[A]ccording to Generalmajor Edmund von Glaise‐Horstenau, the German Plenipotentiary General in Zagreb, Kvaternik had privately promised that the Ustaša would ultimately exterminate “the remaining one and a half million Serbs, including women and children.”26
His son Dido suggested that Anti‐Serbdom was “the quintessence of the Ustaša doctrine, its raison d’être.”27 More recently, Croat scholar Jozo Tomasevich has suggested that “only the resistance of the Partisans and, to a much lesser extent, Serb Četnici, saved the Serbs in the territory of the NDH from total disaster.”28
[…]
Principle Thirteen articulated one of the Ustaša’s “creation myths,” the centrality of the peasant,31 which, among other things, labeled the krajina Serbs who had migrated to the frontier between Bosnia and Croatia several hundred years earlier as immigrants and non‐Croats.32
[…]
The 17 April 1941 Law for the Defense of the People and the 30 April Law Decree on Citizenship provided the legal basis for the NDH’s policies towards Serbs, Jews, Roma, and unpatriotic Croats. Though the Ustaša would murder over 80% of the NDH’s Jews and Roma, their principal target was the Serbs. According to Milovan Žanić, the Minister of Justice:
This has to be a country of Croats and nobody else, and the method does not exist which we as Ustaša would not use in order to make this country truly Croatian and cleanse it from the Serbs, who have threatened us for centuries and would threaten us at the first opportunity.33
Such statements laid the groundwork, ideologically, for the genocide against the Serbs. […] Those who tainted Croatia’s purity could now be legally killed—which clearly applied to impure Serbs, now labeled “Greek Easterners,” because of their purported link to the East. […] Unofficially banned from civic and public social activities, Serbs had to wear blue armbands bearing a large P, for pravoslavac (Orthodox). This was later replaced by yellow tin neckplates.
[…]
In addition, the Vatican began receiving reports from [Axis] sources that claimed that as many as 300,000 Serbs had already been killed. In March 1942, for instance, Cardinal Eugène Tisserant told Nicola Rusinović, one of two “unofficial” Croatian representatives to the Vatican:
I know for a fact that it is the Franciscans themselves, as for example Father Simic of Knin, who have taken part in attacks against the Orthodox populations so as to destroy the Orthodox Church. In the same way you destroyed the Orthodox Church in Banja Luka. I know for sure that the Franciscans in Bosnia and Herzegovina have acted abominably, and this pains me. Such acts should not be committed by educated, cultured, civilized people, let alone by priests.49
Indeed, according to [Axis] and eyewitness reports, many Catholic clergymen in the NDH, particularly in Bosnia‐Herzegovina, encouraged, took part in, or led massacres and acts of brutal violence against Serbs.50 Pius XII refused to see Pavelić again, even privately.51 But in response to pleas on behalf of endangered Jews and Serbs, the Vatican issued only discrete recommendations that the Ustaša moderate its behavior.52
Click here for events that happened today (March 10).
1928: Yukio Araki, Axis pilot, was born in Miyamae.
1933: SA men publicly humiliated Jewish attorney Michael Siegel in München.
1937: At Guadalajara, the Spanish Nationalist invasion force attacked in two columns. The right‐hand (or western) army, which General José Moscardó Ituarte commanded, had little trouble in forcing the opposing Republican troops back, but the left‐hand (or eastern) army, which was composed of Italian Fascists and led by General Mario Roatta, experienced stiffening resistance after their capture of Brihuega on this date. Apart from that, SS‐Hauptsturmführers Walther Wüst spoke at a SS gathering in München as Reich Ambassador to China, Oskar Trautmann, met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Chonghui (Wang Chung‐hui) in Nanjing.
1938: Berlin ordered its military leaders to review Case Otto for the invasion against Austria.
1940: Reich Foreign Minister Ribbentrop met with Benito Mussolini in Fascist Italy, informing him of the Chancellery’s wish to invade France, and lobbied for him to conduct a joint‐invasion. Mussolini promised to join the reinvasion, but only when he felt that Fascist Italy was ready.
1941: The Axis’s 5th Panzer Regiment arrived in North Africa, and Axis submarine U‐552 sank Icelandish trawler Reykjaborg with surface weapons 460 miles southeast of Iceland at midnight, slaughtering twelve. Axis bombers assaulted Portsmouth, England overnight, slaughtering ten folk on shore, sinking minesweeping trawler HMT Revello (killing somebody) and damaging various Allied vessels. Axis units faced off Allied ones at Degehabur, Ethiopia, and the 5,972‐ton Axis steam merchant Widar was mined in the Ems Estuary near the Island of Borkum off the German coast.
1942: In the morning, Axis submarine U‐161 sank Canadian passenger ship Lady Nelson (slaughtering twenty‐five but leaving two hundred four alive) and British freighter Umtata (massacring four to the exclusion of one hundred sixty‐nine) off Port Castries, Saint Lucia. Overnight, Essen railways leading to Krupp factories experienced Allied bombing, involving six civilian deaths and twelve wounded.
1943: The Gestapo sent eleven Polish men and eleven Polish women from Bielsko to Auschwitz.
1944: One thousand five hundred one Jews arrived at Auschwitz from Drancy in Paris. The Axis registered 110 men and 80 women into the camp, but exterminated the remaining 1,311. Heinrich Himmler lifted various laws against Jewish and Roma people as their ‘evacuation and isolation’ had already been achieved, and Ar 234B jet aircraft took its first flight with civilian test pilot Joachim Carl in the cockpit.
1945: Over 25,000 folk evacuated from Kolberg in Pommern, Germany (now Kolobrzeg, Poland) by the Kriegsmarine. An Axis coke plant at Dortmund experienced an Allied bombing as the Wehrmachtbericht daily radio report mentioned Friedrich‐Wilhelm Müller, and Imperial troops entered Fort Bayard in Zhanjiang in the French treaty port of Kouang‐Tchéou‐Wan (Chinese: Guangzhouwan) in southern China, disarming French ones. Feldmarschall Kesselring relieved Feldmarschall von Rundstedt and the Axis evacuated Wesel as U.S. Third Army captured Bonn. Axis road and river traffic, railroad, gun positions, warehouses, airfields, and troop concentrations in central China experienced an Allied aerial assault.
1947: A court in Nanjing found Axis Lieutenant General Hisao Tani guilty of war crimes and sentenced him to death. Coincidentally, Axis commanding officer Harukichi Hyakutake expired.
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