DESPITE A LOT OF TALK about apologies, the Catholic Church stands ready to anoint a patron saint of genocide. On October 4, 1998 Pope John Paul II traveled to the Republic of Croatia to beatify [
1.] that country's national hero, Alojzije Stepinac, the Archbishop of Zagreb during the Second World War. In so doing he underlined the real commitment of the Catholic Church to stand by its history, no matter how barbaric. Officially, Stepinac was honored as a martyr of the Church's most recent crusade, its crusade against communism. But in making this fanatic a saint, the pope is absolving Stepinac of complicity in crimes of genocide against Serbs, Jews and Roma (Gypsies) that took place in the Nazi puppet state of Croatia during the Second World War.
This act belies the sincerity of the church's recent and well-publicized campaign to cleanse its past by admitting in a very general way that mistakes were made. [
2.] In beatifying Stepinac, the pope makes common cause with those who deny that this holocaust ever took place.
By making Stepinac a saint, the Catholic church is trying to bury one of the darkest chapters of its own recent history with honor. In Croatia, the church did not merely turn a blind eye to genocide, it was an active and enthusiastic participant. Priests and monks took part in atrocities, bishops promoted anti-Semitism and vilified Serbs at the very moment the Jews and Serbs were being exterminated, and forced conversions took place all across Croatia. All the while, the Vatican stood by, waiting to see whether or not this social experiment would advance its interests. The church has yet to apologize for, or even acknowledge the existence of, this genocide. Now Saint Stepinac stands in the way of memory and responsibility.
THE POLITICAL CONTEXT
After the collapse of Yugoslavia, on April 11, 1941, the Nazis installed a puppet regime in Croatia headed by Ante Pavelic, a terrorist and head of the clero-fascist Ustashe movement, as leader or "poglavnik." Pavelic and his followers had been in exile in Italy under the protection of Mussolini and was wanted in both France and Yugoslavia for orchestrating the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia and French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou. The regime he established in Croatia with the help of his Nazi patrons, the NDH (Independent State of Croatia), was run by the Ustashe party, an organization which combined fascist and Catholic ideologies and which aimed to build a Croatia cleansed of its ethnic and religious rivals, the Eastern Orthodox Serbs.
The identity of the state itself was based more on religious affiliation than on ethnicity, with the fanatically Catholic Ustashe determined to solidify their control through a combination of forced religious conversions, expulsion and outright extermination. In the words of Ustashe Minister of Education and Culture Mile Budak:
The basis for the Ustashe movement is religion. For minorities such as the Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies, we have three million bullets. We will kill a part of the Serbs. Others we will deport, and the rest we will force to accept the Roman Catholic Religion. Thus the new Croatia will be rid of all Serbs in its midst in order to be 100% Catholic within 10 years. [3.]
This sentiment was echoed a couple of days later by a pastor from Udbina, Mate Mogus:
Until now we have worked for the Catholic faith with the prayer book and with the cross. Now the time has come to work with rifle and revolver [4.]
The regime quickly moved to make good on these threats. The Ustashe's primary enemy, the Orthodox Slav minority, was persecuted with a ferocity that at times alarmed even their Nazi patrons, who feared that the grisly brutality of the atrocities committed against such a large minority would drive them into the arms of the Partisans. On February 17, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, the day-to-day supervisor of the Final Solution, scarcely known for his great sensitivity, reported to Reich Führer of the SS Heinrich Himmler:
The number of Slavs massacred by the Croats with the most sadistic of methods must be estimated at a count of 300,000.... The fact is that in Croatia, living Serbs who have converted to the Catholic Church, are able to remain residing unharrassed...From this 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. [5.]
The Italian fascists who controlled a portion of Croatia during the war were genuinely horrified by the Ustashe and rescued a substantial number of Jews and Orthodox from Ustashe persecution, resisting all attempts to extradite the refugees who fled into their zone of control.
Although the Serbs were the primary target of the Ustashe's ethnic cleansing campaign, they were not the only target. In line with Hitler's directives and a substantial amount of indigenous anti-Semitism and racism, the Ustashe also rounded up and exterminated the vast majority of the Jews and Gypsies in the country.
