VISIONS OF ANNIHILATION

PITT SERIES IN RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN STUDIES

Jonathan Harris, Editor
VISIONS OF
ANNIHILATION
The Ustasha Regime and
the Cultural Politics of Fascism,
1941–1945

RORY YEOMANS

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260
Copyright © 2013, University of Pittsburgh Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Yeomans, Rory, author.

  Visions of annihilation : the Ustasha regime and the cultural politics of fascism, 1941-1945 /
Rory Yeomans.
   pages  cm. — (Pitt series in Russian and East European studies)
  Includes bibliographical references and index.
  ISBN 978-0-8229-6192-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
  1. Ustaša, hrvatska revolucionarna organizacija.  2. Croatia—History—1918–1945.  3. World
War, 1939-1945—Croatia.  4. Croatia—Politics and government—1918–1945.  5. Nationalism—
Croatia—History—20th century.  I. Title.
  DR1591.Y46 2012
  949.72΄022—dc23 2012041336
 CONTENTS

Preface vii
Introduction  1
Chapter 1. The Generation of Struggle:
Ustasha Students and the Construction of a New Elite  29
Chapter 2. Annihilate the Old!
The Cult of Youth and the Problem of National Regeneration  81
Chapter 3. Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines:
Making a New Ustasha Man and Woman  126
Illustrations 168–177
Chapter 4. Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste:
Cultural Values after the Revolution of Blood  178
Chapter 5. Between Annihilation and Regeneration:
Literature, Language, and National Revolution  236
Chapter 6. “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”:
The Cultural Politics of Martyrdom and Moral Rebirth  295
Conclusion  345
Notes 365
Bibliography 417
Index 437

v
 PREFACE

Visions of Annihilation is a case study in the cultural politics of mass murder.

It aims to demonstrate how one European fascist movement, the Croatian
Ustasha regime, used popular culture as well as ideas of national regenera-
tion to legitimize its rule and, in particular, its campaign of mass murder
against what it considered to be dangerous, enemy, and “alien” populations.
It explores why the Ustasha regime, which founded and ruled the Indepen-
dent State of Croatia between 1941 and 1945, considered this campaign a vi-
tal precondition for the survival of the Croatian nation and how and why it
evolved over time. The Ustasha regime was notorious in postwar Yugosla-
via for the orchestrated campaign of extermination and terror it instigated
against Serbs, Jews, and gypsies. It aimed to create a Greater Croatia cleansed
of all these “invading” groups. By the time Croatia and Bosnia were liberated
from its rule in 1945, its elite death squads and militias had unsystematically
murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians, including large numbers of
children. With the exception of the Nazi camps in Eastern Europe, it erected
the largest concentration camp on the continent. The sadism and cruelty of
the movement shocked even hardened Nazi commanders, who wrote of it
with contempt. Months before the Wansee Conference was even convened,
the regime in Croatia had already inaugurated its own self-willed Holocaust.
Despite this, relatively little has been written about this subject in the English
language.
Through an examination of the way in which the Ustasha regime used
notions of culture and national regeneration to legitimize its campaign of
mass murder, this book aims to understand how the movement’s activists and
leading cadres perceived the world around them: in their case, the imagined
Croatian nation. It also explores how, for the most part, radical nationalist in-
tellectuals, artists, and writers—the public face of the regime—presented and

vii
 viii Preface

interpreted the regime’s visions to the nation. Given the still-controversial

nature of the subject and, until recently at least, the lack of English-language
research, there is a tendency to expect any study to provide a comprehen-
sive history of the state, its policies, and fortunes. Due to constraints of space
and time, I have had to omit many important areas I had initially planned to
cover, including detailed analysis of the mechanics of the Ustasha regime’s
campaign of mass murder against Serbs, Jews, and gypsies; racial politics and
the regime’s evolving policy toward the Serbs; and the regime’s complex atti-
tude toward Muslims. Nor have I been able—except tangentially—to explore
the public reception of the regime or the attitude of the Catholic Church, ei-
ther among the ecclesiastical hierarchy or at the local, village level. The im-
portance of all these areas is acknowledged and addressed in the introduction
but is outside the scope of this study’s focus.
That said, in the past decade a new generation of scholars has emerged,
in Croatia and elsewhere in Europe and the United States, that is committed
to exploring many of these subjects from new and innovative perspectives. I
hope that, if nothing else, my study—whatever its deficiencies, omissions, and
oversights—will help contribute in some modest way to the ongoing intellec-
tual dialogue about the Ustasha regime and the Independent State of Croatia.
The issues raised by its rule are as important and relevant today as they were
in 1945.
Chapter 3 originally appeared in a somewhat different form under the ti-
tle “Militant Women, Warrior Men, and Revolutionary Personae: The New
Ustasha Man and Woman in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941–1945,”
Slavonic and East European Review 83, no. 4 (October 2005). I am grateful to
Martyn Rady and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Board for granting
me permission to reprint some of this material here.

The conception, research, writing, and completion of this book would not
have been possible without the assistance, advice, and, in many cases, friend-
ship of a number of individuals. In the course of writing a book, most histo-
rians accumulate so many debts it is a wonder they have any friends left at the
end of the process. I hope I will be forgiven if I have inadvertently omitted
to thank any individuals by name. First and foremost, I thank Peter Siani-
Davies, formerly of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, Uni-
versity College London, who made an immeasurable contribution to the early
development of this book. Not only was he extremely supportive of me in ev-
ery step of the book’s evolution, making countless perceptive suggestions that
have aided the clarity of my central argument, but he has also been unfailingly
kind, considerate, and tolerant. At numerous moments, when I despaired of
ever completing it, he never lost faith. I also thank Wendy Bracewell, who,
 Preface  ix

with her unparalleled knowledge of the history and politics of southeastern

Europe, was enormously encouraging and on a number of occasions showed
me the way forward when my research plan came to a grinding halt.
My sincere thanks are also due to Rebecca Haynes for her early interest in
my work and her encouraging remarks. She not only read drafts of my man-
uscript, making many judicious observations, but also arranged for me to
present research papers in both the initial and the late stages of my research,
which helped me clarify and develop my ideas profoundly. Marius Turda de-
serves recognition for his consistent interest in and support of my work, as
do Hannes Grandits, Christian Promitzer, and Sevasti Trubeta. Tomislav
Dulić from Uppsala University and Anton Weiss-Wendt from the Center for
Holocaust Studies in Oslo were extremely supportive of my work in its later
stages. Tomislav, in particular, was generous in sharing archival sources with
me, some of which I have used here with kind permission from the Military
Historical Institute in Belgrade and the National Archives and Records and
Administration, Washington, DC. I am grateful to Miladin Milošević at the
Archives of Yugoslavia in Belgrade, Josip Kolanović at the Croatian State Ar-
chives, and Dragan Kršmanović at the Military-Historical Archives in Bel-
grade for granting Tomislav permission to share some of his primary source
material with me. Needless to say, I alone am responsible for all errors of fact,
interpretation, and translation.
In America, I would like to thank Robert M. Hayden for his support of
my research and work. I am also extremely grateful to Peter Kracht, editorial
director at the University of Pittsburgh Press, who agreed to publish the book
and displayed remarkable patience even while I promised to make (and sub-
sequently missed) countless deadlines and word limits. His belief in the im-
portance of the story being told was a key motivating factor in its completion.
In Britain, I owe a massive debt of gratitude to the staff of the British Library
at St. Pancras and the Newspaper Library in Colindale, as well as the staff of
the library of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Their help-
fulness, availability, and accessibility went far beyond the bounds of duty. In
Croatia, which I visited on a number of occasions for research purposes be-
tween 2003 and 2010, I would like to thank the staff of the Croatian State Ar-
chives and the National University Library in Zagreb for their kindness and
helpful attitude. Not only did they locate many rare journals and documents,
but they also dealt heroically with my unreasonable requests and enquiries
about a subject still highly controversial in their country. I would especially
like to thank Boris Suljagić of the Croatian State Archives for his unfailing
good cheer and enthusiasm. I should also like to thank the many individuals
in Zagreb and elsewhere with whom I enjoyed stimulating conversations and
exchanges of opinions. They are too numerous to mention. I am grateful to
 x Preface

them all. I would like to thank my family and friends for their understanding,
support, and good humor during the researching and writing of this book,
which sometimes seemed to them as if it would never be completed (a friend:
“The Bible took less time to write than this!”). I hope they will agree that the
finished product was worth the wait.
Finally, I should like to pay a debt of gratitude to four works that were
influential in the development of this study: first, Stanko Lašić’s Krležologija
ili povijest kritičke misli o Miroslavu Krleži, which was among the first stud-
ies to take the Ustasha regime’s cultural politics seriously and analyze them
in a complex way. As well as informing my thinking on the evolution of the
regime’s cultural policies, it also introduced me to the Plug student group.
Second, Sheila Fitzpatrick’s The Cultural Front and its ideas about hard and
“soft” lines on culture, interest groups, and middle-class tastes and values in
the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Third, Zeev Sternhell’s seminal 1976 essay “Fas-
cist Ideology” for its impact on my understanding of fascism as well as its
rich bibliography of fascist texts to consult. Finally, Marko Samardžija’s pio-
neering studies of linguistic policy in the Independent State of Croatia, which
played a major role in the structure of the section on language policy.
 INTRODUCTION

O
n 8 September 1942, the third Zagreb economic and trade exhibition
in the Independent State of Croatia was officially opened. The press por-
trayed it as an unparalleled triumph for the young state: newly con-
structed trams took visitors to the entrance of the Zagreb fairground; the
city’s travel office was open late for visitors from abroad needing accommo-
dation for the duration of the exhibition; and thousands of citizens, many
of them workers carrying trade union flags, bought tickets and wandered
with “great attentiveness,” curiosity, and interest around the exhibits. As one
Zagreb newspaper concluded, despite the difficult wartime economic con-
ditions, the warm and pleasant autumn weather and the influx of foreign visi-
tors meant that this year’s fair would be visited in “record numbers.” Opening
the exhibition, Dragutin Toth, minister for commerce, crafts, and agricul-
ture, called it a “mirror of Croatian economic life.”1
Among the many exhibits visited by Toth and his official party was one
organized by the Ustasha Supervisory Service (Ustaška nadzorna služba—
UNS). This was no ordinary trade exhibit: inside a square building the UNS
had replicated the “typical living quarters” of what the state euphemistically
termed “collection and work camps.” The UNS display was part of a wider
series of propaganda exhibitions aimed at educating the general public about
the social utility of the Ustasha state’s concentration camps and the UNS sec-
tion responsible for their operational running: Bureau 3, the Ustasha Defense

1
 2 Introduction

Unit (Ustaška obrabena zdrug). This exhibit, like a number of others held in
Zagreb that year, aimed to show the healthy and productive lives led by in-
mates in its “peaceful work camps.” In an exhibition organized by the Usta-
sha Defense Unit in central Zagreb in the same year, for example, to showcase
the achievements of the largest concentration camp, Jasenovac, photographs
of smiling inmates were combined with exhibits of the products and artifacts
manufactured by inmates in the camp’s workshops. This exhibition, com-
missioned by the unit’s notorious commander, Vjekoslav Luburić, was aimed
at convincing the Croatian public that Jasenovac was a benign reeducation
camp transforming ideologically degenerate and anti-national individu-
als into valuable members of the national community through the dignity
of labor, not a factory of death dedicated to the extermination of predomi-
nantly Serb, Jewish, and gypsy citizens. As the newspaper Hrvatski narod put
it: “Their former labor was political; our present politics is based on labor.”
Yet the wholesome disposition of the exhibition was at violent odds with the
brutal reality of life and death in Jasenovac. By the time the state collapsed
in 1945, at least one hundred thousand inmates, including large numbers of
women, children, and babies, had perished as a result of starvation and mal-
nutrition or at the hands of the camp’s guards.2
The ideology of the Ustasha movement, the fascist organization that
founded and ruled the Croatian state from 1941 to 1945, was inherently con-
tradictory. On the one hand, the Ustasha movement saw itself as an elite body
of patriotic fighting men—“revolutionary warriors,” as one of their leading
ideologues wrote—struggling for an independent Croatian state.3 To achieve
this aim, they were prepared to employ the most uncompromising methods
necessary, including mass murder. This is the familiar image of the move-
ment. However, there was another aspect that has been little discussed: the
importance its ideology placed on cultural concerns. In fact, Ustasha ideol-
ogy was shot through with notions of culture. In the years before it came to
power, Ustasha leadership often stressed that their movement was one of cul-
ture that sought to liberate the Croatian people from the barbarism and back-
wardness of their Serbian oppressors.4
Conventional wisdom suggests that fascism and culture do not belong to-
gether. The novelist Thomas Mann wrote of the Nazis as “heralds of a world-
rejuvenating barbarism” and the Hitler regime as a “dictatorship of the scum
of the earth.”5 The definitive statement on the relationship between the two
was summed up by the character in a Hanns Johst play who exclaimed:
“When I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver!”6 However, fascist
movements were above all national movements with national ideologies.
Therefore, it is hardly surprising that they gave primacy to cultural concerns.
As Anthony Smith and Ernest Gellner have argued, nationalist regimes insti-
 Introduction  3

tute a “cultural and educational revolution” in which ecclesiastical authority

and tradition are replaced by the new deity of the state. Culture thus becomes
“the necessary shared medium, the lifeblood or, perhaps, rather the minimal
shared atmosphere with which alone the members of the society can breathe
and survive and produce.”7
Visions of Annihilation is the story of how one fascist movement tried to
use this necessary shared medium as a means of regime legitimation. In par-
ticular, it examines how the Croatian Ustasha regime used popular culture
and notions of culture to legitimize its campaign of mass murder, deporta-
tion, and persecution against what it considered racial aliens and “foreigners”
in pursuit of a nationalist utopia. There is now a large and growing schol-
arship examining the Ustasha regime’s campaign of mass murder.8 There
is also a growing literature on cultural politics in the Independent State of
Croatia. However, up to now relatively few scholars have placed the two el-
ements together.9 On the contrary, existing studies have tended to separate
cultural politics from the Ustasha regime’s wider genocidal policies and, as a
result, arguably created a distorted and unrealistically benign impression of
both the nature and the role of cultural politics in the Independent State of
Croatia.10
Furthermore, few studies of the Ustasha regime have attempted to situate
the regime in the comparative framework of other European fascist regimes;
nor have they utilized the innovative social, intellectual, and cultural meth-
odologies common to studies of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in the past
three decades pioneered by scholars such as George Mosse and Ze’ev Stern-
hell.11 The culturalist approach is not unproblematic. At its most self-indul-
gent, as Sergio Luzzatto has pointed out, it reduces fascism to “nothing more
than a series of linguistic expressions or a collection of symbols,” a creation
of “rhetoric and fancy” in which social, economic, and ideological ideas play
little or no role.12 Yet in spite of its misuse and overuse in recent years, at the
very least it attempts, as Mosse argued in 1999, to see fascism “as it saw itself
and as its followers saw it, to attempt to understand the movement on its own
terms.”13 The failure to apply such a framework to the Ustasha regime has
meant that an understanding of its worldview, appeal, and mechanics of rule
have been limited.
This book aims to examine the way in which art, literature, ceremonies,
and festivals, as well as social ideas and intellectual arguments, were utilized
in the pursuit of a new society in which the nation would be purified and
regenerated, relations between the classes reinvented, and aging democratic
notions replaced by the energy of youth. At the same time, it considers how
radical-right and nationalist artists, writers, intellectuals, and commenta-
tors interpreted that vision to a wider population. Through an examination of
 4 Introduction

the Ustasha regime’s use of cultural politics, this book aims to gain a greater
understanding of the way in which the regime, its activists, and its intellec-
tual supporters viewed the world and hence the rationale for their destruc-
tive policies. When the Ustasha regime talked about culture, it did not just
mean the rituals, festivals, art, and symbols through which societies and in-
dividuals represent the world around them: culture also signified a code of
conduct by which the nation lived. For Julije Makanec, the minister of edu-
cation, Croatia, through virtue of its traditions and history, its Catholicism,
and its geopolitical position and alliances, belonged to the culture of the West
and Europe. Croatia, he wrote, had been developing for one hundred years
in the heart of Europe; only by retaining its Western European culture and
resisting the Asian culture of the East could it survive. The Ustasha move-
ment, he wrote, was struggling for the Europe of Sophocles, Plato, Dante,
Ruder-Bošković, Pascal, and Goethe.14 Although Makanec’s cultural refer-
ences somewhat resembled a Croatian, radical-right version of T. S. Eliot’s
definition of En­glishness—“Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the Twelfth
of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensley-
dale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-
century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar”—there is little doubt that
the Ustasha regime took the project of remaking the nation in European
terms extremely seriously.15
Some scholars of the Ustasha regime have long made a distinction be-
tween its ideology and that of other radical-right European regimes. Aleksa
Djilas contrasts the permanent dynamism of fascism and Nazism with the
Ustasha regime, which was, he argues, “ultimately a static movement since
[it] aimed for a stable state of affairs: the creation of a homogeneous nation
state.” If fascism was largely a reaction to class and social conflicts within ad-
vanced European societies, a means of addressing the crises of political insti-
tutions and problems of modernity, then the Ustasha regime’s ideology was
far more rudimentary. It had “no developed program for internal affairs and
only a rudimentary idea of what the state should be like” because “the na-
tion and the national state were the supreme goals.”16 But it wasn’t as simple
as this. First, the Ustasha regime was not ideologically monolithic. On the
contrary, it was an uneasy coalition of different interest groups and individu-
als struggling for power and influence with the movement’s leadership and
hoping to make their plans and dreams reality. Another layer of complex-
ity was added by the often sharp regional differences in attitudes toward the
new regime. This meant that while the central Ustasha authorities attempted
to ensure conformity and regularity, regional branches of the movement of-
ten ignored the official line, implementing statutes and laws as they saw fit.
Moreover, for many of the movement’s members, ideologues, and cultural
 Introduction  5

theorists, the foundation of the state marked the starting point, not the cul-
mination, of their aspirations. As much as the foundation of a nation-state,
many within the movement aimed to create a state that would reverse the tide
of secular, modernizing principles. From the perspective of young national-
ist artists, poets, and novelists struggling to be published in cultural journals;
radical students battling against an oppressive Yugoslav state; Catholic intel-
lectuals watching with dismay as their nation collapsed into the mire of secu-
larism and degeneracy; and workers’ unions and syndicates battling against
the inequity of the “Jewish” capitalist system, the Ustasha regime could look
very different. The tenth of April 1941 represented liberation not just from
the “prison” of Yugoslavia in which the Croatian nation had been incarcer-
ated, but from its liberal democratic capitalist ideals too. National revolution
would be joined by cultural revolution.
Second, under the Ustasha regime there was a symbiotic relationship be-
tween cultural politics and racial ideology. The campaign of mass murder
against Serbs, Jews, and gypsies in pursuit of a homogeneous nation-state was
as much driven by social goals and pressures as by racial or national ideology.
The Ustasha regime’s program of racial and national purification was, to use
Zygmunt Bauman’s elegant formulation, genocide with a purpose, “an ele-
ment of social engineering, meant to bring about a social order conforming to
the design of the perfect society.”17 The Ustasha regime viewed the eradication
of all “foreign” influences and populations as one path to national regenera-
tion. It believed that the racial and national purification of the Croatian state
would act as a collective panacea for the nation’s cultural, moral, and social
ills, which would disappear as soon as the contaminating effect of centuries
of foreign influence was eradicated. Only with the completion of this first,
national revolution—the “revolution of blood”—could a “second” social and
cultural revolution make sense. As a result, even the regime’s most utopian
social and cultural experiments were frequently framed in the language of
purification and annihilation. Since cultural politics was a legitimating tool
of the regime’s campaign of mass murder, its evolution both mirrored and,
to a great extent, was dependent on the wider direction of the movement’s
leadership. Following the official abandonment of the regime’s “revolution of
blood,” many of the more radical cultural and social projects were also either
modified or completely forgotten and were only revived much later when the
original revolutionary project was relaunched in 1944.

THE 1930S AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE USTASHA MOVEMENT

The Ustasha movement, according to its own mythology, was born in the heat
of national struggle as a secret army of men dedicated to liberating the op-
pressed Croatian nation from Yugoslavia, in which it had been enslaved since
 6 Introduction

1918. The Ustasha Croatian Revolutionary Organization, or Ustasha move-

ment, was formed, probably sometime in 1930, from radical student societies
and militant youth activists of the Croatian Party of Right (Hrvatska Stranka
Prava—HSP). They had gathered under the leadership of Gustav Perčec, a na-
tionalist journalist, and Ante Pavelić, a lawyer and deputy for the HSP. That
said, there are indications that Pavelić had been considering the formation
of some kind of nationalist insurgency group as early as 1928.18 Ironically,
in 1925 Pavelić had led negotiations with Nikola Pašić’s Radical Party that
would have seen the Croatian Party of Right become the Croatian branch of
the Radical Party in Zagreb and King Aleksandar accede to King Zvonimir’s
crown. In return, Croatia would have received full cultural and political au-
tonomy. This initiative, Pavelić contended, was the only way to prevent the
betrayal of the Croatian national cause. Yet negotiations broke down, and the
assassination of Stjepan Radić, leader of the Croatian Peasant Party, and the
king’s subsequent decision to impose a royal dictatorship rendered reconcili-
ation between nationalist Serbian and Croatian politicians impossible. The
assassination and the violent student protests that followed seemed to signal
to Croatian separatists that peaceful methods would not achieve their aim of
an independent state.
The Ustasha movement’s overriding aim was the establishment of a
greater Croatian state, including Croatia and Bosnia, purified, by force if nec-
essary, of all racial “aliens,” primarily Serbs, present on the the territory of the
future Greater Croatia in large numbers. Although initially anti-Semitism
was not a primary concern of a movement that attracted to its ranks a num-
ber of radical-right Croatian-Jewish students and intellectuals, this began to
change in the 1930s under the influence of National Socialism. In 1933, the
movement set down its ideological program in a document called the “Usta-
sha Principles.” The main features of the seventeen principles were the cre-
ation of an independent Greater Croatia; the construction of a society based
on the values of the peasant zadruga (community), traditional morality, and
the patriarchal family unit; and a campaign of “balanced breeding” and eu-
genics to render the nation racially pure. This set of principles was admittedly
basic. However, it was supplemented by theoretical discussions in Ustasha
journals that sought to develop many of these rudimentary ideas and by the
voluminous contributions of radical-right Croatian intellectuals and writers
in mainstream nationalist cultural and intellectual journals, effectively con-
stituting an unofficial and informal intellectual cadre of the movement.19
Equally, while the Ustasha movement drew on National Socialism and
Italian fascism for much of its ideological inspiration, it was also influenced
by a cohort of Croat intellectuals, anthropologists, scientists, and philos-
ophers, many of whose ideas were rooted in an extreme form of Croatian
 Introduction  7

nationalism. This was especially true of the movement’s attitude toward the
state’s Serb minority, which was profoundly shaped by Croatian intellectuals
and scientists writing in the 1900s, including the anthropologist Ivo Pilar and
the archaeologist Ćiro Truhelka, director of the Agronomical Museum in Sa-
rajevo. Specifically, the regime appropriated Truhelka’s and Pilar’s theories
regarding the foreign nomadic “Vlachian” origins of the Serb population. The
regime’s belief in Croatia as a Western stronghold struggling against an “Asi-
atic” and Balkan East, embodied in Serbia and the Serbs, similarly owed far
more to the writing of Croatian scholars such as the anthropologist and HSP
intellectual Milan Šufflay and radical-right and separatist intellectuals than it
did to Nazi race theorists or fascist philosophers.
The movement also attempted to appropriate a number of Croatian his-
torical and intellectual figures with whom they had a far less easy and unam-
biguous relationship. For example, it early on claimed the politician Eugen
Kvaternik, who had led an insurrection against Austro-Hungarian rule in
Rakovica in 1871, as a kindred spirit. Likewise, it embraced the nineteenth-
century essayist, politician, and father of the Croatian nation Ante Starčević,
the founder of the first nationalist party in Croatia, as a progenitor of the
Ustasha ideology. In neither case, however, were such dubious claims to intel-
lectual lineage uncontested.
Shortly after forming the movement, Pavelić, Perčec, and their followers
fled the kingdom of Yugoslavia, finding sanctuary in a number of European
countries. The leadership established a series of terrorist training camps in
Italy and Hungary where recruits drawn not just from Croatia but also from
the large community of young émigré workers in Europe were transformed
into ruthless terrorists. Pavelić also founded a propaganda center in Berlin
run by two of the movement’s young intellectuals, Branimir Jelić and Mladen
Lorković. The focus of Ustasha activity, however, was the training camps, es-
pecially the camp on the Isle of Lipari in Italy, since this was not only where
Pavelić settled but also where the movement’s council, the Main Ustasha
Headquarters (Glavni Ustaški Stan—GUS), was situated. From the GUS,
the leadership issued edicts and commands, printed propaganda leaflets and
newspapers, and formulated plans. The camps themselves were run on strict
military lines, and all recruits were obliged to take an oath of loyalty to both
the movement and Pavelić: the penalty for violating it was death. According
to one salacious account of the camps published in Yugoslavia by Perčec’s ex-
fiancée, Jelka Pogorelec, disputes, hunger, womanizing, conflicts, killing, and
even suicide among recruits were common.20 The social structure of the émi-
gré Ustasha movement abroad was similar to that of other fascist movements
in Europe. Although students and intellectuals were present, the rank and file
of the movement was dominated by workers, peasants, and sailors. The edu-
 8 Introduction

cational level of rank-and-file Ustashas was basic, and most of the small num-
ber of students in the émigré organization had not completed their university
education. By contrast, among activists and supporters of the Ustasha move-
ment who remained in Croatia (the so-called home Ustashas), there was a far
higher proportion of intellectuals and students: one of its major strongholds
was at the University of Zagreb. Generally, home Ustashas, as befitted their
“cultured” air, were more politically moderate than their pugnacious émigré
comrades, who for their part denigrated home Ustashas as dilettantes and
flâneurs and certainly not real Ustasha men: self-serving opportunists rather
than elite self-sacrificing warriors.
One of the main differences between home Ustashas and émigré Usta-
shas was in their method of political struggle. While home Ustashas, led by
radical students, engaged in violent protests against both their political op-
ponents and the Yugoslav state, less frequently did their methods become
explicitly terroristic. This was in contrast to the émigré Ustashas, who repeat-
edly carried out bombing campaigns and assassinations in an attempt to de-
stabilize Yugoslavia and tended to have a terroristic mindset. From the early
1930s, a wave of violent attacks convulsed Yugoslavia. Although the majority
of terrorist attacks targeted security personnel, prominent regime supporters,
or infrastructure, Ustasha operatives did not shrink from bombing public
transport, venues, and events, and an ethos of official vigilance and paranoia
became a fact of everyday Yugoslavism in the 1930s. Nonetheless, the Usta-
shas were also prepared to sacrifice their own lives, including committing
suicide. In a failed uprising in the Lika in 1932, the Ustasha insurgent Stipe
Devčić blew himself up with his hand grenade rather than face the ignominy
of capture by Yugoslav gendarmes.

THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE INDEPENDENT STATE OF CROATIA

The Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska—NDH) was
formally created on 10 April 1941, following the invasion of Yugoslavia by
Axis forces in March of that year. The new state comprised Croatia, Bosnia,
and parts of Srijem in the Vojvodina region, with the capital in Zagreb. A con-
dominium state, it was divided into two zones of occupation, with one side
of the state controlled by the German authorities and the Dalmatian Coast,
the “cradle” of Croatian culture, annexed by Italy and placed under the con-
trol of Fascist forces. In return, the Duke of Spoleto, the brother of the Italian
king, was created King Tomislav II, the head of a putative new Croatian royal
dynasty. Despite this unpromising beginning, the Independent State of Croa-
tia did have some popular support. In his memoirs, Maček recalled that “a
wave of enthusiasm pervaded Zagreb at this time, not unlike that which had
 Introduction  9

swept through the town in 1918 when links with Hungary were severed.”21 In
a prize-winning essay of 1942, Aleksandar Žibrat wrote that with the procla-
mation of an independent Croatia, “fear and worry disappeared. Croatia had
become free and happy. Our house, which through many years had been a
place of silent family tragedy, experienced on that day, one could say, a heav-
enly joy.”22 Although Žibrat was a member of the nationalist student move-
ment and later a high-ranking cultural commissar, independent accounts
from foreign diplomats appear to confirm the euphoria the declaration of the
new state provoked. On 13 June 1941, looking back on the events leading up to
the establishment of the Independent State of Croatia two months earlier, an
American diplomat in Zagreb, James John Meilly, portrayed it as a popular
national revolution. According to him, shortly after Colonel Slavko Kvater-
nik’s announcement on Ustasha radio that the Independent State of Croatia
had been created, German troops entered Zagreb to be greeted by “thousands
of enthusiastic citizens” who “wildly acclaimed” the first units of the Ger-
man mechanized forces. In the meantime, a small group of local Ustashas,
aided by members of the Civil Defense Peasant Party militia and an Usta-
sha army major, took over public offices, the railway, and the radio station.
“The bloodless severance of Croatia from the Yugoslav state was thus con-
summated,” Meilly recorded.23 Late editions of the evening newspapers on
the evening after independence was declared reinforced the mood of national
elation: reports described strangers kissing each other, students marching
in triumphant processions, and Croatian soldiers throwing off their Yugo-
slav army uniforms.24 However, not all Croatians, even in the early euphoric
days, welcomed the new state. For those Croatians who had been support-
ers of Yugoslavism and even more so the former Yugoslav regime, there was
little to cheer about, and many of them must have known the grim fate that
awaited them. While some chose to flee into exile, others, such as the writer
Ivan Mažuranić and the journalist Ivan Nevištić, committed suicide.
The structure of the state was both centralized in the sense that power was
located in the capital Zagreb, concentrated in the hands of a few select mem-
bers of the movement, and regional in the sense that the state was split up
into a series of counties and regions subject to the authority of powerful and
influential Ustasha regional governors, commissioners, and leaders. Whereas
in theory the Poglavnik, or supreme chieftan—the title Pavelić gave himself
after he came to power in 1941—enjoyed ultimate control over all state deci-
sions, in reality regional governors, commissioners, and leaders implemented
their own rules and regulations responding to the local situation or their own
prejudices. Although the movement aimed to build a new kind of Croatian
consciousness that would unite the nation and eradicate the divisions of the
 10 Introduction

past, in reality, due to the structure of the state and the effective autonomy of
local leaders, Croatia under the Ustasha regime was characterized by a high
degree of regional variation and difference.
Beyond the Poglavnik, the real seat of power was GUS, composed of seven
deputy chiefs of staff, the Corps of Adjutants and Commissioners, and an
extensive and active propaganda department. Ustasha authority in the state
was divided into three branches. The first branch, civilian, referred to regis-
tered members of the Ustasha movement. Adult males were organized in the
male Ustashas, females in the female Ustashas, and youths up to the age of
eighteen in the Ustasha Youth. There was a separate Ustasha student orga-
nization, with its headquarters at the University of Zagreb. A central syndi-
cate, the Main Alliance of Syndicates, led by Aleksandar Seitz, systematized
the relationship between workers and the state. The regime established a cor-
porate economic system predicated on the concept of “Croatian socialism,”
although its most prominent theorists sometimes disagreed over its nature.
The second branch of the state was the military, which comprised the elite
Ustasha army; the regular Croatian army, commanded by Slavko Kvaternik;
various paramilitary units and death squad militias, such as the Black Legion
of Colonel Jure Francetić; and the elite party militia, the Poglavnik Body-
guard (Poglavnikov tjelesne sdrug—PTS). The third branch of the state, the
security service, was overseen by the UNS; a parallel agency, the Director-
ate for Security and Public Order (Ravnateljstvo za sigurnost i javni red—
RAVSIGUR), was located inside the Interior Ministry and headed by Eugen
Dido Kvaternik. UNS contained three main bureaus in addition to a person-
nel bureau, all of which were led by militant Ustashas: Bureau 1, the Ustasha
police, commanded by Božidar Čerovski, which was tasked with the arrest
of political opponents and the suppression of anti-regime dissent; Bureau 3,
Luburić’s Ustasha Defense Force, which administered the state’s concentra-
tion camps; and Bureau 4, the Ustasha intelligence service, headed by Viktor
Tomić, whose network of agents monitored, reported on, and rooted out sedi-
tion. In January 1943, this agency was disbanded and its duties transferred to
RAVSIGUR, with the exception of Bureau 4, which was incorporated into the
PTS. For its part, RAVSIGUR, in addition to these expanded functions, al-
ready operated a number of departments dealing with Serb and Jewish issues
and communist and anti-state sedition, as well as the secret police.
Equally important was the creation of cultural institutions. In January
1941, the regime established a department for national enlightenment within
the Ministry of National Education, headed by Mile Starčević. Initially known
as the State Institute for National Enlightenment, before being renamed the
Main Directorate for Mass National Enlightenment, its mission was to pro-
 Introduction  11

