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Ustase
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Ustase

The content of this article is disputed and .

The Ustaše (often spelled Ustashi in English; singular Ustaša or Ustasha) was a Croatian right-wing organisation put in charge of the Independent State of Croatia by the Axis Powers in 1941. They pursued nazi/fascist policies and were subsequently expelled by the communist Yugoslav partisans and the Red Army in 1945.

At the time of their founding in 1929, the Ustaše were nationalist political organisations that committed terrorist acts. When they came to power in WWII, they also had military formations that later numbered some 76,000 strong at their peak in 1944.

Table of contents
1 History
2 Victims
3 Symbols
4 Ideology
5 Connections with the Catholic Church
6 Neo-Ustašism
7 Bibliography
8 External links

History

After the Kingdom of Yugoslavia banned all national parties in January 1929, the Croatian Party of Rights' militant wing founded the Ustaše movement. Its leaders were Ante Pavelić and Gustav Perčec;, but Perčec was later assassinated by Pavelić in 1933.


Ante Pavelić

The origin of their name is in the noun "ustaš" which means "insurgent". Their name didn't have fascist connotations during their early years in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia as it was used throughout Hercegovina to denote (Serb Orthodox) insurgents from the 1875 Hercegovinian rebellion. Later, the name would acquire its pejorative connotation, particularly among the Hercegovinian Serbs who would be hardest hit by the atrocities.

The Axis invaded Yugoslavia on April 6, 1941. Vladko Maček;, the leader of the Croatian Peasant Party (HSS) which was the most influential party in Croatia at the time, rejected offers by the Nazi Germany to lead the new government. Ustaše took the opportunity and with the help of the foreign armies installed their regime on April 14th 1941. A group of several hundred of them infiltrated from Italy, their commander Slavko Kvaternik took control of the police in Zagreb and proclaimed the formation of the "Independent State of Croatia" (Croatian acronym "NDH"). The name of the rogue state was an obvious and successful attempt at capitalizing on the Croat people's desire for independence, which had been unfulfilled since 1102.

Vladko Maček called on people to obey and cooperate with the new government the same day. Ante Pavelić, arrived on April 20th to become the head of state, poglavnik (führer), of the state that would soon encompass most of today's Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and parts of Serbia (Srem and Sandžak; regions). Because the Ustaše did not have a capable army or administration necessary to control the territory, the Germans and the Italians split up the NDH into two zones of influence, one in the southwest controlled by the Italians and the other in the northeast controlled by the Germans.

The atrocities against non-Croats started on April 27, 1941 when a newly formed unit of Ustaša army massacred a largely Serbian village of Gudovac (near Bjelovar).

Eventually all who opposed and/or threatened the Ustaše were outlawed. The HSS was banned on June 11, 1941 in an attempt of the Ustaše to take their place as the primary representative of the Croatian peasantry. Vladko Maček was sent to Jasenovac concentration camp, but later released to serve a house arrest sentence due to his popularity among the people. Maček was later again called upon by the foreigners to take a stand and counteract the Pavelić government, but refused.

Pavelić first met with Adolf Hitler on June 6, 1941. Mile Budak, then minister in Pavelić's government, publicly proclaimed the violent racial policy of the state on July 22, 1941. Vjekoslav "Maks" Luburić, one of the chiefs of secret police organizations, started building concentration camps in the summer of the same year.

As early as June, 1941, rebels started to organize in response to Ustaša atrocities. There were two factions among them: the Partizans, who were guerillas composed of all nations with a common cause to fight the fascists and were mostly led by communists, and \Chetniks who were Serb royalist rebels that opposed the Ustašas.

The first Partisan armed unit was formed on June 22nd in Brezovica near Sisak, and the Partisans first engaged in combat on June 27th in Srb in Lika. The first Chetnik armed unit in Croatia was formed on June 28 (also St. Vitus' Day, an Eastern Orthodox holiday).

The Ustaša gangs ravaged villages across the Dinaric Alps to the extent that the Italians and the Germans started expressing their horror. By 1942, general Edmund Glaise von Horstenau had written several reports to his Wehrmacht commanders in which he expressed his dismay at the extent of the Ustaša atrocities, which actually preceded the Final Solution. These were corroborated by those of field marshal Wilhelm List.

The Italians also became disinclined to cooperate with the Ustaše and would soon come to cooperate with the Chetniks in the southern areas that they controlled. Although Hitler insisted that Mussolini should have his forces work with the Ustaše, the Italian general Mario Roatta, among others in the field, ignored those orders.

The regular army of the NDH, the Home Guard (Domobrani), was composed of enlisted men who were barely combat-ready and did not participate in the atrocities. The members of the Ustaša party were part of the paramilitary units that committed the crimes. Pavelić had claimed that over 30,000 people had joined the party during this time, although the more neutral reports concluded that their number was less than half of that.

