Introduction

Abstract: The introduction outlines the main aim of the book, which is to examine Ustasha race theory and its importance to the political and legal functioning of the Independent State of Croatia by focusing on the case of Croatian Jews who were granted the rights of Aryan citizens of the Ustasha state; this question is examined within the broader context of anti-Semitism, nationalism and race theory in Croatia from the mid-nineteenth century. The introduction provides an overview of the relevant historiography on the Ustasha regime and the Independent State of Croatia, pointing out that historians have tended to downplay or ignore the importance of racial ideas to the Ustasha movement, including racial anti-Semitism.

Bartulin, Nevenko. Honorary Aryans: National–Racial Identity and Protected Jews in the Independent State of Croatia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126  N. Bartulin, Honorary Aryans: National-Racial Identity and Protected Jews in the Independent State of Croatia © Nevenko Bartulin 2013  Honorary Aryans

In 1910 a Jewish member of the liberal–nationalist Croatian Pure Party of Right, Vladimir Sachs, declared that Croatia’s Jews were not part of a separate nation but ‘Croats of the Mosaic faith’.1 Thirty years later, in late May 1941, Sachs sent an application to the Jewish section of the Ustasha Directorate of Police requesting that it grant him, ‘a person of non-Aryan descent’, the full rights of an Aryan citizen of the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH), because he had proved him- self ‘meritorious for the Croatian people’, and had always fought against ‘international Jewry’.2 Sachs based his application (to which he received a positive answer) upon the fact that the sixth article of the first Ustasha racial law decree, issued on 30 April 1941, had indeed given the Head of State the right to grant all political rights that belong to individuals of Aryan descent to non-Aryan individuals who had proven themselves ‘meritorious for the Croatian people, especially for its liberation’ before 10 April 1941.3 This date was the day the NDH was proclaimed by the unofficial head of the Ustasha movement in Croatia, the former Austro– Hungarian Colonel Slavko Kvaternik (1878–1947), who was married to the daughter of Josip Frank (1844–1911), the baptised Jew who had led the Pure Party of Right from 1895 to his death in 1911. The members of this party later became known as ‘Frankists’ (frankovci). Frank would have presumably had no inkling that his one-time political followers – including the future Poglavnik (Leader) of the NDH, Ante Pavelić (1889–1959) – would establish a movement and state that completely rejected his, and Sachs’, idea of a civic and liberal Croatian nation state. Sachs himself belonged to a small group of assimilated Jews who, given the ‘privilege’ of living in the NDH, would no longer be able to be Croats of the Mosaic faith, but merely ‘honorary Aryans’ or protected Jews, a coterie of Jews living on the margins of a racial state that was prepared to accept ‘exceptions to the rule’ (in this case Jews who were defined as possessing Aryan ‘spiritual’ or mental qualities) but not accept Jews as Jews. This book examines the case of the so-called honorary Aryans, as well as Jews in mixed marriages and so-called Mischlinge (half- and quarter Jews), by focusing on how these exemptions from the NDH’s race laws were justified by race theory. This question is explored within the broader context of anti-Semitism, nationalism and racial theory in Croatia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This work analyses, in detail, the position of Jews in Croatian and Yugoslav nationalist discourses on race, ethnicity and nationhood. Ustasha anti-Semitism needs to be comprehended within

