The Ustasi plan called for the extermination of one portion of the Serbian population and for the forced conversion to Roman Catholicism of the other. in either case, the Serbs, as an Orthodox people, had no place in the Catholic Croatian state. This shows that in spite of the presence of widespread National Socialist "Aryan" racist propaganda in Croatia, the hatred for the Serbs was based on their being Orthodox. One Catholic periodical in lauding the head of the Ustasi state, Pavelic, praises the Ustasi "Crusader" (Krizar) organization as "Raised in the spirit of radical Catholicism, which knows no compromises so far as principles are concerned, that never knew what it meant to give in and abandon any part of the program of Croatian nationalism." Thus the program of Serbian conversion and/or liquidation, can be viewed as being in the tradition of the medieval crusades which were launched to stamp out the enemies of the Roman church. Archbishop Stepinac saw the Serbs as being schismatics and an evil "almost greater than Protestantism." Croatia was viewed as a bastion of Roman Catholicism in the Balkans. In 1944 a Berlin newspaper wrote: "An extraordinary ecclesiastical struggle is going on in Croatia. The Ustasi government is persecuting the Orthodox Church and is trying to convert as many Orthodox people as possible to Catholicism by means of intimidation and all kinds of devices. At the opening of the so-called Croat Assembly, Pavelic said that religious freedom did exist in principle, but it did not include the Orthodox Church. Apart from nationalistic reasons, Pavelic endeavored to represent himself as a missionary by virtue of his work on behalf of the church, thus desiring to acquire greater prestige. We still recall his visit to the pope at the time when he was just organizing his 'State'." On May 8, 1941, the infamous martyrdom of the Serbs of the Glina region began. The Ustasi began by killing seven Serbs. In the short time that followed, they arrested and murdered 560 people from that region. Then on May 11 a train carrying 120 Serbs stopped at Glina. They were then removed to the courtyard of a local Jewish merchant, where a number of them were killed, and the rest taken to an unknown destination. On May 4, the Orthodox bishop of Banja Luka, Platon, was ordered by the Ustasi to leave town immediately. He then appealed to the local Catholic bishop to intercede with the authorities to grant him several days to prepare. The Catholic bishop gave him his word, but during the night six Ustasi terrorists came and arrested the hierarch. Then, together with Father Dugan Subotic, he was led some six kilometers away to the village of Vrbanja, where they were all killed. Their bodies revealed how they had been tortured. They were shaved with a blunt knife, their eyes were put out, their ears and noses cut off, and fires were lit on their chests. Their remains were found in the Vrbanja river on May 23. A few days later the eighty-year old metropolitan of Bosnia, Peter (Zimonjic), was arrested by an Ustasi cleric. He was ordered to forbid the use of the Cyrillic alphabet, and when he refused, he was taken to Zagreb and later to the infamous concentration camp of Jasenovac, where he perished. On May 21, Bishop Sava (Trlajic) of Karlovac was arrested at his home. He was taken, together with three priests and thirteen other Orthodox Serbs, in a truck to Ogulin. There they were locked in a stable, beaten and tortured, and then taken to Gospic, from where on August 15, they were sent together with 2,000 other Serbs to the Adriatic island of Pag, where they were all killed. The metropolitan of Zagreb, Dositej, is also numbered with those who suffered martyrdom, having been beaten and tortured before his death. The martyrdom of these hierarchs and other clergy, the imprisonment of others, as well as the conditions of the occupation in general, caused the disintegration of all Orthodox ecclesiastical administration and open Church life in the territories of Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the Vojvodina from 1941 to 1945. In many villages the massacres followed a certain pattern: The Ustasi would arrive and assemble all the Serbs. They would then order them to convert to Catholicism. Those who refused, as the majority did, were told to assemble in their local Orthodox parish church. They would then lock them in the church and set it ablaze. In this manner many Orthodox men, women and children perished in scores of Serbian settlements.

• published: 13 Jan 2014
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