| |
 |
|
Chapter 10
|
|
|
THE POPE, STEPINAC AND PAVELIC TRY TO
SAVE CROATIA
By Avro Manhattan |
As in the darkest Middle Ages, so also now the
Catholic Church firmly believes that the ruthless brandishing of the
Catholic sword is the surest way of saving the souls of men. This, not
so much to confer on them eternal bliss, as to further the Church
militant—that is, her expanding dominion on earth. Archbishop Stepinac
and Pope Pius XII, therefore, let the terror in sealed Croatia take its
course to the very end. Indeed, far from ever attempting to curtail it,
they kept it alive, until the Kingdom tumbled with the fall of Fascism.
And yet before the echoes of the dictators ceased to
be heard the Vatican suddenly appeared by the side of the victors, in a
stealthy attempt to save moribund Fascism wherever it could.
Following consultations with Rome, Archbishop Stepinac
and Ante Pavelic set in motion a joint plan to prevent their model State
from crumbling as Fascist Europe was doing all around them. This
consisted of:
(a) preventing the Yugoslav Government from scattering
the Ustashi armies;
(b) persuading the Allies to occupy Yugoslavia, so as
to prevent the Central Government from taking over the Independent
Catholic State of Croatia.
The two set out with desperate determination to
implement their new policy, sustained by the belief that the Vatican
would use its influence among the big Powers to save them. While
waiting, however, they began to reorganize the Ustashi armies, with the
specific objectives of (a) preventing the collapse of Ustashi Croatia,
and (b) of resisting and possibly destroying the new Central Yugoslav
Government.
To the latter, such stubborn hostility was of the
utmost seriousness, as at that period it was busily engaged in cleansing
the country of resisting pockets of Nazi troops. The fight it had
simultaneously to maintain against the Ustashi bands, therefore, put a
considerable additional strain on the new Central Government. This was
rendered even graver by the fact that in the international sphere
Yugoslavia was considered a pawn for the already quarreling victorious
great Powers, each of which was ready to negotiate with anyone, in or
outside that country, to advance its own projects.
Stepinac and Pavelic did all they could to see that
Yugoslavia might be occupied by the "right" Allies—that is to say, by
those willing to strike a deal with the Vatican for continued
"independence" of Croatia. The true nature of their exertions can best
be gauged if it is remembered that since 1941 Yugoslavia had been one of
the Allies herself. Stepinac and Pavelic approached the Supreme Allied
Command for the Mediterranean, and duly submitted a memorandum, openly
outlining their policy: indeed, asking specifically for a prompt Allied
occupation of the whole country. Anglo-American armies should be
dispatched with speed, they said. Ustashi troops would welcome them, and
more would join them. The "right" Allies must not lose another day.
Civil war had broken out all over Yugoslavia. They must intervene.
Having invoked the guns of the "right" Allies, the
good Archbishop set out to use the spiritual guns of the Church. On
March, 24, 1945, he summoned his own bishops to a conference. Result:
the blatant use of the spiritual authority of the Church for the
promotion of political and military designs. Stepinac, backed by most of
the bishops, issued a pastoral letter. After duly praising Ante Pavelic,
their lordships attacked the Yugoslav National Liberation movement with
all the pious venom of which they were capable. Thereupon they ordered
all Croats to help the Ustashi bands to fight the Yugoslav troops. Only
thus they thought would Ustashi Croatia survive.
As the situation worsened it became necessary to take
another step. Following hasty consultations with the Vatican shortly
before the total disintegration, Ante Pavelic asked a trusted friend to
take hold of the reins of Ustashi Government. His name? Archbishop
Stepinac.[1]
It was a shrewd move. A last desperate attempt to unite the Ustashi
State into a truly compact unit. Stepinac—or rather the Vatican, which
had inspired it—had fancied that, once the spiritual, political, and
military forces of the State were centralized in the head of the
Catholic Hierarchy, the Archbishop's authority would delay the
disintegration of the State—indeed, by strengthening its fabric, might
even prevent its collapse, and thus enable Vatican diplomacy in the
meantime to exert its growing pressure on certain Allies, until these
consented to save the Ustashi State from obliteration.
The move neither stopped the swiftly advancing
Yugoslav Army nor saved from total collapse the fast-tumbling European
Fascism. The Ustashi State had been doomed long before Stepinac tried to
save it. In a losing battle to prevent its inevitable fate, Pavelic and
his bloody bands, months before, had unloosed such a reign of terror as
almost to surpass the previous ferocity. People were hanged, executed,
or liquidated as hostages on the slightest suspicion.
