Ante Pavelic was the leader of the fascist party of Croatia (the Ustaše), who, on Adolf Hitler's instruction, became the leader of Croatia after the Nazi invasion of 1941. Paveli? was an extreme Croatian nationalist who believed that the Serbian people were an inferior race - he would preside over a genocide that ultimately killed an estimated 390,000 Serbs during World War II. Croatia under Ante Paveli? provides the full history of this period, with a special focus on the United States' role in the post-war settlement. Drawing on previously unpublished documents, Robert McCormick argues that President Harry S. Truman's Cold War priorities meant that Paveli? was never made to answer for his crimes. Today, the Ustaše remains difficult legacy within Croatian society, partly as a result of Paveli?' political life in exile in South America. This is a new account of US foreign policy towards one of the Second World War's most brutal dictators and is an essential contribution to Croatian war-time history.

This book covers the full story of the Ustasha, a fascist movement in Croatia, from its historic roots to its downfall. The authors address key questions: In what international context did Ustasha terrorism grow and develop? How did this movement rise to power, and then exterminate hundreds of thousands of innocents? Who was Ante Pavelić, its leader? Was he a shrewd politician, able to exploit for his independent project Mussolini's imperial ambitions, Hitler's pan-German aims, and the anti-Bolshevism of the Holy See and the Western bloc? Or was he, consciously or not, a pawn in other hands, in a complex international scenario where Croatia was only arena among many? And after the movement's collapse, how were several of the most prominent Ustasha leaders able to evade capture by Tito’s victorious army? The book places the appearance of the Ustasha movement not only in the context of the interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia but also in the wider perspective of the emergence of European fascism.

A New York Review Books Original The distinguished Croatian journalist and publisher Slavko Goldstein says, “Writing this book about my family, I have tried not to separate what happened to us from the fates of many other people and of an entire country.” 1941: The Year That Keeps Returning is Goldstein’s astonishing historical memoir of that fateful year—when the Ustasha, the pro-fascist nationalists, were brought to power in Croatia by the Nazi occupiers of Yugoslavia. On April 10, when the German troops marched into Zagreb, the Croatian capital, they were greeted as liberators by the Croats. Three days later, Ante Pavelić, the future leader of the Independent State of Croatia, returned from exile in Italy and Goldstein’s father, the proprietor of a leftist bookstore in Karlovac—a beautiful old city fifty miles from the capital—was arrested along with other local Serbs, communists, and Yugoslav sympathizers. Goldstein was only thirteen years old, and he would never see his father again. More than fifty years later, Goldstein seeks to piece together the facts of his father’s last days. The moving narrative threads stories of family, friends, and other ordinary people who lived through those dark times together with personal memories and an impressive depth of carefully researched historic details. The other central figure in Goldstein’s heartrending tale is his mother—a strong, resourceful woman who understands how to act decisively in a time of terror in order to keep her family alive. From 1941 through 1945 some 32,000 Jews, 40,000 Gypsies, and 350,000 Serbs were slaughtered in Croatia. It is a period in history that is often forgotten, purged, or erased from the history books, which makes Goldstein’s vivid, carefully balanced account so important for us today—for the same atrocities returned to Croatia and Bosnia in the 1990s. And yet Goldstein’s story isn’t confined by geographical boundaries as it speaks to the dangers and madness of ethnic hatred all over the world and the urgent need for mutual understanding.

This special issue provides important new scholarship from a variety of perspectives on the structure, ideology and political history of the central fascist group in interwar and Second World War Yugoslavia, the Croatian Ustasha. It is the first volume in English to closely explore the Ustasha’s Independent State of Croatia between 1941 and 1945, a period when it was an active collaborator with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and largely responsible for Yugoslavia suffering the highest proportion of national casualties in the Second World War. By using the top scholars in the field to explore the nature of the NDH, The Independent State of Croatia 1941-45 contributes to scholarly understandings of Croatian nationalism, Balkan politics, European fascism, and genocide in the Second World War.

This book is based on the unprecedented declassification of thousands of US intelligence files.

