All this went on as the Nazis took control of the country. As far as the Nazis were concerned, as long as the Croatian militia carried out their orders to round up and intern Jews from the region, the troops were at liberty to persecute whoever else they pleased. Thus, as well as rounding up Jewish and Roma people, the Ustase interned many Serbs. In one of the worst war crimes to take place in Yugoslavia, over 6,000 children were separated from their parents and taken to a camp at Sisak. There, they lived in squalid conditions without enough to eat or drink, until around 1,600 of them died. A similar scene took place at the concentration camp of Jastrebarko, where over 3,000 children met with the same type of neglect, and hundreds of them dying in the process.
At the end of the war, the horrifying statistics on the carnage were revealed. It is estimated that in total, 11,176 Serbian children die between 1941 and 1942. Of these, the majority were boys. Tragically, the average age of the children was six-and-a-half years old.
The architect of the Serbian massacres was Ante Pavelic, the leader of the Croatian National Socialist Ustase movement, who became head of the so-called Independent State of Croatia when the Nazis invaded the Balkans during World War II. Far from being an independent state, as its name suggested, Croatia in fact became a puppet state of the Third Reich, and it set about supporting the Germans in their persecution and murder of the Jews and Roma people. In addition, the Croatian Ustase pursued their own agenda, which was to rid the country of the Serbian nationals living there, without opposition from the German government.
Pavelic himself was a fascist activist who had campaigned for a separate Croat state and had been tried for terrorist activities before the war. In 1929, after being sentenced to death, he had fled the country, and while abroad, had founded the Ustase, an underground terrorist organization. He had helped to create a militia for the organization, setting up terrorist training camps throughout Italy and Hungary. In 1934, the Ustase had succeeded in assassinating the king of Yugoslavia, Alexander I, together with one of Alexander’s ministers. For this, Pavelic was arrested and imprisoned in Italy, but before long, he was released. He remained in Italy until the outbreak of World War II. When the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia, he returned to his homeland and set up a pro-Nazi government there.
According to many sources, even the Nazis themselves were horrified at the brutal sadism of the Ustase regime. Barbaric rituals, such as gouging out victims’ eyes, or wrapping prisoners in barbed wire before throwing them down pits to starve to death, were routinely used by Pavelic’s Ustase troops. The stated aim of the pro-German, pro-Catholic Pavelic regime was to exterminate one-third of all Serbs in the country, which they succeeded in doing. Their plans were for another third to convert to Catholicism, while the remaining Serbs would be forced to move abroad.
After the war, it became clear that the Vatican had never condemned Pavelic’s activities, and that in fact he had been given a private audience by the pope. Many commentators later saw the collusion of the Catholic Church in condoning the brutal Serbian massacres of World War II as one of the most shaming episodes in its history.
As the defeat of the Germans at the end of the war at last became a reality, Pavelic fled Croatia, first to Austria and then to Rome, where his Catholic friends in the Church helped to hide him from the authorities. However, since he was not a communist, the Americans were not, by all accounts, interested in pursuing him. Six months later, Pavelic managed to secure a passage to Argentina, where he found protection and help from the country’s leader, Juan Peron. Peron also helped thousands of other Croatian Nazis and others who fled their homeland as the communist government of Josip Tito took control.
In April 1957, Pavelic became the target of an assassination attempt. He was not killed but was seriously injured. Rumours were that the assassins were working for Tito’s security forces, but these were not confirmed. However, Pavelic was then forced to flee Argentina, since Tito’s government was trying to make arrangements to have him extradited. This time, Pavelic went to Spain, where he was able to seek protection from the fascist government under Franco. On 29 December, 1959, he died in Madrid from complications caused by the injuries he had received in the assassination attempt.
Sadly, towards the end of the war, Tito’s incoming communist partisan troops, who had vowed to liberate the country, also behaved with extreme brutality. For example, at Siroki Brijeg on 7 February, 1945, 25 monks from a local monastery were attacked by the partisans, who tore down the crucifix in their church and demanded that they abandon their faith. The monks, not surprisingly, refused to do so, and knelt down to kiss the cross. In response, the friars – some of whom were ill in bed with typhoid – were dragged outside, doused in petrol and set alight. It was not until many years after the war that their bodies were finally given a proper burial.
In other instances, German and Hungarian civilians were set upon by Tito’s communist troops at Vojvodina in southern Hungary. Helped by the local Serb population, who had suffered so much under the Nazi regime, the partisans murdered thousands of Germans and Hungarians. The victims were tied together in groups around stacks of corn and then set alight. Often, the perpetrators of these crimes were women, who wreaked their vengeance on the victims by torturing them to death. They devised horrible tortures, such as killing Catholic priests by tearing off their testicles with pincers, or chopping their victims up in sawmills. They also impaled their victims on sticks, putting them up on display for spectators to see. In one appalling case, they strapped a grenade to a small boy and allowed him to run away across a field before firing at the grenade so that it blew up, exploding his small body into pieces.
In all, Tito’s partisans are thought to have murdered 34,000 victims at the end of the war, most of whom were Hungarian. Thus it was that, in the final years of the conflict, the most terrible brutality was unleashed, and the hideous carnage that ensued created resentments that lasted until the end of the 20th century and beyond.
Italy: Abyssinian War Atrocities
The fascist dictatorship of Benito Mussolini began in 1922 and provided a model for other dictators in Europe, such as Adolf Hitler in Germany, General Franco in Spain and Antonio Salazar in Portugal. Under Mussolini, all democratic liberties were taken away and state control was imposed on all aspects of citizens’ lives. Only one party, the National Fascist Party, was permitted, and a secret police conducted constant surveillance on the population to maintain adherence to the regime. There was little opposition to Mussolini’s regime within the country as the Italian economy had been decimated since World War I and many feared the rise of communism or the outbreak of civil war. Abroad, the European nations tended to turn a blind eye towards the rise of fascism in Italy because they had only just emerged from a full-scale war and were afraid of provoking another one.
Thus, Mussolini was largely left to indulge his grandiose schemes of Italian world domination without interference from the Allied nations. In October 1935, shortly before World War II took place, Italian forces invaded Ethiopia, then known as Abyssinia. Mussolini had dreams of a modern Italian empire, like the Roman Empire of antiquity, that would rule the countries around the Mediterranean. He was jealous of the large empires held by France and Britain, and believed it was Italy’s right to colonize other countries in the same way.