Whereas part of the horror of the Nazi genocide lay in its dispassionate application of the principles of mass production and efficiency to the business of murder, the Ustashe genocide was far more primitive and personal, characterized by a sadistic personal enjoyment of torture and revenge that harkened back to the very worst excesses of the Dark Ages. Deschner summarizes the horror:
Mass executions were common where the victims had their throats slit, were sometimes quartered, and also now and then hung in butcher shops with the sign: 'human flesh.' Cruelties occurred along side of which the deeds of the German thugs of the KZ paled by comparison. The Ustashe loved games of torture with nightly orgies; they stuck burning nails under fingernails, poured salt into open wounds, cut off all possible body parts and determined by noble competition who was best at cutting throats. They burned churches full of people, impaled children in Vlasenika and Kladany, preferred to cut off noses and ears and poked out eyes. The Italians photographed one Ustashe around whose neck hung two chains of human tongues and eyes. [6.]
Like the Nazis, the NDH maintained a series of concentration camps, the most notorious of which was Jasenovac, a camp in which tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, [
7.] perished. The work of the camps was supplemented by innumerable pogroms in the villages and in the countryside.
The primary targets of this liquidation effort were the educated classes, anyone whom the Ustashe believed likely to retain a separate Serbian culture or identity. For the peasantry there was sometimes the mercy of forced rebaptism, which was conducted en masse throught the countryside. Despite occasional quibbles about the details of the forced conversions, the church in general, both the Croatian clergy and the Vatican, welcomed the conversions as a victory for Catholicism. [8.]
THE ROLE OF THE CLERGY IN THE NDH
Indeed, for the most part, the clergy welcomed the new regime with fanatical enthusiasm. The Catholic Church had long considered Croatia its outer bulwark in the Balkans against the Eastern Orthodox Church and grated against participation in a Yugoslavia dominated by their confessional opponents. Most also shared to some degree the ideological goals of the Ustashe and welcomed the end of the religious tolerance that had been imposed by Yugoslavia.
Archbishop Saric of Sarajevo even went so far as to publish poetry extolling the Ustashe Leader. The words of his "Ode to Pavelic" reflect the xenophobic religious nationalism endemic among the clergy:
Against the greedy Jews with all their money,
who wanted to sell our souls,
betray our names
those miserable ones.
You are the rock on which rests
homeland and freedom in one
Protect our lives from hell,
from Marxism and Bolshevism [9.]
Stepinac too showed evidence of anti-Serbian xenophobia in his writings:
All in all, Croats and Serbs are of two worlds, northpole and southpole; they will never be able to get together unless by a miracle of God. The schism [Eastern Orthodoxy] is the greatest curse in Europe, almost greater than Protestantism. Here there is no moral, no principles, no truth, no justice, no honesty. [10.]
Throughout the duration of the war Stepinac and the rest of the Catholic hierarchy continued to extend public support to the regime, conducting a variety of politico-religious ceremonies, sitting in the Ustashe parliament, and continually sanctifying and celebrating the Ustashe state.
Many of the lower clergy went well beyond words and participated directly in forcible conversions, torture and mass murder. Italian historian Carlo Falconi remarks:
Allowing for exceptions here and there, the phenomenon just described is characteristic of Ustashe massacres - as opposed to exterminations in other countries during the Second World War - in that it is almost impossible to imagine a Ustashe punitive expedition without a priest at its head spurring it on, and usually a Franciscan. [11.]
Although the majority of religious figures personally involved in atrocities committed their crimes in raids on the Bosnian countryside [
12.] the largest and most notorious concentration camp in the country,
Jasenovac, was for a time run by a former Franciscan friar,
Miroslav Filipovic, who not only directed but actually took part in acts of torture and mass murder. At his trial he confessed to personally supervising the murders of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies. In 1943 Filipovic was replaced as concentration camp commandant by another former priest, Ivica Brkljacic.
