Church in Croatia slammed by Simon Wiesenthal Center

Church in Croatia slammed by Simon Wiesenthal Center

JERUSALEM -- The Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center has condemned the holding of a mass in a Catholic church in Zagreb, Croatia, commemorating Ante Pavelic.

Pavelic was at the helm of the so-called Independent State of Croatia (NDH) - a Second World War-era Nazi-allied entity, whose Ustasha regime operated death camps where hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Roma were murdered.

The mass held on Monday was a "badge of shame" for the Catholic Church, the Center said.

"It's hard to believe that in the center of the capital of a member of the European Union, very close to Zagreb's Jewish community, hundreds of people gathered yesterday to commemorate the memory of one of Europe's biggest mass murderers," the head of the center's Jerusalem office, Efraim Zuroff, said in a statement.

The service marking the 55rd anniversary of Pavelic's death an "insult to the memory of Pavelic's hundreds of thousands of innocent victims and a badge of shame for the Catholic Church."

AFP said in its reports that masses commemorating Pavelic's death are regularly held in Zagreb and Split.

"He died in Madrid on December 28, 1959, reportedly from wounds inflicted in an attack on him two years earlier in Buenos Aires, where he had fled after the Axis defeat in 1945," the French agency said.