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The Ustaše (), also known by anglicised versions Ustasha or Ustashe, was a Croats fascist and ultranationalist organization active, as one organization, between 1929 and 1945, formally known as the Ustaša – Croatian Revolutionary Movement (). From its inception and before the Second World War, the organization engaged in a series of terrorist activities against the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, including collaborating with IMRO to assassinate King Alexander I of Yugoslavia in 1934.The Assassination of Europe, 1918-1942: A Political History, Howard M. Sachar, University of Toronto Press, 2014, , pp. 251–258. During World War II in Yugoslavia, the Ustaše went on to perpetrate the Holocaust and genocide against its Jews, Serb and Roma populations, killing hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Roma, as well as Muslim and Croat political dissidents.
The ideology of the movement was a blend of fascism, Roman Catholicism and Croatian ultranationalism. The Ustaše supported the creation of a Greater Croatia that would span the Drina River and extend to the border of Belgrade.Meier, Viktor. Yugoslavia: a history of its demise (English), London: Routledge, 1999, p. 125. The movement advocated a Racial purity Croatia and promoted genocide against Serbs—due to the Ustaše's anti-Serb sentiment—and Holocaust against Jews and Roma via Nazi racial theory, and persecution of anti-fascist or dissident Croats and Bosniaks. The Ustaše viewed the Bosniaks as "Croat Muslims", and as a result, Bosniaks were not persecuted on the basis of race. The Ustaše espoused Roman Catholicism and Islam as the religions of the Croats and condemned Orthodox Christianity, which was the main religion of the Serbs. Roman Catholicism was identified with Croatian nationalism,Kent, Peter C. The lonely Cold War of Pope Pius XII: the Roman Catholic Church and the division of Europe, 1943–1950, McGill-Queen's Press (MQUP), 2002 p. 46;
" Fiercely nationalistic, the Ustaše were also fervently Catholic, identifying, in the Yugoslav political context, Catholicism with Croatian nationalism..." while Islam, which had a large following in Bosnia and Herzegovina, was praised by the Ustaše as the religion that "keeps true the blood of Croats."
It was founded as a nationalist organization that sought to create an independent Croatian state. It functioned as a Terrorism organization before World War II. After the invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, the Ustaše came to power when they were appointed to rule a part of Axis powers-occupied Yugoslavia as the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), a Quasi-state-protectorate puppet state established by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Yugoslavia, Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website; accessed 25 April 2014. The Ustaše Militia () became its military wing in the new state.
The Ustaše regime was militarily weak and failed to ever attain significant support among Croats. Therefore, terror was their means of controlling the "ethnically disparate" population. The Ustaše regime was initially backed by some parts of the Croat population that in the interwar period had felt oppressed by the Serb-led Yugoslavia, but their brutal policies quickly alienated many ordinary Croats and resulted in a loss of the support they had gained by creating a Croatian national state.
With the German surrender, end of World War II in Europe, and the establishment of socialist Yugoslavia in 1945, the Ustaše movement and their state totally collapsed. Many members of the Ustaše militia and Croatian Home Guard who subsequently fled the country were taken as prisoners of war and subjected to forced marches and executions during the Bleiburg repatriations. Various underground and exile successor organisations created by former Ustaše members, such as the Crusaders and the Croatian Liberation Movement, have tried to continue the movement to little success.
He envisioned the creation of a Greater Croatia that would include territories inhabited by Bosniaks, Serbs, and Slovenes, considering Bosniaks and Serbs to be Croats who had been converted to Islam and Orthodox Christianity, and considered the Slovenes "mountain Croats". Starčević argued that the large Serb presence in territories claimed by a Greater Croatia was the result of recent settlement, encouraged by Habsburg rulers, and the influx of groups like Vlachs who took up Orthodox Christianity and identified themselves as Serbs. Starčević admired Bosniaks because in his view they were Croats who had adopted Islam in order to preserve the economic and political autonomy of Bosnia and Croatia under the Ottoman Empire occupation.
The Ustaše used Starčević's theories to promote their own annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina to Croatia and recognized Croatia as having two major ethnocultural components: Catholics and Muslims. The Ustaše sought to represent Starčević as being connected to their views. Josip Frank seceded his extreme fraction from Starčević's Party of Rights and formed his own, the Pure Party of Rights, which became the main pool of members of the subsequent Ustaše movement. Historian John Paul Newman stated that Austria-Hungary officers' "unfaltering opposition to Yugoslavia provided a blueprint for the Croatian radical right, the Ustaše".
The Ustaše promoted the theories of Milan Šufflay, who is believed to have claimed that Croatia had been "one of the strongest ramparts of Western civilization for many centuries", which he claimed had been lost through its union with Serbia when the nation of Yugoslavia was formed in 1918. Šufflay was killed in Zagreb in 1931 by government supporters. "Einstein accuses Yugoslavian rulers in savant's murder", The New York Times, 6 May 1931. mirror mirror
The Ustaše accepted the 1935 thesis of Krunoslav Draganović, a Catholic priest who claimed that many Catholics in southern Herzegovina had been converted to Orthodox Christianity in the 16th and 17th centuries, in order to justify their own policy of forcible conversion of Orthodox Christians to Catholicism.
The Ustaše were heavily influenced by Nazism and fascism. Its leader, Ante Pavelić, held the position of Poglavnik, which was based on the similar positions of Duce held by Benito Mussolini and Führer held by Adolf Hitler. The Ustaše, like fascists, promoted a Corporatism economy. Pavelić and the Ustaše were allowed sanctuary in Italy by Mussolini after being exiled from Yugoslavia. Pavelić had been in negotiations with Fascist Italy since 1927 that included advocating a territory-for-sovereignty swap in which he would tolerate Italy annexing its claimed territory in Dalmatia in exchange for Italy supporting the sovereignty of an independent Croatia. The Ustaše ideology has also been characterized as clerical fascism Fascism: Past, Present, Future By Walter Laqueur. p. 263 by several authors, who emphasize the importance the movement attached to Roman Catholicism.