The Home Guard served more as a supply depot for the resistance movement: many units would surrender or defect so that the Partisans and the Chetniks would obtain weaponry and other supplies. The Chetniks under the command of pop Momčilo Đujić grew in power and regularly retaliated against the Ustaše detachments in Bosnia. The Partizans under Josip Broz Tito also made many inroads and had started to control sizeable patches of superficially NDH territory by 1943.

In 1943, the Germans suffered major losses on the Eastern Front and the Italians started massively defecting, leaving behind even more armament the rebels used against the Ustaše. The Partizans soon became the main rebel force in all of Yugoslavia, having started accepting both Domobran and Četnik defects, and getting help from the western Allies in the form of airdrops.

The power of the Chetniks eventually faded due to two things: their retaliations against the Ustaša had transformed into massacres of their own (such as that in Foča against Bosnian Muslims), and the fact that they lost support from the Allies. One large group of Chetniks was led by Đujić to Italy, and another group led by Draža Mihajlović moved to Serbia, only to be caught and executed by the partizans.

Eventually the Red Army and partisans liberated Yugoslavia and the Ustaše were utterly defeated as well. They continued fighting even a bit after the German surrender on May 9th, 1945, but were soon overpowered. A large column of Ustaša and some Domobran soldiers, as well as many civilians, tried to flee for Austria and Italy later in the same month, but was handed over back to the partizans at Bleiburg, Austria and subsequently either executed or sent at a "death march" back into the country. Pavelić managed to escape, hid in Austria and Rome for a while with the help of his associates among the Franciscans, and then fled to Argentina.

After World War II, the remaining Ustaše went underground or fled to foreign countries. Some of them persisted in their crusade against Yugoslavia: Ustaše were implicated in over two dozen terrorist acts following the post-war period. They were generally unsuccessful due to lack of domestic support and actions of the Yugoslav intelligence agencies, whose agents, notably, shot Ante Pavelić in Buenos Aires, inflicting injuries that would later prove to be fatal.

Victims


Ustaše with the head of a Serb Orthodox priest,
Drakulići Feb 7, 1942

The Ustaše hated and tried to exterminate Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, and basically all others that opposed them, including some Communist Croats. Once they came to power during World War II, they founded several concentration camps, the most notorious of which was the Jasenovac complex.

Exact numbers of victims are not known, only estimates exist, however it is certain that hundreds of thousands of innocent people were rounded up and killed in concentration camps and outside of them.

According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center:

"Ustasa terrorists killed 500,000 Serbs, expelled 250,000 and forced 250,000 to convert to Catholicism. They murdered thousands of Jews and Gypsies." [1]

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says:

"Due to differing views and lack of documentation, estimates for the number of Serbian victims in Croatia range widely, from 25,000 to more than one million. The estimated number of Serbs killed in Jasenovac ranges from 25,000 to 700,000. The most reliable figures place the number of Serbs killed by the Ustaša between 330,000 and 390,000, with 45,000 to 52,000 Serbs murdered in Jasenovac." [1]

Slavko Goldstein, head of the Council of the Jasenovac Memorial Area, puts the number of killed in that complex at about 70,000 - 90,000. [1] Some other scholars such as the statisticians Vladimir Žerjavić and Bogoljub Kočović have had similar findings.

Milan Bulajić, director of the Belgrade Museum of Holocaust, has compiled a list of over 77,000 names of Jasenovac victims.

Concentration camps

Symbols

The symbol of Ustaše is a wide capital letter U with pronounced serif. This symbol could easily be spraypainted.

Their hat insignia was the shield of Croatian coat of arms surrounded or embossed with the U.

The flag of the Independent State of Croatia was a red-blue-white horizontal tricolor with the shield of the Croatian coat of arms in the middle and the U in the upper left. Its money was the kuna.

The Ustaše greeting was "Za dom - Spremni":

Salute: Za dom! For home(land)!
Reply: Spremni! (We are) ready!

This greeting is used instead of the Nazi greeting Sieg - Heil. In on-line communication, it is often abbreviated as ZDS.

While the greeting appears to be invented in the 19th century by Croatian ban Josip Jelačić, today it is generally associated only with the Ustashas.

Ideology

The Ustaše embraced the Nazi ideology of the time. They aimed at an ethnically "pure" Croatia, and saw their biggest obstacle as the Serbs that lived in Croatia, Bosnia and Hercegovina. Thus, Ustaše ministers Mile Budak, Mirko Puk and Milovan Zanic declared in May 1941 that the goal of the Ustaše was:

  1. One third of the Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia (ISC) to be catholicized
  2. One third of the Serbs to be expelled out of ISC
  3. One third of the Serbs in the ISC to be liquidated

A small problem with the Nazi ideology was that the Croats are Slavs, and thus themselves "inferior" by Nazi standards. The Ustaša ideologues thus created a theory about a pseudo-Gothic origin of the Croats in order to raise their standing on the Aryan ladder.

