Austrian authorities under pressure to axe Nazi sympathizer event
Jewish leader calls annual memorial for Ustasha regime supporters ‘an affront to the memory of Holocaust victims’
Austrian authorities are under pressure to stop an annual event in which some 15,000 Croatians gather to commemorate a 1945 massacre that has become a magnet for supporters of the Nazis’ Croatian allies and far-right sympathizers.
The memorial remembers the killing of sympathizers of Croatia’s Ustasha regime and others at the hands of communist partisans at the end of World War II in and around Bleiburg. The number of those killed is still debated. Estimates vary from a few dozen to tens of thousands.
The Ustasha were allied to Nazi Germany and persecuted and killed hundreds of thousands of ethnic Serbs, Jews, Roma, and political opponents, many in the Jasenovac death camp.
In 1945, fleeing Ustasha militiamen were handed over to Communist partisans at Bleiburg, making the locale significant for supporters of the movement.
But in recent years the ceremony has drawn more than 10,000 people, including Croatians who still revere the Ustasha, as well as neo-Nazis from across Europe.
Austria’s DOW resistance archive center, which specializes in documenting Nazism and neo-Nazism, has called Bleiburg “the biggest fascist meeting in Europe.”
Efraim Zuroff, Eastern Europe director for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, last month traveled to Bleiburg in an effort to draw media attention to what he called “an affront to the memory of Holocaust victims.”
Ustasha men are responsible for killing the majority of the 30,000 Croatian Jews murdered in the Holocaust, according to Yad Vashem. Only about one-fifth of the country’s pre-Holocaust Jewish community survived the genocide.
“Austria, where displaying a swastika is illegal, should know better than to allow this event featuring fascist symbols to go unchallenged year after year,” he told JTA.
Organizers from the Bleiburg Honorary Platoon said that, following pressure, flags with the Ustasha slogan “Za dom spremni” (“Ready for the Home[land]”) will be banned from the event.
Austrian authorities will deport anyone wearing uniforms or displaying fascist symbols at the event, officials told the HINA news agency.
Last month, Austria’s chancellor Sebastian Kurz said he was powerless to stop the memorial at Bleiburg because it was a private event organized by the Croatian church, but warned that local police would “act in a very decisive manner” if Austrian law was broken.
