ADSS 8.430 Giuseppe Marcone to Maglione: Croatian Jews

The first series of reports from Abbot Giuseppe Marcone OSB, Apostolic Visitor to Croatia appear in ADSS from July 1942, nearly a year after his arrival in Zagreb the previous August (ADSS 5.36).  There is a clear pattern that emerges in the documents showing Marcone's work in attempting to help the Jews of Croatia.  Without further material it is hard to speak of Marcone's work as overly energetic, even when the historical contexts of Ante Pavelic's regime are taken into consideration.  Marcone does not appear to have been fooled by the murderous nature of the Ustasha, but he does appear to have maintained a position of strict neutrality.

Requests to do what he could to help Croatian Jews were forwarded to the Visitor by Cardinal Maglione (ADSS 8.238, 289, 502) and Marcone replied with reports indicating what he had done to help (ADSS 8.347, 537, 557).  Domenico Tardini noted the concerns of Niko Mirosevic-Sorgo (1884-1966), the Yugoslav ambassador to the Holy See, about Croatian Jews in Italian occupied Dalmatia threatened with possible deportation by Croatian authorities.  "Of interest to Marcone" appears at the end of the ambassador's letter. (ADSS 8.450)

There was difficulty obtaining reliable information about what was happening to Croatia's Jews in the summer of 1942, which is hard to credit given the amount of information travelling between Vatican diplomats that spoke of unprecedented murder "in the East".  As we see below and in the following post, Marcone approached two of the architects of the murder of the Jews of Croatia - Andrija Artukovic and Eugene Kvaternik - asking for their advice and  help.  In an almost surreal moment, Marcone writes that his secretary, Fr Giuseppe Masucci OSB, wrote a letter of protest to the Croatian government at the suggestion of Artukovic, drafter of the anti-Jewish laws and founder of the Croatian concentration camps! (ADSS 8.430; see below)

Marcone did work with the Chief Rabbi of Zagreb, Miroslav Freiberger (1904-1943) before he was transported to and murdered in Auschwitz.  One of the plans was to try and send Jewish children out of Croatia to Turkey (ADSS 8.514) and Italy (ADSS 8.566).  Nothing appears to come of the plan.  Freiberger wrote in gratitude for the work that Marcone was doing, which indicates the Visitor was seriously trying to help. (ADSS 8.495).ADSS 8.430

Reference: Report number 417/42 (AES 5766/42, original)

Location and date: Zagreb, 17.07.1942

Summary statement: Difficulty in obtaining information about Croatian Jews.

Language: Italian

Text:
In response to the letter number 48473 of 18.04.1942 (1) I have the honour to report as follows.
In recent months requests for information about the Jews made to the Croatian authorities have met an inexplicable silence. At the suggestion of Dr [Andrija] Artukovic, [1899-1988] Minister of the Interior [04.1941-10.1942], my secretary [Giuseppe Masucci] made a protest in my absence, after which a response was made …

References:
(1) Not published.
(2) Information omitted.

NYT Obituary of Andrija Artukovic.

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/19/obituaries/andrija-artukovic-88-nazi-ally-deported-to-yugoslavia-is-dead.html


Andrija Artukovic, 88, Nazi Ally Deported to Yugoslavia, Is Dead


By RALPH BLUMENTHAL


Published: January 19, 1988


Andrija Artukovic, a former leader of the Nazi puppet state of Croatia who was extradited from the United States to Yugoslavia, died Saturday in a prison hospital in Zagreb, where he had been condemned to death for mass murder, the Yugoslav press agency announced yesterday. He was 88 years old and had won a stay of execution on the ground of poor health.


''Convicted war criminal Andrija Artukovic died of illness,'' the press agency, Tanyug, said. It did not specify the ailment but the court had previously found him to be suffering from sclerosis, heart ailments and anemia.


Mr. Artukovic's son, Radoslav, a stockbroker in Los Angeles, said yesterday that when he last saw his father in prison in December he was down to 95 pounds and was suffering from Alzheimer's disease. He said his father ''was only guilty of being on the wrong side of World War II.''


