The Croatian Ustasha Regime and Its Policies Towards
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THE IDEOLOGY OF NATION AND RACE: THE CROATIAN USTASHA REGIME AND ITS POLICIES TOWARD MINORITIES IN THE INDEPENDENT STATE OF CROATIA, 1941-1945. NEVENKO BARTULIN A thesis submitted in fulfilment Of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of New South Wales November 2006 1 2 3 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Nicholas Doumanis, lecturer in the School of History at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia, for the valuable guidance, advice and suggestions that he has provided me in the course of the writing of this thesis. Thanks also go to his colleague, and my co-supervisor, Günther Minnerup, as well as to Dr. Milan Vojkovi, who also read this thesis. I further owe a great deal of gratitude to the rest of the academic and administrative staff of the School of History at UNSW, and especially to my fellow research students, in particular, Matthew Fitzpatrick, Susie Protschky and Sally Cove, for all their help, support and companionship. Thanks are also due to the staff of the Department of History at the University of Zagreb (Sveuilište u Zagrebu), particularly prof. dr. sc. Ivo Goldstein, and to the staff of the Croatian State Archive (Hrvatski državni arhiv) and the National and University Library (Nacionalna i sveuilišna knjižnica) in Zagreb, for the assistance they provided me during my research trip to Croatia in 2004. I must also thank the University of Zagreb’s Office for International Relations (Ured za meunarodnu suradnju) for the accommodation made available to me during my research trip. Last but not least, I would like to thank my family, especially my parents Luka and Manda Bartulin, for all their support, moral and financial, without which this thesis could not have been completed. 4 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 9 PART ONE: HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 52 Chapter One: Croatdom and Slavdom 52 Political and cultural identity: kingdom, religion, language and literature The pre-modern Croatian ethnie/nation Relations with the Serbian Orthodox minority Chapter Two: Illyrians and Yugoslavs 79 One language = one people? The Illyrian movement Yugoslavism ‘National oneness’ Chapter Three: Ante Starevi4 and the Croatian Party of Right 100 Croat versus Slav The ‘Other’: Slavoserbs and Vlachs Ideas of ‘blood’ and race The Frankists Chapter Four: Stjepan Radi4 and the Croatian Peasant Party 120 Tribe and nation 5 The creation of the state of Yugoslavia Serbian dominance in Yugoslavia Slavophile pacifism Chapter Five: The Croatian pan-Slavist ius sanguinis 143 PART TWO: THE USTASHA MOVEMENT 1930-1941 155 Chapter Six: The Founding of the Ustasha Movement 155 Croatian independence and terrorism Croatian national individuality ‘Better some sort of Croatia than no Croatia at all’: Paveli and Fascist Italy Chapter Seven: Ustasha Race Theory 175 Race and civilization: the theories of Ivo Pilar and Milan Šufflay Western racism and the Balkans Yugoslavist racism Croatian ethnic and historic identity The Dinaric race Muslim-Catholic Croatian unity Chapter Eight: Ustasha Anti-Semitism 223 The Croatian peasant and Jew Ustasha anti-Communism: internationalism as ‘the negation of blood ties’ Identifying the ‘enemies’ of the Croatian people 6 PART THREE: THE INDEPENDENT STATE OF CROATIA, 1941-1945 244 Chapter Nine: The Ustasha State 244 The German Reich recognizes its southern ‘Gothic’ neighbour The clash of German and Italian interests in the NDH The ‘Independence’ of the NDH Dictatorship: the rule of the ‘best of the nation’ The ‘Croatian SS’: the Ustasha Militia Reflections on Ustasha rule: marching with Germany to the end Chapter Ten: The Nation of Wolves and Lions – the NDH as the Bulwark of the White West and the Bridge to the Orient 299 The ‘Croatian spiritual revolution’ and the ‘new Croatian man’ The Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina The Dalmatian question: Latin ‘civilization’ and Croatian ‘barbarism’ The Ustasha regime and the Catholic Church Chapter Eleven: Aryan Racial Identity and Croatian National Individuality 344 The Ustasha race laws The ‘Nordic-Dinaric’ race Chapter Twelve: The Orthodox Serb ‘Problem’ in the NDH 361 Defining the ‘Greek-Easterners’ The merging of Serbian, Jewish and Gypsy stereotypes in Ustasha propaganda 7 The mass deportation and mass killing of Serbs Religious conversion The Croatian Orthodox Church Chapter Thirteen: The Persecution of Jews and Roma in the NDH 398 Ustasha anti-Semitic policies: deportation, murder and exemptions The Gypsy ‘problem’ EPILOGUE 413 BIBLIOGRAPHY 418 8 INTRODUCTION In the short period from 1941 to 1945, the Croatian Ustasha* regime attempted to remove, through deportation, physical extermination and forced assimilation, the Serbian, Jewish and Roma minorities of the ‘Independent State of Croatia’ (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH). The Nazi-backed regime also attempted the first serious effort by any regime in the region to nationally integrate the large Muslim population of Bosnia-Herzegovina. This endeavour of ‘demographic engineering’ in the Balkans in the 1940s was, as Stanley Payne rightly