To take the city of Zagreb and its immediate environs,
in the course of only seven months (From August, 1944, to February,
1945) 379 hostages were publicly hanged. On August 7, 1944, between the
villages of Precec and Ostrono, ten persons were hanged; on August 26,
at Jablanac, near Zapresic, thirty-six persons; on September 30, on the
railway between the stations of Pusca Bistra and Luka, ten persons; on
October 4, at St. Ivan, twenty-nine persons; on October 5, again at
Zapresic, five persons; on October 6, at Cucerje, twenty persons; on
October 9, at Velika Gorica, thirteen persons; on October 28, at
Djurinac, twenty persons; on the same day at Sveta Nedjelja, near
Samobor, eighteen persons; on December 1, at Brezovica, ten persons; on
December 20, at Odra, thirteen persons; on December 28, at Krusljevo
Selo, fifty persons; on January 4, 1945, at Zitnjak, twenty-five
persons; on January 25, at Konscina, forty persons; on February 3, again
at Zitnjak, ten persons; on February 10, at Remetinac, thirty persons;
on February 13, at Vrapce, twenty persons; on February 22, again at
Vrapce, another twenty persons.
Notwithstanding all this, the end approached fast.
Within a few days, Zagreb, the Croatian capital, was liberated. The
Ustashi tried to save what they could. At the end of April, 1945,
Pavelic, with the full consent of Stepinac, ordered the burial, in the
Franciscan monastery in Zagreb Cathedral city, the Capitol, of
thirty-six chests of plundered gold and valuables—rings, jewelry, gold
watches, gold dentures, gold fillings which had been wrenched from the
jaws of victims whom the Ustashi had massacred—and about two truckloads
of silver. Then, when the collapse was complete, having entrusted to the
care of Stepinac himself their most important documents,
[2]
the Ustashi ran for their lives. Some were executed. Many escaped.
Pavelic fled to Austria, where he was made a prisoner by the American
forces near Salzburg. While preparations for his official trial were
well on their way, a "mysterious intervention" stopped the proceedings.
Why! Pavelic was released unconditionally. Pius XII, through Stepinac
and the Archbishop of Salzburg, had seen to it that his protégé did not
suffer the fate of many other war criminals who were hanged. Pavelic,
rendered immune by the powerful papal protection, traveled to Italy and
found it in the Vatican City, where he waited for easier times.
After a while, to avoid scandal, the Pope, now a
pillar of the victorious democracies, required Pavelic to quit Rome.
Pavelic went from one monastery to another in monkish disguise under
various aliases, Father Benares, or Father Gomez.
Meanwhile in Croatia—Stepinac, in accord with the Holy
Father, continued his ominous preparations for war. The Ustashi, instead
of disbanding, became guerrillas. They were, as in olden times, to fight
in the hills and woods of "occupied Croatia." Their new enemy: the
Central Government of the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia, which
had replaced the Yugoslav kingdom. Their new terrorist activities were
to be cloaked again in innocent-sounding religious organizations. The
old name of "The Crusaders" was adopted. After clandestinely meeting
with the Ustashi Chief of Police in September, 1945, Stepinac summoned
another Bishops' Conference in Zagreb. Once more their Graces, claiming
to be men of peace, incited to war. In a pastoral letter they asked the
people in so many unctuous words to rise and overthrow the Government.
Before such battle orders were issued, a flag, a
symbol of the great holy army of the Ustashi, was consecrated to the
Ustashi Crusaders' forces. Where did the ceremony take place? In
Stepinac's chapel. On November 8, 1945, the good Archbishop received an
agent who brought from Salzburg the "Pledge of Ustashi intellectuals"—to
fight the Yugoslav Government till the end "for the liberation of the
Croatian people."
