These documents reveal new information about Pius XII's actions regarding the Ustaše regime, the genocides in Poland, the finances of the wartime church, the deportation of the Roman Jews, and the postwar " ratlines " for Nazis and fascists fleeing Europe.

From 1941 – 45, the Croatian Ustaše regime murdered around 500, 000 people, 250, 000 were expelled, and another 200, 000 were forced to convert to Catholicism ; the victims were predominantly Serbs but included 37, 000 Jews.

The Ustaše regime committed a genocide against Serbs, Jews and Gypsies.

The camp was established by the governing Ustaše regime in August 1941 in marshland at the confluence of the Sava and Una rivers near the village of Jasenovac, and was dismantled in April 1945.

Romanies were also victims of the puppet regimes that cooperated with the Third Reich during the war, especially the notorious Ustaše regime in Croatia.

After the defeat of the Croatian Ustaše regime, Filipović was convicted of war crimes by both a German military court and a Yugoslav civil court and hanged at Belgrade.

Of that, 295, 000 died in Croatia, and 328, 000 in Bosnia and Herzegovina ( both part of the Independent State of Croatia and under the Ustaše regime at the time ), and another 36, 000 from those countries died abroad.

: vengeance for the crimes committed by the Ustaše was executed immediately after the war, with the terrible massacres at Bleiburg in Austria and during the so-called Way of the Cross ( Death Marches ), when many innocent opponents of the Communist regime were also killed.

During World War II, a concentration camp was set up on the island of Pag by the Croatian Ustaše puppet regime.

Raven Shields story begins in 1945, as two members of the Nazi-sponsored Ustaše regime in the Independent State of Croatia manage to escape the country with huge amounts of Holocaust-era loot just before Allied troops move into the capital.

In 1941, when the Ustaše regime formed the Independent State of Croatia, they introduced the Independent State of Croatia kuna.

He initially received very little guidance from the Vatican and was given great leeway in how to deal with the rise of the Ustaše regime.

The family of Đapić had a history of supporting the old Croatian Party of Rights, and later the Ustaše regime.

It was established by the Ustaše ( Ustasha ) regime of the Independent State of Croatia (" NDH ") in 1941 at the Stara Gradiška prison near the village of Stara Gradiška.

In 1998, he beatified Aloysius Stepinac, the Croatian war-time Archbishop of Zagreb, a move seen negatively by those who believe that he was an active collaborator with the Ustaše fascist regime, which committed genocide against Serbs as well as Jews.

Around the same time the website gained a reputation for yellow journalism after exposing a series of scandals, the two most notable being the 2003 controversy stirred by a discovered recording of popular singer Marko Perković in which Perković publicly performed Jasenovac i Gradiška Stara, a song praising the WWII fascist Ustaše regime, and the 2004 celebrity sex tape scandal involving Severina Vučković, a pop singer.

The plaintiffs seek an accounting and restitution of the Ustaše Treasury that, according to the US State Department was illicitly transferred to the Vatican, the Franciscan Order and other banks after the end of the war, in order to further the goals of the Ustaše regime in exile and fund the Vatican ratline.

The defendants also argued that, under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act ( Reagan recognized Vatican sovereignty in 1984 ), they had no obligation to return the looted Ustaše gold to Yugoslavia in 1946 because the country was ruled by a hostile Communist regime, saying:

Moreover, in Yugoslavia there existed the Jasenovac concentration camp ( August 1941 – April 1945 ), which was the only central extermination camp outside of Poland, and the only one not operated by Nazis, but by the fascist Ustaše forces of the Independent State of Croatia, the majority of whose victims were Orthodox Christian Serbs, Roma, and Jews.

In Yugoslavia the Carabinieri formed a battalion of the Italian partisan Garibaldi Division, which fought alongside the Yugoslav partisans against German and Croatian Ustaše Forces.

At the end of World War II, many Ustaše members fled to the West, where they found sanctuary and continued their political and terrorist activities ( which were tolerated because of Cold War hostilities ).

Chernozemski was a militant fighting for the cause of the IMRO ( Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization ), which cooperated greatly with the Croat fascists who called themselves the Ustaše.

Nazi-sponsored Croatia had a notable Serb community, roughly two million strong, which the Croatian Ustaše sought to eliminate through genocide: In the Croats ' political programme it was explained that " ⅓ of the Serbs were to be killed, ⅓ were to be expelled and ⅓ were to be forcibly converted to Catholicism " ( see World War II persecution of Serbs ).

It is also illustrated by the report sent by Hans Helm to Adolf Eichmann, in which it is stated that the Jews will first be collected in Stara-Gradiška, and that " Jews would be employed in ' forced labor ' in Ustaše camps ", mentioning only Jasenovac and Stara Gradiška ," will not be deported ".

The state was actually controlled by the governing fascist Ustaše movement and its Poglavnik, Ante Pavelić, which in turn were primarily under German influence.