Mr. Artukovic, a longtime resident of Seal Beach, Calif., south of Los Angeles, was the highest-ranking fascist official known to have found refuge in the United States after the war. He was the Interior Minister and then Justice and Religion Minister in the government of the Croatian fascist dictator Ante Pavelic. The postwar Yugoslav Government charged Mr. Artukovic with ordering the machine-gunning of hundreds of civilians and with responsibility for the killing of more than 700,000 other Serbs, Jews, gypsies and Croats.


Charged With Killings


As the chief justice official in the German-created puppet state of Croatia, Mr. Artukovic was accused of drafting racial laws modeled after the Nazi statutes and setting up a network of concentration camps. He was directly charged with the reprisal slayings of civilians in the village of Vrgin Most.


After his long-disputed extradition to Yugoslavia in February 1986, he was tried for war crimes and convicted after a one-month trial during which he maintained his innocence. He said he never knew of any killings and had never been to Vrgin Most. The Government postponed execution of the death sentence last April.


Mr. Artukovic's 35-year effort to stave off Yugoslav demands for his return spun an extraordinary legal chronicle that illustrated both the exhaustiveness of American judicial review and the politicization of American courts, in the opinion of some experts.


After the war, according to a Justice Department investigation, Mr. Artukovic escaped to the British zone of Austria where he was questioned and inexplicably released. He fled next to Switzerland, where he adopted the alias Alois Anich, and then to Ireland.


In 1948, with his wife and three children, he traveled to California on a 90-day tourist visa that was to sustain his residency in America for the next 38 years. Identity Is Learned


As early as 1949, the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Los Angeles learned his true identity but took no action against him.


By 1951 the Yugoslavs, who had been hunting him since 1946, learned he was in California and disclosed the story to the newspapers. Mr. Artukovic was then arrested. But Croatian emigre groups and influential clerics petitioned for his release and he was let out of jail pending an extradition hearing.


An aide to Deputy Attorney General Peyton Ford instructed Immigration that Mr. Artukovic ''should not be sent to apparently certain death at the hands of the Yugoslav Communists.'' In fact, he added, ''if his only crime was against Communists, I think he should be given asylum in the U.S.''


Mr. Artukovic was ordered deported in 1952 and the Board of Immigration Appeals upheld the ruling. But other court decisions threw the question into doubt and the case seesawed back and forth until 1957 when the Supreme Court sent the case back for an Immigration rehearing. A commissioner then ruled that the Yugoslav affidavits charging Mr. Artukovic with murder were unreliable and alleged, at most, political crimes. The Case Is Revived


Yugoslavia's effort to try Mr. Artukovic languished for nearly two more decades until the Immigration Service revived the case under pressure in the late 1970's. The Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations finally won the extradition order two years ago.


Mr. Artukovic was born Nov. 29, 1899, in Croatia, then part of Austria-Hungary, studied law and grew active in the Croatian separatist movement. In 1934 he was charged with others in the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia in Marseilles but he was aquitted. Afterward he fled Yugoslavia, working with the Nazis in Germany, Hungary and Austria until Hitler's formation of Croatia in 1941.


In addition to his son, he is survived by his widow, Anamarie, and four daughters, Visnja, Zorica, Ruzica and Nada, who live in California and Arizona.


The Yugoslav Government said Mr. Artukovic's remains would be disposed of in accordance with the death penalty, apparently meaning the body would be cremated and the ashes scattered to avoid creating a memorial.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrija_Artukovi%C4%87  

Andrija Artukovic seated far left next to

Abbot Marcone and Archbishop Stepinac.

 

1986 Andrija Artukovic on trial for war crimes in Zagreb.

Pavelic, Croatia and the Vatican

Over the last few months I have been reading my way through Volume 8 of ADSS.  It is a selection of documents that deal with the Vatican's attempt to help the victims of the war, especially the Jews.  I have posted a series of documents on the attempts made to stop the deportations from Slovakia.  In these texts we have seen how the Vatican used both its diplomatic efforts alongside the work of its representatives "in the field" combined with local and international influences. 

