Recalling The Croatian Holocaust, Horrible Even By Nazi Standards
Trump and other world leaders who preach hatred, bigotry, revenge and ultra-nationalism must understand how the same atmosphere led to the worst carnage in world history.
Next month marks the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II and the downfall of a pro-Nazi European administration that was savage even by Nazi standards. The anniversary should be marked by calls for rejection of bigotry and not the uninterrupted hatred shown by trump.
Even Nazi leaders said that nowhere was the cruelty worse than in the Nazi puppet state of Croatia. Leaders like trump who guide their minions like lemmings must look into the souls of the past victims of terror, starting with the dreaded Ustaše or Ustashas, a Croatian fascist and ultranationalist organization active between 1929 and 1945.
Trump, who is notoriously uneducated, must understand how people like the relatively unknown Croation clerk, Ljubomir “Ljubo” Miloš, was transformed after he was empowered by the murderous Ustaše, newly crowned Croation leaders by the nazis. Miloš served as commandant of the Jasenovac concentration camp on several occasions and was responsible for the deaths of thousands. Miloš was described as an “extremely sanguine fanatic and sadist” and a “brutal butcher” who was one of the worst Ustaše murderers.
German officers in Croatia and Bosnia repeatedly expressed abhorrence at Ustaše mass killings of Serbs, using words like “slaughter”, “atrocities”, “butchery” and “terror,” while citing hundreds of thousands of victims. Nazi officers in Croatia and Bosnia described the Ustaše with words like “slaughter,” “atrocities,” “butchery” and “terror. Major Walter Kleinenberger, a Nazi officer with the 714th division, complained that Ustaše brutality “was in defiance of all laws of civilization. German Captain Konopatzki called the Ustaše Black Legion slaughter of Serb civilians in Eastern Bosnia “a new wave of butchery of innocents.”
Lieutenant Colonel von Wedel wrote that in western Bosnia, Ustaše killed women and children “like cattle” in a series of “bestial executions.” Hitler’s Plenipotentiary to Croatia, General von Horstanau, described the aftermath of slaughter committed by Jasenovac concentration camp guards in a nearby village:
“At Crkveni Bok, an unfortunate place, over which about 500 15- to 20-year-old thugs descended under the leadership of an Ustasha lieutenant colonel, people were killed everywhere, women were raped and then tortured to death, children were killed. I saw in the Sava River the corpse of a young woman with her eyes dug out and a stake driven into her sexual parts. This woman was at most twenty years old when she fell into the hands of these monsters. All around, pigs devoured unburied human beings. ‘Fortunate’ residents were shipped in terrifying freight cars; many of these involuntary ‘passengers’ cut their veins during transport to the camp [Jasenovac].”
The dreaded Ustaše murdered thousands of Jews, Roma and Serbs in occupied Croatia. Serbs were exterminated solely for refusing to convert to Catholicism. A memorial to the victims of Jasenovac, the largest death camp in Croatia, show that more than half of a total of 80,914 murdered were Serbs. In some cases, prisoners were immediately killed upon acknowledging Serbian ethnicity.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that the Ustaše murdered between 77,000 and 99,000 people at the Jasenovac death camp between 1941 and 1945, including “between 45,000 and 52,000 Serb residents of the so-called Independent State of Croatia, between 12,000 and 20,000 Jews, between 15,000 and 20,000 Roma (Gypsies), between 5,000 and 12,000 ethnic Croats and Muslims, who were political opponents of the regime.”
The Nazis easily conquered Yugoslavia 1941 and they joined with the Italian fascists to carve out a puppet state of Croatia that would rule with Nazi backing until 1945. The new government was headed by the Ustaše who were empowered by the Nazis to perpetrate genocide against hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Roma, as well as Muslim and Croat political dissidents. Many were gassed and others were killed with the swipe of the weapon of choice, a banal agricultural knife known as a “Srbosjek” or “Serbcutter.”
The Ustaše was created in 1929 by Croatian politician Ante Pavelić who would remain as dictator after the Nazi invasion. On April 28, 1941, the head of the Catholic Church in Croatia, Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac, issued a public letter in support of the new Independent State of Croatia under Ustaše-led government, and asked the clergy to pray for Pavelić.
During the war, Pope Piux XII had “warmly endorsed” Croatian nationalism as an “outpost of Christianity.” Pavelic and Pope Puis XII “frequently exchanged cordial telegrams” and on New Year’s Day, 1943, the Pope offered his blessing to Pavelic, according to Vladimir Dedijer, a Yugoslav partisan fighter during World War II who became known as a politician, human rights activist, and historian.
According to Dedijer, the Pope told 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.”
In 1998 Pope John Paul II beatified Stepinac, who was strongly anti-communist. The Pope had called Stepinac “the most illustrious figure of God’s Church amongst Croats.”
After the war, the Ustaše who escaped from Yugoslav territory including Pavelić were smuggled to South America in what were known as “ratlines” operated by Catholic priests who had previously secured positions at the Vatican.
