Yalta
and The Bleiburg Tragedy
Chapter from the book Od
Bleiburga do Naših Dana
YALTA AND THE BLEIBURG
TRAGEDY
University of San
Francisco, California USA
Condensed from the chapter with the same title
in:
Od Bleiburga do
Naših Dana
Jozo Marovic, Editor
Zagreb: Školska
Kniga, 1995
Presented at the
International Symposium for Investigation of the
Bleiburg Tragedy Zagreb, Croatia and Bleiburg,
Austria
May 17 and 18, 1994
We are approaching the
fiftieth anniversary of the Yalta Conference
which shaped the post-war world and forever
changed the history of Croatia and a dozen other
nations. In February of 1995 we will have had a
half century to reflect on the tragedy of the
so-called "Great Powers" dividing up
the world and forcing hundreds of thousands
seeking freedom to be returned to their captive
nations against their will. And yet, in this half
century, what have we really learned and how have
we gone about the study of forced repatria-tion?
The subject of forced
repatriation of hundreds of thousands of human
beings at the end of the Second World War is so
multifaceted that it presents an array of
problems for those who would study it. Unlike the
study of the Jewish Holocaust, now considered a
single interdisciplinary field, post-war
repatriation is still seen primarily in the
limited context of the nations involved. There is
no field of "Repatriation Studies" and
each exploration must rely on a single
discipline, such as History or Political Science,
to explore a single aspect without really
considering the whole. While a multi-disciplinary
approach is warranted, History can perhaps best
focus on cause and effect. Forced repatriation
did not "just happen." While there were
many causes, the instrument of implementation,
indeed of legalization, was the Yalta Agreement.
The effects of repatriation were likewise many
and varied, but this brief overview seeks to
explore a single effect of the whole: The forced
repatriation of Croatians to Yugoslavia in and
around the village of Bleiburg, Austria and the
events that followed over the next two years.
Next Spring will mark the
fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II.
It is perhaps of interest to look back a decade
at how the fortieth anniversary was marked in
1985 to observe how much things have changed in a
decade and how some things never change. The
Soviet Union noted the fortieth anniversary of
World War II as the great victory over Fascism in
the "Great Patriotic War" which
"liberated" half of Europe into the
Commu-nist fold. A decade later, the Soviet Union
no longer exists and Communism is on its death
bed. The Western Allies remembered those who fell
in battle and who served their country and they
will do so again next year. But NATO, the true
successor to the wartime Western Alliance, will
no longer have as its primary mission the
containment of Commu-nism. West Germany
remembered her dead a decade ago and the horror
of Hitlerism never to be repeated while East
Germany honored the Soviets for their liberation
while claiming that Hitlerism still lived in the
West. Next year a united Germany will grapple
with how to mark this anniversary as a member of
NATO and with rising nationalism and Fascism
arising primarily from the former Communist east.
Japan remembered her dead in 1985, especially
those who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the
unwilling ushers into the nuclear age. But Japan
did so unbowed. In the past decade, the Japanese
government has formally apologized to many of the
victims, both people and states, of Japanese
aggression. Finally, throughout the world ten
years ago, Jews and Gentiles alike painfully
noted the liberation of the concentration camps
and vowed that such a Holocaust would never
happen again. Next year we will again remember
these victims but with the knowledge that
"ethnic cleansing" has again taken
place in the heart of Europe while the so-called
"Great Powers" stood silent.
Much of what shaped the
post-War world is directly linked to a single
word: Yalta. The word first entered the world's
common vocabulary on February 13, 1945, when it
was reported that a historic meeting had taken
place in the Crimea from the fourth through the
eleventh of that month at a place called Yalta.
At the time it was called the Crimea conference
and it is perhaps best to refer to the conference
itself by that name since today Yalta has come to
mean much more than a place where Franklin D.
Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin
met with their foreign ministers and
chiefs-of-staff. Yalta has come to mean the
partitioning of Germany, the Nuernberg Trials and
the division of Europe between democracy and
totalitarianism. Yalta meant the partition of
Poland despite the fact that it was supposed to
be the partitioning of Poland that started the
Second World War. Yalta sacrificed the proud
nations of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia and the
agreement ratified the Soviet annexation of
Rumanian, Slovak and Finnish lands.