Between March and October 1942 about 58,000 Slovakian Jews were deported, most were sent to Auschwitz where they were murdered.  Deportations did not resume until September 1944 when the Red Army was approaching the eastern borders.

Slovakia's neighbour, the German-puppet state of Croatia, had many similarities.  Both were ruled by men who claimed legitimacy in part through Catholicism, both sought papal approval for their regimes, both employed German-style antisemitism as government policy, both used police and militia as enforcers of anti-Jewish laws, both exercised state-sanctioned persecution, imprisonment, exclusion, expropriation and extermination of Jews, and both relied in varying measures on the tacit approval of at least some of the Catholic clergy.

Croatia was different in a number of respects - all of them marking the Ustasha regime of Ante Pavelic as one of the most bloody and sadistic episodes not only of World War Two and the Holocaust, but of modern European history.  Not even the Balkan "ethnic cleansing" of the 1990s came close to the horrors of the Ustasha.  One indicator was the revulsion expressed by the different members of the German and Italian military, as well as the Gestapo, to the means by which the Ustasha murdered their victims.  The history of the mass murder of Jews, Orthodox Christian Serbs, and largely Catholic and Orthodox Roma by the Ustasha and their collaborators is by any standards sickening reading.

The Vatican's diplomatic involvement with the Pavelic regime began with the request from Pavelic for a papal representative in Zagreb.  Pavelic visited Rome in May 1941 in part to seek Pius XII's blessing for the new Croatian state as well as score the propaganda coup of having papal recognition done on the world stage.  Pavelic was to be disappointed on both counts. 

Pius has been widely criticised for receiving the dictator; but what choice did he have?  Having proclaimed neutrality at the outbreak of the war, the pope could not very well refuse to receive a head of state, even a Nazi puppet such as Pavelic who made so much of his Catholicism.  Nonetheless, the Vatican did move to ensure that the visit was as low key as possible. 

ADSS provides us with a timeline of how the Holy See saw the Pavelic visit and what was possible, what was probable, and what would certainly not happen.

The references come from Volumes 4: June 1940-June 1941 and 5: July 1941- October 1942.

4.348  16.05.1941  Note of Giovanni Battista Montini, Secretariat of State: Pavelic had requested an audience with the pope.  Pius will grant a private audience. It was standard Vatican diplomatic practice not to grant formal diplomatic recognition to a state created during wartime or to recognise altered borders of a state made during war.  While Pavelic was, as far as the Croatian and German governments concerned, the head of state, the Vatican still recognised the Yugoslavian government in exile in London as the legitimate government and accorded Sorgo Mirosevic (1884-1966) full diplomatic status as its ambassador.  Therefore there would be no discussion of "recognition" of the new Croatian state.

4.351  17.05.1941 Note of Domenico Tardini, Secretariat of State: Making reference to the previous note, Tardini writes that the situation is "delicate".  The question was how to grant the audience - it would be diplomatically foolish to deny one since Pavelic made much of his Catholicism - without it becoming a political spectacle.

4.352  17.05.1941 Note of Tardini:  The pope will receive Pavelic alone in a private meeting.  The diplomatic language was "without delegation".  Pavelic could arrive at the Vatican in whatever way he chose, but once inside, he was going to be treated as a private person, a Catholic meeting with the pope.  There would be no formal agenda, no photos, no exchange of gifts and no reception with honour guards, papal nobility etc.  It would be as plain as possible.

4.356  18.05.1941 Note of Montini:  Pavelic and his entourage were received by the pope in a general audience - ie, as a group of Catholics who have come to Rome to see the pope.

4.357  18.05.1941 Note of Montini: The rector of St Jerome [the Croatian National College in Rome] Monsignor Magjerec will fly the Croatian flag during Pavelic's visit.

4.358  18.05.1941 Note of Montini: Pavelic's audience with the pope.  Pius XII received Pavelic as a "son of the Church".  Any recognition of the new state must wait until the end of the war.