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126 Introduction  the context of a wider racial ideology, which did not concern itself solely, or even primarily, with Jews. The historiography on the NDH has reduced the question of Ustasha anti-Semitism to: a) a matter of political pragmatism and opportunism on the part of the Ustashe, i.e. introducing anti-Semitic laws and policies in order to receive further favour and sympathy of the Third Reich; b) the need to protect members of the Ustasha movement who were of Jewish descent; and c) economic greed, in other words, pursing anti-Semitic policy merely in order to acquire Jewish property. Although these factors should not be ignored or overlooked in a study of Ustasha anti-Semitism, historians of the NDH have tended to dismiss Ustasha ideas on race in general as little more than a carbon copy of National Socialist ideologi- cal views. In line with that historiographical position, the existence of Jewish honorary Aryans could easily be seen as a contradiction of race theory, which thereby highlights the supposed ideological shallowness of the Ustashe, as well as their willingness to exempt certain Jews purely in return for economic gain. In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Hannah Arendt thus referred to the ‘highly assimilated and extraordi- narily rich’ group of Jews who were able to acquire honorary Aryan sta- tus by parting ‘voluntarily with their property’.4 Gerald Reitlinger wrote that ‘the whole of the Ustashe autocracy was mixed with Jewish blood’, but Pavelić nonetheless ‘decreed the confiscation of all Jewish property’ because ‘the trigger-happy Ustashe needed plunder and the wealth of the orthodox Serb minority was not enough to satisfy them’.5 Since the pub- lication of these two books (Reitlinger’s work was first published in 1953) little more has been offered in the way of a historiographical explana- tion for Ustasha anti-Semitic policy and the justification for exempting certain Jews. Only two historiographical studies have really dealt with the question of honorary Aryans in any detail, namely, Holokaust u Zagrebu (‘The Holocaust in Zagreb’, 2001) by Ivo (and Slavko) Goldstein, and When Courage Prevailed: The Rescue and Survival of Jews in the Independent State of Croatia 1941–1945 (2011), by Esther Gitman.6 While Goldstein exam- ines the Ustasha persecution of Jews in the NDH (focusing on Zagreb), Gitman’s book explores the efforts of various political and social actors to save Jews from that persecution. While both books provide a good deal of detail on the individual cases and fates of Jewish honorary Aryans,7 they neglect to examine how the Ustasha government attempted to justify, in an ideological and legal sense, the exemption of these Jews from the race

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126  Honorary Aryans laws. Goldstein merely cites the sixth article of the first racial law decree, and provides biographical notes on the several high-ranking Ustashe of Jewish descent or married to Jewish/half-Jewish women,8 but makes no attempt to situate this question within the context of Ustasha ideology. In any case, Goldstein defines Ustasha ideology as nothing more than ‘a specific synthesis of Fascist and Nazi elements, adapted to the Croatian and Bosnian reality’. Accordingly, the Ustasha regime implemented the ‘ideology of Croatian exclusivism’, which had ‘developed into a typical Nazi ideology transplanted onto Croatian soil’.9 Goldstein is mainly concerned with highlighting the genocidal nature of the NDH, including its anti- Semitism, without actually examining the roots of Ustasha racial ideology. Gitman, for her part, notes that the Ustashe ‘officially embraced the Nazi goal of a genocidal Final Solution’, but also ‘worked to protect those individuals whose education, skills, or family ties they deemed vital to Croatia’s national interest’.10 She further argues that:

[ ... ] Pavelić made one significant change to the Nazi definition of ‘Jew.’ Rather than relying on the criteria of three Jewish grandparents, he empow- ered himself as head of state to recognize new categories specific to Croatia: ‘Honorary Aryan’ and ‘Aryan Rights.’ The Nazis, naturally, objected to the change, primarily because it introduced arbitrary and subjective criteria that invited corrupt practices.11

While the last sentence is a valid point, Gitman is incorrect when she claims that Pavelić made a ‘significant change’ to the ‘Nazi definition of Jew’ by not relying on the criteria of three Jewish grandparents. According to the first Ustasha racial law decree, which Gitman does not actually examine, individuals with at least three Jewish grandparents were in fact legally defined as Jewish. Similarly to the position of German Jews under the 1935 Nuremberg laws, quarter Jews (individuals with one Jewish grandparent) and certain half-Jews (with two Jewish grandparents) in the NDH were able to acquire full Croatian citizenship and recognition as Aryans. As regards the categories ‘Honorary Aryan‘ (which was never officially used) and ‘Aryan rights’, it must be stressed that Jews who were granted such status were not in fact recognised or defined as racially Aryan. These Jews were awarded the full rights that belonged to Aryan citizens of the NDH because they had proven themselves ‘meritorious’ for the Croatian people and/or possessed vital economic skills, but they were only honorary Aryans. Although representatives of the German Foreign Ministry and SS (Schutzstaffel) in the NDH were critical of these