Jews and Serbs who were family members of Ustaše leadership were granted titles of "honorary Aryans". It is known that Ustaše of lesser rank proved their loyalty by killing their Serb wives and children.

Ustaše held that Slavic Muslims are Muslim Croats. Unlike Orthodox Serbs, Muslims were not persecuted by them and some joined in the Ustaše forces and their grim atrocities (see SS Hanjar and SS Kama). The state even transferred a former museum in Zagreb to be used as a mosque.

On other subjects, Ustaše were against industrialization and democracy.

Basic principles

1. The Croatian nation is an independent ethnic and national unit, a nation by itself, and in that sense it is not identical with any other nation nor it is a part or a tribe of any other nation.

2. The Croatian nation has its original and historical name, CROAT, under which it came 1300 years ago to its present territory, and under which it lives today. That name cannot and must not be replaced by any other name.

3. The Croatian nation made its present country its homeland already in ancient times, inhabiting it permanently, becoming one with it and giving it the original and natural name CROATIA. That name cannot and must not be replaced by any other name.

4. The land which was occupied in ancient times by the Croatian people, and which became their Croatian homeland, extends over several provinces, many of which had their names even before the arrival of the Croats and some of which were given their names later, but all of them constitute one single Croatian homeland, and therefore nobody has the right to claim for himself any of those provinces.

5. The Croatian people came to their homeland of Croatia as a completely free nation in the time of the Great Migrations, by their own will, thus conquering that land and making it their own forever.

6. The Croatian nation was completely organized when it came to its Croatian homeland, not only in a military sense but also in a familial sense, so that it immediately founded its own state with all of the attributes of statehood.

7. The state of Croatia was already formed when many other nations lived in complete chaos. The Croatian nation preserved its state through the centuries until the end of the World War, and never abandoned it, not by any act or by any legal resolution, nor did it give away its rights to anyone else, but at the end of the World War foreign forces prevented the Croatian people from exercising their sovereign right to form their own CROATIAN STATE.

8. The Croatian nation has the right to revive its sovereign authority in its own Croatian State in its entire national and historical area, that is to say to reconstitute a complete, sovereign and independent Croatian state. This reconstitution may be accomplished by any means, including force of arms.

9. The Croatian nation has the right to happiness and prosperity, and every single Croat has that right as a part of the Croatian nation. Happiness and prosperity can be revived and fulfilled for the nation in general and for individuals as members of the nation only in a complete, sovereign and independent Croatian state which must not and cannot be a component of any other state or any creation of a foreign power.

10. The Croatian nation is sovereign, therefore only it has the right to rule an independent state of Croatia and to manage all state and national affairs.

11. In the Croatian state and in the national affairs of a sovereign and independent state of Croatia no one can make decisions who is not by origin and by blood a member of the Croatian nation, and in the same way no other nation or state can decide the destiny of the Croatian people and the Croatian state.

12. The Croatian nation belongs to western culture and to western civilization.

13. The peasantry is not only the foundation and source of life, but it alone constitutes the Croatian nation, and as such it is bearer and agent of all state authority in the Croatian state.

14. All classes of the Croatian people constitute one unified whole, defined by their Croatian blood, who can trace back their origins and who maintain a permanent familial connection with a village and the land. In ninety-nine out of a hundred cases someone in Croatia who does not originate from a peasant family is not a Croat at all, but a foreign immigrant.

15. The material and moral wealth of the Croatian state is the property of the people, therefore the people are the only ones authorized to possess and to use it.

16. The essence of the moral strength of the Croatian people is found in an orderly and religious family life; its economic strength is in agriculture, communal life and the natural wealth of the Croatian land; its defensive strength is in its valor, and its educational and cultural progress is based on a natural genius and proven ability in the fields of science and learning. Craftsmanship is the helping hand of the entire peasant economy.

17. Balanced breeding, the promotion and perfection of these virtues and branches of national life is the goal of all public welfare and of state authority as such, because they have guaranteed survival for centuries of existence and will guarantee the prosperity of future generations of the Croatian nation and existence of that security in the independent Croatian state.

Connections with the Catholic Church

Main article: Involvement of Croatian Catholic clergy with the Ustasa regime

The Ustaša policies against the Eastern Orthodoxy were related to the policy of the Roman Catholic Church known as "Uniatism", which consisted of Catholicizing as many Orthodox believers as possible, by means of re-baptism or by entering into Union. In the 20th century, when most south Slavs became united in Yugoslavia, Pope Benedict XV supported the creation of separate states for the Croats and the Slovenes who were Catholic, as opposed to the Serbs who were Orthodox.