By signing the Yalta
Agreement, Roosevelt and Churchill became
co-signatories of the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939.
Yalta became synonymous with great power politics
and colonialism: three kings dividing up the
world without regard to the wishes of the peoples
of every nation. The cavalier manner with which
the future of nations was decided was best
described by Winston Churchill in his book The
Second World War: Triumph & Tragedy:
"Let us settle about our affairs in the
Balkans...how would it do for you to have 90%
predominance in Rumania, for us to have 90% in
Greece, and go 50/50 in Yugo-slavia?" He
then wrote the equation on a half sheet of paper
and handed it to Stalin.
Churchill pushed the list
to Stalin who made a large check-mark on it with
a blue pencil. Churchill then said "Might it
not be thought cynical if it seemed we had
disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions
of people, in such an offhand manner? Let us burn
the paper."
The Atlantic Charter, for
which hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers,
sailors and airmen had died was thus disposed of
at Yalta. The words of the Atlantic Charter
promis-ed that "All peoples have a right to
choose their own forms of government; those
forcibly deprived of the right should have it
restored." Such lofty words were not to
apply to any of the captive nations of the USSR
or eastern Europe. These millions of people could
not have known, nor would they have believed,
that their ancient nations and homelands were
dispatched with the flick of a blue pencil.
In a half century it would
seem that every aspect of this tragedy would have
been explored in detail by historians, political
scientists and politicians. Surely, after a half
century, there could be no questions unanswered
and no factual data unexplored. And indeed there
has been some very good scholarly research into
this earth changing event.
Some of the blame has been
laid at the feet of Stalin, although only in
passing. He perhaps deserves the least blame if
only because he was open and honest in his
motives and did most for his own political
interests. We now know that Roosevelt was nearly
on his death bed at Yalta, but history tends to
forgive those who die in power, as it seldom does
for those who die in exile or shame. Roosevelt
remains a hero to much of America. Winston
Churchill will forever be protected by history as
the bulldog who saved Britain. Each of the three
had his advisors and aids at his side. Howard
MacMillan was hired by Britain to re-shape the
Mediterranean in the imperial mold, but stayed on
to run the shop. Alger Hiss, Roosevelt's own
in-house communist, became something of a folk
hero to America's liberal elite. And Brea,
Stalin's Chief of Secret Police has taken the ups
and downs of historical revisionism with the
political mood in Russia.
History has been written
and the blame has been put at any number of
deserving feet. Yet through it all, one aspect of
Yalta has been given little attention by
scholarly and popular writers alike. The subject
is the planned, pre-ordained murder of hundreds
of thousands of men, women, and children in the
months and years after World War II. The victims
of Yalta died at the hands of Stalin and his
surrogates, but only with the cooperation and
active participation of the Western Allies: the
United States and Great Britain.
Each nation has its own
name for this holocaust. For Croatia the name is
the Bleiburg Tragedy after the small Austrian
village from which thousands began their long
march back into a new Communist Yugoslavia. The
American military code-named it Operation
Keelhaul from the ancient punishment of keelhauling
wayward sailors who were dragged under the keel
of a moving ship at the end a rope. By whatever
name, this was without question one of the most
shameful episodes of the Second World War if only
because it occurred after the War ended. The
Bleiburg tragedy was murder which began when the
legal killing called warfare ended.
In 1945 there was some
international law on the subject of forced
repatria-tion. In brief, the concept was not
acceptable under any international guidelines.
The Hague Conven-tions of 1899 and 1907 treat it
only by exclusion and by making it clear that
prisoners-of-war must be treated humanely. The
Geneva Accords of 1929 also did not recognize the
concept of forced repatriation. The 1949 Geneva
Accords prohibit forced repatriations
"during hostilities." Still the wording
is vague. Dozens of treaties between the USSR and
neighboring states did explicitly prohibit the
forced return of any individual against his or
her will.
