WHAT IS THE VATICAN HIDING?

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Unk's Wild Wild West : One Thread

The Internet Anti-Fascist: Sunday, 24 May 98 Vol. 2, Number 32 (#116) " WHAT IS THE VATICAN HIDING?" The Vatican's Complicity in Genocide in Fascist Croatia: The Suppressed Chapter of Holocaust History by Barry Lituchy 10 May 1998 [special to The Internet Anti-Fascist] The so-called Ustasha Minister of Education, Dr. Mile Budak, summarized the racial policy of Croatia in a speech on July 22, 1941 in Gospic when he said:"The movement of the Ustashi is based on religion. For the minorities Serbs, Jews and Gypsies, we have three million bullets. We shall kill one part of the Serbs. We shall deport another, and the rest of them will be forced to embrace the Roman Catholic religion. Thus, our new Croatia will get rid of all Serbs in our midst in order to become one hundred percent Catholic within ten years." Meanwhile the foreign minister of fascist Croatia, Mladen Lorkovic, sent instructions to his diplomats and to the world: "... the Croatian people annihilate all foreign elements, which weaken its powers; those foreign elements are the Serbs and the Jews." How committed was the Catholic Church in Croatia to this ideology and its racial laws? As has been mentioned already, priests were among the intellectual godfathers of Croatian fascism and racism. Whereas anti-Serbian racism had roots deeply connected to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, anti-Semitism in Yugoslavia was almost entirely the product of Catholic propaganda after World War I. Official church publications in Croatia like Catholic List frequently published condemnations of Jews during the 1930's as being the source of communism, free-masonry, abortions and immorality.(34) It should not be surprising therefore that the man appointed to be President of Ustasha Central Propaganda Office (equivalent to the position held by Goebbels in Germany) was none other a priest, Father Grga Peinovic. To claim that the Catholic Church simply adapted to the fascist regime would be a whitewash of their long-standing promotion of racism. They were the very leaders responsible for articulating this ideology to the people and for the regime itself. But there were considerable obstacles blocking the creation a pure Croat-Catholic state. The most serious of these was the fact that Croats did not even constitute a majority of the population in their own state, just 3.3 million out of around 6.7 million people. There were 2.2 million Serbs, 60,000 Jews, 700,000 Muslims, 70,000 Protestants, not to mention hundreds of thousands of Romas and other minorities. The Ustasha solution was clear: kill as many Serbs, Jews and Romas as quickly as possible-and then sort the rest out later. The Ustasha regime wasted no time at all commencing upon their systematic policy of racial extermination of all Serbs, Jews and Romas shortly after coming to power. If we are to adjudge that the Holocaust began with the first mass murders of entire peoples, then it is clear that the Holocaust began in Croatia in April 1941. The earliest punitive actions against Serbs are believed to have taken place on the evening of April 13, 1941 in Ogulin where Pavelic stopped to make a speech on his way to Zagreb from Italy.Mass killings began in earnest on April 28, 1941 as Ustasha military units were dispatched to towns and villages all across the fascist state. Thousands of Serbian men, women and children were rounded up and killed that day, their property confiscated, in cities like Vukovar and villages like Gudovac, Tuke, Brezovac, Kokochevac, Bolch. Throughout May and June hundreds of towns and villages throughout the Croatian state underwent these same terrorist operations in which Serbs, Jews and Romas were either murdered on the spot or led away to concentration camps. By the beginning of July nearly 200,000 people, the vast majority of them Serbs, already were killed.(35) As Holocaust historian Jonathan Steinberg has pointed out, the Ustashi pioneered the methods of genocidal terror and extermination only later perfected by the Nazi SS Einsatzgruppen another fact "conveniently" overlooked in conventional Holocaust studies.The Ustasha operations were carried out with incredible acts of sadism and torture. In some cases entire villages were axed to death, in others men and women were hanged, crucified, burned to death or buried alive, body parts mutilated, decapitated, infants impaled or hammered. In the Orthodox church at Glina hundreds of Serbs were lured inside only to be slaughtered. Nazi Wehrmacht units attached to the Ustasha military were so impressed by the Ustashi's methods for carrying out genocide that they established a commission to study the killings at Bjelovar, exhume the bodies, take photographs and write a report, later published under the title "Ustachenwerk bei Bjelovar." However, the top Nazi and Italian military authorities were concerned that they were dealing with out of control psychopaths who would destabilize their own regime, and thus Axis control of the Balkans. They were right. The Nazi "Plenipotentiary" in Zagreb, General Edmund Glaise von Horstenau reported back anxiously to Berlin in early June 1941 that "according to reliable reports from countless German military and civil observers during the last few weeks, in country and town, the Ustashi have gone raging mad." As the noted historian of fascism Ernest Nolte has put it, "Croatia became during the war a giant slaughterhouse." The operations continued with only brief pauses throughout 1941 and 1942, then at a slightly slower pace thereafter through 1945. No portion of territory given to Ustasha rule was untouched by this terror. In those areas where the Orthodox Serbs comprised a majority of the population, the Ustashi committed the worst atrocities. Vast areas were emptied of population and left a wasteland. Only a minority of those affected were killed immediately, the rest were rounded up for deportation to death camps. Croatia became at this time, as Croatian historian Antun Miletic has said, "a land of concentration camps." In order to execute the state's racial laws, the Directorate for Public Security under Eugen Kvaternik was ordered by Interior Minister Andrija Artukovic to create a series of concentration camps throughout Croatia. From April to August 1941 Serbs, Jews, Romas and anti-fascists who were not killed outright were relocated to collection camps, such as Danica, Kerestinec, Pag, Caprag, Jadovno, Krushchica, Loborgrad, Gornja Rijeka, Djakovo, Tenj, Sisak, Jastrebarsko