Mussolini's support of the Ustaše was based on pragmatic considerations, such as maximizing Italian influence in the Balkans and the Adriatic. After 1937, with the weakening of French influence in Europe following Germany's remilitarization of the Rhineland and with the rise of a quasi-fascist government in Yugoslavia under Milan Stojadinović, Mussolini abandoned support for the Ustaše from 1937 to 1939 and sought to improve relations with Yugoslavia, fearing that continued hostility towards Yugoslavia would result in Yugoslavia entering Germany's sphere of influence.Van Creveld, Martin L. Hitler's Strategy 1940–1941: The Balkan Clue. 2nd ed. London/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974. pp. 6–8
The collapse of the quasi-fascist Stojadinović regime resulted in Italy restoring its support for the Ustaše, whose aim was to create an independent Croatia in personal union with Italy. However, distrust of the Ustaše grew. Mussolini's son-in-law and Italian foreign minister Count Galeazzo Ciano noted in his diary that "The Duce is indignant with Pavelić, because he claims that the Croats are descendants of the Goths. This will have the effect of bringing them into the German orbit".Galeazzo Ciano, Count; Malcolm Muggeridge (translator). Ciano's diary, 1939–1943. W. Heinemann, 1950, p. 392.
Hungary strongly supported the Ustaše for two aims. One, in order to weaken Yugoslavia, Little Entente, in order to ultimately regain some of its lost territories. The other, Hungary also wished to establish later in the future a strong alliance with the Independent State of Croatia and possibly enter a personal union.
Nazi Germany initially did not support an independent Croatia, nor did it support the Ustaše, with Hitler stressing the importance of a "strong and united Yugoslavia". Nazi officials, including Hermann Göring, wanted Yugoslavia stable and officially neutral during the war so Germany could continue to securely gain Yugoslavia's raw material exports. The Nazis grew irritated with the Ustaše, among them Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler, who was dissatisfied with the lack of full compliance by the NDH to the Nazis' agenda of extermination of the Jews, as the Ustaše permitted Jews who converted to Catholicism to be recognized as "honorary Croats", thus putatively exempt from persecution.
The KNIFE, REVOLVER, MACHINE GUN and TIME BOMB; these are the idols, these are bells that will announce the dawning and THE RESURRECTION OF THE INDEPENDENT STATE OF CROATIA.
In 1933, the Ustaše presented "The Seventeen Principles" that formed the official ideology of the movement. The Principles stated the uniqueness of the Croatian nation, promoted collective rights over individual rights and declared that people who were not Croat by "Heredity" would be excluded from political life.
Those considered "undesirables" were subjected to mass murder. These principles called for the creation of a new economic system that would be neither Capitalism nor Communism and which would emphasize the importance of the Roman Catholic Church and the patriarchial family as means to maintain social order and morality. (The name given by modern historians to this particular aspect of Ustaše ideology varies; "national Catholicism", "political Catholicism" and "Catholic Croatism" have been proposed among others.) In power, the Ustaše banned contraception and tightened laws against blasphemy.Atkin, Nicholas and Frank Tallet. Priests, Prelates and People: A History of European Catholicism since 1750. New York: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2003. p. 248.
The Ustaše accepted that Croats are part of the Dinaric race,Caccamo, Francesco and Trinchese, Stefano. Rotte adriatiche. Tra Italia, Balcani e Mediterraneo. FrancoAngeli, 2011. p. 158. but rejected the idea that Croats are primarily Slavic, claiming they primarily come from Germanic roots with the Goths.Rich, Norman. Hitler's War Aims: the Establishment of the New Order (1974), pp. 276–277. W.W. Norton & Co: New York. The Ustaše believed that a government must naturally be strong and authoritarian. The movement opposed parliamentary democracy for being "corrupt" and Marxism and Bolshevism for interfering in family life and the economy and for their materialism. The Ustaše considered competing political parties and elected parliaments to be harmful to its own interests.
The Ustaše recognized both Roman Catholicism and Islam as national religions of the Croatian people but initially rejected Orthodox Christianity as being incompatible with their objectives. Although the Ustaše emphasized religious themes, it stressed that duty to the nation took precedence over religious custom.Greble, Emily. Sarajevo, 1941–1945: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Hitler's Europe. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2011. p. 125.
In power, the Ustaše banned the use of the term "Serbian Orthodox faith", requiring "Greek-Eastern faith" in its place. The Ustaše forcefully converted many Orthodox to Catholicism, murdered and expelled 85% of Orthodox priests, and plundered and burnt many Orthodox Christian churches. The Ustaše also persecuted Old Catholics who did not recognize papal infallibility. On 2 July 1942 the Croatian Orthodox Church was founded, as a further means to destroy the Serbian Orthodox Church, but this new church gained very few followers and was abolished in 1945.
″Today, practically all finance and nearly all commerce in Croatia is in Jewish hands. This became possible only through the support of the state, which thereby seeks, on one hand, to strengthen the pro-Serbian Jews, and on the other, to weaken Croat national strength. The Jews celebrated the establishment of the so-called Yugoslav state with great joy, because a national Croatia could never be as useful to them as a multi-national Yugoslavia; for in national chaos lies the power of the Jews... In fact, as the Jews had foreseen, Yugoslavia became, in consequence of the corruption of official life in Serbia, a true Eldorado of Jewry."
Once in power, the Ustaše immediately introduced a series of Nazi-style racial laws. On 30 April 1941, the Ustaše proclaimed the "Legal Decree on Racial Origins", the "Legal Decree on the Protection of Aryan Blood and the Honor of the Croatian People", and the "Legal Provision on Citizenship". These decrees defined who was a Jew, and took away the citizenship rights of all non-Aryans, i.e. Jews and Roma. By the end of April 1941, months before the Nazis implemented similar measures in Germany and over a year after they were implemented in occupied Poland, the Ustaše required all Jews to wear insignia, typically a yellow Star of David. The Ustaše declared the "Legal Provision on the Nationalization of the Property of Jews and Jewish Companies", on 10 October 1941, and with it they confiscated all Jewish property.
