interventions in individual cases, he refused to allow converted Jews to wear the yellow star in church, and he forbad military chaplains to administer the ustaSa oath if a crossed dagger and revolver were lying in front of the crucifix. Eventually he arranged for about 7,000 children, who were either orphans or had lost their families, to be accepted into Catholic homes, but forbad the clergy to baptize them into the Catholic Church. The ustaša authorities were furious with him, Pavelić detested him and according to Fr Masucci, secretary of the Vatican representative in Zagreb, asked the Vatican on three occasions to withdraw him. His friend Ivan Meštrović the sculptor, who met him in Rome during one of Stepinac's visits to the Vatican, wrote later in his memoirs that Stepinac told him that he expected to be killed either by the ustaSe or the communists. Mark Biondich stated that Stepinac was not an "ardent supporter" of the Ustaše regime legitimating their every policy, but neither was he an "avowed opponent" publicly denouncing their crimes in a systematic manner, that many of his defenders claim. Post-war period The Allies recognized the new Tito–Šubašić Yugoslav government in 1944. In February 1945 the Zagreb Archdiocese newspaper reported that Stepinac and other Church dignitaries attended a congratulatory New Year's reception at Pavelić’s, which included members of the Allied German Armed Forces, led by Generalfeldmarschall Maximilian von Weichs. On March 24, 1945, as the Partisans fought their final pitched battles against retreating German, NDH and other collaborationist forces, Stepinac and the Croatian bishops, at the behest of the Ustaše regime, issued a pastoral letter asking Croats to remain loyal to the NDH, and stand firm against the advancing Partisans. On April 10, 1945, Stepinac celebrated his last Te Deum for the NDH, which still had Race Laws, and was just then killing the last remaining 3,500 inmates, including 700-800 Jews, at the Jasenovac concentration camp. In the final days of the war Stepinac received and hid the archives of the Ustaše Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which later proved to contain gold stolen from concentration camp inmates. Shortly after the fall of the NDH and during the surrender at Bleiburg, on 17 May 1945, Stepinac was effectively put under house arrest in Zagreb and was for the subsequent two weeks interviewed by Yugoslavia′s security, military judicial, and Communist party officials such as Veljko Drakulić, Vladimir Ranogajec,