Catholic Church, looking for a bulwark against communism, supported
what became genocidal regime of Nazi satellite Croatia.
The controversy over the canonization of Pope Pius XII concerns
whether he spoke out enough against the slaughter of Jews during
World War II. But that question is a red herring when trying
to grasp the big picture of the Vatican's role during the war.
The real question is whether the Vatican supported the world
order, or at least aspects of it, that the Third Reich promised
to bring, a world order in which dead Jews were collateral
damage - which Pius indeed regretted. The answer can be found
in a region of Europe that is generally ignored despite being
the nexus of world wars: the Balkans.
The Catholic Church was looking for a bulwark against expanding,
ruthless, church-destroying communism, but in doing so it
supported a Croatian movement called Ustasha, which rose
to become the genocidal regime of Nazi satellite Croatia.
American historian Jared Israel points to a February 17,
1941 New York Times article which reported that the archbishop
of Zagreb (Croatia's capital), Alojzije (Aloysius) Stepinac,
was holding conferences in Vatican City "seeking the
freedom of Catholic priests detained in [pre-Nazi] Croatia
in connection with the circulation of... 'Free Croatia!'
pamphlets, attributed to Ante Pavelic." Pavelic, who
once criticized Hitler for originally being too soft on the
Jews, was the founder of the fascist Ustashas, who were engaging
in terrorism all over Europe to "liberate" Croatia
from Yugoslavia. He famously said, "A good Ustasha is
one who can use a knife to cut a child from the womb of its
mother."
Israel explains the significance of the understated Times
article: "The arrested priests were agitating for a
fascist coup d'etat," and if these had been rogue priests, "the
Vatican would have disciplined them and perhaps issued a
statement condemning them; it certainly would not have [held]
top-level conferences to manage their defense."
At the time, Pavelic was being harbored in Mussolini's Italy
- where his Ustasha soldiers were being trained - after France
sentenced him to death for masterminding the 1934 double
assassination of Yugoslavian King Alexander I and French
foreign minister Louis Barthou. When Hitler invaded Yugoslavia
in April 1941, Pavelic was activated and became fuehrer,
or "Poglavnik," of the new, clerical-fascist Croatia.
Archbishop Stepinac held a banquet for Pavelic, blessed
the Ustasha leader and regime, calling them "God's hand
at work," and the following month had Pavelic received
by Pius XII. This was four days after the massacre in the
town of Glina, where the Ustashas locked hundreds of Serbian
Orthodox inside their church and burned it down, as became
standard practice in Pavelic's Independent State of Croatia
(known by its Croatian acronym NDH). Pius XII received Pavelic
despite a Yugoslav envoy's request that he not do so, given
the atrocities taking place.
In July of that year, Pavelic's minister of education, Mile
Budak, publicly outlined the purification process, already
being implemented against Serbs: Kill a third, expel a third,
convert a third.
That August, more than a thousand Serbs had gathered inside
another Glina church for conversion, after which Zagreb police
chief Bozidar Corouski announced, "Now that you are
all Roman Catholics, I guarantee you that I can save your
souls, but I cannot save your bodies." In came Ustasha
henchmen with bludgeons, knives and axes, killing all but
one man - Ljuban Jednak - who played dead, then stole away
from the mass grave he was dumped into.
Pius and Pavelic continued exchanging "cordial telegrams," as
author Vladimir Dedijer - former cochairman of Bertrand Russell's
International War Crimes Tribunal - wrote in his 1992 book
The Yugoslav Auschwitz and the Vatican. The Croatian Catholic
press consistently published approving articles about the
regime.
In his forthcoming book The Krajina Chronicles: A Short
History of Serbs in Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia, Dr. Srdja
Trifkovic writes, "A part of the Roman Catholic hierarchy
became de facto accomplices, as did a majority of the clergy.
The leading NDH racial 'theorist' was a clergyman, Dr. Ivo
Guberina... He urged Croatia's 'cleansing of foreign elements'
by any means. His views were echoed by the influential head
of the Ustasha Central Propaganda Office, Fr. Grga Peinovic.
"When the anti-Serb and anti-Jewish racial laws of
April and May 1941 were enacted, the Catholic press welcomed
them as vital for 'the survival and development of the Croatian
nation'... Archbishop of Sarajevo [then part of Croatia]
Ivan Saric declared... 'It is stupid and unworthy of Christ's
disciples to think that the struggle against evil could be
waged... with gloves on.'"
IN AN unusual move, Germany entrusted Croatia with running
its own concentration camps, without oversight. Shamefully,
clergy members took a voracious dive into the bloodbath,
serving as guards, commanders and executioners at the 40
camps, most famously Jasenovac, the Holocaust's third-largest
yet least spoken-of camp. There, they killed Serbs, Jews,
Gypsies and anti-fascist Croats. On August 29, 1942, a friar
from the monastery of Siroki Brijeg, named Petar Brzica,
won first place for killing the most Serbs in the shortest
time, boasting 1,350 throats slit in one night.
