Examining the Holocaust

Looking at some of the complex history of the Holocaust

By nessie

Pope John Paul II's recent apologies for the Holocaust era Vatican holds little weight with the heirs and few elderly survivors of one of the bloodiest chapters in the history of the Roman Catholic Church - the 1941-1945 atrocities by the fanatically Catholic Ustashi.

The Ustashi regime was Nazi Germany's wartime puppet state in what was then called Croatia. The Ustashi were a lot like the Nazis themselves, only worse. They systematically and mercilessly robbed, murdered, or deported their Serb, Roma, and Jewish populations. Gold and other valuables of all these victims were worth as much as $80 million. They became a part of the Ustashi treasury.

A lawsuit filed nearly a year ago in federal court in San Francisco, Alperin et al versus Vatican Bank and Franciscans OFM (USDC ND CA, C99- 4941 MMC), accuses the Croatian Franciscans OFM of Word War II atrocities including leading pogroms against Serbs and Jews, burning Serbs alive in their churches and providing commanders for Croatian-Nazi concentration camps. This little-known but shameful period in the history of Roman Catholic Church is well documented by both Yugoslav and independent American sources.

Alperin et al are suing to recover hundreds of millions of dollars of property looted by the Croatian Nazis, converted to gold, and held by the Vatican Bank for safekeeping. Rumors had long circulated about the fantastic wealth that allowed Croatian war criminals to escape justice and live lives of luxury in South America, Spain, and even California. In June 1998 a U.S. State Department report confirmed the story. The Vatican Bank's sordid history has been well documented. The short version is that the Bank, a major player on the world financial stage, was caught red-handed laundering bogus paper for the Gambino crime family, and that was just the tip of the iceberg. There's lots more (see Read up below).

More about USDC ND CA, C99- 4941 MMC can be found at vaticanbankclaims.com . As you read, keep an open mind. The suit is not an attack on Catholicism, on Catholics, on the Catholic Church, on all Franciscans, or even on the Vatican. It is extremely precise and specific, as are all legal proceedings, as to what it addresses. To understand it, we must studiously avoid confusing the church with the religion and the religion with its practitioners. Otherwise we will find ourselves blaming a fifth of humanity for the crimes of a few thousand. This isn't about religion. This is about money and politics. And, yes, it is confusing. But remember, there's a world of difference between the Calvis and Sindonas of this world and the people who cook at the Martin de Porres soup kitchen. All Catholics are not to blame.

Attorney Jonathan Levy has run up against a stone wall in his attempts to use the Freedom Of Information Act to pry certain documents concerning this case loose from the clutches of the Department of the Army and from the CIA. He has recently filed an official FOIA complaint and has high hopes it will succeed. My own hopes are not so high. This is the Holocaust we're talking about here, and the truth won't surface quickly. More than half a century has elapsed, and only recently have token attempts been made to begin to resolve it. Some people these days don't even know what the word "Holocaust" means. Of course, this is not entirely their fault. The official story has been revised a number of times as has the unofficial story.

This may come as somewhat of a surprise to my regular readers, but I too consider myself to be a Holocaust revisionist, though certainly not in the common sense. This term, like the term "Nazi" itself, is routinely thrown about with unscholarly imprecision. So I'm going to define my position on this very precisely. Otherwise, a lot of you are not going to read any further, and I wouldn't blame you. Usually, "a Holocaust revisionist" is a euphemism for a Nazi, a Nazi sympathizer or one of their dupes. I'm not a Nazi. I hate Nazis. As far as I'm concerned, the only good Nazi is a dead Nazi. If you feel any differently, you're dead wrong. They are a cancer on the body politic. It must be excised before it metastasizes any further.

I'm not a Holocaust denier, either. It happened, all right. There's no doubt about that. Anybody who says that it didn't is lying. One thing I do object to, though, is it being called "the" Holocaust. It was a recent holocaust. It was a truly horrific holocaust, arguably the worst ever. But it was not a unique event, not even close. Mass murder has plagued human society since the rise of hierarchy. Only the establishment of a democratic, planetwide, federation of interdependent, egalitarian societies will put a final end to it. No, I do not mean the United Nations, the NWO or the neo-liberal, corporate plutocracy. If you don't know what I do mean, figure it out.

