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After the Axis withdrew from Yugoslavia, the Ustaše were subsequently defeated and expelled by the Communist Yugoslav Partisans in 1945. At the time of their founding in 1929 , the Ustaše were a Nationalist organisation that is known to have committed violent acts. Their goal was to create an Independent Croatian state. When they came to power in WWII , they also had military formations (Ustasha Army/Ustaška Vojnica) that later numbered some 76,000 strong at their peak in 1944. After the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, there was a certain resurgence of Ustaše ideology and some Paramilitary units claimed the mantle of the name. VICTIMS The Ustaše tried to exterminate all Serbs , Jew s, Gypsies , and basically all who opposed them or did not hold their Roman Catholic religion, including some Communist/dissident Croats . Once they came to power during World War II , they founded several Concentration Camp s, the most notorious of which was the Jasenovac Complex . Exact numbers of victims are not known, only estimates exist; however, it is certain that at least 700,000 people were rounded up and killed in Jasenovac alone, and many more elsewhere. The number of murdered Jews is fairly reliable: around 32,000 Jews were killed during WWII on NDH territory. Yugoslav Roma (Gypsies) numbered around 40,000 fewer after the war. The numbers of murdered Serbs are much larger, and estimates tend to vary between at least 300,000 and 700,000. Since 300,000 alone died at Jasenovac , obviously the lower estimate is incorrect. The history textbooks in the Socialist Federal Republic Of Yugoslavia had included 700,000 as the number of victims of Ustaše at Jasenovac. This was promulgated from a 1946 calculation of the demographic loss of population (the difference between the actual number of people after the war and the number that would have been, had the pre-war growth trend continued). After that, it was used by Edvard Kardelj and Moše Pijade in the Yugoslav War Reparations claim sent to Germany . According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center (based on '' Encyclopedia Of The Holocaust '', by Israel Gutman ): : "Ustasa terrorists killed 500,000 Serbs, expelled 250,000 and forced 250,000 to convert to Catholicism. They murdered thousands of Jews and ). 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" (see ). The Jasenovac Memorial Area, currently headed by Slavko Goldstein , keeps a list of 59,188 names of Jasenovac victims that was gathered by government officials in Belgrade in 1964 . Because the gathering process was imperfect, they estimated that the list contains between 60 and 75 percent of the total victims, putting the number of killed in that complex at about 80,000 - 100,000. The previous head of the Memorial Area Simo Brdar estimated at least 365,000 dead at Jasenovac. The analyses of the statisticians Vladimir Žerjavić and Bogoljub Kočović were similar to those of the Memorial Area. In all of Yugoslavia, the estimated number of Serb deaths was 487,000 according to Kočović, and 530,000 according to Žerjavić, out of a total of 1,014,000 or 1,027,000 deaths (resp.). Žerjavić further stated that there were 197,000 Serb civilians killed in NDH (78,000 as prisoners in Jasenovac and elsewhere) as well as 125,000 Serb combatants. The Belgrade Museum of Holocaust compiled a list of over 77,000 names of Jasenovac victims. It was previously headed by Milan Bulajić , who supported the claim of a total of 700,000 victims. The current administration of the Museum has further expanded the list to include a bit over 80,000 names. During the 1961 trial of ) Alexander Arnon testimony: ''Q. One more question: I am not sure that I heard correctly when you said that in one camp hundreds of thousands of Serbs were exterminated?'' ''A. Hundreds of thousands.'' ''Q. In what year was that?'' ''A. Beginning in 1941, and until the end.'' ''Q. And who killed them?'' ''A. The Ustashi.'' During WWII , various German military commanders gave different figures for the number of Serbs , Jews and others killed on the territory of the Independent State Of Croatia . They circulated figures of 400,000 Serbs ( Alexander Lehr ); 350,000 Serbs ( Lothar Rendulic ); between 300,000 (Edmund Glaise von Horstenau); more than "3/4 of million of Serbs" ( Hermann Neubacher ) in 1943; 600-700,000 until March 1944 (Ernst Fick); 700,000 (Massenbach). Out of around 39,000 Jews that lived on the territory that became the Independent State of Croatia, only around 20% survived the war. Concentration camps , 1942 ]] The first group of camps were formed in the spring of 1941. These included:
These six camps were closed by October 1942. The Jasenovac Complex was built between August 1941 and February 1942. The first two camps, Krapje and Bročica, were closed in November 1941. The three newer camps continued to function until the end of the war:
There were also other camps in:
Numbers of prisoners:
HISTORY Before WWII In October 1928, after the assassination of Croatian leader Stjepan Radić in parlament in Belgrade by a radical Serbian politician Puniša Račić, a youth group named ''Hrvatski Domobran'' (which was the name of legal Croatian army in Austro-Hungary) started publishing an eponymous newspaper dedicated to the Croatian national matters. Various members of the Croatian Party Of Rights contributed to the writing, until around Christmas 1928 when the newspaper was banned by the authorities of the Kingdom Of Yugoslavia . In January 1929, the King banned all national parties, and radical wing of the Party of Rights was exiled, among them Ante Pavelić , Gustav Perčec, Branimir Jelić. This group was later joined by several other Croatian exiles. On 20 April , 1929 , Pavelić and others co-signed a declaration in Sofia , Bulgaria together with the members of the Macedonia n National Committee, asserting