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May 20th, 2015 
David Schulberg 
Israeli chief of the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center has called on the Croatian government to stop paying pensions to former soldiers who served in the country’s Nazi-allied armed forces.
Paying pensions to members of the Ustaša armed forces is a
“horrific insult to the victims, their families and all
Croatians with a sense of morality and integrity,” said the
director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, Efraim
Zuroff, in a letter addressed to Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic,
as quoted by AFP on Tuesday.
“In view of the horrendous war crimes committed in the
so-called Independent State of Croatia (NDH)… such a policy is
inherently mistaken,” he said.
The Ustaša was an ultranationalist and fascist movement active
between 1929 and 1945. After Ustaša came to power in part of
Axis-occupied Yugoslavia , the NHD army and the Ustaše militia
cooperated with Nazi Germany in the Holocaust, supporting the
genocide of Serbs, Jews, Romani people, and anti-fascist
Croatians.
According to historians, by the end of the war Ustaše had
exterminated 30,000 Jews, about 29,000 Gypsies, and up to 750,000
Serbs in NDH concentration camps in Europe.
Croatia is paying pensions to about 10,000 such collaborators,
costing the government around 50 million euros ($56 million)
yearly, according to AFP estimates.
In 1993 Croatia amended a law on pensions to provide them to
former members of the Ustaše army. Under the amendment, they
would also receive double for each year spent in the armed forces
or in detention after the war.
Zuroff urged the Croatian PM to “take the appropriate
measures to change this policy as quickly as possible and spare
Croatia the shame of rewarding those who were among the worst and
most cruel perpetrators of WWII crimes.”
It’s not the first time the Simon Wiesenthal Center, named after
the Holocaust survivor and world-famous Nazi hunter, has
criticized the Croatian government on their stance towards its
Ustaša members.
READ MORE: Gorbachev accuses western leaders of
disrespect toward victors over Nazism
In 2012 Zuroff slammed memorial masses conducted in Zagreb and
Split on December 28 to mark the 51st anniversary of the death of
Ante Pavelić, the head of NDH state which existed from 1941 to
1945.
He called the service “unthinkable” and questioned:
“How does such an event to honor the memory of one of the
biggest mass murderers of World War II pass with nary a word of
protest or condemnation?”
He also criticized the EU governments for failing to deal with
the revival of fascist ideology.
“The sad truth is that in this respect, the European Union
has failed miserably in dealing with the resurgence of
neo-fascism and the promotion of Holocaust distortion in its
post-Communist members. Once admitted to the EU (and NATO),
countries like Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Hungary and Romania
have begun to take active steps to rewrite their World War II
histories, minimizing or attempting to hide the
highly-significant role played by their nationals in Holocaust
crimes, with barely a word of protest or condemnation from
Brussels,” he wrote in a Jerusalem Post article.
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Israeli center calls on Croatia to cut pensions to former Nazi-allied servicemen
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