The Vatican Exposed: Money, Murder, and the Mafia (11 page)

The pope received the new king one day before the coronation
and met with Pavelic in private for several hours. He then blessed
Pavelic's prime minister and the entire Ustashi delegation, including
members of the Great Crusaders' Brotherhood whose task was to
convert the Orthodox Serbs to Roman Catholicism.2

In accordance with traditional Catholic teaching, the new state
was governed by civil and religious authority. Ante Pavelic, as the
leader of the Ustashi, was hailed as the fuhrer of New Croatia and
solemnly blessed by Archbishop Stepinac in a ceremony at the Cathedral of Zagreb. Pavelic reciprocated by appointing Stepinac the
Supreme Military Apostolic Vicar of the Ustashi Army. On June 28,
1941, Stepinac held a service of sanctification to bless Pavelic as the
leader of the Croatian people. "While we greet you cordially as head
of the Independent State of Croatia," the archbishop said, "we
implore the Lord of the stars to give his divine blessings to you, the
leader of the people."3 These were strange words to be coming from
an official spokesman for the Church. Pavelic was neither a benign
shepherd nor a peace-loving ruler. The Croatian dictator had been
sentenced to death in absentia by Yugoslav and French courts for the political assassinations of King Alexander of Yugoslavia and Louis
Barthou, the French Foreign Minister.

With the archbishop in tow, Pavelic set out to cleanse the new
nation of all religious and genetic impurity in order to create a model
Fascist Catholic nation. All institutions were compelled to conform to
the letter and the spirit of canon law. On April 25, 1941, Pavelic
decreed that all publication of works in Cyrillic script (as used by the
Orthodox Serbs) was forbidden. Over the next month anti-Semitic
laws were passed, describing Jews in racist terms, prohibiting the marriage of Jews to Ayrans (such as the Catholic Croats), and instituting
the "Aryanization" of bureaucracies, the professions, and the universities. By the end of May the first Jews were deported from Zagreb to
a concentration camp in Danica.4 At the same time, political opponents of the Ustashi-Communists, Socialists, and Liberals-were
banished or imprisoned. Trade unions were abolished, freedom of
speech was suppressed, and the press became the voice of Pavelic's
regime. Nuns and priests marshaled children to march in semimilitary
formations and to salute images of Pavelic, Hitler, and Mussolini.
Catholic doctrine became compulsory in all schools and all government agencies. Jews were compelled to wear the Star of David on
their clothes. Orthodox Serbs were forbidden to hold public office, to
teach in schools, and to work in factories. Signs appeared at the
entrance to parks and on all means of public transport that read:
"Entry forbidden to all Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and dogs."5

Such measures were not sufficient to realize the dream of a New
Croatia. A new policy of mass murder of all "undesirables" was
adopted. "Undesirables" were defined simply as all individuals who
were not "Aryan" and not members of the Roman Catholic Church.
On June 2, 1941, Minister of Justice Milovan Zanitch declared:
"This State, our country, is only for the Croats, and not for anyone
else. There are no ways and means which we Croats will not use to
make our country truly ours, and to cleanse it of all Orthodox Serbs.
All those who came into our country 300 years ago must disappear.
We do not hide our intention. It is the policy of our State, and during
its promotion we shall do nothing else but follow the principles of the
Ustashi."6 On July 22, 1941, Minister of Education Mile Budak offi cially confirmed the plan of genocide by saying: "We shall kill one
part of the Serbs; we shall transport another; and the rest will be
forced to embrace the Roman Catholic religion. This last part will be
absorbed by the Croatian elements."7

The plan for ethnic cleansing was ambitious. The new State was
composed of a vast number of racial-religious groups that had to be
eliminated. Out of a population of 6.7 million, only 3.3 million were
Croat Catholics. Over 2 million Orthodox Serbs inhabited the
country, along with 700,000 Muslims, and 45,000 Jews.8

Within a matter of months, the death camps became fully operational at such places as Djakovo, Stara Gradiska, Krapje, Gradina,
Brocice, and Velika Kosutarica. From December 1941 to February
1942, 40,000 Serbs were executed at the notorious Jasenovoe Camp,
the Ustashi answer to Dachau. By summer the camp displayed a
much greater efficiency. Between June and August of 1942, 66,000
Serbs, including 2,000 children, were put to death. The crematories
at Jasenovoe ran day and night, and the Ustashi became so intent
upon the elimination of Serbs that they began to cast them into the
furnaces while the Serbs were still alive. This plan was soon abandoned because of the terrible reaction among those who were to be
burned. "People shrieked, shouted, and defended themselves," a
Ustashi officer later recalled. "To avoid such scenes, it was resolved
first to kill them and then to burn them."9