Already on their first day, 10–11 April 1941, Ustaše arrested a group of prominent Zagreb Jews and held them for ransom. On 13 April the same was done in Osijek, where Ustaše and mobs also destroyed the synagogue and Jewish graveyard. This process was repeated multiple times in 1941 with groups of Jews. Simultaneously, the Ustaše initiated extensive antisemitic propaganda, with Ustaše papers writing that Croatians must "be more alert than any other ethnic group to protect their racial purity, ... We need to keep our blood clean of the Jews". They also wrote that Jews are synonymous with "treachery, cheating, greed, immorality and foreigness", and therefore "wide swaths of the Croatian people always despised the Jews and felt towards them natural revulsion".
In May 1941, the Ustaše rounded up 165 Jewish youth in Zagreb, members of the Jewish sports club Makabi, and sent them to the Danica concentration camp. All but three were later killed by the Ustaše. The Ustaše sent most Jews to Ustaše and Nazi concentration camps—including the notorious, Ustaše-run Jasenovac concentration camp—where nearly 32,000, or 80% of the Jews in the Independent State of Croatia, were killed. "Holocaust Era in Croatia 1941–1945: Jasenovac" United States Holocaust Memorial Museum In October 1941, the Ustaše mayor of Zagreb ordered the demolition of the Zagreb Synagogue, which was completely demolished by April 1942. The Ustaše persecuted Jews who practiced Judaism but authorized Jewish converts to Catholicism to be recognized as Croatian citizens and be given honorary Aryan citizenship that allowed them to be reinstated at the jobs from which they had previously been separated. After they stripped Jews of their citizenship rights, the Ustaše allowed some to apply for Aryan rights via bribes and/or through connections to prominent Ustaše. The whole process was highly arbitrary. Only 2% of Zagreb's Jews were granted Aryan rights, for example. Also, Aryan rights did not guarantee permanent protection from being sent to concentration camps or other persecution.
Decrees enacted by the regime formed the basis that allowed it to get rid of all unwanted employees in state and local government and in state enterprises, the "unwanted" being all Jews, Serbs and Yugoslav-oriented Croats who were all thrown out except for some deemed specifically needed by the government. This would leave a multitude of jobs to be filled by Ustašes and pro-Ustaše adherents and would lead to government jobs being filled by people with no professional qualifications. Dalmatian-American historian Jozo Tomasevich in War and Revolution in Yugoslavia: 1941–1945 remarks "never before in history had Croats been exposed to such legalized administrative, police and judicial brutality and abuse as during the Ustaša regime."
In October 1928, after the assassination of leading Croatian politician Stjepan Radić, (Croatian Peasant Party President in the Yugoslav Assembly) by radical Montenegrin politician Puniša Račić, a youth group named the Croat Youth Movement was founded by Branimir Jelić at the University of Zagreb. A year later, Pavelić was invited by the 21-year-old Jelić into the organization as a junior member. A related movement, the Domobranski Pokret—which had been the name of the legal Croatian army in Austria-Hungary—began publication of Hrvatski Domobran, a newspaper dedicated to Croatian national matters. The Ustaše sent Hrvatski Domobran to the United States to garner support from Croatian-Americans.Kivisto, Peter. The Ethnic enigma: the salience of ethnicity for European-origin groups. Cranbury, NJ/London, UK/Mississauga, Canada: Associated University Press, 1989. p. 107 The organization around the Domobran tried to engage with and radicalize moderate Croats, using Radić's assassination to stir up emotions within the divided country. By 1929 two divergent Croatian political streams had formed: those who supported Pavelić's view that only violence could secure Croatia's national interests, and a much larger group supporting the Croatian Peasant Party, led then by Vladko Maček, successor to Stjepan Radić.Đilas, Aleksa. The Contested Country: Yugoslav Unity and Communist Revolution, 1919–1953, Harvard University Press, 1991, pp. 114–115, 129.
Various members of the Croatian Party of Rights contributed to the writing of the Domobran, until around Christmas 1928 when the newspaper was banned by authorities of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. In January 1929 the king banned all national parties,Jović, Dejan. Yugoslavia: a state that withered away, p. 51 and the radical wing of the Party of Rights was exiled, including Pavelić, Jelić and Gustav Perčec. This group was later joined by several other Croatian exiles. On 22 March 1929, Zvonimir Pospišil, Mijo Babić, Marko Hranilović, and Matija Soldin murdered Toni Šlegel, the chief editor of newspaper Novosti from Zagreb and president of Jugoštampa, which was the beginning of the terrorist actions of Ustaše. Hranilović and Soldin were arrested and executed for the murder.:"Ustaške terorističke akcije počele su 22. marta 1929. godine u Zagrebu, gdje su Mijo Babić i Zvonko Pospišil revolverskim hicima ubili glavnog urednika zagrebačkih »Novosti« i predsjednika »Jugoštampe« Toni Šlegela." On 20 April 1929 Pavelić and others co-signed a declaration in Sofia, Bulgaria, with members of the Macedonian National Committee, asserting that they would pursue "their legal activities for the establishment of human and national rights, political freedom and complete independence for both Croatia and Macedonia". The Court for the Preservation of the State in Belgrade sentenced Pavelić and Perčec to death on 17 July 1929.
The exiles started organizing support for their cause among the Croatian diaspora in Europe, as well as North and South America. In January 1932 they named their revolutionary organization " Ustaša". The Ustaše carried out terrorist acts intended to maximize damage to Yugoslavia. From their training camps in fascist Italy and Hungary, they planted time bombs on international trains bound for Yugoslavia, causing deaths and material damage. In November 1932 ten Ustaše, led by Andrija Artuković and supported by four local sympathizers, attacked a gendarme outpost at Brušani in the Lika/Velebit area, in an apparent attempt to intimidate the Yugoslav authorities. The incident has sometimes been termed the "Velebit uprising".
