Miroslav Filipovic-Majstorovic

Miroslav Filipović (5 June 1915 – 1946), also known as Tomislav Filipović and Tomislav Filipović-Majstorović, was a Bosnian Croat Franciscan friar and Ustashe military chaplain that participated in atrocities during World War II in Yugoslavia. Convicted as a war criminal in a Yugoslav civil court, he was executed by hanging in 1946.

For the duration of the war, the Vatican kept full diplomatic relations with the Independent State of Croatia and was briefed on the efforts of the Ustaše to convert ethnic Serbs to Catholicism. Some former priests, mostly Franciscans, particularly in, but not limited to, Herzegovina and Bosnia, took part in the atrocities themselves. Filipović-Majstorović joined the Ustaše on 7 February 1942 in a brutal massacre of 2,730 Serbs of the nearby villages, including 500 children. He was reportedly subsequently dismissed from his order. He became the Chief Guard of the Jasenovac concentration camp where he was nicknamed "Fra Sotona" ("brother Satan") due to his sadism. When he was hanged for war crimes, he wore his clerical garb, although some claim he had been defrocked.

Filipović's date of birth was 5 June 1915, but little else about his early years has been recorded. In 1938 he joined the Franciscan Order at Petrićevac monastery, Banja Luka, and took “Tomislav” as his religious name.

In 1941, following establishment of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), a puppet state installed by the Axis Powers embracing Bosnia-Herzegovina as well as most of Croatia by the Ustaše, an organisation of extremist Croatian nationalists, Filipović was assigned to a chaplaincy in the Rama region in northern Herzegovina but did not take up the assignment. In January 1942, after completing his theological exams in Sarajevo, he became a military chaplain with the Ustaša. A report by the State Commission of Croatia for the Investigation of the Crimes of the Occupation Forces and their Collaborators (SCC), Section D-XXVI, entitled Crimes in the Jasenovac Camp (Zagreb 1946) is publicly available in English and Serbian.

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