The Ustasha and Vatican's Silence - Part 1
The crimes of the Croatian Ustashis (NDH).
ANOTHER HOLOCAUST
THE VATICAN AND THE CROATIA'S GENOCIDE
Pavelic and the Catholic Archbishop of Zagreb, Aloysius Stepinac. (Photo)
The most people ignore that during the Second World War was produced another genocide, whose brutality topped with an increase that seen in the Nazi concentration camps. The murder of a half million Serbs in Croatia has passed to the annals of the most infamous crimes against humanity. The Catholic Church's role in this tragedy wasn't at all minor.
When Adolf Hitler attacked the Yugoslavia on 6 April, 1941, it was immediately clear the Wehrmacht had the support of traitor groups within the Yugoslavian state. The country's army was against the wall, surmounted by the huge German war machine and stabbed in the back by terrorists pro-Nazi members of the Ustasha Party, a dangerous Croatian far-right organization. Even the commands of some units with Croatian majority were in talks to Nazis, opening the doors of the country to them.[01]
The independent State of Croatia was declared on April 10, 1941, in the same day that the German 14th Panzer Division entered Zagreb and was received with enthusiasm by the population. The invasion of Yugoslavia by the troops of Hitler assumed the division of the country into two independent nations. The Catholic Croatia actually saw the reality in his dream of being independent from the Orthodox Serbia. In terms of its organization and ideology, the new Croatian state was a totalitarian nation founded on the principle of a Führer who, since that would keep their subordination to Germany, he could make any of his whims.
The warlord who took the reins of the country was Ante Pavelic, head of the Ustasha. Pavelic and his followers were exiled in Italy under the protection of Mussolini, as they were wanted by the governments of France and Yugoslavia accused of plotting the murders of King Alexander of Yugoslavia and the French Prime Minister Louis Barthou. Pavelic established in Croatia, with the help of their sponsors Nazis, the NDH "Nezavisna države Hrvatska" (Independent State of Croatia). On April 14, the first bishop of Croatia, Alojzije Stepinac, met with Pavelic to convey to him their congratulations in the sane time when all the bells tolled the country to celebrate this victory. In addition, Stepinac received the appointment of Supreme Military Apostolic Vicar of the Ustashi Army. The Catholic press was a sea of flattery with the dictator.
God, who controls the destiny of the nations and directs the hearts of the kings, has given us Ante Pavelic and promoted as the leader of a friendly and allied people, Adolf Hitler, to use his victorious troops to disperse our oppressors and enable us to create the State independent Croatia. Glory to God, our gratitude to Adolf Hitler, and infinite loyalty to the boss Ante Pavelic.[02]This outpouring is not surprising if we consider that an investigation committee's Yugoslavian war crimes established that Archbishop Stepinac had been a major player in the conspiracy that led to the conquest of Yugoslavia. Ultimately, the Catholic Church took centuries dreaming about the idea of a Catholic kingdom in the Balkans, something that finally happened when Pavelic and Hitler have risen Tomislav II to the throne, whose function was purely decorative. The identity of the state was based more on religius affiliation than ethnicity. The Chatholic fanaticism of the Ustasha was determined to turn Croatia into a Catholic country through a combination of forced religious conversion, expulsion and extermination.
HERO PAVELIC
The clergy supported the regime with a fanatical enthusiasm. Most Catholics shared the ideological goals of the Ustasha and received with pleasure the end of religious tolerance imposed to the former Yugoslavia. The Pope himself received Pavelic in audience and blessed the Ustasha entire delegation that moved to Rome, including the representation of the Brotherhood Crusade, in charge of converting Serbs to Roman Catholicism through tactics which, as we shall see, were not exactly evangelizing.[03]
During his four years of existence as an independent state (1941-1945), in Croatia were executed more than 750,000 Serbs, Jews and Gypsies.[04] From 80,000 Jews of Yugoslavia, 60,000 were killed, most of them in Croatia. Most of these killings were committed by the Ustasha. Croatia was the only country, along with Germany, which operated the concentration camps on a large scale in World War II.