19/20.05.1941 L'Osservatore Romano published a full account of the Pavelic visit.

4.361  18.05.1941 Cardinal Luigi Maglione, Secretary of State to all Nuncios and Apostolic Delegates: Circular emphasising the apolitical nature of Pavelic's visit to the pope. The fact that this was sent to all the papal representatives is very significant.  Rome wanted no misunderstanding about the visit - it was private and was in no way an approval of either Pavelic's regime or the new state.  Diplomatically, this was a very begrudging acceptance of something considered very unpleasant and unwanted.  I have no doubt Pavelic would have been made aware of the circular.

4.364  19.05.1941 Maglione to all Nuncios and Apostolic Delegates: More information on the audience granted to Pavelic.  Pavelic and his entourage were received by the pope.  Pius and Pavelic then went into another room for a private conversation.  At the end of this the pope returned to greet the delegation.  The customary courtesy call to the Secretary of State did not happen.  This reinforces what was mentioned above and also points to the high degree of sensitivity the Vatican knew surrounded the visit.  Pius knew the visit would generate hostility from many quarters.  This is possibly the first recorded "public relations management" exercise by the Vatican.  Misinformation was not slow to appear.  See 4.373, 379,407

4.369  21.05.1941 Note of Montini: Sorgo Mirosevic, the Yugoslav minister, requested L’Osservatore Romano publish the precise details of the audience granted to Pavelic.  Reports from French Radio suggest the Pope gave official recognition to the new state and spoke of a concordat.

4.385  02.06.1941 Note of Tardini:  Sorgo Mirosevic had made a protest at news of a papal representative being appointed for Croatia.  The protest was rejected.

4.386  02.06.1941 Sorgo Mirosevic to Secretariat of State:  Official protest at the news that the Vatican will appoint a papal representative to Croatia. While Mirosevic's protest is understandable, the Vatican's position can not be ignored.  There was no advantage for the pope is he refused the opportunity of having a representative in Croatia.  It was a case of realpolitik.  A diplomat of Mirosevic's experience would certainly understood this.  The protest was a diplomatic formality.

4.392  07.06.1941 Note of Tardini:  The pope has promised the Archbishop of Zagreb, Alojzije Stepinac, that he will appoint a papal representative to Croatia.  I have written about this in an earlier post.

4.400  13.06.1941 Note of Tardini:  Pavelic has expressed dissatisfaction that Croatia is to receive a nunciature while Croatia is to be given an Apostolic Visitor who is only "an observer".  This was not accurate.  Giuseppe Burzio, the papal representative in Slovakia, held the rank of charge d'affaires, which was less than ambassadorial rank.  The nunciature was not restored until after the war.

4.404  14.06.1941 Secretariat of State to Sorgo Mirosevic:  The Vatican's formal response to Mirosevic's protest of 02.06.1941.

ADSS 5.17  22.07.1941 Note of Tardini:  (See to 5 and 9).  The papal representative to Croatia will not have the title of Apostolic Visitor because of papal diplomatic policy regarding states created during war. Evidently there was a change of mind as the title was retained.

5.21  25.07.1941 Maglione to Stepinac:  Abbot Giuseppe Marcone has been appointed as the papal envoy to Croatia.

Marcone's despatches from Croatia mirrored much of what Giuseppe Burzio was reporting from Slovakia, namely a regime with a murderous policy towards Jews and others deemed unworthy of participation in the building of the new Croatia.

Mourning Pavelic: Shame in Croatia

I have been following the controversy over memorial Masses for Ante Pavelic the now-long dead leader of Fascist Ustasha Croatia.  Efraim Zuroff is right in expressing his surprise at the lack of reaction to a very provocative act. 

"Controversy" is hardly the right word, since outside of a few media articles scattered here and there, the memorials have generated no reaction outside of The Jerusalem Post, an article in the English language Croatian Times, some of the more fringe hate groups and the academic server, Holocaust H-Net.  Perhaps things will develop over the next few days - I hope so.

