Buc are at the head of this organization (they are already known from the time of the first Ustashi emigration). This same committee published the newspaper Hrvatska Drzava (The Croatian State).

The Ustashi in Germany are in close touch with the remnants of the German national minorities who fled with the Hitlerian troops because of their collaboration and the crimes committed against the Serbs and the Jews. In Klagenfurt, Austria, Ustashi organized themselves a society named Velebit.

In Rome it is the Institute of Saint Jerome which serves as the center of Ustashi activities among the Croatian clergy, under the direction of Krunoslav Draganovic.

In Paris, the Croatian Ustashi are grouped within the syndicate Croatian Workmen (Hrvatski Radnicki Savez), affiliated with the “Confederation Francaise des Travailleurs Chretiens” (French Confederation of Christian Trade Unionists). They publish a bulletin called Hrvatski Radnik (The Croatian Worker). They have some other organization such as “Alois Stepinac,” “Stjepan Radic,” “Dzafer Kulenovic,” “Hrvatska Narodna Odbrana” (The Croatian Defense), “Hrvatski Narod ni Odbor” and “Sredisnji Odbor Hrvatskih Drustava u Evropi” (Central Committee of Croatian Societies in Europe), a recent organization grouping all societies of Croatian separatists in Europe.

The French writer, Georges Oudard, recently wrote two remarkable articles in the weekly paper Carrefour about the subversive activities of the Ustashi in France. In it we can read these lines:

On the contrary, on December 21, 1958, a new manifestation took place with great éclat (success) at the church of Sainte-Odile at the Porte Champeret, under the patronage of the “Catholic Movement for Unity,” which had let itself become involved without realizing the significance of the curious adventure on which it had embarked. The ceremony was officially announced as “A homage to Stepinac” but there was little mention given to him and it all turned out to be a sort of glorification of Croatian separatism.

In the crypt the colors of Ante Pavelic’s state were borne on high, while the lads from Grom and the Commander of the section, representing the patriotic defense of the Croatian National Committee, took over the policing on the sidewalks of the Avenue Stephane-Mallarme, the buttonholes of their lapels decorated with the insignia which appears here above [in the French publication]. His Grace Rupp, national director of Catholic emigration, presided over this reunion where the most vehement eloquence reigned. After Mr. Ernest Pezet, who was then vice-president of the Senate, had talked for sometime about himself, he started a savage attack against our old Serbian allies and their church. At that point R. P. Dragun, took up the subject of a petition sent to President Eisenhower in 1954, advocating a sort of holy crusade, more against the Orthodox Serbs than against communism, and expressed the desire of witnessing the rebirth of the Croatian State. He was exultant just so long as he thought that there were those among the congregation who thought that an Austrian priest had forgotten that he was preaching in a French sanctuary and not at the bosom of the Ustashi Croatian national Committee at Billancourt. His Grace Rupp, in the sermon which he preached during the mass that followed, deemed it necessary to emphasize that the orators were personally responsible for their words,

The success of such an incredible meeting swelled the heads of the organizers of these manifestations to such an extent, that, losing all restraint and caution, they got out a mimeographed circular with the following text: “Invitation for the eighteenth anniversary of the founding of the Croatian State. The Croatian Workmens’ Federation is organizing an important meeting on Sunday, April 19, 1959, at three o’clock in Hall No. 2 of the C.F.T.C. (French Confederation of Christian Workers) at rue Montbolon, Paris, 9eme, Metro Cadet.

The ceremony will begin with holy mass at the Church of Notre Dame de Lorette, 6 bis rue Choron, Metro ‘Le Peletier’ Paris 9 eme, at 12:30.

A buffet lunch will be served after the service.

Long live the anniversary of the founding of the Croatian State.

Death to the Serbs and to the Communists, the greatest enemies of the Croatian people.

Directing Committee of the Workers’ Croatian Federation.”

This ignominous notice, where an appeal for prayer is associated with murder, and the promise of being well fed in the meantime, was the cause of much protestation. Incidents occurred at the door of the church. This infamous commemoration was prohibited the night before by the Prefecture of the Police, but the affair was not carefully looked into.

