The Ustaše (; anglicised as Ustasha or Ustashe) was a Croatian fascist and ultranationalist organization active, as one organization, between 1929 and 1945. It was formally known as the Ustaša – Croatian Revolutionary Movement (). From its inception and before the Second World War, the organization engaged in a series of terrorist activities against the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. It collaborated with IMRO to assassinate King Alexander I of Yugoslavia in 1934.The Assassination of Europe, 1918-1942: A Political History, Howard M. Sachar, University of Toronto Press, 2014, , pp. 251–258. During World War II in Yugoslavia, the Ustaše went on to perpetrate the Holocaust and genocide against its Jewish, Serb and Roma populations, killing hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Roma, as well as Muslim and Croat political dissidents. The ideology of the movement combined aspects of Clerical fascism (particularly derived from Roman Catholicism) and Croatian ultranationalism.
The Ustaše supported the creation of a Greater Croatia.Meier, Viktor. Yugoslavia: a history of its demise (English), London: Routledge, 1999, p. 125. The movement advocated a racially "pure" Croatia and promoted genocide against Serbs—due to the Ustaše's anti-Serb sentiment—and Holocaust against Jews and Roma via Nazi racial theory, and persecution of anti-fascist or dissident Croats and Bosniaks. They viewed the Bosniaks as "Muslim Croats" sparing their prosecution. After the invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, the Ustaše came to power with the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), established as an Italo-German quasi-protectorate in which German influence steadily increased over time as Italian influence waned. The state owed its creation and continued existence to the two Axis powers. The Ustaše Militia was its military wing. With the German surrender, end of World War II in Europe, and the establishment of socialist Yugoslavia in 1945, the Ustaše movement collapsed.
The militarily weak Ustaše failed to ever garner significant support among Croats. Many of those that did initially support the regime in the interwar period – who felt oppressed by the Serb-led Yugoslavia, were alienated by its brutality.
Name The word ustaša (plural: ustaše) is derived from the intransitive verb ustati (Croatian for rise up). "" () was a military rank in the Imperial Croatian Home Guard (1868–1918). The same term was the name of Croatian third-class infantry regiments () during World War I (1914–1918). Another variation of the word ustati is ustanik (plural: ustanici) which means an insurgent, or a rebel. The name ustaša did not have fascist connotations during the early years of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia as the term "ustat" was itself used in Herzegovina to denote the insurgents from the Herzegovinian rebellion of 1875. The full original name of the organization appeared in April 1931 as the or UHRO (Ustaša – Croatian Revolutionary Organization). In 1933 it was renamed the (Ustaša – Croatian Revolutionary Movement), a name it kept until World War II. In English, Ustasha, Ustashe, Ustashas and Ustashi are used for the movement or its members.
Ideology
Ideological roots
One of the major ideological influences on the Croatian nationalism of the Ustaše was 19th century Croatian activist Ante Starčević, an advocate of Croatian unity and independence, who was both anti-Habsburg and anti-Serbian in outlook.
He envisioned the creation of a Greater Croatia that would include territories inhabited by Bosniaks, Serbs, and Slovenes, considering Bosniaks and Serbs to be Croats who had been converted to Islam and Orthodox Christianity, and considered the Slovenes "mountain Croats". Starčević argued that the large Serb presence in territories claimed by a Greater Croatia was the result of recent settlement, encouraged by Habsburg rulers, and the influx of groups like Vlachs who took up Orthodox Christianity and identified themselves as Serbs. Starčević admired Bosniaks because in his view they were Croats who had adopted Islam in order to preserve the economic and political autonomy of Bosnia and Croatia under the Ottoman occupation.
The Ustaše used Starčević's theories to promote their own annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina to Croatia and recognized Croatia as having two major ethnocultural components: Catholics and Muslims. The Ustaše sought to represent Starčević as being connected to their views. Josip Frank seceded his extreme fraction from and formed his own, the Pure Party of Rights, which became the main pool of members of the subsequent Ustaše movement. Historian John Paul Newman stated that Austro-Hungarian officers' "unfaltering opposition to Yugoslavia provided a blueprint for the Croatian radical right, the Ustaše".
The Ustaše promoted 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", which he claimed had been lost through its union with Serbia when the nation of Yugoslavia was formed in 1918. Šufflay was killed in Zagreb in 1931 by government supporters."Einstein accuses Yugoslavian rulers in savant's murder" , The New York Times, 6 May 1931. mirror mirror
The Ustaše accepted the 1935 thesis of Krunoslav Draganović, a Catholic priest who claimed that many Catholics in southern Herzegovina had been converted to Orthodox Christianity in the 16th and 17th centuries, in order to justify their own policy of forcible conversion of Orthodox Christians to Catholicism.