Special death camps were set up for children at Lobor, Jablanac,
Mlaka, Brocice, Ustici, Stara Gradiska, Sisak, Jastrebarsko, and
Gornja Rijeka. Gjordana Diedlender, who served as a guard at Stara
Gradiska, provided the following account at the trial of Ante Vrban,
the commandant at the camp:

At that time fresh women and children came daily to the Camp at
Strata Gradiska. About fourteen days later, Ante Vrban ordered all
children to be separated from their mothers and put in one room.
Ten of us were told to carry them there in blankets. The children
crawled around the room, and one child put an arm and leg
through the doorway, so that the door could not be closed. Vrban
shouted, "Push it!" When I did not do that, he banged the door
and crushed the child's leg. Then he took the child by its whole leg, and banged it on the wall till it was dead. After that we continued
carrying children in. When the room was full, Vrban brought
poison gas and killed them all."'

Several commandants and officers at Ustashi death camps were
Catholic priests. Fr. Miroslav Filipovic, a Franciscan friar, served as
the commandant of Jasenovoe. Three Franciscan monks-Fr.
Zvonko Brekalo, Fr. Zvonko Lipovac, and Fr. Josef Culina, who
served as officers of the Ustashi-aided Father Filipovic in supervising the mass executions.11 Father Brekalo was decorated by Pavelic
in 1944 with the "Order of King Zvonimir" for his distinguished
service to New Croatia. Similarly, Fr. Grga Blazevitch, another Franciscan, served as assistant to the commandant at the concentration
camp of Bosanski-Novi.

As smoke poured from the death camps, Ustashi soldiers traveled
throughout the countryside, destroying towns and villages, gathering
mounds of loot, and putting thousands of Serbs to death. The executions took place in the homes of the victims, with the most primitive weapons-hammers, scythes, pitchforks, and hatchets.12 The
streets were lined with the hanging bodies. Some victims were subjected to crucifixion, including Luke Avramovitch, former member of
the Yugoslav Parliament, and his ten-year-old son.

In one typical incident of atrocity, Ustashi soldiers rounded up 331
Serbs and forced them to dig their own graves before hacking them to
pieces with axes. The Orthodox priest was ordered to recite the prayers
of the dying while his son was dismembered before his eyes. Then the
priest was tortured. The soldiers ripped off his beard and the hair from
his head, gouged out his eyes, and skinned him alive.'3

In order to be singled out for heroism, Ustashi bands would pose
with their victims before cameras. The captured photographs-too
grisly to reproduce-show Ustashi beheading Serbs with axes, cutting through the necks of their victims with saws, and carrying heads
on sticks through the streets of Zagreb.14

Catholic priests, invariably Franciscans, not only encouraged but
also took an active part in the slaughter. Br. Tugomire Soldo, a Franciscan monk, was the organizer of the great pogrom of 1941. Fr.
Bozidar Bralow, known for the machine gun that was his constant companion, performed a dance around the bodies of 180 murdered
Serbs at Alipasin-Most. Individual Franciscan monks killed hundreds
of men, women, and children; set fire to homes; sacked villages; and
laid waste the Bosnian countryside at the head of Ustashi bands.15 In
September of 1941 an Italian correspondent wrote of a Franciscan
priest urging the Ustashi to massacre Serbs in a village south of Banja
Luka, while brandishing a crucifix. The unrestrained "ethnic
cleansing" even horrified hardened Nazi officers. German General
Edmund Glaise von Horstenau reported to Hitler that "the Ustashi
have gone raving mad."16

Many of the greatest horrors were perpetuated not by Croatian
peasants but by the Catholic intelligentsia. This is exemplified in the
case of Peter Brzica, a distinguished law scholar who attended the
Franciscan College at Siroki Brijig, Herzegovina. On the night of
August 29, 1942, in the concentration camp at Jesenovie, orders
were given for mass executions to make room for new shipments of
prisoners. A contest got underway to determine who could slaughter
the most inmates within the span of a few hours. Brzica distinguished
himself by cutting the throats of 1,360 prisoners with a butcher knife
that he continually sharpened with a razor strap. For his efforts the
law scholar was hailed as "King of the Cut-Throats" and rewarded
with a gold watch. For the award celebration the participants were
treated to a feast of roasted suckling pig and vintage wine from a
Franciscan monastery.'7

