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Even during the Second World War, the Allies repeatedly considered how the perpetrators of the most serious war crimes should be punished after the end of the conflict. Thus, in 1942, Winston Churchill proposed summary executions, Stalin a year later indiscriminate execution of “fifty to one hundred thousand German officers”, but after a series of negotiations in Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam, an agreement was reached in London on August 8, 1945. the establishment of military courts to prosecute “major war criminals of the Axis powers”. The largest and most important military court in Europe was the one formed that year in Nuremberg.
As for Yugoslavia, at the second session of AVNOJ, in November 1943, a special commission was formed within the National Committee for the Liberation of Yugoslavia with the task of starting collecting evidence on the crimes of the occupiers and their helpers committed on the territory of occupied Yugoslavia. This body would later be renamed the State Commission for the Investigation of Crimes, which formed a base of 17,175 members of the occupying units and 49,245 members of the Quisling units.
The commission has established intensive cooperation with allied countries regarding the delivery of war criminals, but Dr. Milan Koljanin, a long-term research associate at the Institute for Contemporary History of Serbia, states that not everything went as planned in practice.
– Although the governments of the Western Allies extradited a large number of war criminals to the new Yugoslav authorities, many of them, including some of the most prominent ones, were not extradited. This was primarily influenced by political motives, ie the sharpening of opposition between the great allies after the end of the war – Dr. Koljanin points out and adds that the Roman Catholic Church was engaged in rescuing a number of prominent war criminals from the Independent State of Croatia, but also from the Nazi state. and in Italy, that is, in the Vatican.
– These “rat canals” to South America, mainly to Juan Perón’s Argentina, saved, among others, one of the organizers of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, the commander of the Treblinka death camp, Franz Stangl, then Walter Rauf, the creator of gas-truck chambers, in one of Jewish women and children from the camp at the Belgrade Fair were killed. The most prominent example is the leader of the Independent State of Croatia, Ante Pavelić, who, after hiding in southern Austria and Rome, moved to Argentina via Genoa.
The director of the Museum of Genocide Victims, Veljko Đurić Mišina, states that members of the Yugoslav military and political leadership were not too interested in arresting Ante Pavelić in 1945 or 1946, because he was then under the protection of British and somewhat American military intelligence:
– It is known that at the end of the war, the British and the Americans made plans to use the enemies of yesterday in a possible conflict with the Soviet Union. Recently, several documents of American provenance were published with information about Pavelić’s hiding in Rome and the Vatican.
The role of the HDZ
Dr. Koljanin points out that the Croatian Ustasha emigration also played a significant role in the formation of independent Croatia and the break-up of the SFRY, and that with the coming to power of the HDZ, the attitude towards the events from the time of the Independent State of Croatia was radically changed.
– Some of the Ustasha leaders, such as the propagandist Vinko Nikolić, or Ivo Rojnica, the leader of the Ustashas in Dubrovnik, got prominent positions in the new Croatian state administration. Due to pressure from the international community and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the former commander of the Jasenovac concentration camp, Dinko Sakic, was extradited to Croatia in 1998. But, as in the case of Andrija Artuković, he was tried only for war crimes against civilians, not for the crime of genocide. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison and died in 2006. His wife, Nada Tambić Šakić, half-sister of Vjekoslav Luburić, who was among the most monstrous guards of the Stara Gradiška camp, fared much better. Despite numerous pieces of evidence and witnesses, no indictment was ever filed against her and she died in 2011 in a nursing home in Zagreb – states Dr. Koljanin.
Under British protection
– It was not only Pavelić who had protection among the British. Such is, for example, Andrija Artuković, who seems to have been in a relationship with the British since 1933. There are indications that Pavelić also came into contact with members of the British intelligence services in the first years of emigration, who pursued their government’s policy of helping the Croatian separatism.
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