The ideology of nation and race: the Croatian Ustasha regime and its policies toward minorities in the independent state of Croatia, 1941-1945

In the short period from 1941 to 1945, the Croatian Ustasha\* regime attempted to remove, through deportation, physical extermination and forced assimilation, the Serbian, Jewish and Roma minorities of the ‘Independent State of Croatia’ (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH). The Nazi-backed regime also attempted the first serious effort by any regime in the region to nationally integrate the large Muslim population of Bosnia-Herzegovina. This endeavour of ‘demographic engineering’ in the Balkans in the 1940s was, as Stanley Payne rightly asserts, of ‘truly Hitlerian proportions,’ considering the fact that non-Croatian ethnic, racial and religious minorities constituted approximately one-half of the NDH’s population.1 Jonathan Gumz correctly attributes Ustasha policies to an agenda of a ‘nationalizing war’, that is, ‘the extensive use of military and political violence to reduce a multi-national state to a nationstate. Title page - THE IDEOLOGY OF NATION AND RACE: THE CROATIAN USTASHA REGIME AND ITS POLICIES TOWARD MINORITIES IN THE INDEPENDENT STATE OF CROATIA,1941-1945.......Page 1 Acknowledgements......Page 5 Table of Contents......Page 6 INTRODUCTION......Page 10 Chapter One - Croatdom and Slavdom......Page 53 Chapter Two - Illyrians and Yugoslavs......Page 80 Chapter Three - Ante Starcevic and the Croatian Party of Right......Page 101 Chapter Four - Stjepan Radic and the Croatian Peasant Party......Page 121 Chapter Five - The Croatian pan-Slavist ius sanguinis......Page 144 Chapter Six - The Founding of the Ustasha Movement......Page 156 Chapter Seven - Ustasha Race Theory......Page 176 Chapter Eight - Ustasha Anti-Semitism......Page 224 Chapter Nine - The Ustasha State......Page 245 Chapter Ten - The Nation of Wolves and Lions – the NDH as the Bulwark of the White West and the Bridge to the Orient......Page 300 Chapter Eleven: Aryan Racial Identity and Croatian National Individuality......Page 345 Chapter Twelve: The Orthodox Serb ‘Problem’ in the NDH......Page 362 Chapter Thirteen: The Persecution of Jews and Roma in the NDH......Page 399 BIBLIOGRAPHY......Page 419