Ante Pavelić, along with Dido Kvaternik and Ivan Perčević, were subsequently sentenced to death in absentia by a French court, as the real organizers of the plot. The Ustaše believed that the assassination of King Alexander had effectively "broken the backbone of Yugoslavia" and was their "most important achievement."
Soon after the assassination, all organizations related to the Ustaše as well as the Hrvatski Domobran, which continued as a civil organization, were banned throughout Europe. Under pressure from France, the Italian police arrested Pavelić and several Ustaše emigrants in October 1934. Pavelić was imprisoned in Turin and released in March 1936. After he met with Eugen Dido Kvaternik, he stated that assassination was "the only language Serbs understand". While in prison, Pavelić was informed of the 1935 election in Yugoslavia, when the coalition led by Croat Vladko Maček won. He stated that his victory was aided by the activity of Ustaše. By the mid-1930s, graffiti with the initials ŽAP meaning "Long live Ante Pavelić" () had begun to appear on the streets of Zagreb. During the 1930s, a split developed between the "home" Ustaše members who stayed behind in Croatia and Bosnia to struggle against Yugoslavia and the "emigre" Ustaše who went abroad. Emigre Ustaše who had a much lower educational level were viewed as violent, ignorant and fanatical by the home Ustaše, who were in turn dismissed as "soft" by the emigres, seeing themselves as a "warrior-elite".
After March 1937, when Italy and Yugoslavia signed a pact of friendship, Ustaše and their activities had been banned. This attracted the attention of young Croats, especially university students, who became sympathizers or members. In 1936, the Yugoslav government offered amnesty to those Ustaše abroad provided they promised to renounce violence; many of the emigre faction accepted the amnesty. In the late 1930s, the Ustaše began infiltrating the para-military organizations of the Croat Peasant Party, the Croatian Defense Force and the Peasant Civil Party. At the University of Zagreb, an Ustaše-linked student group become the largest single student group by 1939. In February 1939 two returnees from detention, Mile Budak and Ivan Oršanić, became editors of the pro-Ustaše journal Hrvatski narod, known in English as The Croatian Nation.
Meanwhile, Pavelić and several hundred Ustaše left their camps in Italy for Zagreb, where he declared a new government on 16 April 1941. He accorded himself the title of "Poglavnik"—a Croatian approximation to "Führer". The Independent State of Croatia was declared on Croatian "ethnic and historical territory", what is today Croatia (without Istria), Bosnia and Herzegovina, Syrmia and the Bay of Kotor. However, a few days after the declaration of independence, the Ustaše were forced to sign the Treaty of Rome where they surrendered part of Dalmatia and Krk, Rab, Korčula, Biograd, Šibenik, Split, Čiovo, Šolta, Mljet and part of Konavle and the Bay of Kotor to Italy. De facto control over this territory varied over the course of the war, as the Yugoslav Partisans grew more successful, while the Germans and Italians increasingly exercised direct control over areas of interest. The Germans and Italians split the NDH into two zones of influence: the southwest, controlled by the Italians, and the northeast, controlled by the Germans. As a result, the NDH has been described as "an Italian-German quasi-protectorate". In September 1943, after Italian capitulation, the NDH re-occupied the whole territory annexed by Italy through the Treaty of Rome.
The decline in support for the Ustaše regime among ethnic Croats of those initially for the government began with the ceding of Dalmatia to Italy, considered as the heartland of the state and worsened with the internal lawlessness from Ustaše persecutions.
On 27 April 1941 a newly formed unit of the Ustaše army killed members of the largely Serbian community of Gudovac, near Bjelovar. Eventually all who opposed and/or threatened the Ustaše were outlawed. The HSS was banned on 11 June 1941, in an attempt by the Ustaše to take their place as the primary representative of the Croatian peasantry. Vladko Maček was sent to the Jasenovac concentration camp, but later released to serve a house arrest sentence due to his popularity among the people. Maček was later again called upon by foreigners to take a stand and oppose the Pavelić government, but refused. In early 1941 Jews and Serbs were ordered to leave certain areas of Zagreb.Some were sent to concentration camps and subsequently killed. For a description of these deportations and the treatment in the camps C.f. Djuro Schwartz, "In the Jasenovac camps of death" (ג'ורו שווארץ, במחנות המוות של יאסנובאץ", קובץ מחקרים כ"ה, יד-ושם)
In the months after Independent State of Croatia has been established, most of Ustaše groups were not under centralized control: besides 4,500 regular Ustaše Corps troops, there was some 25,000–30,0000 "Wild Ustaše" (hrv. "divlje ustaše"), boosted by government-controlled press as "peasant Ustaše" "begging" to be sent to fight enemies of the regime. After mass crimes against Serb populace committed during the summer months of 1941, the regime decided to blame all the atrocities to the irregular Ustaše—thoroughly undisciplined and paid for the service only with the booty; authorities even sentenced to death and executed publicly in August and September 1941 many of them for unauthorized use of extreme violence against Serbs and Gypsies. To put an end to Wild Ustaše uncontrolled looting and killing, the central government used some 6,000 gendarmes and some 45,000 newly recruited members of regular "Domobranstvo" forces.
Pavelić first met with Adolf Hitler on 6 June 1941. Mile Budak, then a minister in Pavelić's government, publicly proclaimed the violent racial policy of the state on 22 July 1941. Maks Luburic, a chief of the secret police, started building concentration camps in the summer of the same year. Ustaše activities in villages across the Dinaric Alps led the Italians and the Germans to express their disquiet. According to writer/historian Srđa Trifković, as early as 10 July 1941 Wehrmacht Gen. Edmund Glaise von Horstenau reported the following to the German High Command, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW):
Historian Jonathan Steinberg describes Ustaše crimes against Serbian and Jewish civilians: "Serbian and Jewish men, women and children were literally hacked to death". Reflecting on the photos of Ustaše crimes taken by Italians, Steinberg writes: "There are photographs of Serbian women with breasts hacked off by pocket knives, men with eyes gouged out, emasculated and mutilated".