Historian Carl Savich quotes an AP report stating that "a
priest from Petricevac led Croat fascists, armed with hatchets
and knives, to a nearby village. In the 1942 attack, they
butchered 2,300 Serbs." Testimony from a survivor of
that February 7 massacre, Selo Drakulic, reads: "Prior
to killing the adults, unborn children were violently cut
from their mothers' womb[s] and slaughtered. Of the remaining
children in the village, all under the age of 12, the Ustashas
brutally removed arms, legs, noses, ears and genitals. Young
girls were raped and killed, while their families were forced
to witness the violation and carnage. The most grotesque
torture of all was the decapitation of children, their heads
thrown into the laps of their mothers, who were themselves
then killed."
Archive photos of sadism that would make horror filmmakers
blush survive today: Ustashas displaying an Orthodox priest's
head; an eyeless peasant woman; Serbs and Jews being pushed
off a cliff; a Serb with a saw to his neck; and a smiling
Ustasha holding the still-beating heart of prominent industrialist
Milos Teslitch, who had been castrated, disemboweled and
his ears and lips cut off.
Italian writer Curzio Malaparte in his 1944 book Kaputt
offers this detail: "While [Pavelic] spoke, I gazed
at a wicker basket on the Poglavnik's desk [which] seemed
to be filled with mussels, or shelled oysters... 'Are they
Dalmatian oysters?' I asked. [Pavelic] said smiling, 'It
is a present from my loyal Ustashas... Forty pounds of human
eyes.'"
In their 1991 book Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis
and the Swiss Banks, reporter Mark Aarons and former Justice
Department attorney John Loftus corroborate the grisly Croatian
crimes, as does Genocide in Satellite Croatia 1941-1945 by
Edmond Paris: "The Italians photographed an Ustasha
wearing two chains of human tongues and ears around his neck."
It has been 60 years, and the world still doesn't know the
story of wartime Croatia, where not only did the Vatican
not speak out against crimes, not only was it complicit in
the genocide of a million people, but it subsequently never
expressed remorse for the spilled Orthodox blood as it's
done for Jewish blood. Because the world never demanded it.
Which points to the same apprehensions that have dogged Jewish
groups about the Vatican's genuineness, especially with its
reluctance to open archives about Pius's World War II conduct.
ONE CAN'T help wondering whether the Vatican as an institution
was silently cheering the decimation of its Orthodox rival.
Stepinac, who was photographed blessing the Ustashas before
an upcoming battle or slaughter, reported in May 1944 the
good news about 244,000 forced conversions to Pius. (Pius
himself might have caught BBC broadcasts such as on February
16, 1942: "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.") Observing the liquidation
of Croatia's Orthodox, Heinrich Himmler's second-in-command,
Reinhard Heydrich, wrote a February 17, 1942, letter to Himmler
stating, "It is clear that the Croat-Serbian state of
tension is not least of all a struggle of the Catholic Church
against the Orthodox Church."
It is not Jews to whom the Church owes the biggest apology
over World War II, but Serbs. If by not speaking out about
Europe's Jews Pius hoped to avoid endangering millions of
Catholics, what could have been the reason for not speaking
out about Croatia, which itself horrified the Nazis to the
point that German and Italian soldiers started shielding
Serbs from Ustashas? And what would have been the risk to
the faithful inside Croatia?
A July 5, 1994, Washington Times article attempted to get
to the bottom of why so little is known of the Croatia chapter
of World War II, and why Jasenovac is so rarely spoken of: "For
years the gruesome details... remained officially taboo.
Although documents and eyewitness accounts were at first
ignored, and then mysteriously removed from international
archives... [i]t now appears that a vast international conspiracy
involving Marshal Josip Broz Tito... [and] the United Nations,
some Vatican officials and even Jewish organizations strove
to keep the Jasenovac story buried forever... Tito's watchwords
were 'brotherhood and unity,' and to pursue these high goals
he tried to erase the chapter of Jasenovac. The West generally
went along, particularly after Tito broke with Stalin in
1948. The Vatican wanted to protect Roman Catholic Croats,
who had been willing Nazi proxies in the Balkans.
"The silence of Jewish organizations is less easily
explained... [The late Milan Bulajic, of Belgrade's Genocide
Museum, met] officials of the Holocaust Museum [in Washington
to] find out why no one mentions the Yugoslav Jews who died
there. He did not seem to get a clear-cut answer... When
Yugoslavia fell apart in 1991... troops of newly independent
Croatia briefly captured the site and, according to Serbian
sources, blew up whatever was left of the camp and destroyed
all remaining records."