Unlike the Nazis, who devised a discreet system of industrial extermination, the genocide in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina was characterized by performing ritual murders in public places, perpetrated with sadistic and unbridled enthusiasm. The Austrian historian Freidrich Heer commented in 1968 that what happened in Croatia was the result of "fanaticism of ancient prehistoric times." According to this expert, Pavelic was "one of the biggest killers of the twentieth century." This is no obstacle to that, curiously, Pavelic to be seen as a hero in modern Croatia.
The Croatian "hero" used to refer to Serbs as follows, "The Slavic Serbs are a waste of a nation, the kind of people who sell to anyone for any price ...". Much of this was spurred lively version of pulpits. Archbishop Stepinac himself said:
Croats and Serbs belong to two different worlds, north pole and south pole, they never get along except for a miracle from God. The schism of the Orthodox Church is the greatest curse of Europe, almost more than Protestantism. Here there are no morals, no principles, no truth, no justice, no honesty.[05]On June 12, 1941, all Jews and Serbs in Croatia met with the fact that their freedom of movement was restricted. The Justice Minister Milovan Zanitch had no objection to declare the meaning of these measures:
This state, our country, is only for the Croats and to nobody else. There will be no ways or measures that Croatians don't use for our country to be really ours, clearing it of all Orthodox Serbs. All those who arrived in our country for three hundred years ago should disappear. We don't hide our intentions. It's the policy of our state and for its promotion the only thing we will follow faithfully are the Ustasha principles.[06]
ETHNIC CLEANSING
By then, the killings had already begun. Mile Budak, Minister of Education of the Croatian government declared in Gospic on July 22, 1941:
The bases of the Ustasha movement is religion. For minorities such as Serbs, Jews and Gypsies we have three million bullets. We'll kill a third of the Serbian population, deport another third, and the rest of them will be converted to the Catholic faith, and this way, to be treated as Croats. So wel'ss destroy their last track, and all what's left will be fateful memory of them ...[07]
The campaign of ethnic cleansing had started almost immediately. Much of the legislation and administrative structure of the new state was adapted to make it fit as much as possible to canon law.
Stepinac saw with particular pleasure the law that decreed the death penalty for abortion and the law that imposed thirty days in prison for insulting.[08] The political opposition was swept from public life. Forbade the publication of texts in Cyrillic, the alphabet used by Serbs. Likewise, it began a campaign of "Aryanization" dismissing mixed marriages between Catholic Croats and members of other ethnic groups. At the entrance of the park settled posters with slogans: "No entry of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, and dogs".[09] The Croatian Church received these measures with a barely concealed enthusiasm that was shown, for instance, in the words of Mate Mogus priest of Udbina:
"So far we have worked for the Catholic faith with the prayer book and cross. Now it's time to work with the rifle and the gun".[10]Meanwhile, the infamous concentration camp of Danica began receiving its first victims: "in the beginning only Jews, and soon all those classified as "undesirable", ie, non-Catholics, who accounted for more than 60 percent of the population.