Ustaše held the Eastern Orthodoxy as their greatest foe. In fact, they never once recognized the existence of a Serb people on the territories of Croatia or Bosnia — they only recognized "Croats of the Eastern faith". Catholic priests among the Ustaše were carrying out forced conversions of Serbs to Catholicism throughout Croatia.

Some priests, mostly Franciscans, particularly in, but not limited to, Herzegovina and Bosnia, took part in the atrocities themselves. Miroslav Filipović, a Franciscan friar, was the most prominent of them. He used the Petrićevac; monastery as a base for the Ustaše, and on February 6, 1942, led the Ustaše in a brutal massacre of 2730 Serbs of the nearby villages, including 500 children. The same Filipović later became Chief Guard of Jasenovac concentration camp where he was nicknamed "Fra Sotona".

At the same time the Muslims were not looked upon at all negatively, even though they weren't Christians at all.

For the whole duration of the war, the Vatican kept up full diplomatic relations with the Ustaša state, with its papal nuncio in the capital Zagreb. The nuncio was even briefed on the efforts of conversions, and the pogroms were never condemned by the Catholic church. (This part is particularly disputed.)

After the Second World War was over, the Ustaše who had managed to escape from Yugoslav territory (including Pavelić) were smuggled to South America through rat lines operated by members of the organization who were Catholic priests and had previously secured positions at the Vatican. This operation was directed by friars Krunoslav Draganović, Petranović and Dominik Mandić of the Illyrian College of San Girolamo in Rome which to this very day marks April 10th, the birthday of the Ustaša state.

It is also claimed that the Ustaša regime had kept 350 million Swiss Francs in gold which it had plundered from Serbian and Jewish property owners during WW II. About 150 million was seized by British troops, however the remaining 200 million reached the Vatican and is allegedly still being kept in the Vatican Bank. The issue was the theme of a class action lawsuit in a California court of law which declined the case claiming a lack of jurisdiction, although some point to pressures from the Vatican. (See external links.)

In 1998 Pope John Paul II beatified Alojzije Stepinac, Archbishop of Zagreb during the Second World War. Stepinac is accused of supporting the Ustaše, organising Ustaše military clergy and exonerating it of complicity in war crimes and atrocities. (This part is particularly disputed.)

On June 22, 2003, John Paul II visited Banja Luka. During the visit he held a mass at the aforementioned Petrićevac; monastery. This caused public uproar due to the connection of the Petrićevac monastery with the crimes of friar Filipović-Majstorović. The pope also proclaimed the beatification of the Catholic priest Ivan Merz there, the founder of the "Association of Croatian Eagles", later associated with the Hitlerjugend.

Neo-Ustašism

In the 1990s, modern independent Croatia was formed and Croats and Serbs again waged war. There was no official connection between the Ustaše ideology and the new government that made the country independent of Yugoslavia. President Tuđman; had controversial views on the topic, claiming that the Ustaša state was indeed an expression of the Croat state tradition. (This part is particularly disputed.)

Some Ustaša emigrants freely returned to Croatia. Some factions wished to restore the Ustaše ideology and iconography, and even though they weren't successful, they were never banned by the government. During the war, these committed war crimes against the Serb population on several occasions.

The term neo-Ustaše itself is an external designation; those in question referred to themselves simply as Ustaše, as in the 1940s.

The right-wing parties often attracted votes by promoting extreme nationalism. A singer by the name of Mišo Kovač, who rose to prominence as an evergreen singer of the 1970s once sported an exact replica of an Ustaša uniform during a concert. Pop/folk singer Marko Perković-Thompson sings borderline fascist lyrics, and is not afraid to display his Ustaša sentiment. Supported by right-wing politicians, his concerts attracted support from tens of thousands of people based on this sentiment.

The exodus of Serbs from Croatia following the 1995 offensive Storm in the Krajina was greeted and in part perpetrated by the neo-Ustaše as if the plan from 1941 was finally being fully implemented.

The neo-Ustaše, however, didn't and don't have grass roots support among the Croatian people. The right-most parties, like the Croatian Party of Rights, are most commonly associated with Ustašism and they have the support of a few percent of the population. (This part is particularly disputed.)

Dinko Šakić, one of the commanders of the Jasenovac concentration camp, was tried in 1999 and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Croatia has been cooperating with the ICTY in the legal prosecution of all war criminals. The government is also making an effort to return all refugees to their homes. (This part is particularly disputed.)

Bibliography

External links

Outside view

Croatian views

Serbian views

On connections with the Catholic church

Trial of Dinko Šakić