GERMAN AGGRESSIONS AND THE JESUITS
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these practising Catholics who were the Oustachis inflicted on their poor victims." The English journalist J.A. Voigt wrote: "Croatian politics consisted of massacres, deportations or conversions. The number of those who were massacred reaches hundreds of thousands. The massacres were accompanied by the most bestial tortures. The "Oustachis" put out their victims' eyes and made garlands with them, which they wore, or presented as mementos".(86) "In Croatia, the Jesuits implanted political clericalism".(87) It is the present invariably offered by the famous Company to the nations which welcome it. The same author adds: "With the death of the great Croatian tribune, Raditch, Croatia loses its main opponent to political clericalism which will embrace the mission of the Catholic action defined by Friedrich Muckermann. This German Jesuit, well-known before Hitler's advent, made it known, in 1928, in a book whose foreword was written by Monseigneur Pacelli, then apostolic nuncio in Berlin. Muckermann expressed himself as follows: "The pope appeals in favour of the Catholic Action's new crusade. He is the guide who carries the standard of Christ's Kingdom... The Catholic Action means the gathering of world Catholicism. It must live its heroic age... The new epoch can be acquired for Christ only through the price of blood".(88) Ten years after this was written, the one who wrote the foreword of the Jesuit Father Muckermann's book sat on the throne of Saint-Peter and, during his pontificate, "the blood for Christ" literally flowed in Europe; but Croatia suffered the worst of the atrocious deeds of that "new epoch". There, not only were the priests advocating all out slaughter from the pulpit, but some even marched at the head of the murderers. Others held, apart from their sacred ministry, official posts as prefects or chiefs of the "Oustachi" police, even as chiefs of concentration camps where horrors were not outdone by even Dachau or Auschwitz. To this bloody list of honours, we must enter the names of the Abbe Bozidar Bralo, the priest Dragutin Kamber, the Jesuit Lackovic and the Abbe Yvan Salitch, secretaries to Monseigneur Stepinac, the priest Nicolas Bilogrivic, etc... and numberless Franciscans; one of the worst of these was Brother Miroslav Filipovitch, main organiser of those massacres, chief of and executioner at the concentration camp of Jasenovac, the most hideous of these earthly hells. Brother Filipovitch's fate was the same as Monseigneur Tiso's, in Slovakia: when Liberation came, he was hanged, wearing his cassock. But many of his rivals, not very anxious to win the palm of the martyr, fled to (86) "Nineteenth Century and After", August 1943. (87) and (88) Herve Lauriere, op.cit., pp.82,84,85.