The atrocities that were committed in concentration camps in Croatia have no comparison, and in some cases exceed those of the Nazis. Djordan Diedlender, guard of the camp of Stara Gradiska, gave this jarring testimony during the trial against the camp commander, Ante Vrban:
At that time, arrived daily new women and children to the camp of Stara Gradiska. Ante Vrban ordered that all children were separated from their mothers and taken to a dwelling. He told to ten of us that we took up them wrapped in blankets. The kids were screaming all over the house and one of them put an arm and a leg in the door so it can't be closed. Vrban shouted: "Push her!" and I didn't it, and so he took a hit with the door shattering the leg of the child, then took him and threw the other leg against the wall untill kill her. After this, the children continued getting there. When the house was filled, Vrban used poison gas and killed them all.[12]
PLEASURE TO KILL
The ferocity of the Ustasha alarmed even the Nazis themselves, who feared that a brutal repression against such a large population having culminated in an armed uprising. On February 17, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, one of the greatest architects of the Final Solution (the plan of senior hierarchs of the Third Reich to exterminate the Jews) and, as such, not characterized by his piety, expressed his concern to Reichführer SS, Heinrich Himmler:
The number of Slavs massacred by the Croats of the most sadistic forms is estimated at 300,000 [...]. The reality is that in Croatia the Serbs who remain alive are those who converted to Catholicism, for which is allowed to live unmolested [...]. Because of this, it is clear that the Serbo-Croatian stress is a struggle between the Catholic and Orthodox Church.Faced with the cold efficiency of the Nazi genocide that had been converted into a sinister kind of mass production, the Ustasha did the death of their victims something personal, pleasuring himself in his public torture and humiliation. This is why it retains a large number of photographic testimony of such atrocities.It's mostly snapshots that were taken as "souvenir" by their executioners. In them you can see barbarities hardly conceivable by a sensible mind: from torture sessions animated by an aroused public, until heads stuck on pikes in processions through the streets of Zagreb.[13] Pavelic himself showed itself perversely pleasurable to please diplomats visited him with baskets full of human eyes.[14]
Even the hardened Italian fascists who controlled a portion of Croatia during the war were horrified by the Ustasha, and managed to rescue a large number of Orthodox serbs and Jews, refusing to return them to a certain death all refugees who arrived in their area of control. Archbishop Stepinac complained about this attitude of the Italians to the bishop of Mostar,
the Italians came back and imposed again their civil and military authority. The schismatic churches revived immediately after their return and the Orthodox priests, yet concealed, reappeared with freedom. The Italians seemed to favor the Serbs and hurt the Catholics, [15]as it was stated for the Minister of Italian affairs in Zagreb:
It happens that in the Croatian territories annexed by Italy it can be seen a steady decline of religious life and a clear turn from Catholicism to schism. If the most Catholic part of Croatia no longer be in the future, the guilt and responsibility before God and history will be the Catholic Italy. The religious aspect of this issue turns on my obligation to speak in simple and open terms from the moment that I am responsible for the religious well-being of Croatia.[16]
Photo: Ustashi soldiers (Croatian fascists) kill a victim with a dagger and a bayonet. Yugoslavia, between 1941 and 1944. — Jewish Historical Museum of Yugoslavia
Source: Biografía no autorizada del Vaticano(Non Authorized Biography of the Vatican); Chapter 5; Author: Camacho, Santiago
Notes
[01]. Keegan, John, The Second Worid War, Penguin Books, New York, 1990.
[02]. Manhattan, Avro, Catholic Imperialism and Worid Freedom, op. cit.
[03]. Bulajic, Milán, The Role of the Vatican in the Break-Up of the Yugoslav State: The Mission of the Vatican in the Independen! State of Croatia: Ustashi Crimes of Genocide (Documents, facts). Ministry of Information of the Republic of Serbia, Belgrade, 1993.
[04]. Bulajic, Milán, Never again: Ustashi Genocide in the independent State of Croatia (NDH) from 1941-1945, Ministry of Information of the Republic of Serbia, Belgrade, 1992.
[05]. Dedijer, Vladimir, The Yugoslav Auschwitz and the Vatican: The Croatian Massacre ofthe Serbs during Worid War II, Prometheus Books, New York, 1992. The authenticity of the quote from the Archbishop is unappealable, since the book in question who shows the handwriting of his own hand.
[06]. Manhattan, Avro, The Vatican Holocaust, Ozark Books, Springfield, 1988.
[07]. Dedijer, Vladimir, op. Cit.
[08]. Alexander, Stella, The Triple Myth. A Ufe of Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac, East European Monographs, New York, 1987.
[09]. Crowe, David M., A History of Gypsies of Eastern Europe ana Russia, St. Martin's Griffin, New York, 1994.
[10]. Dedijer, Vladimir, op. cit.