A Gestapo report to Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, dated 17 February 1942, stated:
In September 1942 an Ustaše Defensive Brigade was formed, and during 1943 the Ustaše battalions were re-organised into eight four-battalion brigades (1st to 8th). In 1943 the Germans suffered major losses on the Eastern Front and the Italians signed an armistice with the Allies, leaving behind significant caches of arms which the Partisans would use.
By 1944 Pavelić was almost totally reliant on Ustaše units, now 100,000 strong, formed in Brigades 1 to 20, Recruit Training Brigades 21 to 24, three divisions, two railway brigades, one defensive brigade and the new Mobile Brigade. In November 1944 the army was effectively put under Ustaše control when the Armed Forces of the Independent State of Croatia were combined with the units of the Ustaše to form 18 divisions, comprising 13 infantry, two mountain and two assault divisions and one replacement division, each with its own organic artillery and other support units. There were several armored units.
Fighting continued for a short while after the formal surrender of German Army Group E on 9 May 1945, as Pavelić ordered the NDH forces to attempt to escape to Austria, together with a large number of civilians. The Battle of Poljana, between a mixed German and Ustaše column and a Partisan force, was the last battle of World War II on European soil. Most of those fleeing, including both Ustaše and civilians, were handed over to the Partisans at Bleiburg and elsewhere on the Austrian border. Pavelić hid in Austria and Rome, with the help of Catholic clergy, later fleeing to Argentina.
For several years some Ustaše tried to organize a resistance group called the Crusaders, but their efforts were largely foiled by the Yugoslav authorities.Ladislaus Hory und Martin Broszat. Der kroatische Ustascha-Staat, Deutsche Verlag-Anstalt, Stuttgart, 2. Auflage 1965, pp. 13–38, 75–80. With the defeat of the Independent State of Croatia, the active movement went dormant. Infighting fragmented the surviving Ustaše. Pavelić formed the Croatian Liberation Movement, which drew in several of the former state's leaders. Vjekoslav Vrančić founded a reformed Croatian Liberation Movement and was its leader. Maks Luburić formed the Croatian National Resistance. Branimir Jelić founded the Croatian National Committee. Former Crusader and Ustaša mobile police officer, Srecko Rover, helped establish Ustaše groups in Australia.
Blagoje Jovović, a Montenegro, shot Pavelić near Buenos Aires on 9 April 1957; Pavelić later died of his injuries.
The NDH government cooperated with Nazi Germany in the Holocaust and exercised their own version of the genocide against Serbs, Jews and Roma inside its borders. State policy towards Serbs had first been declared in the words of Milovan Žanić, a minister of the NDH Legislative council, on 2 May 1941:
The Ustaše enacted Nuremberg Laws patterned after those of the Nazi Germany, which persecuted Jews, Romani people and Serbs, who were collectively declared to be enemies of the Croatian people. Serbs, Jews, Roma and Croatian and Bosniak dissidents, including Communists, were interned in concentration camps, the largest of which was Jasenovac. By the end of the war the Ustaše, under Pavelić's leadership, had killed an estimated 30,000 Jews and 26,000–29,000 Roma, while estimates of Serb victims range from 200,000 to 500,000, with historians generally listing between 300,000 and 350,000 deaths.
The history textbooks in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia cited 700,000 as the total number of victims at Jasenovac. This was promulgated from a 1946 calculation of the demographic loss of population (the difference between the actual number of people after the war and the number that would have been, had the pre-war growth trend continued). After that, it was used by Edvard Kardelj and Moša Pijade in the Yugoslav war reparations claim sent to Germany. In its entry on Jasenovac, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says:
The USHMM notes that estimates on the number of Serb victims, the Ustaše's primary victims, vary tremendously but "the most reliable figures place the number between 330,000 and 390,000, with 45,000 to 52,000 Serbs murdered in Jasenovac."
The Jasenovac Memorial Area maintains a list of 83,145 names of Jasenovac victims gathered by government officials in Belgrade in 1964, as well as names and biographical data for the victims identified in recent inquiries. Jasenovac Memorial Site official web site; accessed 25 August 2016. As the gathering process was imperfect, they estimated that the list represented between 60%–75% of the total victims, putting the number of killed in that complex at roughly 80,000–100,000. The previous head of the Memorial Area, Simo Brdar, estimated at least 365,000 dead at Jasenovac. The analyses of statisticians Vladimir Žerjavić and Bogoljub Kočović were similar to those of the Memorial Area. In all of Yugoslavia, the estimated number of Serb deaths was 487,000 according to Kočović, and 530,000 according to Žerjavić, out of a total of 1.014 million or 1.027 million deaths (respectively). Žerjavić further stated there were 197,000 Serb civilians killed in NDH (78,000 as prisoners in Jasenovac and elsewhere) as well as 125,000 Serb combatants.
The Belgrade Museum of Holocaust compiled a list of over 77,000 names of Jasenovac victims. It was previously headed by Milan Bulajić, who supported the claim of a total of 700,000 victims. The current administration of the museum has further expanded the list to include slightly over 80,000 names. During World War II various German military commanders and civilian authorities gave different figures for the number of Serbs, Jews and others killed inside the territory of the Independent State of Croatia. Historian Prof. Jozo Tomasevich has posited that some of these figures may have been a "deliberate exaggeration" fostered to create further hostility between Serbs and Croats so that they would not unite in resisting the Axis. These figures included 400,000 Serbs (Alexander Löhr);Summers, Craig & Eric Markusen. Collective violence: harmful behavior in groups and governments; Rowman & Littlefield, 1999, p. 55 500,000 Serbs (Lothar Rendulic);Rummel, Rudolph J. Democide: Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder; Transaction Publishers, 1992, p. 75. ;
"While German troops were still in several places in Croatia, the Croatians began a beastly persecution of the Orthodox Serbs. At this time at least a half-million people were killed. An unbelievable governing mentality was responsible, as I learned in August 1943 when I received the answer to a question of mine from a government functionary in the circle of the chief of state." 250,000 to March 1943 (Edmund Glaise von Horstenau); more than "3/4 of a million Serbs" (Hermann Neubacher) in 1943;Neubacher, p. 31 600,000–700,000 in concentration camps until March 1944 (Ernst Fick); 700,000 (Massenbach)..