HOW THE YUGOSLAV MISSION WAS NULLIFIED

There was once a Yugoslav mission in France with a Slovene priest, Mr. Nace Cretnik, at the head. It was sub-divided into three Slovene missions and a Croatian mission, run by R. P. Dragun under the auspices of Mr. Cretnik.

On August 16, 1954, the French government sent a note to the secretary of the Vatican requesting that the nomination of foreign missionaries be submitted for approval. Cardinal Piazza, secretary of the Consistory, replied that an organization for emigrants essentially spiritual and wearing political colors seemed impossible. He added that in case of any incidents he would not hesitate to intervene immediately and reiterated that missionaries who meddled with political questions were strictly forbidden. This was a policy which is successor, Cardinal Mimmi, agreed with.

How, under these conditions, did R. P. Dragun, who is an Austrian citizen of Croatian origin, manage to suppress the Yugoslav Mission in France of which there is no trace in the Ordo diocese of Paris, and transform his mission into an outrageous separatist and national enterprise in contradiction with the universalism of the Catholic Church, the spirit of the Constitution Exsul Familia, and the guarantees given to the French government by Cardinal Piazza?

We would never have questioned this apostolic foundation, which is usually regarded with such respect, the nullification of the Yugoslav mission, fomented by this singular monk, had not been of a strictly political character.

Dragun execrates the Serbs, and his greatest desire is to have Yugoslavia disappear from the map of Europe, just as the Mission disappeared from the Ordo. He does not conceal this fact.

In 1954, his name could be found among those who signed the petition to President Eisenhower, asking him to destroy Yugoslavia and resuscitate the Independent State of Croatia, This absurd undertaking masked the real intentions of its promoters under the pretext that Tito was trying to force the Croatian Catholics to become Orthodox. In this case the guilty ones who had committed the inverted crime were posing as protectors of the persecuted faith, but the reasons they gave would not stand examining. Yugoslav communism is atheistic by definition and is hostile to all faiths, barring none. The real truth, quite different from those invented, is that Tito is more afraid of the Catholic Church than the Serbian church which, in the end, has become his prisoner.

The objective aimed at by this petition was to interest American opinion in the cause of separatism, while giving the impression that the Church was at stake, and to convince all those who were gullible. The tactics which Dragun has adopted at home is identical and has already proved successful, since, as can be seen, last year a French prelate took part, without knowing it, in a ceremony that was underhandedly organized by the Ustashi. Georges Oudard, “Les Oustachis a Paris” (The Ustashi in Paris), Carrefour (Paris), September 28 and 30, 1959.

The Ustashi in France are sponsored by Mgr. Rupp, assistant of the archbishop of Paris, and Ernest Pezet, former vice-president of the Senate.

In England the Ustashi are members of the Muslim Society of Bosnia-Herzegovina (Denholm, Bratford). Their activity is also manifested through the Croatian Benevolent Society of Great Britain (Hrvatsko Dobrotvorno Drustvo za Veliku Britaniju) whose chairman is Nikola Hundric, former member of the Ustashi parliament.

The Ustashi in England publish the paper Nova Hrvatska (The New Croatia) , directed by Andrea Ilic, London.

In the near East the most active center is at Damascus. Its paper is Hrvatska Volja (The Croatian Will).

In Belgium, Janko Vranicani sponsored the organization and brought it the support of Belgian Catholic circles.

In Spain an Ustashi group also works freely for Croat separatism, with the benevolent assistance of some Spanish authorities. They are also aided by the Catholic lay organization, Opus dei, whose influence is considerable, both in public life and in government. It was in Madrid that the poet, Ivan Saric, Archbishop of Sarajevo, was found once again, accompanied by his co-worker Vjekoslav-Maks Luburic, former commander of the concentration camps of satellite Croatia, where he is known by the name of “Drinjanin,” and where he is now supporting a semi-military organization and publishing a paper Drina.

We have seen that Franco’s government has even made Radio Madrid available to the Ustashi. Once a week, a certain Pavao Tijan addresses the Croatian population for the purpose of keeping alive the separatist spirit on the home front, dazzling them with the ideal of an Independent State of Croatia.

