By the end of 1945, about a half a million Yugoslavs had become refugees, or ‘displaced persons’ as they were called at the time. This figure includes forced labourers in the German Reich who did not want to return home after the war, but does not include 360,000 ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) driven from Yugoslavia. Nor does it include the unknown number of Ustasha, whose names never appeared in the books of the refugee organisations.1 The ‘displaced persons’ eventually merged with the long-standing communities of the South Slavs in western Europe, North and South America, and Australia and New Zealand. From the 1950s, when the restrictions on travel were lifted, hundreds of thousands of South Slavs, and proportionally still more Albanians from Kosovo, emigrated to join the existing diasporas. The very large number of overseas Yugoslavs, many harbouring grudges from the Second World War, contributed to the nationalities problem inside the country.
Most of the Yugoslav ‘displaced persons’ were anti-Communist soldiers who had escaped to Italy or Austria and there been accepted as political refugees. Long after the war there came to light two strange and sinister features of Allied policy towards the escaping Yugoslavs. The British in Austria sent back by force or deception probably 30,000 Serbs, Croats and Slovenes who had not been found guilty or even accused of any crime other than opposition to Communism. Many, if not most, of these people were promptly killed. Having sent back thousands of possibly innocent people to death or imprisonment, the Allies refused to hand over and even protected Ante Pavelić and most of the leading Ustasha.
The first anti-Communists to escape the country were between 10,000 and 12,000 Chetniks from Croatia under their leader, the Orthodox priest Duke Momčilo Djujič. He and his men from the region round Knin had been the first to take up arms against the Ustasha in May 1941 and had later made an alliance with the Italians. When Italy dropped out of the war, Duke Djujić continued to fight the Ustasha but made an arrangement with the Germans against the Partisans. In the spring of 1945, Djujić led his Dinaric Division to Italy, where he was sheltered by the Catholic Church, ironically, since the Croatian Catholic Church had tried to wipe out his religion. In 1946 the British appointed a special commission under Fitzroy Maclean, to screen the remaining Yugoslav and Ukrainian ‘displaced persons’ in Italy, to determine who were refugees and who if any were war criminals trying to escape from justice. In spite of his pro-Tito reputation, Maclean was sympathetic towards the Chetniks, and all the surviving members of the Dinaric Division eventually settled in Britain in 1947, though Djujić himself went to California.2
The great majority of the anti-Communist Yugoslavs, including the Chetniks from Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia-Hercegovina, were heading for Austria in May and early June 1945. Just as Tito was claiming for Yugoslavia the largely Italian-speaking province of Venezia-Giulia, so he demanded the largely German-speaking southern part of Carinthia, because of its Slovene minority. When troops of the British 5th Corps entered Klagenfurt on 8 May, they reported it swarming with Partisans: ‘The Yugoslavs were attempting to seize public buildings and key installations.’3
The Partisans on either side of the Karavanka mountain range were also hoping to intercept the hundreds of thousands of German and anti-Communist Yugoslav troops who wanted to give themselves up to the British. Winston Churchill had made it clear in a message delivered on 29 April that all surrendering Yugoslavs should be disarmed and held in refugee camps awaiting a further decision about their future. The Partisans were meanwhile using the threat of their military presence to back the demand that all Yugoslavs should be repatriated.