and the Lepoglava Prison. Some of these, like Jadovno and Djakovo were also major death camps. In other cases surviving inmates were transported for extermination to the main concentration camp system in Croatia which opened in August 1941, Jasenovac. It was at Jasenovac that between 600,000 and 700,000 Serbs, at least 30,000 Romas and 25,000 Jews were systematically murdered between August 1941 and April 1945. Of all of the death camps during the Holocaust Jasenovac was the third largest overall in terms of victims. In terms of size it was probably the largest, spread out over 240 square kilometers (150 sq. miles) and encompassing actually a series of five major and three smaller "special" camps. Jasenovac was intended to serve as "the radical solution" to Croatia's racial problem a factory of death. Indeed, it was built around a former brick factory. Its first Commander was the notorious Maks Luburic, a man specifically sent to the Third Reich for training at various Nazi concentration camps prior to the opening of Jasenovac. Jasenovac holds a number of ghastly distinctions for its cruelty. It possessed some of the largest camps for women and children during the war - the names of some 20,000 children murdered there have been collected thus far. It was noted also for its extreme brutality every known method of murder and torture was employed there, as well as a few unknown anywhere else. There are very few examples in human history that can compare with the scale of murder, terror and barbarism conducted at Jasenovac. What was the Church's reaction to and role in all of this? How deeply involved in genocide in fascist Croatia was the Catholic Church and the Vatican? In response to the persecution of the Jews and Serbs the Croatian clergy rallied around the regime and provided endless articles and pamphlets justifying their extermination. Stepinac had the racial laws published in his own publications. Writing in response to the publication of the racial laws of April and May 1941 the Catholic weekly "Hrvatska Strazha" in its editorial of May 11, 1941 welcomed the legislation as necessary for "the survival and development of the Croatian nation." "Defense from Judaism, from that destructive worm, was started by the Fuhrer and Duce.... Our Poglavnik has also announced a regulation on the protection and honor and blood, and we would add, on the protection of the survival and development of the Croatian nation, and with it the Poglavnik wants to prevent the dangerous worm from eating away at the tree of our Croatian national life." Writing in response to new racial laws against the Jews the Archbishop of Sarajevo Ivan Sharich declared: "There exists limits to love. The movement for ridding the world of Jews is a movement for restoring human dignity. All mighty God stands behind this movement." The Catholic Bishops of Banja Luka and Djakovo made similar public statements. The Croatian Academic Catholic Society also published a brochure in 1941 entitled "Why Do They Persecute Jews In Germany?," explaining that Hitler was to be praised for eliminating the Jews because he was defending the German people. Hitler was merely righting the wrongs of the past. By the time the Ustashi and Catholic Church were done with their work they had killed approximately 30,000 of the 40,000 Jews living in the territories of the Independent State of Croatia. Toward Serbs the rhetoric in favor racial extermination was even more severe. The Franciscan Priest Shimich stated bluntly: "All Serbs must be murdered within the shortest time. That is our program." And the actions of the Catholic clergy were not limited to words. Catholic priests and members of orders were recruited into as many Ustasha military commands as possible. As with the clerical fascist state, the clerical fascist army was led by priests. Taking up arms as if in a medieval crusade, the Catholic clergy were transformed, as Carlo Falconi has said, "into thorough going butcher- leaders." At the very first punitive action against Serbs at Ogulin it was the parish priest, Ivan Mikan, who addressed the Ustashi and said "Now there will be some cleaning.. Scoot you dogs (Serbs) over the Drina." It was speeches such as these that gave the signal to launch massacres all across the Independent State of Croatia. Sometimes priests gave less than spiritual reasons for liquidating Serbs, such as Father Mate Mogus in Udbina who told his congregation "Look, people, at these brave Ustashi who have 16,000 bullets and who will kill 16,000 Serbs, after which we will divide among us in a brotherly manner the fields.." Meanwhile, Franciscan priests in dozens of villages attacked Serbian and Roma settlements, tortured, killed and expropriated their victims. Father Mogus explained in another sermon that "We Catholics until now have worked for Catholicism with the cross and with the book of the mass. The day has come however to work with the revolver and the machine gun. The Jesuit priest Dragutin Kamber, who was also the Ustasha Commander for the district of Doboj, personally led numerous raids and ordered the execution of 300 Serbs in Doboj. Father Peric of the Gorica monastery participated in the massacres of 5,600 Serbs in Livno. Father German Castimir, the Abbot of the Guntic monastery, personally directed the massacres at Glina. The genocide of the Serbs was to be carried out in three ways: extermination, deportation and forced conversion. There were simply too many Serbs to kill them all. We have left this third part of the genocide plan, forced conversion, for last because this phase of the genocide was almost exclusively carried out by the Catholic Church itself. At his trial for war crimes in 1986 Andrija Artukovic emphasized that the management of forced conversions was entirely in the hands of Archbishop Stepinac and the church leadership.(48) In June 1941 the Ustashi created an "Office of Religious Affairs" to handle the conversion of Serbs to Catholicism. On July 18, 1941 the government decreed that the Serbian Orthodox religion had ceased to exist. By early September 1941 the government decreed the expropriation of all Orthodox Church property. Across Croatia Priests were instructed to inform the Serbian population that they had only one way out: become Catholic or die. This was the ultimatum the Catholic clergy offered to a lucky third of the Serbs in fascist Croatia. The Ustashi kept particularly good records of this phase of genocide. One of the reasons for this is that the Ustashi were so awfully proud of their accomplishments in this regard, that they filmed dozens of such forced conversions for Croatian newsreels. Another is that each Catholic diocese published weekly and sometimes daily reports of new conversions. Children were especially targeted for conversion, especially orphans. No doubt, today there are tens of thousands of people living in Croatia, if not more, who do not know that they had Serbian or Jewish parents or grand-parents, nor what happened to them. In a letter to the Vatican dated May 8, 1944 Stepinac informed the Holy Father that to date 244,000 Orthodox Serbs had been "converted to the Church of God." As the Serbs were marked for genocide, it was desired that no trace of their cultural heritage should remain. 