Too many people today have no idea about the 1st. Beast in the book of Revelation. Every reformer knew it was the Vatican / Papacy. If you think the NAZI's were bad the Ustasha might make you think again. This is a part of history I only recently learned. There is video evidence of these atrocities that I could only watch for 8 minutes. Title of video :" Jasenovac - Ustashe-Vatican genocide against Serbian Orthodox" . “The Ustasha operations were carried out with incredible acts of sadism and torture. In some cases entire villages were axed to death, in others men and women were hanged, crucified, burned to death or buried alive, body parts mutilated, decapitated, infants impaled or hammered. In the Orthodox church at Glina hundreds of Serbs were lured inside only to be slaughtered. Nazi Wehrmacht units attached to the Ustasha military were so impressed by the Ustashi’s methods for carrying out genocide that they established a commission to study the killings at Bjelovar, exhume the bodies, take photographs and write a report, later published under the title “Ustachenwerk bei Bjelovar.”(37) However, the top Nazi and Italian military authorities were concerned that they were dealing with out of control psychopaths who would destabilize their own regime, and thus Axis control of the Balkans.” “In his report of July 29, 1914 to the Austrian Foreign Minister Berchtold, the Austrian charge d’affairs to the Vatican, Count Palffy reported the views of the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Marry del Val, who, speaking on behalf of then Pope Pius X …expressed the hope that the monarchy would go through to the end… [and] the opinion that it is a pity that Serbia wasn’t made smaller much earlier…. The Pope and the Curia see Serbia as a destructive disease which is slowly eating away at the Monarchy to its very essence and which will eventually destroy it…. Austria is and remains a Catholic state par excellence, the strongest bulwark of Christ’s Church in this century.” “In 1940 an article appeared in the official Church publication “Catholic List” praising Mein Kampf and adding croatian death camp victimsthat there was no conflict between being a good Catholic and a good Nazi.” “There exists limits to love. The movement for ridding the world of Jews is a movement for restoring human dignity. All mighty God stands behind this movement.” — Ivan Sharich, Archbishop of Sarajevo “Kill all Serbs. And when you finish come here, to the Church, and I will confess you and free you from sin.” — Father Srecko Peric of the Gorica Monastery “I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so” — Adolph Hitler, to Gen. Gerhard Engel, 1941 “The Vatican had its ambassadorial Legate Ramiro Marcone in Zagreb throughout the war and his Secretary Guiseppe Masucci who spoke Serbo-Croatian fluently. Both of them visited concentration camps in Croatia (including Jasenovac) and met directly with those most responsible for the Holocaust there: Artukovic, Kvartnik, etc. “ What Is The Vatican Hiding? The Vatican’s Complicity in Genocide in Fascist Croatia: The Suppressed Chapter of Holocaust History. by Barry Lituchy Fourteen years ago the U.S. Government de-classified the now famous “La Vista Report” of May 15, 1947, a top-secret U.S. Army Intelligence report documenting the Vatican’s role in aiding the escape of numerous high-ranking Nazi war criminals, among them Ante Pavelic, fascist leader of wartime Croatia; Franz Stangel, Commander of Treblinka; Eduard Roschmann, “the Butcher of Riga”; Klaus Barbie, “the Butcher of Lyon”; SS General Walter Rauff, inventor of the mobile gas truck; Adolf Eichmann, “architect of the Holocaust”; and tens of thousands of others. Writing about the document prior to its release, internationally renowned Nazi hunter Charles R. Allen Jr. noted that in light of the revelations contained in this and other classified documents about the role of the Vatican in the Holocaust it would be logical and proper that a commission of inquiry into these concerns including Jewish and Catholic scholars ought to be established to locate and examine all documentation in all relevant archives so that collectively they may determine what role both the Vatican and US Intelligence played in aiding and abetting the escape of some of history’s most notorious murderers. (1) Logical, that is, if one assumed that the Vatican truly wanted to get to the bottom of what really happened, and maybe even try to atone for some of the injustices it committed. But fourteen years after the fact, with the release of the Vatican’s official statement on “the mistakes” of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust, we now can see how overly optimistic that assumption was. The “La Vista Report” was documentary evidence that opened a window on a suppressed chapter of the Holocaust: the role of the Vatican in the Holocaust. The Vatican’s report “We Remember, a Reflection on the Shoah (Holocaust),” issued this past March makes it abundantly clear that the Catholic Church is determined to do all that it can to shut that window as tightly as it can, and to keep it shut forever. Forget the idea of a commission-the Vatican has no intention of opening its archives or admitting anything other than “…the errors and failures of those sons and daughters of the Church” who did not “give every possible assistance