These camps were closed by October 1942. The Jasenovac complex was built between August 1941 and February 1942. The first two camps, Krapje and Bročica, were closed in November 1941. The three newer camps continued to function until the end of the war:
There were also other camps in:
Numbers of prisoners:
The German military even took the extraordinary step of trying the Ustaše chaplain, Miroslav Filipović, for the massacre of 2,300 civilians in three villages around Banja Luka in February 1942, including 52 children at a school.BiH Supreme Court Archive, B.I.I.k171-13/15-1 On 3 March, 1943, General von Horstanau, wrote "Thus far 250,000 Serbs have been killed". General Lothar Rendulić wrote how in August 1942 he remarked to an Ustaše official that he could not conceive how 500,000 Serbs had been killed, to which the Ustaše replied "Half-a-million is a slanderous accusation, the number is not higher than 200,000". Other German sources put the total Serb victim numbers in the ISC as high as 600,000 to 700,000.
Thus 85% of the Orthodox priests in the Independent State of Croatia were either killed or expelled to "leave the Orthodox population without spiritual leadership so the Ustašas' policy of forced or fear-induced conversions to Catholicism would be easier to carry out". The Ustaše destroyed and desecrated numerous Orthodox churches, forbade the use of Cyrillic script and the Julian calendar (both officially used by the Serbian Orthodox Church) and even prohibited the term "Serbian Orthodox Church". Orthodox schools were shut down, and the Church was prohibited from collecting donations, robbing it of income. Church properties were confiscated, some were turned over to the Croatian Catholic Church. Finally, to destroy the Serbian Orthodox Church, the Ustaše tried to create its own alternative Croatian Orthodox Church, with an imported Russian hieromonk, Germogen Maximov, reigning as "patriarch", but it failed to gain adherents.
Despite the actions by the Ustaše to destroy the Serbian Orthodox Church, historian Josip "Jozo" Tomasevich found no condemnations of these crimes, public or private, by Catholic Archbishop Stepinac or any other members of the Croatian Catholic Church. On the contrary, he states that this massive Ustaše attack on the Serbian Orthodox Church "was approved and supported by many Croatian Catholic priests", and that the Croatian Roman Catholic Church hierarchy and the Vatican "regarded Ustaše policies against the Serbs and Serbian Orthodox Church as advantageous to Roman Catholicism".
Croatian Catholic Church antagonism toward the Orthodox Church became an important part of Ustaše antagonism toward Serbs, with fateful consequences during the war. The Ustaše supported violent aggression or force to convert Serbo-Croatian speaking Orthodox believers to Roman Catholicism. The Ustaše held the position that Eastern Orthodoxy, as a symbol of Serbian nationalism, was their greatest foe and never recognized the existence of a Serb people on the territories of Croatia or Bosnia—they recognized only "Croats of the Eastern faith". Under the Ustaše policy of eliminating Serbs, the Catholic Church in Croatia participated in the forced conversion of Orthodox Serbs to Catholicism. However, even conversion did not necessarily protect Serbs and Jews from slaughter. Bishop Alojzije Mišić of Mostar described how while Serb converts to Catholicism "were at Church attending holy Mass, they (Ustaše) seized them, the young and the old, men and women, drove them like cattle...and soon sent them to eternity, en masse."
The Ustaše called Bosniaks "Croats of the Islamic faith" and in general tolerated Muslims; in turn the Bosniak community did not demonstrate any particular hostility to the Ustaše government. Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Second World War, Enver Redžić, Enver Redzic, Psychology Press, 2005 68–73, 79–83 Many Muslim conscripts served in the armed forces of Independent State of Croatia and its police forces; only a very small number of Muslims served in the ranks of the communist Partisans until the closing days of the war.Ethnic, Steven L. Burg, Paul S. Shoup Routledge, 4. ožu 2015. The October 12, 1941, Resolution of Sarajevo Muslims by 108 notable Muslims condemned Ustaše atrocities against Serbs.
On 28 April 1941, the head of the Catholic Church in Croatia, Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac, issued a public letter in support of the new Ustaše-led Independent State of Croatia and asked the clergy to pray for Pavelić. This despite the fact that the Ustaše had already proclaimed measures prohibiting Serbs, Jews and Roma to serve as policemen, judges and soldiers, and making easy for the state officials to fire members of those ethnic/religious groups from the public administration, and he knew they were preparing Nazi-style racial laws, which Pavelić signed only two days after.
While Stepinac later objected to certain Ustaše policies and helped some Jews and Serbs, he continued to publicly support the survival of Independent State of Croatia until its very end, served as the state's War Vicar, and in 1944 received a medal from Pavelić. During the ongoing war, Stepinac publicly objected to Ustaše policies—in fact, as regards for the relations with head of the Ustaše regime Ante Pavelić, "it is generally agreed that they thoroughly hated each other... archbishop also opposed Fascist and Nazi ideologies, especially Nazi racist ideology, and many Ustasha policies", unlike some other members of the Croatian Catholic clergy. According to Historian Martin Gilbert, "Aloysius Stepinac, who in 1941 had welcomed Croat independence, subsequently condemned Croat atrocities against both Serbs and Jews, and himself saved a group of Jews in an old age home."
The vast majority of Catholic clergy in Croatia supported the Ustaše at the moment they succeeded in forming Independent State of Croatia; but later when it was clear the Allies would win, the Catholic hierarchy tried to distance the Church from the regime and its war crimes. Cardinal Stepinac: a witness to the truth: a collection of papers from the international conference, Zagreb, September 19, 2008, Željko Tanjić, pp. 23, 45, 62, 76, 84, 170 Yet in its pastoral letter of 24 March 1945, the Croatian Catholic Church still proclaimed its support for the puppet state and its rulers, despite the fact that most senior regime figures were preparing to flee the country. The Catholic press also maintained its support of Pavelić right to the end, and Stepinac himself performed a final Te Deum to the NDH on the anniversary of its founding, on 10 April 1945, while the NDH was carrying out the final mass killings to liquidate the Jasenovac concentration camp.
