Another advocate of Croatian ethnic singularity was Ćiro Truhelka. He was an archaeologist and anthropologist who welded together anti-Serb rhetoric with the tropes of anti-Semitism. He claimed, for example that the despised Vlachs, descended from the pre-Roman inhabitants of the Balkans, would always be ‘recognizable at a hundred paces’. Any intelligent child on meeting a Serb would exclaim ‘That’s a Vlach!’ This peculiar formula was borrowed, of course, from the anti-Semitic maxim that even assimilated Jews could never hide certain telltale physiological traits. Like Hans F.K. Günther, the German Rassenpapst, Truhelka relied on a set of allegedly fixed physiological tropes: Serbs were dark skinned, brown eyed and ‘pigeon-chested’; Bosniaks and Croats were blonde and blue eyed. Serbs were swarthy, degenerate types, who, unless they were ‘removed’, threatened to spread their dark blood among true Croatians. The solution naturally was to build national barriers to protect Croatian lands and blood: Croatia for Croatians.
This strand of Croatian nationalism faded somewhat after the creation of Yugoslavia, but as the kingdom began to fracture after 1925, the Croatian cause found a brilliant new advocate. This was Milan Šufflay, a genuinely brilliant scholar in the Anthropology Department of Zagreb University. Although he was respected outside Croatia, Šufflay developed a fixation with the pre-eminence of the white race and the threat of ‘Asiatic’ that echoed the hysterical theories of the German anthropologists. Like them, Šufflay believed that his own ‘Gothic’ blood line must become a cordon sanitaire between the west and the ‘Asiatic’ east. ‘The blood of Croatdom means civilization,’ he wrote, ‘it does not mean simply a nation. Croatdom is a synonym for all that is beatific and good that the European West has created.’ In the Balkans, Serbs had distinct and threatening ‘Asiatic’ characteristics; they did not belong with Croats within the same pseudo-national borders: ‘Yugoslavism’ was a dangerous delusion.
To proclaim these ideas in royal Yugoslavia was dangerous. In 1931, Serb fanatics ambushed Šufflay in the street outside his home and beat him to death with iron rods. Prominent intellectuals like Heinrich Mann and Albert Einstein, who surely cannot have read Šufflay’s nationalist tracts, denounced the Yugoslavs for failing to protect an academic luminary. Šufflay joined a Valhalla of martyred heroes. The murder galvanised nationalists, including the embryonic Ustasha militia. A new convert to the cause was a young law student called Mladen Lorković who, in 1939, published a pamphlet, ‘The Nation and Lands of the Croats’. Following Šufflay’s lead, Lorković explicitly introduced the language of German racism into Croatian nationalist rhetoric. He stated that Vlach nomads (a pejorative way of referring to the ancestors of Serbs) and Turkish mercenaries had ‘stolen Croatian living space’. He resuscitated the old idea that Bosniaks were the purest Croatians – and that Bosnia thus belonged to Croatia, just as German nationalists had claimed that the Sudetenland and other ethnic German strongholds were an integral territory of the German Reich. But Lorković went a lot further even than Šufflay when he proclaimed that Croatians were originally of Persian descent, and were thus Aryans – not South Slavs at all.22 After 1941, in Ante Pavelić’s puppet state, pseudo-history like this had deadly consequences as the Ustasha regime rushed with unseemly haste to bolster the legitimacy of the NDH. The fantastical notion that Bosniaks had distant Aryan ancestors would later be taken up by Muslim leaders when, in 1943, they sought German backing for their own autonomist aspirations.