The "Yalta Agreement
between the Soviet Union and the United
States," later Britain and France,
"Concerning Liberated Prisoners of War and
Civilians" was signed on February 11, 1945
by U.S. Major General John R. Dene and Soviet Lt.
General Gryzlov. This agreement called upon the
United States and the Soviet Union to take joint
action regarding Soviet and American nationals in
the war zone. There were, of course, few American
nationals, civilian or military, in Eastern
Europe in the final days of World War II. In
part, the Agreement read:
"All Soviet citizens
liberated by forces operating under United States
command ...will, without delay after their
liberation, be separated from enemy prisoners of
war and will be maintained separately from them
in concentration camps until they have been
handed over to the Soviet authorities..."1
The Agreement also
provided for Soviet control of the camps and
"...the right to appoint the internal
administration and set-up the internal discipline
and management in accor-dance with the military
prosecute the laws of their country."
Still, there was no
reference to "forced" repatriation in
the Agreement although it was implied. The entire
agreement was designed to meet Soviet needs and
the method of repatriation was left up to the
Soviet Union. But the Yalta Agreement did not
invent forced repatriation, it simply formalized
existing policy. Documents from September 1944 on
set a clear direction of action against
"...any national of the United Nations who
is believed to have committed offenses against
his national law in support of the German war
effort." Since the act of surrender was a
criminal act in the USSR, all prisoners-of-war
were criminals subject to the death penalty.
These words also applied to any person living on
the territory of Yugoslavia who did not support
the Partisans during the War. On September 16,
1944, U.S. Political Officer Alexander Kirk sent
a cable to U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull
which noted that an agreement had been reached
between the Soviets and the British for
repatriation of Soviet citizens held as
prisoners-of-war "...irrespective of whether
the individuals desire to return to Russia or
not. Statements will not be taken from Soviet
nationals in the future as to their willingness
to return to their native country." Kirk
further noted that "MacMillan is apparently
receiving instruc-tions to this effect from the
(British) Foreign Office."
Unable to believe this
obvious violation of international law, U.S.
Ambassador to Moscow Averell Harriman wired Hull
on September 24, 1944 demanding an explanation
how the British government reached its decision.
Kirk then met with MacMillan who justified the
action by noting that "Since these men will
no longer be treated as prisoners, the Geneva
Conventions will no longer apply."
All such conversations
were "top secret" at the time. Even the
text of the Yalta Agree-ment on Repatriation was
not released until March 1946. The fact that the
agreements were reached only with the Soviets
means little. They were equally enforced by each
of Stalin's proteges, including Josip Tito before
the Tito-Stalin split.
The results of this policy
of the West, giving Stalin all he demanded while
asking virtually nothing in return, are of such
magnitude that they defy comprehension. Nine
hundred thousand to one million followers of
Russian Liberation Army General Andrei Vlasov
were among the first to be forcibly returned. The
leadership was executed and the others were sent
into the vast system of hard labor camps made
famous by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as the
"Gulag Archipelago." The next victims
were over three thousand Cossack officers at
Lienz. Then tens of thousand of officers and men
from every nation in Europe who had served their
country in wartime. Finally, millions of civilian
refugees fleeing the promise of a new Workers'
Paradise under Stalin, Tito, Hoxha and a
dozen others, were also victims of Yalta.
To Croatians, the tragedy
began at the small village of Bleiburg in
Southern Carenthia, Austria. Bleiburg is a model
for all the forced repatriations in post-war
Europe. These post-war massacres of Croatians are
almost unknown outside the Croatian com-munity
despite the fact that the Bleiburg-Maribor
massacres have been documented in such works as Operation
Slaughterhouse by John Prcela and Stanko
Guldescu, In Tito's Death Marches and
Extermination Camps by Joseph He˙imovi˙, Operation
Keelhaul by Julius Epstein, Bleiburg
by Vinko Nikoli˙, and perhaps best known, The
Minister and the Massacres by Count Nikolai
Tolstoy. That these massacres occurred is
irrefutable. Only the number of deaths and the
depth of American and British duplicity are in
question.
