Ivo Omrčanin

Ivo Omrčanin (1 October 1913 – 20 February 2001) was a Croatian theologian, diplomat and Catholic layman who served as the ''chargé d'affaires'' of the Independent State of Croatia's embassy to Nazi Germany in Berlin during the final months of World War II. He later played a leading role in the post-war ratlines which smuggled former Axis officials out of Europe.

Following the Allied victory, he escaped to Rome, where he became involved with the Catholic priest Krunoslav Draganović, a prominent ratline organizer. In Omrčanin's own estimation, 30,000 Axis officials left Europe using the ratlines. Among those whom he personally helped escape were Croatian dictator Ante Pavelić and German commander Klaus Barbie. From 1953 to 1957, Omrčanin worked as an advisor in canon law to the U.S. Army chaplains office in Kaiserslautern, West Germany. Afterwards, he immigrated to the United States and worked as a professor at Assumption College and the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, as well as a translator for the State Department. In subsequent decades, he wrote numerous pro-Ustaše tracts denying the Holocaust and the genocide of Serbs in the NDH, and claiming that half a million or more Ustaše prisoners and Croatian civilians had been killed by the Yugoslav Partisans in the post-war Bleiburg repatriations.

Omrčanin was featured as an interview subject in Marcel Ophuls's 1988 film ''Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie'', and controversially, was cited by political scientist R. J. Rummel in his 1999 book ''Statistics of Democide'' regarding the number of victims of communism in Yugoslavia. He died in Washington, D.C. in 2001. Provided by Wikipedia