Now in the early summer of 1941, the new German-backed Ustasha government would incite a crusade against the hated ‘Asiatic’ Serbs. But to satisfy their sponsors in Berlin, their rage fell first on the Jews. In September 1942 Monsignor Augustin Juretic fled Croatia and submitted a series of reports to the American OSS and the Yugoslav government-in-exile in London. He denounced the genocide as a ‘dark blot on the conscience of many Croats’. Croatia, he said, had become ‘a real slaughterhouse’. Some 80 per cent of Croatian Jews would perish at the hands of Ustasha murder squads and in Croatian camps like Jasenovac.23
In Berlin, as soon as Balkan matters had been settled, the demands of Operation Barbarossa again took precedence. The bulk of German forces were withdrawn from the Balkans and were replaced by garrison units. In Croatia a single division, the 718th headquartered in Banja Luka, was left behind. The German diplomatic corps headquartered in Zagreb proved to be either fanatical Nazis or feeble ‘yes men’. The Plenipotentiary General, the Austrian Edmund Glaise von Horstenau, was not in Hitler’s view, reliable. Glaise von Horstenau was a dedicated Nazi and had served under the fanatical Arthur Seyß-Inquart. But he was hostile to Himmler’s SS and his reports to Berlin show that he was repelled by Ustasha violence, while barely lifting a finger to stop it. The German envoy Siegfried Kasche, on the other hand, a fanatical Nazi who had joined the party in 1926, had no such doubts. He remained a staunch supporter of the NDH to the very end. What troubled Kasche and the German Foreign Office was not Pavelić, but Mussolini. State Secretary Ernst Weizsäcker confusingly warned Kasche that ‘the Croats and Italians would not get along well’ and that he should in all matters ‘spare Italian sensibilities’ and let ‘Italian hegemony in Croatia prevail’.24 But ‘sensibilities’ could not get in the way of German strategic plans. Hitler’s solution was to bind Pavelić to the Reich by exploiting what historian Marko Attila Hoare calls ‘the Ustasha’s genocidal proclivities’.25
In other words, Pavelić and Ustasha militias would serve German interests by fully embracing the core Nazi doctrines of state terror and ethnic cleansing. Croatian propaganda soon enshrined both. In the 1930s, a Croatian ‘legion’ had been trained by German officers in Vienna. In 1941, this became the core of a new Ustasha militia that was loyal to Pavelić and dedicated to ‘Croatia for Croatians’. According to an Ustasha propaganda leaflet: ‘knife, revolver, bomb, and the infernal machine, these are the means that are going to return to the peasant the fruits of his land.’26 But who, in Ustasha minds, was guilty of purloining these fruits? The answer was obvious: Orthodox Serbs, Freemasons, Gypsies and Jews. The hard-faced Croatian nationalists and the Catholic ‘Clericalists’ who had been allotted senior positions in the Pavelić government, including propaganda and mass media, believed ardently that Jews were a toxic ‘foreign element’ that spread poison through the Croatian body politic. But a parochial hatred of Serbs far outweighed the regime’s anti-Semitism.27 One of the terrible ironies of the Croatian genocide is that Ante Pavelić, the head of state and Slavko Kvaternik, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, had half-Jewish wives, and a few high-ranking Ustasha Cabinet members had married ‘full Jews’, whom they secretly protected from the attentions of NDH murder squads. Hoare makes a crucial point: the Croatian genocide was both ‘a Nazi-led genocide of Jews and Gypsies and an independent … genocide of the Serbs’. What drove Ustasha anti-Jewish measures was a desire to fit in with Hitler’s New Order.
The Ustasha campaign against Croatian Jews began early in April with a flurry of reactionary legislation. The law for the establishment of the army and navy excluded both Jews and Serbs from military service except in labour battalions. Then on 30 April, the law decree on racial belonging and the law decree on the protection of Aryan blood and honour of the Croatian people (modelled on the German Nuremberg Laws) proscribed marriage between gentiles and Jews and sexual relations between Jewish men and Croatian women. Jews would have to register with the Ustasha authorities and if they had changed surnames after 1918 they were compelled to resume the use of their original names. The Ustasha regime prohibited Jews from working in the liberal professions or frequenting restaurants and hotels, cinemas and theatres. Jewish religious and cultural institutions were plundered, and a new ‘Office for the Reconstruction of the National Economy’ plundered Jewish and Serbian businesses.
The impact of this legal blitzkrieg was, as Michael Burleigh succinctly puts it, to ‘abrogate all constitutional and legal provisions that granted religious equality and freedom of conscience’.28 NDH anti-Jewish legislatio
n stated explicitly:
Since Jews spread false reports in order to cause unrest among the people, and since by their speculation they hinder and increase the difficulty of supplying the population, they are considered collectively responsible. Therefore the authorities will act against them and beyond criminal legal responsibility; they will be confined in assembly camps under the open sky.29
A tiny handful of Jews – if they had rendered noteworthy service to Croatia, voluntarily given up their property or had married a government official – could sometimes evade persecution as ‘honorary Aryans’. It was this kind anomaly which in 1942 so infuriated intelligence officer SS-Sturmbannführer Wilhelm Höttl (another Austrian) and provoked direct SS intervention to finish off what the Ustasha had started – and then bungled.
