Remembering a Magnum Crimen in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941−1945

After the April War of 6−18th, 1941, the Germans, Italians, Bulgarians, and Hungarians occupied and divided the territory of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia into several parts. The Germans annexed North Slovenia and put under their direct occupation the Yugoslav part of Banat and Central Serbia with Kosovska Mitrovica. The Italians occupied South Slovenia, established their marionette regime in Montenegro, and annexed the Gulf of Boka Kotorska, parts of Konavli and Dalmatia. The Hungarians annexed Prekomurje, Baranja and Bachka. The Bulgarians occupied East and Central Vardar Macedonia and South-East Serbia. The Italians established their own marionette state of Greater Albania with the East Montenegro, Kosovo (without its northern part that was occupied by the Germans for economic reasons), and the West Vardar Macedonia.

However, the most important post-April War creation on the territory of the ex-Kingdom of Yugoslavia was an Independent State of Croatia that was officially proclaimed on April 10th, 1941. It was composed of Croatia, Slavonia, parts of Dalmatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the East Srem (today in Serbia). The official name of the state was Neovisna država Hrvatska (the NDH) with capital in Zagreb. It had 6.663.157 inhabitants according to the last pre-war census and covered the territory of 102.725 sq. km. According to the Rome Treaties from May 1941, the NDH gave to its patron Italy Kastav and Sushak with its hinterland, the islands of Krk and Rab, the North Dalmatian, and parts of the Central Dalmatian littoral, the biggest part of the Adriatic islands and a part of Konavle. Therefore, Italy realized all paragraphs of the secret London Treaty signed between Italy and the Entente in April 1915. Nevertheless, after the capitulation of Italy on September 8th, 1943 the NDH tried to incorporate parts of Dalmatia but did not succeed to establish real state-administrative sovereignty over these territories due to the German obstruction.

The collapse of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1941 was very rapid for at least three reasons:

1. The country was not prepared for the war at all.
2. The aggressors were much stronger from all points of view.
3. The Croat treachery during the April War.

As a consequence of the military defeat, some 375.000 officers and soldiers of the Yugoslav army, but only of Serb origin, fell into the Axis hands and became the prisoners of war in Germany. Nevertheless, on the territory of the NDH fanatical Serb-hating Croat Nazi-Ustashi were on the loose, perpetrating appalling massacres which very soon led to the Serb uprising and the loss of de facto control over the large areas. Destruction of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, her occupation followed by the creation of a Greater NDH, and massacres of its Orthodox and Jewish population were the historical triumph of Vatican and the Roman Catholic separatism.

After the April War in 1941 and the occupation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, as a leading pre-war Croat politician Vladimir Vladko Machek refused the Italian and German offer to become a head of the new quisling state of the NDH, the Croat Nazi-Ustashi leader, Ante Pavelic was brought back from Italy to lead this Independent State of Croatia. V. Machek himself clearly noted that the declaration of the NDH on April 10th, 1941 was greeted with “a wave of enthusiasm” in Zagreb “not unlike that which had swept through the town in 1918 when the ties with Hungary were severed”. The territory of NDH, as the rest of ex-Kingdom of Yugoslavia was divided between the German and Italian zones of influence and administration. When the Nazi-Ustashi Poglavnik (Führer) Ante Pavelic was returned from Italy to be appointed by the Italians as the leader of the NDH he came with some 300 supporters, but it turned out soon that he got silent massive support by the ethnic Croats in the country. The Ustashi movement, established in 1929, found its ideological roots in the mid-19 century chauvinistic Roman-Catholic and Serbophobic ideologist Ante Starchevic – a founder of the nationalistic Croat Party of Rights. A. Starchevic was exactly the person who formulated within the ideological framework of a Greater Croatia the Nazi-Ustashi-committed brutal and sadistic genocide against the Serbs during WWII on the territory of the NDH.