THE CATHOLIC PRESS
The enthusiasm of the Catholic press, under the direct supervision of the religious hierarchy, for the campaign of religious and ethnic cleansing was so unrestrained in its support of fascism, forced conversions and genocide that apologists have attempted to de-legitimize its damning testimony by intimating that such statements were either made under duress or were the work of intrusive Ustashe censors. Such an excuse might have some plausibility if there had been a change in the content of these papers after the Ustashe takeover. In fact, however, there is no such discontinuity. The Catholic press before the war was every bit as rabid in its support of the clero-fascist agenda, the Axis and ethnic cleansing. Consider the following report from Katolicki List praising the establishment of a clero-fascist puppet state in Slovakia:
In a modern state, which placed the interests of the people above all other considerations, the church and the state must cooperate in order to avoid all conflicts and misunderstandings. Thus, in accordance with the teachings of Christ, the Church in Slovakia had already exerted itself to arrange a new life for the Slovakian people.
The views of Dr. Tuka are fulfilled by the formation of a people's Slovakia, which has the approval of the President of the Republic, Msgr. Dr. Josip Tiso. In the National-Socialist system in Slovakia, the Church will not be persecuted. Persecutions will be used against the opponents of National-Socialism. [13.]
The same paper enthusiastically welcomed the entry of German troops into Zagreb and the proclamation of the NDH on April 21,
1941:
The Catholic Church, which has led the Croat nation spiritually through 1300 years of difficulty, accompanies with rejoicing and delight the whole Croat people in this moment of its reconstruction and political independence.
....with sincere joy and pleasure we welcome the foundation of the NDH. Our gratitude is particularly due to those self sacrificing fighters who, under the leadership of Ustashe poglavnik Dr. Ante Pavelic, prepared the way for the proclamation of the NDH. [14.]
And on May 25, 1941, in an article in a Catholic Action publication entitled "Why are the Jews Being Persecuted", Priest Franjo Kralik justifies the persecution on religious
grounds:
The descendents of those who hated Jesus, who condemned him to death, who crucified him and immediately persecuted his pupils, are guilty of greater excesses that those of their forefathers .... Satan helped them invent Socialism and Communism .... The movement for freeing the world from the Jews is a movement for the renaissance of human dignity. The Almighty and All-wise God is behind this movement. [15.]
STEPINAC'S PERSONAL CULPABILITY
As archbishop of Zagreb and military vicar to the armed forces and the Ustashe, Stepinac was the de facto head of the Catholic Church in Croatia during the Second World War. In a regime that counted its Catholicism as the core of its national identity, the Archbishop's importance and influence in the events that transpired there during and after the war were substantial.
There is no question that he initially welcomed the establishment of the Ustashe state as the fulfillment of centuries of Croatian aspirations for independence. In a pastoral letter published less than a month after the founding of the NDH, Stepinac consecrates and legitimizes the new regime:
For as confused as today's fateful events may be, as varying as the factors may be that have influence on the course of events, one can nonetheless see the working of the divine hand. [16.]
He likewise lauded the enactment of Catholic dogma into law that marked the initial stages of the regime. He looked with particular favor on laws that meted out the death penalty for abortion and 30 day in jail for swearing. [
17.] There is no doubt either that he welcomed the elimination of religious tolerance. In a diary entry that details his first meeting with the
poglavnik Stepinac notes with evident approval the coming suppression of rival
faiths.
The Archbishop gave his blessing for his work.... When the Archbishop had finished, the poglavnik answered that he wanted to give all his help to the Catholic Church. He also said the would uproot the sect of Old Catholics which was nothing more than a society for divorce. He went on to say that he would not show tolerance toward the Orthodox Serbian Church because, as he saw things, it was not a church but a political organization. All this left the Archbishop with the impression that the poglavnik was a sincere Catholic and that the Church would have freedom of action, even if the Archbishop did not delude himself into thinking that all these things could happen easily. [18.]