Then there's the matter of the numbers. The current official version is that "the Holocaust" was the mass murder of 6 million Jews who were gassed in the various concentration camps. The initial estimates first bandied about by the Anglo-American and Zionist propaganda machines were that roughly 4.5 million Jews were killed in the camps. This number was gradually revised to 6 million for a variety of reasons, some more credible than others. Some Nazi sympathizers say that this is a lie - that there were only a few hundred thousands. Other Nazi sympathizers say there were none at all, that the whole thing was a fabrication from the get go. This is, of course, ludicrous. But that is no reason to believe the other versions either. We don't know how many Jews died in the camps. It was probably more we than think, but we'll never know for sure, and it doesn't matter. Every one of these various estimates misses the main point. It is not the numbers but the act that matters. One Jew dead at Nazi hands was too many.

They are missing another, far more important point as well. From the best evidence, we can safely conclude that around 13 million people died in the camps alone. They included leftists, communists, anarchists, homosexuals, Serbs, Roma, Catholics, and prisoners of war, among others. The legacy of the Holocaust is in no way shape or form solely the province of Jews. To say that it is demeans the memory of every Jew who died in every camp, to say nothing of the Jews who died fighting back. Some, though by no means all, propagandists for the Zionist cause cheerily stoop this low on a regular basis. Don't believe them. They're liars.

Even if we were to only define the Holocaust as those who died in the camps, the numbers alone rebut the myth that the legacy of the Holocaust is solely the province of Jews. The Nazis didn't even begin gassing Jews until 1943. They started gassing mental patients and the disabled in 1933 (see Trust below). But the real Nazi bloodbath was not what they did to Jews but what they did to Slavs. A bare minimum of 20 million Russians died. To exclude them from the legacy of Holocaust demeans the memory of every Jew who fought at their side, including my personal favorites, the 600 prisoners who killed their guards, burned Treblinka to the ground, and escaped into the woods. Forty of them survived the war. Most settled in Israel. They too were Zionists, but no honest historian can equate them with the men who massacred Deir Yassin.

Therein lies the problem. When considering issues that have political, ethnic, and religious components, it is vital to sort them out clearly. This is not only true in the Middle East. It is also and particularly true in the Balkans. For it was not only the North Slavs who suffered a holocaust.

The Ustashi perpetrated a holocaust of their own. Its ferocity appalled even Nazis, not an easy feat. Their allies saw them as animals. At least the Nazis gassed most of their victims before consigning them to the flames. Not so for the Ustashi. They also amused themselves by holding throat-slitting contests. Mostly they cut Serb throats, though they also slit the throats of Jews and Roma whenever available. A guy named Petar Brzica slit 1,300 throats in a single night. Unless some unsung Rwandan outstripped him during the recent frenzy there, it's probably still the world's record. All told, the Ustashi killed between 300,000 and a million and a half. Estimates vary. Again, one was too many.

Though they were also nationalists, the Ustashi were first and foremost a religious movement. Like all religious movements, it was steeped in ritual.

"The head of the Ustashi, its poglavnik, was Ante Pavelic, a veteran of many Croat right-wing movements. Pavelic molded a political movement demanding fanatic excess and, in return, offering expiation for these passions through mysticism, Croatian nationalism, and [Roman] Catholicism.

Upon joining the Ustashi, the novitiaite was immediately indoctrinated with its mystery and authority. The initiation rite required that one swear before a crucifix framed by a dagger and a revolver an oath promising total devotion:

'I swear before God and all that I hold sacred that I will observe the laws of this society and will execute without condition all that I am ordered to do by the poglavnik.

I will scrupulously preserve all secrets entrusted to me, and I will betray nothing, no matter what it might be.

I swear to fight in the Ustashi army for a free, independent Croat state under the absolute control of the poglavnik. Failing in my oath, I shall accept death as the penalty. God help me, amen.'"

The choice of the three symbols - the crucifix, the dagger, and the revolver - was not a casual one. The Ustashi "call to blood" that Pavelic was demanding of his followers would be a religious calling. The intensity of Croatian [Roman] Catholicism would now be transferred, Pavelic hoped, to a political movement. The devotion, duty, and bloodletting that the Ustashi promised, would become a holy war to create a Croatian state, a state that would be both separate and [Roman] Catholic.

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