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126 Introduction  exemptions from the race laws, the Third Reich itself granted certain groups of German Jews ‘clemency’ from the Nuremberg laws.12 Gitman also makes the common historiographical error of claiming that Ante Pavelić and Slavko Kvaternik had ‘Jewish wives’, implying that they were either full Jews or Jewish by religion.13 A great deal of research has been conducted on the ethnic and racial policies of the Ustasha state towards Serbs, Jews and Gypsies in wartime Croatia and Bosnia–Herzegovina, policies that aimed to transform the NDH into an ethno-racially homogeneous nation state.14 Historians have not, however, subjected Ustasha racial ideology – including anti-Semitic ideas – to a serious historiographical analysis, preferring instead to down- play or ignore race theory as an important legal, political and ideological factor in the NDH.15 One of the main reasons for this neglect is the fact that the history of the NDH was, for many decades, examined according to three strictly delineated historiographical models. The Croatian historian Nada Kisić Kolanović has pointed out that Croatian and Yugoslav historiography on the NDH from the post-war period to 1990 basically consisted of two schools or ‘models’, the ‘Marxist–Yugoslav’ and ‘Nostalgic–Apologetic’.16 According to the Marxist Yugoslav model, represented above all by the historians Bogdan Krizman and Fikreta Jelić-Butić, the NDH was nothing more than a ‘Nazi–Fascist’ puppet state and, furthermore, ‘any attempt to create an independent Croatian state was solely an act of Croatian chau- vinism and the legitimising of terror on other peoples’.17 In contrast to this school, the ‘Nostalgic–Apologetic’ model, found primarily among anti- Yugoslav right-wing intellectuals in the émigré journal Hrvatska revija (The Croatian Review) downplayed or ignored the historical reality of Ustasha racism and crimes against humanity. They aimed to rehabilitate the NDH by reducing it to a question of the Croatian people’s right to independent statehood, so that the NDH was simply the ‘historical realisation of an independent Croatian state’.18 Western historians in turn have generally interpreted the Ustashe and NDH as a movement and state that adhered to political Catholicism or clerical fascism. In his book (which he wrote in cooperation with the Hungarian journalist Ladislaus Hory) Der kroatische Ustascha-Staat 1941– 1945, published in 1964, the German historian Martin Broszat defined the Ustashe as ‘the Catholic-Croatian type of fascism’.19 More recent studies by Western historians continue to maintain that the Ustashe were strongly influenced by an ardent Catholic ideology. Rory Yeomans states that the Ustashe were motivated by a Catholic-derived religious

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126  Honorary Aryans

‘mysticism’, and the ‘overtly apocalyptic, violent and chiliastic imagery the Ustashas employed reflected their extreme Manichean view of the world’.20 According to Jonathan Steinberg, the Croats themselves are ‘a community defined by religion and by almost nothing else’ and this leads him to conclude that the Ustashe therefore ‘hated the [Orthodox] Serbs and so killed them’.21 Jonathan Gumz argues that ‘the Ustaša attempted to tie itself to Catholicism through using a dagger superimposed upon a Catholic crucifix as the movement’s symbol’ (though this claim is incorrect).22 The Ustashe were in fact a thoroughly secular radical nation- alist movement and certainly did not represent a group of anti-Orthodox Catholic fundamentalists. For example, the Ustashe pursued a serious policy of integrating the Bosnian Muslims (or ‘Croats of the Islamic faith’) into the Croatian nation, to the extent that they recognised Islam as an official religion of the NDH and promoted a vigorous Islamophile propaganda campaign.23 The historians mentioned above have ignored or simply overlooked a single important fact: the Ustasha regime’s party program, the seventeen ‘Principles of the Ustasha Movement’ (Načela ustaškog pokreta, 1933), made no mention of Catholicism, and only one principle made a reference to religion at all (i.e. ‘the moral strengths of the Croatian people lie in an orderly and religious family life’).24 Contemporary historians more or less agree in their assessments of the Ustashe as integral nationalists and/or fascists. Although there is no doubt that the Ustashe were indeed fervent anti-Communist integral nationalists with strong political and ideological sympathies for fascist regimes in Europe (though Martin Broszat referred to the Ustashe as being only ‘proto-fascist’ or ‘half-fascist’),25 the specific question of race theory in the NDH remains a neglected subject amongst historians. Mark Biondich, for example, has more recently highlighted that Catholicism had little influence on Ustasha attitudes and policies toward Serbs in the NDH. The Ustashe are defined by Biondich as ‘integral nationalists’, worshippers of the ‘cult of state’ and further characterised by anti- Serbianism and anti-Communism.26 On the other hand, he downplays the significance of racial ideas in Ustasha ideology and policy, arguing that the Ustashe ‘never formulated’ a coherent racial theory, because the regime’s ideological ‘racial or racist undertone’ was supposedly ‘implied rather than explicit’.27 Other historians similarly present Ustasha racial ideas as a peripheral feature of the regime’s ideology or as too vague and unclear to warrant serious analysis. Kisić Kolanović thus argues that it is ‘difficult to identify some sort of racial type of Ustasha nationalism’,

