Whatever Became of Artukovitch?

Extract

I have been reading an 84-page pamphlet called ‘Artukovitch, the Himmler of Yugoslavia’, by three New Yorkers, called Gaffney, Starchevitch and McHugh. Artukovitch was Minister of the Interior, 1941 to 1945, under the dictator Pavelitch in the independent state of Croatia. Very few people have heard of him, yet if his story were told with remorseless candour, we would have a picture not only of Croatia twenty years ago, but of all Christendom in our century. Everything that the New Yorkers relate should be already known to us, except for one startling paragraph. It is an extract from a memoir by Artukovitch himself. After describing how he escaped to Austria and Switzerland in 1945, he goes on:

‘I stayed in Switzerland until July 1947. Then with the knowledge of the Swiss Ministry of Justice I obtained personal documents for myself and my family, which enabled us to travel to Ireland. Using the name of Anitch, we stayed there until 15th July, 1948. When our Swiss documents expired, the Irish issued new papers and under Irish papers we obtained a visa for entry into the U.S.A.’

So evidently we in Ireland, had sheltered this notable man for a whole year. He was not, like Eichmann, a humble executive, but himself a maker of history, dedicated to the extermination not of Jews alone, but also of his fellow-Christians, the Serbian Orthodox. He himself in the spring of 1941 introduced and signed the laws, which expelled them from Zagreb, confiscated their property and imposed the death penalty on those who sheltered them. He established the twenty concentration camps, in which they were exterminated. Why do we know so little about his sojourn among us ?