The Italian installation of the Ustashi regime in the NDH meant nothing else than the Serbophobic Roman Catholic fanatics were now in power in a state where the law and order were framed on the pattern of Nazi Germany’s anti-Jewish law and order – in a state whose population was barely 50 percent Croat followed by 12 percent Muslims (today Bosniaks) and at least one-third the Serbs whose destiny was to disappear by these or other means. The Bosnian-Herzegovinian Muslims officially was declared by the Ustashi regime as the “flower of the Croat nation”, i.e., as the ethnic Croats of the Islamic faith, and as such the Bosniaks took full participation in the Croat-run four years sadistic genocide against the Orthodox Serbs. During the war, the most infamous Bosnian-Herzegovinian Muslim military unit was the SS Hanjar Division that was inspected by H. Himler himself. However, differently to the Muslim case in the NDH, the implacable extreme Serbophobic regime in Zagreb sought to exterminate all Serbs on the territory of the NDH according to the self-proclaimed principle by the NDH Minister of Education, Mile Budak on June 22nd, 1941: one third to kill, one third to expel and one third to convert to the Roman Catholicism (to Croatize). The first laws in the NDH were to ban the Cyrillic script and to outlaw the Serbs who had to wear a special sign on their clothes that they are the Orthodox. The Serb Orthodox churches and schools were firstly closed and later destroyed. The Ustashi organized bloody massacres of the Serbs even inside the churches (in Glina in August 1941) or the schools (in Prebilovci in August 1941). Deportations of the Serbs to Serbia were part of the Ustashi-designed “Final Solution” of the Serb Question in the NDH – in 1945 there were around 400.000 Serb refugees in Serbia from the NDH.

We do not have the right to forgetting that the essence of the NDH was that this state was the first Vatican-sponsored state in the Balkans. The Roman Catholic Church in the NDH put itself to the full exposal to the new Nazi Roman Catholic Ustashi authorities and even participated directly in the massacres of the Orthodox Serbs. For the Roman Catholic clergy in the NDH, one of the most controversial demands of the Ustashi authorities was the conversion of the Serbs to Roman Catholicism. In principle, the clergy was uncomfortable with this policy of direct conversion, without the converts first accepting the Union act (recognizing the Pope as a head of the church but keeping Slavonic liturgy). Nevertheless, the Roman Catholic Church in the NDH accepted a forced conversion of the Serbs under the formal pretext of saving their lives. It is estimated that the total number of converted Orthodox Serbs in the NDH was around 300.000, but it is recorded also that many of already converted Serbs became anyway murdered by the Ustashi detachments. In the spring of 1943, the Ustashi government created a Croatian Orthodox Church that was headed by Bishop Hermogen – the Russian Orthodox priest who escaped from the USSR.

The first organized massive massacre of the Serbs in the NDH was committed on April 28th, 1941 when 187 Serbs from the village of Gudovac and its surroundings were massacred. Among the most brutal and sadistic massacres at the beginning of the NDH was in Glina on August 5th, 1941 when some 1.200 Orthodox Serbs dressed in their Sunday best were called to the local Orthodox church from surrounding villages to be converted into Roman Catholicism. However, instead of the conversion they were locked inside the church and slaughtered by knives. In August 1941 occurred and the Prebilovci massacre of the local Serbs in East Herzegovina including and the children in the village school. A report on this event by the local Italian commander to Mussolini is very sensitive and anti-Catholic as the commander noticed that after the Prebilovci massacre is shameful to be a Roman Catholic. The organized Ustashi genocide against the Serbs very soon became rapid and efficient that according to the U.S. official reports up to August 1942 there were some 600.000 killed people in the NDH, the overwhelming majority of them the Serbs. The massacres of Croat-Muslim Ustashi forces were to such an extent that even Adolf Hitler was forced to personally intervene in this case in order to restrain the Ustashi barbarism. It is also recorded that the German troops were in some cases in Bosnia-Herzegovina opening fire on the Ustashi soldiers in order to save the lives of the Serbs. That was a fact that the Serbs and the Jews were fleeing from the German to the Italian occupation zone of Yugoslavia for the very reason as the Italians protected them from the Ustashi knives.