mote education, bring culture to the general public, and supervise the cre-
ation of a mass national culture. In April 1941 the Ustasha regime also created
its first censorship and propaganda directorate. Like many other ministries,
Ustasha propaganda agencies and directorates experienced frequent changes
of name, ideological direction, and leadership, often reflecting which factions
were in ascendancy at the center of the Ustasha power structure. As such they
became primary sites for the struggle over cultural politics and ideology in
the Ustasha state. Meanwhile, the visual paraphenalia of regime propaganda,
such as posters, advertising, and marketing campaigns, was disseminated
through the Ustasha regime’s own public relations company, located on Ban
Jelačić Square.
The organization of the Ustasha state was based on the structure of the
Ustasha movement itself, which was both highly centralized and organic. Ac-
cording to the movement’s 1929 constitution, there were four basic organi-
zational levels. Below GUS stood the largest organizational unit, the center
(štozer), which was comprised of a number of camps (logor). These, in turn,
were made up of concentrations (tabor). The base unit was the swarm (roj).
After the founding of the state, regional branches of the party were organized
into centers, camps, concentrations, and swarms. The organizational units of
the new state replicated this structure. The state was divided into twenty-two
provinces, the equivalent of centers; these were subdivided into 141 districts,
which replicated camps; underneath these were 1,037 communes perform-
ing the role of concentrations; and at the base level was the swarm, which
was represented in villages as well as city neighborhood quarters, streets, and
apartment blocks. This parallel structure of party and state had two aims: to
create a party system that would incorporate all social classes in its ranks and
to ensure that all those within the national community were under surveil-
lance by the state even in their own neighborhoods and homes.25
The idea of the Ustasha state as not only a regenerated nation-state but
one in which citizens would be under constant observation was woven into
the very fabric of the state. Thus in July 1941 the Ministry of the Interior intro-
duced a law stipulating that all landlords, building supervisors, janitors, and
fellow tenants had to report new guests within three days or risk appearing
before the courts. Similarly, those who moved address were required to report
to the authorities within three days or risk appearing before the courts with
the ultimate sanction of a death sentence. The idea of the Ustasha state as a
surveillance state was also a frequent theme of the writing of party journal-
ists and ideologues. As an editorial in the party journal Ustaša reminded its
readers, wherever party members or ordinary citizens were, they were under
its control. “Nothing escapes the eyes of the Ustashas!” This was backed up
 12 Introduction

by the imposition of general curfews in many of the larger cities and towns
on businesses and nightime activities, especially as the regime became more
suspicious about the threat of resistance activities.26
In an initial wave of enthusiasm, the Ustasha movement received an in-
flux of new members, and by the end of 1941, the movement had more than
150,000 new registered members. In August 1941 a right-wing faction of the
Croatian Peasant Party, led by Janko Tortić and Lovro Šušić, formally joined
the Ustasha government, an event that did not please radical Ustashas, who
feared that the entry of non-Ustashas into the movement would weaken its
ideological purity and elite spirit. Stjepan Radić’s widow, Marija, as well as
his son and daughter, also gave their unqualified support to the new state.27
Throughout the summer of 1941 local branches of the Peasant Party pledged
their loyalty to the movement.28 Significant numbers of workers from regional
branches of the Croatian Workers’ Union did the same.29 For their part, the
Peasant Defense and Civil Defense militias had already joined the movement
en masse in April 1941.
In an attempt to demonstrate its popular legitimacy, the regime recon-
vened the Croatian parliament, the Sabor, with its mystical connections to
the medieval Croatian kingdom. However, it only sat for a few months, and its
members, chosen by the regime rather than being elected, were not allowed to
make any decisions. Despite its totalitarian nature, the Ustasha regime’s rule
was chaotic and subject to constant improvisation. Since laws and statutes
were imposed arbitrarily without consent of or discussion with rank-and-file
activists, these same laws and statutes could be easily adapted to suit a chang-
ing situation. Like all totalitarian movements, the Ustasha regime was actu-
ally a multiplicity of pressure groups whose influence rose and fell according
to the fortunes of the state and the whims of the Poglavnik. The enduring
rivalry involved a struggle for dominance by two factions. On one side were
the tough émigré Ustashas and their supporters. They tended to be ideologi-
cally militant and culturally radical, seeing the Ustasha movement as an elite
warrior organization. On the other were Ustasha activists who had largely re-
mained in the homeland throughout the 1930s and, although extreme nation-
alists, were more intellectual, more willing to open the movement to a wider
diversity of views, and more culturally and ideologically “moderate.”
Of course, the factionalism in both the regime and the movement was
more complicated than this: some of the most hardline Ustasha ideologues
advocating the most violent and extreme solutions to the national and po-
litical challenges confronting the state had never been émigrés; meanwhile,
there were also some relatively moderate elements within the émigré faction.
Officials also regularly transferred their loyalties between the two factions.
Moreover, in addition to this basic division, there were numerous other rival-
 Introduction  13

ries: clerical conservatives against secular racists; “socialists” against right-

ists; supporters of Nazi Germany against sympathizers with Fascist Italy;
revolutionary women against “primitive” Ustasha men. There were also nu-
merous regional and intergenerational struggles and divisions. Finally, since
the Poglavnik frequently rotated his administration, meaning that ministries
magically appeared and then vanished and that ministers and officials could,
under pressure, suddenly change faction and outlook overnight, many of the
regime’s racial, social, and cultural policies were inherently ambiguous, un-
stable, and subject to sudden reversals.

SERBS, JEWS, AND GYPSIES IN THE USTASHA STATE

What did national revolution mean? The Ustasha regime interpreted it as a
final solution to rid the state of the dangerous alien populations living within
its borders, without whose eradication a process of national regeneration
could not be put into effect. In the first six months of Ustasha rule, the re-
gime’s racial, cultural, and social aspirations were given their most totaliz-
ing and revolutionary expression. Following the creation of the state—in the
Ustasha regime’s view, a national revolution—it embarked on a “revolution of
the blood” aimed at the violent and forcible eradication of the foreign groups
residing in Croatian living space. While the Ustasha movement, in common
with much of the Croatian radical right, had long considered the Muslims
of Bosnia to be the racially purest of Croatians, the native Jewish population
and the large Serb population were to be removed from national soil perma-
nently through a combination of deportation, execution, and mass murder.
Only then could the state be truly independent.
Beginning in April 1941, the regime introduced a series of laws that were
to serve as the legal basis for the persecution, removal, and destruction of the
Serb, Jewish, and gypsy communities. They included laws barring Serbs and
Jews from public-sector employment and the dismissal of those already em-
ployed in it; the confiscation and “nationalization” of Serb and Jewish busi-
nesses in the service of the national economy, a process overseen by specially
appointed commissars; and the closure of cultural and community organi-
zations. Jews and Serbs living in major cities were evicted from their homes
by the Ustasha police and security services and settled in ghettos, where
they were subject to strict curfews and restrictions on freedom of movement.
They were also banned from leaving the city. In many cities, such as Zagreb,
they were required to register with the Ustasha authorities or face arrest and
incarceration.30 There were also limitations on where they could shop and
the amenities they could use: some municipal authorities banned Serbs, as
well as Jews, from using cinemas, parks, cafés, restaurants, and swimming
baths; from attending all public events; and from buying food at market.31
 14 Introduction

Some Ustasha municipalities, meanwhile, not only banned Serbs and Jews
from owning radios and Croats from sharing radio news with them but went
as far as to ban Serbs from even visiting the homes of Croatians.32
Beginning in May 1941, the regime introduced a series of Aryan laws set-
ting out “race membership” in the new state. Jews and gypsies were banned
from marriage with “Aryan” Croatians, and Jews were forced by law to wear
a “Ž” (Židov—Jew) insignia on their back and front identifying them as Jews.
In some regions, Ustasha authorities introduced similar statutes compelling
Serbs to wear a “P” (Pravoslavac—Orthodox), although they were not directly
affected by the Aryan race laws. In order to afford the new anti-Semitic laws
scientific legitimacy, the newly created Ministry of National Education estab-
lished the Racial Political Commissariat, composed of scientists and racial
experts who were tasked with ensuring that legal statutes were in harmony
with the principles of racial politics. The commissariat also arbitrated in all
cases where there was disputation about racial membership, something that
was of particular importance in deciding the racial eligibility and continued
suitability of public servants and state employees in the bureaucracy and mil-
itary. In spite of such academic bodies, the experience of most Serbs and Jews,
even in the first few weeks, was more often one of humiliation and straightfor-
ward abuse. In many cities and towns, Ustasha authorities forced local Jews to
carry out physically ardous labour such as breaking rocks, watched with be-
musement by people they had gone to school with, shared workbenches with,
or called neighbors. In some cities, the authorities forced Jews to take part in
the destruction of their own synagogues. Simultaneously, regional Ustasha
councils closed Serb orthodox churches and cathedrals en masse and trans-
ferred their assets to the Catholic Church or the state.33
Despite the initially similar treatment of Serbs and Jews, their collec-
tive fates increasingly diverged. By the summer of 1942, the vast majority of
Jews had been deported to one of the numerous Ustasha concentation camps
or to Nazi death camps in Eastern Europe. The only exception was made for
a category of Jews classified according to a clause in the legal statute on race
membership as “honorary Aryans.” Theoretically, under this clause any Jews
who could prove before 10 April 1941 “their service to the Croatian nation, es-
pecially to its liberation, as well as their spouses with whom they were joined
in matrimony,” could petition the Interior Ministry to be granted “honor-
ary Aryan” status. They would not be made subject to the state’s anti-Semitic
laws and would enjoy “all the rights that belong to people of Aryan origins.”34
While the Interior Ministry received hundreds of thousands of applications,
the majority were refused. Successful petitions were generally restricted to
relatives of high-ranking officials (some of whom had Jewish wives) and the
 Introduction  15

movement’s small number of prominent Jewish activists and ideologues and

their families.
Nevertheless, it was the Serb “problem” that the regime was keenest to
solve and that it embarked on with the most brutality. Throughout the spring
and summer of 1941, officials gave inflammatory speeches calling for the an-
nihilation of the Serb population. For example, in a speech at an Ustasha
rally of 29 May 1941, Viktor Gutić, the leader of the Ustasha movement in
Eastern Bosnia, told his followers: “I have published drastic laws for their
complete economic destruction, and new ones will follow for their complete
extermination. Don’t be generous toward any of them. Bear in mind that they
were always our gravediggers and destroy them wherever they may be found,
and the blessings of the Poglavnik and myself will be upon you. . . . Let the
Serbs hope for nothing. For their sakes it would be best if they emigrate. Let
them disappear from this region of ours, this homeland of ours.”35 Similar
pronouncements were made by government ministers in speeches and rallies
throughout the early summer. Milovan Žanić, speaking on 6 June, explained
that the establishment of the Independent State of Croatia meant that those
who had come as “immigrants” would have to leave. “This is a Croat land
and nobody else’s, and there are no methods that we would not use to make
this land truly Croat and cleanse it of all Serbs,” he vowed. Likewise, at a rally
on 27 July the new foreign minister, Mladen Lorković, stated that Ustasha
Croatia’s mission was to “cleanse itself of all those elements that are the mis-
fortune of the nation, that drain healthy forces in our nation. These are our
Serbs and Jews.”36 In a speech at Dugo Selo, meanwhile, Professor Aleksan-
dar Seitz, one of the movement’s leading social theorists, promised: “Never
fear: neither the Serbs nor the Jews will return, and neither will those who
served them. The Serbs and the Jews will not exist, and nor will those who
served them because our Croatian army and Croatian Ustashas are guaran-
teeing it.”37
Although unlike Jews and gypsies the Serbs were never defined in law as
racially impure or non-Aryan, the regime’s spokesmen and ideologues ag-
gressively promoted the image of the Serbs as dangerous, alien, nomadic im-
migrants. For example, in a speech at Varaždin, Mile Budak, the novelist and
minister for religion and education, compared Croatia to a house that was oc-
cupied by a stranger who refused to leave. “In such a situation, you would not
call for a nun or priest for help, but chase him out with an ax.” He also evoked
the racial inferiority of the Serbs. They had come here as “Balkan trash,”
brought here from the East by the Turks, “who used them as vassals and ser-
vants, water carriers and beggars who fell on the deserted hearths of Croats
like locusts.” Now it was time for them to leave. The Vlach Serbs, he prom-
 16 Introduction

ised, would if necessary be driven out of Croatia to the other side of the Drina
to protect this “purest of Croatia’s regions” and this “purest of Croatian ele-
ments.” According to Budak, “they must leave now, whether willingly or not,”
or else the Ustashas would “force them out of the state.”38 In a newspaper in-
terview of September 1941, his colleague Lorković explained that the Serbs
in Croatia were mostly “the remnants of Balkan-Romanian and Gypsy half-
breeds,” who, while “racially” neither Serbs nor Croats, “represent an unstable
element open to foreign influences who, because they belonged to the Serbian
Orthodox Church, succumbed to political Serbianization.”39 To make matters
worse, from the perspective of Ustasha officials and theoreticians, their high
birthrate threatened the very survival of the Croatian nation: Milovan Žanić
declared that they had spread like “hedgehogs” after arriving in Croatia and,
as a result, had begun “to threaten us and soon will endanger us.” The Usta-
sha movement knew that as long as the “problem of the Serbs is not resolved,
our state will be unstable.”40
Finally, Ustasha officials constantly emphasized the crimes—some of
them real but many of them imagined—committed against the Croatian
nation in the 1920s and 1930s at the hands of Yugoslav officials and security
forces as justification for the regime’s envisioned eradication of the Serbs. In
their eyes, they were collectively to be held responsible, and until they disap-
peared, they would always endanger the Croatian nation. In his speech of 27
July, for example, Lorković made direct reference to the injustice of the Yugo-
slav state as a legitimating factor: “You know for sure that the Ustasha move-
ment is using a strong arm to solve the Serb problem in Croatia. Those who
during the past twenty-two years used fire and word here, those to whom no
cruelty was too small, those who have beaten, mutilated, and massacred tens
of thousands of Croatian peasants, those who put tens of thousands of Croa-
tians in jail, those who shot tens of thousands of Croatians and annihilated
countless Croatian lives . . . those across the Sava and Drina now shout.”41
Whether these speeches were the prelude to a preplanned campaign of
mass murder is almost impossible to say, although the postwar testimony of a
number of Ustasha officials suggests they were. Vladimir Židovec, the former
ambassador to Bulgaria, recalled that at a banquet attended by the leadership
on 12 May 1942 Mile Budak stated explicitly that the extermination of the
Serbs and the Jews would be the overriding priority of the new regime. Simi-
larly, at his war crimes trial in 1946, Ljubo Miloš, the young commandant of
Jasenovac, testified that plans for both the creation of a network of concen-
tration camps and a campaign of extermination against the Serbs had been
drawn up by Pavelić and the Ustasha leadership long before 1941. While the
movement hoped that its seizure of power would lead to an uprising among
 Introduction  17

the new state’s Serbs, if a rebellion did not break out, then the movement in-
tended to provoke one as a pretext for its campaign of genocide.42 As early as
14 April 1941, the movement’s official daily newspaper warned that the “res-
urrection” of the Croatian state after eight and a half centuries could only
be achieved through “bloodily confronting our eternal enemies, our native
Serbs.”43
Evidence that the campaign of mass murder was premeditated, at least
in some regions of the new state, is also supported by a number of speeches
made by Viktor Gutić in the early summer of 1941. In a speech to friars at the
Franciscan Petrićevac friary on 12 May 1941, Gutić stated that “every Croat
who today takes the side of our former enemies is not only not a good Croat
but an enemy and saboteur of our planned and well-thought-out blueprint for
the purification of Croatia from all unwanted elements,” suggesting that the
campaign had been planned for some time.44 Gutić also gave the impression
that these plans were quite advanced. In a reply to a question from the news-
paper Hrvatska krajina (Croatian frontier) regarding what the local Ustasha
authorities intended to do with “foreign” populations, Gutić boasted that the
initial killings of Serbs were only the first step. The “grandiose work of cleans-
ing Croatian Bosnian krajina from undesired elements” would be imple-
mented with the introduction of the harshest and “most energetic” measures
possible. “Everything I have done so far is nothing; it is such a trifle that it can
only be seen through a microscope, so you can imagine what more awaits the
enemies of the Independent State of Croatia in our beautiful Croatian Bosnia.
In this respect my hands are untied. I want to serve the will of God and the
nation. All undesired elements will soon be destroyed in our krajina, so that
soon all trace of them will be wiped out, and only a bad memory of them will
remain.”45
Throughout the summer of 1941, in an echo of the regime’s speeches and
statements, Ustasha militias and death squads swept through the country-
side, burning down whole villages and indiscriminately killing thousands of
ordinary Serbs in a variety of sadistic ways. Armed with axes, knives, scythes,
and mallets, as well as guns, they slaughtered men, women, and children,
who were hacked to death, thrown alive into pits and down ravines, or locked
into churches that were then set on fire. In addition, regional branches of the
newly established State Directorate for Regeneration (Državni ravnateljstvo
za poncvo) and Institute for Colonization (Zavod za kolonizaciju) initiated the
program of appropriating the property and assets of hundreds of thousands
of Serbs, while its special militia organized their expulsion and deportation
to Serbia. Others—predominantly members of the affluent Serb middle-class
intelligentsia—were incarcerated in brutal makeshift concentration camps in
 18 Introduction

which torture and murder were common and that few survived. Orthodox
priests were a particular target for the wrath of Ustasha militias and regional
Ustasha officials.46
To facilitate the liquidation of opponents and alien nations, the regime
brought into being a series of emergency and mobile Ustasha courts through-
out the state, the most notorious of which, in Zagreb, was presided over by
the fanatical Ustasha judge Dr. Ivo Vignjević. Under his administration, the
courts implemented arbitrary justice against Serbs and other “enemies” of the
state. This invariably meant a show trial followed by summary execution. Al-
though the Ustasha regime had established a number of temporary concen-
tration camps in the spring of 1941, in the autumn it laid the groundwork for
the construction of a network of permanent concentration camps. The largest
and most notorious of these, constructed between August 1941 and Febru-
ary 1942, was the Jasenovac-Stara Gradiška camp complex on the banks of
the rivers Una and Sava. The regime also established camps in other parts of
the state, earning it the dubious distinction of being the only satellite state in
Europe to have erected concentration camps specifically for the incarceration
and extermination of children.47 Although estimates of the number of Serbs
murdered by the regime vary, even the most conservative figures suggest that
out of a pre-war population of 1.9 million, at least 200,000 and possibly as
many as 500,000 died at the hands of Ustasha death squads, were executed, or
perished in the state’s concentration camps.48

FROM THE “REVOLUTION OF BLOOD” TO THE “REVOLUTION OF THE SOUL”

National revolution and regeneration quickly turned into national catastro-
phe and imminent state oblivion. As a result of the campaign of mass mur-
der and deportation, by the middle of the summer of 1941 many parts of the
countryside, in particular those regions with a large Serb population, were
in a permanent condition of armed insurrection. So serious did the situation
become that the German and Italian occupation forces feared it might lead
to the state’s early collapse. The regime faced pressure both from “above,” in
the form of the occupation powers, and from “below,” from activists and sup-
porters concerned about the anarchic violence and the future viability of the
state to change course. According to German Wehrmacht officials meeting
with Ustasha counterparts in Sarajevo on 20 June 1941, the actions of Ustashas
there had “grown into brutality of the worst kind, creating a horrible impres-
sion on the inhabitants and horrifying many conscious Croats.” Ustasha col-
onel Petar Blašković, who attended the meeting, argued that the movement’s
authorities in Bosnia and Hercegovina, in particular, had to be given “strict
instructions” regarding a more tactical approach toward the Serbs since their
brutality and indiscriminate killing had fomented rebellion among Serbs and
 Introduction  19

outraged local Croats. “They work too openly,” he complained, “and attract
resentment from the population and vigilance from foreigners, who speak
unfavorably about the organization and think it is not equal to the situa-
tion.”49 Some Ustasha officials had already conceded that the methods be-
ing used were counterproductive. In a circular of 18 June 1941, Marko Roša,
commander of the Ustasha units in Knin, Drniš, and Promina, instructed his
troops to “refrain from any acts of violence” in the presence of Italian troops,
with all arrests of Serbs to be carried out “without undue struggle and com-
motion, as quietly and calmly as possible.” There were to be no mass arrests,
only individual ones, “so that it is not obvious”; they could not be beaten “in
public places,” and the “pillaging” of Serb property had to be prevented.50 In a
speech to regional heads and Ustasha officials on 30 June 1941, the Poglavnik
gave the first indication that the leadership shared some of the same con-
cerns, declaring that arbitrary decisions were being taken against the Serbs
without permission being sought from relevant ministries or agencies, creat-
ing unrest and chaos. While their aims were in line with state thinking, he
explained, their methods were wrong: there had to be a “system.”51
Pressure for a rethinking of the methodologies used to solve the Serb
“problem” was largely tactical and driven by pressure from above. There was
no suggestion that the campaign of killing should stop—simply that it should
be carried out in a more orderly and discreet way. Nevertheless, this reflected
divisions within the movement itself. The debate about the efficacy of the re-
gime’s campaign of mass murder and expulsion coincided with a campaign
to purge the movement’s ranks of unwanted elements, which were blamed for
all the crimes of the militias and death squads. On one level, this campaign,
played out in public in the movement’s journals and newspapers, was in-
trinsically propagandistic, providing scapegoats for the violence, chaos, and
criminality of the new state to an increasingly hostile public and simultane-
ously rescuing the honor of the movement and its leadership. However, it also
provided the regime with an opportunity to ideologically cleanse its ranks
of those deemed disloyal or seen as representing a threat. At the same time,
the campaign of purging, expulsion, and punishment accurately reflected not
only the movement’s internal power struggles and divisions but the state’s
first crisis. In August 1941, the movement established a disciplinary court to
punish members of the movement guilty of abuses of power with penalties
including death.52 The Ustasha disciplinary court ensured that “all those who
don’t think in an Ustasha way” would “feel the weight of Ustasha gravity and
justice.” Newspapers duly printed lists of Ustasha soldiers and militia mem-
bers who had been tried in Ustasha disciplinary courts for a variety of crimes,
ranging from corruption and sexual vice to the murder of civilians, to suggest
that the regime took crimes within its ranks seriously.53
 20 Introduction

Ustasha journalists and ideologues argued that the depredations asso-

ciated with the regime in the spring and summer of 1941 had been carried
out by renegade Ustashas: above all those who had joined the movement af-
ter 1941 and had not made the sacrifices the original cohort of revolutionary
Ustasha warriors had in the 1930s: “idlers, Johnny-come-latelies, Slavoserbs,
and ne’er-do-wells” who had nothing in common with the majority of the
movement’s members.54 As early as July 1941, a symbol for this renegade Usta-
sha was found in Josip Smolčić, a low-ranking Ustasha lieutenant accused of
raping a girl and bringing his uniform into disrepute. He was executed by fir-
ing squad. Simultaneously, all Ustasha regional leaders were dismissed, and
under the slogan “Out with them!” the movement launched what it portrayed
as a war of real Ustashas against renegades, or as Mijo Bzik put it, the small
number of “criminals, drones, thieves, and idlers.” In an editorial of August
1941 in Ustaša, the student Milivoj Karamarko vowed that the movement
would destroy all those who besmirched its good name. “The case of Smolčić
should be an example for enemies and Ustashas,” he wrote. “There are others
who will share Smolčić’s fate, there are other Smolčićes. Renegade Ustashas
will no longer be able to conceal themselves or pretend. The sentence will be
painful and merciless. Death!”55
When new Ustasha regional leaders were appointed in November 1941,
the movement’s ideologues portrayed this shift as the ending of one kind of
revolution and the beginning of another. The idea of a new soft line toward
the Serbs, in particular, and a second revolution became an important theme
in their propaganda. In this “post-revolutionary period” the Ustasha move-
ment would transform the revolution of blood into the revolution of the soul,
the revolution of man. As far as Ustaša was concerned, revolutions destroyed
and created, but since they were founded on “militant struggle,” they could
not build. In this second revolution, the ideology of the Ustasha movement
would become the ideology of the entire nation. In flyers, public pronounce-
ments, and leaflets, regional branches of the movement called on ordinary
members of the public to join in the second stage of the revolution, aimed
at the “internal strengthening and organization of our young state.” Since
the Ustasha movement was not just a political party but a “national faith, the
living philosophy of the Croatian people,” all patriotic Croats had to be in
the Ustasha movement. Only in this way could the movement build on and
secure what had been achieved through “the sweat of muscles and the shed
blood” of the movement’s “best sons.”56
If the immediate past had been defined by the sacrifice of blood, the na-
tional revolution had also opened the way to new visions of the future and a
new way of living informed by the “revolutionary dynamism” of the Ustasha
revolution.57 In contrast to the violence of the “revolution of blood,” the “sec-
 Introduction  21

ond” revolution aspired to promote civilized values, remaking the nation in a

more “cultured” form. It necessarily denoted a dilution of the radical Ustasha
ideology. The ethos of the second revolution applied to racial politics, as well
as cultural and social programs. By the autumn of 1941 a position in the Usta-
sha leadership was evolving that the campaign to eradicate the Serbs through
mass murder, deportation, and execution was not likely to succeed. This did
not mean that a cessation of the campaign of mass murder was imminent.
What it did indicate, though, was that other approaches to the Serb “prob-
lem” were emerging. If mass murder could not eradicate the Serb presence,
the regime hoped that a campaign of forced assimilation might. Specifically,
the regime intended to accelerate and systematize a program of mass conver-
sion to Catholicism, something that the regime had been thinking about and
preparing for since the spring of that year but had not implemented widely.
A program to convert the Serb peasant masses to Catholicism would, the re-
gime believed, be attractive to Serbs when it became clear that converting to
Catholicism would save them from further persecution, stopping their armed
insurgency in its tracks. It would also transform the state’s Serbs overnight
into Croats and solve the “problem” of a “foreign” population in the heart of
Croatian living space. The evolution of a new policy was signalled by a change
in the way the Ustasha press redefined the Serbs. No longer characterized as
racially alien immigrants, the Serbs were instead largely portrayed as apos-
tate Catholics, long-lost Croatian brothers, forced to convert to Orthodoxy
under pressure from the Serb Orthodox Church centuries previously.
In the meanwhile, officials from the Ministry of Justice and Religion—for
the most part Catholic priests—developed a conversion program and a set of
regulations and procedures. Overall responsibility for the program was given
to a young Franciscan priest in the religious section of the State Directorate
for Regeneration, Dionizije Juričev, while a Ministry of Justice and Religion
official, Radoslav Glavas, another young Franciscan and committed Ustasha
activist, took responsibility for its procedures and regulations. Glavas’s regu-
lations betrayed the conversion program’s ultimate aim: the eradication of
the Serb identity in Croatia. They stipulated that no educated or middle-class
Serbs or Orthodox clergy could be accepted into the Catholic faith. They were
to be killed, deported, or otherwise removed. Regime officials and ideologues
hoped that without an intelligentsia, ordinary Serb peasants would quickly
abandon their Serb identity and “become” Croats. Throughout the late sum-
mer and autumn of 1941, zealous young Catholic “missionaries” were sent
into the countryside to conduct mass conversion ceremonies. While many
ordinary Serbs were anxious to convert to Catholicism and secure their lives
and property, the intimidating presence of regional Ustasha officials and lo-
cal Ustasha militias made it clear that there was little choice in the matter. For
 22 Introduction

their part, many regional Ustasha officials resented and actively ignored the
conversion program, continuing to order the persecution of Serbs, even after
they had converted. When it became apparent to ordinary Serbs that conver-
sion to Catholicism would not save their lives, the campaign rapidly sank into
irrelevance. By the beginning of 1942 only about two hundred thousand Serbs
had been converted, and conversion ceremonies became ever less numerous
and well attended; forced conversion was effectively abandoned as a policy
shortly afterward. The intimidating and violent conduct of some missionar-
ies, especially younger radical priests from Hercegovina, combined with the
arbitary nature of the conversions, which often involved no religious cate-
chism and were completed in a matter of minutes, did little to lend the proce-
dure any kind of legitimacy.58
After this failure it became clear that only some kind of official rap-
prochement with the Serb population, at least in the short term, was likely to
be viable. The final approach to the Serb “problem” emerged in February 1942.
In that month, at the opening of the Sabor, Minister of the Interior Andrija
Artuković announced the creation of a Croatian Orthodox Church. Hence-
forth the state’s Serbs were to be considered Croatians of the Orthodox faith.
A Croatian Orthodox Church was established, a Russian prelate named Ger-
mogen was appointed patriarch, and churches shut in 1941 now reopened. The
regime also made limited moves to readmit the Serbs to public life, although
the extent of this varied from region to region: a small number of Serbs were
appointed to positions in the central and regional bureaucracy, special Or-
thodox batallions were created in the home guard, and Orthodox cultural
organizations were created.59 The University of Zagreb founded an Ortho-
dox section in the Faculty of Religion for the training of the next genera-
tion of Orthodox priests, and Serb children were allowed to return to school.
Some Serbs even asked for permission to join the Ustasha movement and
applied for their children to join its youth section. It was at this point, too,
that the Ustasha leadership brought a significant number of officials from
the movement’s moderate wing into the central bureaucracy, ministries, and
agencies. Key members of the moderate faction in the regime’s inner circle in-
cluded Foreign Minister Mladen Lorković and Minister for Traffic and Pub-
lic Works Ante Vokić. They were joined in the wider bureaucracy by younger
party technocrats such as the economist Vladimir Košak, appointed minis-
ter of finance, and the journalist Matija Kovačić, a public relations adviser in
the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Simultaneously, a new cadre of able bureau-
crats such as Vjekoslav Vrančić were brought into the regime from outside
the movement.60 By contrast, many members of the radical émigré faction,
while still exerting influence, were either moved to military positions where
their ideological fanaticism was useful or effectively marginalized. Initially,
 Introduction  23

the views of radical Ustasha ideologues and intellectuals were dominant: they
had argued that the Ustasha movement represented a warrior elite whose élan
would be diluted if large numbers of ordinary and possibly not ideologically
conscious individuals were allowed to join. But from the autumn of 1941 on-
ward, many local branches of the movement as well as GUS made a conscious
effort to broaden both the appeal and the membership of the movement. The
movement launched a campaign in the media and on public placards empha-
sizing that even those who were not and could not become sworn members of
the movement could be supporters of the broader movement if they shared its
aspirations and aims. The campaign to refashion the movement as a national
organization encompassing the entire population was given formal definition
with the Ustasha regulations of August 1942. In its statute, the movement de-
fined itself as a national, social, and working movement that gathered “in its
ranks the whole nation” without “regard to class or profession,” advancing
the prosperity “of all classes of the Croatian national community” and teach-
ing all classes that the prosperity of the community “always comes before the
prosperity of the individual.” Along with formal members it also established
a secondary category of “supporter,” defined as someone who supported the
movement and its aims and wanted to visibly demonstrate their support but
could not carry out “the onerous duties” of a full member. Like members of
the movement, supporters applied through their local camp or swarm and
were tasked with “practically and morally assisting the Ustasha organization
in their region and the Ustasha movement more widely.” They also signed an
oath giving their “solemn word” that they would live their life according to
Ustasha principles. In return, they enjoyed the right to wear party insignia
and uniforms; attend its celebrations, shows, performances, and ceremonies;
and use its libraries and bookshops.61
Cultural politics was also adjusted to the new line. As well as broadening
the appeal of the movement, the second revolution took the form of a series
of initiatives to make the nation more “cultured”: citizens were given lessons
in how to use their radios in a more “cultured” way; cinema and theater go-
ers were advised on how to watch films and plays in a more “refined” manner;
footballers and athletes were lectured about behaving in a gentlemanly way
on the soccer pitch and athletic track. As well as making ordinary Croatians
more “cultured,” the new line in cultural politics aimed to bring culture to
the people: the general public was called on to take an active part in the con-
struction of a cultured state through participating in people’s theaters, at-
tending libraries, and improving literacy. Ustasha activists, militia men, and
soldiers were also targeted for these improvement programs, and the regime
and its cultural ideologues devised campaigns to encourage ordinary Usta-
shas to drink less; be sexually virtuous; express themselves in poetry, mu-
 24 Introduction