After 1933, the Nazis had at first proceeded cautiously against German Jews, starting with the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 and escalating their onslaught two years later in November 1938. In the new puppet NDH, there was no need for such finesse. The killing must begin immediately. On 6 June, Pavelić travelled to the Berghof for a summit with Hitler. They focused on the future ethnic composition of the new state; Hitler advised Pavelić that ‘if the Croatian state was to be truly stable, a nationally intolerant policy had to be pursued for 50 years’.30 Hitler’s lethal arm-twisting must be seen in context with what had already begun to take place in Serbia and the Banat region, which was dominated by radicalised ethnic Germans. As soon as they had crossed the Romanian border into the Banat, German troops and local ethnic Germans squads rounded up and imprisoned about a third of all adult male Jews. Then in the summer of 1941, the German military administration, with minimal SS prompting, began to systematically kill Jews and Serbs. As German troops had withdrawn to the Eastern Front, Yugoslav partisans had begun attacking the German garrison troops. According to brutal German reprisal doctrine, Serb villagers would pay the price in blood. At the same time, just as Himmler did, Wehrmacht generals blamed Jewish ‘bandits’ for inciting attacks. Anti-Semitism and hatred of Serbs intricately blended in the German military psyche. Many soldiers called Serbs a Rattenvolk (rat people), a term borrowed from the lexicon of anti-Semites. Austrian general Franz Böhme egged on his troops: ‘Your mission … lies in the country in which German blood flowed in 1914 through the treachery of the Serbs, women and children. You are the avengers of these dead.’ In the Banat, the depleted German military administration could call on the assistance of radicalised ethnic Germans – one reason why the liquidation of both Serbs and Jews was accomplished there with such horrible speed.31
So when Pavelić kowtowed to Hitler at the Berghof, the mass murder of both Serbs and Jews was already under way. If the Ustasha failed to act, the German army would take over, exposing the illusory autonomy of the NDH. Pavelić returned to Zagreb with a renewed sense of mission. His Education and Culture Minister, Dr Mile Budak, proclaimed: ‘For minorities such as the Serbs, Jews and gypsies, we have three million bullets.’ The genocide tore open, one Ustasha renegade confessed, ‘a great Croatian wound … Our faces burn for shame’.
The Germans kept up the pressure. On 22 June, Hitler summoned Pavelić’s military henchman Slavko Kvaternik to his new eastern headquarters at Rastenburg. The attack on the Soviet Union had begun at 3.15 that morning. As 3 million German soldiers advanced across the Russian border and the Luftwaffe pounded Soviet cities and airfields, Hitler found time to rant at Kvaternik:
The Jews are the bane of human kind. If the Jews will be allowed to do as they will, like they are permitted in their Soviet heaven, then they will fulfil their most insane plans … This sort of people cannot be integrated in the social order or into an organized nation. They are parasites on the body of a healthy society … There is only one thing to be done with them: to exterminate them … it would be nothing less than criminal to spare these bastards.32
Historians have often debated precisely when Hitler ‘gave the order’ to inaugurate the destruction of all European Jews. It is hard to conceive of a more direct instruction than the Rastenburg tirade lapped by Slavko Kvaternik.
German diplomats stationed in Zagreb left us with detailed accounts of the Croatian Holocaust. The main perpetrators were the new Ustasha militias, formed with German assistance in April and modelled on the SS. As in the Waffen-SS, service was voluntary. The majority of recruits were young, awash with testosterone, devoted to the Poglavnik and unquestioning believers in the maxim ‘Croatia for Croatians’. Their modus operandi resembled murderous Hutu militias like the Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi, who rampaged through Rwanda half a century later in the spring and summer of 1994. Like the Hutu death squads, the Ustasha used knives, clubs, hatchets – weapons procured from field and farmyard. The killers customarily herded victims into churches and school buildings, closed spaces where the brute force of hatchets and knives had the most deadly effect. The killing was both grisly and intimate. In July 1941, the German Plenipotentiary General Edmund Glaise von Horstenau reported that the Ustasha campaign incited by his own government was driven by ‘blind, bloody fury’. ‘Even among the Croatians,’ he went on, ‘nobody can feel safe. The Croatian revolution is by far the harshest and most brutal of all the different revolutions I have been through at more or less close hand since 1918.’33
The killers were almost without exception good Catholic boys. In the 1960s, Italian journalist Carlo Falconi investigated the wartime Croatian massacres to try to shed light on how much the Vatican had known about the slaughter.34 His report documented in detail what ‘blind bloody fury’ meant for the Jews and Serbs trapped in Croatia. In the villages, where the targets were mainly Serbs, an attack would usually begin just after dawn. Villagers would be woken by the rumble of truck engines and a blaze of headlights. The trucks would stop in the village square and black-capped Ustasha men would throw open the tail gates to fan out through the village, driving people from their farms and houses. In one case, the Ustasha men herded hundreds of Serbs into a local church to attend a service of ‘thanks giving for Croatian independence’. The Ustasha men thrust their way inside brandishing knives and axes. Serbs were traditionally Orthodox not Catholic, but a minority had converted. Ustasha officers were often loath to murder Catholics and they demanded to see any ‘certificates of conversion’. Just two men possessed the correct documents. They alone were released. The Ustasha men now set about butchering everyone else, men, women and children. Falconi discovered that according to many eyewitness accounts, Franciscan priests took a leading part in the slaughter. These men armed themselves with knives and clubs, set fire to Serb homes and sacked villages. One priest performed a celebratory dance around a pile of Serbian corpses. During one especially hideous massacre that took place in Nevesinie, Ustasha militia rounded up 173 Serbs. Wielding hammers, picks, rifle butts and knives, they mutilated and severed ears, noses, genitals and fingers. They gouged out eyes, they ripped off hair, beards and eyebrows and stuffed them into the mouths of victims. The Ustasha beheaded men and severed the breasts of their wives or sisters. Others they tortured to death in front of their families. When a small boy begged for water he was shot in the head.
