Independent State of Croatia

The Independent State of Croatia (in Croatian Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, shortened as the NDH) was a puppet state created during World War II.^[1][2] It was created in April 1941, when Yugoslavia was split up by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. It included most of what is now Croatia as well as all of Bosnia and Herzegovina and parts of Slovenia and Serbia.

Flag from 1941-1945.

Independent State of Croatia.

Overview

The NDH was ruled by Ante Pavelić and his Ustaše. The Ustaše were a far-right terrorist group^[3] that was created when its members left the Croatian Party of Rights.^[4] The Ustashe had a plan to remove the country of Serbs. This would be achieved through mass killings, forced expulsions, and forced assimilation. Part of this plan started during WWII by genocides in the Jasenovac concentration camp and other places all over the country.^[5]

Establishment

Yugoslavia was invaded by the Axis powers in 1941. The whole country was occupied by Axis forces. Hitler and Mussolini made the Ustashe the leaders of the new Croatian state.

The establishment of the state was proclaimed on April 10, 1941 by Slavko Kvaternik, deputy leader of the Ustashe. Ante Pavelić became the leader (Poglavnik) of Croatia. Italy also made Prince Aimone, the Duke of Aosta, as the King of Croatia. The king did not hold any power however. All real power was with Ante Pavelic and his Ustashe. The Ustashe created a totalitarian state.

Motives for establishment

The puppet state was created by Germany and Italy to ease efforts to prepare for Operation Barbarossa. Hitler wanted to create a puppet state in Croatia, because that would allow him to keep occupation forces to a minimum. The state was also forced to cede territory to Italy and was prevented from having a navy. These demonstrated the dependence of the country upon the Axis powers.

Genocides

Prelude

Racial laws

The first "Legal order for the defense of the people and the state" dated April 17, 1941 ordered the death penalty for "infringement of the honour and vital interests of the Croatian people and the survival of the Independent State of Croatia". It was soon followed by the "Legal order of races" and the "Legal order of the protection of Aryan blood and the honour of the Croatian people" dated April 30, 1941, as well as the "Order of the creation and definition of the racial-political committee" dated June 4, 1941. The enforcement of these legal acts was done not only through normal courts but also new out-of-order courts as well as mobile courts-martial with extended jurisdictions.

Ethnic composition within controlled territories

Most of the NDH population was not Croat, mostly because of the inclusion of Bosnia. It had significant populations of Serbs – about 19% of the population of Croatia at the time and over 30% of the population of NDH. Bosnian Muslims – the largest population group of Bosnia at the time and over 10% of the population of NDH – Germans, Hungarians and others. The Catholics – mainly Croats, Germans and Magyars – constituted just over 50% of the 6.3 million population.

Mile Budak, politician and minister of the NDH – also a Croatian writer – immediately took the chance to declare the Muslims as Brothers and wanted to force them to convert to Christianity. Many Croatians agree with the idea that the majority of Bosnian Muslims are actually Croatians who were converted to Islam during the invasion of the Turks in the 15th Century.

Beginning

Muslim ethnic cleansing

Many Bosnian Muslims were accepted the NDH – in many cases were forced to accept it under the penalty of converting to Christianity or being executed – and immediately became involved. The most infamous of Islamic Ustase divisions was the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar. In respect to the soldiers of Muslim faith, a mosque was built in Zagreb – Croatia's capital city – known as the "Poglavnikova dzamija" or Poglavnik's Mosque. Despite Pavelić's assurances of equality with the Croats, many Muslims quickly became dissatisfied with Croatian rule. A Muslim leader reported that not one Muslim occupied an influential post in the administration.^[source?]

Fierce fighting broke out between the Ustaše, Chetniks and Yugoslav Partisans in NDH territory. Some Ustaše militia units became convinced that the Muslims were communist sympathizers, and burned their villages and murdered many civilians.^[6] The Ustase almost immediately enacted racial laws that reflected the acceptance of the ideology of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, with an emphasis placed on Croatian national issues.^[source?]

