Ivo Omrčanin

Ivo Omrčanin (1 October 1913 – 20 February 2001) was a Croatian theologian, diplomat and Catholic layman who served as the chargé d'affaires of the Independent State of Croatia's embassy to Nazi Germany in Berlin during the final months of World War II. He later played a leading role in the post-war ratlines which smuggled former Axis officials out of Europe.

Following the Allied victory, he escaped to Rome, where he became involved with the Catholic priest Krunoslav Draganović, a prominent ratline organizer. In Omrčanin's own estimation, 30,000 Axis officials left Europe using the ratlines. Among those whom he personally helped escape were Croatian dictator Ante Pavelić and German commander Klaus Barbie. From 1953 to 1957, Omrčanin worked as an advisor in canon law to the U.S. Army chaplains office in Kaiserslautern, West Germany. Afterwards, he immigrated to the United States and worked as a professor at Assumption College and the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, as well as a translator for the U.S. State Department. In subsequent decades, he wrote numerous pro-Ustaše tracts denying the Holocaust and the genocide of Serbs in the NDH, and claiming that half a million or more Ustaše prisoners and Croatian civilians had been executed by the Yugoslav Partisans in the Bleiburg killings of 1945.

Omrčanin was featured as an interview subject in Marcel Ophuls's 1988 film Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, and controversially, was cited by political scientist R. J. Rummel in his 1999 book Statistics of Democide regarding the number of victims of communism in Yugoslavia. He died in Washington, D.C. in 2001.

Early life Ivo Omrčanin was born in the eastern Slavonian village of Podgrađe, in what was then Austria-Hungary, on 1 October 1913. He received a doctorate in theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome in 1939 and a doctorate in canon law from the Catholic University of Paris in 1940.

World War II When the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia commenced on 6 April 1941, Omrčanin was in the town of Banja Luka, in northwestern Bosnia. He came to Zagreb on 18 April, and soon joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Axis puppet state known as the Independent State of Croatia (; NDH). Over the next several years, he fulfilled several functions in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, including as the head of its Italian section and its chief of protocol. In 1942, he helped repatriate the baptismal font of the ninth-century Croatian duke Višeslav from Italy, and had it transported to Zagreb and handed over to the Croatian Academy. On 1 March 1945, he participated in negotiations with Allied representatives regarding the surrender of Ustaše and Croatian Home Guard units.

In the immediate post-war years, Omrčanin lived in Rome's San Paolo alla Regola and worked as a lawyer at the Roman Rota, the highest appellate tribunal of the Catholic Church. As the right-hand man of the Catholic priest Krunoslav Draganović, he became a central figure in the post-war ratlines which smuggled thousands of former Axis officials out of Europe. From 1948 to 1953, he worked directly under Draganović as part of the Croatian Committee of Pontifical Assistance. Omrčanin also worked closely with Austrian bishop Alois Hudal. "Whenever I saw Draganović or Hudal, it was mostly to discuss things," he recounted. "I was helping them, or they were giving me advice. I fought for Europe, and didn't want Europe to have to suffer so much." According to Omrčanin, Draganović had "good contacts with the Americans," who were interested in collecting intelligence from refugees fleeing the Eastern Bloc. Citing the work of investigative reporter Holger Meding, journalist Ignacio Montes de Oca believes it is likely that Omrčanin and Draganović's activities were done in coordination with American counterintelligence.

In June 1946, Omrčanin and another former Ustaše official, Vinko Nikolić, were granted an audience with Pope Pius XII. In November 1948, Nikolić was among those who greeted Pavelić upon his arrival at the port of Buenos Aires. Omrčanin later said, "the Pope would never have considered anyone who was fighting communism ... a war criminal." In 1948, Omrčanin convinced the Holy See to establish a Croatian-language edition of Vatican Radio. In a report dated 21 November 1948, Italian counterintelligence noted the transit along the Brenner Railway of "a party of fifty-two foreigners of various nationalities coming from Salzburg and headed for Rome." Among the travelers was Slavko Cesarić, a former general in the Croatian Armed Forces. The report continued that the party had been greeted by Omrčanin, who "at no charge" had provided them with "food and a train ticket from the Brenner to Rome." (The man in question was Božidar Vučković, who was suspected of having helped the British plan the arrest of Croatian exiles living around the Institute of St.) Jerome. He estimated that the number of German scientists he evacuated to South America numbered in the "thousands". The Italian government alerted the Western powers of his activities, but nothing was ever done.

Professorship and published works From 1953 to 1957, Omrčanin was an advisor in canon law to the U.S. Army chaplains office in Kaiserslautern, West Germany. The following year, he testified as an expert witness for the defense at the extradition hearing of former NDH interior minister Andrija Artuković in Los Angeles, denying he had ever heard Artuković make anti-Semitic remarks and describing him as "a friend to all men". From 1960 to 1962, Omrčanin worked as a translator for the State Department in Washington, D.C., and in 1962, he was appointed as an associate professor of modern languages at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania in Indiana, Pennsylvania. Over the years, she co-authored and helped edit some of his works.

Of all the post-war Croatian émigré writers, the historian Christopher A. Molnar ranks Omrčanin among the most prolific. In a 1959 German-language booklet titled Kroatische Priester emordet von Tschetniken und Kommunisten ("Croatian Priests Murdered by Chetniks and Communists"), he claimed that "Serbs and Communists" had killed one million Croats since 1918 and called for the re-establishment of an independent Croatian state. In his 1984 book Enigma Tito, Omrčanin asserted that the Yugoslav leader was "a certified British agent of long standing", although according to scholar Ivo Tasovac, he "offered no tangible evidence to support it". In Holocaust of Croatians (1986), Omrčanin claimed that Croats were the "greatest victims" of World War II and wrote, "In the past, Jews embraced Communism to destroy as much of western civilization and western nations as possible." The anthropologist Daphne Winland writes that the latter statement "betrays the author's fascist and antisemitic inclinations."

The scholar Vjekoslav Perica characterizes Omrčanin, together with Vinko Nikolić, as one of the "architects" of the so-called Bleiburg myth, which contends that during the post-war Bleiburg killings, hundreds of thousands of Croatian Armed Forces prisoners and their families were tortured and massacred by the Partisans. In some of his writings, Omrčanin asserted that "500,000 Catholic and Muslim Croats" had been killed at Bleiburg. Elsewhere, he suggested "the Bolsheviks killed 550,000 Croats (300,000 from the army and 200,000 civilians)," and fumed that this figure had been brought down by other researchers "to 26,000 Ustashe and 18,000 Domobrani [Home Guards]." He cited the Austrian military historian as the source for his estimates. Kiszling, in turn, had cited Omrčanin's colleague Krunoslav Draganović, who said he believed "that after the Bleiburg capitulation there were at least fifty Katyns" in Yugoslavia. Although mass executions of Ustaše prisoners did take place, there were many orders of magnitude fewer victims than Omrčanin and Nikolić suggested. Žerjavić estimated that around 50,000 collaborationist prisoners were killed at Bleiburg, including Ustaše, Chetniks and others.

Between 1989 and 1991, Omrčanin published a five-volume history of the NDH titled Hrvatska 1941–1945. ("Croatia, 1941–1945").