Tito’s main object was to prevent the escape of the former political leaders of the Independent State of Croatia. On 13 May he instructed his First Army: ‘A group of Ustasha and some Chetniks, a total of 50,000 men, is reported by Third Army in the area towards Dravograd. It includes Pavelić, Maček, the Croatian Government and a huge number of criminals. They are attempting to cross at Dravograd and give themselves up to the British. You must move your forces most urgently from the Celje area … in order to concentrate for an attack aimed at the annihilation of this column.’4
As we shall see, the Ustasha leaders and ‘a huge number of criminals’ succeeded in getting to Austria and then vanished. A large number of less important Croats gave themselves up to the Partisans on the promise of fair treatment. The Partisans drove these men and their families back into Yugoslavia on a long, cruel forced march that ended for many with execution. However, the report by Cowgill, Brimelow and Booker discounts the allegations of mass executions at Bleiburg in Austria.5
On 13 May Tito warned the British that he had the support of the Soviet Union for Yugoslavia’s ‘claim to Austrian territory’, meaning presumably southern Carinthia. Perhaps because of Tito’s threat and the ever more menacing attitude of the Partisans in Austria, the British 5th Corps changed their policy on repatriation. On 17 May Brigadier Toby Low (the future Lord Aldington) directed that: ‘All Yugoslav nationals at present in the Corps will be handed over to Tito forces as soon as possible.’ The following day a supplementary order explained that this was to include ‘all non-Tito soldiers of Yugoslav nationality and such civilians of Yugoslav nationality as can be claimed as their camp followers’. The authors of the report on repatriations comment: ‘In other words the groups comprised precisely those categories of dissident Yugoslavs whom Churchill had in mind when on 29 April he had ruled that they should not be handed over to Tito …’6
From 18 May to 2 June, the British in Austria carried out the forced repatriation, mostly by train, of about 26,000 anti-Communist Yugoslavs. Sometimes the victims were tricked into going quietly by being told that the train was travelling to Italy; sometimes they were forced on board. In either case, this business shamed and revolted most of the British troops involved. According to Djilas, even the Yugoslavs were surprised that the British had fallen for their bluff of a threat to annex Carinthia. On the very day after the start of repatriation, Tito ordered the Partisans out of Austria, and on 9 June he signed a treaty formalising the troop withdrawals from both Carinthia and Venezia-Giulia. In an angry speech delivered at Ljubljana on 27 May, Tito made a veiled attack on the Soviet Union, then called for the punishment of Yugoslav ‘traitors’. This apparently led to the massacre of some or all of the people who had been repatriated.7
On 13 May, the head of the Independent State of Croatia, Ante Pavelić, accompanied by such eminent Ustasha as the Minister of the Interior, Andrija Artuković, the Minister of Religious Affairs, Mile Budak, the Archbishop of Sarajevo, Ivan Šarić, and probably by the commandant of Jasenovac concentration camp, Maks Luburić, travelled towards the Austrian frontier in what Tito described as a column of 50,000 men. If Tito knew this, the British almost certainly knew as well, from aerial reconnaissance, radio interception and ground observation.
Since most of the Ustasha leaders were very high on the list of enemy war criminals wanted to stand trial, one can assume that their names, appearance and records were well known to all units in Austria of the US Counter-intelligence Corps and the British Intelligence Corps, whose Field Security Police were supposed to keep watch on all refugees. Yet somehow, in May 1945, almost all the leading Ustasha vanished in Austria and did not reappear until several years later in Argentina, Spain and the United States. The only prominent Ustasha to be returned to Yugoslavia after the war were the Kvaternik father and son, who were in disgrace for plotting against their leader, Ante Pavelić.
Many years later, various authors in and outside Yugoslavia attempted to piece together the few known facts about the escape of the Ustasha leaders, but the only first-hand account was given by Pavelić’s daughter Marija, when she returned to Croatia to rebuild her father’s Ustasha organisation, now called the Croatian Liberation Movement (Hrvatski Oslobodilački Pokret), or HOP. In an interview with a Zagreb magazine, Marija Pšeničnik, as she is called by her married name, explained that she was sent to Austria in advance of her father’s escape from Yugoslavia.
We were lucky. We landed on an Austrian who saved father. For money. He put him up on a peasant estate in the Alps, with false Austrian papers … The only person who lived with father in that house was a maid, an Italian woman. We (the family) lived elsewhere in San Egilgen. We reported to the Americans, as this zone was under American control … We met up with our father one to three times a week, in the woods. He spent his time in the woods, picking mushrooms and catching fish. He even sent us some of these and we in turn sent him some of the bread rations we had received. One day at the end of summer 1945, it was raining and mother wasn’t feeling well and she asked me to go out and meet father. I found him alone in the woods, with a backpack, preparing to escape. When he had gone home the maid had waved as a signal that the police were there.