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126 Introduction  because the Ustashe also emphasised language, culture and history as key factors of Croatian nationhood.28 Emily Greble notes that ‘the Ustasha Party’s ideological program described the Croat nation as an “identifi- able ethnic unit” ’, but it ‘was identifiable only insofar as it was not “other” nations’. Accordingly, Greble argues, ‘a foreigner was somebody who was not a Croat, and a Croat was somebody who was not a foreigner – at best a political tautology and at worst a stage for national crisis’.29 Such lack of ideological clarity is apparently reflected, in particular, in the theory of the Gothic (Germanic) origin of the Croats to which the Ustashe were supposed to have subscribed. Sabrina Ramet thus writes that ‘the claim that Croats were “Goths“ (whatever that might mean) rather than Slavs was one element in that ideology and provided an ideo- logical groundwork for asserting that Croats (Goths) and Serbs (Slavs) were not related’.30 According to James Sadkovich, the Ustashe ‘began to develop a rather ambiguous racial theory that claimed a “gothic” ances- try for the Croats’.31 Although Ante Pavelić claimed a Gothic origin in conversation with Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) in June 1941, Mario Jareb has recently shown that the Ustashe did not in fact promote a specifically Gothic/Germanic racial identity for the Croats in the NDH; in any case, the NDH’s academics and ideologists readily admitted that the Croats were of at least partially Slavic origin.32 Jareb, however, argues that such an identification (even if only partial) of a Slavic descent highlights that the Ustashe could not therefore claim an Aryan racial identity. According to Jareb, the National Socialists regarded the Slavs as ‘racially less valu- able’ non-Aryans, including in this category the Slavic speaking Croats.33 Yeshayahu Jelinek, for his part, argued that the Ustasha idea of an Aryan Gothic, and/or Iranian, racial identity was ‘for external consumption’ only, that is, a straightforward political ploy to gain the sympathy of Berlin.34 Stanley Payne similarly states that the Ustashe used the Gothic theory to place Croats above other Slavs in the Nazi racial hierarchy.35 The preceding arguments neglect or significantly downplay several key points about the NDH and the question of race. Firstly, they fail to note that the Ustashe emphasised race alongside language, history and culture as vital aspects of Croatian national identity in the NDH. Secondly, the argument that the Ustashe simply imitated or copied National Socialist racial ideology does not take into account the strong intellectual and ideological influence that racial anthropology and race theory exerted on sections of the political and academic milieu of Croatia long before 1941. Thirdly, the claim that the Ustashe did not possess their own Aryan