[11]. Cornweil, John, op. cit.
[12]. Memorandum of genocide crimes committed against the Serbian people by the independent government of Croatia during World War II. October 1950. Sent to the President of the Fifth General Assembly of the United Nations by Adam Pribicivic, president of the Independent Democratic Party of Yugoslavia, Vladimir Bilayco, former magistrate of the Supreme Court of Yugoslavia, and Branko Miljus, former minister of Yugoslavia.
[13]. Anderson, Scott and Anderson, Jon Lee, The League, Dodd, Mead & Company, New York, 1986.
[14]. Black, Edwin, IBM and the Holocaust, Crown Books, Washington, D.C., 2001.
[15]. Dedijer, Vladimir, op. cit.
[16]. Falconi, Cario, U silenzio di Pió XII, Sugar, Milán, 1965.
Thanks for posting this interesting text.
ReplyDeleteThe figures stated therein are too high, however. The claim that 750,000 people were killed in the NDH period in Croatia comes from Milán Bulajic, a Serb historian of dubious reputation. See Vladimir Zerjavic, YUGOSLAVIA-MANIPULATIONS -WITH THE NUMBER OF SECOND WORLD WAR VICTIMS.
USHMM figures:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005449
Roberto and Jonathan, thanks a lot. I've already suspected than the high figure, but it wasn't possible to check other sources to make an observation. Anyway, this is a basic text on the Ustasha and it gives an overview about the action of this group in World War II.
ReplyDeleteAnd very important, the "Revisionists" don't usually mention the Ustasha when they talk about the Holocaust.
I've looked at that research Zerjavic, and also looked at the statistics Bogoljub Kocovic.
ReplyDeleteThe number varies by half as Vladimir Zerjavic and Kocovic.
There is the problem of data submitted by historians, both Zerjavic, kodovic, and others who have already tried other numbers, such as Velimir Terzic, Vladimir Dedijer, in addition to Holocaust deniers like Franjo Tudjman and Ljubo Boban.
The problem with all reporting data is the fact that the conflict Bosnian / Croatian / Serbian ... and use to charge other ethnic / nation.
The number of Victims Were politically motivated.
The numerical figure Zerjavic is more interesting, but there is the problem of identification and discovery of mass graves, bringing the number.
Sorry for my bad english.
ReplyDeleteSerbs slander Pavelic saying ''One third of Serbs to liquidate, one third to convert to Catholicism, one third to exel.'' but they plagiarized this from their own Cosmus Aetlius, Ochrafux patron “saint” of genocide who said "Turks will leave, but shall return and reach Six Apples aony to be ousted to the Red Apple. Of them one third will be killed, one third will be christened, and one third will arrive there." So here you have the evil faith of islamosoviet Ochrafuxy which writes such things and must be scorched and flushed from sacred soil. Smyrna 22 USA 12.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.scribd.com/doc/112084700/Vatican-EU-Case
ReplyDeleteThanks for the post. After Nazi salute at a soccer game in Zagreb, Croatia, it seems even more important to learn about this chapter of the Balkan history. The number of people killed only in the camp Jasenovac was estimated at 500,000 or even more: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/othercamps/jasenovac.html
ReplyDeleteAfter the WW II , Tito, the leader of then united Yugoslavia, decided not to make final count, trying to promote new brotherhood and unity, and to neutralize animosities between different ethnicities . Unfortunately, without a true closure, without recognition of crimes and apology the country was never healed, and nationalisms, some based on continuing hatred, some on the fear, triggered a new war few years after Tito's death.
It seems that nazism is sprouting again across the Europe and I don't believe that we should dismiss any incident as the irrelevant and simply ignore it....
