First-hand testimony of survivors and eye-witnesses is compiled in this shocking, graphic account of the crimes committed during World War II at the largest death camp in Yugoslavia.
At the small Yugoslavian city of Jasenovac, the fascist "Independent State of Croatia" (a satellite of the Nazi Third Reich) constructed a concentration camp where 200,000 people, mostly Orthodox Serbs, were systematically murdered. Among the organizers and directors of this genocide were members of the Catholic clergy, from the Franciscan monk who became the camp commandant to the infamous Archbishop Stepinac, the spiritual advisor to the fascist state appointed by Pope Pius XII.
Vladimir Dedijer, who fought with Tito against the fascists during the war, has gathered together irrefutable evidence attesting to thousands of atrocities and the complicity of the Catholic Church in these crimes. The events described in this important volume provide a historical context to the current conflict in Yugoslavia and sheds light on the motivations behind the apparently senseless ethnic and religious strife which is tearing Yugoslavia apart. Jasenovac was the violent culmination of centuries-old animosities between Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats and a dark episode in the history of the Catholic Church, one that the Church has attempted to hush up for fifty years.
Vladimir Dedijer, who died in 1990, held the post of official delegate from Yugoslavia to the United Nations. He and Jean-Paul Sartre chaired the International Tribune on War Crimes, founded by Bertrand Russell. Dedijer wrote many book, including a widely acclaimed biography of Tito.
445 pages Cloth ISBN 0-87975-752-3