Ustaše

• 1. Introduction

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  The Ustaše announced themselves with a declaration published in their newspaper in 1932. Their leader Ante Pavelić signed it himself. The knife, revolver, machine gun, and time bomb, he wrote, were the "idols" that would deliver Croatian independence. This was not metaphor. Within a decade, the organization he built would kill hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Roma inside a puppet state that lasted only four years. How did a small band of Croatian exiles, trained in fascist Italy and Hungary, come to run one of the most brutal regimes in the history of occupied Europe? And how does a movement that never won genuine popular support leave a shadow stretching into the present century?

• 2. Roots and Ideology

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  The 19th-century Croatian activist Ante Starčević provided the ideological raw material the Ustaše later weaponized. Starčević had argued for a Greater Croatia stretching across territories inhabited by Bosniaks, Serbs, and Slovenes. He considered Bosniaks and Serbs to be Croats who had simply converted to Islam and Orthodoxy, and he viewed Slovenes as "mountain Croats." The Ustaše adopted this framework wholesale, using it to justify their claim to Bosnia and Herzegovina and to deny that a distinct Serb people existed on Croatian or Bosnian soil.

  Josip Frank broke from Starčević's own party to form the Pure Party of Rights, which became the primary recruiting pool for the later Ustaše movement. The movement also drew on 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" before its union with Serbia formed Yugoslavia in 1918. Šufflay was killed in Zagreb in 1931 by government supporters, and the Ustaše used his death as a grievance.

  The movement also adopted the 1935 thesis of Krunoslav Draganović, a Catholic priest, who argued that many Catholics in southern Herzegovina had been converted to Orthodox Christianity in the 16th and 17th centuries. For the Ustaše, this conveniently framed their later policy of forcible conversion of Orthodox Serbs as a restoration rather than an aggression.

  Its formal ideology was laid out in "The Seventeen Principles," published in 1933. The Principles declared the uniqueness of the Croatian nation, subordinated individual rights to collective ones, and excluded anyone not Croat by "blood" from political life. The movement opposed parliamentary democracy as "corrupt" and rejected Marxism for what it called interference in family and economic life. In power, the Ustaše banned contraception and tightened laws against blasphemy, and they banned the term "Serbian Orthodox faith," requiring "Greek-Eastern faith" as a substitute.

• 3. Pavelić and the Exile Years

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  Ante Pavelić, a lawyer and follower of Frank's Pure Party of Rights, secretly contacted Benito Mussolini in 1927 to pitch Croatian independence. His proposal included a territorial trade: Italy could have the Dalmatian coastline it coveted in exchange for backing a sovereign Croatian state. Historian Rory Yeomans found signs as early as 1928 that Pavelić was already contemplating a nationalist insurgency group.

  The assassination of Croatian Peasant Party leader Stjepan Radić in October 1928 by a Montenegrin politician in the Yugoslav parliament created the opening Pavelić needed. A youth organization was founded that year at the University of Zagreb by a 21-year-old named Branimir Jelić, who a year later invited Pavelić to join as a junior member. In January 1929, after the king banned all national parties, Pavelić and his associates were exiled. A Belgrade court sentenced him to death in absentia in July that year.

  From camps in Italy and Hungary, the exiles carried out terrorist attacks on Yugoslav targets: time bombs on international trains, and an armed attack in November 1932 on a gendarmerie outpost at Brušani in the Lika region, an event sometimes called the "Velebit uprising." In January 1932 they formally named their organization "Ustaša."

  The most consequential act came on the 9th of October 1934, when Ustaše operatives working with the Macedonian revolutionary organization IMRO assassinated King Alexander I of Yugoslavia in Marseille. The Bulgarian gunman Vlado Chernozemski was killed by French police on the spot. Three Ustaše members waiting elsewhere in the city were captured and sentenced to life imprisonment by a French court. Pavelić himself, along with Eugen Kvaternik and Ivan Perčević, was sentenced to death in absentia as an organizer. French pressure led Italian police to arrest Pavelić in October 1934; he was held in Turin and released in March 1936. After release he stated that assassination was "the only language Serbs understand."

• 4. The Independent State of Croatia

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  On the 6th of April 1941, the Axis powers invaded Yugoslavia. The leader of the Croatian Peasant Party, Vladko Maček, rejected German offers to lead a new government. On the 10th of April, the senior home-based Ustaše commander Slavko Kvaternik seized control of Zagreb's police and broadcast the formation of the Independent State of Croatia. Maček that same day issued a statement calling on Croatians to cooperate with the new authorities. Pavelić arrived from Italy with several hundred Ustaše and declared a new government on the 16th of April, granting himself the title of Poglavnik, a Croatian approximation of Führer.