Thanks for the post. After Nazi salute at a soccer game in Zagreb, Croatia, it seems even more important to learn about this chapter of the Balkan history. The number of people killed only in the camp Jasenovacis was estimated at 500,000 or even more: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/othercamps/jasenovac.html
ReplyDeleteAfter the WW II , Tito, the leader of then united Yugoslavia, decided not to make final count, trying to promote new brotherhood and unity, and to neutralize animosities between different ethnicities . Unfortunately, without a true closure, without recognition of crimes and apology the country was never healed, and nationalisms, some based on continuing hatred, some on the fear, triggered a new war few years after Tito's death.
It seems that nazism is sprouting again across the Europe and I don't believe that we should dismiss any incident as the irrelevant and simply ignore it....
Thanks for the post. After Nazi salute at a soccer game in Zagreb, Croatia, it seems even more important to learn about this chapter of the Balkan history. The number of people killed only in the camp Jasenovacis was estimated at 500,000 or even more: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/othercamps/jasenovac.html
ReplyDeleteAfter the WW II , Tito, the leader of then united Yugoslavia, decided not to make final count, trying to promote new brotherhood and unity, and to neutralize animosities between different ethnicities . Unfortunately, without a true closure, without recognition of crimes and apology the country was never healed, and nationalisms, some based on continuing hatred, some on the fear, triggered a new war few years after Tito's death.
It seems that nazism is sprouting again across the Europe and I don't believe that we should dismiss any incident as the irrelevant and simply ignore it....
Much of what is written in this article is based on outright distortions and half truths regarding the Catholic Church and the Ustase. The Ustasa was a nationalist movement - if you read the principles of the Ustasa movement it says nothing about Catholicism. The sole aim of the movement was the destruction of Yugoslavia, and to achieve an independent Croatian state by any means necessary. In fact, the Ustasa proclaimed that Croatia was a nation of of two faiths, Catholic and Islamic. The Ustasa believed that the muslims of Bosnia were Croats of the Islamic faith.
ReplyDeleteThere were some clerics who participated in the Ustasa movement but they were excommunicated by Stepinac and the Vatican; they were not acting under Church authority. Stepinac favoured a Croatian state (as did most Croats of the time period -Yugoslavia was a Serb dominated repressive state) but he denounced the atrocities committed by the government. This is well known fact. Forced conversions (if any) were carried out under the orders of the Ustasa, not the Catholic Church.
For detailed information see:
Nationalism and National Policy in Independent State of Croatia (1941–1945) http://archiv3.iwm.at/publ-jvc/jc-06-05.pdf
THE IDEOLOGY OF NATION AND RACE: THE CROATIAN USTASHA REGIME AND ITS POLICIES TOWARD MINORITIES IN THE INDEPENDENT STATE OF CROATIA, 1941-1945. by Nevenko Bartulin
http://www.jasenovac-info.com/biblioteka/Bartulin2.pdf
The Holocaust in The Independent State of Croatia: Genocide between Political Religion and Religious Politics http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/essays&editorials/croationholocaust.html
These three sources demonstrate that the Ustasa was not a form of Catholic fanaticism as some try to falsely claim. Nor was the Catholic Church responsible for the crimes committed by the Ustasa.
The Number of War Victims:
ReplyDeleteThe United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C. presently estimates that the Ustaša regime murdered between 77,000 and 99,000 people in Jasenovac between 1941 and 1945. This figure includes Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and Croats (with Serbs constituting the highest number of victims).
The Jewish Virtual Library states that "the most reliable figures" estimate the number of Serbs killed by the Ustaše to be "between 330,000 and 390,000, with 45,000 to 52,000 Serbs murdered in Jasenovac" sourced to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
German generals issued reports of the number of victims as the war progressed. German military commanders gave different figures for the number of Serbs, Jews and others killed by the Ustaše on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia (not Jasenovac alone). They circulated figures of 400,000 Serbs (Alexander Löhr); 350,000 Serbs (Lothar Rendulic); around 300,000 (Edmund Glaise von Horstenau); in 1943; "600-700,000 until March 1944" (Ernst Fick); 700,000 (Massenbach). Whatever the actual numbers, Serbs attempt to apply the highest figures to Serbs killed at the Jasenovac camp alone. Yet these figures actually reflect the number of Serbs killed on the entire territory of the NDH from 1941-1945.
