APPENDIX -- Croatia, the Vatican, and the Krajina Serbs __________________________________________________________
When Hitler invaded Yugoslavia, he found much support among the Croatians, and particularly among the extensive Ustashe organization that had been plotting the destruction of Yugoslavia for years from their base in Italy. The Ustashe very quickly became the state in Croatia—a quisling state that sympathized deeply with the German Nazi occupation forces to the point where Ante Pavelic (the poglavnik or ‘leader’) personally requested to Hitler that Croatian men of arms be allowed to fight under German command in the Eastern front (Avramov 1995:259). This was in addition to the thousands of Croats already serving under German and Italian command. The Ustashe also obliged the German Nazis by conducting extensive pogroms of Jews and Gypsies. However, the mission in which they took a special delight was that of the extermination of the Serbs, whom they considered their special ‘enemy’. They established an extensive system of death camps and butchered a still unknown number of Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies, with a fanatical brutality that shocked even the German Nazis. Towards the end of World War II, many Croatian Ustashas fled and were assisted in their escape by the money they plundered from hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Roma that they had butchered. They were also assisted in their escape by the Vatican (Avramov 1995:243-244).
Helping spirit out the Ustashe murderers out of Croatia was by no means out of character for the Vatican, nor was it an innocent or well-meaning mistake. The Vatican had been supporting the Ustashe from the beginning with full knowledge of what they were and what they did, starting from the time when Ante Pavelic and his collaborators were training and preparing in fascist Italy, and also during the time of the creation and formation of the “Independent State of Croatia” (this is the name of the quisling state led by Pavelic under German occupation). “The first to congratulate Kvaternik on the proclamation of the Independent State of Croatia was Zagreb Archbishop Dr. Alojzije Stepinac, and when Pavelic arrived in Zagreb he again was the first to pay his respects and bestow upon him his ‘Christian blessing.’” (Avramov 1995:252). The Croatian Catholic clergy was deeply involved with the Croatian quisling state, even down to the details of running the astonishingly barbaric Ustashe death camps. “…priests, Franciscans in particular, had the leading part in the massacres of Orthodox Serbs. They approved of the forceful conversion of Orthodox Serbs, about which the Vatican was informed through the Eastern Church Congregation (…) Four days after the massacres in Glina, Ustasha Leader Ante Pavelic was received by Pope Pius XII at the Vatican, and the Independent State of Croatia was, de facto, recognized by the Holy See” (Bulajic 2002:33). The Vatican collaborated closely with the Croatian Ustashe despite appeals from within its ranks.
"A group of Slovenian Catholic priests, banished by the German Nazis into the Independent State of Croatia, were arrested by the Ustashas and sent to the Jasenovac Camp because they refused to serve a mass of thanksgiving (Te Deum) to Ustasha leader Ante Pavelic. Archbishop Stepinac was informed of the arrest of the group of Slovenian Catholic priests and of their dispatch to the Jasenovac death camp. The Zagreb Kaptol (seat of the Archbishop of Croatia) refused to discuss the matter, considering that all those opposed to Hitler and Pavelic, “who are fighting for the Cross”, were to be considered criminals.
One of the imprisoned Slovenian priests, Anton Rantasa, managed to escape the hell of Jasenovac. On 10 November 1942, he informed the Kaptol and the Apostolic Legate, Marconi, on the fate of his colleagues and on the crimes of genocide being perpetrated at Jasenovac. He was told to keep silent! His testimony, written in 1950, has been preserved."—Bulajic (2002:36-37)
The foregoing gives only the merest taste of the degree of involvement of the Croatian Catholic Church, and the Vatican, in these crimes. It remains here only to note that, even if the evidence of involvement at the time were not already so clear, the assistance that the Croatian Ustashe got from the Vatican in escaping the law, at the end of the war and afterwards, is evidence enough of complicity, for this assistance continued well after the crimes were known to the rest of the world, and therefore well after any claims of innocence on this matter could be credible by whatever measure.