Some priests, mostly Franciscans, particularly in, but not limited to, Herzegovina and Bosnia, took part in the atrocities themselves. Priests like Ivan Guberina served as Pavelić's bodyguards, while Dionizije Juričev, responsible for the forced conversion of Serbs in the Ustaše government, wrote that it was no longer a crime to kill seven-year-olds if they stood in the way of the Ustaše movement. In his diocesan newspaper, the Archbishop of Sarajevo, Ivan Šarić, published that the "liberation of the world from the Jews is a movement for the renewal of humanity". In Bosnia the Ustaše largely ruled through the Catholic clergy, with the priest Božidar Bralo serving as a chief Ustaše delegate for Bosnia.
Miroslav Filipović was a Franciscan friar (from the Petrićevac monastery) who allegedly joined the Ustaše as chaplain and, on 7 February 1942, joined in the massacre of roughly 2730 Serbs of the nearby villages, including some 500 children. He was allegedly subsequently dismissed from his order and defrocked, although he wore his clerical garb when he was hanged for war crimes. He became Chief Guard of Jasenovac concentration camp where he was nicknamed "Fra Sotona" (Friar Satan) by fellow Croats. Mladen Lorković, the Croat minister of foreign affairs, formulated it like this: "In Croatia, we can find few real Serbs. The majority of Pravoslavs i.e. are as a matter of fact Croats who were forced by foreign invaders to accept the infidel faith. Now it's our duty to bring them back into the Roman Catholic fold."Berenbaum, Michael (editor), A Mosaic of Victims. Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis, NYU Press, pp. 74–79 (1992);
For the duration of the war, "in accordance with Holy See long-term diplomatic practice of not recognizing new states in wartime before they were legitimized by peace treaties, the pope did not send a papal nuncio or diplomat to Croatia as requested, but an apostolic visitor, the abbot Giuseppe Marcone, who was to represent the Vatican to Croatian Catholic Church, not to the government. The government ignored this nuance, bestowing a prominent place for Marcone at all official functions". The Pope's Dilemma: Pius XII Faces Atrocities and Genocide in the Second World War, Jacques Kornberg, University of Toronto Press, 2015, p. 87 After World War II ended, the Ustaše who had managed to escape from Yugoslav territory (including Pavelić) were smuggled to South America. "Tied up in the Rat Lines" , Haaretz, 17 January 2006. This was largely done through ratlines operated by Catholic priests who had previously secured positions at the Holy See. Some of the more infamous members of the Illyrian College of San Girolamo in Rome involved in this were Franciscan friars Krunoslav Draganović and Dominik Mandić, and a third friar surnamed Petranović (first name unknown).
The Ustaše regime had deposited large amounts of gold—including the gold plundered from Serbs and Jews during World War II—into Swiss bank accounts. It seems a substantial quantity of gold was additionally transported by Ustaše to Austria at the end of the WWII. Out of a total, by some estimates, of 350 million , an intelligence report estimated 200 million (ca. $47 million) reached the Vatican. U.S. and Allied Wartime and Postwar Relations and Negotiations with Argentina, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey on Looted Gold and German External Assets and U.S. Concerns about the Fate of the Wartime Ustasha Treasury: Supplement to Preliminary Study on U.S. and Allied Efforts to Recover and Restore Gold and Other Assets Stolen Or Hidden by Germany During World War II, William Z. Slany, Department of State, Bureau of Public Affairs, Office of the Historian, 1998, pp. 149–151 The question remains unclarified. Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy: Financing the Vatican, 1850–1950, John F. Pollard, Pollard John F. Cambridge University Press, 6. sij 2005, pp. 200–201
Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac, Archbishop of Zagreb, was accused and sentenced to prison after the end of World War II by Yugoslav communist authorities of supporting the Ustaše and of exonerating those in the clergy who collaborated with them and were hence complicit in forced conversions. Stepinac stated on 28 March 1941, noting early attempts to unite Croatians and Serbs:
"All in all, Croats and Serbs are of two worlds, northpole and southpole, never will they be able to get together unless by a miracle of God. The schism (between the Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodoxy) is the greatest curse in Europe, almost greater than Protestantism. There is no moral, no principles, no truth, no justice, no honesty."Stanojević, Branimir. Alojzije Stepinac, zločinac ili svetac: dokumenti o izdaji i zločinu, Nova knjiga, 1986, p. 51On 22 July 2016, the Zagreb County Court annulled his post-war conviction due to "gross violations of current and former fundamental principles of substantive and procedural criminal law". Court Annuls Verdict against Cardinal Stepinac , Vedran Pavlic, Total Croatia News, 22. July 2016.
In 1998 Stepinac was beatification by Pope John Paul II. On 22 June 2003 John Paul II visited Banja Luka. During the visit he held a Mass at the aforementioned Petrićevac monastery. This caused public uproar due to the connection of the monastery with Filipović. At the same location the Pope proclaimed the beatification of a Roman Catholic layman Ivan Merz (1896–1928), who was the founder of the "Association of Croatian Eagles" in 1923, which some view as a precursor to the Ustaše. Roman Catholic defend the Pope's actions by stating the convent at Petrićevac was one of the places that went up in flames, causing the death of 80-year-old Friar Alojzije Atlija. Further, it was claimed by the apologists that the war had produced "a total exodus of the Catholic population from this region"; that the few who remained were "predominantly elderly"; and that the church in Bosnia then allegedly risked "total extinction" due to the war.
