No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
The Roman Catholic Church and Genocide in Croatia, 1941-1945*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
Just before I sat down to write this paper, I heard the editor of the Serbian newspaper in Knin giving an interview to the BBC. ‘Remember’, he said over the crackling telephone line, ‘we Serbs had our Auschwitz too; it was called Jasenovac’ Jasenovac can legitimately be compared with Auschwitz in the annals of human horror. Nobody knows how many Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies were hacked to pieces with butcher knives, beaten to death with clubs and rifle butts, worked to death on detachments, or died of fright, illness, and starvation in the Croatian death camp. A Serb friend of mine recalls being pulled by his mother from the rails of a ferry on the river Sava, near Jasenovac, in 1941 as he stared at the bits of human anatomy bobbing in the current. In the archives of the Italian Foreign Ministry in Rome there is a file of photographs of the butcher knives and mallets used in the camp and elsewhere by the Ustase in their pogroms, as well as pictures of the mutilated victims. Those pictures have been indelibly burned on to the retina of my memory. Vladko Maček, the leader of the Croatian Peasants Party, was arrested and sent to Jasenovac on 15 October 1941, six months after the foundation of the Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, the Independent State of Croatia. He described it in his memoirs:
The camp had previously been a brick-yard and was situated on the embankment of the Sava river. In the middle of the camp stood a two-storey house, originally erected for the offices of the enterprise … The screams and wails of despair and extreme suffering, the tortured outcries of the victims, broken by intermittent shooting, accompanied all my waking hours and followed me into sleep at night.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1992
Footnotes
*
The primary and secondary sources on which this paper rests are listed below in the notes. About half the references have been drawn from German and Italian military, political, and personal archives. For the student of Croatia during the war, and especially of the relations between the German military and political authorities and the Independent State of Croatia, the personal correspondence of General Edmund Glaise von Horstenau is essential. It can be found in folders 1-13 of the file RH 31 III ‘Bevollmächtigter deutscher General in Agram’, housed in the West German Federal Military Archive in Koblenz. Glaise von Horstenau had a rank as SS Brigadeführer, equivalent to his Wehrmacht rank of Generalleutnant. Hence some of his personal correspondence is housed in the SS files in the Berlin Document Centre. Peter Broucek is the author of a three-volume edition of the papers of Glaise von Horstenau in which much of the material can be found, Ein General im Zwielicht. De Lebenserinnerungen Edmund Glaises von Horstenau, 3 vols (Vienna, 1980, 1983, 1989). The Italian military and diplomatic archives are unusually rich because the Independent State of Croatia was nominally an Italian protectorate. In order to make reference ro these primary sources less tedious, I refer to the page and note number in my recent book, All or Nothing: the Axis and the Holocaust 1941-1943 (London and New York, 1990) as follows: ‘Steinberg, p. 274, n. 134’. The other primary source used in this paper is the diplomatic documents published by the Vatican itself in the series Actes et Documents du Saint Siège Relatifs à la seconde guerre mondiale, 4, 5, and 8 (Vatican City, 1975) [hereafter SrS]. Other references are drawn from secondary sources. I do not, alas, read Croatian.
References
1 Maček, Vladko, In the Struggle for Freedom (University Park, Pennsylvania, 1957), p. 234.Google Scholar
2 Ibid., p. 245.
3 Conway, John S., ‘How shall the nations repent? The Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, October, 1945’, JEH, 38 (1987), pp. 596–622.Google Scholar
4 Steinberg, p. 80 and p. 280, notes 117-19.
5 Borgoncini Duca to Cardinal Maglione, 22 Sept. 1941, StS, 5, no. 95, pp. 244-5.
6 Alexander, Stella, The Triple Myth. A Life of Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac—East European Monographs Boulder, no. 227 (New York, 1987), p. 26.Google Scholar