In the U.S.A., a center of activity was founded in the convent of the Croatian Franciscans in Chicago (4851 Drexel Boulevard) . It has its own press and publishes a weekly paper called Danica (The Morning Star), Nasa Nada (Our Hope) and the Croatia Press, Approximately 76 priests and monks reached the U.S.A. after the debacle of the satellite state. Here they began a relentless propaganda against the Yugoslav state and the Orthodox Serbs while distorting historical facts and events. Unfortunately, in America, they have found appreciable moral and material support in some Catholic circles.

In Argentina, the Ustashi have several organizations and publications: Hrvatska Drzava, Glas sv. Antuna, Hrvatsha Revija. Under the dictatorship of Peron, this was their most active center as well as that of all the other war criminals who had sought refuge outside of Europe.

The multiple Ustashi organizations abroad are not only active in carrying on propaganda but also subversive action in foreign lands, as well as in Yugoslavia. Their activities are aimed much more at the destruction of the Yugoslav state than they are at the destruction of communism.

It is needless to add that the terrorist activity and genocide on the part of the Croatian Catholic clergy in Yugoslavia made communism more possible in that country rather than the reverse.

In order to guard the trust and confidence of the western world, whose policy is concentrated on the struggle against communism, the Ustashi emigrants and the Croatian clericals pose as innocent victims of the communists and as defenders of western democracy for which they had shed their blood for five years during the last world war. They were most astute in making their aspirations seem analogous, and along the same general lines as followed by the policy of the free world.

But in the countries where they have found refuge under the guise of anti-communists they have really been working for the separatist cause and against the Yugoslav state in general, and against the Serbs in particular, with the purpose of eventually detaching Croatia and incorporating it in an eventual Danubian confederation.

With this idea in mind, they have been collaborating closely with the partisan revisionists for the destruction of the status quo in western and central Europe. Among the most active of these organizations are the propaganda centers of Otto Habsburg, the principal ones being: Abendlandische Akademie at Munich, Forchungs-institut fur Fragen des Donauraumes at Salsburg and Centre Europeo de Documentatio. In these propaganda centers are some of the noted Catholic leaders of Europe and America, who, with large sums at their disposal, are exerting strong political influence.

Otto Habsburg thought he could profit from the existing division of the world into two camps, with two opposing political systems, for the realization of his plan for a “Danubian confederation” by playing up the inevitability of a war between the Slavic East and the non-Slavic West. The Slav East, having sunk into communism, Otto Habsburg and his partisans hope they will be helped by the western democracies. The downfall of communism, he believes, will result in the downfall of the status quo in eastern and central Europe, established by the treaties of Versaille, St. Germain and Trianon, and that on the ruins of these national states and in the interest of the “European balance of power,” and in the interest of a “Christian and Western civilization,” the Danubian Confederation, under the sceptre of the Habsburgs, will be realized.

Needless to say, these ideas are extremely dangerous since changing the status quo in central and eastern Europe can not be accomplished without warfare. But the plan is, above all, anti-Slav, and because of this, there is danger of alienating all the Slavs, thus helping the communists.

Otto Habsburg, in order to promote his idea, has based it on federalism, so much in vogue at the moment, and he envisages a Danubian confederation which might in a way be integrated into the United States of Europe. But everyone knows that the idea of democratic federalism is, by its very nature, incompatible with the resurrection of the Habsburg monarchy.

Unfortunately, this revisionism in central and eastern Europe has been encouraged, if not conceived, by none other than Winston Churchill. In the first pages of his Memoirs of the War he writes: “The second major tragedy of this epoch is the complete disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian empire.”

Since the prestige of Sir Winston Churchill is so impressive, this idea of regretting the disappearance of the archaic Austro-Hungarian empire has found in certain classes some adherents, although the resurrection of this empire is absolutely contrary to the interests and desires of the Slavic peoples of Europe and the Balkans, as well as to the maintenance of peace in the European democracies.

Wickham Steed, in his excellent study, The Doom of the Hapsburgs, was also of our opinion concerning the Habsburg empire: “If, in a sense it had appealed to the sword and perished by the sword, its fate was determined in advance by the persistent amorality of the dynastic principle, which its rulers alone respected. Before any armistice could be signed, the Habsburg Monarchy had dissolved itself into its component parts. Even the Austrian Germans and Magyars had set up independent republics and repudiated the Emperor and King. The doom of the Habsburgs was accomplished.” Henry Wickham Steed, The Doom of the Hapsburgs, London, 1936, p. 95.

