Not everyone, especially board Catholics (who, in their shame, choose to ignore it..and hope D1B never brings it up), are familiar with the Croatian Holocaust. The Church gave overt and tacit approval to the Ante Pavelic nationalist regime and their horrendous crimes against Serbs and Jews and Gypsies and others in their Reagan, I mean "reign" of terror. It was so bad, Heinrich Himmler had to meet with them and tell them to cool out!
"During the Second World War in Yugoslavia, Catholic priests and Muslim clerics were willing accomplices in the genocide of the nations Serbian, Jewish and Roma population. From 1941 until 1945, the Nazi-installed regime of Ante Pavelic in Croatia carried out some of the most horrific crimes of the Holocaust (known as the Porajmos by the Roma), killing over 800,000 Yugoslav citizens - 750,000 Serbs, 60,000 Jews and 26,000 Roma. In these crimes, the Croatian Ustasha and Muslim fundamentalists were openly supported by the Vatican, the Archbishop of Zagreb Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac (1898-1960), and the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini. Many of the victims of the Pavelic regime in Croatia were killed in the war's third largest death camp - Jasenovac, where over 200,000 people - mainly Orthodox Serbs met their deaths. Some 240,000 were "rebaptized" into the Catholic faith by fundamentalist Clerics in "the Catholic Kingdom of Croatia" as part of the policy to "kill a third, deport a third, convert a third" of Yugoslavia's Serbs, Jews and Roma in wartime Bosnia and Croatia (The Yugoslav Auschwitz and the Vatican, Vladimar Dedijer, Anriman-Verlag, Freiburg, Germany, 1988)."
On April 6th 1941, Nazi Germany invaded Yugoslavia. By April 10th, Croatian fascists led by Ante Pavelic were allowed by Hitler and his ally Mussolini to set up a "independent" puppet state of Croatia. Hitler granted "Aryan" status to Croatia as his fascist allies carved up Yugoslavia. Pavelic had been awaiting these developments whilst under the auspices of Mussolini in Italy who had granted them the use of remote training camps on a Aeolian island and access to a propaganda station Radio Bari for broadcasts across the Adriatic. As soon as the new fascist state of Croatia was born, and campaign of cold-blooded terror began, as noted by John Cornwell in his book Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (Viking, London, UK, 1999):
"(It was) an act of 'ethnic cleansing' before that hideous term came into vogue, it was an attempt to create a 'pure' Catholic Croatia by enforced conversions, deportations, and mass exterminations. So dreadful were the acts of torture and murder that even hardened German troops registered their horror. Even by comparison with the recent bloodshed in Yugoslavia at the time of writing, Pavelic's onslaught against the Orthodox Serbs remains one of the most appalling civilian massacres known to history" (p 249)
Furthermore, as Cornwell notes, Pius XII had not only "warmly endorsed" Croat nationalism, he had, before the war in November 1939, described the Croats in a speech as an "the outpost of Christianity" of whom "the hope of a better future seems to be smiling on you". Pavelic and Pope Puis XII "frequently exchanged cordial telegrams" according to Dedijer, one on New Year's Day 1943, saw the Pope give his blessing to Pavelic:
Everything that you have expressed so warmly in your name and in the name of the Croatian Catholics we return gracefully and give you and the whole Croatian people our apostolic blessing (Dedijer, p 115)."
Discuss.
