May 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the Bleiburg tragedy and the greatest suffering in the history of the Croatian people and on the so-called “Way of the Cross” from May 15, 1945, onwards. It is worth mentioning several events related to this that took place in and outside Croatia during these days.

On Friday, May 16, 2025, at the Untreloibach cemetery and Bleiburg Field, Austria, wreaths were laid, accompanied by a prayer led by Fr. Pavo Dominkovic, and in the evening, a holy mass was held in the parish church of St. Peter and Paul in Bleiburg, Austria, led by Rev. Prof. Dr.  Zeljko Tanjic, rector of the Croatian Catholic University, commemorating these sufferings and the prayers of numerous Croats for the repose of the souls of all the victims of this tragedy for the Croatians in the aftermath of World War II. The well-known Count Nikolai Tolstoy, from United Kingdom, whose books, e.g. “Minister and the Massacres”, 1986, revealed to the world in detail the terrible brutality of the Yugoslav or Tito’s communists against the Croats in Bleiburg and on the Way of the Cross, and Dr. Robin Harris, whose books, especially on Croatian history and the blessed Alojzije Stepinac, are particularly important for the Croatian truth. This Eucharistic celebration was organised by the Directorate of Pastoral Care for Croats Abroad, a joint body of the Croatian Bishops’ Conference (HBK) and the Bishops’ Conference of Bosnia and Herzegovina ( BiH), as well as the Croatian Catholic Mission in Klagenfurt and the Austrian parish of Bleiburg.

“Without Christ, no one can be a participant in the fulfillment of the promise of a prepared place, of the multitude of dwellings that He has prepared for us, especially for those who have suffered innocently, who have been oppressed, who have gone to their deaths with hope and faith that a shovelful of earth thrown on their silenced mouths and that oblivion and the hatred-intoxicated victory of the communist executioners is not the last word of history,” emphasised Rev. Prof. Dr. Zaljko Tanjic.

On Saturday, May 17, the annual Scientific Symposium of the Carinthian Homeland Service (Kärntner Heimatdienst, KHD) was held in Klagenfurt, Austria, in cooperation with the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in the Diaspora and Homeland/HAZUDD and the Croatian World Congress/HSK, where the new book “Bleiburg” was launched. The Carinthian Homeland Service, probably the most important patriotic civil society organisation in Austria, decided to publish this collection of scientific papers into a book in cooperation with the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in the Diaspora and Homeland (HAZUDD) because the great crime for which Tito’s partisans were responsible took place in Bleiburg on Carinthian soil and is therefore part of Carinthian history. It not only describes the course of events in Bleiburg itself in May 1945, but also the events that preceded and followed it, up to the heartless attempt to ban the commemoration there in recent years. This book will be published in both English and Croatian, in addition to German. While it is a great honour for me to be one of the authors in this book with my presentation on the psychological aspects of the importance of researching the history and future of a nation with a focus on the Croatian people, in which work I also reflect on the ways in which the Yugoslav communists falsified Croatian history, the list of authors is magnificent, which the 80th anniversary of the Bleiburg Tragedy deserves. These are Austrian and Croatian historians and scientists, highly proven experts in their fields: Mihovil Biočić, Damir Borovčak, Robert Hajszan Panonski, Mario Jareb, Franz Jordan, Andreas Mölzer, Franjo Pavić, Vedran Petrović, Heinz-Dieter Pohl, Florian Thomas Rulitz, Josip Stjepandić, Peter Stockner, Miljenko Stojić, Igor Vukić, Ina Vukić.

On the occasion of marking the 80th anniversary of the Bleiburg Tragedy and the Way of the Cross of the Croatian people, on Saturday, May 17, a holy mass was served in front of the Church of the Passion of Jesus in Macelj, Croatia. The concelebrated mass, attended by several bishops and priests, was led by Archbishop Zdenko Kriziz of Split and Makarska. The commemoration was organised by the Croatian Bishops’ Conference in cooperation with the Honorary Bleiburg Platoon. The Holy Mass was attended by the President of the Croatian Parliament Gordan Jandrokovic, Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic, Deputy Prime Ministers Tomo Medved and Davor Bozinovic, and Minister of Foreign and European Affairs Gordan Grlic Radman.

In cooperation with the Croatian Inter-Society Committee of NSW and the Croatian Club Sydney/The Concord Club, on Sunday 18 May 2025, the 80th anniversary of the great suffering of the Croatian people at the end and after the Second World War was solemnly and movingly commemorated in a packed hall. The commemoration thus commemorated the suffering of the Croatian people, which are collectively and symbolically known as the “May Victims”, the “Bleiburg Tragedy”, the “Way of the Cross” or the “Death Marches”. Tears of piety and compassion flowed from both speakers and attendees at this commemoration, which was successfully and devotedly led by Ms. Ivana Zrnic from Sydney. “In mid-May every year, the Croatian people remember with deep reverence and sadness the Bleiburg tragedy and the Way of the Cross – the greatest and most painful wounds in their history. Hundreds of thousands of Croatian soldiers and civilians, including women, children and the elderly, after the end of World War II, hoped to find protection and security, but instead they were met with torture, humiliation and executions without any trial. Many European nations welcomed the end of World War II in freedom, while for our people May 1945 and the period after it meant the beginning of persecution and killing by the Yugoslav state and its army…” With these words, Ivana Zrnic opened this commemoration.

The commemorative gathering on behalf of the Croatian Club Sydney, The Concord, was welcomed by the vice-president of that club, Mr. Zvonimir Kurtovic, who reported that great efforts are being made to include the Bleiburg tragedy and the mass killings along the Way of the Cross after WWII in school curriculum in Croatia.