It should also be noted that Otto Habsburg found adherents in the ecclesiastical circles of the U.S.A., as might be expected, as well as in the financial and industrial world.

As we have already pointed out, of all Yugoslavs abroad, it was the Ustashi alone who joined the Habsburgs. Thus we find the Croatian fascists and the old oppressors of nationalities working together, with the same “lofty policy” in mind for the European area.

DEATH OF PAVELIC AND STEPINAC

The decease, within a six-week interval, of Ante Pavelic and Cardinal Stepinac, brought back into the limelight the ephemeral existence of the state which lasted only four years, but years which were so filled with horror they will go down in history as a frightful example of what can be engendered by political clericalism.

Ante Pavelic died December 26, 1959, in Madrid, where he had found refuge in a Franciscan monastery after his return from Argentina, The Holy See still continued protecting this “unpunished massacrer,” which accounts for his spending his last days in peace among the “Brothers” of those who, heretofore, had given him precious help in exterminating the Orthodox Serbs, an item which the pious press felt it might be inopportune to recall.

The monthly newspaper Hrvatska (Croatia), in its number dated February 1960, published “The official report of the death of Poglavnik Pavelic” which is worded as follows:

The Poglavnik of the Independent State of Croatia left Argentina July 23, 1957, by the frontier town of Rio Gallegos (Patagonia) and on July 24, 1957, reached Punta Arenas in Chili. He stayed four months in Santiago, and then left for Spain, arriving in Madrid Nov. 29, 1957.

During the months of November and December 1959, the Poglavnik submitted to medical treatment in the German hospital at Madrid.

On December 18, 1959, the Franciscan priest, Miquel Maric, heard the Poglavnik’s confession, while the Rev. Franciscan priest administered the holy sacraments on the same day.

On December 27, the Rev. Franciscan priest, Branko Maric, administered the last sacraments. The same day His Holiness Pope John XXIII gave his personal benediction.” This communique was also printed in the monthly Croatian newspaper Hrvatska Zora (Croatian Dawn), Munich, March 1960.

The death of his collaborator, Alois Stepinac, on February 10, 1960, whom Pope Pius XII had made a Cardinal, aroused a powerfully orchestrated concert of lamentation and praise in every Catholic country. International funeral services were held in honor of the “martyr” who was interred in the cathedral at Zagreb.

The man who wrote, in 1941: “Hitler has been sent by God,” and who assiduously upheld the Ustashi regime, will, hereafter, wear a halo and be canonized.

However, public opinion is vigilant. Below is the reaction felt by Ernest Lamber from Paris concerning the death of Cardinal Stepinac, which appeared in the New York Herald Tribune (European edition) on Feb. 10th, 1960:

Stepinac never defied the Fascist Croatian Government, known as the Ustashi, but is recognized as having collaborated with this regime.

The puppet state of Croatia was proclaimed under the egis (shield) of Hitler and Mussolini on April 10th, 1941, and on Easter Day, 1941, Archbishop Stepinac announced from his pulpit, in the cathedral of Zagreb, the foundation of this state.

In his pastoral letter of April 28th, 1941, he endorsed the Ustashi regime when he wrote: “knowing the men who today hold the fate of the Croatian people in their hands, we are firmly convinced that our effort is understood and wholeheartedly supported.”

Stepinac knew very well that these men were none other than Ante Pavelic and Andrija Artukovic, the well-known pre-war terrorists. They were profiting from German domination in their Croatian state to found a homogeneous Croatia from an ethnical and religious standpoint by massacring Serbs, Jews, Tziganes; 289 Orthodox churches and monasteries were destroyed and burnt, once the women and children had been locked inside. Three bishops and 182 priests were killed.

Stepinac never condemned these multiple crimes. Furthermore, he never dissociated himself from a large part of the clergy who were actively collaborating with the Ustashi regime.

That Stepinac “was threatened with death” is far from being a historical truth. Up until the very end of the Ustashi regime he remained persona grata. Proofs abound. In June, 1944, we can see His Grace Stepinac in a photograph which appeared in the Hrvatski Narod newspaper (The Croatian People) No. 1051 of June 4, 1944, blessing the Ustashi military units. In 1944, His Grace was decorated with the highest Ustashi distinction, accompanied by the most eloquent praise, “having, as Archbishop, denounced the rebels on the territory of the Croatian state, not only in the country but in foreign lands.” And those rebels were the ones who had been proscribed by the Nazi doctrine, and who were struggling, weapons in hand, against the Nazi and Facist oppressors.

