Posted on 05/08/2003 11:43:48 AM PDT by Tarsk
May. 8, 2003
Croatia plans to build monument to honor its Nazis
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS - ZAGREB, Croatia
The Croatian government announced Thursday it plans to buy land in southern Austria to build a monument honoring thousands of Croat Nazi troops and civilians who were killed in the aftermath of World War II.
The announcement came just a few days ahead of Sunday's anniversary of the 1945 killings of tens of thousands of Croat soldiers and civilians who fled to Austria in fear of reprisals from antifascists.
They gathered in Bleiburg, a small town near the then-Yugoslav border, waiting for days while the British authorities who were in charge of that part of Austria decided on their fate.
The British eventually sent the crowd back to Yugoslavia, where vengeful antifascists in Yugoslavia killed tens of thousands.
The event is surrounded by controversy, but Vice Prime Minister Goran Granic said a memorial was needed anyway.
"We owe it to the victims," Granic said, adding the land purchase should be carried out in a "dignified way, without any influence of politics." Negotiations about the land purchase have yet to be launched, and it was not immediately clear whether the owners were willing to sell the land.
Croatia was a Nazi puppet state during World War II. Tens perhaps hundreds, of thousands of Jews, Serbs, Gypsies and anti-fascist Croats were killed in Croat-run concentration camps from 1941 to 1945.
In Croatia, the events at Bleiburg have been disputed for decades.
The communist authorities of the former Yugoslavia that Croatia was part of until 1991 sought to diminish the killings. The nationalist government of the late President Franjo Tudjman revived and magnified memories of Bleiburg while diminishing crimes committed by Croatia's Nazis.
The pro-Western government that took power 3 1/2 years ago has tried to take an impartial stand, condemning both Nazi and communist wrongdoings.
It has assisted the reconstruction of Jasenovac, the most notorious Nazi-run concentration camp, and President Stipe Mesic will attend the anniversary of a foiled inmates' escape this Sunday.
Croatian nationalists exaggerate the number of those killed and claim the atrocities committed after the Bleiburg journey were worse than those carried out by Croatia's wartime pro-Nazi rulers.
Many Croats argue that killings following the Bleiburg, known in Croatia as The Way of Crosses, shows that the postwar communist authorities were just as fierce killers as the fascists.
Could any right-thinking person in all conscience blame the "vengeful antifascists" considering the enormity of the crimes carried out by Croatian Nazis? In a perfect world it might have been considered rough justice but what justice exactly did the Nazis allow their victims? No, they got exactly what they deserved and perhaps a little bit less. That Croatia now is honoring these men and women of evil just goes to show how little that nation has changed since the end of World War II and how it should be kept at arms length by the West until it has honestly and truly turned its back on such a wicked and terrible past.
Serbia as a fundamentally decent nation will be rehabilitated in fairly short order. It will be many, many decades, if ever, before Croatia enjoys a similar happy fate.
First of all, let's use correct labels.
These Croatian soldiers weren't necessarily Nazis any more than the average rank and file WWII German soldier was a Nazi.
Additionally, these "anti-fascists" were most probably the pro-Communist irregulars loyal to Tito.
These Croats were probably fighting to defend their country from a Communist takeover, not to defend their government's cowardly collaboration with the Nazis.
Don't buy the left's rhetoric hook, line and sinker.
The Ustashe were a brutal and nasty bunch of thugs. However, Tito and the Communists did go a little nuts when it came to revenge killings.
Not a happy history, the former Yugoslavia.
That's a little simplistic.
These articles out of context are nonsensical and misleading, making me wonder what is the other side of the story.
It looks like the Balkans is a rough neighborhood, and sometimes unsavory alliances were formed in order to save the smaller countries from being overruled by their more powerful neighbors.
Moral cowards? Certainly.
An entire continent full of drooling, psychotic murderers? Less plausible.
As Burke said: "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."
Those who should have known better or been more courageous sat back and did nothing.
Last time I checked, one of our allies was the communist regime in the Soviet Union, one of the most murderous governments ever conceived by humankind.
Just the state-sponsored famines and quota-killing pogroms by Stalin may have killed dozens of millions of people.
Nevertheless, Stalinist Russia was America's ally during WW2.
Who was worse, Hitler or Stalin?
Sorry, but this is one of the grossest over-simplifications I've seen in a long time. People fight wars for an incredible variety of reasons, and never was that more true than in the Second World War. Nazi ideology was a big part of many Germans' motivation, but many others fought for reasons of nationalism, anti-Communism and mere personal survival. For Germany's allies, nationalism (particularly the case with a nascent Croatia) and anti-Communism were major motivations. The latter was especially important to the non-Germans who made up the majority of the Waffen-SS.
Whatever motivations people had do not lessen any of the crimes committed during the war, but to grossly mischaracterize one's enemies is to misunderstand them. Not every soldier in the Red Army fought to spread Marxism-Leninism. Not every American soldier fought to spread FDR's New Deal socialism to every corner of the globe.
Saying that everyone who fought for the Axis was a Nazi is like saying that everyone who fought for the Confederacy fought to preserve slavery. Anyone who knows anything about the Civil War knows that is not true. States rights, regionalism, Constitutional interpretation, etc. all kept the South fighting bravely for its cause.
Since a true Nazi is, by nature, a nasty little coward - the Nazis spent most of their time behind enemy lines, killing defenseless women and children and drawing government paychecks.
Meanwhile, many of the decent people were out dying at the front fighting Communists or Allies, believing that they were defending their country.
Many US veterans will testify to the fundamental decency of many of the troops they fought.
Here's the exercise: imagine being a Croat in 1944.
You live in a tiny country which is only newly independent.
There are two enormous powers fighting to control the Continent.
Neither of them are attractive.
However, one offers to leave your country relatively intact, while the other promises to rip your society to shreds and incorporate it into its empire.
You've seen the Nazis give the defeated French some relative autonomy and home rule. You've seen the Communists literally slaughter and rape millions of Ukrainians - most of whom didn't even rebel!
So you're pretty sure that the Nazis represent a less pressing, longer-term problem, while the Communists will rape your wife and kill your children as soon as they get over your border.
That's the likely thought process of the normal, patriotic Croat in 1944.
If these men were Ustashe, they should have been imprisoned in Austria and tried for war crimes. If they were Croatian army regulars, they were probably innocent of anything other than daring to stand up to Stalin.
There's a reason for this -- they have become two of the most stable, thriving regions in eastern Europe since the Iron Curtain collapsed. The next time you are in a clothing store, pick up a few leather belts and pairs of shoes -- see how many of them are now made in Croatia instead of Italy.
The U.S. has no business judging European nations like this for what occurred there during the 1930s and 1940s. In most cases these people had to choose with one brand of socialism (nationalist socialism, or Nazism) and another (global socialism, or Soviet communism).
The fact that they picked a different poison than the U.S. did doesn't make them any worse than us.
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