Far-right Croats mark massacre of pro-Nazis in WWII

(18 May 2019) Thousands of Croatian far-right supporters gathered in a field in southern Austria on Saturday to commemorate the massacre of pro-Nazi Croats by communists at the end of World War II. For Croatian nationalists, the controversial annual event near the village of Bleiburg symbolises their suffering under communism in the former Yugoslavia before they fought a war for independence in the 1990s. However, Bleiburg’s mayor Stefan Visocnik has branded the event “a mask for the glorification of Nazism.“ Tens of thousands of Croatians, mostly pro-fascist soldiers and their families, fled to the region in May 1945 amid a Yugoslav army offensive, only to be turned back from Austria by the British military and into the hands of anti-fascists. Thousands of the so-called Ustashas were killed in and around Bleiburg. Tens of thousands of Jews, Serbs, Gypsies and anti-fascist Croats perished in Ustasha-run death camps during WWII and the Bleiburg massacre was seen by historians