The Croatian Minister of Culture and Education was Mile Budak, a rabid Catholic-Nazi who propagated the axiom of killing one-third, converting one-third and expelling one-third of all Serbs. Budak and other Catholic Croats believed that Muslims were actually descendants of the ancient Bogomil people who had inhabited the Croatian lands centuries earlier. As a leader in forging the Muslim-Catholic alliance, Budak enthusiastically proclaimed in 1941, "We Croats are happy and proud of our [Christian] faith, but we must be conscious of the fact that our Muslim brothers are the purest of Croats." He elaborated in a speech that the NDH was "Christian. [But] it is also a Muslim state where our people are of the Muslim religion."

In July 1941, Budak openly declared that the new state must exterminate "foreign elements," that is, Jews and Gypsies as well as the larger enemy, Orthodox Serbs. Budak hid nothing about his plans. "The basis for the Ustasha movement is religion," announced Budak. "For minorities such as Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies, we have 3 million bullets."

To cement the Muslim and Catholic killing coalition, NDH president Paveli converted a local Zagreb museum to a huge and impressive mosque, adding surrounding minarets to its modern architecture, and naming the mosque after himself. Numerous NDH ministries were controlled or headed by Muslims. Paveli even donned a Muslim fez to show his solidarity. Muslims were invited to join the barbaric Croatian Peasant Party and did so in significant numbers. When Muslims served in the Ustasha First Regiment, known as Black Legion, their black uniforms were the same as their Catholic co-killers. Senior officers were dressed in identical garb. Ibrahim Piri-Pjani and Memesaga Dzubur led their own local Ustasha-affiliated contingents. Muslim Ustasha Muhamed Hadžiefendi led his own militia in Tuzla. Hadžiefendi's militia became so strong that Bosniaks wanted it to operate autonomously in Muslim areas of Bosnia.

The Diet legislature, which passed a sequence of genocidal decrees, included 11 Muslims specifically appointed for that purpose. These decrees included outlawing Serbian and Jewish existence in Croatia, the looting of Serbian and Jewish property, and the systematic regimentation of Serbian and Jewish citizens into death camps and merciless killing fields. Catholic priests commonly operated the concentration camps, enforcing the most degrading of slaughter rituals. In Sarajevo, most of the looted and confiscated property of victims went to Muslims, who raced to grab Jewish and Serbian assets before their Catholic partners.

Under Croatian decrees, Jews were compelled to wear yellow Star-of-David arm bands and back patches marked with a "Z" for Zidov — Croatian for Jew. Muslims plundered and decimated the Great Sephardic Synagogue in Sarajevo and the centuries-old synagogue in Dubrovnik. When Muslim families were moved out of their villages near the battle lines, the Ustasha evicted Jews from their homes so the Croatian Muslims could take their place. When Jews fled the November 1941 mass roundups in Sarajevo, preparatory to planned extermination, a number of them escaped only by disguising themselves under Muslim veils. At the same time, many of the Jews who did survive the Jew-hunts did so by appealing to merciful neighbors in the Muslim quarter that took them in and hid them until they could escape safely. Many Muslims in Sarajevo rejected the Bosniak Ustasha horror and tried — in vain — to protest to their co-religionists.

Serbs suffered enormously. As Serbs were being forcibly converted to Catholicism, some 450 Serbian Orthodox churches were demolished and their religious icons defiled. Orthodox clergymen, from ordinary priests to the Metropolitan, were gruesomely tortured and their families shipped to concentration camps where they were subjected to every inhumanity.

NDH President Paveli declared early on, "This is now the Ustasha and Independent State of Croatia. It must be cleansed of all Serbs and Jews. There is no room for any of them here. Not a stone upon a stone will remain of what once belonged to them." He later assured, "The Jews will be liquidated within a very short time." To this end, more than 20 Ustasha concentration camps were established for the killing process, manned by combined Catholic and Muslim forces. The most notorious of these camps was the hellish complex known as Jasenovac, considered by many to be more sadistic than Auschwitz by an immeasurable magnitude. Gas chambers were not needed. All death was personally inflicted.