7 Ibid., p. 52.
8 Falconi, Carlo, The Silence of Pius XII, tr. Bernard Wall (London, 1970), pp. 267–8.Google Scholar
9 Alexander, Triple Myth, p. 90.
10 Falconi, Pius XII, p. 277.
11 Steinberg, p. 271, n. 43.
12 Wheeler, Mark, ‘Pariahs to Partisans to Power: the Communist Party of Yugoslavia’, in Tony Judt, ed., Resistance and Revolution in Mediterranean Europe (London, 1989), p. 124.Google Scholar
13 Hilberg, Raul, The Destruction of European Jews, rev. and definitive edn, 3 vols (New York and London, 1985), 2, pp. 710–11.Google Scholar
14 Wheeler, ‘Pariahs’, p. 129.
15 Falconi, Pius XII, p. 274.
16 Steinberg, pp. 24ff. for the negotiations that led to the partitioning of the Balkan territories, which all qualified observers considered absurd.
17 Falconi, Pius XII, p. 271.
18 Steinberg, p. 271, n. 48.
19 Ibid., no. 53.
20 Steinberg, p. 271, n. 56.
21 Ibid., n. 57.
22 Ibid., p. 272, n. 59.
23 Shelach, Menachem, Heshbon Damim. Hatzlat Yehudi Croatiah al yiday haitalikim 1941-43 [Blood Reckoning. The Rescue of Croatian Jews by the Italians] (Tel-Aviv, 1986), p. 30.Google Scholar
24 Ibid., p. 3 in.
25 Falconi, Pius XII, p. 308.
26 Steinberg, p. 272, n. 63.
27 Ibid., n. 64.
28 Ibid., n. 65.
29 Ibid., n. 66.
30 Ibid., n. 67.
31 Falconi, Pius XII, p. 276.
32 Alexander, Triple Myth, p. 68.
33 Ibid., p. 90.
34 Ibid., p. 105.
35 Falconi, Pius XII, p. 281.
36 Alexander, Triple Myth, pp. 71 -2.
37 Ibid., p. 7 in.
38 Steinberg, p. 272, n. 68.
39 Steinberg, p. 272, n. 69.
40 Osborne to Cardinal Maglione, 7 April 1941, StS, 4, no. 313, p. 447; Legation of Yugoslavia to Cardinal Maglione, 17 May 1941, ibid., no. 355, p. 498.
41 Note de Mgr Montini, 16 May 1941, ibid., no. 348, pp. 491-2; Note de Mgr Tardini, 17 May 1941, no. 352, p. 495; Note de Mgr Montini, 18 May 1941, no. 358, p. 500.
42 Cardinal Maglione to Archbishop Stepinac, 25 July 1941, ibid., 5, no. 2], p. 106.
43 Archbishop Joseph Ujcic to Cardinal Maglione, 24 July 1941, ibid., 5, no. 20, pp. 104-5.
44 Alexander, Triple Myth, p. 80.
45 Ibid., pp. 84-5.
46 Ibid., p. 90.
47 Steinberg, p. 80, and p. 280, n. 115.
48 Alexander, Triple Myth, p. 101.
49 Steinberg, p. 119, and p. 286, n. 132.
50 Osborne to Tardini, 3 Oct. 1942, StS, 5, no. 498, pp. 736-7.
51 Chadwick, Owen, Britain and the Vatican during the Second World War (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 302–3.Google Scholar
52 Alexander, Triple Myth, pp. 104-5.
53 Falconi, Pius XII, p. 314.
54 Falconi, Pius XIl, pp. 315-16.
55 The Times, obituary, 10 May 1990.
56 Smyth, J., The Men of No Property’: Irish Radicals and Popular Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century (London, 1992), pp. 49–50.Google Scholar See also pp. 40-1 for South Armagh as a trouble-spot and pp. 46-7 for the frontier as an ethnic and cultural divide. I am grateful to Dr Jim Smyth, my colleague at Trinity Hall, for helping me to understand the world of nationalism in Ireland. He is, of course, not responsible for the conclusions I draw from his lessons.
57 Falconi, Pius XII, p. 265.
58 Elizabeth Murray Despalatovic, Ljudevit Gaj and the Illyrian Movement—East European Monograph Boulder, no. 12 (New York, 197s), pp. 18ff.