that they would pursue "their legal activities for the establishment of human and national rights, political freedom and complete independence of both Croatia and Macedonia". Because of this, the Court for the Preservation of the State in Belgrade sentenced Pavelić and Perčec to death on 17 July , 1929 . The exiles never returned to Yugoslavia, and instead started organizing support for their cause among the Croatian diaspora in Europe, South America and North America. They attained support mostly in Belgium , Argentina , and Pennsylvania . In January 1932, they named their revolutionary organization "Ustaša". In 1932 some Ustaša members led by Andrija Artuković also attempted to stage an uprising in the Lika / Velebit area, but failed, and retreated for northern Italy where they formed a training camp near Brescia . Their name derives from the verb ''ustati'' which means "to rise", hence ''ustaša'' would mean an Insurgent , a Rebel . This name didn't have fascist connotations during their early years in the Kingdom Of Yugoslavia as the term "ustaš" was used in Herzegovina to denote the (Serb Orthodox) insurgents from the Herzegovinian Rebellion of 1875. Perčec was later assassinated by Pavelić in 1933. Due to their previous links with the Macedonian nationalists, the Ustaše were accused in conspiring to murder the Yugoslav king Alexander in 1934, and Eugen Dido Kvaternik was charged with planning the successful assassination committed by members of the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization IMRO . The extent of the Ustaša involvement in the assassination remains unknown, it is only known for certain that it was committed by a Macedonian named Vlada Gheorghieff and not a member of the Ustaše, although the Ustaše provided assistance. Soon after the assassination, all organizations related to the Ustaše as well as the Hrvatski Domobran, which continued as a civil organization, were banned throughout Europe. Pavelić and Kvaternik were detained in Italy between October 1934 until the end of March 1936. After March 1937, when Italy and Yugoslavia signed a pact of friendship, most of the Ustaše members were extradited to Yugoslavia. However, this did not destroy their organization, but only gained them more sympathy among the Croatian youth, especially among university students. In February 1939, two of these returnees, Mile Budak and Ivan Oršanić, became editors of the newly published magazine Hrvatski narod ("The Croatian people"), which supported the Ustaša ideas of Croatian independence. World War II The Axis invaded Yugoslavia on 6 April , 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 14 th 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 '''Nezavisna Država Hrvatska''', acronym "NDH"). The name of the rogue state was an obvious and successful attempt at capitalizing on Croatian ultranationalism. Vladko Maček called on people to obey and cooperate with the new government the same day. Ante Pavelić arrived on 20 April , 1941 , to become the head of government, ''poglavnik'' ('' Führer ''), of the state that would soon encompass most of today's Croatia , Bosnia-Herzegovina and parts of Serbia ( Syrmia 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 27 April , 1941 , when a newly formed unit of Ustaša army massacred the largely Serbian thorp of Gudovac (near Bjelovar ). Eventually all who opposed and/or threatened the Ustaše were outlawed. The HSS was banned on 11 June , 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 6 June , 1941 . Mile Budak , then minister in Pavelić's government, publicly proclaimed the violent racial policy of the state on 22 July , 1941 . Vjekoslav "Maks" Luburić , one of the chiefs of secret police organizations, started building Concentration Camp s in the summer of the same year. 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. By the end of 1942, the news about the Ustaša atrocities in Jasenovac and elsewhere had also spread among the Croatian population. Noted writers Vladimir Nazor and Ivan Goran Kovačić escaped from the Ustasha-held territory to join the Partisans, and were followed by others. 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. 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 defectors, and getting help from the western Allies in the form of Airdrop s. After the war 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 9 May , 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 to the partizans on the Austrian border and subsequently either executed or sent at a "death march" back into the country, the Bleiburg Massacre . 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, such as Canada, Australia, Germany and South America, with the assistance of the Roman Catholic churches in those areas and their "grassroots" supporters. Some of them persisted in their crusade against Yugoslavia: Ustaše were implicated in over two dozen terrorist acts following the post-war period, including bombings in the United States. They were generally unsuccessful due to lack of domestic support and actions of the Yugoslav intelligence agencies (i.e. UDBA / KOS ), whose agents, notably, shot Ante Pavelić in Buenos Aires , inflicting injuries that would later prove to be fatal. IDEOLOGY The word "Ustaše" is a plural of "Ustaša"--a person who participates in "Ustanak" (uprising). Pr The Ustaše aimed at an ethnically "pure" Croatia, and saw the Serbs that lived in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina as the their biggest obstacle. Thus, Ustaše ministers Mile Budak , Mirko Puk and Milovan Žanić declared in May 1941 that the goal of the Ustaše was: # One third of the Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia (ISC) were to be forcibly converted to Roman Catholicism (which met with the approval of the Roman Catholic church and hierarchy in the environs and in Rome). # One third of the Serbs were to be expelled. # One third of the Serbs