Krunoslav Draganović

Krunoslav Stjepan Draganović (* the 30th October 1903 in Brcko , † 5. July 1983 in Sarajevo , Yugoslavia ) was a Roman Catholic priest of the Franciscan Order , church historian and Ustasha - functionary and after the Second World War, smugglers of war criminals .

Life

Draganović was responsible for the deportations of Jews and Serbs during the Second World War as a "resettlement" officer of the so-called Independent State of Croatia (NDH) and went to Rome in 1943 . Here he acted as secretary of the Croatian National Church in the Istituto San Girolamo degli Illirici monastery in Via Tomacelli near the Vatican City . San Girolamo was recognized by the Vatican as the Croatian section of the Pontifical Auxiliary Commission (PCA) and used by Draganović for his purposes.

So Draganović could end and after the Second World War, together with the Austrian Bishop Alois Hudal a highly organized escape assistance companies ( " rat line " or "monastery route") build that many wanted fascists and Nazis , but also by the US military intelligence CIC was used . Almost the entire leadership of the Ustaše state was smuggled from here to Argentina (including Ante Pavelić ). He got Klaus Barbie , the “butcher of Lyon”, a visa to Bolivia . Presumably the Vatican knew about these events, but tolerated them out of its ties with the Catholic Croatian regime. The American CIC also worked closely with Draganović.

In 1967 Draganović returned to Yugoslavia, distanced himself from the Ustasha, praised the Tito system and lived as a kind of internee in a monastery near Sarajevo until his death in 1983.

Fonts (selection)

Draganović's text Poviest crkve u Hrvatskoj (The History of the Church in Croatia) from 1944.

• Katolička crkva u Bosni i Hercegovini nekad i danas [The Catholic Church in Bosnia and Herzegovina then and now] . Zagreb 1934.
• Mass conversions by Catholics to "Orthodoxy" in the Croatian language area during the Turkish rule . Pontificium institutum orientalium studiorum, Rome 1937.
• Hrvati i Herceg-Bosna: Povodom polemike o nacionalnoj pripadnosti Herceg-Bosne . "Nova tiskara", 1940.
• Povijest hrvatskih zemalja Bosne i Hercegovine [The history of the Croatian countries of Bosnia and Herzegovina] . Hrvatsko kulturno družtvo "Napredak", Sarajevo 1942 (new edition 1998).
• Katarina Kosača bosanska kraljica ( Katarina Kosača , Queen of Bosnia) . 1980.

literature

• Zdravko Dizdar: DRAGANOVIĆ, Krunoslav . In: Darko Stuparić (ed.): Tko je tko u NDH: Hrvatska 1941. – 1945 [Who is who in the NDH: Croatia 1941–1945] . Minerva, Zagreb 1997, p. 96-98 (Croatian).
• Miroslav Akmadža: Krunoslav Draganović: Iskazi komunističkim istražiteljima . Ed .: Hrvatski institut za povijest (=  Bibliotheca Croatica: Slavonica, Sirmiensia et Baranyensia . Volume 8 ). Zagreb 2010, ISBN 978-953-6659-53-1 .
• Background Report on Krunoslav Draganovic, CIA, February 12, 1947 ( Memento from February 9, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
• Mark Aarons and John Loftus , Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, The Nazis, and the Swiss Bankers, St Martins Press 1991 (revised 1998)
• Uki Goñi : Odessa: The real story. Escape aid for Nazi war criminals. Translated from the English by Theo Bruns and Stefanie Graefe. 2nd edition 2007. ISBN 978-3-935936-40-8
• Gerald Steinacher, Nazis on the run. How war criminals escaped overseas via Italy, Innsbruck-Vienna 2008, ISBN 978-3-7065-4026-1

Web links

• Mladen Švab: DRAGANOVIĆ, Krunoslav. In: Hrvatski biografski leksikon. 1993, accessed January 13, 2020 (Croatian). 
• Lukas Mihr: The Rat Line ( PDF )
• Theo Bruns: Mass exodus of Nazi war criminals to Argentina. The largest escape aid operation in criminal history. In: ila 299 [1]
• Theo Bruns: The Vatican and the Rat Line. How the Catholic Church smuggled Nazis and war criminals into South America [2]