Ante Pavelić

Ante Pavelić (July 14, 1889 - December 28, 1959) was the leader and founding member of the Croatian national socialist/fascist Ustaše movement in the 1930s and later the leader of the Independent State of Croatia, a puppet state of Nazi Germany during WWII.

Early life

Pavelić was born north of Konjic in Bradina, a small village c. 15 kilometres south west of Hadžići in Bosnia and Herzegovina. As an adult, Ante Pavelić decided to move to Zagreb to read for a degree in law. An extremist even in his youth, he became a member of the organization known as the "Frankovci" whose founder, Dr. Josip Frank, was the father-in-law of Slavko Kvaternik, the first Croat to be elevated to the rank of Field Marshall. In 1919 he was the interim secretary of the Pure Party of Rights. In 1921 he was arrested along with several other members of the party but was released; he defended them at the trial and lost. Kvaternik had long been a strong advocate of Croat separatism and the German ideas on a separate Croat state found in him a ready tool.

Pavelić's quarrelsome nature became more and more apparent in the years immediately after the first war when he became involved in one dispute after another with the Centralist Party and the Croat Peasant Party of Radic. He was the sole representative of his Party in the Skupstina (Yugoslav Parliament) but rarely attended sessions and when he did he sulked in his seat and only occasionally indulged in a long harangue in protest against some measure which he did not approve.

In the early 1920s, Pavelić began to establish his contacts with Croat émigrées in Vienna and Budapest and later entered into close accord with the Macedonian terrorist society IMRO. In 1927 he acted as counsel for the defense of the Macedonian terrorists at the Skoplje trials.

The 20's and 30's

In 1927 he was elected to the Zagreb city council. He held the position of the party secretary in the Party of Rights until 1929 and the beginning of royal government in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Shortly after the proclamation of the establishment of the government Alexander I of Yugoslavia in January 1929, Pavelic fled abroad and was subsequently sentenced to death in absentia at Belgrade for his part in anti-Serb demonstrations organized at Sofia by Bulgarian and Macedonian terrorists. He then co-founded the Ustaše terrorist organization and went underground.

Camps for training terrorists and saboteurs were set up in Italy and Hungary, chiefly at Brescia and Borgotaro in Italy and Janka Puszta in Hungary and an armed insurrection was attempted in 1933 when the Ustaše, armed by the Italians, attempted to invade the country by crossing the Adriatic sea in motorboats. This was unsuccessful but its lack of success probably was instrumental in the decision to assassinate King Alexander I of Yugoslavia. Two attempts were made, the last one successful and Aleksandar was slain at Marseilles 9 October, 1934 along with the French Foreign Minister, Louis Barthou.

The singular lack of armed protection afforded to the Yugoslav monarch, and the general laxity of security precautions when it was well-known that one attempt had already been made on Alexander's life are grim tributes to Pavelić organizational abilities; he had apparently been able to bribe a high official in the Surete General. The Prefect of Police of Marseilles, Jouhannaud, was subsequently removed from office.

Pavelić and his supporters were arrested at Turin Italy in 1934 just a couple of weeks after the murder of king Alexander I. Pavelić was sent to prison but was soon released.

World War II

File:Hitler29.jpg

Ante Pavelić visiting Hitler at Berghof

Pavelić remained in Italy until the beginning of World War II. In 1941, Yugoslavia was invaded and conquered and he became the leader (Poglavnik) of the so-called Independent State of Croatia - a puppet state of Nazi Germany proclaimed on April 10, 1941.

As the leader of the Ustaše he directly ordered, organised and conducted a campaign of terror against Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, and communist Croats. The extent of this campaign reached the proportions of genocide. Pavelić's Ustaše regime was the most murderous Nazi client state in the entirety of occupied Europe. Numerous surviving testimonies from the Nuremberg Trial and the German and the Italian war archives bear witness to atrocities perpetrated against the civilian population of the state. According to these testimonies, the Nazi officers themselves were horrified by the scenes of atrocities committed by his Ustaše, forcing them to stop the bloodshed (Jasenovac, 1941), arrest one of the most notorious Ustaše (Fra Miroslav Filipović-Majstorović, Banja Luka, 1942) and disarm an Ustaše detachment (Eastern Bosnia, 1942). These bestialities were recorded in novelistic literature and poetry: Malaparte's Kaputt ([[1]]) Basket of oysters chapter, inspired by the widespread practices of Ustaše's gouging out the eyes of Serbs; Kovačić's Jama (The Pit), where Ustaše tied Serbs with barbed wire and dropped them into pits; Oljača's Kozara; Svetina's Volčiči (The Wolf Puppies).As far as the Serb population of the puppet state was concerned, the stated aim was the extermination of a third of their numbers, exile for another third, and a forced conversion to Catholicism for yet another. The Ustaše succeeded in reaching their first goal, exterminating close to one third of the Serbs and possibly more. Pavelić's regime was not officially recognised by the Vatican, but at no point did the Church condemn the genocide and forced conversions to Catholicism perpetrated by the Ustaše.^[1] Soon after coming to power in April 1941 Pavelić was given a private audience in Rome by Pope Pius XII, an act for which the Pope was widely criticised. A British Foreign Office memo on the subject described Pius as "the greatest moral coward of our age" for receiving Pavelić.^[2]

Post-war

In May 1945 he fled via Bleiburg to Austria, where he stayed for a few months before transferring to Rome, where he was hidden by members of the Roman Catholic Church (as is documented in de-classified US Intelligence documents [2]).

His stay in Rome was known to the American Counterintelligence Corps, but they apparently were not interested in the arrest of any non-Communists from eastern parts of Europe. Six months later, he fled to South America. Upon arriving in Argentina via the ratlines, he became a security advisor to Juan Peron. Peron issued 34,000 visas to Croatians: both the Nazi collaborators and the anti-communists that fled from the new communist government lead by Josip Broz Tito.

In April 1957 he was shot twice in an assassination attempt. The operation was attributed to Tito's Yugoslav intelligence, although the possibility that this was an attempt at revenge by a Chetnik activist was not dismissed. Pavelić was subsequently forced to flee Argentina to avoid arrest and extradition, and he found refuge in Spain, where he died in Madrid in late 1959, from complications of his wounds.

Endnotes

^ Israel Gutman (ed.) Encyclopedia of the Holocaust vol 2, p.739
^ Mark Aarons and John Loftus Unholy Trinity pp.71-2

References

Hermann Neubacher: Sonderauftrag Suedost 1940-1945, Bericht eines fliegendes Diplomaten, 2. durchgesehene Auflage, Goettingen 1956

Ladislaus Hory and Martin Broszat: Der Kroatische Ustascha-Staat, 1941-1945 Stuttgart, 1964

Encyclopedia Britannica, 1943 - Book of the year, page 215, Entry: Croatia

Worldmark Encyclopedia of the Nations, Europe, edition 1995, page 91, entry: Croatia

Encyclopaedia Britannica, Edition 1991, Macropedia, Vol. 29, page 1111.

Helen Fein: Accounting for Genocide - Victims and Survivors of the Holocaust, The Free Press, New York, Edition 1979, pages 102, 103.

Alfio Russo: Revoluzione in Jugoslavia, Roma 1944.

Ruth Mitchell: The Serbs Choose War, Doubleday, Doran, 1943, page 148

Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust, vol. 2, p. 739.

Avro Manhattan: The Vatican's Holocaust, Ozark Books, 1986, page 48.

External links

[1] Israel Gutman (ed.) Encyclopedia of the Holocaust vol 2, p.739

[2] Mark Aarons and John Loftus Unholy Trinity pp.71-2

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