299 Orthodox churches were destroyed. Some 300 Orthodox priests and five bishops were murdered. As this was a clerical-fascist crusade, the Orthodox clergy were marked for especially cruel torture, usually ending with the gouging out of their eyes or other forms of bodily mutilation. In one case the eighty-one year old Bishop of Banja Luka was shod like a horse and forced to walk until he collapsed, at which point his heart was cut out and he was set on fire. In Zagreb the Orthodox Bishop was tortured until he went insane. Some 400 Orthodox priests were killed in concentration camps.The Croatian Catholic clergy saw the rise of fascism as the beginning of an international Catholic-fascist crusade that would convert the world for Catholicism and the Papacy, as the following statement in Katholicki Tjednik of August 31, 1941 makes clear. This was the time to destroy the enemies of Catholicism: Communism, Judaism, Eastern Orthodoxy. "Until now, God spoke through papal encyclicals..And? They closed their ears... Now God has decided to use other methods. He will prepare missions. European missions. World missions. They will be upheld, not by priests, but by army commanders, led by Hitler. The sermons will be heard, with the help of cannons, machine guns, tanks, and bombers. The language of these sermons will be international." The clergy had to be ready to take on a military role if that was God's will. Indeed, it had to be prepared for death and destruction. Perhaps this explains the scale of the Catholic clergy's participation in running concentration camps. The exact number of Catholic priests who worked as commanders or guards at these camps in Croatia is unknown. However, there is no question that there were hundreds, if not thousands. In a surprising number of cases Catholic priests were named commanders or staff officers of concentration camps. These appointments were reported in the Catholic press during the war. Thus, we read in Novi List in 1941 that Father Stepan Lukic was named camp adjutant of the Zepce concentration camp, Priest Ante Djuric Commander of all camps in the Drvar district, and Father Dragan Petranovic commander of the camp in Ogulin. The active participation of clergy in running concentration camps in Croatia was known by the German, Italian, British and American intelligence services, as well as the Vatican. The U.S. intelligence report of February 23, 1943 entitled "Massacres of Serbs in Croatia" speaks bluntly of "the bloody hands of the Catholic clergy in the camps." The scene of some of the most barbaric killings of all time was theconcentration camp complex known as Jasenovac. German, Italian, British and American intelligence reports (as well as Croatian accounts) suggest that between 600,000 and 700,000 were killed there. Aside from intelligence reports, we have the testimony of survivors and of a few of the perpetrators as to the crimes committed there by the Catholic clergy. Testimony was collected by a Yugoslav War Crimes Commission and obtained during the trials of various Ustashi. A key witness was the parish priest of Jasenovac, Juraj Parshich, who along with survivors testified to the barbaric murders committed at Jasenovac by numerous priests, among whom the most infamous were Zvonko Brekalo, Pero Brzica, Anzelmo Chulina, Father Brkljanic, and the Jesuits Zvonko Lipovac and Father Cvitan. However, there was one priest who has carved out a special place for himself in the annals of sadism, barbarism and genocide. His name before the war was Vjekoslav Filipovich, a Franciscan priest who some say was excommunicated. During the war he went from wearing priestly robes to an Ustasha officer's uniform, and bore the name Miroslav Majstorovich. He directed numerous actions against Serbian villages in which he played a conspicuous part in the killings. Before one such attack in the town of Drakulic he strangled a Serbian baby in his hands. Then he went to Jasenovac where he served as Commander for four months, from September 1942 to the beginning of January 1943. At the War Crimes investigation prior to his trial, Filipovich testified that during the four months of his command "according to my own calculations between twenty and thirty thousand were liquidated in the Jasenovac." It is beyond the scope of this author's comprehension to explain the psycho- pathology of clerical-fascism. However, I do know that they killed a million with clear consciences for their belief in God, the Catholic Church and the Aryan race. This is nowhere more eloquently expressed than in the comment made by Father Srecko Peric of the Gorica Monastery who reassured his fellow Ustashi prior to a massacre by saying: "Kill all Serbs. And when you finish come here, to the Church, and I will confess you and free you from sin." In other words, they were not responsible for their actions for they killed in the name of God, on behalf of God's vicar on earth, Pope Pius XII. The Verdict: The Vatican is Guilty of Genocide Today Pope John Paul II claims Pius XII was innocent, the Vatican was innocent, the Church was innocent. For all these years it has kept its archives closed, claiming it has nothing to hide. But we know otherwise. Even without the Vatican's archives we have sufficient evidence to find not only Pius XII, but Pope Paul VI (then Cardinal Montini, Pius XII's closest advisor) and the entire Vatican guilty of crimes of genocide. We cannot convict or punish them because the United States is their protector today in the same way the Habsburg Empire once was in centuries past. But we know enough of the details to reach a verdict. We know that the Vatican met with and supported the Ustashi before they ever came to power. We know that on April 7, 1941, the day after the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia, the British Ambassador to the Vatican, D'Arcy Osborne, implored the Pope to condemn the invasion, but that he refused to do so."