"On May 4, 1945, [Pavelic] paid a farewell visit to the Zagreb archbishop in his residence at the Kaptol, delivering to his safekeeping crate upon crate of gold, jewelry and other valuables plundered from his victims; on May 5th he left Zagreb, together with some 500 Catholic clergy, headed by Archbishop Saric of Sarajevo. Pavelic first hid in the monastery of St. Gilgen outside Salzburg and then, disguised as a priest and under the assumed name of Father Gomez, he went to Rome and for a time stayed in a monastery there. Three years later he went to Argentina, traveling under a false passport issued to him in the name of Pablo de Aranios by a branch of the International Red Cross in Rome on July 5, 1948. After an abortive assassination attempt on his life, he left Argentina for Spain, again going to stay in a Franciscan monastery. All this was taking place at a time when the Ustasha crimes were no longer a secret to anyone, least of all the Vatican. Pavelic was on the list of war criminals, as undoubtedly one of the most monstrous figures of the twentieth century. He died in a German hospital in Madrid on December 26, 1954, after having received the last rites and the personal blessing of Pope Pius XII."—Avramov (1995:243-244)
The Ustasha mass murderers and their families who had escaped with the help of the Vatican were resident in various countries (including the United States) and spent the entire cold war plotting (once again) the destruction of Yugoslavia. Here is a partial list of their accomplishments during the Cold War (from Avramov 1995:246):
- 1967. Assassinations and bombs in the Yugoslav embassies of Washington DC, Ottawa, and at the Yugoslav consulates in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Toronto.
- February 19, 1968. One killed and several wounded during an attempt to place a bomb in the Yugoslav Club in Paris.
- March 4, 1968. A bomb exploded in front of the Yugoslav Consulate General in Graz (Austria).
- August 10, 1968. A bomb detonated in front of the Yugoslav mission to the United Nations.
- 1969. A bomb went off in Sidney on June 8th; the Yugoslav embassy at Canberra was bombed; on May 8th a bomb exploded in front of the Yugoslav ambassador’s residence in Brussels; on June 30th the military mission at Berlin was attacked, and the head of the mission was seriously wounded; and on August 21 another bomb exploded in front of the Yugoslav consulate in Melbourne.
- January 31, 1971. A large cache of Ustasha weapons was discovered at 334 Heide Street in Frankfurt.
- February 10, 1971. Croatian terrorists occupied the Yugoslav consulate in Göteborg in Sweden and held the employees there hostage.
- April 25th, 1971. A bomb was thrown at the Yugoslav Consulate General in Milan.
- April 7, 1971. The Ustashas Miroslav Barisi, Andelko Brajkovic, Ante Stojanov, Stanislav Milicevic, and Marinko Lero murdered the Yugoslav ambassador Vladimir Rolovic in Stockholm.
- September 25th, 1971. Ustasha Tomislav Tebrina made an assassination attempt against the president of the Club for Yugoslavs in Stockholm. A year later, a group of Ustashas hijacked a Swedish airplane with 86 passengers aboard, demanding that the murderers of Ambassador Rolovic be set free.
- November 22, 1972. A bomb went off in front of the Adriatic Travel Agency in Sidney.
- January 26, 1972. An airplane flying from Stockholm to Belgrade exploded over Czechoslovakia, and 27 passengers and crew members died. Three days later, a bomb completely wrecked the Yugotours office at Stockholm. On the same day, a bomb exploded in the Vienna-Zagreb express train, wounding six.
- Spring, 1972. 19 Ustasha terrorists (trained in Australia and the Federal Republic of Germany), led by Ambroz Andric, entered Yugoslavia clandestinely and tried to organize an uprising in Bosnia. All 19 belonged to the Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood, which had been formed in Australia and was headed by Srecko Rover (there were ten terrorist training camps located in Australia). Fifteen terrorists were killed in a shoot-out with Yugoslav regular police forces, and the uprising proved abortive.
- July 15th, 1972. A bomb exploded at the entrance to the Yugoslav consulate in Munich; a subsequent attempt to free the arrested terrorists was foiled by German police. However, on September 15th, three terrorists successfully hijacked a Swedish airplane and forced the Swedish authorities to free the murderers of Ambassador Rolovic in return for the plane.
- Autumn, 1974. A group of Ustasha terrorists, led by Zelimir Mesterovic, infiltrated Yugoslavia and began a series of subversive actions. Two of them were killed in an encounter with the police on October 29th; one policeman was killed and another one seriously wounded. This group maintained ties with the Black International and attended the congress of Catholic organizations held in Lyon on December 28 and 29 of that same year. The same group claimed responsibility for the assassination of Mladen Dokovic, consul in Lyon in February 1974.
- 1975. From this point onwards, tactics changed and the principal activities were transferred to Yugoslavia, and the various organizations eventually coalesced into the coalition known as Hrvatsko Narodno Vijece (HNV), whose headquarters were established in the United States, with branches in Croatian towns. An important component of their strategy to dismember Yugoslavia, from this point onwards, became to give assistance to the ultranationalist Shqiptar (Kosovo Albanian) separatists in Kosovo.