The story of Bleiburg
began in early 1945 as it became clear that
Germany would lose the War. As the German Army
retreated toward the Austrian border, the Red
Army advanced, and the Partisans began their
con-solidation of power, anarchy prevailed in
what was Yugo-slavia. A dozen or more nationalist
movements and ethnic militias attempted to
salvage various parts of Yugoslavia. Most
nationalists, Croatian, Slovenian and Serbian
alike, were anti-Communist and all had visions of
the Western Allies welcoming them into the coming
battle against Communism. Croatians especially
cherished the totally unsup-ported notion that
Anglo-American intervention would save an
independent Croatian state.
As in every other part of
eastern Europe, armies, governments, and civilian
populations began moving toward the Western
lines. Some were pushed before the retreating
Ger-mans, others followed in their wake. Many
traveled in small bands, armed or unarmed, while
others were well organized into mass movements of
people and equipment. Along the trek north they
fought the Partisans and ˙etniks. Many
surrendered, others fought to the death.
The retreating Germans,
usually without bothering to inform their
erstwhile allies, took with them much of the
material support needed by the Croatian armed
forces. Despite conditions, several Croatian
generals wanted to defend the city of Zagreb from
the Partisan advance and fight to the finish if
necessary. The Partisans made it clear that the
city, swollen to twice its size with refugees,
would be destroyed if they met resistance. A
final meeting of the Croatian government was held
on April 30, 1945 at which the decision was made
to abandon Zagreb and retreat into Austria.
Still quite naive
concerning Allied intentions, many Croatian
officers hoped that the still sizable Croatian
Army would be allowed to surrender to the British
to fight again against the Russians. Since both
Croatia and Britain were signatories to the
Geneva Conventions, it was felt that at worst the
Croatians would be treated as prisoners of war.
The exodus from Zagreb
began on May 1st. Some 200,000 civilians were
flanked by almost as many soldiers, sailors and
airmen of the Croatian armed forces. The
Arch-bishop-Metropolitan Aloysius Stepinac took
charge of the govern-ment for the few hours
between the departure of Croatian officials and
the arrival of the Partisan Army. State Minister
Vran˙i˙ was dispatched to Italy as a peace
emissary to the Allies and several high-ranking
English-speaking officers headed the main column
toward Austria.
The retreat was well
ordered and the protecting flank armies insured
that all of the civilians arrived safely at the
Austrian border by May 7. A number of military
units remained behind to fight delaying actions
as late as May 12. Still other units, known as Crusaders
fled into the hills and fought sporadic guerilla
actions until 1948.
The huge column finally
came to rest in a small valley near the Austrian
village of Bleiburg, where they arrived on May
14th and 15th. Believing in the sense of fair
play and justice for which the British had made
themselves known, the Croatians surrendered to
the British with the promise that they would not
be forced back into Yugoslavia.
The leaders had no way of
knowing that their peace emissary, Dr. Vran˙i˙,
had traveled as far as Forli, Italy by plane and
car under a white flag only to be stopped short
of his goal. At Forli, Vran˙i˙ and Naval
Captain Vrkljan, who spoke fluent English, were
detained by one Captain Douglas of British Field
Security who was more interested in their
diplomatic grade Mercedes-Benz automobile than
their mission to see Field Marshal Alexander in
Caserta. He held the emissaries incommunicado
until May 20 when he had them thrown into a
prisoner of war camp and confiscated the
automobile.
In the belief that their
envoys had made some arrangement with the
British, the multitude of humanity set up camp in
the valley to await the outcome of negotiations.
One of the first groups to arrive at British
head-quarters was a contin-gent of 130 members of
the Croatian government headed by President
Nikola Mandi˙. All were told that they would be
transferred to Italy as soon as possible by
British Military Police. All were then loaded
into a train and returned to the Partisans. It
was the intent of the British to turn over all
Croatians, as well as Serbs and Slovenes, to the
Communists from whom they had fled.