The fascist Ustasha regime and its militias carried out a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing that killed an estimated half million Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies, and ended only with the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II. In Visions of Annihilation, Rory Yeomans analyzes the Ustasha movement's use of culture to appeal to radical nationalist sentiments and legitimize its genocidal policies. He shows how the movement attempted to mobilize poets, novelists, filmmakers, visual artists, and intellectuals as purveyors of propaganda and visionaries of a utopian society. Meanwhile, newspapers, radio, and speeches called for the expulsion, persecution, or elimination of "alien" and "enemy" populations to purify the nation. He describes how the dual concepts of annihilation and national regeneration were disseminated to the wider population and how they were interpreted at the grassroots level. Yeomans examines the Ustasha movement in the context of other fascist movements in Europe. He cites their similar appeals to idealistic youth, the economically disenfranchised, racial purists, social radicals, and Catholic clericalists. Yeomans further demonstrates how fascism created rituals and practices that mimicked traditional religious faiths and celebrated martyrdom. Visions of Annihilation chronicles the foundations of the Ustasha movement, its key actors and ideologies, and reveals the unique cultural, historical, and political conditions present in interwar Croatia that led to the rise of fascism and contributed to the cataclysmic events that tore across the continent.

A ground-breaking study that looks at why European nations sent troops to take part in Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union.

This book traces the intellectual origins of race theory in the pro-Nazi Ustasha Independent State of Croatia, 1941-1945. This race theory was not, as historians of the Ustasha state have hitherto argued, a product of a practical accommodation to the dominant Nazi racial ideology. Contrary to the general historiographical view, which has either downplayed or ignored the important place of race, not only in Ustasha ideology and politics, but more generally in modern Croatian and Yugoslav nationalism, this work stresses the significant role that theories of ethnolinguistic origin and racial anthropology played in defining Croat nationhood from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Upon the basis of older ideological and cultural traditions, the Ustasha state constructed an ideal Aryan racial type.

On April 6, 1941, the Axis powers attacked Yugoslavia. Within days, the Yugoslav army had surrendered, and Yugoslavia was officially under occupation. Serbia was ruled by a puppet government under German occupation. In Croatia, the Ustashas had established a puppet state called "The Independent State of Croatia" (Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska or NDH), led by Ante Pavelic. In the NDH, the Ustashas introduced Nazi-style laws against Serbs, Jews, and Roma and established concentration camps, where they incarcerated and murdered members of those peoples. Bosniaks (then referred to as Muslims) found themselves between a rock and a hard place. Without proper political representation or institutions, they were split as a nation on all sides. Some joined the Independent State of Croatia, others sided with the Serb royalists (chetniks), and yet others made nice with Nazi Germany, hoping for greater autonomy for Bosnia in return. While the Ustasha regime did not target Bosniaks en masse, many members of their elites disagreed with the new regime's policies. The persecution of Serbs, Jews, and Roma provoked the public condemnation of these crimes. Under-represented, unprotected, and generally labeled enemies or collaborators, the Bosniak elites were pragmatic in their condemnation of the regime's policies: using it as an opportunity for seeking Bosnia's autonomy, hoping in this way to improve the country's position and the security of their people. They did so through the resolutions included in this book, which were initiated and signed by members of the Bosniak establishment, which is to say of the clergy and the judicial and economic elites, who sought to distance themselves from the Ustasha regime. In fact, most of the people to actually sign these resolutions were members of El-Hidaje, the Association of Muslim Clergy. The resolutions played a large role, not only during the war but in the post-war era too, as the struggle for Muslim identity and nationhood got underway. They are one of the few cases in the region, perhaps the only, of such atrocities being condemned and criticized by the elite of a "people without a state."

This book is the first complete study in English of Antonescu's part in the Second World War. Antonescu was a major ally of Hitler and Romania fielded the third largest Axis army, joined the Tripartite Pact in November 1940 as a sovereign state and participated in the attack on the Soviet Union of 22 June 1941 as an equal partner of Germany.