Apr

5

Among the tens of thousands of heart-breaking ironies in the history of the Second World War in Europe is the fact that thousands of Jews fled from Austria and Hungary to Serbia in 1938, 1939 and 1940 in hopes of finding safety from the Nazis. Hundreds of them died (along with 17,000 Serbs) when the Luftwaffe bombed the city in April, 1941 in what was, up to that time, the most successful massacre of civilians by air power in European history. (To this day the Guinness prize for the world record of slaughter from the air remains the Japanese bombing of Nanking.)

Almost all of the Jewish survivors of the bombing — along with hundreds of thousands of Serbs — were sent to the camp set up by the Ustache (Himmler's one successful venture in holocaust outsourcing). This is the reason - apart from human sympathy — that so many Jews have been active in uncovering the records of Jasenovac — the one concentration camp that has the distinction of having the vast majority of its victims be Gentiles and, as far as I have found, the only one whose establishing organization had its Chaplain General celebrated in a mass at the Vatican.


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