When the Croatian military
leaders realized that they had led hundreds of
thousands into a trap, some committed suicide on
the spot. The British extradited at first
hundreds, then thousands of Croatians. Some were
shot at the border, while others joined the
infamous "Death Marches" which took
them deeper into the new People's Republic for
liquidation. They were forced back, some in
trains, some on foot, to the waiting arms of
Tito's Partisans. On May 16, 1945, the killing
began. It would not end for two years.
The survivors of the
initial atrocities were organized into forced
marches by the 7th Brigade of the 17th Partisan
Division. The Croatians called them the
"Death Marches." Tens of thousands of
men, women and children were marched, hands tied
with wire, through the villages and towns of
southern Austria and Slovenia. On their southward
trek toward the camps, they were starved, beaten,
raped and ridiculed. Those who did not march were
shot and dumped into shallow graves or caves.
Wounded and ill Croatian soldiers and civilians
in hospitals and field camps were loaded onto
wagons and sent toward the camps with the
southbound sea of humanity. Many would not
survive. Those who did live would spend as much
as a decade in concentration camps, labor
battalions and prisons. Finally, the government
of Yugoslavia plowed over Croatian military
cemeteries and attempted to erase all traces of
the Bleiburg massacres. As late as 1974 graves
were removed to block investigation of the
tragedy. 2 The total number of people liquidated
may never be known. Despite the scholarship and
masses of documents proving the contrary, the
Yugoslav government denied that the
Bleiburg-Maribor massacres or any subsequent
liquidation of anti-Communists occurred. As late
as 1976 special teams were active in Slovenia and
southern Austria cover-ing up evidence of the
crimes. The American and British govern-ments,
implicated in the forced repatriation that led to
the slaughter, also sought to cover-up or at
least ignore the crimes.
Unlike Lidece, or
Hiroshima, or Dresden, the tragedy of Bleiburg
was not a single event, but hundreds of events
over a long period of time. And, unlike Hiroshima
or Dresden, Bleiburg was not an act of war. It
was an act of post-war retribution. The initial
killings near the Austro-Yugoslav border were
followed by the execution of members of the
Croatian government. There were massacres at
other sites. Some, like Kamnik involved a few
thousand deaths. Others, like Maribor, saw over
40,000 die.
To debate whether the
suffering of the Croatians at Bleiburg and beyond
surpassed that of the Cossacks, Russians,
Ukrainians or the millions of others of all
nations during and after World War II, or to
attempt to quantify whether the collective fate
of the victims of Bleiburg was worse than that of
the citizens of Hiroshima or Dresden, serves
neither an academic or humanistic purpose. One
half century after the fact, continuing to lay
blame, access guilt or call for vengeance serves
no purpose.
What is clearly needed is
further study. Serious, unemotional, study by
historians, political scientists, legal scholars,
sociologists, psychologists, forensic
criminologists and others. The study must be
separated from political or ethnic
considerations. The task at hand is to learn the
true impact of Bleiburg on post-War Croatia, the
psyche and self-image of the Croatian nation. The
mere recognition that Bleiburg did occur, that
ques-tions exist, and that in all things there
are causes, actions, and effects, is a giant
first step toward understanding the tragedy and
healing the wounds still felt by so many.
6.
- 15.V.1945 Massive
numbers of Croatian soldiers and civilians
withdraw from Croatia and march towards southern
Austria to surrender to the Western Allies. They
arrive in the small village of Bleiburg where the
British hand them over to Tito's Partisans. The
infamous "Death Marches" result in the
most horrible slaughters in the history of
Croatia.Yu
Source:
MYTH-
"THERE WAS NO RETRIBUTION AGAINST
THE CROATIANS AFTER WORLD WAR II"-
MYTH: "THERE WAS NO RETRIBUTION AGAINST
THE CROATIANS AFTER WORLD WAR II"
Myth: Because Tito was a Croatian, no
retribution was taken against Croatian officials,
soldiers or civilians after World War II by the
victorious Partisans.
Reality: Thousands of Croatians were
slaughtered immediately after the War, tens of
thousands more were sent to prisons, government
officials were executed and those who escaped
were tracked down and murdered in foreign lands
well into the 1960s.
