Peter Radan (10 April 2020)

Today - 10 April 2020 - marks the 79th anniversary of the proclamation of the notorious and so-called Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska - NDH). The NDH was established four days after Nazi Germany led its Tripartite Pact allies into invading and dismembering the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the short April War of 1941. Although nominally an independent state, the NDH was a puppet state, its chief puppeteer being Nazi Germany. Upon his arrival from exile five days later, Ante Pavelić, the leader of the Ustaša terrorist organisation, was installed as the NDH's titular head.

For Pavelić and his Ustaša organisation, the creation of the NDH was the crowning achievement of their campaign for independent statehood, an objective shared by most of Yugoslavia's Croat population who welcomed them as liberators.[1] Cheering crowds also welcomed German armed forces when they first entered Zagreb - the NDH's capital city, archival film footage of which appears in early scenes of Emir Kusturica's Felliniesque masterpiece, Underground, released to international acclaim in 1995.[2]

The Ustaša Policy of Genocide

In imitation of its Nazi overlords, the singularly most important objective of the NDH, whose territorial scope approximated to the territory of today's Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina, was to create an ethnically pure Roman Catholic Croat state. As Serbs constituted approximately one-third of the NDH's population, a brutal policy of genocide against them, as well as the much smaller Jewish and Gypsy communities, was launched in mid-1941 with the aim of solving the NDH's "Serb problem".[3]

The Ustaša government minister, Milovan Žanić, signaled the future fate of the Eastern Orthodox Serbs when, in a speech in mid-April, he said: "This must be a country of Croats and no one else, and there are no methods that we as Ustasha, will not use to make this country truly Croatian so that we can cleanse it of the Serbs, who have been threatening us for hundreds of years and would threaten us again at the first opportunity.[4]

For the Ustaše, Serbs were, according to Mile Budak, the NDH's minister for education, "Balkan trash" who had been brought to the Balkans by the Ottoman Turks who then "used them as vassals and servants and beggars who fell on the deserted hearths of Croats like locusts".[5]

According to Hrvatski Narod, the official mouthpiece of the Ustaša movement, the "truly Croatian" state that Žanić demanded could only be achieved by "bloodily confronting our eternal enemies, our native Serbs".[6] As Robert McCormick aptly points out, the visceral hatred of the Serbs by the Ustaše was such that, "without the Serbs, Ustaša ideology could not exist."[7] This ideology led to the implementation of the first pillar of a policy of genocide that commenced in the summer of 1941 and is described by Rory Yeomans as follows:

"Ustasha militias and death squads swept through the countryside, burning down whole villages, indiscriminately killing thousands of ordinary Serbs in a variety of sadistic ways. Armed with Axes, knives, scythes, and mallets, as well as guns, they slaughtered men, women, and children, who were hacked to death, thrown alive into pits and down ravines, or locked into churches that were set on fire".[8]

The second pillar of the Ustaša policy of genocide was that of expulsion and deportation which saw a flood of Serbs obtain refuge and sanctuary in neighbouring Serbia, then under occupation by the Germans. Estimates of the number of Serbs who were expelled or fled range from 284,000 to 338,000.[9]

Of the Serbs who were not exterminated or expelled, many thousands were incarcerated in concentration camps, the most notorious one being that at Jasenovac. According to the demographer Bogoljub Kočović, between 85,000 and 100,000 victims, overwhelmingly Serbs, were exterminated at this concentration camp, which has been aptly described as the "Auschwitz of the Balkans". Kočović also estimates that between 370,00 and 410,000 Serbs perished as the result of massacres across the NDH or in its various concentration camps. Kočović also estimates that 26,000 Jews and 19,000 Gypsies suffered a similar fate at the hands of the Ustaše.[10]

The final pillar of the Ustaša policy of genocide was the forced conversion of approximately 100,000 Serbs into the Roman Catholic faith,[11] a policy rationalised, according to Yeomans, by the claim that the Serbs in Croatia were really "apostate Catholics, long-lost Croatian brothers, forced to convert to Orthodoxy under pressure from the Serbian Orthodox Church centuries previously".[12] In implementing this policy, Yoemans writes:

"No educated or middle-class Serbs or Orthodox clergy could be accepted into the Catholic faith. They were to be killed, deported, or otherwise removed. Regime officials and ideologues hoped that without an intelligentsia, ordinary Serbs would quickly abandon their Serb identity and 'become' Croats".[13]

