Croatia is the most disturbing of the wartime German allies. The Independent State of Croatia, set up under German auspices in April 1941 after the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, was run by the Ustasha movement under Ante Pavelic. The Ustasha conducted, on Croatian territory, killings of Serbs, Jews and Roma at a scale and with a level of cruelty that shocked even the visiting German officials. Around 30,000 of the 39,000 Croatian Jews were murdered, most of them by the Ustasha rather than by the Germans. The largest single Croatian killing site was the Jasenovac complex, run entirely by Croatians, where between 80,000 and 100,000 people were murdered. Around 20,000 of the Jasenovac dead were Jews. The remainder were Serbs and Roma.
The Ustasha state
The Ustasha movement was a small Croatian fascist organisation led by Ante Pavelic, which had been operating in exile since the early 1930s with support from Mussolini’s Italy. Germany dismantled Yugoslavia in April 1941 and installed the Ustasha as the government of a new Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska, NDH) covering Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and parts of present-day Serbia. The new state had no domestic political mandate; the Ustasha had limited popular support and ruled through paramilitary terror.
Within weeks of taking power the Ustasha had passed antisemitic legislation along Nuremberg lines and had begun rounding up Jews, Serbs and Roma. The Croatian Jewish community of around 39,000 people, mostly in Zagreb and the larger towns of Bosnia-Herzegovina, was a primary target. So was the much larger Serb population of around 1.9 million within the new Croatian borders, whom the Ustasha intended to convert, expel or kill in roughly equal proportions.
Jasenovac
The Jasenovac complex, on the Sava river around 100 kilometres south-east of Zagreb, opened in August 1941 and operated until April 1945. It was the only concentration camp system in occupied Europe run entirely by a non-German organisation. The German military advisers who visited Jasenovac in 1942 produced reports describing the conditions as worse than anything they had seen at the German camps. The killing methods at Jasenovac included shooting, hanging, cutting throats, and a particular Ustasha implement, the Srbosjek (Serb-cutter), a curved knife strapped to the hand. Mass killings were carried out without gas chambers or any of the industrial machinery of the German camps. The Ustasha guards killed by hand.
The total death toll at Jasenovac is contested. Yugoslav post-war estimates put the figure at 700,000 or more; modern historical reconstruction places the figure at between 80,000 and 100,000, of whom around 50,000 were Serbs, 20,000 Jews, 20,000 Roma, and the remainder Croatian and Bosnian political opponents of the regime. The lower figure is now accepted by mainstream historians, though the political controversy continues.
The Croatian Jewish deportations
Some Croatian Jews were also deported to the German camps, particularly Auschwitz. The deportations began in 1942 with around 5,000 Jews handed over to the Germans for transport to Auschwitz. Most of these were Croatian Jews of foreign citizenship, whom the Germans considered a particular concern. The native Croatian Jews were mostly killed inside Croatia, at Jasenovac and at the smaller Ustasha camps of Stara Gradiska and Lobor.
The Italian zone
Croatia was divided into German and Italian zones of influence. The Italian zone included most of the Adriatic coast and the western parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Italian military authorities, particularly the Second Army under General Mario Roatta, declined to hand over Jews in the Italian zone to the Ustasha. Several thousand Croatian Jews were sheltered in Italian-controlled territory, on the islands of Hvar, Korcula and Brac, and were eventually evacuated to Italy proper. They survived the war when Italy switched sides in 1943 and they could be moved to areas the Allies controlled.
The Croatian Jewish survivors
Around 9,000 Croatian Jews survived the war. About half of these had been in the Italian zone or had escaped to Italy. The other half had survived in hiding, with partisans, or by passing as non-Jewish. The Yugoslav Partisans under Josip Broz Tito, the only effective resistance movement in occupied Yugoslavia, had a substantial Jewish element from early in the war. Several Jewish doctors became senior figures in the Partisan medical service. The Partisans, when they reached areas with Jewish survivors, brought them under their protection.
The post-war record
Yugoslavia after the war prosecuted around 50 Ustasha leaders. Pavelic himself escaped via the ratlines through Italy to Argentina, where he lived openly until 1957, when he was wounded in an assassination attempt. He moved to Spain and died there in 1959. He was never tried.
The Croatian record has remained politically contested. The post-war Yugoslav state suppressed the religious and ethnic specifics of the Jasenovac killings, treating the dead as Yugoslav anti-fascist victims rather than as specifically Serbs, Jews or Roma. Independent Croatia, since 1991, has had a difficult relationship with the Ustasha legacy. Some Croatian nationalists have attempted to minimise the scale of the killings or to recast the Ustasha as patriotic anti-communist resistance fighters. The Croatian Jewish community of around 1,500 people today is small, urban and largely secular. The Jasenovac memorial site exists but remains the subject of ongoing political dispute.
See also
Sources
- Jonathan Steinberg, All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust 1941-1943, Routledge, 1990
- Ivo Goldstein, The Holocaust in Croatia, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016
- Esther Gitman, When Courage Prevailed: The Rescue and Survival of Jews in the Independent State of Croatia 1941-1945, Paragon House, 2011
- USHMM: Croatia