sic, and literature; visit church more often; and abstain from swearing. At
the same time, regime officials also wanted to make cultural life accessible to
a wider range of artists, writers, and cultural figures, bringing to the state’s
cultural organizations, institutions, and journals a more diverse spectrum of
cultural perspectives, including those of some liberal and leftist intellectu-
als. As with the state’s racial politics, the introduction of the new line in cul-
ture was facilitated by the leadership’s decision to bring young intellectuals
from the movement’s moderate faction into the mainstream of official life in
large numbers at the end of 1941. The promotion of party intellectuals such
as Tias Mortigjija and the group of writers, theorists, and journalists around
the newspaper Spremnost; the appointment of cultural moderates like Mile
Starčević to influential positions in key cultural institutions at the expense of
cultural hardliners; the emergence of the Plug movement of students, young
poets, and writers from within the Ustasha Student movement: all these de-
velopments caused deep resentments.
But changes in the cultural or racial sphere should not be exaggerated.
Some scholars have tended to overstate or interpret benignly cultural politics
in the Independent State of Croatia. For example, in his article about cul-
tural politics in the Independent State of Croatia, Dubravko Jelčić admon-
ished Yugoslav-era historians for interpreting Croatian national and state
life in the Independent State of Croatia through a biased Yugoslav prism that
conflated the Independent State of Croatia with the Ustasha regime. Arguing
for the autonomy of the Croatian state from the Ustasha regime, he wrote that
the European “idealistic and creative” values of Croatia were embodied in the
state and its cultural politics. This fact demonstrated not only that Croatian
culture in the 1940s was an “authentic expression” of the national conscious-
ness but that the Ustasha regime, while repressive in its national politics, was
“visibly tolerant” in the cultural sphere, encouraging a “free spirit” in art and
literature. Specifically, he argued that the regime’s cultural politics, charac-
terized by a “high degree of freedom,” aimed to “rectify or at least amelio-
rate their mistakes in the political field.” Similarly, Ana Antić has recently
argued that Ustasha discourse changed after 1942, transforming itself from
its “initial conservatism, traditionalism (in both sociopolitical and cultural
matters), pseudo-feudal worldview of peasant worship and anti-urbanism,
anti-Semitism and rigid racialism in relation to nation and state into an ideol-
ogy of increasingly inclusive, culture-based and non-ethnic nationalism and
with an exceptionally strong leftist rhetoric of social welfare, class struggle
and the rights of the working class.” After 1942, she concluded, the regime
exhibited increasing “humanism,” as well as “openness, liberalization, and
inclusiveness.”62
However, as this book illustrates, many of these supposedly progressive
 Introduction  25

social and cultural policies were arguably not a reflection of the increasing
liberalization of the state or regime. Rather, they were both a kind of com-
pensation directed at the tough working-class faction of hardliners whose
influence had been sidelined after September 1942 and a form of social con-
trol that would mobilize ordinary citizens behind an increasingly unpopular
state, ensuring their compliance if not their support. Also, since there was
no simple separation between cultural politics and the regime’s wider ideol-
ogy, after the introduction of a “soft” line in 1942, popular culture and litera-
ture represented mediums through which the Ustasha movement’s original
annihilatory visions could continue to be explored, discussed, and debated.
Ideas about the envisioned utopian Ustasha state were refracted by writers,
poets, soldiers, students, and playwrights through cultural journals, poetry
anthologies, and agitprop theater productions at the same time as they were
ostensibly removed from the ideological sphere. Cultural politics, intended
as a compensation for the retreat from radicalism, ultimately became a meta-
phor for it too, exposing the profound divisions that existed at all levels of the
regime and more widely in the movement itself. Of course, the state’s cultural
politics was not only utilitarian: it also reflected the regime’s genuine com-
mitment to refashioning society and remaking citizens in the image of the
Ustasha weltanschauung.
That a change in cultural politics did not necessarily reflect a transforma-
tion in state ideology is demonstrated by the fact that long after the launch
of the second revolution, the state remained committed to its original cam-
paign of national and racial purification. It was in July 1942, in fact, that one
of the bloodiest actions against the Serb population occurred when, with
German troops, Ustasha forces launched an assault on the Serb population on
Mount Kozara. As a result, thousands of Serb men were executed or deported
as forced labor to Germany, while tens of thousands of women and children
were incarcerated in appalling conditions in concentration camps where
many of them starved to death, were murdered, or died of disease. It was also
in summer 1942 that gypsies were deported en masse to the Jasenovac camp.
Their collective fate was directly affected by the aborted campaign of geno-
cide against the Serbs, since after the mass armed uprisings by Serbs in the
summer of 1941, a plan for resettlement was transformed into one of depor-
tation and genocide.63 Meanwhile, the persecution of Jews continued relent-
lessly. Few of them benefitted from “honorary Aryanism,” and even some of
those who did were later murdered. On 24 February 1942, in the same speech
to the Sabor in which he announced the founding of the Croatian Orthodox
Church, Andrija Artuković heralded the imminent destruction of the state’s
Jews, promising that the Ustasha regime would deal with the final solution of
the Jewish question even more radically than the Nazis had, taking “healthy
 26 Introduction

and decisive action” to destroy the “insatiable and poisonous parasites” and
writing “the newest and most glorious pages” of Croatia’s history. This speech
signaled the beginning of the systematic campaign for the Jews’ mass depor-
tation to Ustasha concentration camps and Nazi death camps in the East that
summer.64 Nor should it be assumed that the changes were necessarily sin-
cere: for example, on 4 September 1941, only days before the new regime an-
nounced a general amnesty for Serbs, the Poglavnik had stated in a speech
in front of influential Ustasha commissioners and officials, including Nikola
Mandić and Jure Francetić, that “all the Serbs should be exterminated!”65
Totalitarianism and violence remained woven into the very structure of
the state. The campaign of mass murder against ordinary Serbs continued at
least until the autumn of 1942. In September 1942, Edmund Glaise von Hor-
stenau, the German general in Zagreb, reported Eugen Dido Kvaternik saying
in conversation that “in a certain period of time he would kill the remaining
one and a half million Serbs, including women and children.” In conversation
with Glaise von Horstenau a few weeks later, the Poglavnik denied he had any
intention of annihilating the Serbs—something the German general strongly
doubted. At the time he made this statement, the Poglavnik was preparing
the dismissal of both Eugen Dido Kvaternik and his equally hardline father,
Colonel Slavko Kvaternik. While after their removal the leadership increas-
ingly blamed the state’s atrocities on them, as well as on other hardline offi-
cials replaced or sidelined at the same time, it also reflected the fact that even
in September 1942 there were still influential voices within the regime com-
mitted to the implementation of the final solution. This second opportunistic
purging of Ustasha ranks by the Poglavnik in September 1942 suggests that
the new line and the accompanying personnel purge in favor of a more mod-
erate cadre of bureaucrats reflected less a decision to abort the campaign of
mass murder and more a short-term tactical maneuver—under pressure from
the occupation forces—to postpone the revolution of blood.66
In any case, many Ustasha agencies, authorities, and activists remained
bitterly opposed to the new line toward the Serbs and simply ignored its
strictures. This hostility was also reflected in the new soft line on culture,
which, even at its height, could never entirely conceal the incipient radical
resentment of many Ustasha cultural commissars and ideologues bubbling
just beneath the surface. Ultimately, the “second” revolution in both cultural
and racial politics was considered contingent, viewed as temporary and un-
wanted, forced on the state by the course of events and intraparty divisions.
The regime leadership intended that once Germany and its allies had been
victorious and the state stabilized, it would return to its radical racial and
cultural agenda.
The crisis between late summer 1941 and the winter of 1942 and the sub-
 Introduction  27

sequent relaunch of the Ustasha project should be put into context. Although
the struggle between extremists and moderates in this period was probably a
defining one, the Independent State of Croatia and the Ustasha regime were,
in fact, characterized by a series of crises and relaunches. One example of
this was the collapse of Italian rule in Dalmatia in September 1943, the rein-
tegration of the region into the Croatian state, and the beginning of a second
ostensible campaign to purge Ustasha ranks of hardliners. The movement’s
moderate faction also needs to be qualified. With few exceptions, it was in
no sense liberal and was “moderate” only in comparison to the extremism of
the tough radical émigré Ustashas and their supporters. Many of its represen-
tatives, both in the higher echelons and at lower bureaucratic levels, shared
many of the cultural and racial goals of hardliners, although they frequently
disagreed about how these could most effectively be achieved. In fact, some
of those capable technocrats brought in from outside the movement and un-
burdened by ideology proved themselves to be the most ruthlessly efficient in
the implementation of the regime’s final solution and the most loyal new re-
gime cadre, since promotion depended on obedience and efficiency, not ques-
tioning and theorizing. One of the many reasons why Vjekoslav Vrančić rose
so rapidly through party and bureaucracy ranks, eventually becoming a key
member of the Poglavnik’s inner circle, was his diligence and pragmatic single-
mindedness, as undersecretary of the interior, in ensuring that measures
against Jews and Serbs were thoroughly implemented. Likewise, as finance
minister, Vladimir Košak, a close colleague of Lorković and a member of the
moderate faction, utilized his economic knowledge and skills to oversee the
confiscation and nationalization of Jewish and Serb property. For his part,
Ante Vokić, with his friend Jure Francetić, was a founding member of the
Black Legion. Ultimately, regime conflicts were always as much about power
struggles and personality clashes as ideology. Furthermore, not all ideologi-
cal and cultural aspects of the Ustasha program evolved, and some did not
essentially change at all.
Even this limited revision of ideology was deemed a step too far by mili-
tant factions. Tensions reached an apex in the autumn of 1944. The previ-
ous September, following the reoccupation of Dalmatia by Ustasha forces and
the abolition of the Croatian “monarchy,” the state had been renamed the
Independent Republic of Croatia, an allusion to the revolutionary workers’
and peasants’ republic that Ustasha ideologues always claimed they wanted
to establish. This fired the ideologically utopian fervor of activists, especially
student leaders, who called for a return to the movement’s socially radical
roots. But it also had the effect of mobilizing the militant faction of the re-
gime. If the events of September 1943 proved to be the high watermark of re-
gime moderates, then September 1944 proved to be their nadir. By the middle
 28 Introduction

of the next year, Ustasha radicals and their ideas were back in fashion. In
September 1944, with the state facing immiment collapse, the leaders of the
moderate faction, including Lorković and Vokić, were arrested on charges
of sedition, as were many of their key supporters among students, the bu-
reaucracy, and the intelligentsia. The radical émigré faction returned to favor
and ascendancy in both the ministries and the leadership’s inner circle and,
after a brief interlude of two years, their ideology too. Anxious to relaunch
their original revolutionary program in cultural and racial politics, they set
to work reviving the defining revolution of blood, especially against the Serb
population. Resentful and vengeful, hardliners also instigated a campaign to
purge the movement of traitorous elements, principally leading advocates of
the “soft” line on race and culture who had held sway since the middle of 1942.
By the time the state collapsed, the regime was once more permeated by the
“hard” values of apocalyptic fervor, fanaticism, and mass murder. Radical-
ism also returned to cultural politics. Many cultural projects abandoned by
the regime at the end of 1941 were revived. There was a renewed campaign
for language cleansing; the idea of female militancy and activism within the
movement that had briefly flourished in spring 1941 was relaunched; numer-
ous experimental sociocultural ideas were likewise revived. Cultural politics
was joined to racial politics, once again in revolution.
CHAPTER 1

THE GENERATION OF STRUGGLE

Ustasha Students and
the Construction of a New Elite

O
n 23 April 1941 eleven hundred student and high school members of
the Ustasha movement gathered in the courtyard of the main univer-
sity building. Led by the commander of the Ustasha University Center,
Zdenko Blažeković, these “steeliest of Ustasha warriors,” with the Croatian
tricolor on their arms, marched toward St. Mark’s Square with “military dis-
cipline and in military formation” to hear a speech from the Poglavnik. In si-
lence the Ustasha “student-warriors” listened to the speech of their Poglavnik
and then took an oath of loyalty to him and the Ustasha state. Praising radi-
cal nationalist students for having led the resistance of the nation to Serb rule
in the 1930s and the liberation of the homeland, he told them: “We will not
avenge ourselves on anyone but we will also not permit there to continue to
live in the nation poison and weeds, which still suffocate the Croatian na-
tion and its life. We will not allow anyone to exist in the State of Croatia who
would work against the interests of the Croatian nation.” In reply, the stu-
dents roared their approval, declaring themselves prepared for all sacrifices.1
In a speech afterward, Blažeković told the Poglavnik that Ustasha stu-
dents were prepared to “follow you in life and death!” while the Poglavnik
reminded them that the university flag being hoisted by Ustasha students
contained parts of the flag that Croatian students had carried into battle in
1848, when they had shed their blood to protect the borders of Croatia. Only
liberated nations could achieve not just economic and cultural regeneration

29
 30  The Generation of Struggle

but national survival itself: “If heads had not fallen, if there had not been
blood, be assured that the Serbs and the Serbians from Serbia would be rulers
in our land. They were sent by our so-called native Serbs in Croatia. We are
the possessors of something that is great: that is the greatest decisiveness and
preparedness as well as killing machines. Brothers and friends! The Croatian
nation has taken up the task of eliminating from its land its external enemy.
Now it will remove its internal enemy. The time has come when the Croatian
nation will take power in its own hands. With its own hands it will elimi-
nate everything that oppressed and strangled this nation.” While he wanted
a peaceful state in which a new Ustasha nation-state could be constructed,
he nonetheless cautioned: “I am prepared to—as you and we all are when it
is necessary—heroically defend what has been achieved with weapons and in
blood.”2
When the Ustasha movement came to power in 1941, radical students who
flooded into the new Ustasha student organization were among its most un-
compromising supporters, enlisting enthusiastically in the movement’s mi-
litias and death squads and joining the bureaucracy. For its part the regime
constantly stressed the sacrifice and heroism of the new generation during
the dark days of oppression in the 1930s. Yet, very rapidly, this mood of en-
thusiasm evaporated as even committed Ustasha students confronted the re-
ality of onerous military duty, the regimentation of university life, and the
authoritarianism of the regime. Many Ustasha students watched in dismay
as the initial social and cultural radicalism of the regime fell away, replaced
by ideological aimlessness, stagnation, and official corruption. They were also
impatient for real power and influence.
Paradoxically, the initiation of the second revolution combined with their
status as the future Ustasha elite saw the emergence of new thinking on race
and culture among Ustasha students, particularly those arriving at university
after 1942. When students began openly to express this new line of thinking
in 1944, they were assailed on all sides: both from “above” in the form of an
older generation of student commissars and more ideologically fanatical con-
temporaries and from “below” in the form of younger, more militant Ustasha
Youth activists. Although Ustasha students rallied to the defense of both the
regime and the state after a hard line on culture and race was reimposed in
1944, energized by the establishment of a worker and peasant republic, their
leaders were now viewed with suspicion by many in the regime hierarchy,
less heralds of revolution and more hare-brained schemers. Ironically, in late
1944, when the leaders of the new student politics were arrested, they were
incarcerated in the same prisons as an older generation had been in the late
1930s, now victims of a regime they had helped bring into being.
 The Generation of Struggle  31

THE NATIONALIST STUDENT MILIEU IN THE 1930S

In 1923, Ladislav Žimbrek, a liberal student activist, mordantly admitted
that Yugoslav youth were “without orientation or ideas, without a future,
and without a worldly perspective.” Liberal ideals simply did not capture the
imagination of youths in the same way as extreme nationalism. Instead, in
the service of poisonous nationalism and the “personal ambitions of our Bal-
kan politicians,” youth were having “weapons, revolvers, and bombs placed in
their hands” and being encouraged to “destroy cafés and bookstores.”3 Uni-
versity students, in particular, were drawn to nationalist and politically ex-
treme groups. There were a number of reasons for this. In Yugoslavia, the
vast majority of students were extremely poor, coming from poverty-stricken
parts of the country and suffering great material hardships to attend univer-
sity. True, there were government scholarships, but only 5 percent of students
received them, and scholarships from other sources such as the armed forces
were rare and, in any case, paltry.4 Universities tried to compensate for this by
ensuring that economically disadvantaged students were able to stay in dor-
mitories and eat cheaply in the university dining halls. Every semester, each
student was given thirty dinars from the university so they could visit the
doctor, hospital, or clinic and purchase medicine if they were ill.
However, the fact was that many students were reduced to sleeping rough
and living off scraps as their finances did not stretch to the rent on an apart-
ment or regular meals. As Žimbrek and a journalist, Stevan Jakšić, pointed
out, the extreme poverty of students and a feeling that they were being ig-
nored was a dangerously combustible combination. Young people felt them-
selves “denied and pushed away from everything” despite the fact that youth
were officially lauded as the progenitors of everything new, exciting, and ener-
getic. In exchange for their idealism, Žimbrek argued, young people had been
offered only the prospect of a continuation of the older generation’s world of
“wealth and privilege” and therefore were being asked to sacrifice their ideals
for very little. Jakšić complained that university professors had little time for
or interest in their students, leaving them feeling disconnected and alienated.
These feelings were exacerbated by the growing social stratification between
students. Before the war, he wrote, poor students had always been able to ob-
tain scholarships and afford smart clothes, good food, an apartment, and
books. But now there was an enormous social gulf between students. “How
can a group be united that contains such divisions?” Jakšić asked.5 In fact,
students were more politically atomized than ever. While most students were
enrolled in Yugoslav-orientated societies, this was not evidence of sincere be-
liefs, in contrast to nationalism, which was playing an increasingly crucial
 32  The Generation of Struggle

role in student life. Political activity was steadily characterized, Jakšić com-
plained, by “sectarian fanaticism,” exacerbated by a feeling that students from
some regions were receiving preferential treatment in scholarships. Small
wonder that students’ political leanings were characterized by “fury, extreme
nature, dizzy-headedness, and intolerance.”6
Politically committed students only ever comprised a minority of the uni-
versity population. Writing at the beginning of 1936, Vasilj Popović viewed
the greater part of students as “indifferent or in some other way uncommit-
ted” in the midst of the fierce ideological rift between the radical left and the
radical right, even if their passivity indirectly aided the “aggressive energy” of
far left and far right students on campus.7 Nationalist commentators too criti-
cized the attitude of contemporary Croatian university youth. Young radical-
right journalists like Vladimir Mintas, writing in Nezavisnost, despaired of
the indolent and apathetic attitude of many contemporary Croatian students,
complaining that the majority of them possessed “no enthusiasm for any-
thing noble or idealistic, showing absolutely no militancy: their only ambi-
tion lies in passing exams, taking home a wage, becoming professionals, and
ruminating.”8 Those students who were ideologically radical typically came
from poor peasant families in ethnically mixed border and mountainous
regions and were militant, tough, and fanatical. In the villages from which
many of the most radical students came, social conditions were appalling. On
his visits to rural Yugoslavia, Stevan Jakšić found the villages to be “pauper-
ized” both economically and socially, with primitive levels of health and so-
cial care and prostitution, broken marriages, venereal disease, violence, and
alcoholism rife.
Education levels were also deplorable, he noted. Although the govern-
ment had made some effort to increase literacy levels with the opening of
new schools, the teachers who had been sent to them made little attempt to
hide their discontent at teaching in these remote communities. In any case,
many of these schools were inaccessible to peasant children, who often had to
walk as many as ten kilometers every day, often in snow and mud, to reach
the schools, arriving hungry and barefoot. It was almost impossible for peas-
ant parents to send their children to a high school in the city, and as a result,
many gifted children were abandoning their education to work in the fields
for long hours at the “most miserable” wages. Was it therefore any wonder, he
asked, that “today at university we have students from villages who are starv-
ing and do not know how they will survive and where they will finish their
studies?”9 Even if they were able to attend high school, Mihailo Pražić pointed
out, many of them graduated without finding gainful employment. In effect,
they became a kind of educated proletariat, prey to extremist ideologies.10 If
they made it as far as university, there was no guarantee of a job once they had
 The Generation of Struggle  33

completed their studies, leading, in the words of one university professor, to

the “hyperproduction of intellectuals” chasing a very small number of jobs
in government ministries.11 Overall, as sociologist Julija Bošković noted, this
was an incredibly angry generation, with the gulf between older and younger
becoming ever wider, even in the most respectable “bourgeois” families.12
Although Yugoslav universities were technically autonomous institu-
tions, in practice there was a significant element of state interference, and
professors and teachers were routinely removed from tenured positions for
holding inappropriate political opinions. In 1924, for example, the central
government removed a number of professors from the University of Zagreb.
This was condemned in a student resolution that complained that the atmo-
sphere at the university was becoming increasingly violent and oppressive
and accused the authorities of wanting to make universities into caricatures,
with “the systematic bulldozing and persecution of all those who think freely
or differently.”13 The issue of academic freedom was not quite as simple as the
resolution implied, however. Nationalist students engaged in the same kind
of censorship themselves to silence ideas they did not like. In 1934, for exam-
ple, a number of student clubs at the University of Zagreb sent a memoran-
dum to the leading Croatian cultural institution, Matica Hrvatska, calling for
liberal Croat writers or those who had had work published in Belgrade to be
censored from its journal Hrvatska revija because they were “traitors, desert-
ers, and émigrés.”14 Similarly, when liberal sociologist and professor Dinko
Tomašić presented a seminar at the philosophy faculty in 1937, nationalist
students rioted and threw eggs at him for his lack of “knowledge” and “ob-
jectivity.” They complained that he had cited “degenerate” and “pansexual”
sociologists such as Sigmund Freud, a sign of his leftist bias. Liberal journals,
by contrast, interpreted this as another sign of the depressing ascendancy of
nationalist extremism at Croatia’s premier seat of learning.15
Intellectuals who had no particular leftist credentials were also attacked,
both physically and verbally. Srećko Zagliu, for example, was subject to a vit-
riolic student protest at the book launch of his legal textbook in 1936 simply
because it was printed in Cyrillic; radical students also attacked University of
Zagreb professor Ljubomir Tadić by pelting him with rotten eggs and stab-
bing him in the legs because he would not support their ideological agenda.
After cooperation with communist and leftist students against the Yugoslav
regime broke down following the collapse of a Yugoslav-wide student strike
in 1936, radical-right students resorted to increasingly aggressive rhetoric.
In a leaflet of April 1936 they signaled the beginning of more violent meth-
ods: “In our struggle we have tried cultured methods, but in vain. Therefore,
we have ceased with paper petitions, ‘agreements,’ and abstentions. It is time
that we, with the rest of the Croatian nation, enter into a mutually beneficial
 34  The Generation of Struggle

struggle. In agreement with the position of the competent political leaders of

the Croatian nation, we are changing the character of the current struggle
that we have led so decisively and honorably for such a long time.” They also
formed their own separate student union, the Croatian Academic National-
ist League (Hrvatska akademička nacionalistička liga—HANL), comprising
rightist students from the Peasant Party student society Matija Gubec and
the clerical student club Domagoj, as well as radical-right and proto-Ustasha
student organizations.16
Radical-right students alone were not responsible for campus extremism.
Like many European universities in the 1930s, the University of Zagreb was
the center of a fierce ideological conflict between ideologically opposed stu-
dent groups. In the 1930s students at the University of Zagreb, on both the
radical right and the Marxist left, were becoming progressively more influ-
enced by international events. Nevertheless, the victory of Franco’s Falangist
forces in the Spanish Civil War undoubtedly energized radical-right student
clubs and societies. They also gained ideological inspiration and context from
a number of extreme right-wing student movements elsewhere in Europe,
including the League of the Archangel Michael at universities in Çluj and
Bucharest and anti-Semitic student societies in Poland. In the late 1930s, the
influence of radical nationalist students was growing and their support in-
creasing. By 1940, they comprised the largest single group on campus and
in a series of student council elections gained control of a number of faculty
clubs. Their program was only narrowly defeated in 1939. In the same year,
the Inter-Club Committee of Croatian University Societies, led by the radi-
cal Student Law Society, banned the Club of Medical Students on the grounds
of its “non-Croatian and anti-Croatian” membership and political opinions
that did not reflect the true opinions of the vast majority of Croatian medical
students.17
Yet despite this success and growing appeal, for much of the 1930s they
were never able to defeat the combined votes of communist and leftist stu-
dents, primarily from the left wing of the Peasant Party, in elections. Conse-
quently, in the increasingly acrimonious atmosphere, clashes between leftist
and rightist students became ever more frequent, violent, and in some cases
deadly. By 1936 the Zagreb police were becoming sufficiently alarmed by the
activities of nationalist students to send a report to the rector of the univer-
sity addressing the large number of illegal student journals and underground
newspapers glorifying the struggle of the Ustasha movement. On 14 April
1937, following the funeral of Stipe Javor, the leader of a radical nationalist
worker youth organization and a clandestine Ustasha activist, there was a vi-
olent clash between leftist students and radical-right students, resulting in the
fatal stabbing of Krsto Ljubčić, a communist student. Radical-right students
 The Generation of Struggle  35

were unrepetant, alleging that on the day he was killed, Ljubčić had been car-
rying a knife and cudgel with him. Their struggle was one of self-defense,
they argued. Who could criticize them if, in the struggle against commu-
nists, “who are in the main foreigners (Jews, Serbs, and Montenegrins),” they
“lightly or seriously wounded one assimilated ‘Croat,’ by his own admission
a militant communist as well as a Belgrade scholarship student, one Jew and
three Serbs, all former Chetniks”?18 Moscow and Belgrade were aiming to de-
stroy the national consciousness of Croatian students by using communist
students to attack them. In addition to Ljubčić, who was a “Serbian-Albanian
cross-breed,” there was Abin Mordehaj, “a rich Jew from Sarajevo,” and Luka
Tubin, an entrepreneur, Serb, and former Chetnik from Bosanska Krupa and
now a Marxist:
Various Moseses, Jovans, Savas, and Mićuns in the greatest educational
institution of the nation, which is proud of its thousand-year culture,
transformed it into a battlefield of torture and wild Balkan Chetnik komiti-
das hajduks. In Zagreb various foreigners, Serbs, Montenegrins, Jewish and
Macedonian traitors, former Orjuna [Organization of Yugoslav Nationalists]
activists, Chetniks, and Yugoslav centrists united in the Zagreb branch of
the Moscow Cheka; threatened the life and security of Croatian students;
and in the Croatian University spat on Croatian national warriors, obviously
thinking that, for the Croats, the end had come, and now the Mordehajs,
Jovans, and Mićuns would rule.19

At the same time, radical nationalist students were also involved in

a struggle with the Peasant Party student organization for the loyalty and
votes of the student body. Although radical nationalist and Peasant Party stu-
dents had been allies in the early 1930s, by the middle of the decade they were
fierce adversaries. Students were abandoning the Peasant Party organization
for radical-right student clubs, and these included a number of subsequently
prominent Ustasha officials, such as the future Ustasha student commissar
Zdenko Blažeković. Vladko Maček recognized the threat that radical-right
students posed to the hegemony of the right-wing Peasant Party student
clubs, and in a speech to nationalist university students in December 1935,
he warned that those students who challenged the authority of the Peasant
Party student organization should be seen as doing the work of the Yugo-
slav regime and therefore as enemies of the Croatian nation: only by joining
Peasant Party student organizations could they realize the liberation of the
Croatian nation. Given that “the entire Croatian peasantry, the vast majority
of Croatian workers, and significant and increasing numbers of intellectuals
and writers” were now supporters of the party, students should also do their
patriotic duty.20 His plea fell on deaf ears. As the Peasant Party became ever
 36  The Generation of Struggle

more divided between left and right factions, politically engaged students
abandoned the Peasant Party for either the Croatian Communist Party or
separatist radical-right student clubs allied to the Ustasha movement.
As well as clashes with rival student groups, radical students aimed to de-
stabilize the Yugoslav regime with demonstrations and riots. One of the larg-
est and most violent of these occurred between the evenings of 20 and 23 June
1928, when students rioted on the streets of Zagreb in protest at the shooting
of the Croatian Peasant Party leader Radić. For three days, students built bar-
ricades and held the center of the city in siege. The riots ended in bloodshed
when three nationalist youths—Jerbić, Bjelos, and Majčen—were shot dead
by Zagreb police. Their graves immediately became sites of pilgrimage for
students. At the funerals of the youths, an editorial in a nationalist youth
newspaper proclaimed that all those who had fallen in “the empire of injus-
tice, crimes, lies, and barbarism cry out for revenge, cry out for reprisals.”
Radical students were duty-bound to carry out this vow.21 Radical students
also made use of eye-catching public “happenings” and spectacles to draw
attention to their nationalist cause. One of these took place on 1 December
1928, the day Yugoslavia celebrated ten years of its uncertain existence. For
radical students, the fact that there was to be a celebration at the Cathedral
of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary simply added insult to injury.
On the day of the festivities, they distributed leaflets on the streets of Zagreb
that proclaimed: “Croats! Do not celebrate this day of shame, this day of de-
feat!”22 Three students also planted a black flag each on the roof of the ca-
thedral to represent the three “catastrophes” that had engulfed Croatia since
1918: the creation of a Yugoslav state in 1918, the failed anti-Yugoslav uprising
of 5 December 1918, and the assassination of Radić in 1928. At the University
of Zagreb, black flags were hoisted at the buildings of the Faculty of Law, into
which students had barricaded themselves, and Yugoslav banners were torn
down. In the violent confrontation that followed, the student Stanko Petrić
was shot dead by the police. According to one account of these events, the
whole of Zagreb rose up against Serb rule. “On the corner of Jurišćeva and
Petrinjska, there flowed a great stream of Croat blood as a terrible stamp of
foreign bestiality.” By the end of the day, a number of students had been ar-
rested: radical students called for university strikes until all their comrades
had been released. Alleging the arrested students were being tortured by the
police, they warned noncommitted students that violence awaited anybody
who disobeyed the strike call.23