At this point in the interview Marija’s husband, Dr Srečko Pšeničnik, the President of HOP, interrupted to clarify who the policemen were:
It was the Austrian police who were acting on behalf of the American secret service as well as the English. Had he been arrested he would certainly have been handed over to Yugoslavia. He had already once been in the hands of the Americans and English but they hadn’t recognised him.8
It is hard to believe that the British and American counterintelligence failed to recognise a man whose face was as well known in Yugoslavia as Hitler’s was in Germany. It is even harder to believe that if they had wanted to find Ante Pavelić they would not have kept an eye on his wife and family, rather than leaving the search to the Austrian police, who were themselves under suspicion of war crimes and did not handle political matters.9
Marija Pšeničnik went on to explain how her father then lived for four years in Rome before going to Argentina: ‘We had spent our childhood in Italy [when the Ustasha were in exile in the 1930s] … There was no similar “witch-hunt” going on there … Both father and mother managed to cross into Italy … Who helped us most? The Jesuit Order. They sheltered father because he had gone to a Jesuit school in Travnik. According to their tradition, every pupil of theirs had an everlasting right to be sheltered. That’s how they saved father.’10
The Jesuits may have helped another distinguished old boy, Archbishop Šarić of Sarajevo, but most of the Ustasha leaders came from the rival Franciscan schools such as Široki Brijeg in Hercegovina. The ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’ who organised the escape of Artuković and many other Ustasha was the Franciscan Father Krunoslav Draganović, a former professor of theology at Zagreb, the mastermind of the punitive laws against Serbs and Jews, a temporary military chaplain at Jasenovac concentration camp, and from 1942 an emissary in Rome. From there in May 1945 on, he helped to run the ‘Ratlines’ organisation providing false papers, travel documents, bribes and hide-out addresses for Nazi and Ustasha members on their way to havens abroad.11
The ‘Yugoslav Himmler’ Andrija Artuković spent some time in a British camp before he was freed by what Hubert Butler described as a ‘mysterious intervention’. The former Ustasha head of the diplomatic service, the Muslim Mehmed Alajbegović, met him in Austria: ‘Artuković showed me how the British had stamped his pass to say that he did not constitute a danger to public order and security, and said they did this when they released him and other members of the government from the camp at Spittal.’12 The authors of Ratlines suggested that Artuković was a British Intelligence agent even before the Second World War. Through Father Draganović, whom he met at an Austrian monastery in November 1946, Artuković got to Switzerland and then to the Republic of Ireland, where he spent a year with Franciscans in Dublin and Galway before joining his brother in California.13
Except for the Kvaternik father and son, all the prominent Ustasha made good their escape. The novelist Mile Budak, who had first made public the Ustasha policy towards the Serbs of ‘convert a third, expel a third and kill a third’, became an adviser on security to Juan Perón, the dictator of Argentina. The Archbishop of Sarajevo, Dr Šarić, retired to Spain to continue writing his poems in praise of Archbishop Stepinac and Ante Pavelić. The commandant of Jasenovac concentration camp, Maks Luburić, took a villa in Spain. He later broke with Pavelić to form a more extreme terrorist organisation in Europe and Australia.14
Although half a million opponents of Tito had left Yugoslavia after the Second World War, a far greater number remained in the country, most of them Serb or Croat nationalists. Many anti-Communist Serbs and Croats were not at the same time separatists, but Yugoslav feeling was stronger among the smaller groups, such as the Slovenes and Bosnian Muslims. The only armed resistance to Tito came from a handful of Ustasha in Croatia and western Bosnia-Hercegovina, and from much larger bands of Chetniks in eastern Bosnia, Montenegro and western Serbia, especially the Ravna Gora retreat of Draža Mihailović.