The Germans were dismayed by this litany of horrors. They deplored the fact that their Croatian killers acted in ‘hate and hot frenzy’; this was not the German way. Glaise von Horstenau grumbled that the Ustasha militia had ‘gone raging mad’. At a conference of Axis military top brass in Rome in 1942, Generaloberst Alexander Löhr described the situation in Croatia as ‘very unsatisfactory’: the Croatian army was unreliable; the Ustasha were savages. Mussolini concurred: ‘it was madness of the Poglavnik’, he complained, ‘to think he could exterminate two million Serbs’.35 There was a steep learning curve on how to use these non-German executioners.
Croatia was the only Axis satellite state that murdered more non-Jewish than Jewish civilians. But this is not to say that Axis occupation did not energise auto-chthonous anti-Semitic energies. The NDH, as we have seen, passed anti-Jewish legislation
that defined Jews in racial terms. Under Edmund Veesenmayer’s tutelage, the Ustasha regime immediately Aryanised the capital and removed Jews from public office and professions with ruthless energy. By May 1941 they had begun rounding up Jews in Zagreb and dispatching them to concentration camps built on the German model. The biggest was Jasenovac, an archipelago of destruction that sprawled alongside the Sava River close to the village of Krapje. Here in different sections the Ustasha segregated Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and Croats. At Jasenovac at least 25,000 Jews perished. The numbers of Serbs and Gypsies who died was possibly even higher.36 Jasenovac was a place of profligate cruelty. Father Petar ‘Pero’ Brzica, the camp’s most notorious guard, wielded a custom-designed blade strapped to his wrist that he called a ‘Serb cutter’. Inside Jasenovac, the Ustasha gassed their Jewish and Serb victims or cremated them alive. They hurled their bodies into the Sava River. A Croatian prisoner who survived to describe his experience described ‘the screams and wails of despair and extreme suffering, the tortured outcries of the victims, broken by intermittent shooting’.37 At the trial of the Jasenovac camp commander Dinko Šakić in 1994, a 77-year-old witness recalled speaking to Ustasha Lieutenant Zrinusic. ‘He told me (once) he had competed in slaughtering, but lost to Ustashi Lt. Brzica. For him, the genuine Ustashi was the one who had bloodied his hands. The Ustashi who would not kill were punished.’38
Hitler sanctioned this hideous regime – and urged its fanatical leaders to be ‘nationally intolerant’ and to ‘exterminate Jews’. The German Plenipotentiary General Glaise von Horstenau may have, on occasion, deplored Ustasha ‘excesses’, but in 1943 his subordinate Siegfried Kasche proudly reported that Croatia had been successfully cleansed of Jews. On 20 January 1942, at the Wannsee Conference, which was convened to plan the administrative details of the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish problem’, Himmler’s deputy RSHA chief Heydrich informed delegates that: ‘In Slovakia and Croatia the matter [of the Final Solution] is no longer so difficult, since the most substantial problems in this respect have already been brought near a solution.’39 In the Balkans, Himmler and the SS leadership learnt important lessons. The Croatian experience showed that native militias like the Ustasha had a role to play in organised mass murder. But while the Ustasha squads had proved themselves to be effective killers, they had ‘run amok’. According to German observers, there was a right way to carry out mass murder and the Ustasha militias had failed to conform. On 17 February 1942 an SS intelligence chief sent a memorandum to Himmler blaming the Ustasha for igniting Serbian ‘bandit activity’ by committing Greueltaten (acts of horror). He estimated that 300,000 Orthodox Serbs ‘have been massacred and sadistically tortured to death’. This was counterproductive.40 Worse, by the summer of 1942 the Ustasha killing spree had run out of steam, forcing the Germans to step in to mop up survivors.
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