Primary Sources
Although Stepinac's life has been the subject of much writing, there are very few primary sources for researchers to draw upon, the main one being the Katolički List, a diocesan weekly journal. Stepinac's diary, discovered in 1950 (too late to be used in his trial), was confiscated by the Yugoslav authorities; it currently resides in Belgrade in the archives of the Federal Ministry of Justice, but only the extracts quoted by Jakov Blažević, the public prosecutor at Stepinac's trial, in his memoir Mač a ne Mir are available. Father Josip Vranković kept a diary from December 1951 to February 10, 1960, recording what Stepinac related to him each day; that diary was used by Franciscan Aleksa Benigar to write a biography of Stepinac, but Benigar refused to share the diary with any other researcher. The diocesan archives have also been made available to Benigar, but no other researcher.
The official transcript of Stepinac's trial Sudjenje Lisaku, Stepincu etc. was published in Zagreb in 1946, but contains substantial evidence of alteration. Alexander's Triple Myth therefore relies on the Yugoslav and foreign press—particularly Vjesnik and Narodne Novine—as well as Katolički List. All other primary sources available to researchers only indirectly focus on Stepinac.
Read more about this topic: Aloysius Stepinac
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“A fact is a proposition of which the verification by an appeal to the primary sources of our knowledge or to experience is direct and simple. A theory, on the other hand, if true, has all the characteristics of a fact except that its verification is possible only by indirect, remote, and difficult means.”
—Chauncey Wright (1830–1875)