The Gospel itself teaches us that only by Truth may man be saved.

UNPUNISHED CRIMINALS

And what could be said of Justice? Nothing, except that it had been put soundly to sleep. Thousands of executioners and torturers, commanders of concentration camps, Nazi ministers, Fascists and Ustashi, escaped punishment. And yet the photographer who took the Fuhrer’s picture was condemned at Nuremberg to ten years in prison just for having committed such a crime as photographing Hitler.

As for the French governments since the liberation, not one even formulated a demand for Pavelic’s extradition, although he had been condemned to death in 1935 by the criminal court in Aix-en-Provence, for the assassination of King Alexander and Louis Barthou at Marseille.

Andrija Artukovic, who emigrated to the United States under the false name of Alois Anic, has been living for several years under an indictment for extradition demanded by the Yugoslav government, but thanks to his protectors in Catholic circles he has, until now, escaped any extradition for his crimes. All the favorable articles written about him by the Croatian and American ecclesiastics are well remembered, and there is absolute proof that Catholic circles of Los Angeles organized various benefits in order to raise funds to defend Andrija Artukovic from the extradition.

At the trial of Adolf Eichmann, responsible for extirpating 6,000,000 Jews, the responsibility of Andrija Artukovic for the annihilation of Jews and Orthodox Serbs in Pavelic’s State of Croatia, was shown. The press of the whole world wrote about it extensively. Here we shall quote two large American dailies which wrote the following about his responsibility:

“Alexander Arnon, wartime secretary of the Jewish community in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, brought up the name of Andrija Artukovic, Minister of Interior in the Nazi-sponsored Croatian Government headed by Ante Pavelic.

The prosecution has submitted several documents relating to Artukovic, whose extradition, at the request of Yugoslavia, was recently refused by the United States.

‘Where is he now?’ Judge Benjamin Halevi asked the witness.

‘Today he is either in New York or California,’ said Mr. Arnon.

Artukovic was reported to have been working as a bookkeeper in Los Angeles in May, 1951.

Judge Halevi continued, ‘And he executed anti-Jewish measures on orders from Germany?”

‘I can’t say directly that this was according to German orders because I have no proof for it,’ the witness replied. ‘But this was after all common knowledge at the time.’”

(The New York Times, May 20, 1961, by Homer Bigart, correspondent from Jerusalem for the Eichmann trial.)

“Adolf Eichmann and his SS colleagues were linked today to the wholesale exterminations of Jews in Yugoslavia. A witness (Alexander Arnon) testified that 60,000 of its 75,000 Jews were murdered.

In addition, the witness estimated that several hundred thousands of Serbs were killed, but he did not blame these murders on Eichmann.

The witness depicted the activities of the Ustashi, Fascist collaborators, in helping in the Nazi persecutions and he told how concentration camps were set up and the killings started.

He said at the Jadovno camp 20,000 Jews were killed and at the Stara Gradiska Camp women and children were imprisoned.

At the same time, the witness testified the destruction of synagogues was going on.

In June of that year trains were running daily and nightly to the fairgrounds in Zagreb where Jews were being concentrated. He said there were no protests against this and added:

‘Croatia was a Catholic state and the Catholic Church in Croatia did not raise its voice and did not say a word in protest.’ ”

(New York Herald Tribune, May 20-21, 1961, Continental Edition, by Robert S. Bird, report from Jerusalem.)

* * *

In vain, emigrant Serbian leaders addressed a memorandum to the United Nations in 1950 condemning the crimes and the genocide of the Ustashi:

Such a measure on the part of the United Nations Organization would demonstrate that the Convention on genocide is not just a gesture for misleading world opinion but an expression of a serious determination to put an end to such crimes. This cannot be achieved if the crimes already committed are not brought to trial and punished.