Many anti-Communists clung to the hope that the Western Allies and in particular the United States would step in to save them from Communism. We know that as early as 1943 Roosevelt’s adviser Cardinal Spellman assured a representative of the NDH that the United States wanted an independent Roman Catholic Croatia. Until the very end of the war the US government continued to back and encourage the Chetniks in Serbia. Milovan Djilas says that as late as August 1946 the American Embassy fostered hopes of intervention: ‘Its employees were arrogant and provocative, even going so far as to promise certain individuals – our enemies and some leaders of former parties – that parachute troops would take over Belgrade and the navy would seize the Adriatic coast.’15
The Ustasha resistance soon crumbled because it had little or no support among the Croatian peasantry. The Chetniks, however, were still generally popular in Serbia proper. Most of them shaved their beards off after the war and acted as part-time guerrillas only. The OZNA secret police, the forerunners of UDBA, carried on a relentless search for the Chetniks, treating the Serbian peasants rather like citizens of an occupied country. Even Ranković was appalled when he heard that his agents in eastern Bosnia had put on display in the centre of Tuzla the severed head of a Chetnik warrior.16
The capture of Draža Mihailović came in March 1946. One of his senior commanders was lured to Belgrade, arrested, recruited by OZNA and sent back to Ravna Gora to lead Mihailović into a trap, fulfilling the Serbian dread of betrayal, as at the Battle of Kosovo. Ranković was away in Moscow when preparations began for the trial, so Djilas took over the job of formulating the prosecution case. To counter accusations of national bias, the judges and prosecution lawyer were Serbs from Serbia proper. To counter hostile critics abroad, the prosecution concentrated on Draža Mihailović’s alleged collaboration with the Germans, rather than on his opposition to Communism. At this time, only a handful of people knew that Tito too had collaborated with Germany in the ‘March Consultations’ of 1943.
Mihailović was not tortured, drugged or made drunk, although he was given brandy. He gave his evidence honestly, for his conscience was clean, and he made a moving speech from the dock in which he quoted the poet Njegoš on how he had been caught up in the ‘whirlwind of the world’. Tito was in two minds over the death sentence for what he admitted to be a ‘political’ trial, but the ‘leading triumvirate’ of Kardelj, Djilas and Ranković told him that any other verdict would dismay the Partisans and outrage the relatives of the Chetniks’ victims: ‘Tito bowed silently to the arguments, more readily because he himself was not opposed.’17
Although he had planned the prosecution and argued in favour of execution, Djilas speaks with respect of Draža Mihailović:
a brave man, but extraordinarily unstable in his views and in his decision-making. A traditionalist, he was incapable of grasping stormy times, let alone navigating through them. For him the common people, especially Serbs, were deeply religious, patriotic and in their good-natured way devoted to king and country … Although his units – sometimes at his direct orders – carried out mass crimes against the non-Serbian population, wantonly executing Communists and their sympathisers, Draža himself was not considered harsh or fanatic.18
The trial of Draža Mihailović, and his execution by firing squad on 17 July 1946, brought condemnation of Tito from Western statesmen, especially Churchill and de Gaulle. But condemnation of Tito was not the same as sympathy and support for Mihailović’s long-suffering people. The majority of the Serbs in Serbia, as distinct from the Orthodox in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina, were, as Djilas put it, ‘deeply religious, patriotic and in their good-natured way devoted to king and country’, in other words anti-Communist.
However, it is the fate of the Serbs that although their vices are known abroad – their stubbornness, their recklessness and their habit of starting wars – their virtues have gone unnoticed. They come to the attention of the Western world only when causing trouble, as in 1875, 1908, 1912, 1914, 1941 and 1991. This is largely because they belong to a Church which, though in theory universal, is really confined to eastern Europe. Although, in the nineteenth century, Serbia enjoyed the support of its fellow Orthodox Christians in mighty Russia as well as the neighbouring states of Romania, Bulgaria and Greece, all but the last of these countries were ruled by atheists after the Second World War. There was nobody in the outside world to speak for the Serbs, except Serbs in exile.
While the anti-Communist Serbs had few friends outside their country, the Croats had the support of the worldwide Roman Catholic Church. The Partisans who entered a silent Zagreb on 8 May 1945 were not encouraged to take revenge on the capital of the Ustasha. As a Croat who understood, if he did not share, the pride and touchiness of his fellow-countrymen, Tito was anxious to win over the followers of the previous regime. From about 1943, when morale had started to crumble among the troops of the NDH, the Partisans had encouraged and welcomed deserters without too many questions being asked. As the Partisans advanced, they arrested and almost immediately executed Ustasha guilty of crimes, including scores of priests and at least two nuns. However, their propaganda tended to play down Ustasha crimes and play up those of the foreign invaders. The hundreds of thousands of Orthodox Serbs who had perished during the early years of the war were lumped together with the rest as ‘victims of Fascism’.
