The Holocaust saw the genocide of Jews within the Independent State of Croatia (, NDH), a fascist puppet state that existed during World War II, led by the Ustaše regime, which ruled an occupied area of Yugoslavia including most of the territory of modern-day Croatia, the whole of modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina and the eastern part of Syrmia (Serbia). Of the 39,000 Jews who lived in the NDH in 1941, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum states that more than 30,000 were murdered. Of these, 6,200 were shipped to Nazi Germany and the rest of them were murdered in the NDH, the vast majority in Croatian Ustaše-run concentration camps, such as Jasenovac. The Ustaše were the only quisling forces in Yugoslavia who operated their own extermination camps for the purpose of murdering Jews and members of other ethnic groups.
Of the minority, 9,000 Jews, who managed to survive, 50% of them did so by joining the Partisans or escaping to Partisan-controlled territory. The Partisans welcomed 10 Yugoslav Jews who were named National Heroes, the highest WWII award, including Jews from Croatia. Croatian civilians were also involved in saving Jews during this period. As of 2024, 133 Croats have been recognized as Righteous among the Nations.
Background
During the 1930's antisemitism grew among the Croatian extreme right, including the fascist, separatist Ustaše, nationalist students and radical Catholic organizations. The Ustaše leader (Croatian: Poglavnik, equivalent of German Fuhrer), Ante Pavelić, identified Jews, along with Serbs, as the principal enemies of Croats, writing before the war:
Jews have robbed the Croatian people for centuries, especially the common man. They managed to acquire almost the entire Croatian national wealth. In an organized and systematic manner, they poisoned Croatian generations through press and books and denationalized them for years. In the future Independent State of Croatia, they will not be able to do this"
On 25 March 1941, Prince Paul of Yugoslavia signed the Tripartite Pact, allying the Kingdom of Yugoslavia with the Axis powers. Prince Paul was overthrown, and a new anti-German government under Peter II and Dušan Simović took power. The new government withdrew its support for the Axis, but it did not repudiate the Tripartite Pact. Nevertheless, Axis forces, led by Nazi Germany invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941.
The Independent State of Croatia was proclaimed by the Ustašea Croatian fascist organizationon 10 April 1941. Approximately 40,000 Jews lived within the new state, of whom only 9,000 would ultimately survive the war.Goldstein, Ivo. Croatia: A History, C. Hurst & Co. Ltd., London, 1999. (p. 136) On the territory of Yugoslavia the Ustaše were the only local quisling force which implemented its own Race Laws and carried out the mass-murder of Jews in their own concentration camps. In Serbia and elsewhere in occupied Yugoslavia the killing was carried out entirely by the Nazis. According to Jozo Tomasevich, of the 115 Jewish religious organizations in Yugoslavia which existed in 1940 only the one in Zagreb survived the war. About 11,500 Jews lived in Zagreb, 3,000 of whom survived the war. The historian Ivo Goldstein notes that 78% of Zagreb Jewish community members were killed in the NDH, with the Ustaše destruction of the Zagreb Synagogue being "the clearest announcement of [Ustaše] plans to completely annihilate Zagreb's Jews". While eliminating all other Jewish organizations, the Ustaše forced Zagreb's Jewish community to pay for transport to, and feeding of Jews in Ustaše concentration camps, while stealing much of the aid.
A special case was the 14,000-strong Sephardic Jewish community in Bosnia, which fled the Spanish Inquisition in 1492, and then settled in Bosnia under the Ottoman Empire, surviving and thriving for nearly 400 years under the Ottomans, Austria-Hungary and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, until the great majority were exterminated by the Ustaše and Nazis in the Independent State of Croatia. The Ustaše and Nazis also exterminated Jews in Serbia, in annexed eastern Syrmia. Thus nearly all 450 Jews in the city of Ruma were killed in the Ustaše Jasenovac and Nazi Sajmište concentration camps, with the Independent State of Croatia confiscating all their property.
Already prior to the war the Ustaše forged close ties to fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. In 1933 the Ustaše presented "The Seventeen Principles", which proclaimed the uniqueness of the Croatian nation, promoted collective rights over individual rights, and declared that people who were not Croat by race and blood, would be excluded from political life. In 1936, the Ustaše leader, Ante Pavelić, wrote in "The Croat Question":
″Today, practically all finance and nearly all commerce in Croatia is in Jewish hands. This became possible only through the support of the state, which thereby seeks, on one hand, to strengthen the pro-Serbian Jews, and on the other, to weaken Croat national strength. The Jews celebrated the establishment of the so-called Yugoslav state with great joy, because a national Croatia could never be as useful to them as a multi-national Yugoslavia; for in national chaos lies the power of the Jews... In fact, as the Jews had foreseen, Yugoslavia became, in consequence of the corruption of official life in Serbia, a true Eldorado of Jewry...The entire press in Croatia is also in Jewish-masonic hands…" Ante Pavelic: The Croat Question |http://chnm.gmu.edu/history/faculty/kelly/blogs/h312/wp-content/sources/pavelic.pdf
The Holocaust
Antisemitic legislation and start of persecution The main Race Laws in the Independent State of Croatia, patterned after Nazi Race Laws, were adopted and signed by the Ustaše leader Ante Pavelić on 30 April 1941: the "Legal Decree on Racial Origins", the "Legal Decree on the Protection of Aryan Blood and the Honor of the Croatian People",Živaković-Kerže, Zlata (2006). "Od židovskog naselja u Tenji do sabirnog logora" Scrinia Slavonica and the "Legal Provision on Citizenship". These decrees defined who was a Jew, and took away the citizenship rights of all Jews and Roma. By the end of April 1941, months before the Nazis implemented similar measures in Germany, the Ustaše required all Jews to wear insignia, typically a yellow Star of David.