The Ustaše were heavily influenced by Nazism and fascism. Its leader, Ante Pavelić, held the position of Poglavnik, which was based on the similar positions of Duce held by Benito Mussolini and Führer held by Adolf Hitler. The Ustaše, like fascists, promoted a corporatist economy. Pavelić and the Ustaše were allowed sanctuary in Italy by Mussolini after being exiled from Yugoslavia. Pavelić had been in negotiations with Fascist Italy since 1927 that included advocating a territory-for-sovereignty swap in which he would tolerate Italy annexing its claimed territory in Dalmatia in exchange for Italy supporting the sovereignty of an independent Croatia. The Ustaše ideology has also been characterized as clerical fascismFascism: Past, Present, Future By Walter Laqueur. p. 263 by several authors, who emphasize the importance the movement attached to Roman Catholicism.
Mussolini's support of the Ustaše was based on pragmatic considerations, such as maximizing Italian influence in the Balkans and the Adriatic. After 1937, with the weakening of French influence in Europe following Germany's remilitarization of the Rhineland and with the rise of a quasi-fascist government in Yugoslavia under Milan Stojadinović, Mussolini abandoned support for the Ustaše from 1937 to 1939 and sought to improve relations with Yugoslavia, fearing that continued hostility towards Yugoslavia would result in Yugoslavia entering Germany's sphere of influence.Van Creveld, Martin L. Hitler's Strategy 1940–1941: The Balkan Clue. 2nd ed. London/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974. pp. 6–8
The collapse of the quasi-fascist Stojadinović regime resulted in Italy restoring its support for the Ustaše, whose aim was to create an independent Croatia in personal union with Italy. However, distrust of the Ustaše grew. Mussolini's son-in-law and Italian foreign minister Count Galeazzo Ciano noted 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".Galeazzo Ciano, Count; Malcolm Muggeridge (translator). Ciano's diary, 1939–1943. W. Heinemann, 1950, p. 392.
Hungary strongly supported the Ustaše for two aims. One, in order to weaken Yugoslavia, Little Entente, in order to ultimately regain some of its lost territories. The other, Hungary also wished to establish later in the future a strong alliance with the Independent State of Croatia and possibly enter a personal union.
Nazi Germany initially did not support an independent Croatia, nor did it support the Ustaše, with Hitler stressing the importance of a "strong and united Yugoslavia". Nazi officials, including Hermann Göring, wanted Yugoslavia stable and officially neutral during the war so Germany could continue to securely gain Yugoslavia's raw material exports. The Nazis grew irritated with the Ustaše, among them Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler, who was dissatisfied with the lack of full compliance by the NDH to the Nazis' agenda of extermination of the Jews, as the Ustaše permitted Jews who converted to Catholicism to be recognized as "honorary Croats", thus putatively exempt from persecution.
Political programme and main agendas In 1932, an editorial in the first issue of the Ustaše newspaper, signed by the Ustaše leader Ante Pavelić, proclaimed that violence and terror would be the main means for the Ustaše to attain their goals:The KNIFE, REVOLVER, MACHINE GUN and TIME BOMB; these are the idols, these are bells that will announce the dawning and THE RESURRECTION OF THE INDEPENDENT STATE OF CROATIA.
In 1933, the Ustaše presented "The Seventeen Principles" that formed the official ideology of the movement. The Principles stated the uniqueness of the Croatian nation, promoted collective rights over individual rights and declared that people who were not Croat by "blood" would be excluded from political life.
Those considered "undesirables" were subjected to mass murder. These principles called for the creation of a new economic system that would be neither capitalist nor communist and which would emphasize the importance of the Roman Catholic Church and the patriarchial family as means to maintain social order and morality. (The name given by modern historians to this particular aspect of Ustaše ideology varies; "national Catholicism", "political Catholicism" and "Catholic Croatism" have been proposed among others.) In power, the Ustaše banned contraception and tightened laws against blasphemy.Atkin, Nicholas and Frank Tallet. Priests, Prelates and People: A History of European Catholicism since 1750. New York: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2003. p. 248.
The Ustaše accepted that Croats are part of the Dinaric race,Caccamo, Francesco and Trinchese, Stefano. Rotte adriatiche. Tra Italia, Balcani e Mediterraneo. FrancoAngeli, 2011. p. 158. but rejected the idea that Croats are primarily Slavic, claiming they primarily come from Germanic roots with the Goths.Rich, Norman. Hitler's War Aims: the Establishment of the New Order (1974), pp. 276–277. W.W. Norton & Co: New York. The Ustaše believed that a government must naturally be strong and authoritarian. The movement opposed parliamentary democracy for being "corrupt" and Marxism and Bolshevism for interfering in family life and the economy and for their materialism. The Ustaše considered competing political parties and elected parliaments to be harmful to its own interests.
The Ustaše recognized both Roman Catholicism and Islam as national religions of the Croatian people but initially rejected Orthodox Christianity as being incompatible with their objectives. Although the Ustaše emphasized religious themes, it stressed that duty to the nation took precedence over religious custom.Greble, Emily. Sarajevo, 1941–1945: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Hitler's Europe. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2011. p. 125.