Pavelić fled to Austria and then obtained a passport from the Vatican which he used to escape to Argentina, where he continued to engage in fascist activities. He later served as a security advisor to the far right wing, Argentine President Juan Perón, who provided sanctuary for many fascist war criminals. On April 10,1957, a Serbian hotel owner shot and wounded Pavelić who died two years later of the injuries, after spending the last two and a half years in Francoist Spain.
Those, like trump, who would lead through hatred must hear the words and see the photo of Italian General Alexandro Luzano standing above a Serbian child slaughtered by the Ustaše in front of a school in Prebilovci. After the crime, Luzano sent a letter to the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. The letter outlines unspeakable horrors and has been preserved in the military archives and reads:
“Dear Duce,
My boundless devotion to you, I hope, entitles me to deviate in some way from strict military protocol. That is why I hasten to describe to you an event that I personally attended three weeks ago.
While visiting the districts of Stolac, Capljina and Ljubinje (between 60 and 130 km north of Dubrovnik) — I learned from our intelligence officers that Pavelic’s Ustashas had committed a crime in a village (Prebilovci) the day before, and that when it became known , the surrounding Serbs to be upset again.
I miss the words to describe what I found there. In the big school classroom, I found a slaughtered teacher and 120 of her students! No children were older than 12! Crime is an inappropriate and naive word. It overcame any madness!
Many had their heads cut off and lined up on school desks. The Ustashas pulled out the hoses from the torn entrails and, like New Year’s ribbons, stretched them under the ceiling and drove them into the walls with nails! The swarm of flies and the unbearable stench did not allow us to stay there longer. I noticed a torn bag of salt in the corner and was shocked to find that they were slaughtering them slowly, salting their necks! And just as we were leaving, a child’s grunt was heard in the back seat. I send two soldiers to see what it is. They took out one student, he was still alive, he was breathing with his throat cut in half! I take that poor child to our military hospital in my car, bring him back to consciousness and learn the full truth about the tragedy from him.
The criminals first, in turn, raped a Serbian teacher (her name is Stana Arnautovic) and then killed her in front of the children. They also raped eight-year-old girls. During all that time, a gypsy orchestra brought by force sang and hit the tambourines!
To the eternal shame of our, the Roman church, one man of God, one pastor, participated in all this! The boy we rescued recovered quickly. And as soon as the wound healed, with our carelessness, he escaped from the hospital and went to his village to look for relatives.
We sent a patrol after him, but in vain; they found him on the doorstep of the slaughtered house! Out of a thousand or so souls, there is no one left in the village! On the same day, we discovered that later, when a crime was committed at the school, the Ustashas captured another 800 inhabitants of the village of Prebilovci and threw them all into a pit or killed them in an animal way on the way to the pit.
Only about 300 men were saved. Only they managed to break through the Ustasha ring around the village and escape to the mountains! Those 300 survivors are stronger than Pavelic’s most elite division. Everything they had to lose they lost! Children, women, mothers, sisters, houses, property. Even the fear of death is freed.
The meaning of their life is only in revenge, in the terrible revenge of them is, in a way, the shame that they survived! And Herzegovina, Bosnia, Lika, Dalmatia are full of such villages as Prebilovci.
The massacres of Serbs have reached such proportions that many water sources have been polluted in those areas. From a spring in Popovo Polje, not far from the pit into which 4,000 Serbs were thrown, reddish water erupted, I was personally convinced of that! An indelible stain will fall on the conscience of Italy and our culture, if, while the time is right, we do not distance ourselves from the Ustashas and prevent it from being attributed to us for supporting insanity!”
Teacher Murdered
Another victim of the insanity of the Ustaše was Stana Arnaut, a Serbian teacher who was murdered on August 5, 1941, in Prebilovci during the Serbian genocide. Arnaut was a teacher in Gabela before she was captured by the Ustaše and held at a village elementary school, Sveti kralj Milutin. She was tortured and murdered along with 120 of her students. All told, the Ustaše killed around 600 women and children by throwing many into the Golubinka pit, near Šurmanci. That summer, the Ustaša continued with mass murders of thousands of Serbs. At the beginning of 1941, Prebilovci had a population of 1,000. The Ustaše’s barbaric campaign narrowed the town down to around 400 survivors.
Among the atrocities in the villages, 50 infants were swung by their legs so that their heads could be crushed against the school wall. There was continuous rape of young girls both in the village and at other locations.
There were monsters too excessive to count. But one stands out, Miroslav Filipović-Majstorović, a Croatian Franciscan friar and Ustaše military chaplain who participated in the wartime atrocities. Convicted as a war criminal in a Yugoslav civil court, Filipović was executed by hanging in 1946.
Filipović-Majstorović joined the Ustaše on Feb. 7, 1942, and participated in the Drakulić massacre, where more than 2,300 Serb civilians were brutalized, including men, women and children who were killed usually with axes or pick-axes.
Filipović-Majstorović was the Chief Guard of the Jasenovac concentration camp where he was nicknamed “Fra Sotona” (“Brother Satan”) due to his sadism. The Ustaše regime murdered somewhere near 100,000 people in Jasenovac between 1941 and 1945.