An apology is also owed to Catholic clergy whose appeals
the Church ignored. Archbishop Misic of Mostar, Herzegovina,
asked Stepinac to use his influence with authorities to prevent
the massacres. And Bulajic wrote of a group of Slovenian
Catholic priests who were "sent to the Jasenovac camp
because they refused to serve a mass of thanksgiving to Ustasha
leader Ante Pavelic... One of the imprisoned Slovenian priests,
Anton Rantasa, managed to escape... On 10 November 1942,
he informed [Stepinac and the papal legate Ramiro Marcone]...
on the crimes of genocide being perpetrated at Jasenovac.
He was told to keep silent."
Similarly, historian Savich writes, "It bears noting
that Stepinac was tried and convicted... by Roman Catholic
Croats... under the regime of a Roman Catholic Croatian...
Many of the historians who documented the Ustasha NDH genocide
were Roman Catholic Croats, such as Viktor Novak."
In his 1950 book Behind the Purple Curtain, Walter Montano
wrote of the Stepinac trial: "A parade of prosecution
witnesses testified at Zagreb, on October 5, 1946, that Catholic
priests armed with pistols went out to convert Orthodox Serbs
and massacred them... Most of the witnesses were Croat Catholic
peasants and laborers."
INDEED, JUST as blame for tacit approval of a genocide and
subsequent escape for the perpetrators can't fall merely
on "a few individuals," it's more than a few individuals
who deserve credit for the opposite. For example, Jews were
saved by the entire Catholic nation of Italy (in its sovereign
pre-1943 form), including the commandant of the Ferramonti
concentration camp, who "said his job was to protect
the inmates, not kill them," as UPI reported in 2003.
Not surprisingly, Italian soldiers also intervened in the
slaughter of Serbs by Croats and Axis-aligned Albanians in
Kosovo.
Unfortunately, rather than distancing the Church from Aloysius
Stepinac, the Vatican-centered newspaper L'Osservatore Romano
responded that the "trial was a trial against the Catholic
Church." New York cardinal Francis Spellman outrageously
named a parochial school in White Plains after Stepinac,
and in 1952 Pius XII made him cardinal. Then, despite requests
by the Simon Wiesenthal Center to hold off until the cardinal's
wartime role could be better assessed, Pope John Paul II
beatified Stepinac in 1998.
Croatian groups (and some Croatian Jews) even appealed to
Yad Vashem to give Stepinac the Righteous Gentile title,
since he saved some Jews on condition of conversion. To which
Yad Vashem had to reply in almost absurd terms: "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."
The same should be said to Pope Benedict about his efforts
to canonize Pius XII. Even as it denied Stepinac's well known
association with the Ustasha, Pius's Vatican served as the
conduit for smuggling the Ustashas out after the war. According
to declassified US documents introduced in a recent class-action
lawsuit against the Vatican Bank for laundering Ustasha loot
- used to finance the Ustashas' escapes and postwar sustenance
- Pavelic was hidden in a Croatian Catholic monastery in
Rome, where the office of the American Counterintelligence
Corps on September 12, 1947, reported that "Pavelic's
contacts are so high, and his present position is so compromising
to the Vatican, that any extradition of subject would deal
a staggering blow to the Roman Catholic Church." From
Rome, Pavelic fled to Argentina, where he became a security
adviser to Juan Peron, who issued thousands of visas to fleeing
Ustashas.
Haaretz in 2006 reported that Msgr. Giovanni Battista Montini,
Pius's undersecretary of state and later Pope Paul VI, learned
of "the investigation [that US Army counterintelligence
agent William] Gowen's unit was conducting. Montini complained
about Gowen to his superiors and accused him of having violated
the Vatican's immunity by having entered church buildings,
such as the Croatian college, and conducting searches there.
The aim of the complaint was to interfere with the investigation."
A May 2007 press release from plaintiffs' attorney Jonathan
Levy in the Vatican Bank case states, "To date, the
Vatican attorneys... [are] insisting that the Vatican Bank's
money laundering scheme for Axis plunder violated no international
law, since the Ustasha's victims, mainly Orthodox Christian
Serbs, were technically citizens of 'Independent' Croatia.
The unrepentant tone of the Vatican bodes poorly for Pius
XII and the current controversy involving his elevation to
sainthood."
THE VATICAN'S ongoing World War II identity crisis was evident
last September when, after prodding from Croatian leaders,
Zagreb Archbishop Josip Bozanic paid a 60-year-late visit
to the Jasenovac memorial site, the first official representative
of the Croatian Church to attend the annual memorial ceremony.