The pledges of the surviving Ustashi, the activities
of Archbishop Stepinac, were no shadow of resistance, but concrete and
real. Stepinac employed dangerous, ruthless individuals. To cite only
one, the former Ustashi Chief of Police. This individual launched a
programme of sabotage and of assassination of the officials of the New
Yugoslav Republic, with the Archbishop's approval. Stepinac furthermore
established contact with the scattered armed bands of the Ustashi,
directing priests and monks to act as liaison with them. These holy men
traveled all over the country, keeping the illegal Crusader groups in
communication with one another. They zealously reported their position,
strength, and equipment to Stepinac in Zagreb. The Archiepiscopal
Headquarters saw to it that such reports reached the Vatican, which, as
a genuine champion of all democracies, forwarded them to the USA.[3]
The chain—Ustashi, Stepinac, Vatican, USA—was not
merely a clandestine news agency. It was something more: a bait to
induce certain Allied forces to promote a timely military intervention
against Yugoslavia. For, indeed, Stepinac and his illegal bands based
their hope of ultimate success upon that. The Vatican, far from
counseling moderation, encouraged the Ustashi resistance, and added
continual fuel to their burning hopes with repeated assurances of
forthcoming military intervention. The Allies would come to their help.
They must hold on, as the international situation was bound to change in
their favour. The Western Powers were going to turn against their recent
ally, Soviet Russia. A war of liberation was in preparation. Once that
had begun, Yugoslavia would be wiped out, and Ustashi Croatia would
spring again to the fore. The Ustashi guerrillas talked of nothing else.
Stepinac saw to it that their expectations were maintained at the
highest level, lest their enthusiasm change to despair, and thus cause
the total collapse of organized military resistance.
To this effect, the prestige and authority of religion
were once more unscrupulously employed. "The Fathers"—that is, the
various Catholic padres whom the Archbishopric of Zagreb had duly
attached to the illegal terroristic Ustashi bands—went from hideout to
hideout, encouraging the impatient Ustashi troops to endure a little
longer. The British and Americans were just coming. But they must be
patient, as, naturally, to plan a good military expedition took time.
The assurances of the Catholic padres were repeated day in and day out,
until they became a refrain for the Ustashi loops, expecting "the day"
as, simultaneously, their day of deliverance and the new birthday of a
more glorious Ustashi Croatia. This was not merely the conviction of the
underground Ustashi formations or that of the priests. It was that of
Stepinac himself, sure that once the Allies intervened, the Ustashi
would be given help by the peasants, who "one day will rise."[4]
The Archbishop, however, was not content only with
wiping out Yugoslavia as a political unit in order to ensure the
resurgence of a new Catholic Croatia. He was allured by visions of
superb grandeur—nothing less than that an Allied intervention would be a
stepping-stone leading them to Belgrade and, then, to Moscow. The issue,
according to conservative forecasting, rested on conventional military
weapons. Stepinac, however, although a Catholic Archbishop, was a man of
progressive ideas. He believed in the power of scientific achievements,
such as the recently discovered atomic energy. The atom bombs dropped
without a warning on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had in a few seconds blotted
out of existence 100,000 men, women, and children. Catholic Providence
had not given the Christian West atomic bombs for nothing. It was the
duty of the Western Allies to use them. Stepinac was a logical man. If
he had used the Ustashi to impose Catholicism upon the Serb Orthodox, it
was perfectly natural for him to look "upon the West to use its atomic
power to impose Western civilization on Moscow and Belgrade, before it
is too late."
The ruthlessness of such advocacy was typically
Catholic. Christianity (that is, Catholicism) could be—indeed, had to
be—imposed upon those rejecting Christian civilization, and, failing
persuasion, this must be done by force. Such Catholic reasoning had made
Ustashi Croatia possible; the same Catholic reasoning now had begun
looking on wider horizons, to make a new Ustashi regime of a whole
Continent.
Was that the personal whim of Archbishop Stepinac? It
was the basic Catholic policy emanating directly from the Vatican. This
was proved only three years later (1949) when another pillar of the
Catholic Church—i.e. Cardinal Mindszenty of Hungary—having planned to
overthrow the Hungarian Government, reckoned on the military
intervention of the "right" kind of Allies. Such intervention would have
meant general war, and hence the use of atomic bombs. Cardinal
Mindszenty had acted on the assumption that the overthrow of the
Hungarian Government, with the consequent "restoration of the Hungarian
Catholic Monarchy of Hapsburg in its place, could be achieved with help
from abroad...in case a new world war created such a situation," to
quote his own words.[5]
"I regarded it (the outbreak of the third world war) as a basis," said
the Cardinal. Mindszenty could well think and act in this fashion, in
the comforting knowledge that behind him stood the Vatican, bent upon
furthering its vast political schemes, on the assumption of a third
world conflict. Vatican political post-war designs had precisely that
"as a basis."
