This special issue provides important new scholarship from a variety of perspectives on the structure, ideology and political history of the central fascist group in interwar and Second World War Yugoslavia, the Croatian Ustasha. It is the first volume in English to closely explore the Ustasha’s Independent State of Croatia between 1941 and 1945, a period when it was an active collaborator with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and largely responsible for Yugoslavia suffering the highest proportion of national casualties in the Second World War. By using the top scholars in the field to explore the nature of the NDH, The Independent State of Croatia 1941-45 contributes to scholarly understandings of Croatian nationalism, Balkan politics, European fascism, and genocide in the Second World War.
A historical study of the treatment of Jews in Yugoslavia after Nazi ideology was adopted, with an emphasis on the ways Jews survived and were rescued by those who put their own lives in great peril. When Courage Prevailed examines the ways Jews were rescued and survived in a country which the Ustaše, with their roots in Yugoslavia's nationality conflicts and politics, adopted the Nazi ideology which emphasized that there could be no compromise in regard to the Jewish Question and the Final Solution: no Jews deserved rescue. Survival of Jews was complicated by Yugoslavia's dismemberment at the hands of the Axis Powers; Germany and Italy and its satellites and puppets. The Nazi propaganda machine advocated that Jews must be exterminated for the good of the Aryans which included the Volksdeutsche, (Yugoslav of German ancestry), the Croats and the Muslims. Those who dared to defy German commands suffered severe penalties.
From 1941 to 1945, a small number of Jews were given the rights of Aryan citizens in Croatia by the pro-Nazi Utasha regime. This study seeks to explain why these exemptions from Ustasha racial laws came to be, how they were justified by the race theory of the time, and how the "Croats of the Mosaic faith" were eventually rejected as racial aliens.
Based on extensive research on the ethnolinguistic and racial ideas of leading Croatian nationalist intellectuals, this book provides a detailed analysis of race theory in one of the Third Reich's lesser known allied states, the Independent State of Croatia.
This book traces the intellectual origins of race theory in the pro-Nazi Ustasha Independent State of Croatia, 1941-1945. This race theory was not, as historians of the Ustasha state have hitherto argued, a product of a practical accommodation to the dominant Nazi racial ideology. Contrary to the general historiographical view, which has either downplayed or ignored the important place of race, not only in Ustasha ideology and politics, but more generally in modern Croatian and Yugoslav nationalism, this work stresses the significant role that theories of ethnolinguistic origin and racial anthropology played in defining Croat nationhood from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Upon the basis of older ideological and cultural traditions, the Ustasha state constructed an ideal Aryan racial type.
On April 15, 1941, Sarajevo fell to Germany's 16th Motorized Infantry Division. The city, along with the rest of Bosnia, was incorporated into the Independent State of Croatia, one of the most brutal of Nazi satellite states run by the ultranationalist Croat Ustasha regime. The occupation posed an extraordinary set of challenges to Sarajevo's famously cosmopolitan culture and its civic consciousness; these challenges included humanitarian and political crises and tensions of national identity. As detailed for the first time in Emily Greble's book, the city’s complex mosaic of confessions (Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim, Jewish) and ethnicities (Croat, Serb, Jew, Bosnian Muslim, Roma, and various other national minorities) began to fracture under the Ustasha regime’s violent assault on "Serbs, Jews, and Roma"—contested categories of identity in this multiconfessional space—tearing at the city’s most basic traditions. Nor was there unanimity within the various ethnic and confessional groups: some Catholic Croats detested the Ustasha regime while others rode to power within it; Muslims quarreled about how best to position themselves for the postwar world, and some cast their lot with Hitler and joined the ill-fated Muslim Waffen SS. In time, these centripetal forces were complicated by the Yugoslav civil war, a multisided civil conflict fought among Communist Partisans, Chetniks (Serb nationalists), Ustashas, and a host of other smaller groups. The absence of military conflict in Sarajevo allows Greble to explore the different sides of civil conflict, shedding light on the ways that humanitarian crises contributed to civil tensions and the ways that marginalized groups sought political power within the shifting political system. There is much drama in these pages: In the late days of the war, the Ustasha leaders, realizing that their game was up, turned the city into a slaughterhouse before fleeing abroad. The arrival of the Communist Partisans in April 1945 ushered in a new revolutionary era, one met with caution by the townspeople. Greble tells this complex story with remarkable clarity. Throughout, she emphasizes the measures that the city’s leaders took to preserve against staggering odds the cultural and religious pluralism that had long enabled the city’s diverse populations to thrive together.