-- Cherri (jessam5@home.com), June 13, 2001

Answers

Gooda grief Missy Cherri, you musta learn to format.

What is Il Papa hiding? Under dosa robes is Sister Theresa.

-- (Fr_Guido_Sarducci_@_Vat.City), June 13, 2001.


Did I mention that I like to have group sex with animals present?

Yup.. I am a real SLUT!

-- Cherri (jessam5@home.com), June 13, 2001.


"WHAT IS THE VATICAN HIDING?"

About 100 trillion tax exempt dollars

-- Pope (is@no.dope), June 13, 2001.


Isn't "it" smart, "It" can copy my name and email address and pretend to be me~~~~

-- Cherri (jessam5@home.com), June 13, 2001.

Mebbe the Vatican is hiding indents?

-- Uncle Deedah (unkeed@yahoo.com), June 13, 2001.


We knew that wasn’t you cherri and the tip-off was the reference to group sex. It is doubtful that you are having ANY sex these days, be it groups, animals, or a Vlasic pickle. You must sit around all day at the keyboard and exist from public assistance programs.

-- Lying (flying@pig.com), June 13, 2001.

Why do you keep attacking Cherri? Attack the articles she quotes, but not her.

-- Dr. Pibb (dr.pibb@zdnetonebox.com), June 13, 2001.

cus shes a filthy welfare whore.

-- Yes (Yes@iam.com), June 13, 2001.

Moderation questions? read the FAQ