A witness, Josip Riboli, said victims were forced to kneel in front of Filipović-Majstorović and two other guards who competed for the title of the best butcher.
“The executioners would fire their revolvers at the backs of their heads. If death wasn’t instant, one of them would grab a knife and slit the victim’s throat,” Riboli said.
Another former prisoner, Egon Berger, wrote about his 44 months at Jasenovac and the bizarre barbarity of Filipović-Majstorović, referred to as Fra Majstorovic, and other guards.
“The priestly face of Fra Majstorovic, all made-up and powdered, dressed in an elegant suit and green hunter’s hat, watched with delight the victims. He approached the children, even stroked their heads,” Berger wrote.
“Fra Majstorovic told the mothers there will now be a baptism for their children. They took the children from the mothers, the child whom Father Majstorovic was carrying, in his child’s innocence caressed the painted face of his killer. The mothers, distraught, perceived the situation. They offered their lives for mercy for the children. Two children were placed on the ground, while the third was thrown like a ball into the air, and Fr Majstorovic , holding a dagger upwards, missed three times, while the fourth time with a joke and a laugh, a child was impaled on the dagger. When all three children were so brutally killed, these three two-legged beasts exchanged money, because they seem to have a bet on who would the first to stick a dagger in a child.”
A lesson for today’s authoritarian leaders like trump is the reality of the Stara Gradiška concentration and extermination camp in Croatia. The camp was specially constructed for women and children of Serb, Jewish and Romani ethnicity. Victims also included communist and anti-fascist Croats and Bosniaks. It was the fifth subcamp of the main Jasenovac concentration camp, where a total of 12,790 victims have been identified.
The Ustaše had various methods for killing prisoners, including firearms, mallets and knives. At the “K” or “Kula” unit, Serbian and Jewish women, with weak or little children, were starved and/or tortured. They were held at the “Gagro Hotel,” a cellar which Ustaša Nikola Gagro used as a place of torture. Other prisoners were poisoned with gas and some were starved, tortured and then strangled to death using piano wire.
Petar Brzica, one of the guards reportedly cut the throats of 1,360 prisoners with a butcher knife. A gold watch, a silver service, a roasted suckling pig, and wine were among his rewards.
Memories Linger
Like trump, many leaders try to rewrite history to suit their political needs. A recent, vivid and regrettable example came when Vice President JD Vance visited Germany and applauded the far right, Alternative for Germany (AfD), a populist and national conservative political party. The AfD has had ties to Nazi ideology in the past.
The Ustaše has never really died in the hearts and minds of many Croation nationalists, who also would rewrite history.
One book about the Croation holocaust examines “the Croatian knight” Maks Luburić, who as head of Ustaše concentration camps was responsible for more than 100,000 deaths. A documentary based on the book minimized children’s deaths in the concentration camps. The Luburić book was promoted with the assistance of the Croatian Catholic Church,
In 2013, the newspaper of Croatian Catholic archdioceses, Glas Koncila, published a series on Jasenovac, by the Jasenovac-denier Igor Vukić, who claims Jasenovac was a “mere work-camp,” and that there were no mass executions. In 2015, the head of the Croatian Bishops’ Conference asked that the Ustaše “Za dom spremni” salute be adopted by the Croatian army.
Croatian soccer fans have repeatedly chanted the Ustaše “Za dom spremni” salute, for which FIFA and UEFA have repeatedly penalized the Croatian soccer federation for fascist outbursts. In 2014, the Croatian soccer player Josip Šimunić was banned from the FIFA World Cup for leading a stadium full of fans in the Ustaše salute.
In 2014 the then-mayor of Split, Croatia, unveiled a monument dedicated to the 1990s Croation Defense Forces (HOS) brigade named “The Knight Rafael Boban,” after the Ustaše commander. Since then the HOS has organized annual ceremonies when the black-uniformed participants shout the Ustaše “Za dom spremni” salute.
In 2019 the Austrian government passed a law forbidding the display of Ustaše symbols, largely as a result of the display of symbols by Croatian nationalists at the annual, Croatian government-sponsored Bleiburg commemoration. Austrian EU parliamentarians declared the Bleiburg ceremony, which tens-of-thousands of Croat nationalists attend, “the largest fascist gathering in Europe.”
Nationalist sympathizers continue to use the prohibited, yet increasingly tolerated, slogan “Za Dom Spremni” (Defend the Homeland) — the Ustaše equivalent of the Nazi “Sieg Heil.” Marko Perkovic, a Croatian singer who goes by the name “Thompson,” is known for his Nazi sympathies, and has sold more than 500,000 tickets for an outdoor concert in July.
Last year, then-Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic posed during a trip to Canada with an Ustasha flag. The previous year in Israel she expressed her “deepest regrets” to victims “killed at the hands of the collaborationist Ustasha regime.”
In 2016, Croatia’s culture minister, Zlatko Hasanbegović, praised a revisionist film claiming that Holocaust survivors’ testimonies from the Ustasha concentration camp of Jasenovac were exaggerated.