These were cruel mass murders without any trial and no verification of guilt or innocence of the victims that lasted for years, which were committed by the Yugoslav communist horde of partisans and party operatives. At the commemoration in Sydney, although far from Croatia, it seemed to us that we were standing on the ground soaked in the blood of the names of known and unknown patriotic Croats, whose blood, just like Abel’s, has been crying from the ground to the sky for all these past decades – for justice for the victims. Because the victims of communist crimes have not yet been caressed by justice, nor by the remorse of their murderers. And in his speech at this commemoration in Sydney, Mr. Branko Jazic aptly compared the fate of these Croatian victims to the biblical depictions of the Stations of the Cross of Jesus Christ.

“In a similar way, at the beginning of May 1945, after the fall of the Independent State of Croatia/NDH, the war government at the first station in Zagreb was shed much swea, looking for a way out of this chaotic situation of the fall of the state, and to save its people from this danger. The decisions were very difficult and uncertain, whether it was better to defend its capital city with military force, which was threatened by attacks from the east by drunken Russians, i.e. the Red Army, and from the west by Allied bombing, or some more painless option. The decision of our military commanders, in agreement with the war government, was to withdraw our ‘Armed Forces’ towards Austria. They left Zagreb on May 6. Hundreds of thousands of Croatian refugees who were fleeing from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Dalmatia, Slovenia joined this huge column of the Croatian army, believing that they would find salvation with their Croatian army, which would eventually surrender to ‘civilised Americans or Englishmen’ and thus save their bare lives from communist murderers. According to available information from the English archives, in the column to Bleiburg at least two hundred thousand Croatian soldiers and over five hundred thousand civilians marched towards Austria… So, on the sixth of May the column set off and on the eighth it crossed the Slovenian Austrian border, only to be stopped by the English on the Bleiburg Field on the 15th. There on that fateful field, the Croatian Defence Forces HOS laid down their weapons and, according to the agreement of the military commanders, surrendered to the English troops.

Upon arriving at Bleiburg Field, Croatian negotiator Prof. Danijel Crljen asked the English to respect the ‘Geneva War Convention’ and to treat the prisoners morally according to the legal discourse that this convention explicitly requires… Under great pressure from the English, Professor Crljen agreed to talk to the Yugoslav commissioner Milan Basta, who unconditionally demanded their surrender and that they be immediately transported by train to Yugoslavia and that he guarantees them a peaceful return to their homes. The English supported and accepted this story as legitimate and, like Pontius Pilate, washed their dirty hands by handing over hundreds of thousands of civilians and Croatian defenders to the slaughterhouse of vengeful communist murderers…

We can symbolically call Bleiburg Field the second station (of the Cross), just as when the Roman authorities, led by Pontius Pilate, handed over our Lord to the Jewish mob to be crucified, which is what happened. As Jesus’ Calvary unfolded, so too did the Croatian people walk in four-rows of columns carrying the Croatian cross to the first horrific mass graves such as Huda Jama, Kocevski Rog, Tezno, Jazovka, Macelj Forest, as well as thousands of unexplored mass execution sites throughout Slovenia, our flat Slavonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and across that hostile country whose name I do not even want to pronounce, all the way to the southern border of Macedonia…

… we who are here today as mediators of the Croatian past and future must do everything to ensure that this grave tragedy of the Croatian people becomes the cornerstone of the ‘culture of remembrance’… We the faithful also believe that every innocent victim, whether he or she belonged to ours or some other nation or any religious community, deserves his or her own grave and prayer.

That is why we, dear Croatian patriots, are here today, that is why Croatian patriots all over the world, wherever there are Croats from South to North America and throughout Europe, as well as on the Bleiburg Field itself, gather to remember the greatest tragedy of the Croatian people. Our homeland Croatia, as well as Bosnia and Herzegovina, in many Croatian Catholic churches during these May days pray for the martyrs, those killed and humiliated, for the Croatian army and civilians during and after the Second World War. We did not lag behind in Sydney, either, we paid for a holy mass for our martyrs with the message that they should not be denied a dignified earthly burial and that the truth and their Eternal Peace will be taken care of by the ONE who said, ‘I AM THE WAY, THE TRUTH AND THE LIFE!’ On this occasion, I would like to thank our priest in the church of St. Anthony in Summer Hill who read during mass our announcement for today’s commemoration and included it in the church’s weekly bulletin. To the Croatian martyrs of Bleiburg and the Way of the Cross as well as to all our fallen defenders and civilians of the Homeland War who embedded their victims in the Altar of the Homeland, we say ‘YOU ARE WITH US’, and we who are alive and love our people and the Croatian Homeland, let us always remain: FOR HOME READY!” Said in Sydney on 18 May 2025, among other things, Mr. Branko Jazic.

After his speech, Mr. Jazic recited words from the song “Pictures of Bleiburg” by Croatia’s leading musician Marko Perković Thompson, and at the end of the commemoration, the prominent poetess of the Croatian community in Sydney, Ms. Rosa Peric, recited the poem “The Truth about Bleiburg” by the late Mirjana Emina Majic. On behalf of the Croatian Inter-Society Committee of NSW, Mr. Tomislav Beram delivered the closing words of thanks at the commemoration and announced the screening of the documentary film by Nikola Knez, Croatian Film Institute, “Bleiburg, Tito’s License for Genocide”.

On Saturday, May 24, 2025, Mr. Roman Leljak is organizing a commemoration at the execution site of the Croatian people at the hands of Tito’s communists in Tezno, near Maribor, Slovenia. I hope to report on this later. Ina Vukic