In the 1980s, calculations were done by Serb statistician Bogoljub Kočović, and by Croat economist Vladimir Žerjavić, who both claimed that total number of victims in Yugoslavia was less than 1.7 million, an official estimate at the time, both concluding that the number of victims was around one million. Bogoljub Kočović estimated that of that number, there were between 370,000 and 410,000 ethnic Serbs who died in the Independent State of Croatia. Žerjavić calculated furthermore, claiming that the number of victims in the Independent State of Croatia was between 300,000 and 350,000, including 80,000 victims in Jasenovac, as well as thousands of deaths in other camps and prisons. Žerjavić actually first calculated 53,000, later brought up to 70,000 and eventually to 80,000.
Although the calculations of WWII victims by Bogoljub Kocovic (a Serb) in Yugoslavia were lower than those of Žerjavić, he has never been called a Holocaust denier like Žerjavić. Kočović's book was ignored in his homeland unfortunately. Žerjavić's research has been considered trustworthy by authorities on World War II Yugoslav history such as Jozo Tomasevich and Sabrina Ramet. Both Kocovic and Zerjavic used a similar method and obtained similar results while working independently from one another.
"These three sources demonstrate that the Ustasa was not a form of Catholic fanaticism as some try to falsely claim. Nor was the Catholic Church responsible for the crimes committed by the Ustasa."
ReplyDeleteRead the observation I made in the last post about this text.
Although this text presents many flaws (that's the reason I'll make a text correcting errors), the Ustasha's method of Extermination corresponds to what was reproduced in the text. The general idea of the text is correct.
Ustasha was a ultra-Nationalist Movement (Fascist), the text doesn't deny it, but the text says that Ustasha had a Clerical Fascism Ideology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerical_fascism) and had the support of the Vatican.
The Historians I cite in the observation confirm these key facts.
The discussion (with corrections) about the real number and distortions of Utasha's victims is just above in the comments of Roberto M. and Jonathan.
ReplyDeleteInside the Vatican of Pius XII: The Memoir of an American Diplomat During World War II
ReplyDeleteThe question of whether Pius XII and the Vatican must bear blame for failing to act decisively in response to Hitler’s Final Solution is as hotly debated today as in the years directly following World War II. INSIDE THE VATICAN OF PIUS XII presents for the first time the observations of an American diplomat who spent four years inside the Vatican. This memoir of Harold H. Tittmann, Jr., describes his encounters with Pius XII and offers details that give a full picture of daily life in the Vatican.
The origins of the first ratlines are connected to various developments in Vatican-Argentine relations before and during World War II. The origins of the first ratlines are connected to various developments in Vatican-Argentine relations before and during World War II. As early as 1942, Monsignor Luigi Maglione contacted Ambassador Llobet, inquiring as to the "willingness of the government of the Argentine Republic to apply its immigration law generously, in order to encourage at the opportune moment European Catholic immigrants to seek the necessary land and capital in our country". Afterwards, a German priest, Anton Weber, the head of the Rome-based Society of Saint Raphael, traveled to Portugal, continuing to Argentina, to lay the groundwork for future Catholic immigration, this was to be a route which fascist exiles would exploit - without the knowledge of the Catholic Church.According to historian Michael Phayer, "this was the innocent origin of what would become the Vatican ratline".
The crimes committed by the Ustasa were never supported by the Vatican.
ReplyDeleteSee "Archbishop Stepinac Reconsidered" by Stella Alexander.
See "Inside the Vatican of Pius XII: The Memoir of an American Diplomat During World War II" by Jr. Harold Tittmann.
"Ustasha was a ultra-Nationalist Movement (Fascist), the text doesn't deny it, but the text says that Ustasha had a Clerical Fascism Ideology , and had the support of the Vatican.The Historians I cite in the observation confirm these key facts."