That there was no retribution against the
Croatians after World War II is not so much a
myth as an outright attempt to falsify history.
As is the case with several other myths, the
Serbian apologists Nora Beloff and David Martin
gave new currency to this story in the world
press during the Croatian war for independence.
Bleiburg
The post-war massacres of Croatians are almost
unknown outside the Croatian community. To
Croatians, the single word "Bleiburg"
summarizes the pain endured by an entire nation.
The Bleiburg-Maribor massacres have been
documented in such works as Operation
Slaughterhouse by John Prcela and Stanko
Guldescu, In Tito's Death Marches and
Extermination Camps by Joseph Hecimovic,
Operation Keelhaul by Julius Epstein, Bleiburg by
Vinko Nikolic, and perhaps best known, The
Minister and the Massacres by Count Nikolai
Tolstoy. That these massacres occurred is
irrefutable. Only the number of deaths and the
depth of American and British duplicity are in
question. The story of Bleiburg began in early
1945 as it became clear that Germany would lose
the War. As the German Army retreated toward the
Austrian border, the Red Army advanced and the
Partisans began their consolidation of power,
anarchy prevailed in what was Yugoslavia. A dozen
or more nationalist movements and ethnic militias
attempted to salvage various parts of Yugoslavia.
Most nationalists, Croatian, Slovenian and
Serbian alike, were anti-Communist and all had
visions of the Western Allies welcoming them into
the coming battle against Communism. Croatians
especially cherished the totally unsupported
notion that Anglo-American intervention would
save an independent Croatian state. As in every
other part of eastern Europe, armies, governments
and civilian populations began moving toward the
Western lines. Some were pushed before the
retreating Germans, others followed in their
wake. Many traveled in small bands, armed or
unarmed, while others were well organized into
mass movements of people and equipment. Along the
trek north they fought the Partisans and each
other. Many surrendered, others fought to the
death.
Retreat from Zagreb
The retreating Germans, usually without
bothering to inform their erstwhile allies, took
with them much of the material support for the
Croatian armed forces. Despite conditions,
several Croatian generals wanted to defend the
city of Zagreb from the Partisan advance and
fight to the finish if necessary. The Partisans
made it clear that the city, swollen to twice its
size with refugees, would be destroyed if they
met resistance. A final meeting of the Croatian
government was held on April 30, 1945 at which
the decision was made to abandon Zagreb and
retreat into Austria.
Still quite naive concerning Allied
intentions, many Croatian officers hoped that the
still sizable Croatian Army would be allowed to
surrender to the British to fight again against
the Russians. Since both Croatia and Britain were
signatories to the Geneva Conventions, it was
felt that at worst the Croatians would be treated
as prisoners of war.
The exodus from Zagreb began on May 1st. Some
200,000 civilians were flanked by 200,000
soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Croatian
armed for~es. The Archbishop-Metropolitan
Aloysius Stepinac took charge of the government
for the few hours between the departure of
Croatian officials and the arrival of the
Partisan Liberation Army. State Minister Vrancic
was dispatched to Italy as a peace emissary to
the Allies and several high-ranking English
speaking officers headed the main column toward
Austria. The retreat was well ordered and the
protecting flank armies insured that all of the
civilians arrived safely at the Austrian border
by May 7. A number of military units remained
behind to fight delaying actions as late as May
12. Still other units, known as
"Crusaders" fled into the hills and
fought sporadic guerilla actions until 1948. The
huge column, numbering perhaps as many as
one-half million soldiers and civilians,
including Slovenes, Serbs and even Cetnik units,
finally came to rest in a small valley near the
Austrian village of Bleiburg.
The leaders had no way of knowing that their
peace emissary, Dr. Vrancic had traveled as far
as Forli, Italy by plane and car under a white
flag only to be stopped short of his goal. At
Forli, Vrancic and Naval Captain Vrkljan, who
spoke fluent English, were detained by one
Captain Douglas of British Field Security who was
more interested in their diplomatic grade
Mercedes-Benz automobile than their mission to
see Field Marshal Alexander in Caserta. He held
the emissaries incommunicado until May 20 when he
had them thrown into a POW camp and confiscated
the automobile.