The question that must come to many people’s minds, concerning the Vatican’s support for these people, is why? Why would the Vatican associate itself with a policy of extermination and forced conversion of Orthodox Serbs, Jews, and Roma? Why would it help spirit out the Ustashe monsters far from the reach of justice, enabling them to continue a campaign of terrorism against Yugoslavia from the Diaspora? The answer is that
"[Ante] Pavelic was an exponent of the Vatican and two popes, Pope Pius XI and Pope Pius XII, who were committed to confessionalism, to a policy which was based on theological traditionalism—“Roma eterna” and Roman Catholicism as the only true faith. It is true that this policy was crushed in the Thirty Years’ War, but the Vatican never renounced it in its policy toward the Orthodox world. It was pursued systematically, and Vatican diplomacy was engaged on several parallel fronts. In essence it was the ideological opponent of communism, but it supported communism wherever such a line meant the destruction of Orthodoxy, and this was true of the countries of Eastern Europe.
The Vatican made every possible effort to save the Ustashas, so that at a given moment it could skillfully use them in the anti-communist movement of the West, again heaping all the odium on the Serbs and Serbia. This explains why Ustasha war criminals received a different treatment in the West from that meted out to Nazi war criminals, and this explains why the genocide of the Serbs was hushed up. Under the aureole of “papal infallibility,” with clerical discipline and assistance from the highly sophisticated Vatican propaganda machine, the Ustasha movement survived the death of its own state. Under the patronage of the Western democracies, the Ustashas consolidated their ranks and began their campaign to destroy Yugoslavia, this time the communist “AVNOJ” Yugoslavia."—Avramov (1995:244)
In Hitler's pope: The secret history of Pius XII (1999), John Cornwell has meticulously documented the involvement of the former pontiff with the Nazi powers and in the Holocaust. Cornwell’s book is all the more remarkable for the fact that the work is based on painstaking research in the Vatican secret archives and other previously unmined sources, and for the fact that he is a Catholic. Moreover, he began his research in an attempt to exonerate Eugenio Pacelli, also known as Pius XII, of what he initially believed to be unfair accusations.
"When journalist John Cornwell began his examination of certain secret Vatican records, he believed he would find evidence to vindicate the controversial papacy of Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII, pope during World War II.
In fact, Cornwell's very access to the archives depended on the assurances he gave Vatican scholars about the viewpoint of his work."[18] [my emphasis]
But the data leads where it will and because it convicts Pacelli it changed Cornwell’s mind. The following summary of Cornwell’s findings is by Frank Mclynn, writing in the Glasgow Herald[19]:
"As Pius XI's Secretary of State he [Pacelli] suppressed the powerful Catholic opposition to Hitler in Germany, which might well have led to Hitler's defeat, just as it had led to Bismark's in the Kulturkampf of the 1870s. Pacelli backed the Nazis to the hilt throughout the 1930s, even going behind Pius XI's back to do so. As Pope from 1939 onwards he supported Germany's annexation of Poland and overrunning of France and Belgium in 1940. He backed the vile fascist regime of Ante Pavelic and Ustashe in Croatia and connived at the anti-Serbian pogroms there. He did not protest when the Nazis in 1943 transported thousands of Italian Jews from Rome, under the very walls of the Vatican, to death camps in Poland. He did not protest when German bombers razed London and Coventry, but did so when Allied bombers appeared over the Eternal City. He was an anti-communist zealot throughout his life, thought Franco's Spain the most perfect society on earth, and despised democracy and the parliamentary system. His apologists, defenders of the indefensible, have tried to palliate, extenuate, or explain away his guilt over the Holocaust. Their arguments vary from the (documentarily falsifiable) claim that he did not know what was going on in Germany to the barefaced Cold War argument that to help in discomfiting Hitler was to aid the Soviet Union. Cornwell's meticulous research blows away all this nonsense. How can anyone seriously claim that the following mealy-mouthed formula, part of Pacelli's Christmas 1942 broadcast, amounts to a condemnation of the Final Solution? After pleading for a vow to be made by men of good will to bring society back to its "immovable centre of gravity in divine law" (whatever that means), Pacelli continued: "Humanity owes this vow to those hundreds of thousands who, without any fault of their own, sometimes only by reason of their nationality or race, are marked down for death or gradual extinction." No mention of Nazis or Jews here, millions are reduced to "hundreds of thousands," and systematic extermination becomes "sometimes". And this was actually Pacelli's strongest statement ever on the Holocaust!"
Topic: risking banning to publish the truth... (Read 4514 times)