Free The Fracture Zone by Simon Winchester Page B

though the Wehrmacht and soldiers from the Italian army were everywhere to lend support, it was run principally and with blood-chilling ruthlessness by Zagreb’s dreaded home-grown terror organization, the so-called Insurrectionists, the Ustashi.
    The men who peopled this appalling organization of unutterably violent Croat separatists, a body that had existed since the thirties, first came to worldwide attention when, in 1934 in Marseilles, they asssassinated the Serbian king, Alexander I (Alek-sandr Karadjordjevic). * The uncanny connection between cathedral and hotel is that for an indecently long while, beginning in April 1941, the Ustashi were receiving their orders from the Gestapo officers at the Esplanade while at the same time, and even more chillingly, they were said to be receiving their moral imprimatur and, for a while, their blessing, from the archbishop up in the Zagreb cathedral. Sezession mansion and Gothic church were thus united, at least for a while, in the underwriting of one of the great bestialities of modern times.
    From the evidence collected in the years since the war, it seems that almost every dire act the Croat madmen perpetrated against the Serbs—the butchery, killings with knives and mallets and hacksaws, the throat slittings, the ax murderings either because the Serbs were members of what many Croatian Catholics considered the apostasy of the Orthodox Church, or because they were reckoned to be Communists—was said to be done under the invigilation and approval of one of the more allegedly diabolical figures that the modern Roman Catholic Church has produced.
    He was called Alojzije Cardinal Stepinac, and his consecrated remains, lately blessed by the pope, lie in the cathedral today, in an elegant tomb not far from a celebrated Dürer bas-relief, and under the gold stars and azure sky of the cathedral ceiling. His memory is revered by thousands of Croats still—I watched a line of several dozen young women with their children waiting to kneel before his tomb, to kiss his image and mutter incantations over their rosaries. Yet seen by today’s standards, Stepinac seems hardly worthy of such unswerving Christian devotion. He was bytoo many accounts to disbelieve a cruel, dogmatic man, a puritan zealot and a bigot, and a figure who was cynically used by the Ustashi to give moral authority to the terrible things they were doing to the Serbs who lived among them.
    One side of his zealotry was harmless enough—he was a stickler for the unvarying protocols of church ritual, he took a Franciscan oath of poverty, he believed that Masons were everywhere plotting, and he railed against the immorality—as he saw it—of such innocent pursuits as sunbathing and mixed swimming. But he also made sermon after impassioned sermon condemning those who wanted—as many intellectuals did in those days—an end to the schism between the Eastern and Roman churches. The archbishop’s firmly held belief, at least as a young man (and he was first inducted into the Zagreb cathedral chancery when he was only thirty-two) was that the Orthodox Church represented a perversion of holy truth, and all who held to the Byzantine beliefs should be shunned, converted, or worse. His belief mirrored precisely the stated policy of the Ustashi regime, which famously and chillingly said of the Serbs that the only way to deal with them was to ensure that one-third were exiled, one-third were converted, and one-third were killed.
    The most egregious example of Stepinac’s alleged tyrannies had to do with both conversion and killing. He is said to have directed, and on occasion presided over, the forced conversion to Catholicism of tens of thousands of Orthodox Serbs at the infamous Jasenovac concentration camp, seventy miles away from Zagreb. The conversions were given, or forced, just moments before the camp’s Ustashi thugs set about the men with hammers and axes, killing them in such numbers and with such viciousness that even