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126  Honorary Aryans race theory because the Croats are linguistically Slavic and therefore regarded by the Third Reich as ‘racial inferiors’ is a deeply entrenched, but highly misleading, thesis. ‘Slav’ and ‘South Slav‘ are in the first instance linguistic terms and this fact was accepted by German racial anthropologists and National Socialist ideologists in the Third Reich, at least in theory.36 Furthermore, it was entirely conceivable for Croat nationalists to claim an Aryan (i.e. Indo–European/Indo–Germanic) racial identity. As far as the Gothic theory of Croat origins is concerned, the Ustashe never claimed that the Croats were actually Goths, but rather that this Germanic people had significantly contributed to the Croatian ethnic and racial composition.37 Accordingly, historians cannot dismiss Ustasha race theory with the assertion that such ideas are too obviously fictitious or a political ploy without an intellectual/ideological basis, and therefore not worthy of seri- ous scholarly analysis. As the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) pointed out, ‘with race theories you can prove or disprove anything you want’.38 The Ustashe were committed to the formulation of a national ‘ethno-history’, that is, ‘the subjective view of later generations of a given cultural unit of population of the experience of their real or presumed forebears’.39 Ethno-histories are based on a combination of ‘varying degrees of documented fact’ and ‘political myth’.40 Furthermore, an ethno-linguistic or race theory could be more easily seen to be substantiated when that theory was built upon an earlier ethnic myth and/or national tradition. As the late American historian George L. Mosse noted, one needs ‘tradi- tion to activate thought or else it can not be activated’.41 For example, the Fascist Duce Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) found it difficult to ‘activate’ an imported Aryan–Nordic racial theory, which traditionally had little or no influence on Italian nationalism. Accordingly, ‘when Italian racism was introduced, it had to be invented and you get a crude transposition from the German Aryan man to the Mediterranean Aryan man [ ... ]’42 In contrast to Italian Fascism, the Ustashe did have particular intellectual, ideological and cultural traditions to draw upon in the articulation of their own Aryan/Indo–European/Indo–Germanic race theory. According to the Ustashe, the Croats were not only a distinct political nation (one defined as possessing historic statehood and a modern national consciousness),43 but also a distinct ethnicity (one defined as a group possessing or claim- ing a common ancestry, culture, history and territory).44 Furthermore, the Croats were defined as a distinct white Indo–European people – of Slavic– Iranian–Gothic–Illyrian–Celtic descent – that exhibited the physical and

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126 Introduction  spiritual traits of the main European racial types (Nordic, Alpine, Dinaric, Mediterranean and East Baltic), while the best Croats were said to specifi- cally bear the traits of the more gifted Dinaric and Nordic races. The principal Ustasha political ima was to establish an independ- ent Croatian nation state. Such an aim necessitated the destruction of the state of Yugoslavia, in which Croatia had been wiped off the map as a distinct political entity and reduced, more or less, to a satrapy of the Serbian dominated royalist government in Belgrade.45 This aim was closely connected to the other equally important goal of the Ustashe: to redefine the concept of Croatian nationhood, which, until the end of the First World War, had been defined by the dominant Croatian political ideologies as being purely Slavic in an ethnic and/or racial sense. The redefinition of Croatian nationhood also necessitated defining the ethnic and racial groups who represented the ‘Other’46: these groups were the majority of Serbs and almost all Gypsies and Jews living on the territory considered the ethnic and historic land of the Croatian people (comprising today’s Republics of Croatia and Bosnia–Herzegovina). These groups were further defined as forming part of a broader Asiatic racial counter-type. Accordingly, though Ustasha attitudes towards Jews were directly influenced by National Socialist anti-Semitic ideas, they also need to be understood as forming part of a home-grown ideology that placed Croatia’s Jews in a group together with other peoples defined as racially Near Eastern and Oriental; in this case, the Gypsies and the Serbs, the latter identified as being predominantly of Balkan Vlach (i.e. a non-Aryan racial) origin. Interestingly, that racial ideology had emerged in a curious fashion. Ante Pavelić, along with many other leading Ustasha members, had been a former member of one of the factions of the Croatian Party of Right, which had been founded in 1861 by the Croatian writer Ante Starčević (1823–1896). Starčević promoted the idea that Croatia had a right to independent statehood, outside of the Habsburg Monarchy, upon the basis of Croatian historic state right. He was also opposed to the ideology of Yugoslavism, which propagated the idea of the ‘national unity’ of all the South Slavs. Starčević was, however, a strong supporter of civic nationalism and generally opposed to ethnic and racial notions of Croat nationhood. He chose as his successor to lead the Party of Right (now renamed the Pure Party of Right), Josip Frank. Due to Frank’s Jewish background and the fact that a large number of Croatian Jews supported his party, the Pure Party of Right gained the reputation of