to those being persecuted, and in particular … Jews.” […] The Vatican’s Role: A Suppressed Chapter of the Holocaust If we consider for a moment the manner in which the phenomenon of genocide has been treated in the twentieth century by both historians and governments, in general we can say that it often has been cynically exploited for political purposes. When it suited the Western powers, they criticized the genocide of Armenians by Turkey in World War I. But after Turkey became a bulwark against the Soviet Union and a military ally, this chapter of twentieth century history was suppressed-and largely remains so to this day. Most historians in this country are still unwilling to consider the mass extermination of Native American peoples or the deaths of millions of Africans during slavery as acts of genocide, legally sanctioned by this country. At the U.S. Holocaust Museum the history of the Holocaust has been tailored to fit the political fashions of the Clinton administration and the New World Order: hence, one finds the words “Serbs” and “Russians” are altogether absent from the official record of the Holocaust, and instead are replaced in the most obscene Orwellian manner by the words “Yugoslavs” and “Soviets.” A most vicious and ironic cover up, considering that the U.S. today does not even recognize the existence of these states or peoples. In all of these cases we see instances of the suppression of the history of genocide against certain peoples for clearly political purposes (not least of which is the desire to target these same peoples for future destruction). The role of the U.S. and British governments in protecting and employing Nazi and fascist mass murderers will also probably not be fully disclosed or incorporated into history books in our lifetimes. But nowhere has the truth been hijacked and suppressed more than in regard to that one chapter of the Holocaust that historians still hesitate to confront: the Vatican’s role in fascist Croatia. The story of the Holocaust in wartime Croatia is absent from many scholarly discussions of the Holocaust and from most Holocaust museums in this country. It is an odd omission considering the fact that if one defines the Holocaust from the first mass murders of civilians, then the Holocaust itself began in Croatia with the first murders of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies by the Croatian fascist regime in April 1941 — some nine months before the Wannsee Conference, more than two months before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. It is like a book whose first chapter is torn out. What then are the political reasons for the systematic and deliberate suppression of the history of the Holocaust in Croatia? There are several, and they are all connected to vital geo-political considerations of the leading Western powers. One is the leading role that Croatian fascist war criminals played in establishing the “ratline” escape routes of European fascism after the war and their enormous contributions to U.S. and British intelligence agencies during the Cold War. Another was the American and British governments’ refusal to return for trial and punishment to post-war Yugoslavia Croatian war criminals in particular, thus violating the Moscow Declaration of 1943 in which they had sworn to do so. Still another was the long range goal of U.S. and Western imperialism to partition and destroy Communist Yugoslavia, a plan which depended on the support of the thousands of escaped Croatian fascists subsidized by the U.S. for decades in anticipation of this long sought goal.(7) The need to suppress such information from the public and from political discourse is obvious: a self-proclaimed moral superiority based on genocide is a fraud the whole world can see. But all of these justifications pale in comparison to the importance placed on suppressing the truth about the Vatican’s and the Catholic Church’s role in the Holocaust in fascist Croatia. For in Croatia, the question of what role the Catholic Church played in the Holocaust is not limited to the relatively minor issues of whether they did or spoke out enough against it-here the question concerns the role of the Church and the Vatican in running concentration camps and in carrying out a religiously inspired genocide. Nowhere is the role of the Vatican more worthy of investigation, and nowhere has that role received less attention. Vatican Sponsorship of Fascism To understand the Vatican’s role and motives in the Holocaust in Yugoslavia we need to understand the phenomenon of genocide as a product of modern imperialism. Genocide is a direct consequence of imperialist wars of conquest aimed at territorial expansion for economic, political and military domination. After World War I the Vatican was determined, like its fascist partners of Italy and Germany, to destroy the Yugoslav state and reconstitute in that region the power and influence the Papacy had lost with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The Yugoslav state emerged out of the century long struggle of the peoples of the Balkans to overcome colonial oppression. The idea of a federation of Balkan peoples had its roots in the struggles against first Turkish and then Austrian-German and other Western domination. It was born of the realism of Balkan political leaders in the nineteenth century that small nations by themselves cannot defend themselves against the great imperialist powers, but that together they might be able to do so. It was this ideal that Yugoslavia in a truncated form represented, and that German and Italian fascism were determined to annihilate.