Tito’s motives were no doubt mixed. He feared that a full-scale war crimes trial, with all the horrific publicity that would follow, might cause an explosion of anti-Croat hatred among the Serbs, and burden the whole Croat nation with an undeserved and unbearable guilt. We can also assume a less honourable motive. As Tito knew perfectly well, the Partisan army had come to power not as agents of revolution, not even as patriots fighting the foreign invader, but as the defenders of Serbs in the NDH. Without the Ustasha government and its murderous policy towards the Serbs, the Partisans would have had few recruits, and the Communist Party would never have come to power. This was the principal reason why Tito did not want to rake up the Ustasha crimes.
Almost everyone who had stayed in Zagreb during the war was to some extent compromised, as Hubert Butler explains in his essay ‘Nazor, Oroschatz and the Von Berks’. Soon after the liberation, a magazine published in Zagreb reprinted various odes, declamations and pictures which had appeared under well-known names in praise of the Ustasha and the Germans. According to Butler, who came across the magazine in 1946: ‘The editor pointed out that these people were now ardent Partisans and supporters of the government. It was, I believe, the last freely critical paper published since the liberation and it was very quickly suppressed.’19
Soon after the liberation, Tito made courteous approaches to Archbishop Stepinac, asking for help in reconciling the Serbs and Croats after the horror of the Ustasha years. He also suggested that the Croatian Catholic Church should become more ‘national’, that is to say less dependent on the Vatican. In one of his talks with Church officials, Tito went so far as to speak of himself ‘as a Croat and a Catholic’, although this comment was cut out of the press reports on the orders of Kardelj.20 The government gave permission for a march on 8 July 1945 to the shrine at Marija Bistrica, which was attended by 50,000 faithful.
While Tito was trying to be conciliatory, the authorities went ahead with the trials of priests who were said to have ‘blood on their hands’. The monstrous Filipović-Majstorović, the Jasenovac killer known to the inmates as ‘Brother Devil’, was hanged in his friar’s robe. The new authorities closed the religious schools and stopped religious teaching in state education. Civil marriage was introduced, and with it the prospect of easy divorce. As part of its programme for the collectivisation of land, the government confiscated most of the Church’s property.
In his resistance to all these measures, Stepinac was from the start ‘completely uncompromising’, as his biographer Stella Alexander says.21 Throughout the summer of 1945 he issued a torrent of circulars, pastoral letters and scarcely veiled threats to disrupt Yugoslavia’s relationship with the Vatican. In a circular to the clergy and in a letter to Tito, Stepinac rejected the separation of Church and State and claimed for the former the right to religious education, an uncensored press and the receipts of revenue from its land.
Through a series of articles in the diocesan press, Stepinac defended the role of the bishops under the NDH and blamed any ‘errors’ that had occurred on ‘people who often behaved as if there was no church authority’. Even Stella Alexander, who is sympathetic to Stepinac, says that writing about the massacres as a series of errors gave a ‘deplorable impression of self-righteousness and self-justification’.22 It is difficult not to agree with the angry statement by Tito, printed on 25 October 1945, in which he asked a number of pertinent questions: ‘Why had the bishops not issued a pastoral letter against the terrible killing of the Serbs in Croatia [i.e. the NDH]? Why were they spreading racial hatred at a time when everyone ought to be helping to heal the wounds of the war? If the bishops said now that they were ready to sacrifice themselves, they must have kept silent under the Ustasha not from terror but because they agreed with them.’23
Although Stepinac had in effect invited arrest and trial in September 1945, the Communists waited a year before taking the action which, as they knew, would outrage world opinion. And the longer they waited, the harder it was to answer the obvious question: if Archbishop Stepinac committed crimes during the war, why was he not arrested and brought to trial as soon as the war was over?
A few years later, Tito explained to a sympathetic American journalist how he had tried to avoid a trial, in spite of Stepinac’s clear-cut guilt: ‘I asked Cardinal Stepinac to leave the country – go anywhere, go to Rome. But he refused. I appealed to the Pope [Pius XII] to intervene but did not get a reply from the Vatican. There was at that time a papal nuncio in Belgrade, Bishop [Joseph Patrick] Hurley [of St Augustine, Florida], so I asked him to intervene with the Vatican and get Stepinac out of the country. Bishop Hurley was sympathetic. He took the documentation of treason and sent it to Rome. But he also got no reply. It was only then that the authorities arrested Stepinac.’24
As Tito had foreseen, the trial, which began in September 1946, was a propaganda disaster for himself, and an undeserved triumph for the Archbishop. For reasons already mentioned, the government dared not say that Stepinac, the hierarchy and much of the Croat nation had backed the Ustasha regime, and either approved or ignored the murder of 350,000 Serbs as well as the Jews and Gypsies. The principal charges levelled against Stepinac were that he welcomed the Ustasha government while Yugoslavia was still at war; that he persecuted the Serbs in the interests of ‘the Vatican and Italian imperialism’; that since the war he had entertained Ustasha representatives from abroad. The second charge was especially disingenuous, since the Italians had protected the Serbs from Croat persecution.
