The twentieth century witnessed the crowning of a multitude of martyrs. Following the Bolshevik revolution, Holy Russia alone gave the Orthodox Church millions of new heavenly intercessors and champions of the faith—a sacrifice well known to the entire Orthodox world. Unfortunately, many Orthodox Christians remain unaware of the profound sufferings endured by nearly 750,000 Serbian Orthodox Christians during the Second World War.
These faithful gave their lives defending and confessing their faith within the territories of the so-called "Independent State of Croatia" and other parts of German-occupied Yugoslavia. They perished at the hands of Croatian nationalists and other enemies of the Orthodox Church, often with the instigation and open participation of the Latin clergy.
This persecution was explicitly aimed at the complete eradication of the Orthodox Church in these regions. Attempts at forced conversion to Catholicism were paired with the systematic, overt destruction of every trace of Orthodoxy. The violence was carried out with such fierce, inconceivable brutality, in such a short span of time, and across such a relatively small geographic area that it defies the imagination.
Indeed, the scale and nature of this recent persecution are virtually unprecedented in Church history since the trials of the first centuries. The sacrifice and memory of these Serbian martyrs must not remain hidden or known only to their countrymen; their witness should be shared and commemorated for the edification of all Orthodox Christians.
It was in Croatia and Bosnia that the worst atrocities were committed against the Serbs by the Ustaše and the Catholics. On April 28, 1941, the Catholic Archbishop Stepinac of Zagreb issued an appeal rapturously praising the Ustaše and calling on all Catholic priests to collaborate with them. Three days before, the government had banned the Cyrillic script and imposed a special tax on the patriarchate. On May 8–10, the Serbs in Zagreb were expelled to the suburbs and forbidden from leaving their homes before six in the evening. On June 3, all Orthodox schools and kindergartens were closed, and on June 26, all Serbs were forced to wear colored armbands with the letter “P” (for Pravoslavac – Orthodox).
On July 18, the use of the term “Serbian Orthodox religion” was banned; in its place, “Eastern Greek faith” was to be substituted. On August 9, services were banned in all Orthodox churches. On June 22, the minister of education said that one-third of the Serbs in Croatia would be expelled, one-third killed, and one-third converted to Catholicism. In July, the arrests of Serbs began. By the autumn, over 15,000 Serbs had passed through the camps, and by 1943, there were 300,000 Serbian refugees from Croatia in Serbia.
On April 4, 1942, the Croatians passed a law ordering all Church feasts to be celebrated according to the new calendar. The Russian émigrés were informed of this and were threatened with punishment if they did not obey. Metropolitan Anastasy, however, immediately petitioned for an exception to be made for the Russian parishes, and with the help of the German Evangelical Bishop Hackel, this request was granted. However, no Serb was allowed to visit the émigré services.
Joachim Wertz writes: “In many villages the massacres followed a certain pattern. The Ustashi would arrive and assemble all the Serbs. They would then order them to convert to Catholicism. Those who refused, as the majority did, were told to assemble in their local Orthodox parish church. They would then lock them in the church and set it ablaze. In this manner many Orthodox men, women and children perished in scores of Serbian settlements.”
According to Archbishop Stepinac’s report to the Pope on May 8, 1944, 240,000 Serbs had apostatized to Catholicism. However, many of these returned to Orthodoxy after the war. Hundreds of churches were destroyed or desecrated, and vast amounts of property were confiscated. According to German Nazi figures, about 750,000 Orthodox Serbs were killed, including five bishops and 177 other clergy. Bishop Nikolai Velimirović inscribed these martyrs into the Church calendar for August 31: “The 700,000 who suffered for the Orthodox faith at the hands of the Roman crusaders and Ustashi during the time of the Second World War. These are the New Serbian Martyrs.”
With the single exception of the Catholic Bishop of Mostar, all the Catholic bishops joined in the persecution of the Orthodox. The Franciscans were particularly cruel. Thus in the notorious camp of Jasenovac, where 200,000 Serbs perished, together with many Jews and Gypsies, 40,000 of them died on the orders of the Franciscan Father Filipovich. In Livno, one Franciscan told his flock: “Brother Croats, go and kill the Serbs. And first of all, kill my sister, who has married a Serb. And then kill all the Serbs one by one. When you have finished your job, come to me, I will listen to your confessions and give you absolution of your sins.”