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126  Honorary Aryans being a Jewish run liberal party. The party argued that Croat Jews were, in a national sense, ‘Croats of the Mosaic faith’, equal in all respects to Croats of Catholic, Orthodox and Islamic faith. In contrast, Croat Yugoslavist nationalists, in other words, those who viewed the Croats as a purely Slavic people, were highly critical of the ‘Jew’ Frank and tended to view the predominantly urban, and mainly German and Hungarian speaking, Croatian Jews as racial aliens. During the early twentieth century many intellectuals and supporters of the Pure Party of Right had begun to develop an ethnic–racial theory of Croat nationhood, but one that was opposed to Yugoslavism. This was mainly due to the ideological need to ‘prove’ the existence of a separate ethno-linguistic Croatian people, since general academic opinion in and outside of Croatia viewed the Croats as an integral part of the South Slav or ‘Yugoslav’ nation, which gave the ideology of Yugoslavism a stronger intellectual foundation. Croatian Jews increasingly came to be seen as racial foreigners by anti-Yugoslavist Croat nationalists, including the Ustasha movement. During the 1930s the Ustashe increasingly developed an openly anti-Semitic stance, whilst still making a distinction between individual ‘good’ Croatian Jews and ‘international’ or foreign Jewry as a whole. This distinction was maintained in the NDH, to a certain degree, by the legal practice of granting individual Jews honorary Aryan status. Parallel to the development of anti-Yugoslavist Croat nationalism from an ideology of civic national identity to one of national identity understood as ethnic–racial kinship, Croatian Jews were also develop- ing their own identity, marked by the opposing forces of assimilation and Zionism, within the political structures of two multi-ethnic states, namely, the Habsburg Monarchy and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Jewish identity in Croatia was inextricably linked, on the one hand, to the Habsburg Monarchy, and, on the other, to modernity. Large-scale Jewish settlement in the autonomous Kingdom of Croatia–Slavonia, part of the Habsburg Monarchy since 1527, only began with the Edict of Toleration issued by Emperor Joseph II in 1782, which permitted Jews to settle in Croatia. The Jews lived exclusively in the towns and cities of Croatia where they worked as lawyers, doctors and/or were engaged in industry and trade, in stark contrast to the great majority of ethnic Croats who were peasants. In terms of its ideology, the Ustasha NDH represented a radical break, not only with Yugoslav racial supranationalism, but also with Habsburg dynastic ‘multiculturalism’ and nineteenth-century liberalism. The Ustashe further rejected many aspects of modernity,

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126 Introduction  such as urban life, cosmopolitanism and the internationalist ideologies of communism and laissez-faire capitalism. In Ustasha eyes, the Jews were the representative type of the modern, rootless and materialist cosmopolitan. A Jewish identity could survive, and even thrive, in the Habsburg and Yugoslav political contexts, but it could not be preserved within a modern racialist state that extolled an ideal Aryan racial type. This book shows that the presence of Jewish honorary Aryans in the NDH does not bring into question the importance of racial thought in the NDH, but rather, it actually highlights the significance of race for the Ustasha state. This book focuses its attention on theory, that is, on ideology and law, in order to examine how race theory and the race laws in the NDH accommodated and justified the inclusion of Jewish hon- orary Aryans in the body of NDH citizens. A study of this race theory cannot be undertaken without first examining the roots of that theory. Accordingly, the Chapters 1 and 2 chart the development of racial theory, nationalism and anti-Semitism in Croatia from the late eighteenth cen- tury to the Second World War. Chapter 3 examines the phenomena of racism, anti-Semitism and honorary Aryans in the NDH. The leaders and ideologists of the Ustasha movement had genuinely rejected the Frankist heritage of civic Croat nationalism, but they could still make exceptions to the rule, granting assimilated Jews the privilege of NDH citizenship, whilst still recognising, in theory, their racial otherness.