ReplyDeleteUntil recently, in the historical literature the opinion prevailed that the Ustasha were fascists and that their ideology was a Balkan version of fascism. This idea was so widespread because of the unscientific treatment of the problem of fascism. In the old literature, terms as “clero-fascism,” “monarcho-fascism,” and simply “fascism” were very frequently used, and these labels were assigned to all anti-democratic and autocratic movements and regimes in Europe of the interwar period and the Second World War.
Marxist authors freely used “fascist” as a smear-word, designed not so much to identify anything specifically fascist but rather to discredit a person, group, or whole movement that had an anti-Communist ideology. The Ustasha organization was a Croatian nationalistic revolutionary organization. Fascism and Nazism were mainly a reaction to conflicts within nationally homogeneous societies (a form of solving class conflicts and the crises of political institutions through violence and dictatorship) while for the Ustasha, the creation of the state itself was the main goal; for them the nation and the national state were the supreme goals, while for the fascists they were instruments for power. They Ustasha did borrow certain elements from the National-Socialism of Hitler& fascism of Mussolini (national megalomania and chauvinism, racism, xenophobic hatred of the “foreign elements”- anti-Semitism, anti-Communism etc; However, the Ustasha had a specific character all its own which mad it unique.
To brand the Ustasha as "clerical-fascist" is over-simplistic and reductionary. The authors you cite merely reflect the outdated discourse of Marxist authors.
Taking in consideration documents, testimonies, statements of surviving victims, medical and anthropological forensic excavations, published data and all the available sources the International Commission for the truth on Jasenovac concluded that Croat and Muslim population of the Independent State of Croatia exterminated, after sever torture, deprivation of food and water, exposure to cold weather, infestation and infection more than 110 000 Serbian, Jewish and Roma children under the age of 14. Croatia was the only state in the world that had concentration camps for extermination of small children. Unborn children cut out from the wombs of pregnant women were not included into this number. Names, origin and age are recorded for more that 33 000 children or approximately for one third of the executed children. http://www.ic-jasenovac.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=29&Itemid=1
ReplyDeleteIt's somewhat laughable to cite the "International Commission for the truth on Jasenovac", which is an organization headed by a government and people who have rehabilitated and continue to glorify the Serbian War Criminals, such as Draza Mihaolivic - who called for the cleansing of all national minorities and anti-state elements from Serbian territory in his 1941 Memorandum. And General Milan Nedic, who was head of the puppet state of Serbia during WW2 (in command of the Serbian State Guard and Serbian Volunteer Corps). . (And let's not forget other war criminals such as Kosta Pecanac & Dimitrije Ljotic).
ReplyDeleteAlso, the claim that "unborn children were cut out from the wombs of pregnant women" was a common Serbian Chetnik practice both during and prior to WW2. Furthermore, torture, deprivation of food and water, exposure to cold weather, infestation and infection were all too common tactics and occurrences perpetrated by Serbian Chetniks forces against the non-Serbian civilian population during Royalist Yugoslavia from 1918-1939.
To claim that Croatia had concentration camps for the sole purpose exterminating small children is also the product of Serbian delusion and mythology.
These false claims are only a continuation of the writings about the Ustasha during the Serbian dominated Yugoslav-Communist regime.
ANTI-SEMITISM IN SERBIA http://www.helsinki.org.rs/doc/HCHRS_ANTI-SEMITISM%20IN%20SERBIA.pdf
ReplyDeleteToday in Serbia, the Serbian Orthodox Church has canonized Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic who had considered Adolph Hitler a first-rate statesman. Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic wrote, "all modern Europe's ideas were invented by Jews who had crucified Christ: democracy, strikes, socialism, atheism, religious tolerance, pacifism, worldwide revolution, capitalism and communism" (Nikolaj Velimirovic)
Denial and negation of anti-Semitism are especially strong in the political and social spheres, reflecting as they do a legacy of a society, policy, and elites incapable of confronting and overcoming a controversial past.