Ustaše, Croatia

The Ustaše was the Croatian fascist organisation that ruled the Independent State of Croatia (NDH, Nezavisna Država Hrvatska) from April 1941 to May 1945, under the leadership of Ante Pavelić. The NDH was a German-Italian satellite state covering most of present-day Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the Srem region of present-day Serbia. The Ustaše regime conducted, on its own initiative and with limited German oversight, a programme of mass killing of Serbs, Jews, Roma, and political opponents that shocked even the Italian and German occupation authorities sharing the territory. The killings, conducted at the Jasenovac camp complex and at hundreds of village sites across the NDH, killed between 320,000 and 340,000 people, of whom around 30,000 were Jews. The Ustaše operation is the case of a local fascist movement conducting genocide largely independently of German direction and, in its methods, often more brutally than the Germans were doing themselves.

The 30 April 1941 race laws

The Ustaše came to power on 10 April 1941 after the German and Italian invasion of Yugoslavia. Within three weeks the new regime had passed the Legal Decree on Racial Origin and the Legal Decree on the Protection of Aryan Blood and the Honour of the Croatian People (30 April 1941), modelled on the German Nuremberg Laws. The decrees defined Jews and Roma as racial categories, excluded them from public and economic life, and provided the legal framework for what followed. The decrees were Croatian, not German, in origin. The Germans had not requested them.

The Jasenovac complex

The Jasenovac camp, established in August 1941 around 100 kilometres south-east of Zagreb on the Sava river, was the principal Ustaše killing site. It was a complex of five camps in which Serbs, Jews, Roma and political prisoners were held and killed. The killing methods at Jasenovac were notably primitive. Most killings were conducted by manual methods: knives, blunt instruments, drowning in the Sava river, mass shootings into pits. The most notorious individual instrument was the srbosjek, a curved knife strapped to the hand designed for cutting throats. The use of these methods was, on the surviving testimony, partly a function of resource scarcity and partly a deliberate choice. The Italian and German liaison officers who visited Jasenovac wrote reports back to their headquarters expressing shock at what they had seen.

The death toll at Jasenovac has been the subject of substantial historical dispute, with estimates ranging from around 80,000 (the Croatian post-war state’s low estimate) to 700,000 (the Yugoslav post-war state’s high estimate). The current scholarly consensus, based on the work of the Belgrade Museum of Genocide Victims, the Jasenovac Memorial Site at the camp itself, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, is around 80,000 to 100,000, of whom around 50,000 were Serbs, around 16,000 to 20,000 were Roma, around 13,000 to 20,000 were Jews, and the remainder were Croatian and Bosnian Muslim political prisoners.

The wider killings

Jasenovac was the principal but not the only Ustaše killing site. Mass killings of Serbs, in particular, were conducted across rural NDH from summer 1941 onwards in operations directed against Serb villages by Ustaše militia units. The killings at Glina (the Glina church massacre of August 1941, in which around 700 Serbs were killed inside the village Orthodox church before it was burned), at Korita, at Gudovac, and at hundreds of smaller village sites, were conducted by Ustaše militia and the Croatian Home Guard. The killing of Roma communities was particularly comprehensive: the great majority of the NDH Roma population, around 25,000 to 30,000 people, was killed. The killing of Jews was carried out by the Ustaše state apparatus, by deportation to Jasenovac and to Auschwitz, and by direct shooting. Around 30,000 of the NDH’s 40,000 Jews were killed.

The Italian dissent

The Italian occupation forces in the coastal zone of the NDH (Italy held the Dalmatian coast under the 1941 Treaty of Rome) refused to cooperate with the Ustaše killings and, in many cases, actively protected Jews and Serbs in their zone. The Italian Second Army command in 1942 evacuated around 5,000 Jews from the German zone to the Italian zone, in defiance of the Ustaše and German authorities. The Italian dissent ended with the Italian armistice of September 1943, when the Italian zone was occupied by Germans and the Croatian operations resumed there. The Italian conduct in the NDH is one of the better cases of an Axis force protecting victims of an allied state’s killing programme.

The Pavelić flight

Pavelić fled the NDH on 8 May 1945 ahead of the Yugoslav Partisans’ entry into Zagreb. He escaped through Austria to Italy, where he was sheltered by Catholic Church networks, principally Bishop Krunoslav Draganović’s operation at the Pontificio Collegio Croato di San Girolamo in Rome. He travelled to Argentina in October 1948 with a Red Cross travel document under a false name. He lived openly in Buenos Aires for the next decade, surviving an assassination attempt in 1957 that left him with injuries from which he never fully recovered, and dying in Madrid in December 1959, where he had moved under Franco’s protection. He was 70.

The post-Yugoslav reckoning

Yugoslav authorities prosecuted Ustaše leaders extensively after the war. The Ustaše senior figure who returned, Andrija Artuković, was eventually extradited from the United States to Yugoslavia in 1986 (the most prominent successful Yugoslav extradition request) and tried for war crimes; he was convicted in 1986 but died in custody in 1988 before the death sentence could be carried out. The wider Ustaše rank and file dispersed across the post-war Croatian émigré communities in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Germany and the United States. The Croatian state under President Franjo Tuđman in the 1990s engaged in partial rehabilitation of the Ustaše legacy as part of the broader project of Croatian national assertion against Serbia, an episode that the post-Tuđman Croatian state has progressively moved away from. The Jasenovac Memorial Site is now a substantial memorial complex with international support.

What it was

The Ustaše operation is the case of the small-state fascist regime that conducted genocide in its own way, more primitively than the Germans, more independently than most other collaborator regimes, and against three different victim groups (Serbs, Jews, Roma) for three different reasons that the regime had elaborated in its own terms. The Italian and German shock at what the Ustaše were doing is the diagnostic detail. The Ustaše killed in ways that the SS, the most ideologically committed killing organisation of the period, found excessive. The methods were the regime’s own.

See also

Sources

  • Tomislav Dulić, Utopias of Nation: Local Mass Killing in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1941-42, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2005
  • Mark Biondich, The Balkans: Revolution, War, and Political Violence since 1878, Oxford University Press, 2011
  • Jasenovac Memorial Site, current research and victim list
  • Belgrade Museum of Genocide Victims, victim documentation
  • USHMM: Jasenovac and the NDH