For Serbs who signed certificates attesting to their conversion to Catholicism, this was, as Pino Adriano and Giorgio Cingolani point out, "the only way to avoid physical annihilation",[14] as is illustrated by the gruesome events in Glina on 14 May 1941. On that day, Glina's 700 or so residents were gathered into the local Orthodox church to ostensibly celebrate their conversion to Catholicism. Before the function started they were asked to produce their conversion certificates. Only two were able to do so and they were told to leave. The rest were massacred on the spot and the church was then set on fire.[15]

This policy of forced conversion was accompanied by the systematic slaughter of scores of Serbian Orthodox clergy and the destruction of hundreds of Orthodox churches and religious sites. A notorious example of the latter was the razing of the Orthodox cathedral in Banja Luka in the presence of the local Catholic bishop in 1942. In many cases, such as the St Elijah church at Nova Gradiška, captured Serbs were forced, upon threat of death, to participate in the destruction of their own churches.[16]

The Catholic Church and the Genocide in the NDH

In this genocidal reign of terror, the role of the Catholic Church in Croatia, headed by the controversial Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac, was akin to the role of German Catholics and Protestants to the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis.

Stepinac failed to use the authority of his position of influence to publicly denounce the massacres of the Serbs. Nor did he attempt to influence Pavelić, a devout Catholic, to halt them. However, as the full extent of the genocide became apparent, he did attempt, in vain, to persuade Pavelić to have concentration camp inmates treated more humanely and stop the demolition of Orthodox churches.[17] McCormick provides the following assessment of Stepinac's conduct:

"The archbishop was not an active participant in the murders; however he knew that the Ustaše were slaughtering Serbs and Jews in the thousands. ... He [was] a tacit participant in the NDH. He repeatedly appeared in public with [Pavelić] and issued Te Deum's on the anniversary of the NDH's creation. His failure to publicly denounce the Ustaše's atrocities in the name of the NDH was tantamount to accepting Pavelić's policies".[18]

Although Stepinac himself was, as McCormick says "not an active participant in the murders", sections of his clergy were. As Stevan Pavlowitch points out, "individual clergy were ustasha adherents, active as theoreticians, propagandists, official, and even killers".[19] Catholic priests, especially from the Franciscan order, serving as military chaplains for the Ustaša militia, were usually found leading and inciting the expeditions massacring the Serbs.[20] One of the most notorious of these was Friar Miroslav Filipović-Majstorović, whom the English novelist Evelyn Waugh, a Catholic himself who served with British intelligence forces in Croatia, described as "a ruffian in ustaša uniform ... who practiced great cruelties on the prisoners at the notorious Jasenovac concentration camp".[21]

Reactions to the Ustaša Terror

Unsurprisingly, the Ustaša terror unleashed a response from the Serbs who were fortunate enough to escape the tentacles of their genocidal campaign. Thousands of them joined one of the two rival resistance movements, the predominantly Serb backed Royalist Četniks or the communist led Partisans. Although the great majority of Croats initially welcomed the creation of the NDH, when the reign of terror unleashed by the Ustaša became apparent for all to see, many of them joined the forces of resistance, predominantly the Partisans, but also in lesser numbers, the Četniks. Indeed, some Croats, appalled by the actions of the Ustaše, renounced their Catholic faith and converted to Orthodoxy.

Of Nazi Germany's military and other officials stationed in the NDH, some were taken aback by the brutality of the Ustaša terror which McCormick describes as one of "zealotry, matched only by the most maniacal SS men in the Third Reich".[22] Edmund Glaise von Horstenau, the German Plenipotentiary in Zagreb, protested, both publicly and privately, against Ustaša brutality and the indiscriminate slaughter of Serbs, but to no avail.[23]

Italian occupying forces, at the request of the Commander of the Second Army, General Vittorio Ambrosio, sought approval from Rome for permission to intervene to stop, what he described as "the crimes ... being carried out before the eyes of the command and troops of our army". These pleas fell on deaf ears, but Italian soldiers ignored Rome's orders by rescuing and providing shelter for many Serbs.[24]

Aftermath

The NDH collapsed in 1945 following a brutal civil war and revolution in the dismembered parts of Yugoslavia which ended up with a reunified Yugoslav state under the aegis of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. As for the Ustaša elites and followers, a number were captured and executed by the new communist regime. Others fled and found refuge in various parts of the world, including Western Europe, South America, the United States, and Australia.