THE SOCIAL VISIONS OF THE NEW GENERATION

Racial and national concerns always played a key role in radical student ideol-
ogy. Inspired by the anti-Semitic activism of similar student groups in Roma-
 The Generation of Struggle  37

nia and Poland that had forced their universities to introduce “ghetto clubs”
for Jewish students, they made increasingly regular and vociferous demands
for a numerus clausus at the University of Zagreb despite the fact there were a
number of baptized Jews among their leadership.24 Other student groups such
as the Brothers of the Croatian Dragon posted leaflets around the Zagreb
University campus proclaiming death to the Jews. Meanwhile, in their news-
papers, leaflets, and proclamations they recycled anti-Semitic propaganda
and stereotypes and dedicated themselves to addressing the Jewish “problem”
in Croatia.25 However, for the majority of them, anti-Semitism was a relatively
marginal concern. A more important preoccupation in their newspapers and
petitions was the Serb “problem.” They frequently attacked Croatian Serb stu-
dents and the wider Serb community, declaring it the natural enemy of the
nation’s aspirations. They mused at length on the “criminal-pathological eth-
nography” of this “Vlach-Morlach-gypsy element,” which, as far as they were
concerned, represented nothing other than the Serb Belgrade bourgeoisie
(čarsija), intent on destroying Croatia and Croatdom. The inherent treachery
of the Serb population was demonstrated by their economic and commercial
activities throughout the 1930s. During a period when the Croatian economy
was experiencing a terrible depression, Serb banks, businesses, and institu-
tions were flourishing, motivated by the aim of “weakening, enervating, and
destroying” Croatia.26 Liberal Yugoslavs were also assailed for their traitorous
behaviour. The well-known medical expert Andrija Štampar, by the late 1930s
a professor of social medicine at the University of Zagreb, was vociferously
criticized in the radical student press for his program to improve student liv-
ing conditions and access to free health clinics and dining halls because while
nationalist students acknowledged his contributions to improving the health
of Croatian students, he had allowed “trouble-making” communist students
as well as “all other anti-Croatian and non-Croatian elements,” including
Serbs and Slovenes, to stay in student dormitories. Since the student dorms
had been built by Croatian students themselves, the only students living in
them should be “future generations of impoverished sons of the Croatian na-
tion and not traitorous trash and foreigners.”27
On 21 April 1939, as Vladko Maček and Dragiša Cvetković met to negoti-
ate the terms of an autonomous Croatia, right-wing student clubs in Zagreb
led by Grga Ereš and Muhamed Hadžijahić convened a conference to declare
that Bosnia was a Croat land and should be included in any future Croatian
state. The resolution, which showed concern that some of the inhabitants of
Bosnia would fall under the power of “immigrant Serb elements,” declared
that it would not allow Bosnia to be separated in the event of any agreement
between Belgrade and Zagreb. The students proclaimed that the unity of Bos-
nia was essential to the liberation of the Croatian people: without it any Cro-
 38  The Generation of Struggle

atian state was doomed to failure. It was “the heart, center, and stronghold
of the Croatian lands,” and without Bosnia and Hercegovina, “between the
two outstretched arms of Croatia would yawn a mortal gulf.” For the stu-
dents, the racial blood brotherhood of Catholics and Muslims in Bosnia was
obvious. The Muslims, they declared, were the racially purest part of Cro-
atdom, comprising a majority over the “immigrant Vlach-Greek Eastern or
Serb elements.”28
Not all concerns revolved around purely national issues. Radical students
often called demonstrations to protest a variety of other concerns: living
and studying standards at the university, the structure of university exam-
inations, the economic situation. In a student resolution of 1936 protesting
student living conditions, they declared: “We are fighting today for our class
and professional rights. We seek to be allowed to study and live. We want the
university to be a real national scientific and educational institution that will
be in the position to carry out its aims and duties toward the Croatian peo-
ple.”29 At the same time, through their poetry collections, literary journals,
and illegal underground newspapers and journals, radical students were con-
structing the foundations of an alternative social vision based on a modern
peasant state. They called on young urban Croats to return to the village to
discover the true nature of Croatdom. For them, the city represented an arti-
ficial, alienating way of living, at odds with real Croatian values. The names
they chose to give to their literary journals, illegal newspapers, and poetry
collections, evoking the organic nature of the Croatian soil, indicated that if
there were ever to be an independent Croatian state, it would be founded on
the principle of peasantism. As much as they were opposed to national op-
pression under Yugoslavia, the materialistic, urban culture associated with it
offended them too. For Zvonimir Topali, the village represented “an organic
unity” as opposed to the “organic division” of the city. In the future peasant
state Topali envisaged that peasants and intellectuals would collaborate, with
the result that the city would achieve the same organic unity that existed in
the village. In this way, relationships between the city and the village would
be harmonized.30
Radical students also developed plans for social and economic life in the
village. Writing in the Croatian Student Almanac in 1938, Vilko Rieger, then
a young doctoral candidate in economics, argued that the struggle for na-
tional liberation and the economic renewal of the Croatian nation were sym-
biotically linked. He envisioned the creation of a new national economy that
would reject the extremes of both Marxism and capitalist cartellism, instead
being “guided” by the Croatian state and, at the same time, decentralized and
economically autonomous in order to avoid bureaucracy and inefficiency.
However, the radical transformation of the Croatian economy would not be
 The Generation of Struggle  39

possible, he wrote, without the “elimination” of “foreign” control of the na-

tional economy, which, statistics showed, was fatally aiming to weaken it.
Foreign influence should be replaced by the “will of the people” in the form of
national representatives chosen freely by ordinary citizens, who would shape
the economy according to “authentic” national needs. What these authentic
national needs might comprise was set out by Emil Lašić in an essay of 1939.
Arguing that the future Croatian state would be a peasant one, Lašić believed
that the priorities of a peasant state would include improving the deplor-
able state of hygiene in most rural settlements, the unacceptably high level
of illiteracy, and disastrous living standards. In the future Croatian state, he
wrote, peasants would receive decent prices for the goods they brought to
market, helping to generate revenue that could be used to culturally elevate
the village. Student leaders encouraged undergraduates to learn more about
the social and economic conditions in Croatian towns and villages in addi-
tion to socioeconomic theories more generally. As an article in the student
newspaper Uskok pointed out in 1940, the socioeconomic conditions in which
students and Croatians lived generally were “unhealthy” and radical reform
was required. It was no surprise that many students supported those ideolo-
gies that stressed social and economic programs “because it is in their na-
ture to be discontented with the established and old-fashioned and to seek
new directions to escape these difficult conditions.” But learning more about
Croatia’s social situation was a national imperative, too, and should lead, Us-
kok argued, to the development by students of a socioeconomic program for
the nation. After Croatia had been liberated, the first priority for an indepen-
dent Croatian state would be the “complete resolution of social and economic
problems.”31
Through their poetry, students were also expressing their affinity for the
village and the cognitive alienation they experienced while living far from
home in the city. For example, in 1934, Mile Starčević published an anthol-
ogy of student poetry dedicated to the village. In the introduction, Kamilo
Križanić declared the intention that the book enable Croatians to become ac-
quainted with the poetry written by young nationalists about the village. The
Croats were a peasant nation with their own unique culture, and the younger
generation wanted to emulate the desire that the poet Đuro Arnold had ex-
pressed in one of his most famous poems: to be a peasant. To resist foreign
cultural ideas and create a new purified literature born out of living in the vil-
lages with peasants: this was the ambition of radical students, whose slogan
was “To the village!”32
Many radical students identified strongly with the village since it repre-
sented their own roots. As the student newspaper Rakovica pointed out with
pride: “Croatian student nationalists are in no way gentlemen; they are, in the
 40  The Generation of Struggle

majority, the sons of peasants and from the poorest regions of the Croatian
hinterland.”33 Yet because they had been educated at a university in the city,
they also believed they were the avant-garde of a new Croatian society, a fu-
ture national intelligentsia.34 In addition, because they had suffered, making
profound sacrifices for Croatia’s liberation, the nation could be assured there
would be nothing empty-headed, decadent, or spineless about their intellect.
Behind their social and cultural ideas and poetry and literature stood their
enduring, uncompromising, and often violent struggle for an independent
Croatian state. In this sense, their cultural production was simply a reflection
of their authentically Croatian nationalist and peasant instincts. As Marko
Čović wrote in his editorial introduction to an anthology of nationalist stu-
dent poetry published in 1939, it was an “echo of our experiences: difficult,
violent, bloody.”35 Nonetheless, despite the eulogizing of peasant values and
organic village life, radical-right students enthusiastically embraced moder-
nity, and student journals wrote proudly of the construction of technologi-
cally advanced faculty buildings. Without constructing “more modern and
spacious” new buildings, the architect Edo Šen wrote in Alma mater Croatica,
the intellectual life of the university as well as the material well-being of the
students would suffer. This also applied to student accommodation. Stanko
Hondl argued that Zagreb needed its own student quarter, as Berlin, Paris,
and Madrid all had, not as now merely crumbling faculty buildings “scat-
tered” across the city, making access for students difficult. Radical students
looked to the pioneering example of Fascist Italy and its university city in
Rome, constructed as a result of the fascists’ “well-known agility and speed.”
They wrote with astonishment of the avant-garde design of this university
city, with its car parks, statues, landscaped grounds, and “absolutely contem-
porary, beautiful, and monumental” buildings, built to the demands of mo-
dernity and the highest standards of hygiene.36
By the late 1930s, various student societies had registered their support for
the terrorist actions of the Ustasha movement. The most public expression of
this came in June 1938 when, at the annual conference of students, radical-
right students produced a statement in honor of Ante Pavelić and the Ustasha
movement. In autumn 1939, a declaration signed by members of the Student
Law Club expressed absolute understanding of the movement’s violent strug-
gle. The authorities were alarmed. On 9 December 1940, the students’ Law
Club was raided by Croatian police, and a number of radical students were
arrested for anti-state activities and for barricading the premises. In later
Ustasha mythology, after a quick trial in which they were found guilty, they
were imprisoned, refusing all inducements to repudiate their nationalist be-
liefs. Their answer to all offers of clemency was to sing Ustasha loyalty songs
and shout through their cell windows: “Come home, Ante: the homeland is
 The Generation of Struggle  41

calling you!” This action so infuriated the authorities it transferred them to

the Lepoglava internment camp, where many suspected Ustasha activists
were already being held.37
In the student elections of winter 1939 and 1940, radical-right and na-
tionalist students won the majority of student societies, except the forestry
and medical clubs. In all, the nationalist bloc with the slogan “Croatia for
the Croatians!” won control of the symbolically important law club, as well
as agronomy, veterinary, all but one of the individual philosophy clubs, and
the majority of sections of the technical clubs and societies. They were clear
about the reasons why they had lost some clubs and societies: the presence of
foreign students who “generously supported” the Croatian Peasant Party and
Communists. Writing in Uskok, Radoslav Antunović argued that although
nationalist students had lost the medical club elections, they had succeeded
in securing the votes of the majority of Croatian students who had voted;
by contrast, the victorious leftist students had relied on the votes of 114 Jew-
ish and Serb voters out of the total 201 votes cast for it. Similarly, in the me-
chanical engineering elections, the fact was, Antunović complained, that “the
Serbs and Jews uniformly campaigned against the Croatian nationalists.”38
Irrespective of these electoral victories, police reports showed that be-
tween 1940 and 1941 a significant and growing number of radical nationalist
students began to abandon political activism and protest in favor of joining
clandestine university Ustasha cells, taking part in weapons and terrorist
training.39 These reports of military training were noticed by their ideological
adversaries too. A report in the journal of the Communist Party of Croatia,
Srp i čekić, for example, warned that radical-right students had abandoned
conventional politics and student elections: this accounted for the current
“quietness” among radical-right students at the University of Zagreb. Instead,
they were working directly among the masses, militarily training fellow
students, high school pupils, workers, and peasants for a national revolu-
tion, having gained many adherents.40 The police grew increasingly anxious
about the combination of radical-right politics and arms and attempted to
use emergency powers to suppress it. When Mladen Marković, a twenty-four-
year-old law undergraduate, was arrested in December 1940 for the illegal
possession of a revolover, after it was discovered that he was also “one of the
most tireless” of student activists, his initial sentence of thirty days in prison
was replaced with indeterminate internment in Lepoglava.41

THE ORGANIZATION OF SCHOLARLY LIFE IN THE INDEPENDENT STATE OF CROATIA

The radical reorganization of education was an integral aspect of the Usta-
sha movement’s cultural politics, especially higher education. According to
Marko Veršić, a professor and policy adviser at the Ministry of Education,
 42  The Generation of Struggle

writing in autumn 1941, in the new academic year great tasks lay before uni-
versity professors, who must ensure that their research and teaching was im-
bued with “moral discipline.” Echoing the words of the Poglavnik spoken at a
conference with leading academics, they would have to ensure that teaching
at the university was “national, moral, and intellectual.”42 What this meant in
practice was explained in more detail by the minister for education and re-
ligion, Mile Budak, in a series of announcements and interviews in fall 1941.
In May, the Ministry of Education had published a long and detailed legal
decree on the organization of the Croatian University. Among the numerous
proposals was the establishment of a commissariat for the Croatian Univer-
sity and the polytechnics, composed of eleven university professors, headed
by Stjepan Zimmerman as president. It was their task to suggest new laws
and statutes as well as plans for the reform of the university and polytechnics;
these were then considered by policy officials in the Ministry of Education
and educational experts. On the occasion of the first sitting of the new com-
missariat, on 15 May 1941, Budak also announced that commissariat mem-
bers would be tasked with helping to “purify” the university of those lecturers
and professors, predominantly Serbs and Jews, who were identified as having
been the “most embittered enemies” of the radical student movement.43
In an interview in September, Budak announced the launch of a cam-
paign to ideologically and racially purge the university, pointing out that the
university had only been able to lead the liberation struggle against foreign
rule because “healthy youths” had avoided the “dangerous influence” of both
the Belgrade regime and the “many slipshod” and “Yugomason” professors
“who served this alien regime.” This, he argued, was especially the case with
the older generation of professors, who demonstrated no interest in mentor-
ing younger professors and scholars. In the future, professorial committees
would be imbued with at least a miminal understanding of Ustasha ideology.
Since “we know that many professors are already Ustashas, especially many
associate professors and teaching assistants,” no young scholar would be ac-
cepted as a teaching assistant or selected as a lecturer “if he is not also an
Ustasha.” Only in this way would it be possible to “reconstruct” the university
as “the greatest of learning institutions, appropriate for the Ustasha state.”44
How to facilitate the departure of older conservative professors in favor
of younger more radical ones? On 12 May the Ministry of Education intro-
duced a new legal decree stating that no professor past the age of seventy
could remain on the departmental faculty without the prior approval of the
university commissariat. The law not only potentially provided a path to pro-
motion for younger scholars who were registered members of the movement
but also encouraged ambitious young scholars to publicly embrace the Usta-
sha ideology since it was now an important factor in social mobility and ca-
 The Generation of Struggle  43

reer advancement in academia. In effect, the removal of Serb, Jewish, and

ideologically suspect professors and the radicalization of the faculty meant
that the Croatian academy could be transformed into the Ustasha university.
Added to this, the purges were designed to rid the academy of not only dan-
gerous professors but students. Thus, university youth “poisoned by Masonic
leftism”—an ideology that, Budak maintained, “especially blossomed in the
technical and medicine faculties” due to the presence of Jewish and Serb stu-
dents—would be expelled too. “We will completely drive them out so that in
the Croatian university there are only Croatian youths in the full sense of the
word,” Budak held, observing proudly that the regime was building a state for
the university youth who had sacrificed so much in the liberation war. From
every side, he exclaimed, “water is being turned into Ustasha wine.”45
To ensure ideological conformity, all student clubs and societies were
banned, closed down, or placed under the control of Ustasha student com-
missars. The only student societies and organizations that were allowed to
exist were the official Ustasha student organizations or clubs and societies
associated with them. Now, the main organization for ambitious or ideo-
logically committed students was the Ustasha University Center (Ustaški
sveučilišni stožer—USS), led initially by the hardline student commissars
Zdenko Blažeković and Grga Ereš, both of whom had cut their teeth in the
late 1930s and 1940 in violent confrontations with communist students. Al-
though all students were technically required to join the organization, most
did not. Increasingly, it was transformed into an organization of the Ustasha
student elite, with strict rules for membership but also seductive privileges,
including being able to attend rallies at which the Poglavnik spoke and the
right to wear an Ustasha uniform. However, irrespective of whether under-
graduates joined the center or not, it had a significant impact on their lives
since, according to the university legal decree of May, it enjoyed the exclusive
right to develop and approve all disciplinary measures relating to students in
agreement with the university commissariat.46
In an interview with the newspaper Novi list, the USS commander
Blažeković confirmed Budak’s policy prescriptions for the Croatian Univer-
sity in Zagreb. He stated that all work in the academy would be in harmony
with the new Ustasha spirit, a spirit with which youth had been imbued for
years in the decades when the university was the “battlefield” of the Croatian
struggle for liberation. Blažeković explained that the first priority of the new
student organization would be the social welfare of students and the expan-
sion of student dining rooms and halls of residence. He also announced a
major program of construction at the university, including a “monumental
and modern center for students” that would allow students to continue with
their normal schedule and more successfully complete their studies. Never-
 44  The Generation of Struggle

theless, the USS, he promised, would be particularly dedicated to address-

ing the needs of students who had “worked unceasingly during the period of
struggle for the liberation of the homeland,” ensuring that their work in the
liberation struggle was not to the detriment of their study.47
He also explained the structure of the university and students under USS
leadership. The university would be refashioned according to Ustasha prin-
ciples: each faculty would have its own camp, while faculties that had nu-
merous departments would also have their own concentrations. Each faculty
camp would consist of a camp leader and seven adjutants with the respon-
sibility for military training, socioeconomic welfare, professional training
and contacts, sport, professional education, and professional journals. For the
first academic year of the Ustasha state, “veteran warriors” would work at
the university, but in the following year, as they were called by the homeland
to new duties, they would be replaced by fully trained “younger forces” who
had spent the previous academic year preparing for their new roles. Hold-
ing out an olive branch to ideologically noncommitted students, Blažeković
explained that volunteer students would collaborate in the construction and
popularization of the USS and other Ustasha student organizations. However,
once these had established themselves in university life, the USS would es-
tablish a nonideological, professional student organization to incorporate all
Croatian students. By contrast, when asked whether Jews and Serbs would be
permitted to attend university in the new Ustasha state, Blažeković’s answer
was unequivocal: “In the coming academic year, the University will be swept
clean of foreigners hostilely disposed to Croatians and the Ustasha move-
ment, and in this way our endeavors at the university will be made easier.”48
At the same time, Budak promised a renaissance in Croatian universi-
ties: they would be given back their autonomy. Nationalist students, he said,
should be rewarded for their activism in interwar Croatia, as should Usta-
sha students for cleansing “undesired foreigners, corrupt elements, and senti-
ment hostile toward the Croats and Ustasha movement” from the university,
including twenty-nine professors, five special professors, and one instructor.
The Ministry of Education announced an ambitious building scheme for the
university, including the construction of a new faculty of medicine and new
lecture halls, classrooms, and laboratories, as well as a technology faculty
to reflect the modern outlook of the state. This, the ministry argued, would
enable students to concentrate on social and educational matters. However,
their Ustasha spirit should not be completely abandoned, Budak believed,
and he instructed the newly appointed university commissariat to ensure that
“our universities don’t become dead, abstract institutions for the production
of facts; on the contrary, they should be living institutions as they are in other
educated nations.”49
 The Generation of Struggle  45

With privileges were to come responsibilities, and the regime made it clear
from the very beginning that one of those responsibilities was military ser-
vice. In a speech of spring 1941 to Ustasha university students, the Poglavnik
vowed that they would be the future intellectual elite of the state. As a result,
the entire ethos of the university would have to change. Under the leadership
of Ustasha university students, the university would become a place of “revo-
lutionary Ustasha spirit and revolutionary work,” creating Ustasha men who,
following graduation, would attain positions of influence, therefore ensur-
ing this revolutionary spirit continued. At the same time, university Ustasha
youth must be prepared to “take the university flag not only to rallies but also,
if needed, into a bloody battle for the nation, the homeland, and the state,”
defending the nation “in blood.” In return, one day the young state would
belong to them. “By your Ustasha education and your Ustasha work,” he told
them, “you offer the greatest guarantee that the intellectual class of the Croa-
tian nation in the future will be the carriers of the banner of Croatian na-
tional ideals, tireless workers for the Croatian nation and for the homeland,
and fearless defenders of the sacred national right to independence.”50

THE MYTHOLOGIES OF USTASHA STUDENTS

The University of Zagreb to which Croatian students returned in the sum-
mer semester of 1941 was a very different institution from the one they had
left a few weeks before. The university had been reorganized on a revolution-
ary basis, with each faculty representing a separate Ustasha camp, the basic
organizational unit of the movement. The university was also transformed
along national revolutionary lines. If the Ustasha press was to be believed,
the dark days of Yugoslav misrule at the university had been succeeded by the
enlightened administration of the Ustasha regime, which would bring pros-
perity, learning, and autonomy to the academy. “This year,” the student jour-
nal Alma Mater Croatica proudly announced, “only Croats are registered at
this university.”51 Not only this, but Zagreb University students could look
forward to bright future careers as bureaucrats, politicians, and intellectual
workers. By all accounts, students took an active role in the Ustasha revolu-
tion. They had been the nucleus of the first Ustasha paramilitary unit in the
dying days of Yugoslav rule; had been part of the Poglavnik Bodyguard; and,
as James Meilly reported, had aided the peasant Civil Defense in taking over
public offices, the railway station, and public radio in Zagreb.52 Three days af-
ter the creation of the Independent State of Croatia, a number of nationalist
student clubs, including the paramilitary Matija Gubec society, along with
the youth organizations Croatian Hero and the Croatian Scouts, organized a
march in front of the Poglavnik’s deputy, Colonel Slavko Kvaternik, as a dem-
onstration of loyalty to the new state.53 Students also helped to burn the books
 46  The Generation of Struggle

of censored writers and purge ideologically and racially suspect teachers and
professors. They were also among the first to join Ustasha paramilitary for-
mations. Not for nothing did the Poglavnik laud them as the “bravest and
most idealistic” generation, shedding their “youthful blood” and giving their
lives, “participating with their living faith in the cleansing of the homeland
from enemies and dangerous elements.”54 Following the national revolution
of 1941, they had exchanged lecture rooms, laboratories, dissection rooms,
and books for the battlefields and an Ustasha uniform. As one newspaper
report put it on the occasion of a parade of students in the Poglavnik Body-
guard Brigade in July 1944: “In place of the pen, they accepted rifles; beauti-
ful university halls were exchanged for rooms more modest in appearance,
but perhaps more important for the future development of lives. In a short
time, the first consequence of this enthusiastic work was applied. Through
Zagreb’s streets passed the units, which showed discipline, enthusiasm, and
love toward the homeland and Poglavnik. A song echoed: ‘Poglavnik, hear us
now / hear our holy vow, / we are always prepared for the homeland, to die for
the homeland!”55 In 1942, in honor of their sacrifices for the state, the Usta-
sha regime inaugurated a Week of the Ustasha Student. Each January, there
was a program of lectures and speeches on state radio and features and ar-
ticles in journals and magazines about various aspects of Ustasha student life
from the days of struggle in interwar Yugoslavia to their cultural, political,
and military contribution to the new state. There were also public readings
from novels, short stories, and poems celebrating the role students played in
the national revolution, and fifteen minutes were set aside each evening for
a radio program entitled Croatian Student Ustashas Talk to the Nation, with
readings from their leaflets, flyers, brochures, and newspapers from “the pe-
riod of national struggle for liberation.” In addition, there was also a Day of
the Ustasha Student Martyr to honor the fact that nationalist and later Usta-
sha students had willingly given their lives for the liberation of the Croatian
nation.56
The mythologization of the student struggle was an important aspect of
Ustasha propaganda and cultural politics. It involved not just the celebration
of their ongoing sacrifices for the Ustasha state but also their militancy and
their resistance to Greater Serb rule in the 1930s. Ustasha functionaries re-
peatedly evoked the archetype of the university student as zealous Ustasha
warrior. Mladen Lorković, for one, called radical student clubs the “embryos”
of the Ustasha movement and the students in them “fanatical warriors for the
resurrection of Croatia,” while Jure Pavičić believed that no one had demon-
strated such “effort, labor, and sacrifice” as university youth.57 In an article
lauding their role in the “ideological and physical resistance” of the Croa-
tian nation, the student journalist Milivoj Karamarko sternly admonished
 The Generation of Struggle  47

the nation to acknowledge their role as “heralds of resistance and revolu-

tionary Ustasha power.” He pointed out that on 14 October 1941, in recogni-
tion of their contribution to spreading the Ustasha philosophy in villages and
towns and struggling against the “Serbian occupationist forces” during the
national revolution, the Poglavnik had made the Ustasha Student Militia a
constituent part of the PTS. As an embryonic Ustasha intelligentsia, imbued
with the ideals of social justice, he pointed out, “the great majority—more
than three-quarters—of the Ustasha intelligentsia came directly from peas-
ant homes and workers’ log cabins. In our ranks there were no spoilt upper-
class children from the rich elite circles.” This young Ustasha intelligentsia, he
remembered, “took the oath, carried out their Ustasha duty, rotted in prison,
and went together with them to the gallows.”58 Another Ustasha journalist re-
called how, on “beautiful, sunny” Sunday mornings in Zagreb after morning
mass, hundreds of university students had gathered in the university court-
yard to practice drills, to march, and to plan revolution as members of this
university Ustasha unit. Meanwhile, in designating the Student Militia a con-
stituent unit of the PTS, the Poglavnik himself honored the years students
had led the “most arduous revolutionary war” at the University of Zagreb
in “struggle and blood.” More than that, he acknowledged their crucial role
in the construction of Ustasha Croatia, creating a “new generation and new
world”: in short, a “new faith.”59
However, commemorations of the suffering of students in 1930s Yugosla-
via, including dying for the Croatian nationalist cause, were also utilized by
commentators as a means of drawing attention to and implicitly criticizing
the tawdry, grasping conduct of Ustasha officials. By stressing the idealistic
outlook and demeanor of revolutionary nationalist students in both the 1930s
and the present day, they elevated Ustasha students to the position of the con-
science of the movement. Their suffering and virtuous behavior would be the
benchmark by which all Ustasha officials’ actions should be judged. It served
both as a threat to officials that they were expendable if they did not live up to
the students’ sancrosanct ideals and a reminder to students that their onerous
sacrifices for the homeland would eventually be recognized and rewarded.
In an article of March 1943 in Ustaša comparing the martyrdom and sac-
rifices of Ustasha students in the 1930s and the current period, Aleksandar
Žibrat, a prolific Ustasha journalist and an official in the propaganda division
of GUS, noted pointedly that as poverty-stricken freshmen in 1930s Yugosla-
via, radical students had been “small, powerless, frequently hungry, and na-
ked,” suffering under the weight of “Jewish gold.” Yet they had kept to their
principles after the national revolution of 1941 while more demonstrative pa-
triots grabbed positions, houses, stores, and everything previously “stolen” by
the Jews that remained.
 48  The Generation of Struggle

And the students? They, who in this miserable period fought and withered
away in prison, who fled into exile with their leader, who sacrificed their
studies, their jobs, their families, their homes, who suppressed their manly
desires to be better warriors and Ustashas, they continued to be true to
their nationalist principles; they remained on the streets or went into army
barracks, or, in short, only took positions where the state needed them and
where there were no educated workers because they felt the state needed
them there as yesterday it needed them in prison. Student men in Croatia
represented and still represent the robust Croatian peasant neck that did
not and never will bow their heads down before foreign or domestic traitors
but will always without regard to gauntlet or social hierarchy look back to
his brother, the little man, leading with his intellect and heart, to show the
nation the path, teaching him that foreigners cannot dictate and defending
and protecting what is his like a Likan seadog or mountain wolf, like an
Uskok or Ustasha. These are the Croatian university students, these are the
poverty-stricken sons with rich souls, always clear and full of hope. They
cannot be bought with gold or honors or women or reputations, because in
their view the only notion that is worth anything is the notion of idealism.60

Now the Ustasha students demonstrated their heroism in the countless

numbers who had joined units of the PTS, either not returning or coming
back dead to be given solemn funerals. In spite of the ultimate sacrifice made
by the youngest, bravest, and most gifted, he pointed out, their zealous and
self-sacricing commitment continued: “This number and this circle of dead
students is not complete or ended; it is spreading, new graves are being dug,
still the blood is flowing, and it is not for us to write great obituaries and
eulogies about individuals when black and hungry death has removed the
lives of so many sons of the Croatian Alma Mater.” Countless young students,
Žibrat wrote, “unselfishly and honorably presented their lives in an equation
of death” for the nation. From Ante Polonjio, who had abandoned his stud-
ies to join an Ustasha training camp only to perish shortly after crossing the
border into liberated Croatia on 15 April 1941, to the student social activist Jo-
sip Blažek, who had died heroically as a captain in the Poglavnik Bodyguard,
they had stood in line, inseparable from the dozens of other students from
all faculties who “fought and perished” for a free Croatia, setting off on the
“journey to eternity.”61
In particular, the persecution of radical students arrested at the Univer-
sity of Zagreb Law Club and led away to the jeers of Serbophile students to
be incarcerated in Christmas 1940 in Lepoglava Prison was also a constant
theme of propaganda.62 The writer Jerko Skračić, at the time one of the law
students arrested by the authorities, wrote a memoir of his months in Lep-
 The Generation of Struggle  49

oglava, published in 1942, Pod drugom ključom (Under Another’s Lock and
Key). In his book, Skračić defined the aim of his memoir as an attempt to
chronicle everything that Croatian prisoners had experienced under “the
common rule of national traitors and the Belgrade rulers in the last days of
the notoriously artificial state” and, in particular, the tribulations of the stu-
dents from the Zagreb University Law Club, “the nest of Ustasha ideology,”
as he called it.63 By contrast, Zlatko Milković’s novel Tamnica (The Prison),
also published in 1942, explored radical student activism from a fictional per-
spective. Tracing the fate of a generation of nationalist university students, it
focused on the relationship between two student activists, Petar and Tonči;
their disparate circle of friends; their grim, determined struggle against the
authorities; and Agneza, the girl who comes between them. Written in a
social-realist style, weaving fiction with documentary excerpts, the novel
aimed to recapture the atmosphere of terror, repression, and violent resis-
tance at the University of Zagreb when, in Milković’s view, radical students
had paid with their lives for freedom and independence, “with horrible
deaths and the gallows, prison and torture, when the corpses of dead Croa-
tian youths were thrown from a room on the second floor of Zagreb central
prison to the sound of a gramophone record so that you could not hear the
body fall on the asphalt.”64 Milković, who had been a student at the Univer-
sity of Zagreb in the 1930s, wanted to explore how students made the transi-
tion from nationalist activists to ruthless Ustasha operatives, and the climax
of the novel was set against the backdrop of a nationalist student uprising,
loosely based on a combination of the student summer riots in 1928 and
the Law Club battle of 1940, when university students erected barriers and
fought running battles with the police. In this revolution of youth, students
throw portraits of the king, the queen, and the royal family—symbols of the
ancien régime—onto the tram lines and the heads of the police below. At the
beginning of the battle, Petar, unlike his friends, is a bystander. He stands in
the vestibule watching as injured youths are brought in, blood seeping out of
their shirts in droplets onto the floor. As a mass of youths look back at him
and the vestibule benches turn “sticky with blood and tears,” he decides to
leave the shelter of the room. He joins the students outside on the barricades
who are chanting for Pavelić; shouting down the Yugoslav state; and fighting
the gendarmes, the symbols of an oppressive state.
At the end of the novel his friend Miljenko, a diligent student from a
middle-class family, dies in his arms, shot dead by the brutal gendarmes.
Milković imagined the low metal fence between the police and the students
as a barrier between two worlds, “the fervor of youth, the fervor of idealism,
and sincere outrage at the injustice and suffering of the whole Croat nation”
opposing “alien foreign money, sick ambition, and bestial, half-evolved men
 50  The Generation of Struggle

who shoot as soon as they are given a gun and kill with a rifle butt because
they are told to kill.” The novel ends with Petar staying in Zagreb to continue
his student activism while Tonči flees across the border to an Ustasha terror-
ist camp.65 Many established reviewers gave the novel a cold reception: they
saw it, at best, as a useful social document of a part of Croatia’s struggle and,
at worst, as a poor effort from a gifted young writer. Ljubomir Maraković
was disappointed with the lack of dramatic action by the novel’s central pro-
tagonist, who, rather than being “one who suffers in prison on account of his
revolutionary activities or is essential in the building of a nationalist ideol-
ogy,” gives the impression of a man “beating his head against a brick wall.”66
Other reviewers didn’t like the documentary approach of the novel. For Djuro
Kokša, the novel was full of documents that belonged in a “political encyclo-
pedia, not a piece of literature,” while Tomislav Pavić, rather more charitable,
nevertheless conceded that the novel remained more valuable “as a testimony
of our national crucifiction than as a literary and artistically accomplished
work.”67 By contrast, perhaps because of its experimental literary style and
its mythologization of a central aspect of the Ustasha struggle, younger re-
viewers were far more enthusiastic. In a review for the Ustasha Youth literary
journal Plava revija, Vlado Miličevic, himself a student at the University of
Zagreb, praised the author’s use of neorealist narration as entirely appropri-
ate to a discussion of the “gloomy and sterile Yugoslav reality.” It was a liter-
ary style that showed the “national fervor of one entire young generation,”
united by a fervent desire to “escape jail, freed from the foreign yoke.”68
Despite the criticism of at least one reviewer that Tamnica, in focusing on
the sacrifices of nationalist students, ignored the contribution of other social
classes, most reviewers agreed that it accurately captured the ideological fa-
naticism of radical students in interwar Croatia, a quality that was also em-
phasized in the obituaries of fallen Ustasha students. Students who had joined
the Poglavnik Bodyguard and other death-squad militias were invariably de-
scribed as modest, thoughtful, and loyal comrades, as well as religiously de-
vout, emotional, and zealous. Petar Bubalo’s obituary, for example, likened
him to a Christian martyr who had made the “perfect sacrifice,” dying so that
the nation could live. Arriving at the University of Zagreb in 1940 from Široki
Brijeg in Hercegovina, he had almost immediately abandoned his philosophy
studies for service in the Ustasha student unit, where he fell in battle, “hor-
ribly murdered,” in 1944.69 Twenty-four-year-old Poglavnik Bodyguard mem-
ber Jakob Horvat’s obituary similarly noted his ideological commitment to
the death squad, describing him as virtuous, devout, and melancholy but also
possessing opinions that “sometimes bordered on fanaticism.”70 When com-
munists attacked Ustasha student guards in August 1941 on the grounds of
the University of Zagreb, injuring twenty-three, Ustaška mladež emphasized
 The Generation of Struggle  51

their eagerness for sacrifice. Marijan Velnić, the journalist sent to interview
them for the youth journal, reported that although they lay wounded, “on
their lips a smile flickers, a smile of contentment and happiness, proud that
drops of their blood sprinkled the foundations of our new State. Proud of ev-
ery drop of blood that drained from their wounds.”71
It is not difficult to see why some students, at least, were attracted to the
Ustasha cause. In its propaganda, the Ustasha regime consistently employed
a discourse of revolution and radicalism, something that appealed to na-
tionalist students too. “We are idealists, fanatics, and warriors who do not
know what the word ‘compromise’ means and reject any talk of conciliation
with our enemies,” declared an Ustasha student commissar bombastically in
1945.72 The iconoclastic, apocalyptic aspects of Ustasha ideology were also ap-
pealing. The Ustasha ideology emphasized the need to divest oneself of all
concepts of bourgeois respectability in order to become a merciless warrior
and, at the same time, emphasized that this was an ideology of the young,
engaged in a ruthless physical and ideological struggle in which everything
it considered reactionary, old, and anti-revolutionary would be destroyed.
Thus, the Swedish diplomat’s wife who, at a banquet, expressed such disgust
when Zdenko Blažeković, the commander of the Ustasha University Cen-
ter, boasted of the huge numbers of Serbs he had killed, adding that he kept
their ears on a necklace to wear with his smoking jacket, should perhaps not
have been so shocked.73 In fact, many of the first campaigns of mass murder
in Bosnian and Croatian towns as well as in the countryside were carried
out by members of the PTS Student Militia in the name of the revolution of
youth. On 28 May 1941, for example, a group of Ustasha students from Za-
greb University arrived in Trebinje, Hercegovina. Assisted by members of the
local Ustasha Youth organization, they first took down all signs in Cyrillic
and destroyed Serb and Yugoslav monuments to eradicate any traces of the
former regime and the cultural presence of its “alien” population. On 1 June
the killing began with the shooting of nine and the arrest of another fifteen
Serbs. The victims were predominantly older, “eminent” Serbs from the upper
strata of society—middle-class and educated professionals, members of par-
liament, former police officers, small businessmen, and affluent peasants—
who were denounced as people who had always worked against “the interests
of the Croatian and Muslim nations.” A number of those shot were also killed
with the justification that they had belonged to “Chetnik societies” or Sokol
organizations or had been Serb volunteers at Salonika during the First World
War. In the days that followed, the student militia and Ustasha Youth activ-
ists killed large numbers of Serbs, including a group of high school pupils.
While most of the victims were shot, some were bludgeoned to death with
cudgels, had their throats slit, or were thrown alive into pits and ravines.74
 52  The Generation of Struggle