The religious intolerance of the Ustashe continued to be a major factor in Stepinac's support for the regime throughout the war. At one point, he complained bitterly that the Italian fascist troops that were occupying a portion of Croatia during the war were allowing so much religious freedom that it was threatening the stability of the state. To the Bishop of Mostar Stepinac
wrote,
The Italians have returned and resumed civil and military authority. The schismatic Churches have immediately come to life again, and the Orthodox priests, in hiding up till now, have reappeared in freedom. The Italians seem to be favorably disposed toward Serbs and severe toward Catholics. [19.]
He addressed a similar complaint to the Minister for Italian Affairs at
Zagreb:
It so happens that in the Croatian territory annexed to Italy a constant decline in religious life is to be observed, and a certain discernible shift from Catholicism to schism. If that most Catholic part of Croatia should cease in the future to be so, the blame and the responsibility before God and history will lie with Catholic Italy. The religious aspect of the problem I am discussing makes it my duty to speak in such plain and open terms, since I am responsible for the religious well-being of Croatia. [20.]
Stepinac also explored the possibilities for enriching the church at the expense of its dispossessed Orthodox rivals. The Archbishop specifically petitioned the
poglavnik to hand over the Orahovica Serb monastery to Trappists whom Hitler had expelled from their monastery at Reichenberg.
HESITATION AND SECOND THOUGHTS
Although Stepinac was fully in accord with the clero-fascist agenda of criminalizing dissent and driving it underground, he became rather less sanguine about actual genocide. In his sermons after1942 there are veiled protests against the extreme methods the Ustashe were employing to eradicate the Serbs, particularly when these methods clashed with matters of religious doctrine. He directly challenged the authority of the Ustashe government to determine policy concerning baptism and conversion. As part of their program of ethnic cleansing, the Ustashe government wanted to limit options of conversion for those elements of the population that they had targeted for death (primarily Serbian Orthodox intellectuals) and this the Archbishop refused to sanction. Stepinac eventually questioned the sincerity of the mass conversions conducted at the point of the gun. He later personally intervened to save a number of individuals, both Orthodox and Jewish, from the Ustashe. [21.] This level of opposition from such a key church official prompted Pavelic to secretly petition the Vatican for Stepinac's removal. [22.]
On the basis of such sporadic acts of humanitarianism in the later years of the war some latter day Croatian nationalists have petitioned the Israeli Yad Vashem to include Stepinac on the role of Righteous. Their request was has been denied twice. A representative of Yad Vashem noted that "persons who assisted Jews but simultaneously collaborated or were closely linked with a Fascist regime which took part in the Nazi orchestrated persecution of Jews may be disqualified for the Righteous title."
Stepinac's stance on these issues was in fact far from consistent. For instance, in his May 1943 report to the Vatican on the state of affairs in Croatia, he still points with pride to the large number of converts (240,000 is the number he mentions) as a positive accomplishment of the regime that would be lost if Croatia were to fall. During the same visit, he even went so far as to defend the anti-Semitic laws of the NDH. Lobkowicz, the Ustashe representative to the Vatican, describes the Archbishop's reasoning:
According to information from various sources and according to the Archbishop's own statement, he made a very positive report about Croatia. He revealed that he had kept quiet about some things with which he is not at all in agreement in order to be able to show Croatia in the best possible light. He mentioned our laws against abortion, a point very well received in the Vatican. Basing his arguments on these laws, the Archbishop justified in part the methods used against the Jews, who are in our country the greatest defenders of crimes of this kind and the most frequent perpetrators of them. [23.]
Stepinac and the rest of the clergy enthusiastically welcomed the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 as a Christian Crusade.
Katholicki List remarks:
With the whole cultured and the whole Christian world we welcome the necessary operation on the body of mankind in the belief that the German army will succeed in extracting this poisoned tooth of the Comintern, and drain off poison from the healthy organism of human society. [24.]
The following year Stepinac reaffirmed his identification with the cause of the
Axis:
The whole civilized world is fighting against the terrible dangers of communism which now threatens not only Christianity but all the positive values of humanity ....Until recently the church was virtually alone in seeing this danger to the whole civilized world... [25.]