Notes

 Ivo and Slavko Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu (Zagreb: Novi liber, 2001), 619.  Bogdan Krizman, Pavelić između Hitlera i Mussolinija (Zagreb: Globus, 1980), 137, 191fn. See a copy of Sach’s application in Krizman, Pavelić između Hitlera i Mussolinija, 224–225.  ‘Krv i čast hrvatskog naroda zaštićeni posebnim odredbama’, Hrvatski narod, 1 May 1941, 1.  Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: The Viking Press, 1963), 184.  Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe 1939–1945 (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc., 1987), 365.  See Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu and Esther Gitman, When Courage Prevailed: The Rescue and Survival of Jews in the Independent State of Croatia 1941–1945 (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2011).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126  Honorary Aryans

 See Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu, 132–144, 378–384; and Gitman, When Courage Prevailed, 67–91.  Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu, 119, 619–625.  ibid, 93, 95.  Gitman, When Courage Prevailed, 67.  ibid, XVII.  Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military (Kansas: University of Press of Kansas), 203.  Gitman, When Courage Prevailed, 67. Claims that the wives of Pavelić and Kvaternik were Jewish or required honorary Aryan status are also made by Emily Greble, Sarajevo, 1941–1945: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Hitler’s Europe (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011), 90; Jure Krišto, ‘The Catholic Church and the Jews in the Independent State of Croatia’, Review of Croatian History, 3, No. 1 (2007): 35; and Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration (California: Stanford University Press, 2001), 593.  Ustasha policies of deportation, extermination and forced religious conversion in relation to the NDH’s Serb, Jewish and Gypsy minorities have been extensively documented. See Mark Biondich, ‘Religion and Nation in Wartime Croatia: Reflections on the Ustaša Policy of Forced Religious Conversions, 1941–1942’, Slavonic and East European Review, 83, No. 1 (2005): 71–115; Fikreta Jelić-Butić, Ustaše i Nezavisna Država Hrvatska 1941–1945. (Zagreb: Sveučilišna naklada Liber, 1977); Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu; Greble, Sarajevo, 1941–1945; Jonathan Gumz, ‘Wehrmacht Perceptions of Mass Violence in Croatia, 1941–1942’, The Historical Journal, 44, No. 4 (2001): 1015–1038; Ladislaus Hory and Martin Broszat, Der kroatische Ustascha-Staat 1941–1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1964); Narcisa Lengel-Krizman, Genocid nad Romima: Jasenovac 1942 (Zagreb: Biblioteka Kameni cvijet, 2003); Holm Sundhaussen, ‘Der Ustascha-Staat: Anatomie eines Herrschaftssystems’, Österreichische Osthefte, 37 (1995): 516–532; and Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 380–415.  The only works specifically dealing with race theory in the NDH have been the following three articles by the author of this book: Nevenko Bartulin, ‘The Anti-Yugoslavist Narrative on Croatian Ethnolinguistic and Racial Identity, 1900–1941’, East Central Europe, 39, Nos. 2–3 (2012): 331–356; ‘The Ideal Nordic-Dinaric Racial Type: Racial Anthropology in the Independent State of Croatia’, Review of Croatian History, 5, No. 1 (2009): 189–219; and ‘The Ideology of Nation and Race: The Croatian Ustasha Regime and Its Policies toward Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia 1941–1945’, Croatian Studies Review, 5 (2008): 75–102.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126 Introduction 