In the course of a long and fair trial, Stepinac often refused to answer questions, confining himself to saying that his conscience was clear. In a statement from the dock, he expressed his detestation of Communism, especially its atheistic teaching in schools, and he once more declared his faith in an independent Croatia: ‘The Croat nation unanimously declared itself for the Croatian state and I would have been remiss had I not recognised and acknowledged the desire of the Croatian people enslaved in the former Yugoslavia.’25
Stepinac was sentenced to sixteen years’ hard labour but served only five years at Lepoglava, under conditions more comfortable than those Tito had experienced in the 1930s. He was released in 1951 and once more offered the chance to go into exile, but he chose instead to stay under house arrest in a village south-west of Zagreb. When Stepinac died in 1960, Tito allowed a funeral service in Zagreb Cathedral, which did not appease the Catholic Croats but much enraged the Orthodox Serbs who continued to look on Stepinac as the man chiefly responsible for their suffering during the Second World War.
His trial and imprisonment made Stepinac a hero and martyr to Croats in exile, to Roman Catholics throughout the world and to most anti-Communists outside Serbia. For many years I was among those who thought that Stepinac’s crime ‘was not that he fraternised with the fascists but that he refused to fraternise with the Communists.’26 Having since examined the history of the Croatian Catholic Church, especially Viktor Novak’s monumental indictment Magnum Crimen, I now believe that Stepinac was guilty of complicity in the Ustasha crimes.
Stepinac welcomed the Independent State of Croatia, knowing full well the character of its leader Ante Pavelić, a terrorist murderer even before the war. For at least a year, Stepinac uttered no word of public or even private complaint about the Ustasha murders, of which he was fully informed by his bishops. From 1942 he began to make mild public criticism of the Ustasha regime and even made contact with enemies of the regime such as the British agent Rapotec, to whom he said that he hoped for the restitution of Yugoslavia after the war. In retrospect it appears that Stepinac was simply hedging his earlier bet on an Axis victory. Even before the end of the war, when the Western Allies were growing hostile to Tito, Stepinac returned to his earlier faith in an independent Croatia.
Stepinac betrayed his Christian duty during the war but his greatest crime was committed afterwards. Not only did he refuse to accept any blame for the forced conversion and massacre of the Serbs but he never expressed so much as a word of contrition, regret or ordinary human sympathy for the bereaved. By insisting as head of the Church that his conscience was clear, he exculpated the rest of the Church, including the Ustasha priests and pious laymen such as Pavelić, Budak and Artuković. By reaffirming support for the Independent State of Croatia, Stepinac gave retrospective approval to what it accomplished. By disclaiming any responsibility for the massacre of the Serbs, he helped to encourage the legend that this massacre never took place.
At the end of her biography The Triple Myth, Stella Alexander quotes with approval the judgement on Stepinac made by the sculptor Ivan Mestrović: ‘He was a just man condemned as it has often happened in history that just men are condemned by political necessity.’27 The Irish historian Hubert Butler, who attended the trial and spoke to Stepinac in prison, described the archives of the Croatian Catholic Church as ‘the Rosetta Stone of Christian corruption’. In writing of priests such as Stepinac who welcomed and worked with murderers and terrorists, Butler asked rhetorically: ‘Is it not clear that in times like these, the church doors should be shut, the Church newspapers closed down and Christians who believe that we should love our neighbours should go underground and try to build up a new faith in the catacombs?’28
After his visit to Zagreb in 1946, Butler gave an Irish radio talk on Yugoslavia but did not mention the Communist treatment of the Church, nor the gaoling of Archbishop Stepinac: ‘I could not refer to the Communist persecution of religion without mentioning the far more terrible Catholic persecution which had preceded it, so I thought silence was best.’ Nevertheless, Ireland’s leading Catholic weekly The Standard published a harsh attack on Butler for which he demanded but did not receive an apology.