The Ustasha's barbaric methods for exterminating Jews and Serbs included sadistic group killing by cracking heads open with hammers until the cranial cavity was exposed. That was for adults. Children were commonly marched into the forest, where their heads were crushed with long mallets. Sometimes children were thrown live into flaming furnaces. Decapitation or dismemberment with giant lumber saws was frequent; Branko Jungic was one of many Serb villagers subjected to this monstrous murder technique. The terrifying photograph of his dismemberment became famous. Neck punctures with great iron bars were commonly accompanied by bowls carefully positioned to collect spurting blood, thus sparing uniforms the splatter. All too often, these Ustasha atrocities were not committed in fits of mad rage, but for sport, with the gleeful perpetrators smiling for the camera over the helpless victim waiting to be brutalized.

Mass throat-slittings at great velocity were achieved with a small hand blade wrapped tight to the wrist and dubbed the "Serbcutter." They were specially designed and manufactured for the purpose. One night, guards at Jasenovac wagered amongst themselves to see who could cut the most throats with their Serbcutters. Guard Petar Brzica, a Franciscan priest, was determined to prove his skill, which he did by slicing the throats of an estimated 1,360 defenseless inmates. Guard Ante Zrinusic lost the bet by only cutting the throats of about 600 helpless prisoners. Guard Mile Friganovi was close behind the winner, murdering only about 1,100 Serbs that night. But Friganovi was also known for an unspeakable incident in which an old man was asked to shout a salute to Croat president Ante Pavelić. When the old man hesitated, Friganovi systematically and gleefully cut off his ears first, then the nose and tongue, after which he gouged out his eyes, and then extracted the victim's heart — and only after all that did Friganovi end it all by slitting the prisoner's throat. Friganovi called the experience one of "ecstasy."

Groups of shivering Jewish children were brought into a camp one day. For sport, one guard began spinning a child above his head as the other guards slashed at it with their bayonets. Eventually, the guard was left with nothing but the child's hand as a trophy. Other Ustasha trophies included eyeball collections, stored in wicker baskets for show and sometimes worn strung up in necklaces. NDH president Pavelic himself once showed a journalist a wicker basket filled with some 40 pounds of eyeballs. Pavelic joked that he could make an oyster stew with them.

Women were carted away and raped endlessly until their captors were finished — at which time they were horribly mutilated for souvenir body parts. "A good Ustasha," Pavelic told his troops, "is he who can use his knife to cut a child from the womb of its mother."

The bi-ethnic Ustasha never disappointed their president.

Cruel and inhumane as the Nazis were, they retreated in wide-eyed astonishment when they learned of the joint Catholic-Muslim Ustasha atrocities. German General Edmund Glaise von Horstenau, the commanding officer of the region headquartered in Zagreb, reported back to Berlin, "According to reliable reports from countless German military and civil observers during the last few weeks, the Ustasha have gone raging mad." He added, "The Ustasha camps ... are the 'epitome of horror!'" In revulsion, Glaise von Horstenau wrote, "The most wicked [concentration camp] of all must be Jasenovac, where no ordinary mortal is allowed to peer in."

Hermann Naubacher, Hitler's personal assistant for the Balkans, called the Ustasha exterminations "a crusade that belongs among the most brutal mass-murder undertakings in the entire history of the world." Naubacher somberly added, "According to the reports that have reached me, my estimate is that the number of those defenseless slaughtered is some three-quarters of a million."

Eventually, the Nazis fell. Their allies in the Ustasha, and the three Waffen SS divisions faced post-war justice in many cases. But too many melted into the turbulent history of the Cold War. The Mufti escaped to become a revered icon of the Palestinian people.

The legacy of Islamic and Arab hate that spurred the Farhud burned broad enough to help Hitler get ever closer to his goal of exterminating all Jews. But the Third Reich fell. And those in the Arab-Nazi movement went on to form the post-war geopolitical Middle East that prevails in the current century.
 

Edwin Black is the author of "IBM and the Holocaust." This article is drawn from his just released book, "The Farhud, Roots of the Arab-Nazi Alliance During the Holocaust" (Dialog 2010). Buy it at www.Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, etc. It appeared February 24, 2011 in the Cutting Edge
http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=31836& pageid=37&pagename=Page+One

The pictures are not part of the original article. They come from Jared Israel's Emperor's Clothes website
http://www.tenc.net/vatican/cpix.htm and illustrate "The Vatican and Nazism in Germany and Croatia," published December 11, 2008.