Stella Alexander charitably suggests that such a "blinkered view of the world" showed that Stepinac "found it hard to grasp that anything beyond the boundaries of Croatia, always excepting the Holy See,
was quite real." [
26.] In fact such views were typical of Catholic clergy all across Europe at the time, their pro-Axis views fueled by an anti-communism so fanatical that even Hitler was an acceptable ally. [
27.]
After 1943, when it had become clear that the tide had turned against Germany in the East, Stepinac's unbridled hatred of communism took over as the key motivating force in his increasingly desperate support for the regime. The idea of Croatia as a Catholic bulwark against Orthodoxy was gradually supplanted by a notion that Croatian independence must be preserved at any cost as a fortress against godless communism.
Stepinac's relationship to the Ustashe in the later years of the regime thus forms a general pattern of private protest and public support, of lauding the goals but balking at the means. Ultimately, his actions show that his support for the goals of Croatian nationalism and clerical fascism was the more powerful motivation. Throughout the duration of the war, he continued to lobby for the NDH with the Vatican, participated in a large number of public ceremonies sanctifying and celebrating the Ustashe state, and accepted military awards from the regime up to the date of its final defeat in 1944. At the same time he tried to ameliorate the consequences of his support by saving victims here and there and lobbying the regime for a gentler implementation of its policies. When defeat was inevitable, he took charge of the Ustashe archives and some of the regime's looted gold. [28.]
THE VERDICT
Some time after the war Stepinac was put on trial by the Communist government of Yugoslavia after repeated requests to the Vatican requesting his removal were ignored. He was tried for collaboration with the Ustashe and for his support of the ex-Ustashe Krizari (Crusaders), a terrorist group then conducting intermittent raids on Yugoslav territory. Although the conduct of the trial was no doubt biased, the guilty verdict was entirely justified. Stepinac was not merely an anti-Communist dissident. During the war he had aided and abetted an invading enemy and presided over a national clergy that had supported and engaged in genocide; after the war, he supported the actions of terrorists attempting to destabilize the government. At his trial his only defense was "My conscience is clear," a phrase that rings oddly hollow when juxtaposed to the day to day realities of the Ustashe state. What kind of "saint" could have a clear conscience in the face of the horrors that had been committed in the name of his religion and by people under his own supervision? Only a morally bankrupt individual would feel so little responsibility and so little remorse. Only a morally bankrupt church could take such a man for a saint.
Stepinac indeed suffered from the same kind of moral blindness that afflicted the Catholic Church as a whole during this period. The Vatican, in general, and Msgr. Montini (later Paul VI) [29.] in particular, were extraordinarily well informed about what was happening in Croatia and about the culpability of members of the clergy in the atrocities. Yet the Church chose to remain silent and to this day the Catholic Church has never even acknowledged, let alone condemned, the atrocities committed by its representatives. In fact, pope after pope has done the very opposite. After the war, the Church concealed fleeing war criminal Ante Pavelic from Allied authorities in the Vatican itself until this fact was discovered by American intelligence. They then helped the former Ustashe dictator flee to Peron's Argentina via the so-called Vatican Ratlines. [30.] On his deathbed in Franco's Spain in 1959 Pavelic even received a personal benediction by then pope John XXIII. The current pope, John Paul II, has refused repeated requests to visit the site of the Jasenovac concentration camp on his visits to Croatia, preferring instead to exchange greetings with former Croatian head of state and holocaust-denier Franjo Tudjman and to make a saint of the highly compromised Stepinac.
The recent beatification of Stepinac continues this pattern of responsibility denied and crimes sanctified. What is most inexcusable about elevating Stepinac to sainthood lies in this covering up of evidence of the crimes of the Church, in this rewriting of history, and in the Church's miserable failure to learn anything from such horrible mistakes.