Deception and Betrayal
In the belief that their envoys had made some
arrangement with the British, the multitude of
humanity set up camp in the valley to await the
outcome of negotiations. One of the first groups
to arrive at British headquarters was a
contingent of 130 members of the Croatian
government headed by President Nikola Mandic. All
were told that they would be transferred to Italy
as soon as possible by British Military Police.
All were then loaded into a train and returned to
the Partisans for execution. It was the intent of
the British to turn over all Croatians, as well
as Serbs and Slovenes, to the Communists from
whom they had fled.
When the Croatian military leaders realized
that they had led hundreds of thousands into a
trap, many committed suicide on the spot. The
British extradited at first hundreds, then
thousands of Croatians. Some were shot at the
border, while others joined the infamous
"Death Marches" which took them deeper
into the new People's Republic for liquidation.
Realizing the importance of the clergy to the
Croatian people, most church leaders were
arrested. Although Archbishop Stepinac was
sentenced to death, he was saved by a massive
outcry of world public opinion and died under
house arrest in 1960. Two bishops, three hundred
priests, twenty-nine seminarians and four lay
brothers were less fortunate and were executed.
The number of Muslim religious leaders executed
has never been determined, although the figure is
thought to be in excess of six hundred. Churches
and mosques were closed or destroyed throughout
Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina. The new
government dynamited the minarets around the
mosque of Zagreb, turned the building into a
museum glorifying the Partisan victory and
renamed the square in which it stood
"Victims of Fascism Square." One of the
first acts of the Croatian government in 1991 was
to rename the plaza.Almost every government
official from the President to local postmasters,
every military officer above the rank of major
and virtually every Ustasse officer, regardless
of rank, was found guilty of "crimes against
the people." Many were executed. Enlisted
members of the Ustase were often found guilty en
masse and sent to concentration camps where many
died. All top ranking members of the government
were executed. Chief-of-state Ante Pavelic
managed to flee only to be gunned down by a
would-be assassin in 1957. He later died of
complications.
Denial and Discovery
The total number of people liquidated may
never be known, but figures of 100 to 180
thousand have been voiced by some, up to
one-quarter of a million by others. Despite the
scholarship and masses of documents proving the
contrary, the Yugoslav government denied that the
Bleiburg-Maribor massacres or any subsequent
liquidation of anti-Communists occurred. As late
as 1976 special teams were active in Slovenia and
southern Austria covering up evidence of the
crimes. The American and British governments,
implicated in the forced repatriation that led to
the slaughter also sought to cover-up or at least
ignore the crimes.
Finally, in July of 1990 with the departure of
the Communist regime, the truth began to come to
light. In underground caverns in Slovenia and
northern Croatia, researchers using spelunker's
equipment descended into the mass graves long
before sealed by the authorities. They found
layer upon layer of human bones, crutches, rope
and wire. Many of the skulls had a single bullet
hole in the back. Estimates ranged from 5,000
victims in one cave to as many as 40,000 in
another. When news was made public, people from
throughout Croatia and Slovenia reported other
mass grave sites that had been known to them for
years. For obvious reasons none had ever spoken
publicly of them before.
In 1990 the Croatian Parliament formed a
commission which included foreign experts to
determine, for the first time, the full extent of
the post-war massacres. Determining how many
perished will be a difficult undertaking that
will require years of grizzly exploration and
detailed research. Whatever the final result, it
will never again be said that Croatia did not
suffer in post-war Yugoslavia.
Genocide
- A Short Survey of Croatia
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleiburg_massacre
Bleiburg
massacre
From
Wikipedia, the free encyclopediach
The Bleiburg massacre
occurred near to the end of World
War II, during
May 1945. It is named after the village
of Bleiburg on the Austrian-Slovenian border, near where the massacre
began. It involved mass
murder of Croatian soldiers and civilians who were
fleeing from the defeated Independent State of Croatia, a puppet
state of the Nazi regime in Germany. The atrocities were a reprisal against the real or alleged
members or collaborators of the fascist regime,
by the communist Yugoslav partisan army, presumably with the full
knowledge of their supreme commander Josip
Broz Tito, who
was himself half-Croatian.