Genocide of Jews, Roma and Serbs

The normal jails could no longer sustain the rate of new inmates and the Ustaša government started preparing the grounds what would become the Jasenovac concentration camp by July 1941. The regime would eventually form concentration camps in eleven different locations. The Ustaše started conducting a deliberate campaign of mass murder, deportation and forced conversions to do away with the Serbs. The Jews and Roma were set for total annihilation.^[5] The Jasenovac concentration camp would become the place of murder of up to 100,000, with some estimates claiming that this camp was the third largest camp of WWII. Overall Ustase death count is estimated at around 600,000, but all written records were destroyed to cover it up.^[5]

Atrocities

The state of permanent terror, mass killing, raping women and looting properties of their victims in the Independet State of Croatia forced, primarily, the Serbs to rebel. According to the Glaise von Horstenau ^[7] reports, Hitler was angry with Pavelić whose policy inflamed the rebellion in Croatia - by which Hitler lost ability to engage the Independent State of Croatia forces on the Eastern Front.

Moreover, Hitler was forced to engage his forces in quelling the rebellion. For that reason, Hitler summoned Pavelić to his war headquarters in Vinica (Ukraine) on September 23, 1942. Consequently, Pavelić replaced his minister of the Armed Forces, Slavko Kvaternik, with the less zealous Jure Francetić. Before meeting Hitler, to appease the public, Pavelić published the Važna obavijest Vlade ("Important Government's Announcement") in which he threatened those spreading news,

[A]bout non-existent threats of disarmament of the Ustashe units by representatives of one foreign power, about the Croatian Army replacement by a foreign army, about the possibility that a foreign power would seize the power in Croatia.

Connections with the Roman Catholic Church

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) shaking hands with Alberto Vassallo-Torregrossa (1865–1959), a high-ranking Vatican clergy in Bavaria, Nazi Germany.

Pope Pius XII kept diplomatic relations with the Ustaše state throughout WWII.

Throughout the Catholic Ustaše-led NDH's existence, the Roman Catholic Church played a significant role in Ustaše's genocides.^[8] Alojzije Cardinal Stepinac, then the Archbishop of Zagreb, was seen by the survivors as an Ustaše war criminal.^[8] Stepinac was crucial in the Church's decision to sponsor the Ustaše due to his perception that the Ustaše was the^[8]

• guarantor of Croatia as the "Bulwark of Catholicism" against Islam and Orthodox Christianity
• hope for a Catholic state to reconvert the 200,000 Serbian Orthodox Christians who changed from their Catholic faith after WWI

NDH leadership

In May 1941, Pope Pius XII met the NDH leader Ante Pavelić – a devout Catholic himself – with Stepinac. It was followed by Pope Pius XII's posting of Giuseppe Ramiro Marcone (1882–1952) as his rep to the NDH,^[8] despite Pope Pius XII's clear knowledge of the ongoing genocides of Croatian Jews, Roma and Serbs.^[8] Aligned with the Pope's will, Stepinac only disagreed with brutalizing Catholic Jews, but not the vast majority of non-Catholic Jews.^[8]

Pogroms

Pogroms against Croatian Jews, Roma and Serbs were often incited by Catholic priests who hated the presence of non-Catholics in their parishes.^[8] To avoid immediate death, many Serbs were forced to convert to Catholicism, while Jews who converted were still killed as the Ustaše regime followed the Nazi racial policies on seeking to wipe out Jews as a race rather than a religion.^[8][9]

Under subordinate bishops' pressure, Stepinac told the Pope that they would ask Pavelić to stop the massacres and forced conversions, while sending Pavelić a different letter in which they asked for neither to stop.^[8] Instead, they asked Pavelić to delegate them the conversion authority to make the persecutions look more "humane".^[8]

Support for the NDH

In April 1942, Stepinac visited the Vatican for the second time, when he presented a report to Vatican's State Secretary Luigi Cardinal Maglione that praised the Ustaše regime's crackdown on abortion and pornography,^[8] while denying that Ustaše's genocides were planned.^[8] The Vatican kept full diplomatic relations with the NDH until its defeat in 1945.^[8]

To stay friendly with the Jews, Stepinac arranged for Chief Rabbi Freiburg of Zagreb to write the Pope a letter to thank him for the help, which the Church had not actually offered.^[8] Chief Rabbi Freiburg of Zagreb was killed in the Auschwitz concentration camp on 8 May 1943 upon arrival for protesting the Nazi brutalization of his fellow Jews.^[10]

Participation in the Holocaust

Contrary to the common perception that the Roman Catholic Church was opposed to Nazism and the Holocaust, priests and bishops throughout the Church hierarchy were highly sympathetic to them due to classical antisemitism and their belief that Nazi Germany was the "lesser evil".^[8][9]