As long as there is a danger of armed partisan gangs, Chetnik formations will voluntarily cooperate with the Croatian armed forces in fighting and destroying the partisans and will be under the command of the Croatian armed forces in these operations.Beyond that, the agreements specified that the NDH military will supply Chetniks with arms and ammunition, Chetniks wounded in anti-partisan operations will be treated at NDH military hospitals, and widows and orphans of killed Chetnik soldiers, will receive state financial aid equal to aid received by widows and orphans of NDH soldiers. The NDH authorities arranged for Serbs in Ustaše concentration camps to be released, but only on the special recommendation of Chetnik commanders (thus, not partisans and their sympathizers). On 30 June 1942, the Chief Headquarters of the Poglavnik (i.e. Ante Pavelić), sent a statement, signed by Marshall Slavko Kvaternik, to other NDH ministries, summarizing these agreements with NDH Chetniks. The Ustaše signed collaboration agreements with key NDH Chetnik commanders, in the following order:
On 26 May 1942, the Ustaše minister, Mladen Lorković, wrote in a communique to local NDH authorities, that pursuant to these agreements "Home Guard Headquarters agrees with your proposal to grant one million kuna aid to the leaders of the Greek-Eastern community i.e., Momčilo Djujić, Mane Rokvić, Branko Bogunović, Paja Popović and Paja Omčikus, 200 Yugoslav guns and 10 machine guns". Ustaše and Chetniks simultaneously participated, alongside German and Italian forces, in major battles against the Partisans in the NDH: the Kozara Offensive, Operation Weiss, Operation Rösselsprung, the Battle for Knin (1944), etc.
In 1945, the Chetnik commander, Momčilo Djujić and his troops, with Ustaše leader Ante Pavelić's permission, escaped across the NDH to the West. In April 1945, by his own admission, Ante Pavelić received "two generals from the headquarters Draža Mihailović and reached an agreement with them on a joint fight against Tito's communists", while in the first days of May, Chetnik units passed through Ustaše-held Zagreb, on their way to Bleiburg, after which Chetniks and members of the Ustaše army, were killed by the Partisans in various sites, including Tezno near Maribor.
The flag of the Independent State of Croatia was a red-white-blue horizontal tricolor with the shield of the coat of arms or Croatia in the middle and the U in the upper left. Its currency was the NDH kuna.
The Ustaše greeting was " Za dom – spremni!":
This was used instead of the Nazi greeting Heil Hitler by the Ustaše. Today it is associated with Ustaše sympathisers. On the internet, it is sometimes abbreviated as ZDS.
The songs promoting the Ustaše included "italic=no", "italic=no", "italic=no". "Evo zore, evo dana" (also called "Jure i Boban") promoted the Black Legion, and it was common for songs to have both a Partisan and a Ustaše version.
Popular Croatian singer Marko Perković Thompson regularly starts his concerts with the salute “Za Dom Spreni”, a salute infamously coined by the Ustaše. The Wiesenthal Center has protested this, along with other attempts at revisionism and Holocaust-denial in Croatia.
In the 1980s, Serbian historians produced many works about the forced conversion during World War II of Serbs in Ustaše Croatia. These debates between historians openly became nationalistic and also entered the wider media. Historians in Belgrade during this time who had close government connections often went on television during the evenings to discuss real or invented details about the Ustaše genocide against Serbs during World War II. Serb clergy and nationalists blamed all Croats for crimes committed by the Ustaše, and for planning a repeat genocide against Serb people, referring to the Croatian people as “genocidal by nature”. These propagandistic activities were aimed at justifying planned crimes and ethno-demographic engineering in Croatia.
Some actions in the Socialist Republic of Croatia would further fuel such rhetoric. Seeking to unify support for Croatia's independence, Franjo Tuđman, Croatia's first president, in the late 1980s advocated "pomirba", i.e. national reconciliation between Ustaše and Partisans. This led to a revival of pro-Ustaše views, symbols and salutes among the Croatian political right. Following Croatia's Independence in the 1990s, streets were renamed to carry the name of Ustaše leaders, such as Mile Budak and Jure Francetić. Although some of these were later removed, Radio Free Europe noted that of some 20 streets dedicated to Mile Budak in the '90s, half still remained in Croatia in 2019.
Croatian soccer fans have repeatedly chanted the Ustaše "Za dom spremni" salute, for which FIFA and UEFA have repeatedly leveled penalties against the Croatian soccer federation for fascist outbursts. In 2014, the Croatian soccer player Josip Šimunić was banned from the FIFA World Cup for leading a stadium full of fans in the Ustaše salute.
In 2014 the then-mayor of Split, Croatia, unveiled a monument dedicated to the 1990s HOS brigade named "The Knight Rafael Boban", after the Ustaše commander, which includes the HOS emblem with the Ustaše "Za dom spremni" salute. Since then the HOS organization has organized annual commemorations at the memorial on 10 April (the anniversary of the founding of the Independent State of Croatia), during which the black-uniformed participants shout the Ustaše "Za dom spremni" salute.
In 2016 the Croatian HOS war veterans' organization posted a plaque at Jasenovac concentration camp with the Ustaše "Za dom spremni" salute. Despite protests by Jewish and other organizations, this was allowed to remain until criticism by the US State Department special envoy on Holocaust issues, forced the government to move it to a nearby town. As a result of this, and allegations of the government's tolerance for the minimization of Ustaše crimes, Jewish, Serb and Croat WWII resistance groups refused to appear with government representatives at the annual Jasenovac commemoration.
In 2019 the Austrian government passed a law forbidding the display of Ustaše symbols, along with previously banned Nazi symbols, largely as a result of the display of same by Croatian nationalists at the annual, Croatian government-sponsored Bleiburg commemoration, where Austrian police have repeatedly arrested Croat nationalists for Nazi and fascist salutes. Three Austrian EU parliamentarians declared the Bleiburg ceremony, which tens-of-thousands of Croat nationalists attend, "the largest fascist gathering in Europe." The Austrian Catholic Church banned a Mass by the Croatian Catholic Church at Bleiburg because, as they stated, "the Mass at Bleiburg has become part of a manifestation that is politically instrumentalised and is part of a political-national ritual that serves to selectively experience and interpret history," adding that it misuses "a religious service for political purposes while not distancing itself from the Fascist worldview."
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