As documented by Mark Aarons and John Loftus, the escape of prominent Ustaša leaders, was facilitated through the network of "ratlines" organised by the Vatican.[25] One of them was Pavelić, who, in 1948, found a safe haven in Juan Peron's Argentina. Following the collapse of the Peron regime in 1955 and an attempt to assassinate him in 1957, Pavelić fled to Franco's Spain where he died in December 1959.[26]

On the other hand, Stepinac chose to stay in Yugoslavia. In 1946 he was tried and convicted on charges of high treason and war crimes and sentenced to 16 years imprisonment, the last nine of which he served in home detention. In the meantime, the Vatican elevated him to the position of Cardinal in 1953.[27]

Stepinac died in 1960, but the controversy surrounding him did not. To the dismay of many, in October 1998, Pope John Paul II beatified Stepinac and declared him to be a martyr.[28] Currently, the Vatican is conducting an inquiry as to whether he should be canonised. Politically, Stepinac was rehabilitated by the Republic of Croatia that emerged following the second dismemberment of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, when the 1946 verdict against him was controversially annulled by the Zagreb County Court in July 2016.[29]

Footnotes

[1] Vladko Maček, In the Struggle for Freedom, Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, 1957, 230. [2] Underground won the best picture prize at the Cannes Film Festival of 1995. For a review of the film see Marianna Yarovskaya, 'Underground by Emir Kusturica and Pierre Spengler' (1997-1998) 51(2) Film Quarterly 50-54. [3] Menachem Shelah, 'Genocide in Satellite Croatia During the Second World War' in Michael Berenbaum (ed), A Mosaic of Victims, Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis, New York University Press, New York, 1990, 74-79. Slavic Muslims were an exception to this policy. Based upon the theory that they were Croats who had converted to Islam during the period of Ottoman rule in the Balkans, they were seen as the 'flower of the Croatian people': Pino Adriano & Giorgio Cingolani, Nationalism and Terror: Ante Pavelić and Ustasha Terrorism from Fascism to the Cold War, CEU Press, Budapest-New York, 2018, 191. [4] Quoted in Slavko Goldstein, 1941: The Years That Keeps Returning, New York Review of Book, 2013, 104-105. [5] Quoted in Rory Yeomans, Visions of Annihilation: The Ustasha Regime and the Cultural Politics of Fascism, 1941-1945, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013, 15. [6] Quoted in Yeomans, Visions of Annihilation, note 5 above, 17. [7] Robert B McCormick, Croatia Under Ante Pavelić: America, the Ustaše and Croatian Genocide, I B Tauris, 2014, 82. [8] Yeomans, Visions of Annihilation, note 5 above 17. [9] Stevan K Pavlowitch, Hitler's New Order: The Second World War in Yugoslavia, Columbia University Press, 2008, 33. [10] Adriano & Cingolani, Nationalism and Terror, note 3 above, 280; Pavlowitch, Hitler's New Order, note 9 above, 34. [11] Mark Biondich, 'Religion and Nation in Wartime Croatia: Reflections on the Ustaše Policy of Forced Religious Conversions, 1941-1942' (2005) 83 Slavonic and East European Review 71-116, 91. [12] Yeomans, Visions of Annihilation, note 5 above, 21. [13] Yeomans, Visions of Annihilation, note 5 above, 21. [14] Adriano & Cingolani, Nationalism and Terror, note 3 above, 194. [15] Adriano & Cingolani, Nationalism and Terror, note 3 above, 194-195. [16] McCormick, Croatia Under Ante Pavelić, note 7 above, 80. [17] Adriano & Cingolani, Nationalism and Terror, note 3 above, 242-243. [18] McCormick, Croatia Under Ante Pavelić, note 7 above, 82-83. [19] Pavlowitch, Hitler's New Order, note 9 above, 35. [20] Adriano & Cingolani, Nationalism and Terror, note 3 above, 195-196. [21] Quoted in Stella Alexander, The Triple Myth: A Life of Alozije Stepinac, East European Monographs, 1987, 76. [22] McCormick, Croatia Under Ante Pavelić, note 7 above, 82. [23] Jonathan Steinberg, All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust, 1941-1943, Routledge, 1990, 30, 194. [24] Raphael Israeli, The Death Camps of Croatia: Visions and Revisions, 1841-1945, Transaction Publishers, 2013, 157-158. [25] Mark Aarons & John Loftus, Ratlines: How the Vatican's Nazi Networks Betrayed Western Intelligence to the Soviets, William Heineman, 1991. [26] McCormick, Croatia Under Ante Pavelić, note 7 above, 173-181. [27] Alexander, The Triple Myth, note 21 above, 143-206. [28] Mark Biondich, 'Controversies surrounding the Catholic Church in Wartime Croatia, 1941-45' (2006) 7 Totalitarian Movements and Political Religion, 429-457, 430. [29] BBC News, 'Croatia overturns conviction of WW@ 'collaborator' Cardinal Stepinac', 22 July 2016, at <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36866939>.