Footnotes
1. Beatification is the last step before elevation to sainthood. [back]
2. The Orwellian phrase used by the Holy See to describe this process is "the purification of memory." International Theological Commission Memory And Reconciliation: The Church And The Faults Of The Past, December 1999. The text of this document is available on the Vatican website. For a critical evaluation of the "apology" see Randolph L. Braham (ed), The Vatican and the Holocaust: The Catholic Church and the Jews During the Nazi Era (Colombia University 2000). [back]
3. Speech of 22 July 1941. Quoted in Vladimir Dedijer, The Yugoslav Auschwitz and the Vatican (Prometheus 1988) p.141. [back]
4. Novi List 24 July 1941. Quoted in Dedijer p.131. Mogus also took an active part in the atrocities. See some of the testimony from his trial in Dedijer pp. 185-186. [back]
5. Karlheinz Deschner, With God and Furher p. 282. The Ustashe also seem to have differed from most of the Nazis in their enthusiasm for photographing themselves involved in acts of butchery. [back]
6. Deschner pp. 280-281. Deschner's reference to deciding "by noble competition who was best at cutting throats" is illustrated by the following testimony:
The Ustashi genocidal criminal-slaughterer, Mile Friganovic told the incredible story about how Fransiscan Pero Bnica, a scholarship holder of the Siroki Brijeg monastery, slaughtered 1,350 prisoners in the Jasenovac camp in only one night:
Franciscan Pero Bnica, Ante Zrinusic, Sipka and I waged a bet on who would slaughter more prisoners that night. The killing started and already after an hour I slaughtered much more than they did. It seemed to me that I was in seventh heaven. I had never felt such bliss in my life. And already after a few hours I slaughtered 1,100 people, while the others only managed to kill 300 to 400 each. And then, when I was experiencing the greatest ecstasy I noticed an elderly peasant standing and peacefully and calmly watching me slaughter my victims and them dying in the greatest pain. That look of his shook me: in the midst of the greatest ecstasy I suddenly froze and for some time couldn't make a single move. And then I walked up to him and found out that he was some Vukasin from the village of Klepci near Capljina whose whole family had been killed, and who was sent to Jasenovac after having worked in the forests. He spoke this with incomprehensible peace which affected me more than the terrible cries around us. All at once I felt the wish to disrupt his peace with the most brutal torturing and, through his suffering, to restore my ecstasy and continue to enjoy the inflicting of pain.
I singled him out and sat him down on a log. I ordered him to cry out: 'Long live Poglavnik Pavelic!', or I would cut his ear off. Vukasin was silent. I ripped his ear off. He didn't say a word. I told him once again to cry out 'Long live Pavelic!' or I would tear off the other ear too. I tore off the other ear. Yell: 'Long live Pavelic!', or I'll tear off your nose. And when I ordered him for the fourth time to yell 'Long live Pavelic!' and threatened to take his heart out with a knife, he looked at me, that is, somehow through me and over me into uncertainty and slowly said: 'DO YOUR JOB, CHILD!' After that, these words of his totally bewildered me, I froze, plucked out his eyes, tore out his heart, cut his throat from ear to ear and threw him into the pit. But then something broke within me and I could no longer kill that night.
Fransiscan Pero Brzica won the bet because he had slaughtered 1,350 prisoners and I paid the bet without a word.