Pavelic was a mass murderer of Jews, Roma and Serbs.  He sent his thugs into Serbia to murder Christians as much as Jews.  The Ustasha were so brutal and bloody in their killing frenzies that even the SS counselled moderation.  The Catholic Church was, to its shame, complicit in more than some of the killing, but that may be discussed here at a later time.  What is certain is that the pope, Pius XII knew something of the involvement of Catholic clergy in the murder rampages.

Interestingly, the article in the Croatian Times is a very abbreviated version of the original article and contains a defense from Zvonko Franc of the masses.  It would appear that Franc has little understanding of the canon law demand that the Mass never be used as a means of propaganda or that any memorial service could be seen as a source of scandal for "the Faithful".

The priest mentioned, Vjekoslav Lasic, is a Dominican friar of the Croatian province who has a reputation for supporting the memory of the Pavelic state.  He has travelled throughout Croatian communities abroad, including Australia, giving succour to Croats who yearn for "the good old days", that is, before Tito and Communism.  Lasic is currently listed as a "reserve councillor" for the Dominican province, which suggests that he is regarded as being in good standing with the Order.  Ironically, the motto of the Order of Friars Preacher, is "Veritas" - truth.

Nazi memorial in Croatia a disgrace to Europe



By Efraim Zuroff


04/01/2012


A service for Hitler is unthinkable. So why is the world quiet in response to a service for Ante Paveli?

Imagine for a minute that memorial masses were held in two major cities in Germany on the anniversary of the death of Adolf Hitler. Needless to say, such a ceremony would arouse fury, indignation, and widespread protests not only in Germany, but throughout the entire world. Last week, the local equivalent of such an event took place in Croatia, but instead of anger and demonstrations, not a single word of protest was heard from anywhere in the country.


I am referring to the December 28 memorial masses conducted in Zagreb and Split (and perhaps elsewhere as well) to mark the 51st anniversary of the death of Ante Paveli, the head of state of the infamous Independent State of Croatia, created by the Nazis and their Italian allies in 1941.


Following its establishment, rule was turned over to the local fascist movement, the Ustasha, headed by its Poglavnik (leader) Ante Paveli.



During the entire course of its brief existence (1941- 1945), the Ustasha sought to rid the country (which consisted of the area of today’s Croatia plus most of Bosnia-Herzegovina) of all its minorities, as well as their local political opponents. In order to do so, they established a network of concentration camps all over the country, the largest and most notorious of which was Jasenovac, located on the banks of the Sava River, southeast of Zagreb. There, many tens of thousands of innocent civilians were murdered in a variety of brutal ways, which earned the camp the nickname of the “Auschwitz of the Balkans.”


To this day, there continue to be disputes regarding the total number of civilians murdered by the Ustasha, but the number is certainly no fewer than several hundred thousand, primarily Serbs, along with Jews, Roma and anti-fascist Croats. And while all those who participated in these atrocities bear criminal responsibility, the individual with the greatest culpability was undoubtedly Ante Pavelic, who headed the most lethal regime in Axis-dominated Europe.

THE MEMORIAL masses to honor Pavelic, who died in Spain in 1959 from wounds suffered in an assassination attempt two years earlier, mark a renewal of a tradition which began in the 1990s following the reestablishment of Croatian independence. In the wake of the conviction in
Zagreb of Jasenovac commandant Dinko Sakic and in response to protests by the Wiesenthal Center, the mass was stopped and the priest responsible,Vjekoslav Lasic, left Croatia.

Unfortunately, however, Lasic returned to Zagreb a few years ago and renewed his neo-fascist activity with impunity. At the funeral of Sakic, who insisted on being buried in his Ustasha uniform although in prison for his World War II crimes, it was Lasic who administered final rites.
According to the Dominican priest, although Dinko Sakic did not observe all the Ten Commandments (Thou shalt not murder?), he was a model for all Croatians, and every Croat should be proud of his name.