The United Nations Organization could, by such action, fortify and reassure the moral conscience of humanity which was enormously shaken by the horrible events which accompanied the last world war.*

* Adam Pribicevic, Dr. Vladimir Belajcic and Dr. Branko Miljus, Memorandum on crimes of genocide committed against the Serbian people, by the government of the “Independent State of Croatia” during World War II, addressed to the General Assembly of the United Nations 1950.

The Serbian National Defense Council of America has published a declaration on the crime of genocide committed by the Croatian Ustashi.

Below are a few excerpts from this declaration, cited by the Honorable Herbert H. Lehman, senator from New York, during the session of the U. S. Senate, October 20, 1951:

Genocide has destroyed some 20,000,000 persons in the last fifty years—the world must face the problem of genocide in the twentieth century.

While the nineteenth century was marked by the liberation of the individual and his entrance into political life, as well as by a strong movement of national liberation which helped many nations to achieve their unity and independence, the twentieth century is a century in which collective violence directed not so much against men in their individual capacity, but against entire nations, races and religious groups has become typical. . . .

Therefore, the world should now focus its primary attention on the phenomenon of the mass extirpation of human groups and should organize collective measures to meet collective crime of great dimensions and fatal consequences for mankind.

For centuries the Serbian people have stood in the Balkans as a bulwark of Christian civilization against invaders and oppressors. As a consequence of their stand, great losses have been inflicted on them in the course of centuries. . . . Genocide in its worst and most destructive form, however, was inflicted upon the Serbs in 1941-1945 by the members of the Croatian Fascist movement, the Ustashi. In 1941, after the invasion of Yugoslavia by the Axis, a Croatian puppet state was created by the Axis under the name Independent State of Croatia and all power was given to the Ustashi. . . . In the late evening of April 9, 1941, a speech of Ante Pavelic, proclaiming the Ustashi revolution, was broadcast. It was followed by a fiery speech by Andrija Artukovic, who instigated the Croats not only to kill the Serbian officers and soldiers, but even children in their mothers’ wombs. The next day, a Croatian government was formed in which Artukovic was appointed minister of interior.

In that state, which comprised about 3,500,000 Croats and over 2,000,000 Serbs, the odious crime of genocide was perpetrated on the Serbian people by the Ustashi and large segments of the Croatian population.

This crime was not a consequence of aggression but was organized and directed against the Serbs as a nation and as a religious group with the aim of wiping them out and creating an ethnically pure Croatian territory, according to Ante Pavelic, the head of the Ustashi who became head of the Independent State of Croatia.

The tragic experiences of the Serbian people are offered here not in a sense of recrimination but with the constructive purpose of awakening the conscience of the whole world to the necessity of adopting the law against genocide…

It is up to the nations of the world, and especially the leading democracies, to make the choice between indifference which amounts to encouragement, or decisive action by ratifying the Genocide Convention and indicating the moral and legal repudiation of the greatest crime against civilization.

The Genocide Convention deals with national, racial, religious, and ethnical groups, that is, all inhabitants of a country belonging to the same nationality, religion, or race.

The above provisions find full application to the genocide perpetrated by the Fascist, Croatian Ustashi, on the Serbian people. The leaders did not conceal their intention to destroy the Serbian national group.

The massacres were carried out in various ways: by invading villages and towns and killing people in their homes, or after assembling them in schools, town halls, or horse stables.

Sometimes they were assembled in churches. The massacres carried out in the Serbian Orthodox Church in Glina between May and August, 1941, belong undoubtedly to the darkest chapters of human depravity in modern times. . . .

Babies were torn from their mothers’ arms, and while they were held by their feet, they were swung forcibly against walls, smashing their heads before their mothers’ eyes. . . .

The mutilations defy all imagination. Limbs were cut open, salt pet inside the wounds and then the limbs were tied together and bandaged. Tongues were torn out, ears, noses, and genitals cut off. . .er Cases are known where Croatian Ustashi would proudly wear necklaces of human eyes and tongues cut from their Serbian victims. . . .

But all these memoranda, all these declarations, and all the appeals have brought no results, and the greatest crimes against humanity committed by the government of satellite Croatia still remain unpunished.

Continued in Appendixes

All chapters of Genocide in Satellite Croatia 1941-1945 by Edmond Paris

Download a PDF file of this article.

Please follow and like us:

(Visited 17 times, 7 visits today)

James Japan

Vital information not found in mainstream media, school or church.