Quoted in Milan Bulajic
The Role of the Vatican in the Breakup of the Yugoslav State (Beograd 1994) pp. 156-157. [
back]
7. There has been a great deal of debate about the exact numbers killed by the NDH in general and at Jasenovac in particular. The debate has assumed an extremely partisan character because of more recent Croatian-Serbian conflicts. The late president of the newly revived Croatia, Franjo Tudjman, made a name for himself with his extreme downward revisions of the number of people killed. Tudjman estimates only 30,000 died at Jasenovac while Serbian sources normally cite a figure of 600,000 or 700,000. The US Government recently weighed in on the issue during the trial of former Jasenovac Commandant Dinko Sakic, releasing a captured Nazi document which supports a figure of 120,000 killed at Jasenovac by December 1943 (Newsday, May 2, 1998). There an earlier discussion of this issue in Alexsa Djilas The Contested Country (Harvard, 1991) pp. 125-127. Although Djilas seems overly willing to trust the integrity of Tudjman's calculations, he is clear that the calculation does not affect the overtly genocidal nature of the regime under sections (a), (b) and (c) of the Convention on Genocide adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1949 (Djilas p. 212-213 n.59). It is worth noting that Tudjman in 1996 proposed reburying the remains of the Ustashe killed by the Yugoslav partisans together with the victims of the Ustashe at Jasenovac. (Reuters, April 22, 1996) This proposal to reunite the Ustashe perpetrators with their victims met with a huge international outcry and was eventually abandoned. [back]
8. Djilas, The Contested Country, p. 211 n.46. [back]
9. A complete translation of the poem along with facimilies of the original publication is given in Dedijer pp. 97-102. [back]
10. Diary Entry for 28 March 1941 quoted in Dedijer along with a photograph of the original entry in Stepinac's handwriting p. 142. [back]
11. In Carlo Falconi, The Silence of Pius XII (Little, Brown 1965) p. 298. [back]
12. Dedijer provides very extensive documentation for this in his chapter "Documents on Massacres under the Leadership of Priests" pp. 176-221. [back]
13. Katolicki List January 1940. Quoted in Yugoslav Embassy, The Case of Archbishop Stepinac (Washington 1947) p. 45. An online version is available here, courtesy of the Clero-Fascism Project. [back]
14. Richard Patee, The Case of Cardinal Archbishop Stepinac (Bruce 1953) p. 166. Part of the documentation submitted at Stepinac's trial. [back]
15. From Katolicki Tjednik. Quoted in Yugoslav Embassy pp. 47-48. [back]
16. Dedijer p.95. [back]
17. Stella Alexander, The Triple Myth. [back]
18. Diary entry April 27, 1941 quoted in Falconi p. 273. It is worth keeping in mind that even at this point Stepinac was fully aware that Pavelic was an assassin and fugitive from justice. Pius XII also had a private audience with the poglavnik in May of 1941 in full awareness of what the man had done and never uttered a word of reproach. Afterwards, Pius XII met with an Ustashe delegation that included Mile Budak. [back]
19. Falconi p. 320. [back]
20. Falconi p. 320. [back]
21. See Patee pp. 306-340. It is worth noting that the earliest of the interventions Patee provides documentation for is March 1942 with the majority of cases falling in 1943 or later. [back]
22. This by no means represented a complete repudiation of the Archbishop, but was more a sign of the maximal nature of Pavelic's ambitions. As he fled the country, Pavelic asked Stepinac to head the provisional government, a sign that he retained a significant amount of trust in the archbishop. Although Stepinac declined that offer, he did accept custody of the Ustashe archives and some of the looted gold. [back]
23. Falconi pp. 315-316. [back]
24. Patee p.167. [back]
25. Alexander. [back]
26. Alexander 88-89. [back]
27. For example, Archbishop Constantini, Secretary of the Congregation for the propagation of the Faith, gave a speech in Venice in which he identified with the German cause and cast the struggle against the USSR in the language of a crusade:
Just as yesterday on Spanish soil, so today in Bolshevik Russia itself, in that boundless land where Satan himself seems to have found his instruments and his best collaborators among the highest authorities of the Republics -- there brave soldiers of our own fatherland, along with others, are fighting the greatest battle of all. We wish with all our hearts that this battle may bring us the conclusive victory over a Bolshevism bent on negation and upheaval.
Quoted in Saul Friedlander,
Pius XII and the Third Reich: A Documentation (New York, Knopf 1966) p. 79. [
back]
28. See Dedijer pp.415-418 and Mark Aarons and John Loftus Unholy Trinity (New York, St. Martin's 1991/1998) Chapter 6. The ultimate fate of the rest of the Ustashe gold, which appears to have been channeled at one point through the Vatican bank, has been the object of intensive recent investigations. The US Treasury department has issued a report discussing the curent status of the investigation as part of its overally inquiry into the role of the Swiss banks in laundering Nazi plunder. There is also an ongoing lawsuit on behalf of victims of the Ustashe genocide to force the Vatican to release information from its archives concerning the fate of the gold. [back]
29. For a discussion of Montini's role in supporting the NDH see Falconi pp. 334-343. [back]
30. See Aarons and Loftus. [back]