The question now is, how does such an event to honor the memory of one of the biggest mass murderers of World War II pass with nary a word of protest or condemnation? The obvious address for such indignation would be in Croatia itself, where many people fought with Tito’s partisans against the Ustasha, and a significant sector of the population have a strong anti-fascist tradition. But the same question applies outside the country as well.

Croatia is well on its way to membership in the European Union (slated for 2013), a membership which is ostensibly contingent on the acceptance of EU values and norms. Is a memorial mass for one of Europe’s worst war criminals compatible with EU membership?

The sad truth is that in this respect, the European Union has failed miserably in dealing with the resurgence of neo-fascism and the promotion of Holocaust distortion in its post-Communist members. Once admitted to the EU (and NATO), countries like Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Hungary and Romania have begun to take active steps to rewrite their World War II histories, minimizing or attempting to hide the highly-significant role played by their nationals in Holocaust crimes, with barely a word of protest or condemnation from Brussels.

Instead of actively combating the Prague Declaration of June 3, 2008, which promotes the canard of historical equivalency between Nazi and Communist crimes and undermines the justified status of the Holocaust as a unique case of genocide, the EU has failed to adequately respond to this dangerous challenge to the accepted Western narrative of World War II and

its tragic consequences.

I wish I could conclude with the good news that Israel and the Jewish world have responded appropriately, but unfortunately that is not the case. These developments have been purposely ignored by the Israeli government, which under Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman refuses to

respond to the assault on our past in those countries which have evinced no particular interest in championing the Palestinian cause.


Last week’s masses in honor of Ante Pavelic are a mockery of Christian values and an insult to all the victims of the Ustasha, their relatives, friends, and people of morality and conscience the world over. The time has come for effective protests from within Croatia, as well as from the European Union, the United States and Canada, Israel and the Jewish world.


That is the minimum that we owe the victims of that notorious mass murderer.






The writer is the chief Nazi-hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and director of its Israel Office. His most recent book is, Operation Last Chance; One Man’s Quest to Bring Nazi Criminals to Justice,  (Palgrave/Macmillan).

Dinko Sakic in Ustasha uniform, with wife, concentration camp guard, Nada Lubaric, 1943

Vjekoslav Lasic OP presides at the burial of Sakic in July 2008

 
 
 

Abbot Marcone and Croatia

I have been rather busy of late and been kept away from blogging.  Just before work commitments went into top gear, this article appeared in L'Osservatore Romano.  It looks at the Apostolic Visitor to Croatia, Abbot Giuseppe Marcone OSB, (1882-1952).  The Ustasha dictator, Ante Pavelic (1889-1959) desperately wanted Vatican recognition of his regime.  His visit to Rome in May 1941 (See ADSS 4.348, 351, 352, 356, 358) was a tight-rope exercise for the Vatican.

ADSS makes it clear that the pope wanted to avoid anything that would create an impression that the Holy See recognised the Croatian state or that is endorsed the policies of the Ustasha.  It is not difficult to see how these impressions were possible.  It mattered little that Pavelic's visit had none of the trappings associated with diplomatic visits; the fact remained that the pope received him.  To be fair to Pius, he had little choice.

One of the outcomes of the Pavelic visit was the appointment of Marcone as an Apostolic Visitor, a promise Pius made to Archbishop Stepinac in June 1941 (ADSS 4.392).  It was not until July 1941 that the pope appointed Marcone as Apostolic Visitor (ADSS 5.21), and August when the Visitor arrived in Zagreb (ADSS 5.36).

Marcone held no formal diplomatic credentials and was a guest of the Croatian government, nothing more.  His role was to watch the concerns of the Church in Croatia.  Nonetheless, Marcone not only watched Catholic interests, but also the growing rabid antisemitism in Croatia.  On 23 August 1941 he wrote to Cardinal Maglione, the Secretary of State, about the marking of Jews that had just begun in Croatia.  He also mentioned the hatred Jews were exposed to.  Maglione's instructions to Marcone (ADSS 8.139) were basically to do whatever he could to help while keeping out of anything that could compromise his official status.  I will post my translation of this document in the next post.  The Cardinal also added that Marcone was to ensure that the clergy kept out of politics and remain neutral.

Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac

and

Abbot Giuseppe Marcone,

Apostolic Visitor to Croatia

****************************

The papers of Apostolic Visitor, Giuseppe Ramiro Marcone reveal the Holy See’s commitment to helping Jews persecuted by Nazis

2011-08-09 L’Osservatore Romano

While the Second World War was blazing on the European continent, Benedictine abott, Monsignor Giuseppe Ramiro Marcone, was sent, in the summer of 1941, by the Holy See to the Croatian episcopate, as an Apostolic Visitor, to look after the Catholic interests in that country.

Detailed instructions from the Secretary of State of the Holy See clearly state that Abbot Marcone’s mission had “a completely spiritual and religious aim…from which it follows that the Most Reverend Abbot Marcone visiting the Kingdom of Croatia…will endeavor to avoid official contact with the governing authorities, in such a way that his mission be, and appear to be, in accordance with the desires of the Holy See, of a strictly religious nature...Particularly, the Most Reverend Prelate will advise and support Monsignor Stepinac and the Episcopate in combating the evil influence of neo-pagan propaganda which could be exercised in the organization of the new state.”

Only three weeks after his arrival, the diligent Apostolic Visitor sent a detailed report to the Holy See in which he described, in an abundance of detail, the precarious condition of the Jews in Croatia. The Roman Curia did not delay in replying, and on September 3rd, a letter from the Secretariat of State reached him containing precise directives which the Pope’s representative was advised to follow scrupulously: “Moderation is recommended regarding the treatment of Jews who reside in Croatian territory.” I

In reality, as Marcone’s secretary, Don Giuseppe Masucci, writes in his diary of the events, beginning on February 10, 1942, Abbot Marcone was asked to approach, with a certain swiftness, the Ustasa authorities to plead the cause of the Jews who were about to be taken to concentration camps; the prelude to the wicked “final solution to the Jewish problem.” S.S. Captain, Franz Abromeit, had been sent to Croatia to oversee the transfer of 5,500 Jews who – between August 13-20, 1942 – were removed from Croatian concentration camps and put on five trains destined for Auschwitz.

Seriously worried for the precipitation of events, Chief Rabbi of Zagreb, Miroslav Shalom Freiberger, in the late afternoon of February 10, 1942, decided to immediately call on the Pope’s representative. In Don Giuseppe Masucci’s diary the entry reads, “Chief Rabbi Dr. Freiberger presented himself to me at 6 pm, out of breath, and communicated to me that the city is full of notices announcing that all Jews, without distinction, must present themselves to the police. I told him that I would ask to speak with the Chief of Police the following day, and ask for an explanation. He added that the situation was very urgent because they would have already arrested everyone that night. So I telegraphed Dido (Eugen Kvaternik) saying that I had an extremely urgent matter to discuss with him and that there was no time to waste; he told me that I could come at 7 pm. At 7 pm I went to him and at length spoke, implored him and begged on behalf of these unfortunate Jews. I told him that mixed marriages should not be considered Jewish, but as part of the Catholic Church.”

The Police Chief , “was fairly pensive and immediately gave the order to publish in the newspapers that the notices were annulled. That all Jews in a mixed marriage should not be further disturbed, and that those who were still alive in concentration camps should be immediately released.” Abbot Marcone then took it upon himself to organize the transport of a small group of Jewish children – among whom was the son of the Chief Rabbi of Zagreb – through Hungary and Romania to safety in neutral Turkey.

As a sign of his gratitude, Rabbi Freiberger sent a letter to the Pontiff, on August 4, 1942, in which he expressed his deepest thanks for the sacrifice of many Catholic religious in assisting the Jews, and hoped that the Vatican would continue in this direction: “Full of respect, I dare come before the throne of Your Holiness to express, as Grand Rabbi of Zagreb and spiritual head of the Jews in Croatia, my most profound gratitude, and that of my congregation for the goodness, without limits, that the representatives of the Holy See and the heads of the church have shown to our poor brothers.”

By Giovanni Preziosi