Instead of an apology, Bozanic defended Stepinac and the
Church, and used the long-awaited moment to also mourn the
massacre of fleeing Nazis by partisans in Bleiburg, Austria
- where an annual, Croatian government-sponsored commemoration
ceremony is well attended by Catholic dignitaries. Bozanic
was not reproached by the Vatican, which also doesn't reproach
the Croatian Church's tolerance of the ubiquitous pro-Nazi
symbolism in that country, which reemerged as Croatian "culture" in
the early 1990s.
President Stjepan Mesic himself, who just left office after
10 years, had to recently ask the Vatican to pay closer attention
to a bishop and military chaplain who regularly recites a
violent poem that ends with the Ustasha saying: "For
the fatherland, ready."
This is the Balkan country that's on the fast-track for
EU membership. That's where decades of evasion, deflection
and cover-up get us, something that contributed to John Paul
II's own neglect of Jasenovac - the Balkans' largest killing
grounds - during his three trips to Croatia. It also leads
us to last December's spectacle of Pope Benedict having a
private audience with Marko Perkovic, lead singer of the
notorious clerical-fascist Croatian pop band Thompson, which
regularly invokes "For the fatherland, ready" and
had odes to concentration camps on earlier albums. Many Thompson
fans engage in Nazi salutes, and nuns and politicians attend
the "patriotic" concerts.
People bury history in order to repeat it. John Ranz, chairman
of Buchenwald Survivors, in a 1996 letter to The New York
Times, wrote: "Ironically, with US help, [1990s president]
Franjo Tudjman was able to accomplish last year what the
Nazis and their World War II collaborators could not, namely
the uprooting of the entire Serbian Krajina population...
The World War II fascist regime of Ante Pavelic is being
officially rehabilitated in Croatia today. Streets and public
buildings are being named after the architects of the Holocaust,
Nazi-era currency revived, while the numbers and scope of
the human carnage are being rewritten."
Had history not been dumped into a mass grave, Western publics
might have been allowed a fuller understanding of the Balkan
wars, given that by 1991 it was "normal to kill Serbs," as
Zarko Puhovski, of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights,
put it. When Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia in June 1991
- and the Vatican was the first to recognize it despite a
UN resolution warning this could imperil a peaceful solution
- survival dictated that the Serbs secede from the secessionists. "A
few days after the Croatians declared war," writes historian
Israel, Pope John Paul II "sent a letter to the Yugoslav
government demanding it not suppress the rebellion." And
so it was that in 1991 three Croatian soldiers saw "truckloads
of bloated, stinking bodies, mothers and children blown up
by bombs, and someone wearing a necklace made of ears," Reuters
reported on January 28, 1998.
And so it was that president Tudjman was a prominent guest
at the inauguration of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in
1993, despite saying that "900,000 died, not 6 million," and
ranged from calling Jasenovac a "myth," to blaming
Jews for the killings there, to offering a formal apology
for the 20,000 Jews killed there - but not for the several
hundred thousand Serbs. And so it was that in 1995, as Croatian
soldiers with Ustasha insignia cleansed the Krajina of Serbs
- under US air cover - the Glina massacre survivor Ljuban
Jednak once again fled for his life, dying a refugee in 1997.
And so it was that in 2005, when then Hague prosecutor Carla
del Ponte learned that indicted 1990s war criminal Gen. Ante
Gotovina was being sheltered in a Franciscan monastery in
Croatia, the Roman Catholic lady found herself "'extremely
disappointed' to encounter a wall of silence from the Vatican" which,
she told the Daily Telegraph, "could probably pinpoint
exactly which of Croatia's 80 monasteries was sheltering
him 'in a few days.'"
And so it was that at the 2006 inauguration of the spruced-up
Jasenovac memorial, the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Efraim
Zuroff observed "the absence of any identification of
the individuals responsible for the crimes described... I
was amazed that none of the speakers mentioned... Croatia's
greatest achievement in facing its Ustasha past - the prosecution
and conviction of Jasenovac commander Dinko Sakic... Could
it be that the punishment of such a criminal... is so unpopular,
even in today's Croatia...?"
And so it was that Sakic was buried last July in full Nazi
uniform, with a Father Vjekoslav Lasic - one of many who
hold masses in honor of Ante Pavelic - officiating. "Independent
State of Croatia is the foundation of today's homeland of
Croatia," Lasic said. "Every honorable Croat is
proud of the name Dinko Sakic."
When no Croatian official of stature spoke out against the
display, Zuroff called on the president to condemn the organizers
and remind Croatian society that Sakic brought it shame,
not pride.
In enshrining the Church's divided World War II loyalties
by canonizing the ambivalent pope at the time, the Church
would be announcing to the world what it's made of. But the
Church is better than the sum of its nastier parts. Canonizing
Pius XII would be unjust to Catholics who did more than he,
and an insult to Catholics everywhere. Pius shouldn't be
demonized, but he shouldn't be sanctified.
jpost.com
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