were 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. Ustaše held that Bosnian Muslims are Muslim Croats . Unlike Orthodox Serbs, Muslims were not persecuted by them and a few joined in the Nazi and Ustaše forces as part of Waffen-SS divisions SS Handschar in Muslim Bosnia (led by Amin Al-Husayni ) and SS Kama advised by Edmund Glaise Von Horstenau (the representative of the German military in Croatia) and led by Colonel Ivan Markulj , who was later replaced by Colonel Viktor Pavicic . Lt-Col. Marko Mesic commanded the artillery section. The state even transferred a former museum in Zagreb to be used as a Mosque . On other subjects, Ustaše were against Industrialization and Democracy . The basic principles of the movement were laid out by Pavelić in his 1929 pamphlet " Principles Of The Ustase Movement ". SYMBOLS The symbol of Ustaše is a wide Capital letter U with pronounced Serif . This symbol can easily be Spraypainted . A slight variation of it includes a small plus inserted at the top, symbolizing a Cross . In on-line communication it is sometimes written as =U=. Their hat insignia was the shield of Coat Of Arms Of Croatia surrounded or embossed with the U. The flag of the Independent State Of Croatia was a red-white-blue horizontal Tricolor with the shield of the Coat of Arms or Croatia in the middle and the U in the upper left. Its currency 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. CONNECTIONS WITH THE CATHOLIC CHURCH ''Main article: Involvement Of Croatian Catholic Clergy With The Ustasa Regime '' The Ustaša policies against the Eastern Orthodoxy are called "). Still it is a, generally pejorative, description of the Catholic Church's efforts to convert large numbers of Orthodox Christians through aggressive evangelism or the creations Unions with them. That said the Ustaše would represent an extreme example of "Uniatism." They supported violent aggression or force in order to convert Orthodox believers. Forced conversion has been condemned by St. Augustine , Pope Leo XIII , and others. The Ustaše held the extreme position that Eastern Orthodoxy was their greatest foe. This was also out of the mainstream as Papal encyclicals, at this point, traditionally deemed the Orthodox to be the only valid Christians outside the Catholic Church. Further the Ustaše never once recognized the existence of a Serb people on the territories of Croatia or Bosnia — they only recognized "Croats of the Eastern faith". They also called Bosnian Muslims "Croats of the Islamic faith", but they had a stronger ethnic dislike of Serbs. Roman Catholic priests among the Ustaše supported their hostility by carrying out forced conversions of Serbs to Catholicism throughout Croatia. Some former priests, mostly Franciscans , particularly in, but not limited to, Herzegovina and Bosnia , took part in the atrocities themselves. Miroslav Filipović was a Franciscan friar (from the Petrićevac monastery) who joined the Ustaša army on 6 February , 1942 in a brutal massacre of 2730 Serbs of the nearby villages, including 500 children. He was allegedly subsequently dismissed from his order and defrocked, although there is no concrete proof of this whatsoever. In fact when he was hanged for his War Crimes , he wore his Franciscan robes. He then became a member of the Ustaše and also Chief Guard of Jasenovac Concentration Camp where he was nicknamed ''"Fra Sotona "''. For the whole duration of the war, the Vatican kept up full diplomatic relations with the Ustaša state (granting Pavelić an audience), with its Papal Nuncio in the capital Zagreb . The nuncio was briefed on the efforts of religious conversions to Roman Catholicism. The true extent of Vatican support/involvement is unlikely ever to be known due to the destruction of evidence. After the , Petranović, and Dominik Mandić. The Ustaša regime had sent large amounts of gold that it had plundered from Serbian and Jewish property owners during WW II into Swiss banks. Of a total of 350 million Swiss Franc s, about 150 million was seized by British Troops ; however, the remaining 200 million (ca. 47 million dollars) reached the Vatican. Allegations exist that it's still being kept in the Vatican Bank . This was reported by the American intelligence agency SSU in October 1946. This issue is the theme of a recent Class Action Suit Against The Vatican Bank And Others . Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac , Archbishop of Zagreb during the Second World War, was accused of supporting the Ustaše, and exonerating those in the clergy that collaborated with the Ustaše of complicity in forced conversions. On the other hand, he himself reportedly helped victims of the Ustaša terror at the same time. The cardinal was criminally prosecuted and convicted after the war by the new Communist authorities of Yugoslavia . In 1998, Stepinac was Beatified by Pope John Paul II . On 22 June , 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 former friar Filipović. At the same location the pope also proclaimed the Beatification of the Catholic layman Ivan Merz (1896-1928) who was the founder of the "Association of Croatian Eagles" in 1923, which many view as the precursor to the Ustaše. Roman Catholic Apologist s defend the Pope's actions by claiming that the convent at Petricevac was one of the places that went up in flames causing the death of 80-year-old Friar Alojzije Atlija. Further, that the war had produced "a total exodus of the Catholic population from this region"; that the few who remained were "predominantly elderly"; and that the church in Bosnia then risked "total extinction" due to the war. Therefore, supporters state that the focus on the tragedy presently occurring was more important than focusing on one of 60 years ago. REFERENCES
SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS Ustaša sites Outside views
Croatian views
Serbian views
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