  The NDH was built on an unstable foundation. Within days of declaring independence the Ustaše were forced to sign the Treaty of Rome, surrendering Dalmatia and a string of Adriatic islands and towns including Šibenik, Split, and the Bay of Kotor to Italy. This loss of Dalmatia, considered the heartland of the Croatian national story, began to erode support immediately. The NDH was divided into German and Italian zones of influence, with the northeast controlled by the Germans and the southwest by the Italians, a configuration historians have described as "an Italian-German quasi-protectorate."

  The Germans and Italians had different opinions about the organization they had empowered. Nazi Germany had initially not wanted an independent Croatia at all. Hitler had stressed the importance of a "strong and united Yugoslavia," and German officials including Hermann Göring wanted Yugoslav raw material exports to flow uninterrupted. Even the SS grew frustrated: Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler was dissatisfied that the NDH allowed Jews who converted to Catholicism to be recognized as "honorary Croats" and thus exempt from extermination.

  Mussolini's enthusiasm was always pragmatic. His son-in-law, foreign minister Count Galeazzo Ciano, recorded 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." Italian influence in the NDH steadily gave way to German dominance as the war progressed, and after the Italian armistice in September 1943 the NDH re-occupied the territories Italy had annexed through the Treaty of Rome.

• 5. Genocide and the Camps

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  Ustaše ministers Mile Budak and Milovan Žanić declared in May 1941 that the goal of the new state was an ethnically pure Croatia. The strategy was explicit: one-third of the Serb population was to be killed, one-third expelled, one-third forcibly converted to Catholicism. Žanić, as a minister of the NDH Legislative Council, stated on the 2nd of May 1941 that "there is no method we would hesitate to use in order to make it truly Croatian and cleanse it of Serbs."

  The first mass killing of Serbs occurred on the 30th of April 1941, when Ustaše rounded up and killed 196 Serb villagers at Gudovac. A wave of massacres followed across the Dinaric Alps, with German military commanders expressing revulsion in their own reports. Wehrmacht General Edmund Glaise von Horstenau reported to the German High Command on the 10th of July 1941 that German troops were being forced to witness events that "does not reflect well on their otherwise high reputation." A Gestapo report to Himmler dated the 17th of February 1942 attributed increased rebel activity to Ustaše atrocities and stated that roughly three hundred thousand Orthodox civilians had been "massacred and sadistically tortured to death." German General Lothar Rendulić wrote that in August 1942 he remarked to an Ustaše official that he could not conceive how five hundred thousand Serbs had been killed, to which the Ustaše replied that half a million was a slander and the number was "not higher than 200,000."

  The first concentration camps were opened in the spring of 1941, including Danica near Koprivnica, camps on the island of Pag, and Jadovno near Gospić. These were closed by October 1942. The Jasenovac complex was built between August 1941 and February 1942 and operated until the end of the war. Its sub-camps included Stara Gradiška, designated as the camp for women and children. The Jasenovac Memorial Area maintains a verified list of 83,145 named victims compiled in 1964, and estimates that this list represents between 60% and 75% of total victims, placing the number killed in the Jasenovac complex at roughly 80,000 to 100,000. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum cites the most reliable figures for total Serb victims across the NDH at between 330,000 and 390,000.

  Jews were targeted from the NDH's first days. On the 10th of April 1941, Ustaše arrested a group of prominent Zagreb Jews and held them for ransom; on the 13th of April the same was done in Osijek, where mobs also destroyed the synagogue and Jewish cemetery. On the 30th of April 1941, the Ustaše proclaimed racial decrees defining who was a Jew and stripping non-Aryans of citizenship. By the end of April, months before the Nazis implemented similar measures in Germany itself, the Ustaše required all Jews to wear the yellow Star of David. In May 1941, 165 members of the Jewish sports club Makabi in Zagreb were rounded up and sent to the Danica camp; all but three were later killed. Of the Jews in the Independent State of Croatia, nearly 32,000, representing 80% of the total, were killed. The Ustaše also killed an estimated 26,000 to 29,000 Roma.

• 6. The Church and the Regime

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  On the 28th of April 1941, just two days after Pavelić signed racial laws stripping Jews and Roma of citizenship rights, Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac issued a public letter supporting the new Ustaše-led state and asked the clergy to pray for Pavelić. Stepinac later objected to certain Ustaše policies and helped some Jews and Serbs, but he continued to publicly support the survival of the Independent State of Croatia until its very end, served as the state's War Vicar, and received a medal from Pavelić in 1944.

