THE HERZEGOVINIAN FRANCISCAN PROVINCE - during and after the Second World War

The massacre of the Herzegovinian Franciscans was not the consequence of the friars’ alleged role in organising Operation Bura, nor was it a consequence of their alleged participation in the battles for Široki Brijeg, nor was it the self-willed reaction of a group of NOVJ soldiers. The Commander of the British Mission attached to the Supreme Command of the NOVJ, Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean dispatched a communiqué from Belgrade on February 8, 1945, (No. 164) to the Foreign Office, in which he referred to the liquidation of the Franciscans in Široki Brijeg. Maclean stated in his report that Josip Broz Tito had “recently told [him] that for military reasons and for reasons of internal security, he would be forced to undertake drastic measures against these Franciscans, even though, more than ever, he is fervently opposed to any form of religious persecution.” Fitzroy Maclean’s report directly corroborates that Tito had planned to liquidate the friars of Široki Brijeg much sooner, as early as the autumn of 1944. A month after the above events had transpired, that is, on March 12, 1945, Maclean was awarded the Partisan Star of the 1st Order on the recommendation of Marshal Josip Broz Tito for his extraordinary services and courage in the battle against Yugoslavia’s and Great Britain’s mutual enemy – Fascist Germany.
Yugoslav historiography and media after 1945 re-constructed reality by marking the Franciscans of Široki Brijeg as a monolithic group of Ustaša collaborators, which they were not. The facts clearly indicate that the friars of Široki Brijeg were not liquidated for allegedly supporting the Ustaša regime. For the Communist regime, the Franciscan friars were potential enemies, anglophiles, and adherents of western democracy, and also loyal to the Catholic Church, which was truly the ideological enemy of the new Communist regime. They were also potential enemies because they did not compromise themselves in any way during the Second World War. They collaborated with opponents of the Ustaša regime, saving many of them from danger, and protecting them throughout the entire war, obedient to the directives issued by the Catholic Church. For some of the Herzegovinian Franciscans who withdrew with the armed forces of the government of the NDH in the spring of 1945, we can postulate that they had collaborated with the NDH authorities. Both groups of Franciscans were killed by the Partisans without any type of trial. In the period that followed, the authorities sought to establish the guilt of the massacred Franciscans after the fact and thus attempted to justify their own war crimes.