The wholesale slaughter produced a financial windfall for the
Church. Orthodox churches, monasteries, and houses were ransacked and the valuables were transferred to Franciscan churches and
monasteries and later to the Vatican.18

There was another boon for the Church from the Holocaust in
Croatia. It produced wholesale conversions of Orthodox Serbs to the
Roman faith. The conversions were produced by a simple method
best expressed by Fr. Dionizio Juric, Ante Pavelic's private confessor:
"Any Serb who refuses to become a Catholic should be condemned
to death." With bayonets at their throats, great masses appeared
before Catholic priests to recant their false form of Christianity and
to receive the sacrament of penance.

Penance in several Croatian towns and villages came at the steep
price of 180 dinars. In the village of Jasenak, Fr. Ivan Mikan collected 80,000 dinars at one ceremony of mass conversion to the
faith.'9 Within one year over 30 percent of the Serbs in New Croatia
converted in order to escape execution. The money collected for
conversion certificates was deposited into Franciscan accounts at the
Vatican Bank. The names of the converts were listed in diocesan bulletins. Katolicki List of the Archdiocese of Zagreb, for example,
reported in issue no. 31 of 1941 that "a new parish of over 2,300
souls" had been created in the village of Budinci, as a result of the
entire village having been converted to the Catholic faith.20 All the
converts were compelled by the Catholic clergy to send congratulatory letters to Archbishop Stepinac. These letters also were published
in church newsletters and the Ustashi newspaper, Nova Hrvatska. In
its issue of April 9, 1942, Nova Hrvatska published four such
telegrams, all addressed to the archbishop. One read as follows:
"2,300 persons, assembled in Slatinski Drenovac, from the villages of
Pusina, Kraskovic, Prekorecan, Miljani, and Gjristic, accepted today
the protection of the Roman Catholic Church and send their profound greetings to their Head. 1121 Within a matter of months over 30
percent of the Serbs residing in New Croatia were converted to
Roman Catholicism.

At 180 dinars, a certificate of conversion was a bargain, even for
the humblest peasant who had to sell all his possessions to obtain
one. This became clear on May 14, 1941, at a place called Glina,
where hundreds of Serbs were forced to attend a service of thanksgiving for the constitution of New Croatia. Once the Serbs were
herded into the meeting hall, a gang of Ustashi soldiers, under the
direction of Fr. G. Casimir, abbot of the Monastery of Gunic, entered
with axes and knives. The Serbs were commanded to produce their
certificates of conversion. Only two had the required document and
were released. The doors were then locked and the rest were
butchered while Father Casimir uttered pious prayers.22

By the end of the war the sale of conversion certificates had
netted the Holy See and New Croatia untold millions. Additional
revenue came from the priceless treasures that had been stripped from the Orthodox churches and the personal possessions of the
Jews, Gypsies, and Serbs that had been confiscated.

Protests were raised to the pope to no avail. On March 17, 1942,
the World Jewish Congress sent a cry for help on behalf of the persecuted Jews in Croatia to the Holy See. The plea read as follows:
"Several thousand families were either deported to desert islands on
the Dalmatian coast or incarcerated in concentration camps.... [A]II
the male Jews were sent to labor camps where they were assigned to
drainage or sanitation work and where they perished in great numbers. . . . At the same time, their wives and children were sent to
another camp where they, too, are enduring dire privations."23 A
copy of the plea remains in the Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, but it
was excluded from the eleven volumes of wartime documents that
the Vatican released in 1995. This indicates that the Vatican still
refuses to make a full disclosure of what it knew about the Croatian
atrocities and the early stages of the Final Solution.

Despite adamant denials, the Vatican gave its blessing to the
Holocaust in Croatia. Pius XII kept well informed of eventsincluding the massacres, the death camps, and the forced conversions-from Monsignor Ramiro Marcone, his personal representative
in Croatia. Monsignor Marcone participated in most of the official
and semiofficial functions where he openly blessed the Ustashi, publicly gave the Fascist salute, and encouraged Croats to be "faithful to
the Holy See, which had stood for centuries against Eastern barbarism," 24 that is, against the Orthodox Church and the Serbs.