In the attempt to finally solve the Serb Question westward the Drina River, the Ustashi government established a network of death camps among all Jasenovac (a Yugoslav Auschwitz) nearby the Sava River on the very border with Bosnia-Herzegovina became the most infamous in which perished around 700.000 people among them 500.000 the Serbs. The extermination techniques included a slaughtering of the prisoners by a special type of knife known as the Srbosjek (a Slaughterer of the Serbs) made in the Solingen factory in Germany under the Ustashi design or making the hand-washing soaps of alive boiled human bodies sold in the shops in Zagreb. The evidence of extermination of the Serbs was sent by the local executors to Zagreb and from Zagreb later to the Vatican. The most enduring of this genocide is for sure the scene described by the Italian journalist and writer Curzio Malaparte in his book Kaputt. This book is an account of his wartime experiences as a war correspondent. Therefore, several months after the NDH became proclaimed Malaparte went to make an interview with Ante Pavelic – a head of the state and a leader of the Ustashi movement. On this occasion, he was joined by the Italian minister in Zagreb, Raffaele Casertino. What he wrote as a witness is:

“While he spoke, I gazed at a wicker basket on the Poglavnik’s desk. The lid was raised and the basket seemed to be filled with mussels, or shelled oysters – as they are occasionally displayed in the windows of Fornum and Mason in Piccadilly in London. Casertano looked at me and winked, “Would you like a nice oyster stew?” “Are they Dalmatian oysters?” I asked the Poglavnik. Ante Pavelic removed the lid from the basket and revealed the mussels, that slimy and jelly-like mass, and he said smiling, with that tired good-natured smile of his, “It is a present from my loyal Ustashis. Forty pounds of human eyes.”

The NDH was internationally recognized by Germany, Italy, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Japan, Spain, National China, Finland, Denmark, and Manchuria. It existed from April 10th, 1941 to May 15th, 1945. In the other words, the NDH existed a whole week after the German capitulation as the last Nazi state in Europe. After the war, new communist authorities in Yugoslavia, led by Josip Broz Tito of Croat and Slovenian origin, did everything to eliminate the pieces of evidence of the Croat-Muslim Magnum Crimen against the Serbs during the war. A most notorious case happened with the death camp of Jasenovac that was totally demolished. Very soon after the war simply nothing left as evidence of the 9th Circle of Dante’s Hell followed by the destruction of the written and other documents. After 1990 a new nationalistic government of Franjo Tudjman in Zagreb did everything to disgracefully whitewash a history of the NDH directly supported by the official scientific institutions in Croatia. In this context, one of the most shameful “scientific” publications was published in several languages by the Croatian Institute of History in 1997.

Today, it is much more reliable to consult the German and Italian sources on the NDH than the archival material from the Yugoslav archives. Therefore, the most useful reports to Berlin and Rome are by the German and Italian embassies in Zagreb, German General Artur von Flebs, German dr. Josef Fessl, German Wilhelm Hetl, German Lothar Rendulitz, German Herman Neubacher, German dr. Josef Matl, Italian General Pitzio Biroli, Italian General Mario Roata, Italian Colonel Guisepe Angelini, Italian Enzo Cataldi, or Italian historian Salvatore Loi who published an extremely valuable anthology of the Italian documents and reports on the Italian military operations in Yugoslavia in 1978. S. Loi’s account on the NDH is probably one of the most relevant and realistic. According to him, the NDH became transformed into the lake of Serb blood until mid-August 1941. The Croat-Muslim genocide against the Serbs was, according to the same author, the most barbaric part of WWII, even more, barbaric than the holocaust against the Jews.

Subsequently, it is not of any surprise that U.S. President Th. F. D. Roosevelt told in 1944 that after the war the Croats as a nation has no right to their own national state as they showed to be the animals during the war. For such a nation as the Croats were, Roosevelt anticipated international monitoring but not any kind of Croatia. However, after the war, a Croat-led the Communist Party of Yugoslavia created an even bigger Croatia within Yugoslavia than it was before the war reducing Serbia into the borders before the Balkan Wars of 1912−1913. Finally, the Croats backed by Vatican and Germany continued a policy of the NDH in 1991 and in essence succeeded as today in Croatia there are only up to 4 percent of the Serbs in comparison to 25 percent in 1940 or 12 percent in 1990.

Prof. Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirovic

www.global-politics.eu/sotirovic

globalpol@global-politics.eu

Personal disclaimer: The author writes for this publication in a private capacity which is unrepresentative of anyone or any organization except for his own personal views. Nothing written by the author should ever be conflated with the editorial views or official positions of any other media outlet or institution.

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