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My forthcoming book, Dark Shadows Hover, will be released on January 26, 2025 to coincide with events surrounding International Holocaust Remembrance Day, annually recognized on January 27. I'm honored th atAmserdam Publishers in the Netherlands, which specializes in Holocaust memoir and some fiction, is the book's publisher. AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER NOW ON AMAZON.
This weekly series of blog posts will introduce the reader to some basic history before reading my book, a biographical fiction based on the young life of Moris Albahari, who at the age of twelve became a Yugoslav Partisan. Though it’s not critical to read the posts to enjoy the book, I trust you’ll find them interesting. If you’d like to receive subsequent blog posts leading up to book publication, and are not already on my email list, subscribe at jordanstevensher.com.
The Nazis, their Collaborators, and Tito’s Partisans in World War II Yugoslavia
Part 3: The Ustasha
In 1929, Ante Pavelic, a delegate in the Croatian Parliament, and an advocate for separating Croatia from Yugoslavia, fled to Italy and formed the Ustasha, which means “insurgence.” They modeled themselves after Italian fascists, and set up terrorist training sites in Italy and Hungary. They fomented political crises in Yugoslavia with acts of terror meant to destabilize the kingdom. His terrorist activities culminated in 1934 with the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia. Pavelic was sentenced to death by a French court in absentia, but instead served an eighteen-month sentence in Italy where he continued to have free reign to direct destabilizing activities.
As Hitler’s military marched through Europe, Pavelic was tasked to prove his organization’s worthiness of joining the Axis. The German Reich asked him to draft a statement confirming his beliefs The heart of the memo read as follows: “Today almost all banking and almost all trade in Croatia is in the hands of the Jews…All the press in Croatia is in Jewish hands. This Jewish Freemason press is constantly attacking Germany, the German people and National Socialism. “
The Ustasha goal was to create a purely Croatian land blending Catholicism and fascism, so it embarked upon a plan to exterminate all Serbs, Jews, and Romani from Yugoslavia. Their modus operandi was genocide and terror. There methods were so brutal that they even shocked the Germans, and the Italians had to occasionally intervene in what was territory given to them by Germany.
The Ustasha ultimately achieved their goal of creating the Independent State of Croatia, or NDH, after Hitler conquered Yugoslavia in early April of 1941. Under the auspices of the Italian government, Pavelic set up the new state to govern parts of Croatia, and all of Bosnia and Herzegovina. His goal, of course, was to take control of all of Yugoslavia. The new state conscripted a Croatian military to fight with the Germans as part of the Axis Powers.
The Ustasha Belief System toward Jews, Romani, and other non-Aryans
Like that of the Nazis, the Ustasha propaganda against Jews, in particular, was based in conspiracies and lies. As Ante Pavelic was growing his movement, he wished it to coincide with Hitler, recognizing that it would be prudent for his party to do so. Therefore, it was necessary for the Ustasha to target the same group. Slowly, racial laws made their way into the body politic leading to restrictions against the Jews and Roma. Of course, the significant shift, to include the persecution of Orthodox Christian Serbs, happened after the Ustasha took control of the NDH, per Hitler’s dictates. This sums up the rhetoric that he and his party used to stir up fear and hatred in the rank and file of Croatia- In his 1942 book, ‘The Ustasha Principles’, Danijel Crljen claimed that “in the cultural field, the Jews had ‘promoted decadence in all directions’: ‘they made music into barbarism, painting into a disgrace to true art, and the theatre into an exhibition of absurdity and filth’. The Jew had no concept of honor, which one Ustasha intellectual described in the same year as the basic Aryan principle, according to which the Aryan man would ‘rather die than trample on his honour’, and against the honorable Aryans stood ‘the parasitic people of Jewish liars.”
The race laws of Croatia mirrored what had been written in Germany beginning in the early 1930s, and made their way to Mussolini’s Italy later. Croatia fully adopted its racial policies in 1941 after Germany invaded Yugoslavia and put the Ustasha in charge. Unlike Germany and Croatia, Italy’s concentration camps, though squalid, did not include murder in most cases. And, in Italy, mainly Jewish women and children were interned in small hilltop villages where they remained until the Nazis marched north from southern Italy sweeping those interned up in mass deportations to their concentration camps.
“Along with the race laws issued on April 30, 1941, numerous other decrees were passed prohibiting Jews, among other things, the right to change their surnames or display the Croatian national flag. On June 4,1941, a law decree was passed stating that ‘Racial Jews cannot influence through co-operation, the construction of the national and Aryan culture’. In other words, Jews were prohibited from joining or participating in social, youth, sporting or cultural organizations and ‘especially in literature, journalism, the fine arts and music, town planning, theatre and film’. In late May, Jews were ordered, three months before German Jews would be required to do the same in the Reich, to wear the yellow star.” (Nevenko)
These laws catapulted the Ustasha in its terror against Jews, Roma, and Serbs that led to genocide.
In the Ustasha death camps, especially the largest, Jasenovac, they perpetrated the slaying of up to340,000 Serbs 30,000 Jews, and 29,000 Romani.
(information attributed to multiple sources, britannica.com and Nevenko Bartulin, PhD thesis, University of South Wales,11, 2006)
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