Are these speculations? Actions speak louder than
words. Pius XII at this same period was not idle. He held talks with
prominent military leaders of the "right" Allies upon whom first
Stepinac and then Mindszenty had counted so much. British and, above
all, American generals came and went in endless procession to and from
His Holiness. To give one typical example: On one single day in June,
1949, Pius XII received five USA generals in successive audiences;
General Mark Clark, wartime Commander of the U.S. Fifth Army in Italy,
and subsequently Commander in the Korean war; Lieut.-General J. Cannon,
Commanding General of the U.S. Air Force in Europe; Major-General Robert
Douglass, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Armed Forces in Europe;
Major-General Maxwell Taylor, Deputy Commander, European Command; and
Lieut.-General Geoffrey Keyes, Commanding General of the U.S. forces in
Austria.[6]
All these went to see, not the self-styled papal Prince of Peace; they
went to talk with the Pope, like them, a man of war.[7]
With the Vatican as a busy center of vast war designs,
it was inevitable that some of its dignitaries in various countries
should become its political reflections or spokesmen. Archbishops and
Cardinals consequently spoke and acted on the assumption of war, and
hence the use of atomic bombs. The Vatican, which within an
astonishingly brief period had developed the most intimate relations
with certain malign forces in the USA, was not merely indulging in
wishful thinking when it passed on such information to its emissaries
abroad. It informed them of what was going on behind the scenes in
certain quarters. That this was a most sinister, incredible reality was
demonstrated to a stunned world the following year. On August 27, 1950,
Mr. Francis Matthews, during a speech in Boston, called upon the United
States to become the first aggressor for peace.
[8]
In plain words, to launch a third world conflict. That is, to initiate
an atomic war. Mr. Francis Matthews was neither a crank nor an
irresponsible citizen. He was a powerful man in the American Government:
none other than the Secretary of the American Navy. But Mr. Matthews was
also something which at this juncture was perhaps even more ominous. He
was a fanatical Catholic, honoured many times for his services to
Catholic welfare work; and, more than that, Mr. Matthews had been the
head of the most villainous Catholic organization in the whole of the
USA—that is, the Knights of Columbus. And, as if that were not
sufficient, he was nothing less than a secret Papal Chamberlain
of Pope Pius XII.
With individuals so highly placed, the Vatican could
not help being so well-informed of what was brewing in certain quarters
preparing to be the first aggressors for peace. The information
it passed to the Servants of the Church, therefore, moulded the policies
of bishops and Cardinals, such as Stepinac and Mindszenty, playing the
complicated Vatican game on the chessboard of postwar Europe. The
declarations of secret Papal Chamberlains, of Cardinals, and of
Archbishops, consequently, far from being the personal opinions of
individuals, were the expression of hopes and policies entertained at
the source which, as early as 1946, had already inspired all the main
schemes and beliefs of Stepinac—namely, the Vatican.
Footnotes
1. This was done ten days before the final collapse.[Back]
2. Ustashi Ministers left their belongings in
Stepinac's care. Minister Alajbegovic, later extradited by
Anglo-American authorities and condemned to death by Zagreb on June 7,
1947, for instance, buried the files of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
in the Archbishop's palace, while Pavelic himself had all the phonograph
records of his own speeches carefully concealed among the files of
Archbishop Stepinac's Spiritual Board in Zagreb.[Back]
3. Very often it was the other way round. This was
openly admitted by American diplomats. For a frank appraisal of this
American Vatican intelligence traffic, see Lying in State
(published 1952), the Memoirs of Mr. Stanton Griffis, who was U.S.
Ambassador in Warsaw in 1947 and 1948. In it Mr. Griffis describes how
he transmitted letters from Polish bishops to the Vatican, giving the
names of the Church's representatives, to whom he also handed sums of
dollars, although the illegal possession of dollars was then considered
a capital offense. [Back]
4. Stepinac's statement to a British liaison officer.
See New Statesman & Nation, London, October 26, 1946.[Back]
5. For more details, see the author's Catholic
Imperialism and World Freedom (Watts), Chapter 20, "The Spectacular
Case of Cardinal Mindszenty."[Back]
6. See announcement in Osservatore Romano,
also Universe, June 10, 1949.[Back]
7. For more details of the Vatican's activities with
the USA. at this period, see the author's Catholic Imperialism and
World Freedom (Watts), Chapter 4, "Papal Promotion of Contemporary
Religious Superstition for Political Purposes."
[Back]
8. See The Times, London, August 28, 1950.
Also the New York Times.[Back]
|
|
Survival guide for the end of time!
About us