This book covers the full story of the Ustasha, a fascist movement in Croatia, from its historic roots to its downfall. The authors address key questions: In what international context did Ustasha terrorism grow and develop? How did this movement rise to power, and then exterminate hundreds of thousands of innocents? Who was Ante Pavelić, its leader? Was he a shrewd politician, able to exploit for his independent project Mussolini's imperial ambitions, Hitler's pan-German aims, and the anti-Bolshevism of the Holy See and the Western bloc? Or was he, consciously or not, a pawn in other hands, in a complex international scenario where Croatia was only arena among many? And after the movement's collapse, how were several of the most prominent Ustasha leaders able to evade capture by Tito’s victorious army? The book places the appearance of the Ustasha movement not only in the context of the interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia but also in the wider perspective of the emergence of European fascism.
Ante Pavelic was the leader of the fascist party of Croatia (the Ustaše), who, on Adolf Hitler's instruction, became the leader of Croatia after the Nazi invasion of 1941. Paveli? was an extreme Croatian nationalist who believed that the Serbian people were an inferior race - he would preside over a genocide that ultimately killed an estimated 390,000 Serbs during World War II. Croatia under Ante Paveli? provides the full history of this period, with a special focus on the United States' role in the post-war settlement. Drawing on previously unpublished documents, Robert McCormick argues that President Harry S. Truman's Cold War priorities meant that Paveli? was never made to answer for his crimes. Today, the Ustaše remains difficult legacy within Croatian society, partly as a result of Paveli?' political life in exile in South America. This is a new account of US foreign policy towards one of the Second World War's most brutal dictators and is an essential contribution to Croatian war-time history.
A New York Review Books Original The distinguished Croatian journalist and publisher Slavko Goldstein says, “Writing this book about my family, I have tried not to separate what happened to us from the fates of many other people and of an entire country.” 1941: The Year That Keeps Returning is Goldstein’s astonishing historical memoir of that fateful year—when the Ustasha, the pro-fascist nationalists, were brought to power in Croatia by the Nazi occupiers of Yugoslavia. On April 10, when the German troops marched into Zagreb, the Croatian capital, they were greeted as liberators by the Croats. Three days later, Ante Pavelić, the future leader of the Independent State of Croatia, returned from exile in Italy and Goldstein’s father, the proprietor of a leftist bookstore in Karlovac—a beautiful old city fifty miles from the capital—was arrested along with other local Serbs, communists, and Yugoslav sympathizers. Goldstein was only thirteen years old, and he would never see his father again. More than fifty years later, Goldstein seeks to piece together the facts of his father’s last days. The moving narrative threads stories of family, friends, and other ordinary people who lived through those dark times together with personal memories and an impressive depth of carefully researched historic details. The other central figure in Goldstein’s heartrending tale is his mother—a strong, resourceful woman who understands how to act decisively in a time of terror in order to keep her family alive. From 1941 through 1945 some 32,000 Jews, 40,000 Gypsies, and 350,000 Serbs were slaughtered in Croatia. It is a period in history that is often forgotten, purged, or erased from the history books, which makes Goldstein’s vivid, carefully balanced account so important for us today—for the same atrocities returned to Croatia and Bosnia in the 1990s. And yet Goldstein’s story isn’t confined by geographical boundaries as it speaks to the dangers and madness of ethnic hatred all over the world and the urgent need for mutual understanding.
Picturing Genocide in the Independent State of Croatia examines the role which atrocity photographs played, and continue to play, in shaping the public memory of the Second World War in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. Focusing on visual representations of one of the most controversial and politically divisive episodes of the war -- genocidal violence perpetrated against Serbs, Jews, and Roma by the pro-Nazi Ustasha regime in the Independent State of Croatia (1941-1945) -- the book examines the origins, history and legacy of violent images. Notably, this book pays special attention to the politics of the atrocity photograph. It explores how images were strategically and selectively mobilized at different times, and by different memory communities and stakeholders, to do different things: justify retribution against political opponents in the immediate aftermath of the war, sustain the discourses of national unity on which socialist Yugoslavia was founded, or, in the post-communist era, prop-up different nationalist agendas, and 'frame' the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. In exploring this hitherto neglected aspect of Yugoslav history and visual culture, Jovan Byford sheds important light on the intricate nexus of political, cultural and psychological factors which account for the enduring power of atrocity images to shape the collective memory of mass violence.