Likewise, eyewitness testimonies of the terror in towns such as Karlo-

vac highlighted the key role of ideologically committed university students.
Milan Radeka, a writer and teacher, recalled that two university students—
Aleksandar Šantić and Joco Gombač—had instigated and led the killing of
members of the local Serb elite such as the lawyer Milan Vujičić, leader of the
Karlovac branch of the Serb Democratic Party, and Gojko Janjanin, an infan-
try captain. According to another eyewitness, Eva Fundak, the men were ar-
rested and then, overnight, abducted by the students and driven to a remote
location, where they were killed. On the second night after the killing, Šantić
and Gombač threw a piece of Vujčić’s trouser leg into the home of his Croa-
tian widow. When she reported them for murder to her uncle, a general in
the Croatian army, they were initially arrested, but the regional governor and
chief of police provided them with passports to escape to Vienna. There they
continued their studies and were “rewarded with scholarships, positions, and
appointments in Ustasha ranks,” the details of which were printed in the local
regime newspapers.75
The ideological zealotry of Ustasha students, in part, reflected their ex-
treme nationalism. As they had been in the 1930s, young intellectuals were
preoccupied with the racial origins of the Croats and the alien, “foreign” na-
ture of the Serbs. Writing in an Ustasha student journal in 1941, Muhamed
Hadžijahić argued that religion was the only factor that separated Muslims
and Catholics in Bosnia, with everything else the same: “racial characteris-
tics, language, culture, feelings, and writing.” The racial affinity of Muslims
and Catholics in Bosnia, he argued, could be seen in the “intensity of their
pigmentation,” while that of the Orthodox was dark, which was only to be
expected since they were of immigrants of foreign blood. This “alien” blood
accounted not only for their nomadic lifestyles but also for their disloyalty
to the state.76 In the same journal, Smail Balić wrote that there were, in fact,
two “Easts” in Croatia: one the cultured East of the Muslims; the other the
primitive East, represented by the Vlachian Serbs with their “Asiatic” blood,
sexual degeneracy, avarice, and innate corruption, characteristics that made
them even more dangerous than the Jews, especially in a time of war and even
more so when they pretended to be friendly to their neighbors.77 The logi-
cal conclusion of these ideas was set out by another undergraduate, Vatroslav
Murvar, an acolyte of the Croatian archaeologist Ćiro Truhelka. In the pages
of the intellectual Ustasha Youth journal Plava revija, he recalled the influ-
ence of Truhelka’s work on his milieu’s thinking after arriving as a freshman
in 1940 from Banja Luka and joining the illegal student Ustasha organization.
At a time when it seemed as if liberation was just a utopian dream, students
had been inspired by the racial truth that they were the original inhabitants
of Bosnia, the heart of the Croatian homeland they had been cheated out of
 The Generation of Struggle  53

by the deception of “Greek Easterners, the obstacle to our liberation and a

menace to our independence, who settled here as part of the Turkish occupa-
tion of our land.”78 In a subsequent article of 1942 in Ustaški godišnjak, he ex-
plored solutions to the problem. What could be done with these “foreigners”?
he asked. In most states an immigrant population assimilated even when it
spoke a different language. Uniquely, in Croatia “this colonizing Vlach popu-
lation always spat on the land and people who accepted them and always be-
trayed them.” This was a legacy of their “nomadic, itinerant” character and
gypsy blood. No methods should be discounted in the struggle to purify Cro-
atia’s racial living space, Murvar argued. “It would be hard to have this enor-
mous alien population living in the heart of Croatia. Therefore, we should be
prepared for all solutions and not discount any of them.”79
However, there were also functional reasons why some students rallied
to the new regime. With the creation of the Independent State of Croatia,
military and social regimentation increased greatly. Yet in comparison to the
atomized and chaotic educational system that prevailed in Yugoslavia, when
the right to a university education often relied on a rich supporter or a risible
government stipend, free speech and democratic institutions did not mean
very much. As well as being ultranationalistic, the Ustasha regime also pub-
licly advocated a society free from the inequalities of capitalism. At the same
time as it was racially and nationally purging the university, it was opening
it up to students whose socially deprived backgrounds would normally have
excluded them from university through a greatly expanded scholarship sys-
tem.80 The regime, in particular the Ministry for Social Welfare, was also in-
vested in the development of student social welfare services. The Bureau for
the Social and Physical Protection of Universities and High School Students,
established by Andrija Štampar in the 1930s, set up soup kitchens and dor-
mitories to ameliorate the effects of chronic malnutrition, homelessness, and
poverty among Croatian students; it was nationalized and expanded under
the Ministry of Education.81 Following Štampar’s arrest on suspicion of com-
munist activities shortly after the Ustasha regime came to power, control of
the office was given to his deputy, Ustasha student commissar Josip Blažek,
a member of the PTS. When he fell in battle in 1943, he was eulogized as a
model Ustasha student not just on account of his bravery but also because of
his social activism. His obituaries feted “his social awareness in the aiding
of the poverty stricken,” differentiating it from that of Štampar, which had
led him to found facilities that had become “meeting places for foreign and
anti-Croatian students.” By contrast, as adjutant for socioeconomic welfare
in the USS, Blažek cared for the needs of Croatian students and, even when
persecuted in the 1930s as a radical student activist and a member of the il-
legal Ustasha student organization, coordinated their nutrition, his modest
 54  The Generation of Struggle

room next to the student dining hall constantly full of individuals spending
the night with him in conversation. After the foundation of the state in 1941,
it was natural that this “uncompromising revolutionary” would lead a bat-
talion of students in the Poglavnik Bodyguard. Despite being appointed by
the Poglavnik adjutant for student social welfare, he worked ceaselessly for
the welfare of students and was always “simply a student, modest in his de-
mands.” After his funeral, his remains were ceremonially transported from
the mortuary at Mirogoj to his hometown of Ilok. On its final journey from
Zagreb’s main railway station his coffin was accompanied by a Student Bat-
talion platoon, as well as large numbers of Ustasha students and Ustasha
Youth activists. Zdenko Blažeković, the USS commander, and Ivan Oršanić,
supreme commander of the Ustasha Youth, stopped in front of the university
and gave the traditional Ustasha farewell oath to him: “Ustasha Josip Blažek!
He is with us!”82
At the same time as student welfare services were being expanded, the
model Ustasha student was also expected to demonstrate his or her social
conscience and commitment to the Ustasha regime’s social revolution. Ac-
cording to a law of 3 May 1941, all male university students were required
to undertake military training and enlist in the State Labor Service—which
lasted four months—as well as in the Ustasha Youth labor camps and public
works projects. The introduction of two new laws regarding labor and mil-
itary service in August and September 1942 made studying conditions for
students, including members of the USS, even more challenging. The first,
of 25 August 1942, stipulated that high school students had to undergo mili-
tary training before enrolling at university, while another, of 10 September
1942, stated that graduating female students had to undertake a year of labor
service in the Ustasha Youth before they, too, could continue their studies.83
While young male Ustasha students rallied enthusiastically to the cause of
defending the homeland, female Ustasha students, as an integral part of their
university studies, were sent to assist in agriculture, industry, and medicine.
So that this unpaid and “entirely voluntary” community service could serve
an academic function, the Ministry of Education stipulated that it would
count as the practical part of female students’ degree courses and contribute
toward their final degree mark. The ministry endeavored to match students’
social work with their academic interests: medical students were assigned
hospital positions to look after wounded soldiers; agricultural students were
sent to work in the countryside, helping to bring in the harvest; economics
students were sent to work in factories to relieve female workers so that they
could have a few months’ paid family holiday at home. While the summer
placements were aimed at providing context for the students’ academic stud-
 The Generation of Struggle  55

ies, with the ministry ensuring that female students working in the provinces
had enough time set aside to continue their studies, as well as addressing the
state’s increasingly chronic labor shortage, there was also a clear ideological
agenda.
The ministry wanted female students to become better acquainted with
the life of ordinary workers in order to eliminate the “slightest trace of class
difference.” The collaboration of young female intellectuals with ordinary
workers was designed to reverse decades of “Jewish capitalism,” the root of
the “poisoning of the national consciousness, respect, and industry in the
ranks of the workers,” and “destructive ideas” introduced by “foreign mer-
cenaries” that had taught the worker to “blindly hate” owners of factories
and all those who were not from his class. The placement of female medi-
cal students in hospitals would ensure that “our future generation of female
doctors” would “together with an Ustasha spirit also be imbued with a na-
tional and social consciousness.” At the same time, their work with orphans
would ensure that those they cared for would not only grow up to be physi-
cally strong but also live “normal lives.” This meant having respect for or-
der and discipline; attending schools that taught military exercises; and being
“brought up and indoctrinated in the spirit of Ustasha principles, so that the
Croatian state would inherit worthy members of society.” The ministry also
insisted that female medical students attend daily lectures on the importance
of the Ustasha movement.84
As a result of the ideological rigidity of the Ustasha regime, advancement
often depended on unquestioning loyalty to both the principles of the move-
ment and the status of the regime as the supreme authority. This opened up
avenues of opportunity and social mobility for ambitious students. In becom-
ing a student commissar, an undergraduate gained a uniform, importance,
and privileges unthinkable in Yugoslavia (such as being excused the neces-
sity of sitting university exams). Students who volunteered for the Ustasha
army were offered an automobile, a flat, a handsome salary, and all the fa-
cilities and materials they needed for academic study: the army would even
pay their travel costs to the interview. For an unmarried male university stu-
dent or a high school graduate from an “Aryan” racial background, there was
the promise of rising quickly in the army after he had finished his compul-
sory training, accelerated to one year instead of the normal two. In addition,
students enlisted for positions of responsibility in the state terror and secu-
rity apparatus, whether as members of state militias, UNS investigators, or
concentration camp guards and administrators. They also entered the vari-
ous propaganda, social, and cultural ministries of the new state in significant
numbers, finding positions as researchers, investigators, and cultural policy
 56  The Generation of Struggle

advisers, as well as writing for various party literary and youth-oriented jour-
nals and penning individual propaganda books for the regime.85 A student, in
a short period of time, could become someone. In addition, because the Usta-
sha cause was tied irrevocably to the national destiny, the regime appealed to
nationalist students keen to serve in a community of brotherhood with oth-
ers for the good of their nation.86 Of course, given the factional and revolv-
ing nature of the state bureaucracy, while Ustasha students could rise rapidly
in the state bureaucracy, they could fall from grace very rapidly too. For ex-
ample, Andrija Ilić, an undergraduate student and prolific author, appointed
to an influential policy position in the GUS Office for Propaganda in Zagreb
in late 1941, was suddenly released from duty on 15 June 1942 on the basis of
the violation of two statutes of the constitution of the Ustasha movement.
Despite this, his poems and polemical articles continued to be published in
newspapers, literary journals, and Ustaša itself, as well as in poetry antholo-
gies showcasing the state’s most talented young writers. And in fact, when his
first collection of poetry, Lutanja (Wandering), was published in December
1942, it was widely praised. One literary critic in Spremnost praised him as a
pioneering young poet, the first of the new generation of writers to produce
his own poetry collection. Although the critic acknowledged that his melan-
cholic poems had stylistic and technical shortcomings, in his opinion they
were deeply contemplative, a sincere reflection of the poet’s soul written “in
blood and tears.”87
Even if one could not become powerful immediately, or if one’s career
path was temporarily curtailed, a return to favor, as with Ilić, was always
possible; more important, in the long term the lure of future rewards was
dangled before the eyes of students: in this case, the nucleus of a future state
ruling class. As far as the regime was concerned, university youth were the
intellectual elite of the new Croatia, the “guarantee of our national freedom,
state security, and the great and happy future of the whole Croatian nation.”88
According to the prominent Ustasha ideologue Milivoj Magdić, it was youth
who could reinvigorate the revolution, giving it new dynamism and energy.
In comparison to communist youth, who, he argued, were excessively dog-
matic, Ustasha students would be the practical new elite of Croatian national
politics. They would not become a new intelligentsia—a term the Ustasha re-
gime loathed since it suggested urban liberal values—but they would be the
future rulers of Croatia.89 This did not mean that the regime’s leading cadres
were contemplating handing over power, nor that they were signaling their
intent to seriously take into account the wishes of students: far from it. Even
the Ustasha commissars at the apex of student power in the state enjoyed lit-
tle influence or authority.
 The Generation of Struggle  57

REDEFINING THE USTASHA STUDENT PROGRAM

The regime’s eulogization of the sacrifices of youth unceasingly linked the re-
generation and survival of the nation to the merciless and self-sacrificing and
intrepid actions of student youth. What did evolve, however, was the attitude
of many Ustasha students. By July 1942, flattering rhetoric was not enough.
Between the national euphoria of 1941 and the defeat of 1945, enthusiasm for
the Ustasha regime appears to have declined dramatically among students,
with profound disillusionment setting in. Students were coming under the
influence of the Communist Youth of Yugoslavia and other anti-fascist youth
groups. The Ustasha regime was well aware of what was happening at the uni-
versity as, in addition to youth commissars, they also had a well-coordinated
network of student spies and secret informers and a cadre of ideologically
committed recruits eager to work for the Ustasha secret police. On 2 No-
vember 1942, one of these recruits, a third-year undergraduate named Slavko
Kaštela, sent a letter to the Ustasha Supervisory Service providing it with a
list of “dangerous communists” he had known at university in 1940 and who
he knew in some cases were still attending university or living in the capital.
Similarly, on 30 April 1942 an anonymous student Supervisory Service agent
at the Trade High School in Zagreb, posing as a communist sympathizer, sent
a letter to the authorities denouncing two comrades who had talked of people
being murdered in Jasenovac, insulted the regime, admitted to being part of
the communist resistance, and claimed to possess firearms in preparation for
a future uprising. He also listed a number of other students who had refused
to sing the state and Ustasha anthems at school ceremonies.90 Many of the
students who contacted the secret police or applied to join its ranks did so
for ideological reasons, being committed supporters of the Ustasha regime.
Marcel Filipe, an undergraduate in the Technical Faculty who applied to join
the Ustasha police in November 1941, joined the movement immediately af-
ter the Independent State of Croatia was established, at which time he was
already a member of the illegal Ustasha student organization.91 However, spy-
ing for the security services also enabled financially hard-pressed students
to obtain precious military scholarships to see them through their study at
university, something that many student informers probably were tempted to
take advantage of. Personal ambition also undoubtedly played a role, and the
Supervisory Service was able to attract recruits from the ranks of university
students until the collapse of the state.92 Information from the university wor-
ried the regime. As early as 1942, in a speech to female university students, the
Poglavnik had warned them to take care that young women arriving at uni-
versity did not come under the influence of “foreign” or dangerous ideologies,
 58  The Generation of Struggle

by which he meant Yugoslav or communist ideas. Likening these ideologies

to a disease, he urged his listeners to isolate new students from them and im-
bue them with Ustasha and Croatian ideals.93 Increasingly, Ustasha student
commissars punctuated calls for students to attend rallies and meetings with
warnings that the names of those who failed to attend would be noted and
subject to “Ustasha justice.”94
Despite these kinds of warnings most students appear to have remained
apolitical: neither openly opposing nor actively supporting the regime. Cer-
tainly only a minority joined the USS, and by 1943 Ustasha leaders had long
since given up on the idea of the center as a universal compulsory under-
graduate institution. In response to growing concerns about the distinct lack
of enthusiasm among students for the USS in a lengthy article in the pages
of Plava revija in early 1943, Velimir Pustajec, one of the most vocal Ustasha
student leaders, announced that the regime intended to create a new organi-
zation for intellectual youth, the Union of Croatian Students (Savez hrvatska
sveučilištaraca—SHS), modeled on similar organizations in Germany and It-
aly. This organization was necessary, he claimed, because the Croatian state
was a young state under construction. For the Croatian nation to become co-
hesive, it required above all “a young and healthy intellectual class that will
be informed about the national question, national challenges, and national
yearnings, as well as able to resolve everything that affects it. What it needs is
young intellectual Ustashas.”95
Pustajec identified four types of student at university: “those who by their
conviction and work are Ustashas; the second are those who cannot be [Usta-
shas] because they cannot take on themselves all the demands of the Usta-
sha oath and the Ustasha life, but are supporters and allies of the Ustasha
ideology and the state, people who are Croatian by their feelings, but do not
have the energy to be among the most active of Croatians, in other words
Ustashas.” The third constituted the indifferent masses, who, “owing to im-
maturity or a false prioritization of interests, are neither engaged in life nor
strictly separated from it.” Finally, there were those who “are opponents of
the Ustasha ideology, the state, and hence the Croatian nation and who have
therefore isolated themselves from the national community.” University and
student life within it would therefore be founded on two organizations: the
USS for actively revolutionary students and the general Union of Croatian
Students. The two organizations were not parallel nor rivals to one another,
he explained. Rather, they would “live in symbiosis” with one another.96
The USS incorporated only the most elite and best students, who must
be committed Ustashas because “it is only the best, it is only the elite who
desire to give all their strength, all their possibilities for its nation and state,
and these are Ustashas.” According to Pustajec, the USS had “great and im-
 The Generation of Struggle  59

portant” tasks to carry out as the “salt” of the nation, movement, and uni-
versity. Not only was it the “nucleus from which will emerge the germ of a
new generation,” but its members would be engaged in the construction of
Ustasha ideology in the nation. By going into communities in the country-
side and working-class suburbs, students would educate ordinary Croatians
about only superficially understood Ustasha ideology. By injecting the cells of
Ustasha ideology into the bodies of Croatian workers and peasants, it would
grow in its “purest form.” By contrast, the new union would be an entirely
specialist organization that would have no involvement in political questions.
Instead, its work would focus on purely technical questions such as the wel-
fare of Croatian students, addressing social and health problems, studying
and working conditions, and questions about professional qualifications, as
well as practical needs like paper, books, writing implements, student ac-
commodations, and dining halls. While the union incorporated second-rate
“weaker” students who would never be able to join the USS, it was also to
act as a fast-stream organization for talented and ambituous but ideologically
passive students who aspired to join the revolutionary elite of the USS. On the
other hand, Pustajec warned that those students who were enemies of Croat-
dom would be excluded not just from both these organizations but from the
“ranks and membership” of the Croatian nation too.97
Where these ambitious embryonic Ustasha students were meant to come
from it was hard to tell. By 1943, even among many initially ideologically
sympathetic students, deep disenchantment had set in. This was only partly
linked to the authoritarian and repressive manner in which the USS in par-
ticular, and the regime in general, treated students. Many Ustasha students
had been furious about the annexation of Dalmatia by the Italians. In the
wake of the Rome Agreements, they had threatened to tear up their Ustasha
membership cards and defect to Slavko Govedić’s Croatian National Social-
ist Workers’ Party en masse; Ustasha students, many of them from Dalmatia
itself, had taken part in demonstrations against the annexation in Zagreb on
Christmas day 1941. Chanting “Long live Dalmatia! Long live Split!” they in-
tended to march to St. Mark’s Square and were only prevented after the head
of internal security, Eugen Dido Kvaternik, placed a cordon around the police
station and instructed Ante Moškov, the commander of the PTS, to install a
unit of his men to “disperse these Dalmatian mobs who want to pursue poli-
tics in the streets of Zagreb.” Although this was overruled by the Poglavnik,
nonetheless seventeen card-carrying Ustasha students were arrested for civil
and public order offenses, although they were later released.98 However, the
regime had been partially successful in heading off rebellion by instigating
its radical agenda of national regeneration and racial purification, which had
fired the imagination of students who streamed into the state’s paramilitary
 60  The Generation of Struggle

units and death squads. By holding out the promise of a leading role in the
state as the future bureaucratic and intellectual elite, the regime hoped to win
some favor. Nonetheless, for all their talk of students as the avant-garde of the
revolution, they did not much respect their opinions. After the euphoria of
the national revolution, concerned Ustasha student leaders began to detect a
creeping spirit of ennui and “emptiness.” After an initial period during which
students had left their studies to enlist in paramilitary units and liberate the
nation, many had returned to their books “to compensate for what they had
lost during the war. At university, a lull is felt.” For all the pressure that stu-
dent leaders exerted, Ustasha student camps were not universally well at-
tended, and the new Ustasha student societies did not prove to be as popular
as hoped. Press reports noted that students only turned up in large numbers
when some well-known figure was giving a lecture. What was needed was a
new direction and new content that would “fill the emptiness felt by students
after their victory.”99
Although acknowledging that a problem existed, Ustasha ideologues and
student activists could offer few solutions. Student leaders did complain that
due to the military service they were required to perform, their studies were
suffering. One student, Zlatko Majtin, argued that one solution to the prob-
lem was for university departments to retain contact with students while they
were performing their military exercises so they could return to university
after the war. Otherwise, students not finishing their exams would represent
a “great loss for the Croatian people.” The difficulties of combining academic
ambition with military duties had been a long-standing problem for the re-
gime; since the autumn of 1941 students had been writing to the regime to re-
arrange a time to take their examinations.100 Other students who had found
employment in the various propaganda departments of the regime were able
to postpone their military service after recommendations from their heads
of department on the basis of their “indispensable” skills and knowledge.101
But this was rare. Added to military duties, Majtin argued, students were also
being prevented from finishing their studies owing to the general war sit-
uation and the enormous social and economic problems associated with it.
Addressing the complaints of the movement’s working-class faction, which
resented the perceived privileges of university students and viewed them as
indolent loafers, he denied there was an “overproduction of intelligentsia.”102
His was not a solitary complaint. Another prominent Ustasha student activ-
ist, Zdravko Brajković, argued that it “shouldn’t be a source of contentment”
that today’s student was abandoning his “cherished books and seminars” for
the battlefield and was expected to choose between his duties as a warrior
and as a student. No matter how “daring and persistent” he was as a soldier,
for Brajković the solution was simple: “Without delay, he should be returned
 The Generation of Struggle  61

from the battlefield to study and learning.” That Brajković was writing in 1944
demonstrated what an enduring issue the problem of completing academic
study remained throughout the years of Ustasha rule.103
The regime employed a number of strategies to relegitimize itself among
its student supporters. Staged events provided one possibility. On 25 April
each year, the state celebrated the Day of the Ustasha Student. The date
marked the anniversary of the rally held exactly a year earlier, when Ustasha
students had vowed their lives to the Poglavnik, and he had promised them
the purification of the homeland from all internal enemies.104 On 25 April
1942, to mark the first such day, the USS planned a mass rally at which the
Poglavnik was to speak. Zdenko Blažeković issued a notice in Hrvatski narod
on 23 and 24 April, commanding veteran Ustasha students as well as exist-
ing members of the USS to gather at nine o’clock on the morning of 25 April
in the main university building to greet the Poglavnik. While some of those
ordered to attend by Blažeković were existing members of the student orga-
nization and others were recent graduates from the university, many had not
been students since at least the late 1930s and were now high-ranking regime
officials, bureaucrats and policy advisers, or important party theorists, writ-
ers, and journalists; a few were, in addition, regional party leaders or militia
and death squad commanders. Reading like a who’s-who of the state elite, the
list of former radical student activists who after April 1941 had risen to key
posts under the new regime was evidence not only of the strongly youthful
demographic profile of the movement but also of the extent of social mobility
available to those students prepared to commit their support to the regime.
The order also instructed all existing university students to attend the rally
in honor of the Poglavnik, scheduled for later the same day in Stjepan Radić
Square, “whether they are busy or not,” stating that those who were Center
members could also wear their uniforms.105
The mass student rallies held on the main grounds of the University of
Zagreb and Stjepan Radić Square were organized to demonstrate the loy-
alty of university students to the Ustasha regime and to enable the regime
to relaunch its legitimacy among students. In an effort to regain some of the
original support the party had enjoyed among students, party newspapers
not only praised the sacrifices of students but held out the promise to them
of being a future intellectual elite and the Ustasha state’s leaders-in-waiting.
Nonetheless, the same newspapers simultaneously made it clear that students
should be prepared to make more sacrifices. According to Nova Hrvatska, on
26 April, the day after the rally, university students were “our pride and our
strength.” In the “first era,” it was their bravery and sacrifice that had given
the rest of the nation the courage to step into battle too, assured that with
such youth better days were ahead of them. In the “second era,” after achiev-
 62  The Generation of Struggle

ing the liberation of Croatia, students had given everything of themselves in

the construction of the new state. Acting entirely unselfishly and driven not
by personal gain or profit, they had sought only to dedicate themselves and
their work to the nation and the homeland, to work “and if necessary sacri-
fice themselves for their nation and their Poglavnik.” The newspaper contin-
ued: “We could observe our university students in every field of work and
activity in the first year [of liberation]. They were forced by circumstances
to abandon their studies and examinations and prematurely take on various
difficult and responsible duties. They worked among the people, in offices, in
state institutions, in the Party, in the army; they gave as much of themselves
as they could and when it was necessary their own life.” Now, the newspaper
concluded, the “third era” of student life had begun with new duties and tasks
that would have to be carried out at the same time as students completed their
studies; only in this way would they be suited to assisting the nation in its
progress. This meant finding time in their studies to spread the spirit of the
Ustasha ideology throughout the nation, “in their region and among their ac-
quaintances.” As they had zealously sacrificed themselves in the attainment
of liberation, they now had to be willing to do everything in the continued
construction of the state.106
While students gathered in the courtyard of the university in their black
uniforms and feathered university caps, organized in formations, the be-
ginning of the ceremony was announced by the sound of a trumpet and
the entrance of Blažeković, accompanied by his adjutants, carrying Usta-
sha and university banners. After the singing of the state and party anthems,
Blažeković gave a speech pointedly recalling the role his generation of stu-
dents had played in the destruction of the Yugoslav state. He also remembered
the period immediately after students had been released from the “chains”
that had been “fettering” them. Without the Poglavnik, he declared, there
would have been no state and no students. The fact that he had met with stu-
dents two weeks after the national revolution, despite the enormous amount
of work to be done in the “destroyed and devastated” homeland, illustrated
his appreciation for all the sacrifices students had made for the liberation of
the homeland. But Blažeković also admitted to the assembled students that
after 10 April a crisis had emerged “in the wake of the terrible nervous strain,
after the great wave of energy that led to the moment of liberation.” This cri-
sis was worst at the Croatian University,” which had seen an “enormous”
number of its male students appointed to state positions. As a result of these
“warriors” being appointed to “demanding positions and important work,”
the university had been left without the men who had led it for years: “Some
might say that Croatian students lack direction. And I reply to you that they
have: their direction is the Ustasha philosophy. Their direction is the Usta-
 The Generation of Struggle  63

sha uniform. Their direction is the same as yours and mine: Ustasha.” This
uniformity of thinking meant that all students should rally behind the Po-
glavnik, grant him unquestioning loyalty, and tell him that “you are his, the
Poglavnik’s, Croatian, Ustasha, and that you will be always for Him and the
homeland prepared!” Two other student speakers, Ivan Valičić, a member of
the Law Camp of the USS, and Blažeković’s adjutant, Pustajec, also called on
younger students to follow the example of the previous generation and take
part in the construction of a “firm state edifice.” Valičić and Pustajec prom-
ised that Ustasha students would defend the state in blood, the same way it
had been created.107
In his speech to students in Stjepan Radić Square a couple of hours later,
the Poglavnik conveyed much the same message, appealing to the students’
dissipated spirit of zealous enthusiasm:
Today you have concluded the second era of Croatian students’ work, a
period of work in the first year of the Independent State of Croatia. It is my
duty to acknowledge that you carried out all your responsibilities in this
year not considering yourselves, not seeking personal profit, but zealously
you placed yourselves at the service of the Croatian people and the Inde-
pendent State of Croatia. Apart from your university duties, you carried out
your military duties too, your Ustasha duties. In this period you gave your
own blood. . . . In this first year you did not ask what would happen to your
lost years, you did not ask when you would be able to finish your studies,
you did not hesitate, but instead carried out your duties. You did not seek
Jewish businesses or Persian rugs, nor houses, nor positions or ranks, but
you sought only one thing: to work and sacrifice yourself for the nation, for
the homeland.108

Despite the rapturous reception he received from Ustasha students, chanting

his name and raising their right fists in salute, he confirmed that in the “third
era” of student life, even greater demands and sacrifices were to be placed
on students, since while Croatia was “Ustasha in our hearts,” in its work it
was still not completely Ustasha. For this to be achieved, students had the
task of making sure that all branches of national life were made “completely
Ustasha.” Students were to be sent into all branches of commerce, economic
and social life, and culture and transform them. In this sense, student social
mobility and expanded horizons could, for all the Poglavnik’s grandiloquent
phrases about student fortitude and selflessness, look more like an onerous
duty, delaying the day of graduation even further:
What awaits you is writing desks, offices, courtrooms, hospitals, roads,
bridges, buildings, woods, mines, and fields, great work that is crying out to
 64  The Generation of Struggle

be in capable and Ustasha hands. I am sure that during your study at uni-
versity with your patriotic and wider Ustasha duty, you will fulfill this great
duty that has been placed before you by the Croatian people. . . . I see in
your eyes that you look clearly and courageously into the future, I hear the
beating of your hearts, which beat only for the good of the Croatian people.
I see on your faces utter decisiveness to prepare, make ready, and be capable
leaders of the Croatian nation in the future, to invest all your spiritual power
for it, and when and if it is needed for the nation and the state to pledge your
own blood and life.109

