Tropoljac, don't think you know me. My knowledge base is formidable.
Maybe you can expand my knowledge base, T. What uniform did your daddy or granddaddy wear in WW2? Where were the stationed?
John Cornwell is an exposed liar. Is that your idea of a knowledge base?
Archbishop Stepinac repudiated the Pavelic regime almost immediately after its accession to power. Though Pius did receive Pavelic in a private audience, he saw him as a private citizen, according him none of the honors of a head of state.
In The Vatican in the Age of the Dictators (1922-1945) Anthony Rhodes writes that, although Archbishop Stepinac was an initial supporter of the Ustache, by May 1943, Nazi spies in Zagreb were complaining to Henirich Himmler that they were "far from satisfied with his attitude toward the new Croatian state. Not only did he never have a good word to say for the Ustache, but he was known to criticise the government in private, and now inreasingly in open gatherings. To this the Archbishop [replies] that the Church has its own laws of God...The sole responsibility, said the Archbishop, for the growing and dangerous Communist partisan movement, for instance, would be laid at the door of the government who wer acting too severely, even unlawfully, against Orthodox Serbs, Jew, and Gypsies, imitating the methods of the Germans. [A.A. Pol III Acten Repetorium p.0027, Beziehungen zu Kroatien, 1942-3].
Also according to Rhodes, a contemporaneous German dipolomatic report from Zagreb speaks of "the personal intervention of the Archbishop in favor of the Orthodox Serbs and Jews," and mentions "a personal note of the 6th March, 1943 by Archbishop Stepinac to the government in which he wrote that 'by these methods you are helping to create the Communist partisan movement. As a result of unlawful measures, you have caused a number of despairing people to join the partisans.'" In a sermon on Marc 28, 1943, Archbishop Stepinac condemned the Poglavnic's doctrine of a new mankind based on racial lines. This message was repeated on the feast of Christ the King, October 31, 1943: "The Catholic Church cannot admit that a race or a nation, simply because it is larger or stronger, can use violence against another which is smaller or weaker. We cannot admit that innocent people should be massacred simply because a soldier has been killed, perhaps in an ambush, even if it is claimed that he is a member of a superior race. A system which consists in shooting hundreds of hostages for a crime whose author has not been apprehended is a pagan system. It has never borne good friuts, nor will it ever do so." This message, read from all Catholic pulpits the following Sunday, resulted in the Germans' arrest of 33 priests.
In March, 1943, Archbishop Stepinac opposed orders intended to result in the deportationof Jews to death camps: "No civil power or political system has the right to persecute a person on account of his racial origins. We Catholics protest against such measures, and we will oppose them."
The English author Evelyn Waugh, who as a British officer in Yugoslavia saw up close the machinations of the Communist partisans (and who openly acknowledged the complicity of certain Croatian Frnaciscans in genocidal acts), reported that when in September 1941 Archbishop Stepinac led a delegation to Pavelic to protest his persecution of the Jews, many members of his delegation wore yellow stars as a sign of protest and solidarity.
If Archbishop Stepinac had been such an enthusiastic supporter of the Pavelic regime, Spar, why did it demand his replacement three times inthe years 1943-5?
Archbishop Stepinac's "conviction" of war crimes after the war was confected in a Communist show trial orchestrated by Tito, and was simply another component of Tito's postwar persecution of the Catholic Church, in which Waugh reports dozens of individual cases, complete with names and gruesome details of executions. Waugh's reports have never been credibly challenged, and survive as a damning indictment of the perfidious English decision (heavily influenced by Brig. Fitzroy Maclean and other Communist agents of influence) to switch its support to Tito.
It's a shame that you choose to embrace a deeply cynical Communist distortion of history, simply to air a racial grievance.