The foreign editor of The Standard, an Austro-Irishman named Count O’Brien of Thomond, went on to publish a book called Archbishop Stepinac: The Man and his Case, which carried commendations from leading churchmen such as Cardinal Spellman of New York. Yet Butler says that ‘there was a major error of fact, or interpretation, or a significant omission, on almost every page’. The climax of Butler’s annoyance came when the Irish Minister of Agriculture advised a meeting of law students to model themselves on Archbishop Stepinac and on Ante Pavelić, the Ustasha leader. Butler could stand it no longer: ‘I felt that the honour of the small Protestant community in Southern Ireland would be compromised if those of us who had investigated the facts remained silent about what we had discovered.’ He wrote letters to the Kilkenny and Dublin newpapers giving his version of Pavelić.
A few years later it was announced that Tito was going to visit England, sparking off anti-Communist demonstrations there and in Ireland. Butler attended a meeting in Dublin in which the editor of The Standard spoke on ‘Yugoslavia: The Pattern of Persecution’. Afterwards Butler started to make a reply when a stately figure rose from among the audience and then stalked from the hall. It was the Papal Nuncio to Ireland. The subsequent newspaper scandal – ‘Pope’s envoy walks out; Government to discuss insult to Nuncio’ – led to Butler’s expulsion from several local government posts as well as the loss of his honorary secretaryship of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society.
Before he resigned, Butler decided to tell the society’s two or three hundred members why he had challenged the Church’s version of the events in wartime Croatia. In particular he wished to refute the allegation by Count O’Brien that all the Catholic bishops had opposed the ‘evil plan’ of Pavelić for the forced conversion of Orthodox Serbs. According to O’Brien’s book, Archbishop Stepinac had swept into Pavelić’s office: ‘“It is God’s command,” he said, “Thou shalt not kill,” and without another word he left the Quisling’s palace.’
In his letter to the members, Butler quoted at length from Archbishop Stepinac’s letter to Pavelić, and gave the Bishop of Mostar’s account of the massacre of the Serbs in Hercegovina. The Bishop of Mostar’s account was published several times in the Dublin and Kilkenny press, yet as Butler ruefully said: ‘It struck me as odd that nobody in the British Isles, at a time when so much was written and published about the imprisoned Archbishop, ever commented on it, quoted from it, or wrote to me to enquire how I had secured it.’
The memory of the Ustasha crimes continued to be confused or effaced. Articles in the Irish press compared Pavelić with Roger Casement and Patrick Pearse, as a simple-hearted patriot. He was photographed in the Argentine sun with his wife and family and their pet dog. Butler was bewildered. Three centuries earlier, Milton had given lasting notoriety to the massacre and forced conversion of the Waldenses in the Alps, yet no one now bothered about the recent and far greater forced conversion and massacre of the Serbs. Butler worked off some of his anger in a sonnet:
Milton, if you were living at this hour
they’d make you trim your sonnet to appease
the triple tyrant and the Piedmontese.
‘Why for some peasants vex a friendly power?
We’d like to print it, but Sir Tottenham Bauer
and half the Board would blame us. Colleen Cheese
would stop its front-page ad. They’re strong RCs.
It’s old stuff now, and truth, deferred goes sour …29
Notes
Britain was largely responsible for forcing at least 30,000 Yugoslavs to return to their deaths at the hands of Tito’s Partisans. Britain was also largely responsible for not sending back Ustasha war criminals such as Ante Pavelić. Thanks to the secrecy of the British government, both these shameful matters are still obscure. Some writers on the forced repatriations to Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union have been carried away by indignation, and muddied the issue with wild allegations. I have relied mostly on Cowgill et al., The Repatriations from Austria in 1945: The Report of an Inquiry. One of the three authors of this report, the journalist Christopher Booker, pursued his inquiries further and wrote his own separate book, which has not yet been published. He concludes that most of the Yugoslavs were shot on the orders of Tito, after a vengeful speech at Ljubljana.