Such staged events were only ever likely to appeal to a minority of even
the most ideologically committed students. The regime, aware of the disquiet
and dissatisfaction of Ustasha students, made various more meaningful ges-
tures in their direction over time. In response to Ustasha student complaints
that they were unable to finish their studies, as well as to ensure that there was
a ready supply of male students for the armed forces, the Ministry of Educa-
tion introduced an order in 1943 enabling Ustasha students to complete their
studies early. The order of 19 January gave Ustasha students special privileges
and exemptions regarding study and taking exams if they could show that
they had been imprisoned or forced to leave the homeland before 1941 and
were now on active Ustasha duty; if they had joined the army after April 1941;
or if they had been prevented from taking their exams before 10 April 1941
due to political persecution but were no longer on official Ustasha duty. All
students who fell into these categories were allowed to take their exams, irre-
spective of how long they lasted; were exempted from taking exams again in
subjects they had failed; and were permitted to have conditional registration
and attend lectures outside the normal hours. The law also obligated lectur-
ers and teachers to inform students which parts of the syllabus would not be
needed to pass the final examination. Moreover, if these students failed an
exam, they were to be given credit for those individual parts of the exam they
had passed and were permitted to take their final and end-of-year exams sep-
arately: this meant that failure in one or more subjects did not mean they had
to take the entire exam again. In addition, they were exempted from some
exams if they were not necessary for their intended field of specialization and
were exempted from taking their finals in subjects they had already passed in
the previous year.110
Not surprisingly, over time the perception grew among undergraduates
who were not members of the USS that Ustasha students represented a privi-
leged elite on campus. In some ways, this perception was true enough; they
did have access to services and opportunities that were not available to their
less ideologically acceptable classmates, whose university experience, when
 The Generation of Struggle  65

they were not being subjected to terror and surveillance, was frequently infe-
rior by comparison. They already had something of a reputation, as a group,
for being less academically capable and pursuing less academically rigorous
subjects than their class comrades; the special examination exemptions they
enjoyed simply added to the resentment of the majority of students who en-
joyed no such dispensations. But the characterization of Ustasha students as a
new class was also only partly accurate because it ignored the substantial sac-
rifices they were compelled to make for the Ustasha state in return for those
privileges. In part, at least, these laws simply reflected the fact that Ustasha
students were expected to spend a large proportion of their time away from
their university studies on military, political, or administrative duty, often in
very challenging circumstances.111
In any case, it was not completely accurate to suggest that Ustasha stu-
dents were simply allowed to skip subjects or avoid examinations; often their
duties presented them with little choice. Stanko Belić, for example, made
an unsuccessful request directly to the USS in October 1942 asking for per-
mission to conditionally register for the seventh semester in the Electrome-
chanical Section of the Technical Faculty. He explained that he had not been
able to take his preliminary final examinations in May, as between 14 and 23
June he had been sent from the Headquarters of the Labor Service to Sara-
jevo to organize the regional office for the Labor Service, and from 29 June
he had been a member of the PTS Student Militia, and on 18 August he had
been appointed to work in the Welfare Office of the Poglavnik Bodyguard,
from which he was now writing. And while some Ustasha students did gain
permission from the authorities to study at foreign universities in Germany,
Austria, and other allied states—often for economic as much as ideological
reasons—these seem to have been the exception rather than the rule even for
USS members.112
In addition, in October 1943 the regime arranged a student plenum at
which students could put their concerns and questions to the minister of lib-
erated territories, Edo Bulat, and the armed forces minister, Ante Vokić. They
also had the opportunity to speak at this plenum. Unfortunately, Bulat’s and
Vokić’s speeches did not really adequately address the complaints of students
and simply restated the regime’s mantra, lauding the sacrifices students had
made in the 1930s and since 1941, the heralds of “our endeavors and our sure
and final victory.” Bulat also reiterated, as countless other Ustasha officials
already had, that students would be called on to use their intellectual powers
as well as their muscles in the defense of the nation, holding out the promise
of future intellectual and ideological influence. Likewise, Vokić, the minister
of the armed forces, stressed the importance of Croatian student soldiers in
 66  The Generation of Struggle

the biological survival of the nation: they were, he said, warriors for Croatian
national ideology.113
Was this the answer students were seeking? Following the speeches,
Brajković recited some poems that appeared to be a careful criticism of
the regime. Among the poems he read were two by the young poet Zvoni-
mir Katalenić: “A Posthumous Military Honor” and “In Place of a Funeral
Wreath.” Student life, Brajković appeared to be implying, had to amount to
more than military service and an inevitable glorious death: students weren’t
just cannon fodder. Finally, in April 1944, in an era of “total war,” as Nova
Hrvatska termed it, the USS established an Office for Academic Support to
Student-Soldiers. The aim of the office was to provide students on active duty
with free advice and support across the range of academic, university, and
military-related subjects from which they had been separated during their
period of conscription: examinations, registration, the length and duration of
semesters, and how to maintain interest in study while carrying out military
duties elsewhere in the homeland were all covered, for example. The office
also offered to mediate in cases where there were conflicts between the de-
mands of army life and the pressures of academic study, supporting student-
soldiers on study leave from the army with accommodations, welfare, and
academic assistance. And it was only at the beginning of that year that stu-
dents serving in the civil service and the army were allowed to take a sabbati-
cal to complete their studies, ironically because the state was suffering from a
lack of doctors, lawyers, and young intellectuals.114
Demoralization and resignation were reflected in the cultural sphere too.
Cultural student journals as well as novels and plays written for and about
students wallowed in nostalgia. There were few, if any, books or plays that
dealt with student life as it was in Ustasha Croatia. By and large, they dealt
with the previous generation of students who had blazed the trail of Usta-
sha rule. Novels like Milković’s Tamnica or reminiscences like Skračić’s Pod
drugom ključom had a certain propaganda value, reminding current students
of what had been sacrificed by the previous generation, but they had little
relevance for students struggling with problems such as military conscrip-
tion and chronic food shortages. And they certainly did not mean very much
for freshman students enrolling at the University of Zagreb in 1943 or 1944.
Student poetry—the one cultural genre that did flourish in the Ustasha uni-
versity—tended toward the introspective and the melancholy. The poems of
Jakov Ivaštinović, for example, explored sexual guilt, the alienation of the
city, and separation from the countryside and family. In a collection of poems
published in the Anthology of Croatian Students of 1942, the poet imagines
that he is living far away from home, contrasting the warmth of village life
and his family with the depressing reality of life in the sophisticated big city.
 The Generation of Struggle  67

In this lonely world, even a treat such as going to the cinema can seem unbear-
ably bleak. “Outside it is gloomy / dark and / dense. / The rain pours down . . .
/ And I was in the cinema / and gulped a look / at a girl with large breasts,”
he writes. “The village remained far away from me / from me, / who walks
the streets / hungry, / while father shares out the food.” In another poem, he
imagines spending a desolate Christmas Eve in the city while all his family
gather in the village, roasting chestnuts and playing with his brothers’ chil-
dren, who ask where their uncle is, to which his father replies sadly: “—In the
city. He’s not coming. / And my godfather / and uncle / and aunt all asked /
and father’s answer was the same to all of them.” It will be a lonely and deso-
late kind of celebration for him. “Today is Christmas Eve,” he writes, “and
tonight father will carry in the straw. / And they will all be together for the
evening / except me.”115
In Lutanja, Andrija Ilić mined similar themes, his melancholic poems
focusing on the contrast between his idyllic childhood by the coast and the
alienating nature of life in the metropolis. He yearns for home in tear-stained
letters to his mother and brother: he contrasts the purity of the rhythms of
the coast—the blue sea, the clarity of the nights, going out in a boat, catch-
ing fish on the beach—with the snow, the frozen hands, the “somber, heavy”
mornings of fall, and the “corroding cold,” both physical and emotional, of
the city. In a poem in the form of a letter home to a friend, Ilić uses his feel-
ings of homesickness and ennui to warn his friend away from being tempted
to move to the urban metropolis: “I would have loved to stay with you / in my
dear village / in which I spent the days / of my youth,” he confesses. “I would
have my own little house / and piece of land, / I would work and rest as much
as I wanted / and I could say: this is mine!” Instead, his life in the city has
taken a very different and depressing course: “But here I am exhausting and
killing myself / by day and by night. / In the damp basement where I live / the
light is weak, / and I am ruining my eyes. My chest is inflamed / and day after
day I am getting sicker. / In the words of my book, seen double through tears /
I seek comfort and solace, / because strange people don’t like the alienated.”116
Writing in the student anthology of 1942, Janko Žanetić, meanwhile, couldn’t
help looking gloomily back on his life in solitary confinement as an impris-
oned youth in late 1940, irrespective of the fact that he now lived in the sup-
posed nationalist utopia of Ustasha Croatia: “On the second floor someone
sings a song, / a long nostalgic one / for freedom. / Above the silence the sor-
row spills out. A silhouette in black / displays a kiss in bloom / that in a secret
letter / was sent to him by his beloved—as is his melancholy.”117
The ennui and resignation of Croatian students do not imply that most
or all students had abandoned the concept of an independent state or had be-
gun to openly rebel against the Ustasha authorities, however. Although the
 68  The Generation of Struggle

candidates tended to be slightly older and the numbers slightly smaller—as a

result of the disruption caused by war and mobilization—as well as perhaps
less ideologically motivated, large numbers of students were still applying to
join the Ustasha University Center, and Ustasha students continued to enthu-
siastically attend rallies.118 In April 1944, in response to the growing crisis of
regime and state legitimacy, students held an inaugural congress, the aim of
which was to express solidarity and rally Ustasha students. The congress—
which included the taking of a mass midnight oath to the Poglavnik and was
opened by Ivica Krilić, a student on military duty—was attended by only the
most uncompromising and fanatical students. Student speaker after student
speaker stood up to announce that they would never reconcile with the “great
Serb enemy who wants to carry the insane and repulsive idea of Yugoslav-
ism across the pastures of graves and the bloody Foča Bridge.” Instead, they
glorified the values of the Croatian race and, as the delegate Višeslav Breža
put it, the “shining possibilities of our development, politically and cultur-
ally.”119 He had a warning for those students who did not want to commit
to the national cause: “Those who stand aside or are intellectually immature
and racially bloodless, lacking in diligence, or who are corrupted will receive
suitable punishment: the word is punishment. In stagnant water, a stone is
thrown, and the water is stirred up. Let the current be set in motion!”120 The
climax of the conference was an Ustasha student resolution that reaffirmed
the loyalty of university youth to the state and the movement.121
In this resolution, the students left no doubt that they were still the most
militant supporters of an independent Croatian state. They were also keen to
stress their loyalty to the regime and declared that they were bonded to the
Poglavnik “for eternity” since it meant loyalty to their dead comrades and
compatriots who had died “because they believed in the Poglavnik and be-
lieved in Croatia.” In fact, the resolution was, in some respects, more radical
even than official Ustasha policy. For example, on territorial issues it called
for the union of all those lands populated by ethnic Croatians. It declared
that, in addition to Croatia and Slavonia, the regions of Istria, Medimurje,
the Sandžak, and Bačka in the Vojvodina all represented “organic indivisible
parts of the Croatian nation in name, language, and aspirations, connected to
Croatian state continuity, land, and people.” In addition, it affirmed that Bos-
nia was the center of Croatia and an indivisible organic part of it.
The resolution was also socially radical. The students affirmed that the
state had to be run according to peasant values and “just” progressive eco-
nomic and social principles, which were the founding ideology of Stjepan
Radić’s peasantism and the Ustasha Principles, and they lamented the ap-
pearance of corruption, materialism, and “Croatian Jewishness,” which
“must be torn out at the root without mercy because leaders should serve only
 The Generation of Struggle  69

the people and the state.”122 Furthermore, the resolution violently condemned
the Partisans as “foreign and alien” to Croatian national values and any kind
of Yugoslav nation since between them stood “the hundreds of thousands of
Croatian lives from the December victims of 1918 to the Chetnik victims in
the present day.” On the other hand, the resolution showed the emergence
of independent thought within the Ustasha student movement on issues as
contentious as religion, race, and identity. Thus the students rejected the idea
that any Croat could be excluded from or promoted into political life on the
basis of their religion. True, religion was defined in terms of Catholicism or
Islam, with Orthodoxy not mentioned. Nonetheless, the students declared
that neither religious nor political institutions had the right to “propagate
religious division.” The students also envisaged a time in the future when
Croatia would be the leader of a Dinaric bloc of nations, therefore position-
ing Croatia, in opposition to Ustasha propaganda, in the “Balkan, Danube-
Adriatic” region, which included Montenegro, Slovenia, and Albania.123 For
many radical Ustasha students this would simply be a reflection of the mul-
tifaceted character of the nation. After the regime announced plans to con-
struct a university in Sarajevo—Husrevbegović University—with the existing
medical faculty at its core, Emil Medvedović, an undergraduate student and a
member of the Ustasha Student Center, wrote in Plug that another university
should be built in Split, named the Bulić University, after Don Frane Bulić.
This would complement the existing Croatian University in Zagreb and
Husrevbegović University in Sarajevo. The foundation of an academic center
in Sarajevo would show young Muslims they were an integral part of the state
and not condemned to degeneration and extinction. Additionally, he argued,
it would provide them with opportunities to enter the fields of academia,
medicine, law, and economics. The social mobility and entry of Muslim stu-
dents into the professions in large numbers would also directly benefit the
social and economic progress of the state. Equally important, though, the ex-
istence of the three universities would symbolize the three “cultural regions”
of the nation, meaning that its Central European, Balkan, and Mediterranean
characteristics could find their “authoritative expression.”124
The Congress of Ustasha Students of 1944 was a curious event. Although
the Ustasha press promoted it as a demonstration of student allegiance to
the state, its message was ambiguous. Whereas the student speakers all pro-
claimed their devotion to state and movement, many of the ideas set out
in the resolution were inimical to official Ustasha ideology; were implicitly
critical of state and governance structures; and suggested the need for a sec-
ond, student-led revolution to complement the “second” cultural revolution.
This was certainly the argument set out by Milivoj Karamarko, a twenty-
three-year-old sergeant major in the Student Militia and in January 1944 the
 70  The Generation of Struggle

appointed leader of the Ustasha Student Center. In case any Ustasha veteran
objected to this message, he pointed out not only that students were free
from prejudice, preconceptions, and burdens of the past but that they were
also gradually assuming the leadership of the armed forces and would one
day assume the leadership of the state itself. Why shouldn’t they, therefore,
have the right to develop their own ideas about the future of Croatia?125 Four
days later, expanding on his second revolution theme, Karamarko called
on students to lead the struggle against corruption in the state. It was the
task of students and young intellectuals, he explained, to help construct a
“Croatian people’s socialist society and mercilessly liquidate the appearance
of all native Jewishness and capitalism, people and groups who consider
themselves bearers of some new form of political leadership and anti-state
speculation.”126
The Poglavnik declared himself pleased with the resolution, calling it an
expression of “sobriety, seriousness, and an Ustasha expression of decisive-
ness.” Behind the scenes there were tensions, however. Ustasha commissars
were noticing that students were starting to become dangerously indepen-
dent. In April 1944, a student club at Rudolph University in Vienna, the
Croatia Academica club, which aimed to continue the tradition of interwar
nationalist student clubs, published a resolution with essentially the same
message, except that it went even further. While lauding the Ustasha move-
ment as the salvation of the nation and condemning Serbs, Jews, and com-
munists as “political” people, it proceeded to redefine the nation in a way that
struck at the very nature of the Ustasha movement’s ideology. Calling for an
integral Croatia in which all Croatians, and especially students, irrespective
of their ethnic and religious affiliation, would be equal, it spoke with pride at
having secured students of all three main faiths in its ranks. At the launch of
its manifesto in August 1944 in the Johannesgasse, the students sent a mes-
sage of loyalty to the Poglavnik, stressing their commitment to the Ustasha
state. Nonetheless, they demanded “free religious expression and especially
the creation of civic and political equality between members of the Ortho-
dox, Muslim, and Catholic faiths” as “an essential precondition for Croatian
life.” Croatdom, they stated, is not a border but “a synthesis of worlds.” The
students believed that in the same way that the words “Latin” and “Turk” had
disappeared from Croatia, so too would the notion of the “Serb” since “Croa-
tian Orthodoxy strengthens the Slavic freshness of Croatdom.” As far as they
were concerned, “absolute harmony on the basis of equality” was a “merci-
less diktat,” and whoever betrayed it also betrayed Croatdom.127 Accordingly,
Croatia would become an integral part of the Balkans; a League of Balkan
Countries could be established to protect the interests of the Dinaric nations
and the entire eastern coast of the Adriatic from Zagreb to Corfu. In it, Croa-
 The Generation of Struggle  71

tia would enjoy an important role, incorporating in its borders all Croatian
living spaces from Zemun to Zadar and acting as a synthesis of the East and
the West: “The Croatia of yesterday was a living wound of world conflicts.
The Croatia of tomorrow will be a symphony of their reconciliation. East and
West, North and South never anywhere experienced such a collision as in
the Croatian soul—now their followers must achieve complete harmony in it.
This is the mission of Croatdom.”128
Generally, Ustasha students lauded the Vienna resolution as the basis
of a “radical statist and nationalist program,” and some of them—including
their leader Karamarko—advocated ideas close to it. Thus, although Kara-
marko saw the Ustasha movement as “an incendiary bomb of the national-
istic spirit,” it was also a nationally unifying force that advocated harmony
and brotherhood. Croatia could no longer be “closed, cramped, or uniform”
but, on the contrary, must be a “multifaceted and complex synthesis.” Some-
what heretically, he expressed the belief that the Ustasha movement had to be
remade, in his words, as a more activist and principled organization, warn-
ing those who could not “throw off the ballast of decayed ideas and decayed
politics” that they could not expect “respect, peace, or comradeship.”129 More-
over, he argued that Croatia was not only both culturally and politically in
the Balkans but also absolutely Slav. “This generation is nationally integrated,
culturally synthesized, and politically state-constructed. . . . The prospects of
the State can only be achieved with its determined and active involvement in
the circle of Balkan nations,” he wrote.130
The emerging generation of Ustasha students who supported the Vienna
resolution reasoned that as they had been the first to be educated in an in-
dependent Croatia, their outlook was bound to be different. Many of those
who were most enthusiastic had still been in high school at the time of the
national revolution. Višeslav Breža, for one, saw the spate of Ustasha student
manifestos not as an expression of disloyalty to the regime but as a sign that
the current generation of students had something to say, that they were ca-
pable of saying it in a decisive and manly manner, and that they possessed the
qualities necessary for “the cultural and political shaping of reality.” Behind
the mountains of daily news and phrases and the noisy racket of sensation-
alism, he continued, “a new consciousness” and the “embryonic nucleus of a
new political generation” were being created. It was a testimony to the way
in which this generation stood out from the daily, the trivial, and secretarian
cliques. As with every epoch, Ustasha Croatia had given birth to a Croatian
generation: one that was “pure, strong, and alive.” Their commitment to and
love for the homeland should not be in doubt since in their resolutions and
manifestos they had demonstrated that the salvation of the nation and the
people was their most fundamental ideal. That said, they had been shaped by
 72  The Generation of Struggle

revolution, conflict, and war. The “stern” and “rough” introduction to adult
life they had endured had given them a wider national view and led them to
consider a variety of social and political questions. Social questions should
not be seen “as an obstruction to the nation’s strength.” On the contrary, this
generation, serving in the military, had a valuable role to play. If nothing else,
the controversial statements of students would stimulate debate.131
An older generation of Ustasha students saw it differently, however.
Franjo Nevistić, one of the most militant student radicals of the late 1930s and
the new hardline editor of Spremnost, sought to highlight the ideological de-
viations of these resolutions. Partly, the radical nature of the resolution was
the result of the differing experiences of Croatian students in the 1930s and
today. Students like himself had been thrust into real life. They had sacrificed
themselves in the struggle for Croatian statehood and had therefore not had
the time or opportunity to pose the kinds of questions that were typical of a
national and intellectual elite in their own state. “The kind of struggle im-
posed on us by Greater Serbian expansionism did not allow such niceties. The
struggle, as such, absorbed all our national energies, and it was not possible
to devote time to the issues awaiting us immediately following the struggle
for the destruction of the artificial Yugoslav state and the establishment of
Croatian statehood,” he recalled. Today’s generation of university students,
by contrast, was in the happy situation of being able to “put into motion and
resolve all those questions, unsolved conflicts, and hatreds that characterized
our generation. While our generation achieved a national state, the new gen-
eration has the task of securing the state and strengthening it.”132
On the surface Nevistić interpreted the resolutions, in many ways, as a
recapitulation of existing Ustasha principles and spoke positively about the
new ideas contained in them: for example, the principle of “integrated Cro-
atdom” and the equality of religions, which had not been mentioned in the
public sphere for some years. While he conceded that the Vienna resolution
emphasized the Balkan character of Croatdom, he also noted that this did
not exclude Croatia from the Western cultural orbit, and in fact, much of the
thinking joined Croatia to contemporary Europe. He also appeared to defend
the interests of students in social, rather than national, questions. The fact
that the majority of male students were actively taking part in the military
defense of the nation-state had given a special character and outlook to their
generation. Their army service, together with their undergraduate studies,
had enabled them to become acquainted with the problems of the new state
and the “little man.” Out of these experiences they had been able to develop a
social program. This social conscience meant that, in his opinion, they were
well placed to successfully fulfill the functions of an intellectual and political
elite.133 But he chided the students that, while he did not want to stand in the
 The Generation of Struggle  73

way of their “positive” activities, the current political climate was not suited
to an ideology that had only just been developed. Only when the war was over
would they have the right to demand complete social justice for the little man,
a program for the future, not the present. In the current climate, there was
no place for social programs. Just as students needed to appreciate that their
studies would have to be curtailed in the interests of national defense, so they
must accept that “today we live in times that don’t recognize sentimentality,
when, in the ceaseless struggle for national existence, there must sometimes
be sacrifices, including principles that would make a valuable contribution in
more normal times.”134
In an editorial to mark the Day of the Ustasha Student in 1944, the ed-
itors of Plug, the official newspaper of Ustasha students, which had loudly
proclaimed the idea of a second youth revolution, defended their right to ide-
ological independence and to set out their views unambiguously, or, as they
put it, “in a manly manner.” This, they claimed, was a mark of their maturity
and education, as well as a sign of their status as intellectuals. They reminded
the regime leaders that in the days before the creation of the Independent
State of Croatia, their generation had played a crucial role in the liberation
struggle of the nation; in the current era, students as a group had unani-
mously stood up in the defense of the state as soldiers and warriors: “today
in the units of the Croatian armed forces and tomorrow in the preparation
for entry into national life.”135 Were university youth challenging the found-
ing principles of the Ustasha state, as Nevistić feared? Not really. What their
implicit criticisms of the regime did indicate, however, was that many actively
revolutionary students were no longer content to be used by the regime for
simple propaganda purposes; they were not satisfied to sacrifice their lives
for the nation in return for nothing more meaningful than shallow adulation
in the press. Most of all, they wanted a meaningful role in the movement and
the state: they wanted to engage in a critical intellectual discussion about re-
gime policy and the future direction of the state; they would no longer accept
Ustasha ideology uncritically. As Zrinko Nikolić, another student journal-
ist, pointed out in April 1944, today’s students had grown up together in the
tastes and ideology of 10 April, and in 1941 five thousand students had entered
the Ustasha army. What they were striving for was certainly not the destruc-
tion of the Ustasha state, he pointed out, but rather the evolution of state-
society relationships within it. In this evolved relationship, Nikolić pointed
out, humanism and Ustasha state ideology would be combined, but human-
ist values would not usurp state ideology or become “volcanically rebellious”:
Ustasha ideology should remain the guiding ideology of the state. Nonethe-
less, for all their protestations, Ustasha students were beginning look forward
to a time when the war would be over and the kind of society they would like
 74  The Generation of Struggle

to construct when it was. They didn’t want to be merely the intelligentsia of

the future but to make a meaningful contribution in the present.136

CULTURAL REBELLION IN THE USTASHA STUDENT RANKS

The ideological experimentation among Ustasha students was mirrored in
their cultural tastes: in the vanguard of the idea of a second revolution by
youth was a coterie of student journalists based around a cultural Ustasha
student journal. For over a year, Ustasha students, led by Karamarko had been
lobbying the center leader Zdenko Blažeković for permission and funding to
start a newspaper specifically for members of the center, a request that was
cautiously granted by the hardliner Blažeković. After a number of false starts,
in the spring of 1944 the first edition of Plug (The Plough) was published, spe-
cifically designed to address the alienation of students from the regime and
“fill up the emptiness that is felt in the lack of newspapers for Croatian stu-
dents.”137 Although Plug was intended as a journal for Ustasha students and a
vehicle for propagating uncompromising Ustasha values among the student
masses, it nonetheless managed to gather not only young essayists, poets, and
intellectuals such as Zvonimir Katalenić, who were committed supporters of
hardline Ustasha cultural values, but also many others, like Vlado Miličević
and Zdravko Brajković, who were identified with a more moderate form of
Ustasha student cultural politics. However, many of the young artistic and
literary contributors to Plug, such as Dražen Panjkota, Jakov Ivaštinović, and
Aleksandar Srnec, were neither members of the Ustasha student organization
nor even identified with the radical right. As well as providing a literary and
artistic forum for an emerging generation of experimental young writers and
artists, over time, it gained an air of anarchic and rebellious irreverence. In
its editorials, Karamarko and Plug’s editors, Brajković and Ejub Čensić, set
out their opposition to the “literary and political coterie” and their “modest
and lyrical timidity, drawn into itself.” Instead, as they put it, criticism and
freedom would be the aim of their journal.138 It is uncertain how many stu-
dents read it and how influential it was on campus. What is clear is that its
ideas quickly took an unexpected turn. From the moment of the entrance of
students into public life, the editors wrote in October 1944, they had had no
chance to rest and catch their breath; they never had the opportunity to ex-
perience wealth or relax. Instead, they had been launched into the full fury of
the struggle for liberation and the protection of their state. As a result, their
generation’s lucid views of the world had remained confused and unarticu-
lated. This journal gave the new generation the opportunity to articulate their
views and the public the chance to become acquainted with the perspectives
of students.139
From its inception, the journal sought to challenge both the literary and
 The Generation of Struggle  75

the cultural tastes of older conservative critics and prevailing ideas about stu-
dents among the rank and file of the movement. Regarding the latter, Franjo
Trbuha, a university student who wrote regularly for Plug, believed that the
most important contribution the journal could make would be to demolish
the stereotype of the indolent student conjured up by some commentators.
Far from not caring about the fate of Croatia, he retorted, the true Croatian
student could not study in peace if he saw those near to him destroying the
nation. The fact was, the majority of today’s Croatian students were prepared
for sacrifice, had already endured it, and were a strong enough presence to
repress contemporaries who, chronologically, belonged to their genera-
tion but were “the dregs of the old, transformed from relativism into solip-
sism.”140 The students around Plug also wanted to challenge the dominant
cultural tastes of conservative critics, especially their attacks on surrealism
and other avant-garde forms of art. Zdravko Brajković, for example, a poet
and critic, defended Tin Ujević from conservative critics who attacked his
lack of popular appeal: “They complain that the masses don’t understand the
poems of Tin Ujević (as they presumably did Gaj’s awakening), but this is not
such a tragedy; the masses lose themselves in jazz music, pulp fiction, cheap
celluloid films. That is a far greater tragedy.” For him, artists lived outside
all social and moral norms.141 Two other prominent Plug contributors, Jakov
Ivastinović and Vlado Miličević, were bold in their challenging of perceived
Ustasha cultural norms. In his discussion of the problems of nationalism and
literature, to mark the publication of Vinko Nikolić’s study of the national
and revolutionary tasks of literature, Ivastinović added to the Croatian liter-
ary canon a number of banned writers, such as Miroslav Krleža and Slavko
Kolar, proscribed by the regime, categorizing them as integral elements of a
synthetic national literature that, ideally, he perceived as both Croatian and
universal.142 In a similar manner, Vlado Miličević praised as a genius the
same Krleža Nikolić who had been decried for his “degenerate” literature.143
And in his review of a book surveying literature in the Independent State of
Croatia, he criticized the author for giving nationalist writers of little artis-
tic or literary merit precedence over more accomplished Serb or communist
writers. In his review, Miličević singled out in particular two writers, one a
Muslim Partisan who had died in battle in 1942 and the other a Bosnian Serb,
as more worthy of inclusion than some of the radical nationalist and Usta-
sha intellectuals, theorists, and writers praised in the survey: “Novak Simić
and Hasan Kikić are not mentioned at all,” Miličević complained, “while
St.[anko] Vitković, R.[adovan] Latković, [Tias] Mortigjija, [and] [Mladen]
Bošnjak are mentioned even though they have no significance as artists in
Croatian literature.”144
Nonetheless, their literary rebellion only went so far and was underlaid
 76  The Generation of Struggle

with nationalist sentiment. Zdravko Brajković might praise Ujević, but this
was supplemented with expressions of loyalty to Ustasha cultural politics
and, in particular, to its aim of constructing a literature expressing and syn-
thesizing all the characteristics of national-state life. In his opinion, the fact
that literature should reflect trends in Croatian society would not limit the
freedom of expression of the Croatian artist as long as such developments
were not coerced; in fact, it could reinvigorate it. “Croatian national life, like
a beggar needs bread, thirsts for a literary generation that is full of Croatian
blood. Let the psyche of the Croatian national soul stream into novels and
poems, let our expression grow out of the land and cut the good from evil
in our soil.” Instead of chasing after Western culture like a “little boy run-
ning around after polite, perverse European governesses,” Croatian literature
had to find a new voice and conscience, a task that could only be achieved by
youth “because more complete and traditional experiences disrupt the devel-
opment of new thoughts.” The representatives of the Croatian literary genera-
tion would only develop if there was “a growth of Croatian ideology in the
souls of creators. Thanks to the whirlwind of the new Croatian faith, living
with the fire of Croatian energy (the soil and the man), the healthy words
of our voice will echo out.”145 Similarly, while Miličević praised Krleža, he
advocated the “organic growth of Croatian literature” and violently rejected
Krleža’s insertion into Croatian literature as “redundant” and based on Eu-
ropean prejudices that did not appreciate that Croatian literary circles had
developed differently from Paris’s. It was not necessary to exhibit all the char-
acteristics of European culture for literature to be authentic or unique or Cro-
atian. Krleža’s own essays betrayed these prejudices, Miličević complained,
frequently mentioning French and Russian literary figures such as Mallarmé,
Stendhal, Hugo, and Maeterlinck, but having nothing positive to contribute
to debates about Croatian literary problems.146 In fact, as Niko Zekanović, an-
other student contributor, emphasized, no matter how modern their cultural
tastes, they remained militant nationalists opposed to urban cosmopolitan
values. His generation “reacted to the illness, weakness, and soft decadence”
of the past century and its “lax, passive, and pacifist nature” by reading
Nietzsche, not Tolstoy and Maurras, not Ibsen. It would not accept anything
“opaque or shadowy,” instead seeking clarity and order. “Due to this atti-
tude,” he concluded, “it would not kneel before cosmopolitan ideas; it did not
exalt in panegyric thoughts.”147
Instead, for Zekanović’s generation, nationalism was a logical idea. It
“visibly hated” foreigners who trod on the honor of the nation and would
“lead a war of extermination” against its enemies, who “spewed bile and as-
saulted the biological unity of our nation.”148 Far from moderating, in some
respects the nationalist rhetoric of Ustasha students grew increasingly fanati-
 The Generation of Struggle  77

cal the more vocal their ideas of second revolution became. Cultural synthe-
sis, religious equality, and cultural experimentation were only one side of this
revolution: the other was blood, the violent repulsing of wild Eastern hordes
and a war of extermination against the internal and external enemies of the
nation-state. On 12 August 1944, for example, three days after the assassina-
tion of army commander Franjo Šimić in Mostar, students issued a bloodcur-
dling leaflet that called for the Croatian authorities to intensify their war of
extermination against national enemies:
The Chetniks, these devious snakes and criminals, entered into an alliance
with the Italians. Now they are using the Germans for the very same aim.
They kiss the bottom of their garments and threaten them behind their
backs with the very same filthy knife. They wade shamefully in our holy
Croatian blood. Belgrade is the meeting point for both the Partisans and the
Chetniks, as well as the Serbian émigrés and Nedić supporters. The Parti-
sans and Chetniks are two bloody manifestations of one and the same band
of cutthroats who stick their filthy claws into the pure Croatian body: they
are both representatives of the House of Karađorđević. We demand from
the Croatian government that it proceed by all means at its disposal with
the ruthless and merciless extermination of the Chetniks. We demand from
the Germans that they cease supporting and tolerating the Chetniks, their
deadly enemy. The Italian example must not be repeated in the cultured
world. Croatianism and the Chetnik ideology cannot and will not ever coex-
ist. Death and vengeance to the Chetniks! Long live the Croatian state!149

Students also declared war on their more recalcitrant colleagues. At a stu-

dent rally, Milivoj Karamarko declared that no student should be allowed to
remain on the sidelines in the struggle for a Greater Croatia stretching from
the west to the east. The tradition of Croatian students had never been ser-
vile: revolutionary students had risen militantly to the “cruel” demands of the
time. The honor and freedom of the nation, the sovereignty and unity of the
state, the imperium in the hands of the Poglavnik, a just and orderly society:
these were principles for which Ustasha students were perishing.150
There was also a return to the kind of apocalyptic language that had long
characterized student rhetoric, even in the pages of Plug. The Croatian na-
tion, Karamarko vowed, would be prepared to struggle to the bitter end for
a free Croatian state against the Partisans, communist by their political and
social principles, Greater Serb by origins and personnel, and anti-Croatian
through their work and plans, and thus “the greatest enemies and most dan-
gerous poison” of Croatia, and the Chetniks, who were conspiring “through
the most terrible means to wipe away all traces of us.” In this final confron-
tation, a united Croatia of three faiths would face its enemy across the Drina
 78  The Generation of Struggle

because no one could take away its people’s independence through force of
arms: “We are prepared to pay the bloodiest price for our state, and therefore
we will keep it. All that is currently befalling us is the final confrontation with
Greater Serbianism, for which we are ready. One defensive war on the Drina.
We are waiting!”151 The war against communism, Karamarko wrote in the
Christmas 1944 edition of Plug, was a struggle of “healthy” European masses
against the “catastrophic invasion of Bolshevik ideas.” It would be wrong to
think that just because the fate of Croatia relied on national and international
decisions, the nation was not able to decide its own fate or that the Croatian
Republic favored a return to liberal democracy. “In place of election lists, the
Croatian nation with the guns of hundreds of thousands of voting soldiers
led and proclaimed to the world their bloody national plebiscite, their na-
tional and state self-determination. All of them vowed their faith and lives
to the Republic and the Poglavnik.” Nonetheless, he noted that in the same
way the leaders of the republic’s three main faiths were collaborating in the
defense of the homeland, so too would the nation’s “conservative” political
forces need to join forces with the “radical activist forces” in a “Croatian na-
tional front” rising up on Croatian soil to “terrify and destroy” the “Croatian
popular front” of the communists. Such a nationwide front would ensure the
salvation and survival of both the republic and the nation. Although they
might all perish in this endeavor, he countered, it was better for the nation to
fall “with the crack of thunder, heroically and celebrated,” rather than “with
a whimper or in flight!”152
This was to be the last edition of Plug and the final article written by Kar-
amarko as leader of the USS. In December 1944, Karamarko was relieved of
his duties as center leader to be succeeded, ironically, by his longstanding
critic, the stern hardliner Franjo Nevistić, a survivor of the older generation.
Karamarko was arrested along with other student leaders, such as Miličević,
Brajković, and Hinko Wolf, two or three days before Christmas. He was im-
prisoned in Petrinjska Street, accused of being involved in the Lorković-Vokić
putsch. In the police investigations led by Ante Štitić, the articles he had writ-
ten in Plug were seen as particularly damning evidence of his sympathy for,
if not active involvement in, the supposed conspiracy. Placed before the Dis-
ciplinary Court of the GUS in early April 1945, he was given a reprimand and
released on 25 April. Due to return to military duties as a sergeant major in
the Poglavnik Bodyguard on the afternoon of 26 April and missing his pistol,
which had been confiscated when he was arrested, he returned on the morn-
ing of 26 April to Petrinjska Street, where he was arrested by troops from the
Ustasha Defense Unit and incarcerated in Luburić’s barracks in Drašković
Street. Students in the university soup kitchen the next morning were in-
formed that Karamarko had been sent to join one of Luburić’s units in Sisak.
 The Generation of Struggle  79