Although a still
undefined number of Croatian soldiers died during
a series of battles and skirmishes, it is
generally accepted that the vast portion of
violent deaths were the result of executions that
lasted at least two weeks after the cessation of
hostilities. The victims were Croatian soldiers
and civilians, executed without trial as an act
of vengeance for the crimes committed by the Ustaše regime in Croatian-controlled
territories during World War II — frequently
in overtly gruesome manner (mass rape and subsequent killing by stoning of women; beheading of disarmed Croatian soldiers).
Murder continued in nearby Slovenia, and it is
hard to estimate the number of victims in
Bleiburg field, compared to those later found in
the trenches in the Maribor area and other numerous pits in
Slovenia. Many captives were sent on a death
march further
into Yugoslav territory.
Croatian political
émigrés, as well as other sources related to
the Cossacks, had published numerous
testimonies on the atrocities and British
involvement in the affair (interestingly enough,
British archives on the Operation
Keelhaul tragedy
are still sealed), but their publications have
received little attention, supposedly since communist Yugoslavia was the West's protégé and the buffer
zone to the
Soviets in the post-war period.
Number of victims
The number of those who
met their death in the Bleiburg massacre is
almost impossible to ascertain. Generally, there
are three schools that have tried to do this:
1. The school based
mainly on historiographic and demographic
investigations of scientists:
- The Croatian
statistician Vladimir Žerjavic has estimated based on
demographic records that ca. 55,000
people were killed in the Bleiburg area
and in Slovenia.
- British journalist Misha Glenny and other investigators
or publicists have come up with the
figure of 50,000 executed disarmed
soldiers and 30,000 civilians.
- The
Croatian-American historian Jozo
Tomaševic (from Stanford University) collected fairly exact
records stating that 116,000 Croatian
combatants (Ustaše and Domobrani)
arrived at Bleiburg (in a group of around
200,000 people in total), and were
subsequently barred entry. He stated this
number with certainty, and then proceeded
to estimate that around one half of them
were killed.
Which of these figures
is closest to the reality is still hard to
decide.
2. Another school
operates with big numbers, and their contention
is that over 250,000 Croats had been executed in
Bleiburg, Slovenia and northern Croatia. This
theory has gained some publicity in recent years,
when Slovene authorities have estimated, in 1999
and 2000, that mass excavations in wider Maribor
area have found circa 180,000 human corpses,
mostly Croats (judging from the remnants of
military insignia). As reported elsewhere:
- In 1999 the
resources from the Republic of Slovenia
reported as many as 110 mass graves of
Croats discovered in this state, victims
of the "Way of the Cross" in
1945 immediately after the end of World
War II. Among them there were not only
soldiers, but also a large number of
civilians. The Slovenian public was
shocked by the size and number of these
graves.
- In 2001 Slovenian sources reported as many as 296
mass graves on their territory, and an
estimate of about 190,000 people killed
immediately after the end of World War II
(May 1945 and later), mostly Croats. Just
in the region of Tezno woods Slovenian
sources estimate about 60-80,000 killed.
Many children's bones have been found
among the victims' remains.
3. The third school
operated with small numbers. Petar S. Brajovic, a
Yugoslav general who participated in the battles
around Bleiburg and is, along with other senior
Yugoslav officers like Albert Nad and Dušan
Basta, frequently accused as having organized the
Bleiburg massacre, claims in his book
"Konacno oslobodenje" ("Final
liberation") published in 1983, that
Ustaše had no big victims in Bleiburg and
that artillery was not used. In the local
cemetery there were only 16 their soldiers
buried. In the same book is written that Third
Army of Jugoslav Army captured 30000 soldiers
(6000 of them were Chetniks) and 20000 refugees.
However, the
investigation was stalled, so no definite
conclusion can be drawn.Bleiburg massacre - Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia
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