The Germans knew what was going on. Thus on February 17, 1942, Heydrich, who masterminded the Holocaust, wrote to Himmler: “The number of Slavs destroyed by the Croats by the most sadistic methods has reached 300,000… If the Serbs living in Croatia accept Catholicism they are allowed to live without persecution.”
One of those martyred in Jasenovac was an old man called Vukashin. He was standing “in an aura of peace and joy, softly praying to Christ. The executioner was greatly angered by the old man’s peacefulness and saintly composure, and he ordered that he be dragged to the place of execution.
“St. Vukashin was given the usual charge, ‘Accept the Pope or die a most terrible death’. The old man signed himself with the honorable Cross and peacefully intoned, ‘Just do your job, my son’. The executioner trembled with anger. He brutally slashed off one of the saint’s ears, repeating his charge. The Holy Martyr again peacefully replied, ‘Just continue to do your job, my son.’ And so the irrational persecutor continued: first the other ear, then the nose, and the fingers one by one. Like a new James of Persia, St. Vukashin was ‘pruned as a sacred grapevine of God.’ With each grisly and bloody cut, the noble Vukashin, filled with peace and joy by the Holy Spirit, calmly replied, ‘Just continue to do your job, my son.’
“At length, the vicious torturer gouged out the eyes of the martyr, and the saint once more replied, ‘Just continue to do your job, my son.’ With that, the executioner flew into a rage and slew the holy martyr. Almost immediately, the executioner lost his mind and went completely mad.”
In February 1942, Dr. Privislav Grisogno, a Croatian Catholic member of the former Yugoslav cabinet, wrote in protest to Archbishop Stepinac:
“I am writing to you as a man to a man, as a Christian to a Christian. I have been meaning to do this for months hoping that the dreadful news from Croatia would cease so that I could collect my thoughts and write to you in peace. For the last ten months Serbs have been killed and destroyed in Croatia in the most ruthless manner and the value of their property that has been destroyed reaches billions. Blushes of shame and anger cover the faces of every honest Croat.
The slaughter of Serbs began from the very first day of the establishment of the Independent State of Croatia (Gospic, Gudovan, Bosanska Krajina, etc.) and has continued relentlessly to this very day. The horror is not only in the killing. The killing includes everybody: old men, women and children. With accompanying barbaric torture. These innocent Serbs have been impaled, fire has been lit on their bare chest, they have been roasted alive, burned in their homes and churches while still living, covered with boiling water, then their skin was peeled off, salt poured into their wounds, their eyes have been pulled out, their ears, noses and tongues cut off, the priests have had their beards and moustaches torn off from their skulls, their sex organs severed and put into their mouths, they have been tied to trucks and then dragged along the ground, nails have been pressed into their heads, their heads nailed to the floor, they have been thrown alive into wells and over cliffs, and grenades thrown after them, their heads smashed against walls, their backs broken against rocks and tree stumps, and many other horrible tortures were perpetrated, such as normal people can hardly imagine.
Their rivers Sava, Drava, the Danube and their tributaries have carried thousands and thousands of their corpses. Dead bodies have been found with the inscription: ‘direction Belgrade – traveling to King Peter’. In a boat which was found on the Sava river there was a heap of children’s heads with the head of a woman (which could have been a head of one of the mothers of the children) with the inscription: ‘Meat for the Jovanova Market in Belgrade’.
Horrifying is the case of Mileva Bozinic from Stanbandza whose child was removed from her womb. There was also the case of the roasted heads in Bosnia, the vessels full of Serbian blood, the cases of Serbs being forced to drink the warm blood of their slaughtered kin. Countless women, girls and children in front of their mothers were raped or else sent off to Ustashi camps to serve the Ustashi; rapes even took place on the altars of Orthodox churches. In the Petrinje county a son was forced to rape his own mother. The slaughter of the Serbs in the Glina Orthodox church and the murder of Serbs on the altar of the Kladusa church is without precedent in history. There are detailed and original accounts of all these horrors.