In fact, he was murdered on the orders of Ivica Matković, the commander of

Luburić’s barracks and a former high-ranking guard at Jasenovac concentra-
tion camp, suffocated with a pillow while he slept, just before midnight on 29
April 1945. His body was found naked except for his underwear: his dressing
gown had been stolen by the guard ordered to kill him.153
In the meantime, in an atmosphere of hysteria and apocalypse, Usta-
sha students, after this brief interlude, circled back to their original Ustasha
beliefs. Noting that the Croatian nation had pledged its existence in blood,
Ustasha students, in a proclamation printed in Ustaša in April 1945 to mark
the fourth anniversary of the state’s birth, stated that “true to our blood and
spiritual roots in our peasant nation and loyal to the state authorities,” they
considered the renamed Independent Republic of Croatia to be the only pos-
sible representative of the political, cultural, and economic existence of the
Croatian nation. They linked their struggle to that of Croatian radical stu-
dents in the 1930s, pointing out that this had been the ideal of students in
the years before 1941, “even at the cost of their own lives, and these sacri-
fices are happening almost daily in the Independent State of Croatia.” At the
same time, they also tied their fate to that of the regime and the republic. It
was with the “greatest indignation” that they rejected any idea of union with
the Karađorđević dynasty. It provoked “in the souls of Croats such premoni-
tions of horrible crimes that were carried out in their name against the Croa-
tian people” that they offered their limitless support to the leadership of the
Croatian Republic and the Poglavnik. For the students, the most dangerous
enemy was, had always been, “Greater Serbdom in the form of Yugoslav Bol-
shevism,” which would mean for them “slavery and death.” The Partisan ide-
ology and leadership were completely alien to their generation of nationalist
students, and they had given their answer to the invitation to join the ranks
of “the thousands of fallen lives of their comrades who, with a gun on their
shoulders, defend the Independent State of Croatia.” The Croatian nation had
created its national republic and “given limitless faith to their supreme lead-
ership in blood, in the Poglavnik’s journey of daily plebiscites of sacrifice,
blood, and lives.” In their concluding remarks, the students returned to the
Ustasha regime’s original ideas about the Western traditions of Croatia: there
was no talk now of a Balkan federation. Defiantly, they emphasized that, by
its cultural, political, and social characteristics as well as its racial affinity,
Croatia belonged in Europe. It had distinguished itself not only from other
Balkan states by its superior culture but from other European states. While
“Asiatic” communism had penetrated these other states, the Republic of Cro-
atia, giving “streams of blood,” remained the last “anti-Bolshevik bastion”
and the defender of Western European values.154
These defiant proclamations aside, the fact was that by the beginning
 80  The Generation of Struggle

of 1945, a sense of nervousness and impending doom pervaded the univer-

sity. With the repression of the brief period of intellectual and cultural in-
dependence and radicalism in Ustasha student ranks and the arrest of the
instigators, students moved once more—this time decisively—away from the
Ustasha movement and its youth organizations into either fatalistic apathy or
the ranks of the communist resistance. The final applications submitted by
freshman students in the autumn of 1944 reflected the extent to which mem-
bership in the Student Center was perceived by many, somewhat cynically, as
a means of social mobility and career advancement, rather than as an indica-
tion of ideological commitment. By 1945, under the stern, fanatical leadership
of Nevistić, even this questionable perception was increasingly open to doubt.
In desperation, he was reduced to publishing an open letter to students ask-
ing for their support whether they were supporters of the regime or not, on
the basis of national solidarity. “We do not want to make formal Ustashas,”
he insisted. “There is an open door for everyone who wants to collaborate
with us if they accept [our] values, not as the values of a special ideology or a
special group, but as the inevitable values of the Croatian people as such.”155
But under Nevistić’s dour leadership, even those few ideologically commit-
ted members of the Ustasha student organization did not, as Karamarko had
implored, remain to heroically defend the state in blood but opted for a more
uncertain fate, if not with a whimper then definitely in flight: on the night of
6 May 1945 they left on the last train out of Zagreb, a train that for most of
them led to arrest and execution at the hands of the “Asiatic” Partisans.
CHAPTER 2

ANNIHILATE THE OLD!

The Cult of Youth and the Problem
of National Regeneration

W
hile being an Ustasha meant many things, above all, it meant be-
ing young. Youth, dynamism, and energy were at the center of the
Ustasha movement’s ideology and worldview. As Ustaška Mladež, the
Ustasha Youth journal, commented in June 1942: “To be an Ustasha means
to be eternally young and eternally a warrior.” The revolution of the Ustasha
movement was, ultimately, the revolution of youth.1 This was a view shared
widely in the movement. According to the novelist and poet Jure Pavičić, it
was youth with their idealism and lack of sentimentality who had sacrificed
most for the nationalist struggle. The most loyal supporters of the Poglavnik,
with their enthusiasm and passion, had been the militant Croatian youth.
Yet when Prpić talked of the Ustasha movement being a movement of youth,
he also included all those who had supported the movement and now sup-
ported the Independent State of Croatia since they, too, were young. One of
the greatest achievements of the Ustasha movement in the period of national-
ist struggle, he wrote, had been to “completely cleanse from Croatian political
life” the decrepit and all those of an old mentality. While many of these old
had passed over to the enemy camp and become national traitors, colluding
in the persecution, torture, and oppression of the Croatian nation, Croatian
youth “gathered in the Ustasha organization and, under the symbol of the let-
ter with bombs and revolvers provided evidence of their youthful élan in the
struggle for the liberation of Croatia.”2

81
 82  Annihilate the Old!

For Janko Žanetić, the foundation of the Independent State of Croa-

tia meant the creation of a regenerated Croatia, representing a new under-
standing of life. With an independent state under the Ustasha regime, a new
spirit and new “essence” would be cultivated.3 The Ustasha cultural commis-
sar, Marko Čović, meanwhile argued that the creation of this new spirit in
Croatia was part of a longer struggle not just between the old and the young,
but between the nation and its oppressors. Instead of joining the struggle of
youth, those of the old mentality had tried to destroy the dynamism of youth
and, in so doing, “kill and slowly inhibit the living organism of the whole
community.” The older generation had opposed this new generation, “a whole
legion of youth, a whole legion of excited men,” full of “strength, energy, and
healthy blood,” which had emerged to destroy “all the decay, all the coward-
ice, miserable impotence, all this searching and roaming on false paths and
in graveyards, all this old cringing weakness.”4 The establishment of the In-
dependent State of Croatia meant the young had won. But as far as Čović was
concerned, the struggle against the older generation was far from over since
the old “still twitch and cringe, they still peep out from their hideaways and
pits.” In the end, though, the strength and élan of Croatian youth would de-
stroy them.5
The Ustasha movement presented its struggle as a simple one between the
young and the old, between the modernity of fascism and the decrepitude of
democracy. While it did not disdain Croatia’s long history, it viewed an in-
dependent Croatia as an opportunity to remake society. Under its rule, all
manifestations of the old mentality—liberal democracy, plutocracy, and Yu-
goslavism—would be eradicated. For the Ustasha movement, youth would be
the vanguard of the national revolution. Its energy and fanaticism would be
used to transform the nation and regenerate its spirit. However, before this
could happen, the Ustasha movement argued, youth itself would have to be
remade in a new spirit and ethos. It would have to divest itself of the decadent
and morally degenerate habits that it had acquired as a result of twenty years
of liberal democracy. According to Branko Fištrović, an Ustasha Youth leader
from Koprivnica writing in September 1941, although the Yugoslav state had
been destroyed, Croatian youth needed to rid themselves of the habits of Yu-
goslavism and the old mentality. The old values of weakness, deception, and
love of the easy life had to be replaced by a desire for duty, truth, work, and a
better and more respectable life. But this renewal had to begin from within.
Every youth had to confront their past life and construct a new life founded
on the positive qualities of the nation. “It is useless to adorn ourselves with
the Ustasha name, if in everyday life we are on the way practically to being
communists, if we do not attempt to build our character strengthened with
 Annihilate the Old!  83

will and a noble heart. Ustasha Croatia demands a pure and healthy genera-
tion, not a generation of fortune hunters and spineless crawlers.”6
While the Ustasha regime attempted to utilize the energy and fanaticism
of youth and the iconography of youthful rebellion for the purposes of the na-
tional revolution, the characteristics the regime hoped to use in the construc-
tion of a new state and society were the very same qualities that the regime
struggled hardest to control and direct. The Ustasha regime and its youth
commissars aimed to bring discipline, order, and obedience to the lives of
the young and inculcate them with a new sense of moral purity, but this con-
flicted with the ideals of youthful rebellion that the regime simultaneously
encouraged. Increasingly, Ustasha Youth leaders found it more, not less, dif-
ficult to maintain order, complaining about the indiscipline, indolence, and
lack of respect demonstrated by many members of the Ustasha Youth. Over
time, a spirit of cynicism about the moral strictures of the movement, com-
bined with a return to the kind of personal immorality the Ustasha Youth
organizations were supposed to eradicate, also emerged in reaction to the reg-
imented reality of life in Ustasha Youth organizations. More than anything,
though, Ustasha leaders faced great difficulties in controlling the radicalism
of Ustasha Youth, who often had a militant and aggressive agenda that went
much further and was more extreme than even regime ideology allowed for.
Like student leaders, they were vocal in their criticisms of the regime leader-
ship, the stagnation of the national revolution, and the corrupion of everyday
life. At the same time, many members of Ustasha Youth organizations were
also impatient for power and influence. They did not want to wait years to
make a meaningful contribution to the running and the ideological direc-
tion of the state: only with youth in charge would the state be able to return to
its original revolutionary Ustasha principles. While the Ustasha regime had
initiated its revolution in the name of youth and aiming to mobilize youth-
ful enthusiasm, the violent youthful élan it had purposefully cultivated in its
youth organizations and the cult of youth it had employed as a legitimating
weapon among the wider population produced conduct and behavior among
its youth activists it found ever harder to control.

PLOTTING THE REVOLUTION OF YOUTH

In interwar Croatia, youth groups were one of the major strongholds of radi-
cal nationalism. Many of them believed that Croatia was decaying morally
and culturally in Yugoslavia and that Croatians were losing their sense of na-
tional consciousness; some of them argued that Croatians were close to ex-
termination. In this situation, only a merciless war of liberation could save
the nation. There were numerous militant youth groups in interwar Croatia,
 84  Annihilate the Old!

many of which either disappeared very quickly or were banned for their vio-
lent behavior. Some, like the Croatian National Youth, were intended for a
middle-class membership, while others, such as the Croatian Labor Youth,
aimed to prevent urban working-class youths and apprentices from join-
ing socialist organizations. After the outlawing of these organizations by
the Yugoslav authorities on account of their political activities, two others
were formed: the Croatian Right Republican Youth, led by Branimir Jelić at
the University of Zagreb, and the Croatian Right Labor Youth, led in Zagreb
by Marko Hranilović and Matija Soldin, who were hanged in 1931 on terror-
ist charges.7 The Croatian Right Republican Youth, founded in 1927, quickly
turned from a militant nationalist organization into a terrorist one.8 It was
from this group that the Croatian Right Revolutionary Youth was formed in
September 1928. At its second conference in October 1929, the Revolutionary
Youth made the decision to launch a violent insurrection against the Yugoslav
state through the gathering together of “the most militant and decisive” and
“manly” youth in one paramilitary youth organization, the Hrvatski domo-
bran (Croatian Home Guard). This was to become the nucleus for the revolu-
tionary struggle to liberate Croatia from Serb oppression and the “first units
of the future Croatian army.” In the name of the nineteenth-century Croatian
revolutionary Eugen Kvaternik, its members made a decision to embark on
a “bloody and decisive struggle” and “open armed and revolutionary battle”
against the “criminal” rulers in Belgrade. In the first edition of the journal
Kvaternik, the youth leader Branimir Jelić announced that he and his follow-
ers were “the children of a dead father, / Let our slogan of vengeance be in
the air. / To avenge our father and for the freedom of the homeland we would
give / Constantly our heads! Be proud!” Declaring that the youth movement
was guided by Kvaternik’s mysticism and blood, he called not only for a new
Kvaternik but for a new Rakovica. This youth group planned to form clandes-
tine armed units, gathering weapons so that at the moment of national revo-
lution they would have “weapons in their hands to fulfill the thousand-year
pledge of the Croatian people for the creation of an independent Croatian
state.”9
In their journal, members of the Croatian Revolutionary Right Youth
vowed to annihilate Yugoslavia. They believed they were living under a vio-
lent, morally decadent regime that could be defeated only through the cleans-
ing power of violence. They painted a grim picture of life in Croatia in the
months leading up to the tenth anniversary of the founding of Yugoslavia.
Under Yugoslav rule, the Croats were fighting for their biological survival.
They were “completely materially destroyed, robbed, in debt, naked, barefoot,
and hungry,” as the first edition of one of their underground newspapers put
it.10 As far as they were concerned, the very Yugoslav idea, never mind the
 Annihilate the Old!  85

grim reality, was illegitimate. They argued that 1918 marked not the coming
together of three Slavic tribes in brotherhood and unity, but rather the start
of Croatia’s capitulation to the “thievery, corruption, plunder, and banditry”
of Balkan rule and the “bacillus of Balkanism.” The idea of brotherly love was
simply a “ridiculous phrase about the artificial creation of a new nation,” and
they would not be the “gravediggers” as they put it, of their national life.11 In-
deed, so strong was their desire for an independent Croatia free from Serb
rule that any Croat who did not share their philosophy was denounced as a
“national degenerate.” This disdain extended to the politicians of the vari-
ous parties who charted a moderate course. Thus, Stjepan Radić was accused
of “licking the boots of those whom yesterday he threw mud at,” so “out-
raging” Croatian youth with his “traitorous deeds” that they had joined the
Croatian Party of Right en masse.12 Instead, they looked to figures from Croa-
tia’s great and glorious past, such as Kvaternik, to inform their behavior and
conduct. Seeing themselves as an avenging youth army and youth legionaries
of a new “powerful and fearless generation” of “young enthusiastic militant
Croats” and “apostles of Croatian liberationist thought,” they argued that the
student riots of June 1928 signaled the beginning of the war against the Yu-
goslav state and that there was no question that the war, when it came, would
be terrible and violent. The phalanx of Croat youth, their newspaper declared,
would provide a “manly answer” to those who had oppressed the Croatians,
by shaking its fist and trampling over the “demonic diabolical forces” that
had opposed Croatia’s freedom. It would also punish national traitors merci-
lessly; it was like “an iron chain that will smash in the teeth of all those who
dare to oppose it.”13
Although university students formed the leadership of the organization,
militant high school youths contributed regularly to their newspaper, par-
ticularly at the time of the celebrations to mark the tenth anniversary of the
Yugoslav state. Many nationalist high school students had refused to take
part in the 1 December commemorations, despite pressure from school au-
thorities, and, in the Revolutionary Youth newspaper, vowed to deal harshly
with class comrades who had participated and hence betrayed the nation. “In
this case, let us adopt the model of the Irish who deal with their native trai-
tors in a far more terrible manner than with foreigners,” one activist sug-
gested.14 Throughout the 1930s, there were increasingly regular nationalist
incidents in high schools, including acts of vandalism, desecration of monu-
ments and wreaths, shouted insults, fights, and declarations of support either
verbally or through the distribution of leaflets for Ante Pavelić and the Usta-
sha movement.15 Many of the most militant and active high school centers of
radical nationalist youth activism were located in cities and towns such as
Šibenik and Split in Dalmatia, where nationalist sentiment was least strong
 86  Annihilate the Old!

but where there were also strong communist and Yugoslavist youth groups.
It was from high schools in Šibenik and Split that a number of the most in-
fluential Ustasha cultural, political, and youth figures emerged.16 But on their
own, as Janko Škrbin explained, these acts of nationalist militancy could do
little to counter the anti-Croatian direction of high schools as long as teach-
ing remained in the hands of “foreigners” who belonged on the “other side
of the Drina,” “national traitors,” and “alcoholics” promoting the “diseased”
ideology of Yugoslavism to “weaken and destroy” Croatian youth resistance
and national identity.17
Although concepts of nation and race were always important, youth also
developed an alternative vision of culture and society. In the late 1930s, a se-
ries of nationalist youth literary journals emerged, introducing a new literary
generation to the public. It was in journals such as Omladina (1936), Sjeme
(1938), Pregnuća (1940), Matoš (1940), and Plava revija (1940–41) that radical-
right and later Ustasha artists and writers such as Janko Škrbin, Jerko Skračić,
Vatroslav Murvar, and Radovan Latković first made their mark. These jour-
nals provided a generation of new writers, poets, and literary critics, includ-
ing Dražen Panjkota, Duško Kečkemet, Ivan Raoš, Jure Kaštelan, Vlado
Miličević, Zvonimir Katalenić, and Vladimir Kolbas-Lidov, with a forum for
their work. While some of them shared the ideology of the radical right, oth-
ers just shared the same cultural and artistic sensibilities.18 As with radical
students, the return to the countryside and an authentically Croatian way of
life was central to their outlook, both artistically and ideologically. In their
literary journals, a familiar theme in many short stories was the rebellion of
a spirited young member of the bourgeoisie against his affluent urban life,
casting aside wealth and materialism in search of the Croatian countryside
in order to find himself.19 The rejection of urban values was depicted as part
of a wider generational conflict in their theoretical writing too. In an article
of 1940, Jerko Skračić argued that unless the younger generation of national-
ists was prepared to confront the destructive aspects of modern life (selfish-
ness, materialism, and an urban view of life), national independence would
be meaningless. He called for rebellion against social norms. While many
youths “set out in the struggle for life swimming with the tide,” in his view,
they should resist the pressure to conform. “‘To row against the tide!’ That
should be our slogan! We must have a showdown with the times and create a
real man from the Croatian man, full of social conscience!”20
In the meantime, other, more extreme youth options were emerging. In
the late 1930s, high school students began to form a range of illegal paramili-
tary and terrorist organizations. In the late 1930s, Ivo Protulipac, the former
leader of the Catholic Crusader movement, founded a new youth organiza-
tion, the Croatian Hero (Hrvatski junak). Based on the principles of radi-
 Annihilate the Old!  87

cal Croat nationalism, as well as physical fitness, military training, and iron
discipline, members’ activities included not only physical exercise and ideo-
logical indoctrination but terrorist training. In a speech of 26 October 1939
before seven hundred youths, Protipulac characterized Croatian Hero as a
militant organization protecting youth from the enemies of the Croatian
people, who would attempt to seduce them with “foreign murderous ideas.”21
Ostensibly apolitical youth organizations were militarized too. By the 1930s,
the Croatian Scout movement had adopted an ultra-nationalist ethos. Along
with an emphasis on athletic tournaments, trips to the countryside, camping
expeditions, and extreme nationalist rhetoric, it criticized mainstream scout
movements for promoting the easy life and the “cult of individualism and in-
ternationalism.” The organization’s oath proclaimed that each scout would be
“faithful to almighty God, the sacred Catholic Church, and the dear Croa-
tian homeland.” At a time when young Croatians were being “poisoned” with
various repulsive ideologies like internationalism, communism, and freema-
sonry, the Croatian scout organization was more needed than ever. From its
ranks would emerge a new youth living and working for the Croatian home-
land to the exclusion of everything else, making “the most precious sacrifices
for the happiness and prosperity of the Croatian homeland.”22 Simultane-
ously, Ustasha youth groups were being formed, and by 1940 some of them
at least were self-confident enough to release regular flyers inviting Croatian
youth to take part in their demonstrations, activities, and rallies.23 The revo-
lution of Croatian youth was approaching.

THE USTASHA REGIME’S ORGANIZATION OF YOUTH

The Ustasha regime sought to refashion Croatian schools and the education
of the young. In September 1941, Mile Budak discussed sweeping changes to
the school system. Arguing that under the Yugoslav regime an anti-Croatian
sentiment had prevailed, he announced all school textbooks from this pe-
riod were to be removed and replaced with Austro-Hungarian-era books,
specially adapted to the new national spirit. Budak envisaged that schools in
Croatia would be transformed into “hothouses of Ustasha philosophy and pa-
triotism,” from which would emerge a new generation capable of continuing
the Ustasha legacy. As with the university, schools were to be ideologically
purged. However, Budak emphasized that teachers could save their careers
by “sincerely converting to the Ustasha cause.” In order to preempt indepen-
dent action on the part of the radical-minded, Budak stated that it would not
be possible to expel all teachers of an anti-national persuasion immediately,
since then many schools would have to close.24 The Ustasha regime believed
their movement represented a generational revolution in which the dyna-
mism of youth would replace exhausted democratic institutions. For Rado-
 88  Annihilate the Old!

van Latković, now a young Ustasha ideologue, the Ustasha ideology was a
“revolution, a crossroads between two lives; the one that was, the one that has
passed, and the one that is building the foundations of a new society, erected
from the bones, blood, and spirit of martyrs.”25 With its violent language of
millenarian change and contempt for bourgeois propriety, the Ustasha ide-
ology appealed to the rebellious instincts of youth. Yet more practically, the
Ustasha revolution offered young people an opportunity to be active partici-
pants in the construction of a new society, whether in the bureaucratic, the
military, the intellectual, or the cultural arena. Since the demographic struc-
ture of the Ustasha movement was itself extremely young, the Ustasha seizure
of power and the radical reordering of society offered youth a level of power,
influence, and social mobility that their age and experience would not other-
wise have warranted.
Many of its activities took place either in school or during school hours,
and this meant that youth leaders were forced to negotiate with teachers and
school principals to ensure that elementary and high school students could at-
tend Ustasha camps or use school buildings for meetings. Officially, Ustasha
Youth leaders were encouraged to seek compromise with school authorities,
but in practice the demands of the movement superceded those of educa-
tional establishments. If school authorities remained “intransigent,” Ustasha
Youth camp leaders were instructed to consult local Ustasha Youth leaders so
action could be taken. Youth activities also took precedence over the wishes
of parents and family; youth handbooks informed camp leaders that if par-
ents did not allow their children to attend lessons, they should be financially
penalized. Despite the importance the movement placed on traditional fam-
ily life, if it came to a choice between their parents and the Ustasha family, an
Ustasha youth was expected to choose the latter. Generational rebellion was
woven into the very fabric of joining the movement.26
As with the Ustasha student organization, all existing Croatian youth or-
ganizations were either, as in the case of liberal, Yugoslav, and leftist ones,
outlawed or, as in the case of right-radical ones such as the Croatian Scout,
subsumed into the Ustasha Youth. Although many of these organizations
and their members were already strongly sympathetic to the Ustasha move-
ment or had formal links with it and, as a result, voluntarily stepped into
Ustasha Youth ranks in many regions, compulsion was also used by regional
Ustasha organizations in instances where there was resistance, as with some
regional branches of Croatian Hero.27 There were three sections within the
Ustasha Youth. From the age of seven to eleven, children joined Ustasha
Hope, from eleven to fifteen the Ustasha Hero, and from fifteen to eighteen
the Starčević Youth. Ustasha youth groups were organized in a military man-
ner and structured territorially and regionally. Like the Ustasha movement
 Annihilate the Old!  89

itself, each county had an Ustasha Youth Center, each administrative dis-
trict had an Ustasha Youth camp, and each community had a concentration.
Within concentrations there were platoons and squads, with platoons orga-
nized in branches according to age. The elite members of the Starčević Youth
were organized into the Ustasha Assault Unit, where they underwent rigor-
ous paramilitary training. As in the broader Ustasha movement, the concept
of martyrdom was built into the identity of its youth organization, and on
many of their banners and flags were numerals commemorating the dates of
the deaths of Ustasha youths in the struggle for national liberation, before,
during, or after the revolution. Although the regime classified members of
the Ustasha Youth according to their social and educational origin, peasant,
worker, and intellectual youth were encouraged to get to know each other and
to work together “in brotherly cooperation,” constructing a “common life.”
Finally, all branches of the youth organization emphasized physical fitness,
moral virtue, and comradeship.
Young people joined the Ustasha Youth for various reasons. Although the
constitution of the Ustasha Youth proclaimed that only death or marriage
could end membership, political radicalism was just one reason to join.28
Ustasha youth organizations founded their own specialist schools and societ-
ies where children could develop their athletic, intellectual, and artistic tal-
ents. They ran training courses where ambitious young Ustashas could gain
qualifications, becoming part of the next generation of leaders. The desire to
be part of a national movement was also a motivating factor, and for some,
the Ustasha Youth gave a sense of meaning to their lives. Certainly not least
important was the aspect of rebellion that joining the Ustasha movement rep-
resented. The Ustasha regime emphasized that the founding of its movement
represented a youthful rebellion against the Yugoslav state. It made persua-
sive propaganda not least because it made a powerful contrast between the
energy and dynamism of the Ustasha movement and the exhausted, decrepit
nature of Yugoslavia. But as their short stories, poems, and reminiscences
illustrate, young Ustashas really believed they were at the center of a youth
rebellion. Recalling his adolescent political activities in Varaždin in the late
1930s and early 1940s, the Ustasha Student Militia member Jakob Horvat
wrote that after he joined an illegal youth group as a teenager, the need to
train and meet in secret made life exciting. The fact that joining the group
also represented a rebellion against convention, due to the fact that Varaždin
was known as a Yugoslav town, was also part of the attraction. “Our fami-
lies, our professors, the great majority of our classmates, did not understand
us. They spoke to us and taught us the precise opposite.” This feeling of re-
belliousness increased in 1940 when he joined the local branch of the Croa-
tian Hero organization and undertook military training.29 It is not clear how
 90  Annihilate the Old!

many young people joined Ustasha Youth organizations, although Zdenko

Blažeković, leader of the male Ustasha Youth, claimed an unlikely figure of
half a million members. That said, it appears that in the initial months, many
thousands of youths joined, fueled by a revolutionary nationalist zeal. By May
1941, some Ustasha Youth camps were publicly stating that they were refusing
to take new members as they lacked the capacity to do so.30
Technically, joining the Ustasha Youth was compulsory. Its founding
statute of November 1941 stated that “the whole of Croat youth belongs in
the Ustasha Youth.” It also ordered the closing of every other existing youth
group; their members were to be incorporated into the Ustasha Youth.31 Im-
mediately, regional Ustasha camps launched drives to recruit children into
the organization. For example, on the same day as the statute, Vinko Sablić,
Ustasha camp leader in Dubrovnik, issued a public notice requiring that all
schoolchildren would have to join the Ustasha Youth. The only ones who
would be excluded would be “non-Aryans” and “Greek-Easterners”—that
is, Serbs, Jews, and gypsies. Sablić’s order warned families, teachers, profes-
sors, businessmen, and others not to obstruct the Ustasha Youth activism of
children, students, or apprentices; Sablić set out timetables and venues not-
ing when and where young people could come and register with the move-
ment. Male and female Ustasha Youth leaders in Dubrovnik also published
their own announcements, as did camps in other parts of the state.32 Not all
Ustasha Youth camp leaders seem to have taken the same approach; others
appear to have issued public notices that adapted the statute to particular lo-
cal situations. One of these was published by Ante Boras, leader of the Usta-
sha camp in Petrinja. Boras stated in a leaflet of 6 December that the ranks of
the Ustasha Youth would now only be open to those who “voluntarily want
to step into the ranks of the Ustasha Youth and want to work for the fur-
ther construction of the Poglavnik’s Croatia.” This registration would take
place each day between the first and the tenth of each month. Despite this,
the leaflet appealed to youth to enter the Ustasha movement’s youth wing:
“Croat youth: your place is in the Ustasha ranks, and our duty is to work for
the continued construction of Ustasha Croatia. Croat youth, the Poglavnik
is calling you!”33
With the failure of this mass recruitment drive, the organization both at
the center and in the regions developed an increasingly selective and elitist
character. According to the Ustasha Statutes of August 1942, members of the
Ustasha Youth had to serve a probationary period of between four and seven
months in their local camp before they could be accepted as registered mem-
bers of the movement, ready to undertake the initiation ceremony and sacred
oath. Increasingly, the Ustasha Youth became an organization that provided
ambitious or ideologically committed members of the movement an oppor-
 Annihilate the Old!  91

tunity for social mobility and political influence. Its fast-stream program,
for example, promoted outstanding members of the Starčević Youth into the
ranks of the Ustasha Army via the Ustasha Assault Unit; talented members
of the female Starčević Youth could be fast-tracked into the Ustasha Maidens
organization.34
In spite of the professionalization of the Ustasha Youth, the general prin-
ciple that all children and young people should be members of the organi-
zation did not change. Nonetheless, the ambiguous nature of the Ustasha
Statutes meant that from time to time the organization did feel the need to
emphasize that it was the organization of all Croatian youth. In a memoran-
dum to all camp and concentration leaders in the Zagreb region in April 1943,
Lavroslav Koprivnjak, writing on behalf of the Zagreb Ustasha Youth Cen-
ter, pointed out that only a nation that was harmonious and “nationally con-
scious” could not be defeated. Noting that not all youths in the Zagreb region
were taking part in the Ustasha Youth organization, he emphasized that the
Ustasha Youth was not “a mountaineering or rambling society, where one can
decide whether one wants to take part or not,” but an organization concerned
with the “strength and fate of the entire nation!” Since this generation of chil-
dren would be the “bearers of nationhood and statehood in the future,” par-
ents had to ensure that they gave their children “the firm moral foundations”
of national consciousness. Thus, Ustasha Youth camps and concentrations
should compel all parents to send their children to the Ustasha Youth, and all
teachers and members of the Croatian intelligentsia should collaborate with
the Ustasha Youth in its work. “The lack of uniforms and rooms should not
be in any way a reason to reject this suggestion. The Ustasha movement is a
national movement and is not in any way a political party, nor should it turn
into a party,” he insisted. “We have already had too many parties, and now we
want only the NATION and the STATE!”35

THE APOCALYPTIC VISIONS OF USTASHA YOUTH

In contrast to the ennui at universities, the Ustasha Youth organization was
full of élan and spirit. In an article of Christmas 1941, Franjo Trbuha, an Usta-
sha Youth leader, argued that the youth of Croatia were the “explosive of the
revolution”—the Ustasha revolution of youth. Many of yesterday’s youth had
destroyed or betrayed their youth and become “perfect and miserable petite
bourgeoisie,” content with monthly wages that dictated their whole life and
behaving like servants. Others had kept their youthful élan and militancy
but did not remain true to the ideals of youth. The challenge of youth was to
reach adulthood without losing principles, morals, or purity. For youth to be-
tray their youthful ideals, he explained, would be to betray the “great struggle
that we are leading today.” Instead of weakening, they should “harden” their
 92  Annihilate the Old!

