Throughout Europe, Catholic groups had carried out atrocities during the Second World War. The Croat Ustasha, overwhelmingly Catholic, ultra-nationalist and fascist outdid the Nazis in their barbarism against Orthodox Serbs and partisans, and assisted in exterminating Jews. Some of their leaders, who together were responsible for hundreds of thousands of murders, were Franciscans. One, the commandant of Jasenovac concentration camp, known as "Brother Devil", accounted for 40,000 lives or more. Other churchmen also found common cause with the Nazis. The President of Slovakia, Joseph Tiso, was a leading Nazi responsible for setting up concentration camps in his country. But this was not his only vocation, For President Tiso was also a Roman Catholic Priest. He was executed for his crimes in 1946. Other bishops and priests were responsible for many thousands of deaths, having collaborated freely with the Nazi authorities. Here is, Dr Joachim Kahl, an ex pastor and German Church historian on the Catholic fascist movement in Croatia which flourished between1941 and 1944:
The Ustaša, as this terrorist organisation was called, was responsible for the forcible conversion of some 240,000 Orthodox Serbs to Roman Catholicismand for putting about 750,000 of these people to death. There was, from the very beginning, close collaboration between the Catholic clergy and the Ustaša. Archbishop Stepinac, whom the Vatican appointed in in 1942 to be the spiritual leader of the Ustaša, had a place, together with ten of his clergy, in the Ustaša parliament. Priests were also employed as police chiefs and as officers in the personal body-guard of the fanatical Croation head of state, Pavelic. Nuns marched in military parades immediately behind the soldiers, their arms raised in the fascist salute. Abbesses were decorated with the Ustaša order. The most cruel part of this movement was played, however, by the Fransiscans, whose monaseries had for some time been used as arsenals. Several monks and priests agreed to work as executioners in the hastily set p concentration camps to which the Orthodox Serbs were sent for mass execution by decapitation. These massacres were so brutal that even Croatia's allies, the German Nazis, protested against them and petitions were sent to the Vatican. Pope Pius XII, however, said nothing, just as he also said nothing about Auschwitz. It was not until some ten years later, in 1953, that he broke his silence by promoting Archbishop Stepinac, who, as one of those bearing the greatest guilt, had been sentenced\by the Supreme People's Court of Yugoslavia to sixteen years' forced labour, to the rank of Cardinal for his "great services" to the Church.