(8) The Vatican was also determined to destroy Yugoslavia, though for its own reasons. The dismemberment of the Catholic Austro-Hungarian Empire was a catastrophe for the Catholic Church. The Vatican was no longer the supreme religious authority in Central and Eastern Europe and had lost the state foundations on which citizens owed a dual allegiance to Church and state. Its disappearance marked a sharp decline in the Church’s world power and influence. Worse still was the replacement of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with states dominated by other religions in which Catholics sank to a minority status. The worst of the bunch was Yugoslavia which was ruled by a King of the Serbian Eastern Orthodox faith, a church that the Vatican viewed as a “schismatic sect.” From the Vatican’s point of view, this schismatic-sect was a cancer, to be eliminated. The Vatican had done all it could to support the Austrian and German war effort in 1914 against Serbia and considered Serbia as the “evil” behind the war. In his report of July 29, 1914 to the Austrian Foreign Minister Berchtold, the Austrian charge d’affairs to the Vatican, Count Palffy reported the views of the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Marry del Val, who, speaking on behalf of then Pope Pius X …expressed the hope that the monarchy would go through to the end… [and] the opinion that it is a pity that Serbia wasn’t made smaller much earlier…. The Pope and the Curia see Serbia as a destructive disease which is slowly eating away at the Monarchy to its very essence and which will eventually destroy it…. Austria is and remains a Catholic state par excellence, the strongest bulwark of Christ’s Church in this century. The demolition of this bulwark would mean for the Church the loss of its firmest support. It would lose its strongest defender. Therefore, for this reason, just as it is necessary for Austria, for the sake of its self-preservation to get its organism rid, if necessary by force, of the evil which is eating away at it, so it is indirectly necessary for the Church to do everything that could serve this purpose.(9) In August 1914 the Vatican encouraged its clergy to rally the Catholic populations of Croatia and Slovenia to fight Serbia, portraying the conflict as a holy war against the very “enemy of Jesus,” i.e.: the Serbs. The Bishop of Ljubljana, Anton Jeglich, called on the Slovenian soldiers…to take arms and defend Catholic Austria and our Catholic imperial family from the sworn enemy of Jesus himself….let us fight the enemies of God, against the enemies of Catholic Austria, against the enemies of the Catholic Habsburg house.”(10) Combined with the Catholic fanaticism encouraged by the Vatican was the extreme racial violence expressed toward the Serbs throughout Austria-Hungary and summed up in the popular jingle of August 1914: “Alle Serben mussen sterben!”(11) This blending of Catholic fanaticism and racial violence toward the Serbs born in the last days of the Habsburg Empire and sponsored by the Vatican prefigured the later emergence of Croatian fascism. Indeed, in World War I, one out of every four male Serbs would be killed-a dress rehearsal, one might say, for the greater genocide to come. Having lost its “strongest bulwark” with the end of the first World War, the Vatican turned to Mussolini and fascist Italy to defend it and its long range goals. Likewise, the Vatican threw its support behind Mussolini’s imperialist ambitions for fascist Italy. The aims of the two Italian dictatorships were quite similar. Both were implacable enemies of the Yugoslav state seeking its destruction: the Pope wished to carve out a Catholic majority state from its northern half; Mussolini sought to annex parts of Slovenia, the Dalmatian coast, and Montenegro, along with Albania and Kosovo, so that he might “turn the Adriatic into an Italian lake.” The origins of fascism in the Balkans can be traced directly back to Mussolini and the imperialist ambitions of fascist Italy, as well as to the generous support provided to them by the Catholic Church in Croatia. It was Mussolini’s fascist state that originally financed and sponsored nationalist extremist political movements in the Balkans, transforming them ideologically and organizationally into full blown genocidal, fascist parties. According to the diary of Mussolini’s foreign minister Ciano, the Italian government financed Croatian fascism at the level of around 25 million lire a year in the 1920’s and 1930’s.(12) By 1934 Italy’s investments in Croatian fascism paid handsome dividends when on October 9th King Alexander of Yugoslavia was assassinated by Croatian fascists in Marseilles, France along with the French Foreign Minister Barthou, both of them obstacles to the fascist domination of Europe. By 1934 Italy’s investments in Croatian fascism paid handsome dividends when on October 9th King Alexander of Yugoslavia was assassinated by Croatian fascists in Marseilles, France along with the French Foreign Minister Barthou, both of them obstacles to the fascist domination of Europe.