Even the Germans and Italians were astounded by these crimes. They photographed a large number of cases of such slaughter. The Germans are saying that the Croatians did this also during the Thirty Years War and that is why there has been a saying in Germany since then: ‘God save us from plague, hunger and Croats.’ The Srem Germans despise us because of this and behave in a more humane fashion with the Serbs. The Italians photographed a vessel with 3.5 kilograms of Serbian eyes, as well as a Croat who wore a necklace strung with Serbian eyes, and another one who came to Dubrovnik with a belt on which severed Serbian tongues were hanging!
The horrors of the camps in which thousands of Serbs were killed or were left to die from exposure, hunger and cold weather, are too terrible to mention. The Germans have been talking about a camp in Lika where there were thousands of Serbs; but when the Germans got there they found the camp empty, drenched in blood and bloody clothing. In that camp it has been said a Serbian bishop also lost his life. Thousands upon thousands of Serbs in the camp of Jasenovac are still being tortured as they are spending fierce winter in wooden Gypsy shacks with no straw or covering and with a ration of two potatoes per day.
In the history of Europe there have been no similar cases. One would have to go to Asia at the time of Tamerlane, or Genghis Khan, or to Africa, to the countries of their bloodthirsty rulers to come upon similar situations. These events have shamed the name of Croatia for centuries to come. Nothing can absolve us fully from this ever again. We will not be able to tell even the last wretched man in the Balkans about our thousand-year-old Croatian culture, because even the Gypsies never perpetrated such cruelties.
Why am I writing this to you, when you are not a political personage and cannot bear responsibility for all this. Here is why: in all these unprecedented barbarian crimes which are more than Godless, our Catholic church participated in two ways. A large number of clergy, priests, friars and organized Catholic youth took an active part in all this. It has also happened that Catholic priests became camp guards and Ustashi accomplices and so approved of the torture and slaughter of Christians. A Catholic priest personally slaughtered an Orthodox clergyman. They could not have done all this without the permission of their bishops, and if they did, they would have had to lose their jobs and be taken to court. Since this did not happen, it means that their bishops granted them permission.
Secondly, the Catholic Church made use of all this to convert the surviving Serbs. And while the soil was still steaming from the innocent victims’ blood, while groans shuddered from the chests of the surviving victims, the priests, friars, and nuns carried in one hand the Ustashi daggers and in the other their prayer books and rosaries. The whole of Srem is inundated with leaflets written by Bishop Aksamovic and printed in his printing shop in Djakovo, calling upon Serbs to save their lives and property by converting to Catholicism. It was as if our church wanted to show that it could destroy souls just as the Ustashi authorities destroy bodies.
It is an even greater blot on the Catholic church, since at the same time many Orthodox churches and all the Orthodox monasteries have been confiscated, their property plundered as well as many historical treasures. Even the Patriarchal church in Sremski Karlovci has not been spared. All this violence against conscience and the spirit has brought even greater disgrace to the Croat nation and name… I write this to save my soul and leave it to you (Archbishop Stepinac) to find a way to save your soul.”
Although some have claimed that Stepinac tried to restrain the murderers, there can be no doubt about his fanatical hatred of Orthodoxy. Thus on March 27 and 28, 1941, he wrote in his diary: “The spirit of Byzantium – that is, of the Eastern Orthodox Church – is something so terrible that only the Omnipotent and Omniscient God could tolerate it… The Croats and the Serbs are from two different worlds, two different poles; without a miracle of God they will never find a common language. The schism of the Eastern Orthodox Church is the greatest curse in Europe, perhaps even worse than Protestantism.”
In 1946, Stepinac was tried by the communist government, found guilty of treason to the State and the murder of Serbs, and imprisoned for five years. On coming out of prison he was awarded a cardinal’s hat by the Vatican, and in 1998 was beatified by Pope John Paul II.
Sources:
1. The Orthodox Patristic Witness Concerning Catholicism by Uncut Mountain Press:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AEhcylQq4ZnbvJVlYy5zP4Ry549_QVtd/view?usp=drive_link
2. The Age of Fascism by Vladimir Moss:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WES_6cDul6ZNDCewYxBAl9sy40qx_spA/view?usp=drive_link