 Nada Kisić Kolanović, ‘Povijest NDH kao predmet istraživanja’, Časopis za suvremenu povijest, 34, No. 3 (2002): 684.  Kisić Kolanović, ‘Povijest NDH’, 684–685. For examples of the Marxist school, see the works of Bogdan Krizman, Ante Pavelić i ustaše (Zagreb: Globus, 1978), Pavelić između Hitlera i Mussolinija and the two volume Ustaše i Treći Reich (Zagreb: Globus, 1983); and Jelić-Butić, Ustaše i Nezavisna Država Hrvatska.  Kisić Kolanović, ‘Povijest NDH’, 687.  Hory and Broszat, Der kroatische Ustascha-Staat, 72. For a highly biased account of the supposedly close link between the Ustasha regime, the Catholic Church in Croatia and the Vatican, see Carlo Falconi, The Silence of Pius XII, trans. Bernard Wall (London: Faber & Faber, 1970).  Rory Yeomans, ‘Militant Women, Warrior Men and Revolutionary Personae: The New Ustasha Man and Woman in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941–1945’, Slavonic and East European Review, 83, No. 4 (2005): 705–706.  Jonathan Steinberg, ‘Types of Genocide? Croatians, Serbs, Jews, 1941–45’, in The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation, ed. David Cesarani (New York: Routledge, 1994), 189–190.  Gumz, ‘Wehrmacht Perceptions of Mass Violence in Croatia’, 1025–1026.  See Nada Kisić Kolanović, Muslimani i hrvatski nacionalizam 1941–1945. (Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 2009).  This statement is found in article 16 of the ‘Ustasha principles’ (which included 15 articles from 1933 to 1941, and then 17 from 1941 to 1945). See Mario Jareb, Ustaško-domobranski pokret od nastanka do travnja 1941. godine (Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 2006), 124–128.  Hory and Broszat, Der kroatische Ustascha-Staat, 177. According to Stanley Payne, ‘the murderousness of the Ustashi did not by itself qualify them to be considered generic fascists, since the great majority of the movements and regimes of this century to have engaged in large-scale killings were either Marxist-Leninists or nonfascist nationalists’. Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 411. For more on the argument that the Ustashe were a fascist movement, see Rory Yeomans, Visions of Annihilation: The Ustasha Regime and the Cultural Politics of Fascism 1941–1945 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013).  Biondich, ‘Religion and Nation in Wartime Croatia’, 77, 113.  ibid, 78.  Kisić Kolanović, Muslimani i hrvatski nacionalizam, 30–31.  Greble, Sarajevo, 1941–1945, 97.  Sabrina P. Ramet, ‘The NDH – An Introduction’,Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 7, No. 4 (2006): 404.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126  Honorary Aryans

 James J. Sadkovich, Italian Support for Croatian Separatism, 1927–1937 (New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1987), 150. For similar views, see Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 348.  Mario Jareb, ‘Jesu li Hrvati postali Goti? Odnos ustaša i vlasti Nezavisne Države Hrvatske prema neslavenskim teorijama o podrijetlu Hrvata’, Časopis za suvremenu povijest, 40, No. 3 (2008): 869–882.  ibid, 874–875, 881.  Yeshayahu Jelinek, ‘Nationalities and Minorities in the Independent State of Croatia’, Nationalities Papers, VIII, No. 2 (1984): 195–196.  Payne, A History of Fascism, 405.  John Connelly, ‘Nazis and Slavs: From Racial Theory to Racist Practice’, Central European History, 32, No. 1 (1999): 1–33. For more on the distinction between racial and linguistic identity see Christopher M. Hutton, Race and the Third Reich: Linguistics, Racial Anthropology and Genetics in the Dialectic of Volk (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005).  See Bartulin, ‘The Ideal Nordic-Dinaric Racial Type’, 197–199, 207–213.  Cited in Aaron Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 1.  Anthony D. Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 63.  Political myths are ‘stories told, and widely believed, about the heroic past that serves some collective need in the present and future’. See Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era.  George L. Mosse, Nazism: A Historical and Comparative Analysis of National Socialism (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1978), 101.  ibid. For more on the Fascist racial elaboration of the terms ‘Aryan‘, ‘Mediterranean‘ and ‘Italian’, see Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy.  A nation, as Holm Sundhaussen notes, claims political sovereignty, and possesses a national consciousness. Holm Sundhaussen, ‘Nationsbildung und Nationalismus im Donau-Balkan-Raum’, Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte, 48 (1993): 236.  Anthony Smith defines theethnie as ‘named units of population with common ancestry myths and historical memories, elements of shared culture, some link with a historic territory and some measure of solidarity, at least among their elites’. Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era, 57. Smith argues that a number of modern nations can trace their origins to pre-modern ethnies. See Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). For modernist views on the origin of national identity, see Ernest Gellner, Nationalism (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997) and Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126 Introduction 

 There is an extensive literature on the politics of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. For works dealing with Croatia’s position in Yugoslavia and nationalist responses to policies of Serbian centralism see Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984), Jareb, Ustaško-domobranski pokret and Sadkovich, Italian Support for Croatian Separatism. For a different appraisal of interwar Yugoslav politics, see John R. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).  Every nation is defined through its relation to other peoples. Nationalism cannot exist without Abgrenzung (delineation or demarcation). Sundhaussen, ‘Nationsbildung und Nationalismus’, 244.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126