asserts, of ‘truly Hitlerian proportions,’ considering the fact that non-Croatian ethnic, racial and religious minorities constituted approximately one-half of the NDH’s population.1 Jonathan Gumz correctly attributes Ustasha policies to an agenda of a ‘nationalizing war’, that is, ‘the extensive use of military and political violence to reduce a multi-national state to a nation- state.’2 This war was another in the series of nationalizing wars that have plagued Balkan and Eastern European political life since the early nineteenth century. The principle of ethnic homogeneity was viewed by successive politicians in the Balkans as a corollary to political, social and economic modernization.3 Modernization implied centralization, and this in turn implied cultural uniformity.4 * ‘Ustasha’ (Ustaša) is singular and adjectival, while ‘Ustashe’ (Ustaše) is the plural form. 1 Stanley Payne, Fascism: Comparison and Definition (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), p. 138. 2 Jonathan E. Gumz, ‘Wehrmacht Perceptions of Mass Violence in Croatia, 1941-1942’ The Historical Journal, 44, 4, 2001, p. 1019. 3 Mark Mazower, The Balkans (London: Phoenix Press, 2000), p. 109. In Mazower’s words, ‘the liberal concept of the nation-state aimed to reconcile majoritarian ethnic rule with guarantees of individual rights…In theory, assimilation of the minority to the majority was supposed in the long run to lead to a homogenisation of the population. But the theory collided with the realities of politics in Europe’s 9 Nationalizing wars were prominent in the East and South-East of Europe because until the nineteenth century, this area was home to multi-national empires ‘with an appallingly complex patchwork of linguistic and cultural differences’.5 In conditions such as these, wrote Ernest Gellner, ‘culturally homogeneous nation-states, such as are held to be normative and prescribed by history in nationalist theory, can be produced only by ethnic cleansing’.6 As Holm Sundhaussen notes in the case of Croatia, ‘the excesses of the Ustasha regime toward the Serbs stand in the tradition of “ethnic cleansing”, which was practiced to a great extent for the first time by the participant states of the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, and was now raised to an extreme’.7 The Ustashe were conscious that their ‘independent state’ could only be culturally homogeneous through ‘ethnic cleansing’, and they willingly accepted this fact. In contrast to earlier Balkan and East European attempts of ethnic cleansing, Ustasha ‘nation-building’ was able to converge with Nazi Germany’s European wide race war.8 In other words, the Ustashe post-imperial states, where tensions, animosities and suspicion between ethnic groups ran high’. See ibid, p. 105. 4 ibid, p. 110. 5 Ernest Gellner, Nationalism (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997), p. 54. 6 ibid, p. 56. 7 See Holm Sundhaussen, ‘Nationsbildung und Nationalismus im Donau-Balkan-Raum’, Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte, 48, 1993, p. 250. All translations of German and Croatian citations in this thesis are the author’s own. 8 The Ustasha mass murder of ‘undesirable’ ethnic minorities in the NDH has been well documented by both Croatian and non-Croatian historians. See in particular, Fikreta Jeli-Buti, Ustaše i Nezavisna Država Hrvatska 1941-1945 (Zagreb: Sveuilišna naklada Liber, 1977), pp. 162-187, Jonathan Gumz, ‘Wehrmacht Perceptions of Mass Violence in Croatia’, Ladislaus Hory and Martin Broszat, Der kroatische Ustascha-Staat, 1941-1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1964), pp. 89-106, Yeshayahu Jelinek, ‘Nationalities and Minorities in the Independent State of Croatia’, Nationalities Papers, Vol. VIII, No. 2, 1984, pp. 195-210, Hrvoje Matkovi4, Povijest Nezavisne Države Hrvatske (Zagreb: Naklada Pavii, 1994), pp. 154-164, Holm Sundhaussen, ‘Der Ustascha-Staat: Anatomie eines Herrschaftssystems’, Österreichische Osthefte, No. 37, 1995, pp. 521-532 and Jozo Tomasevich, 10 aided the Nazis in the latter’s racial persecution of Jews and Gypsies, while the Nazis supported the anti-Serbian policies of the Ustashe. Ustasha racism differed considerably from Nazi racism, however, in that the former was based primarily on the principle that state and nationality should correspond, while German racism was based on an imperialist expansionism, which sought Lebensraum for the German Herrenvolk, as well as the enslavement of the Russian Untermenschen, in the expanses of the East. Ustasha genocide was underlined by two principal aims. One was to establish a Croatian nation-state for the first time in modern history, and secondly, to simultaneously remove the ethnic, racial and religious minorities that the Ustashe considered both alien and a threat to the organic unity of the Croatian nation. Closely linked to the above two aims was the attempt to redefine the notion of Croatian nationhood by grounding it upon a firm ethno- linguistic/racial basis. The way the Ustashe ‘imagined’ the Croatian nation has received little attention from historians. This is because the historiography has always centred on the attempt to establish an independent state, which is represented by historians as the main Ustasha aim.