A Yugoslav historian, Bogdan Krizman, has written a book on the Ustasha in exile, Pavelić u bjekstvu, and their activities are also mentioned by Antun Miletić in his books on Jasenovac concentration camp. Hubert Butler made a special study of the escape of Andrija Artuković, the ‘Yugoslav Himmler’. The Australian broadcaster Mark Aarons’s Sanctuary: Nazi Fugitives in Australia describes in chilling detail the activities of the Ustasha in Australia, supplementing an earlier book by three other authors on the clandestine element in Australian politics, Rooted in Secrecy. Aarons also collaborated with John Loftus, a former attorney with the US Justice Department, to write Ratlines, the story of the escape of Nazi and Ustasha criminals after the Second World War. Many Ustasha war criminals and their friends and relations are now back in Croatia.
1 Stevan K. Pavlowitch, Yugoslavia (London, 1971), p. 177 n.
2 The pro-Serb Michael Lees also served on the commission.
3 Anthony Cowgill, Lord Brimelow and Christopher Booker, The Repatriations from Austria in 1945: The Report of an Inquiry (London, 1990), p. 14.
4 Ibid. p. 41.
5 Ibid. p. 44.
6 Ibid. pp. 81–2.
7 Interview with Christopher Booker.
8 Globus, 22 May 1992.
9 Mark Aarons and John Loftus, Ratlines (London, 1991), pp. 273–4.
10 Globus, 22 May 1992.
11 Croat Franciscans helped to arrange the escape of the German war criminal Klaus Barbie. See Aarons and Loftus, Ratlines, passim.
12 Bogdan Krizman, Pavelić u bjekstvu (Zagreb, 1986), p. 143.
13 See the essay ‘The Artuković File’ in Hubert Butler’s The Sub-prefect Should Have Held His Tongue and Other Essays (London, 1990).
14 Mark Aarons, Sanctuary: Nazi Fugitives in Australia, (Melbourne, 1989), p. 251. Apparently Luburić and the more extreme Ustasha broke away when Pavelić started to talk terms with émigré right-wing Serbs, trying to agree on a frontier between the two nations.
15 Milovan Djilas, Rise and Fall (London, 1985), p. 42.
16 Ibid. pp. 55–6.
17 Ibid. p. 38.
18 Ibid. pp. 36–7.
19 Butler, The Sub-prefect, p. 227.
20 Stella Alexander, The Triple Myth: A Life of Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac (Boulder, Colo., 1987), p. 117; Milovan Djilas, Rise and Fall, p. 39.
21 Alexander, The Triple Myth, p. 121.
22 Ibid. p. 133.
23 Ibid. p. 130.
24 George Selde, Witness to a Century (New York, 1987), p. 432. George Seldes, a veteran newspaper reporter of left-wing but anti-Stalinist views, had got to know Vladimir Dedijer and through him obtained an interview with Tito in November 1948, published in Seldes’s radical magazine In Fact: An Antidote for Falsehood in the Daily Press. In 1950 Seldes went on holiday to Dubrovnik. Tito summoned him to Zagreb and plied him with questions about the American press’s treatment of the Stepinac trial: ‘How powerful is the Roman Catholic Church in the United States?’ ‘Why is the whole American press against Yugoslavia, while in the Catholic countries, such as Spain and Italy, it’s not?’ ‘Do the American people know that Stepinac is just as guilty as Hitler of genocide?’ Seldes adds a postscript to his account of meeting Tito: ‘Of all the world political leaders, noted and notorious, or all the prominent men I ever met, good or evil, dictators and presidents, newsmakers all of whom I had the good or bad fortune to interview and in whose countries I sometimes lived for years, the one I knew longest was Benito Mussolini, 1919 to 1925. In 1919 and 1920 we worked together on an equal basis. I thought we were friends – did he not address me as caro collego, “dear colleague”, and sometimes call me “caro Giorgio”? In 1924 when I finally got an official interview with him, he pretended we had never met. Tito talked to me as a friend.’ (Witness to a Century, pp. 427–34.)
25 Alexander, The Triple Myth, p. 163.
26 Spectator, 4 April 1981.
27 Alexander, The Triple Myth, p. 217.
28 Butler, The Sub-prefect, p. 285.
29 Ibid. pp. 271–83.