On June 26, 1941 Ante Pavelić issued the Extraordinary Legal Decree and Order, stating: "Since Jews are spreading false reports with the purpose of disturbing the population, and using their well-known speculations to hinder and obstruct supplying the population, we consider them collectively responsible and shall therefore treat them accordingly and place them, in addition to implementing penal and correctional measures, in open-air prison camps". This was the signal for the mass deportations of Jews to Ustaše concentration camps, promoted with media campaigns, under the main slogan: "There is no room for Jews in the Independent State of Croatia". On 10 October 1941, the Ustaše proclaimed the "Legal Decree on the Nationalization of the Property of Jews and Jewish Companies", confiscating all Jewish property.
Actions against Jews began immediately after the Independent State of Croatia was founded. On 10–11 April 1941 a group of prominent Jews in Zagreb was arrested by the Ustaše and held for ransom. On 13 April the same was done in Osijek, where Ustaše and Volksdeutscher mobs destroyed the synagogue and Jewish graveyard. The procedure of arresting and holding Jews for large ransoms was repeated in 1941 and 1942 several times with groups of Jews, while large-scale deportations of Jews to Ustaše concentration camps were also soon initiated.
Antisemitic propaganda The Ustaše immediately initiated intensive antisemitic propaganda. A day after the signing of the main race laws on 30 April 1941, the newspaper of the Ustaše movement, Hrvatski narod (Croatian Nation), published across its entire front page: "The Blood and Honor of the Croatian people protected by special provisions".Boško Zuckerman, "Prilog proučavanju antisemitizma i protužidovske propagande u vodećem zagrebačkom ustaškom tisku (1941–1943)" Zavod za hrvatsku povijest, vol 42, Zagreb (2010).
Two days later, the newspaper Novi list concluded that Croatians must "be more alert than any other ethnic group to protect their racial purity, ... We need to keep our blood clean of the Jews". The newspaper also wrote that Jews are synonymous with "treachery, cheating, greed, immorality and foreignness", and therefore "wide swaths of the Croatian people always despised the Jews and felt towards them natural revulsion". Nova Hrvatska (New Croatia) added that according to the Talmud, "this toxic, hot well-spring of Jewish wickedness and malice, the Jew is even free to kill Gentiles".
One of the main claims of Ustaše propaganda was that the Jews have always been against an independent Croatian state and against the Croatian people. In April 1941 the newspaper Hrvatski narod accused Jews of being responsible for the "many failures and misfortunes of so many Croatian people", which led the Poglavnik [the Ustaše leader Ante Pavelic] to "eradicate these evils". A Spremnost article stated that the Ustaša movement defines "Judaism as one of the greatest enemies of the people".
Some in the Catholic Church joined the antisemitic propaganda. The Roman Catholic Bishop of Sarajevo, Ivan Šarić, published in his diocesan newspaper that "the movement to free the world of Jews, represents the movement for the restoration of human dignity. Omniscient and omnipotent God is behind this movement ". In July 1941, a Franciscan priest, Dionysius Juričev, wrote in Novi list that "it is no longer a sin to kill a seven year-old child".
Ustaše concentration camps
Already in April 1941, the Ustaše established the concentration camps Danica (near Koprivnica), Kruščica concentration camp near Travnik and Kerestinec, where along with communists and other political opponents, the Ustaše imprisoned Jews.
In May 1941, the Ustaše rounded up 165 Jewish youth in Zagreb, ages 17–25, most of them members of the Jewish sports club Makabi, and sent them to the Danica concentration camp (all but 3 were killed by the Ustaše).
In May and June the Ustaše established new camps, primarily for Jews who came to Croatia as refugees from Germany and countries which Germany had previously occupied, and some of these were quickly killed. Also arrested and sent to the Ustaše camps were larger groups of Jews from Zagreb (June 22), Bihac (June 24), Karlovac (June 27), Sarajevo, Varaždin, Bjelovar, etc.
Gospić-Jadovno-Pag Island camps On 8 July 1941 the Ustaše ordered that all arrested Jews be sent to Gospić, from where they took the victims to death camps Jadovno on Velebit, and Slana and Metajna on the island of Pag, where they carried out mass executions. As part of this, on July 12, 1941, the Ustaše arrested all the Varaždin Jews and sent them to the Gospič concentration camp. In a report in the newspaper Hrvatski narod (Croatian People) the Ustaše proclaimed Varaždin the first Judenfrei city, i.e. "cleansed" of Jews.
The historian Paul Mojzes lists 1,998 Jews, 38,010 Serbs, and 88 Croats killed at Jadovno and related execution grounds, among them 1,000 children. Other sources generally offer a range of 10,000–68,000 deaths at the Jadovno system of camps, with estimates of the number of Jewish victims ranging from several hundred to 2,500–2,800.