Examples of dictatorships and political movements involving certain elements of clerical fascism include the Croatian Ustaše movement, Obraz in Serbia, António Salazar in Portugal, Engelbert Dollfuss in Austria, Jozef Tiso in Slovakia, Getúlio Vargas in Brazil, the Iron Guard movement in Romania ( which was led by the devoutly Orthodox Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the Rexists in Belgium and Vichy France.

Scholars who accept the term clerical fascism nonetheless debate which examples in this list should be dubbed clerical fascist, with the Ustaše being the most widely included.

On 18 May 1941, a ceremony took place at the Quirinal Palace to which Ante Pavelić, the leader of the fascist Ustaše movement that had assumed power in Croatia in April 1941 after the invasion of Yugoslavia, led a delegation of Croats requesting that Italy's King Victor Emmanuel III name a member of the House of Savoy as king of Croatia.

Most incriminatingly, Stepinac had allowed the state papers of the Ustaše to be stored in his episcopal residence, papers that would be crucial to the Ustaše in retaking control of the country and which contained volumes of incriminating information against Ustaše war criminals.

On October 12, 1941 a group of 108 notable Muslim citizens of Sarajevo signed the Resolution of Sarajevo Muslims by which they condemned the persecution of Serbs organized by Ustaše, made distinction between Muslims who participated in such persecutions and whole Muslim population, presented informations about the persecutions of Muslims by Serbs and requested security for all citizens of the country, regardless of their identity.

On October 12, 1941 a group of 108 notable Muslim citizens of Sarajevo signed the Resolution of Sarajevo Muslims by which they condemned the persecution of Serbs organized by Ustaše, made distinction between Muslims who participated in such persecutions and whole Muslim population, presented informations about the persecutions of Muslims by Serbs and requested security for all citizens of the country, regardless of their identity.

In May 1945, Bleiburg was the initial location of a series of war crimes, in the course of which Yugoslav Partisans executed thousands of Croatian Home Guard and Ustaše, Slovene Home Guard and Serbian Chetnik troopers, as well as civilians, who had surrendered to the British forces in Allied-occupied Austria, only to be forcibly repatriated in the Operation Keelhaul.

IMRO had de facto control of Pirin Macedonia and acted as a " state within a state ", which it used as a base for hit and run attacks against Yugoslavia with the unofficial support of axis Bulgaria and later Fascist Italy, also establishing close links with the Croatian Ustaše movement.

The Serb Democratic Party ( SDS ) of Croatia, supported by Milošević, denounced the HDZ as a reincarnation of the nationalist-fascist Ustaše movement, which had massacred hundreds of thousands of Serbs during the Second World War.

Šakić also ordered the hanging of Dr. Marin Jurcev, the manager of the Ustaše hospital, which aided a defected Ustase to smuggle information of Jasenovac to the partisans, his wife and three internees held in the village of Jasenovac were hanged.

Vladko Maček, who had succeeded Radić as leader of the Croatian Peasant Party, the largest political party in Croatia, was imprisoned, and members of a newly emerging insurgent movement, the Ustaše, went into exile.

It thus appears that the Nazis inspected Jasenovac, possibly due to doubts they had about the Ustaše devotion to the extermination of the Jews.

During an official visit to France in 1934, the king was assassinated in Marseille by a member of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization – an extreme nationalist organization in Bulgaria that had plans to annex territories along the eastern and southern Yugoslav border — with the cooperation of the Ustaše – a Croatian fascist separatist organization.

The Croatian War Crimes Commission in its report was at a loss to explain why such a process had been deemed necessary when Ustaše had already killed thousands of people “ by heinous means, without any justification or procedure ”.

McDonnell Douglas DC-9-32 was destroyed in flight by Émigré Croatian terrorists ( Ustaše ) who had placed a bomb on board.

Because of this he exercised what little power he had from Italy and Hungary, however he never held any real authority throughout his reign as the Ustaše government had deprived the monarchy of most powers and reduced the status of the king to that of a figurehead.

Cornwell is unsure whether the Vatican was aware of the exact atrocities committed by the Ustaše by this point, but he noted " it was known from the very beginning that Pavelic was a totalitarian dictator, a puppet of Hitler and Mussolini, that he had passed a series of viciously racist and anti-Semitic laws, and that he was bent on enforced conversions from Orthodox to Catholic Christianity ".

Partisans of Tito retaliated against the Catholic clergy for their perceived or actual collaboration with the Ustaše ; by February 1945, at least fourteen priests had been killed ; by March 1945, as many as 160 priests ; by the end of the year, 270 priests.

Gradaščević had a minor resurgence during World War II when Ustaše launched a propaganda-rooted proposal to bring his remains back to Sarajevo.

The unit was part of the Brandenburg Division, and was staffed by ethnic Germans who spoke local languages, had many contacts with the Chetniks and Ustaše militia, and had been tracking Tito since October 1943.

Yugoslav and Serb propaganda portrayed the Croatians as genocidal Ustaše who had illegally taken over Yugoslav territory and were threatening Serb civilians in a reprise of the anti-Serb pogroms of the Second World War.