Within the lower clergy, many Jesuits and Franciscans were Ustaše members, who persecuted or massacred Jews, Roma and Serbs for the Ustaše regime.^[8] Some prominent Catholic perpetrators included Ivan Guberina, Mate Mugoš and Franciscan Father Bojanović,^[8] while Franciscan Dionizije Juričev and Radoslav Glavaš served as the head of the Religious Section (VO) and head of the Religious Department of the Ministry of Justice and Religion respectively to oversee forced conversions within NDH territory.^[8]

Miroslav Filipović-Majstorović, the operator of the Jasenovac concentration camp in which 77,000 – 99,000 were killed,^[5] was a Franciscan. In addition, Catholic priest Božidar Bralo served as the security police chief in Sarajevo to target Jews while Dyonisy Juričev as an Ustaše newspaper editor calling for all bishops to join the Ustaše to kill Jews.^[8] 81% of Croatian Jews were killed in the Holocaust.^[9][5]

Critique

In his 1999 book Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII,^[11] British author and journalist John Cornwell pointed out that^[12]

1. Pope Pius XII's allegedly anti-Nazi sermons never mentioned Jews
2. Pope Pius XII was silent after the Nazi roundup of 1,200 Jews below the Vatican hill on 16 October 1943^[13]
3. the reason for (1.) and (2.) was Pope Pius XII's lifelong antisemitism preventing him from developing sympathy for Jews
4. Defenders of Pope Pius XII promoted lies to make him look like a hero by misclassifying his neutral correspondence with the Nazis as "protests" and overstating his interventions in Nazi deportations of Jews^[14][15]

Relations with Nazi Germany

Hans Helm, the appointed head of Gestapo for the NDH, in his confidential report – under the title Basis of the partisan danger and sent to General Kasche of January 14, 1943 – wrote,^[7]

Most of the partisan ranks are coming from the Serbs [. ...] the new regime in Croatia started the programs of annihilation and destruction of the Serbs [. ...] publicly supported by the highest ranks of the Croatian government [...] The fact that a different talk was coming from the official Ustashe side [...] leaves no possibility to compensate the harm caused by, for example, Dr. Mile Budak, the actual (Croatian) minister in Berlin.

Appointed general Horstenau wrote in his report,^[source?]

Ustashe movement is, due to the mistakes and atrocities they have made, and the corruption, so compromised that the government executive branch (the homeguard and the police) shall be separated from the government – even for the price of breaking any possible connection with the government.

Disestablishment

• August 1944
  • A failed coup attempt by Mladen Lorković and Ante Vokić against Ante Pavelić, the leader of the NDH, resulted in the execution of the conspirators.
• Early 1945
  • The NDH army, along with German and Cossack troops, withdrew towards Zagreb as the Yugoslav Partisan forces, led by Josip Broz Tito, advanced.
  • The NDH government began to disintegrate, and many officials fled the country.
• May 1945
  • On May 6, the Yugoslav Partisan forces entered Zagreb, and the NDH government officially ceased to exist.
  • Between May 10 and 15, a large column of Ustaša supporters, NDH soldiers, and civilians retreated towards Austria and Italy.
  • Ante Pavelić fled to Austria, Italy, and eventually Argentina.
  • The British Army turned over many of the retreating troops and civilians to the Yugoslav Partisan forces.
  • On May 25, the last remnants of the NDH army surrendered, marking the final end of the Independent State of Croatia.

Aftermath

The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was established, with Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina as two of its six constituent republics. Many former NDH officials and soldiers were tried and executed for war crimes and crimes against humanity between 1945 and 1949.^[source?]

Related pages

• Antiziganism
• Antisemitism
• Supersessionism

References

• Alfio Russo: Revoluzione in Jugoslavia, Roma 1944.
• Encyclopædia Britannica, Edition 1991, Macropedia, Vol. 29, page 1111.
• Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Vol. 2, Independent State of Croatia entry.
• Encyclopædia Britannica, 1943 - Book of the year, page 215, Entry: Croatia
• Worldmark Encyclopedia of the Nations, Europe, edition 1995, page 91, entry: Croatia
• Ladislaus Hory and Martin Broszat: Der Kroatische Ustascha-Staat, 1941-1945 Stuttgart, 1964
• Helen Fein: Accounting for Genocide - Victims and Survivors of the Holocaust, The Free Press, New York, Edition 1979, pages 102, 103.
• Hermann Neubacher: Sonderauftrag Suedost 1940-1945, Bericht eines fliegendes Diplomaten, 2. durchgesehene Auflage, Goettingen 1956