page_title: Genocide of Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia
section_title: The role of Aloysius Stepinac
hierarchical_section_title: Genocide of Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia / Religious persecution / The role of Aloysius Stepinac
caption_attribution_description: English: Alojzije Stepinac (far right) with two Catholic priests at the funeral of President of the Croatian Parliament Marko Došen in September 1944. Hrvatski: Nadbiskup Alojzije Stepinac (krajnji desno) i ostalih crkveni dužnosnici na sahrani Predsjednika Hrvatskog Državnog Sabora Marka Došena. Italiano: L'arcivescovo di Zagabria Alojzije Viktor Stepinac interviene nel 1944 alle esequie del presidente del parlamento croato Marko Došen, una voce critica nei confronti del regime degli Ustascia, mentre alcuni gerarchi tributano il saluto a mano tesa.
context_page_description: The Genocide of the Serbs was the systematic persecution of Serbs which was committed during World War II by the fascist Ustaše regime in the Nazi German puppet state known as the Independent State of Croatia between 1941 and 1945. It was carried out through executions in death camps, as well as through mass murder, ethnic cleansing, deportations, forced conversions, and war rape. This genocide was simultaneously carried out with the Holocaust in the NDH, by combining Nazi racial policies with the ultimate goal of creating an ethnically pure Greater Croatia.
  The ideological foundation of the Ustaše movement reaches back to the 19th century. Several Croatian nationalists and intellectuals established theories about Serbs as an inferior race. The World War I legacy, as well as the opposition of a group of nationalists to the unification into a common state of South Slavs, influenced ethnic tensions in the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The 6 January Dictatorship and the later anti-Croat policies of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav government in the 1920s and 1930s fueled the rise of nationalist and far-right movements.
context_section_description: A cardinal Aloysius Stepinac served as Archbishop of Zagreb during World War II and pledged his loyalty to the NDH. Scholars still debate the degree of Stepinac's contact with the Ustaše regime. Mark Biondich stated that he was not an “ardent supporter” of the Ustahsa regime legitimising their every policy, nor an “avowed opponent” publicly denounced its crimes in a systematic manner. While some clergy committed war crimes in the name of the Catholic Church, Stepinac practiced a wary ambivalence.  He was an early supporter of the goal of creating an Catholic Croatia, but soon began to question the regime's mandate of forced conversion.
  Historian Tomasevich praised his statements that were made against the Ustaše regime by Stepinac, as well as his actions against the regime. However, he also noted that these same statements and actions had shortcomings in respect to Ustaše's genocidal actions against the Serbs and the Serbian Orthodox Church. As Stepinac failed to publicly condemn the genocide waged against the Serbs by the Ustaše earlier during the war as he would later on.  Tomasevich stated that Stepinac's courage against the Ustaše state earned him great admiration among anti-Ustaše Croats in his flock along with many others. However this came with the price of enmity of the Ustaše and Pavelić personally. In the early part of the war, he strongly supported a Yugoslavian state organized with federal lines. It was generally known that Stepinac and Pavlović thoroughly hated each other.  The Germans considered him Pro-Western and “friend of the Jews” leading to hostility from German and Italian forces. 
  On 14 May 1941, Stepinac received word of an Ustaše massacre of Serb villagers at Glina. On the same day, he wrote to Pavelić saying:
  I consider it my bishop's responsibility to raise my voice and to say that this is not permitted according to Catholic teaching, which is why I ask that you undertake the most urgent measures on the entire territory of the Independent State of Croatia, so that not a single Serb is killed unless it is shown that he committed a crime warranting death. Otherwise, we will not be able to count on the blessing of heaven, without which we must perish.
  These were still private protest letters. Later in 1942 and 1943, Stepinac started to speak out more openly against the Ustaše genocides, this was after most of the genocides were already committed, and it became increasingly clear the Nazis and Ustaše will be defeated. In May 1942, Stepinac spoke out against genocide, mentioning Jews and Roma, but not Serbs.
  Tomasevich wrote that while Stepinac is to be commended for his actions against the regime, the failure of the Croatian Catholic hierarchy and Vatican to publicly condemn the genocide "cannot be defended from the standpoint of humanity, justice and common decency". In his diary, Stepinac said that "Serbs and Croats are of two different worlds, north and south pole, which will never unite as long as one of them is alive", along with other similar views. Historian Ivo Goldstein described that Stepinac was being sympathetic to the Ustaše authorities and ambivalent towards the new racial laws, as well as that he was “a man with many dilemmas in a disturbing time”. Stepinac resented the interwar conversion of some 200,000 most Croatian Catholics to Orthodoxy, which he felt was forced on them by prevailing political conditions.  In 2016 Croatia's rehabilitation of Stepinac was negatively received in Serbia and Republika Srpska, an entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
caption: Aloysius Stepinac with two Catholic priests at the funeral of President of the NDH Parliament Marko Došen in September 1944
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