  Catholic clergy were entangled with the regime at every level. Some Franciscans, particularly in Herzegovina and Bosnia, participated in atrocities. The priest Ivan Guberina served as Pavelić's bodyguard. Dionizije Juričev, who oversaw forced conversions in the Ustaše government, wrote that it was no longer a crime to kill seven-year-olds if they obstructed the movement. The Archbishop of Sarajevo, Ivan Šarić, published in his diocesan newspaper that "the liberation of the world from the Jews is a movement for the renewal of humanity." In Bosnia the Ustaše largely ruled through Catholic clergy, with priest Božidar Bralo serving as chief Ustaše delegate for Bosnia.

  The Franciscan friar Miroslav Filipović participated in the massacre of roughly 2,730 Serbs of nearby villages on the 7th of February 1942, including some 500 children. He subsequently became Chief Guard of Jasenovac concentration camp, where fellow Croats gave him the nickname "Fra Sotona," meaning Friar Satan. He was eventually hanged for war crimes, reportedly still wearing clerical garb.

  Historian Josip Tomasevich found no public or private condemnation of these crimes from Stepinac or any other member of the Croatian Catholic Church hierarchy. The pastoral letter of the 24th of March 1945, issued by the Croatian Catholic Church, still proclaimed support for the puppet state even as its senior figures were preparing to flee. Stepinac himself performed a final Te Deum to the NDH on the anniversary of its founding, on the 10th of April 1945, while the Jasenovac camp was being liquidated.

  After the war, Catholic priests ran ratlines that smuggled Ustaše leaders to South America. Key figures included Franciscan friars Krunoslav Draganović and Dominik Mandić, operating through Rome. Intelligence reports estimated that out of a total of roughly 350 million Swiss francs in gold deposited by the Ustaše regime, including gold plundered from Serbs and Jews, approximately 200 million Swiss francs reached the Vatican; the question remains unresolved. Stepinac was sentenced to prison by Yugoslav authorities after the war for supporting the Ustaše. On the 22nd of July 2016, a Zagreb court annulled his conviction. In 1998 he was beatified by Pope John Paul II.

• 7. Collapse and Legacy

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  By 1944, with the Germans suffering major losses on the Eastern Front and the Italians out of the war, Pavelić was almost entirely dependent on Ustaše units, which had grown to approximately 100,000 fighters organized into brigades and divisions. In November 1944 the NDH armed forces were merged with these Ustaše units to form 18 divisions. Fighting continued after the formal German surrender on the 9th of May 1945, as Pavelić ordered NDH forces and a large number of civilians to attempt an escape to Austria. The Battle of Poljana, between a mixed German-Ustaše column and a Partisan force, became the last battle of World War II on European soil. Most who fled were handed over to the Partisans at Bleiburg and elsewhere on the Austrian border.

  Paravelić himself hid in Austria and Rome with the help of Catholic clergy before fleeing to Argentina. On the 9th of April 1957, a Montenegrin named Blagoje Jovović shot him near Buenos Aires; Pavelić later died of his injuries. The surviving Ustaše splintered into competing exile organizations. Branimir Jelić, who had originally recruited Pavelić, founded the Croatian National Committee. Maks Luburić, former head of the concentration camp system, formed the Croatian National Resistance. Former Crusader Srecko Rover helped establish Ustaše groups in Australia.

  The regime's legacy became a political weapon in the decades that followed. In the 1980s Serbian historians produced numerous works about Ustaše atrocities, and debates that entered national television became openly nationalistic. In the late 1980s Croatia's first president, Franjo Tuđman, advocated "pomirba," or national reconciliation between Ustaše and Partisans, which opened the door to a revival of Ustaše symbols and salutes among the Croatian political right. Streets were renamed after Ustaše leaders including Mile Budak and Jure Francetić; Radio Free Europe noted in 2019 that of roughly 20 streets dedicated to Budak in the 1990s, about half still remained. In 2014, the Croatian soccer player Josip Šimunić was banned from the FIFA World Cup for leading a stadium crowd in the Ustaše salute. That same year the then-mayor of Split unveiled a monument incorporating the Ustaše greeting. In 2015 the head of the Croatian Bishops' Conference proposed that the "Za dom spremni" salute be adopted by the Croatian army, a proposal that continues to mark the unfinished reckoning with what Dalmatian-American historian Jozo Tomasevich described as a period during which "never before in history had Croats been exposed to such legalized administrative, police and judicial brutality."