“eternal” youth, keeping the same dynamic and youthful morals and creat-
ing the “foundations of a new life, pushing history in a new direction.”36 If
the Ustasha movement was “a movement of youth” and its national revolu-
tion a revolution of youth, then as far as the Ustasha Youth was concerned,
the revolution was incomplete and could only be finished by the younger gen-
eration. In the struggle between the youthful Ustasha qualities of merciless-
ness, fanaticism, and violence, on the one hand, and the outdated “pacifism,
compromise, and treachery” of the older generation, there could only be one
outcome.37
The cult of youth was not merely rhetoric: it reflected the fact that high
school pupils had played a pivotal role in the revolution of 1941. In Bjelovar,
for example, in cooperation with the town major, Julije Makanec, and Croa-
tian soldiers, nationalist youths had disarmed a unit of the Yugoslav Army.
Following the liberation of the town from Serb oppression, “armed Croatian
youth and Ustashas together with the police patrolled the city and brought
from all sides arrested Chetniks and various other suspicious elements so
that in a few hours all the prisons were full.” The night of the revolution was
tense with the danger of attack from the remnants of the Yugoslav army, and
some of Makanec’s young comrades lost their lives—including Milan Bačani,
a seventeen-year-old Ustasha high school student, blown apart by a Yugoslav
army bomb as he rushed with his gun to confront a car full of Serbian sol-
diers. According to Makanec, “Milan Bačani was one of the most idealistic
youths that I ever knew. He was among the first to volunteer for the struggle
and one of the first to perish. He died just before the realization of his greatest
ideal could be achieved. When his mother, broken with pain, was shown his
school certificates and reports, which he used to carry with him and which
were covered in the splinters and fragments of the bomb and saturated in his
blood, I was shaken to the core of my soul.”38 In fact, the mythology of politi-
cal activism by high school nationalist youths was an important legitimating
weapon in the completion of the Ustasha revolution. Writing in January 1942,
Janko Škrbin, by then an official in the Ministry for National Enlightenment,
recalled that in the autumn of 1935, as a teenage high school student, he had
organized and led the first high school Ustasha society in Zagreb. Similar so-
cieties were established in other towns and cities across Croatia and Bosnia;
a secret meeting of all the societies was held to discuss tactics, and clandes-
tine military exercises took place. As the day of liberation approached, youths
“with weapons in their hands” had confronted the enemy and laid down their
lives for the homeland.39 In their propaganda youth also recalled the persecu-
tion and mocking they had received at the hands of an older corrupt genera-
tion of teachers and parents. Dragutin Korčmaroš, an Ustasha Youth leader
in Bjelovar, looking back on his school days in the dying era of Yugoslavia, re-
 Annihilate the Old!  93

membered that even after 1939, the teachers in high school remained the same
Serb teachers: “various Jovanovićes, Lazarevićes, Erdeljanovićes, and simi-
lar crotchety characters.” With their lessons on Darwin, the theory of evolu-
tion, and the importance of pan-Slavism, “decrepit” Serb and Jewish teachers
attempted to produce a generation of “indifferent atheistic” pupils with no
Croatian consciousness. Schools in Yugoslavia had been “rotting artificial in-
stitutions” that had to be destroyed and replaced with a new kind of school in
a new national spirit.40
Many radical youth activists in the movement expected that following the
national revolution, the days of being persecuted by teachers for their politi-
cal beliefs were over. Now nationalist high school students would be in charge
of schools, not “various Dokićes, Lazars, Samuels, and so on.”41 Joining the
Ustasha Youth presented them with not only an opportunity for youthful re-
bellion but a chance to gain revenge on an older generation represented not
just by the Serbs and Jews but by an older bourgeois elite committed to liberal
democratic and Yugoslav ideals and, therefore, to the betrayal of the nation.
As Omer Zurabdić-Mirov explained in Ustaška mladež in Easter 1942, this
corrupt older generation had committed numerous misdeeds. This included
persisting “with the farce of some kind of brotherhood with our oppressors
and, under the cloak of equality and freedom, plundering everything Cro-
atian and throwing into the mud everything that was national. Looking at
the betrayal of many of our elders, our young hearts ail, and disappointment
strikes our young souls.” By contrast, the Ustasha Youth possessed “élan,
spirit, and the will to struggle for justice and the life of our nation.” Conse-
quently, Zurabdić-Mirov argued, they deserved first place in the state, their
ideological program adopted as the future direction of the nation. His views
were echoed by another young commentator. Writing in the same journal,
Zdravko Radić asserted that the Ustasha Youth, by virtue of sacrifice and
struggle, deserved a special status in the state. After all, in pursuit of an in-
dependent Croatia, radical Croatian youth had endured a “tortured journey,
watered with fresh blood, blood spilled in struggle, in the epic battle against
enemies and foreigners.” Branko Fistrović, a youth leader in Koprivnica,
writing in the journal ŽAP in September 1941, meanwhile compared pre-
liberation Croatia to a “mausoleum” for martyred Ustasha youth.42
Ustasha youth saw themselves as the conscience of the movement and
were determined not to be ignored. While they were loyal to the Poglavnik
and the regime, their loyalty was not to be taken for granted, and they were
definitely not content to sit in the shadows. They expected high standards
not only of themselves but of their leaders. Franjo Trbuha argued that it was
better to have five exemplary Ustasha youth in a region than hundreds of in-
decisive Ustasha youth who could not live up to the movement’s principles.43
 94  Annihilate the Old!

Youth admonished the Ustasha leadership not to succumb to the temptations

of speculation and capitalism and personal profit. Anyone, “from ministers
or župans to functionaries to soldiers,” lost the right to serve the state if they
compromised their anti-capitalist ideals, because speculators and the power
hungry were “the most dangerous enemies of the state!” Only idealists could
hold positions of responsibility and power. Ustasha Youth leaders also in-
creasingly warned that “a small-town bourgeois” atmosphere was threaten-
ing to affect even the Ustasha movement.44 This fear began to be articulated
publicly within the first year of the founding of the state. Writing in Janu-
ary 1942, Branimir Rogić, a regular contributor to the central Ustasha Youth
journal, complained about the conduct of certain Ustashas. While he blamed
the “mediocre and uncultivated” Yugoslav education system and lack of an
“Ustasha education,” as well as “bourgeois selfishness,” for bringing the Usta-
sha movement’s good name into disrepute, stating that human weakness and
not the movement or its ideology were to blame, he nonetheless argued that
power had led to corruption in the state. “No one should deny,” he admitted,
“that there are those who plunder in the name of the state and on account of
the Ustasha ideology, for whom their pouch is their main and only concern,
even though there are among them those whom one would not expect it from
given their behavior in battle.” These were people who pushed into positions
where they didn’t belong, because they were either not capable or not worthy.
In order for ideological purity to be restored to the movement, it needed to
be thoroughly purged, and those who worked against Ustasha ideology had
to “disappear.” The Ustasha movement needed “workers and not ‘critics.’ . . .
Either they will strive for cleansing and purification, or they will, in silence,
retreat.”45
If many Ustasha officials did not live up to expectations, who could the
Ustasha youth take as a model? For the journal Ustaška mladež, the answer
was obvious: deceased Black Legion commander Jure Francetić. He had given
his life for the nation, and the state should ensure that he become “a national
giant-hero, the first soldier of the Poglavnik about whom every Croatian will
know, about whom the nation will sing songs, familiar with his exploits.” Al-
though there were many Croatian heroes who could be celebrated, with his
“monumentalism, the greatness of his heroism and bravery, the greatness
of his bearing and Ustasha character,” he was the “greatest hero contempo-
rary Croatia has produced.” This could be attested to by the “unit of heroic
youth” of the Black Legion. The importance of teaching the young about the
life of Francetić was doubly important given his bond with the young. Point-
ing out that responsibility was one of the characeristics of a true Ustasha,
the journal declared that Francetić was always conscious of his responsibility,
 Annihilate the Old!  95

especially toward his Legionary youth. “He felt responsible for the youth in
the Black Legion; he saw to their upbringing, for their lives. He was their fa-
ther—‘our Jure’ they called him—and every one of his Legionaries was always
ready to sacrifice their life for Him. A wonderful, ideal relationship between
a commander, a leader, and his underlings. A shining and clear example to
our officials and other officials in civil professions.” Pointedly stressing what
Francetić could teach others in high positions in the state bureaucracy, the
editorial argued that the death-squad commander should be an example
for all Ustashas of how to behave and conduct themselves. “We can perhaps
judge his greatness if we think of how our state would look if everyone car-
ried out their duty like Jure Francetić. Because it must be admitted that it is
precisely those critics and urban rumor mongers who are the greatest cancer
on the national body.”46
In its campaign against immorality and corruption in the state, the Usta-
sha Youth was uncompromising in the use of aggressive and violent language.
Grga Pejnović, a prominent Ustasha Youth theorist, warned that the Ustasha
Youth would keep vigil over the moral worth of the nation and “howl” like a
wolf at anyone who attempted to besmirch its moral virtue because it was con-
scious that a great future could only be achieved if built on “firm moral foun-
dations by highly moral people.” Thus, they applauded “those who carry out
their duty precisely and respectfully and act only in such a way as to profit the
state and the nation,” in contrast to those who worked for their own personal
profit on account of the state and nation. “Before the eyes of the Poglavnik
and the Ustasha youth, these people must get out!”47 In their journals, they
frequently portrayed themselves as the descendants of wolves, disdaining
“pacifism, selfishness, and indifference,” all of which they aimed to suffocate.
Mile Juraga, for one, argued that throughout their history, Croatians from
the Uskok pirates to Matija Gubec to Eugen Kvaternik had been rebellious.
They were children in whom the same “rebellious revolutionary” insurrec-
tionary blood flowed.48 The Ustasha youth were, as Milivoj Karamarko ex-
plained, representatives of a “rugged Dinaric race” of “frontiersmen, piratical
and Ustasha blood, Croat and warrior blood.” Ustasha youth yearned to emu-
late their “warlike ancestors,” and while this blood existed in their culture,
their state and freedom would prevail. The Ustasha youth would be “wolves
of our freedom, lions of our rights, and slaughterers of our enemies.”49 At the
same time, they portrayed themselves as the youthful descendants of an un-
corrupted peasant race struggling against degeneracy and corruption. They
vowed to lead a merciless war of destruction against those who challenged the
authority of the Ustasha movement, settling accounts with the “cowards, de-
generates, and traitors” who had assisted Belgrade’s persecution of them. The
 96  Annihilate the Old!

“fierce, rebellious, and militant” peasant youth coming to the city to make the
Croatian race young and refresh the cities would call to account all those who
had portrayed them as “roving bandits, murderers, and looters.”50
The Ustasha Youth considered their revolution to be a moral revolution
as much as anything else. The Ustasha Youth functionary Božidar Novaković
recalled that in the Yugoslav era the model for working-class youth had been
Al Capone or John Dillinger, while others had fallen under the influence of
“Jewish communist” ideas. They had lost all feeling for the family and ex-
changed it for “the street, bad films, pornographic literature, which Jews and
other foreigners paid for, street prostitutes, and all other evils that we meet on
the street.” This had led to the creation of “young hoodlums” who caused ter-
ror everywhere. Under the Ustasha regime, Novaković promised, everything
characterized by “Serb and Jewish despotism and Balkanism” would disap-
pear.51 Throughout the state, Ustasha Youth activists launched a war against
immoral books and “penny dreadfuls, run-of–the-mill trash, pornography
with the most bestial and banal content.” These books, they claimed, were a
manifestation of the degenerate Yugoslav era when young children had been
taught to idolize crime bosses; they incited impressionable young children
to become “robbers, thieves, and immoral people” and to form feral crimi-
nal gangs, like the heroes of these stories.52 Two Ustasha Youth leaders, Đuro
Balaković and Emil Medvedović, along with students from the University
of Zagreb, led the campaign of burning and confiscating books in Vinkovac
and Sarajevo. Balaković justified the campaign by arguing that the burning
of books should be seen as an act of liberation: “Evil belongs nowhere but on
the fire. If we Croats instigated a real inquisition, our country would be full
of fires. Thank God, finally, we can once and for all radically deal with the
filth that has corrupted our youth.” He reminded booksellers that should they
violate the new censorship laws, then, according to article 92 of those same
laws, they could face the death penalty. This was not an isolated incident:
book burnings were being carried out all across Croatia by zealous Ustasha
Youth members. An Ustasha Youth camp in Ogulin, for example, confiscated
books and journals that propagated an anti-Croat spirit, in particular “por-
nographic” and “Marxist” books.53 In Koprivnica, too, members of the Usta-
sha Youth, under the leadership of Branko Fištrović, conducted an inspection
of all local bookshops and burned all “immoral and anti-national books.”
Following this, they visited all workers’ reading rooms and academic librar-
ies, where they delivered talks on the Jews “and all other negative elements.”54
Predictably, such aggressive language was also used against the national
and racial enemies of the state. Grga Pejnović accused Serbs and Jews of dis-
respecting Croatia’s aspirations for independence in the past and failing to
honor “our rights achieved in blood.” Therefore, they would have to “disap-
 Annihilate the Old!  97

pear” in the national revolution.55 It is clear that the Ustasha Youth considered
the Serbs to be their main enemy, and their intellectual journals replicated
many of the stereotypes prevalent in the Ustasha movement’s own journals.
For example, Jure Boroje, writing in Plava revija in late 1941 about the eth-
nic composition of Hercegovina, depicted the Serbs of Bosnia as aggressive
and foreign colonizers, “Cincars, Vlachs, and others,” who had unjustly taken
the living space of Croatians, the indigeneous population. In order to under-
stand the ongoing political struggle in Hercegovina, it was necessary to ex-
plain “the penetration of the Greek-Easterners through the centuries and the
efforts of the former Yugoslavia to make this Croatian region Serb.” With the
establishment of the Yugoslav state in the twentieth century, conditions for
indigenous Croatians had worsened: regional representatives were exclusively
Serb, often professional tailors and, in the 1930s, barely educated teachers; all
judges were Serb, as were the managers of the state tobacco companies, on
which the region depended. The aim of all this, Boroje asserted, was “to wipe
away all traces of historical, economic, religious, and national Croat charac-
teristics in this important region of Croatia.”56 The Ustasha Youth also passed
a death sentence against the Jews. Typical of their anti-Semitic sentiment was
an article written in December 1941 by Zvonimir Radić, who called for the
“extermination of Jewry in all ways,” not only because the Jews had served
as the most loyal servants of the Serbs in the economic destruction and ex-
ploitation of the Croatian workers but also because, in partnership with the
Serbs, as part of a shared plan for the destruction of the Croatian nation, they
had promoted dance halls, jazz, parties, floozies, and sexual promiscuity to
alienate young people from the national spirit. Radić invited Ustasha youths
to pass a “merciless sentence” against the Jews, a sentence that “from its per-
spective affirms the annihilation of Jewry from all sides.” The Jews were the
“bearers of all evil,” and their day of judgment before the national court had
come.57
This fierce discourse was backed up by violent and bloody actions. Eyewit-
nesses to the Ustasha massacres in the spring and summer of 1941 observed
that many of the worst atrocities had been committed by high school students
and members of the Ustasha Youth. Stjepan Kolesar, for instance, district po-
lice chief in Križevci, recalled in evidence to the Yugoslav war crimes com-
mission that in the months between April and July 1941 a group of Ustasha
youth from the Vitrovica region came to his town. After “plundering” the
shops of local Jewish and Serb traders, they arbitrarily killed a number of
prominent local residents, both middle-class Serbs and Croatians identified
as enemies of the regime. Similarly, the official report about the mass mur-
der of Serbs in Karlovac in summer 1941 noted that among the local Ustashas
involved in the massacres of Serbs and Jews were many high school students,
 98  Annihilate the Old!

who “stepped into the ranks of the Ustashas torturing and killing Serbs, es-
pecially those imprisoned in the camp at Karlovac.” One survivor, Vladimir
Tepavac, testified before the State Commission for Refugees in Belgrade in
late 1941 that “high school students were armed and did as they pleased, kill-
ing whoever they found wherever they found them and being answerable to
no one.” Some went further than this, ascribing the violence of the local Usta-
sha organization to the presence of so many young people in its ranks. In his
testimony of 26 July 1941, Janko Bjegović asserted that much of the violence
could be ascribed to the extreme youth of many Ustasha activists and militia
members: “The Ustashas are really youths aged between fifteen and twenty.
They are young people who have spent their youth in unemployment, disobe-
dience, and disrespect toward their families, schools, and nation. Such people
have been given complete power over the Serb people.”58
This adolescent extremism was exemplified in other parts of the state
too. In Slavonski Brod, Josip Puzstay, an eighteen-year-old journalist, poet,
and Ustasha Youth camp leader, was appointed editor of the local national-
ist newspaper along with another young journalist, Zeno Wolf, replacing the
conservative editors. From their new position, they propagated radical Usta-
sha ideology, Puzstay through his anarchic satirical sketches about everyday
life in Ustasha, Brod and Wolf through virulent anti-Semitic propaganda
against the local Jewish population. Through their newspaper, they invited
the public to participate in solving the “Jewish question.” Wolf mocked that
“small number of compassionate souls who shake their heads at the justi-
fied measures of the police authorities and finally declare that the Jews are
people too. So much has been done to them already. Surely it is now time to
leave them in peace!” Parallel to this, they published threatening and rac-
ist editorials by local Ustasha intellectuals such as Mirko Košutić and Ivan
Oršanić about the “immigrant” Vlach origins of the Serbs in Croatia, their
destructive behavior, and the need to remove them if they would not accept
the new state. Although the newspaper ceased publication in December 1941,
before the systematic deportation and extermination of the majority of local
Jews had begun, it played a decisive role in the coming Holocaust. Moreover,
the local Ustasha organization’s campaign of persecution and mass murder
against the Serbs had reached its climax by then.59 The ideological zealotry
and militant conduct of Ustasha youth were often welcomed by the regime:
since book burning and anti-Semitic and -Serb measures reflected official re-
gime policy, in these cases their militancy was applauded. However, on other
occasions, the regime did not look kindly on their youthful radicalism, which
could easily be interpreted as willful rebellion. Thus Ustasha Youth members
were chided by officials for treating Ustasha institutions such as the National
Defense Units as if they were the exclusive preserve of the young.60
 Annihilate the Old!  99

But such criticisms did little to reassure those commentators, chronologi-

cally if not ideologically representatives of the older generation, who were in-
creasingly concerned that the cult of youth and disdain for everything old
was threatening to get out of hand, turning from an understandable con-
tempt for the “old” mentality into disdain for anyone and anything adult or
old. One anonymous commentator, writing in a Sarajevo newspaper in Au-
gust 1942, admitted he was bewildered by the militancy of youth culture.
One hears many times opinions among the youth, especially those in public
positions, in other words those who yearn to be or who are already on an
ego trip: the old are not worth anything anymore, their time has passed,
increasingly the old are responsible for all the unhappiness and misfortune,
all the evil and injustice that foreign governments inflicted on the Croatian
nation, and one must once and for all deal with them because by biological
laws they have already given everything that they had and now in the best-
case scenario belong in an old people’s home or as faded parchments in old
cupboards in museum collections.

Of course, he wrote, the old could make serious accusations against the young:
“that they are immature, green, untested, that they are still pack-saddle dogs,
that they are uneducated, blockheads who, in today’s revolutionary events,
came to the surface by accident, and that all their actions are rash, not thought
out, the product of supposed youthful ideals, and in truth simply terror, ha-
tred, revenge, and so on.” In truth, he concluded, both stereotypes would be
false and “result in unwanted and undesired consequences in our public life
and work.” Far better to accept that the old and the young were joined to-
gether and could learn from one another. Only in mutual collaboration could
success and a golden future be assured.61
These kinds of criticisms were lost on many Ustasha Youth activists, who,
while certainly aware of the negative image they were acquiring, did not seem
much to care. In any case, why should they, especially since the movement
did not seem to take much notice of such geriatric sniping either? One of the
defining features of the regime’s revolution of youth was an affirmative ac-
tion program that placed youth in positions of influence and power. Partly
this reflected the youthful social construction of the movement and partly
its ideological commitment to the primacy of youth. As a consequence the
movement’s youth leaders could rise very far very fast. In late 1941, for exam-
ple, the twenty-six-year-old leader of the Požega male Ustasha Youth camp,
Dragutin Đurić, was summoned to Zagreb to take up a high-ranking policy
position in the GUS Directorate for Legislative Affairs, an agency that had
a direct impact on national Ustasha policy. Đurić, a law graduate who had
only arrived in Požega in 1939 to lead the local Croatian Hero organization,
 100  Annihilate the Old!

had already risen to the rank of judge in Požega’s emergency court by the
end of 1941. Highly thought of by the Požega branch of the movement, he
was described as “a young man of great agility and selflessness,” an industri-
ous Croatian worker, “a man of initiative, good and wise opinions, an educa-
tor of the young,” with whom he had an immediate bond.62 Since ideological
fanaticism was valued more than ability and intellect, Ustasha Youth lead-
ers with few skills could also rise in the movement, leading to an attitude of
over-ebullience as well as entitlement among some Ustasha Youth leaders,
to the chagrin of older officials. Thus, Zdenko Blažeković felt compelled to
send out a sternly worded circular, reminding Ustasha Youth members that
at public rallies they should chant for the Poglavnik using his formal state
title and not his first name, as youth activists were increasingly doing. He and
they, Blažeković warned, were not on a first-name basis. Nonetheless, some
of them clearly felt they could at least sometimes contact high-ranking state
officials, if not the Poglavnik himself, over the heads of local party organiza-
tions and actors. This was particularly the case in instances where Ustasha
Youth activists felt local authority figures had been less than supportive. The
autonomous intervention of Vjekoslav Mink was a good example of this dy-
namic. On 28 August 1942, Mink, leader of the male Ustasha youth camp in
Borovo-Bata, wrote to Vilko Rieger, the director of the State Investigative and
Propaganda Bureau (Državni izvještajni i promičbeni ured—DIPU) with a
proposal for a light display with the words “Long live the Poglavnik.” With
a nearby riverside villa identified as a suitable location, he wanted electrical
lighting materials and labor from the local factory, as well as from DIPU it-
self. The fact that Rieger duly wrote to the factory director and got immedi-
ate approval indicates the extent of influence the party’s most activist youth
members could have.63
Moreover, given that the regime aimed to create merciless new youth, ide-
ological fanaticism was rewarded. Typical of the careers of zealous youth ac-
tivists was Srećko Rover, a teenager from Sarajevo and one of the founders
of the Black Legion. After serving as an adjutant to Francetić, he became a
lieutenant in the Croatian Secret Police in Sarajevo, responsible for the arrest
of Serbs, Jews, and anti-fascists for the mobile emergency courts. After carry-
ing out his role with ruthlessness and merciless efficiency, he was appointed
to an influential position in the PTS militia. Likewise, Spremnost noted with
pride the “discipline” of guards at the Jasenovac concentration camp, drawn
from the “elite” of student and high school Ustasha youth, thereby under-
lining the sinister side of social mobility, in particular the demographic
youthfulness of those involved in organizing and administrating state terror.
Small wonder that many youth commentators could afford to adopt a defi-
ant stance. “We, the Ustasha youth,” declared one typically bombastic state-
 Annihilate the Old!  101

ment by Omer Zurabdić-Mirov in Ustaška mladež in 1942, “and also those

youth who fell in the first year of the state are most horribly accused. And
while our elders accuse us, they have carried out deeds that one could rightly
call misdeeds.” While some of the older generation accused them of both dis-
honoring the reputation of the nation and displaying disrespect toward adult
authority, they compared criticism of their organization to national betrayal.
Far from betraying the nation, Zurabdić-Mirov concluded, “It is more than
truthful to say that those who do not help us are committing the worst na-
tional treachery!”64

USTASHA YOUTH AND THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF SACRIFICE

Officially, Ustasha Youth members were portrayed as a self-sacrificing and
fanatical cadre of activists ready to kill for the homeland. The typology of
a new merciless youth was nowhere more obviously displayed than in the
iconography of the Black Legion, which in his biography of the Legionaries
Ivo Balentović labeled “the legion of invincible youth,” with “bravery shin-
ing in their eyes.”65 Emil Lašić, the young editor of a newspaper in Sarajevo,
wrote that when Francetić called on the youth of the city to join the Legion,
he could not accept them all “because it was difficult to clothe and arm all
these youths, who, by their instinct, rushed to the invitation of their young
commander.”66 Ustasha Youth members interviewed by journalists typically
stressed their commitment to the authority, order, and discipline of the move-
ment. Thus, a student at an Ustasha training school interviewed in October
1942 told a reporter that obedience on the part of Ustasha youths showed not
servility but rather an independence of spirit, noble enthusiasm, and a desire
to avoid sinking into “permanent, terrible decay.” One could only become “a
tough and decisive warrior” and “suppress all profanities” if one did not “be-
come exhausted at any price.”67 Journalists also emphasized the willingness
of Ustasha Youth members to die for the homeland, something that became
an increasing reality as support for the regime declined sharply and resis-
tance grew in many regions. After 1942, especially, Ustasha Youth journals
were punctuated by obituaries of deceased comrades who had either fallen in
battle or, more usually, been executed by the Partisans. Zdenko Blažeković
wrote that they were guided by the graves of dead comrades, and it was cer-
tainly the case that the movement produced a large number of youth martyrs,
sometimes en masse.68 One of the most celebrated incidents of mass Ustasha
Youth “martyrdom” occurred in Bihać in April 1943, when seven local Usta-
sha youths were executed by a Partisan unit after they briefly took control of
it, instigating, as the Ustasha press called it, a “reign of terror.” According to
the press, after courageously refusing to recant their principles under torture,
they awaited their deaths bravely in the notorious room 1 of the makeshift
 102  Annihilate the Old!

prison. Below photographs of the young men in their Ustasha uniforms and
high school graduation suits, a newspaper report described the “broken bod-
ies” of the “innocent” Ustasha youths tortured before being led onto a field,
where they were slaughtered. They would be remembered as “sacred victims”
and as the “steel” of Ustasha Croatia and commemorated by other youths
and future generations in Bihać as “martyrs, heroes, and elite warriors, flinty
Croats” who had “built the foundations of our young Ustasha state with their
bones.” For the youth of Bihać, it was their duty to live up to the example of
these seven youths and to persevere, drawing inspiration from their bloody
sacrifices.69
There was another lesson too, according to Ustaški mladež: the brother-
hood of Muslims and Croats. That two of the youths, Jusuf Županović and
Ivan Janković, were best friends and of different faiths added poignancy to
the story. “Once more there was an expression of brotherhood of Muslims
and Catholics. Jusuf and Ivan saw in the final moments that Providence had
ordered for them the same fate. They raised their right fists. They kissed each
other, but they did not cry.”70 Young female Ustasha youths were also ele-
vated to heroine status. The Ustasha press not only lauded Andjelka Šarić
and Jelena Šantić for their brave conduct before their deaths at the hands of
the Partisans in the Kozara Mountains in 1943 but also dwelt on the sadistic
nature of their torture—including the humiliation, for Šarić, of having the
letter U carved into her breast.71 As well as graphic newspaper accounts of
the suffering of Ustasha Youth martyrs, comrades wrote personal tributes to
their fallen comrades that nonetheless expressed weariness at their loss. As
Milenko Barbarić wrote in a letter to his dead friend Omer Jahić in 1944:
Could you ever imagine when we sat on the rails of the promenade in
Mostar and quietly hummed the latest songs that I would one day write this
posthumous letter, our Omer! Could we ever imagine that one day we would
only be able to see your ever-clear face in pictures and remember it only in
memories! But the laws of fate and the dictates of Providence are merciless,
and we cannot negate them. In the cradle, you were swung by sharp craggy
mountains; they told you about the glory of our ancestors and the heroism
of your forebears. And you listened to the scream of victorious tempests and
the voice of your own agitated blood, and when the moment of vengeance
came, the moment of battle and the settling of accounts, you hurried joy-
fully with a victorious cry to the streams, the rivers of young soldiers in the
Ustasha army, to show with your labor, blood, and sword how to love, fight,
and perish for the homeland.72

As well as commemorating the lives of friends in obituaries and tributes,

members of the Ustasha Youth also expressed their feelings about being a
 Annihilate the Old!  103

member of the Ustasha Youth in poetry, which because of its immediacy

and power was the most common form of cultural expression in their jour-
nals. Some of these poems were aggressive, envisioning the punishment that
awaited the movement’s enemies. In a poem written in summer 1941 by Mus-
tafa Gaća, a high school Ustasha youth from Fojnica, and sent to the State
Secretariat for Propaganda for possible publication, the young writer cele-
brated the destruction of the Serbs: “Belgrade began to burn / and suffered
great fear. In Sarajevo the same thing happened / and there endured suffer-
ing. All because the Serbs outraged the enemy / and thus received wounds.”
With Ustasha heroes like Mijo Babić and his comrade Antun Podgorelec, the
Ustashas had “given the Chetniks much fear” and “from the Sava to the Adri-
atic Sea / are purifying the earth from Chetnik evil.” With the arrival of the
Ustasha regime, “in Croatia there will be no more Serbdom / and neither will
there be any kind of defiance.” Jews would also disappear from Croatia: the
Poglavnik thought of little else, Gaća wrote. “Jews are the greatest bandit /
and thus will have to pay dearly. In Sarajevo, no more will Leon Finci sit at
his table in his bookshop. No more will he have his piles of money / no more
will anyone have to take care of it for him.”73 Meanwhile, Gabrijel Kolenić, an
Ustasha Youth member from Vinkovac, declared his merciless duties: “I am
a real Ustasha, / a bringer of violence. / Flee tyrant from me, / even his seed
is destroyed. / The Poglavnik leads me in a sacred battle / to avenge the na-
tive soil.”74
But the specter of death was also reflected in Ustasha Youth poems, some
of them reflecting weariness with conflict, upheaval, and the constant milita-
rization of life. In one anthology of poetry by members of the Ustasha Youth
Camp in Požega, the editor Rudolf Strugar wrote of how the young writers
yearned for their innocent memories of childhood, before war and conflict
had completely altered the direction of their lives. “The whirlwind of life
has torn apart their young lives, and the cruel reality and looks of people,
wrecked hearts, and souls full of pain and incessant hatred every day, naked,
tortures them. These young men still cannot feel the true happiness of life.”
They would, he continued, “like to expire in the grass, in its goodness and
sweetness, which covers graves, springing from dead birds and from men who
equally yearn for the heavens” but were instead more likely to die in battle.75
Most of the poems in this collection followed the introduction’s melancholic
spirit. In a poem about Croat soldiers at Stalingrad, for example, Vladimir
Ferenczffy evoked a hellish image of a world shrouded in black while bombs
and guns created a “damned orgy of the devil” so dark that not even the stars
could be seen. After the battle all is quiet, and the Croatian warriors have
fallen, “true to their roaring guns. The snow falls slowly. . . . / Dead war-
riors are concealed by a white shroud / —dead warriors and the streets of Sta-
 104  Annihilate the Old!

lin’s empty city.”76 Writing to his dead brother, Slavko Lerman told him how
their mother visited his grave every night. In another poem, Ler­man imag-
ined himself dead and the things he would do if he was alive again, including
giving his life “for my Croatia.”77 Branko Živković also lingered on his own
death. “I will not tremble, in the hour of death,” he wrote. “I won’t sleep a
wink from the pain. / I will carry all my sorrow to the grave.”78 Young poets
from the Požega camp also visualized the face and corpse of the dead Ustasha
soldier. For Dragutin Gašpar, the unknown Ustasha hero was literally a vi-
sion of death. “Pearls of blood lie on your hands, / in your eyes burns bloody
pain, / in our heart is fire, / torment that you cannot bear, oh, unknown hero
of Croatia!” According to the writer, the young soldier had ideals and had
been content in his Croatian village. But now he had left all this behind to
live the life and death of a Croatian hero. “You ground your teeth and awaited
the pain, / a powerful and heroic death had arrived.” Now a green hillock hid
his body, and a wooden cross stood above his corpse. He was no more, but
“the voice of freedom echoed,” and white clouds sailed across a liberated sky,
and above him and beyond him new life streamed.79 Zvonimir Bajsić, writing
in the Ustasha Youth literary journal Hrvatska mladast, paid similar tribute
to a fallen young comrade: “The troubled water flows, / the slosh of veins /
the death of youth. Hearts are called. / The cannons speak / —the smell of
ecstasy. Above the dead, bells sing in the night. / The ominous murmur of
bloody water / —These are the tears of youth.”80
One indication that significant numbers of Ustasha youth were dying in
battle was the fact that the list of dedications in poems grew ever longer. In
1944, for example, Luka Puljiz, a twenty-nine-year-old poet from Imotski and
an instructor at the Ustasha Youth Center in Sarajevo, in his volume of po-
etry especially dedicated to the lives of deceased Ustasha youths, included
one poem that alone was prefaced by the names of nine fallen comrades.81
In spite of the growing losses, some Ustasha Youth poems looked forward to
the moment of death. According to Alozije Lutz, Ustasha youth should “look
it straight in the eyes” because “death is only the reverse of life.” Another,
pseudonymous youth poet saw death as a living thing “in whose presence
souls tremble.” But the fear stopped as soon as the Ustasha youth confronted
it, “stormed and shot / chasing the fresh enemy traces. And we knew, we felt
/ that death had fled from us!”82 There were numerous short stories about the
ecstasy of dying for the homeland. Vera Franz’s short story, published in 1944,
for example, explored the fate of a young Ustasha warrior dying on the banks
of the River Drina after sacrificing his life in a suicidal mission to destroy an
enemy hut full of ammunition. Hiding behind the trunk of a tree, the Ustasha
throws a bomb at the hut but is mortally wounded in the explosion. Closing
his eyes at the moment of death, he tells his mother not to weep: “‘I am happy,
 Annihilate the Old!  105

Poglavnik,’ whispered the young blond-haired Ustasha with his pallid lips,
‘that today I could die for You. My deeds are very small compared to Yours.
My duty is so unimportant. But the pleasure in my soul is so enormous and
limitless it elevates my body and carries it on waves of happiness.’”83
Not all youth poems glorified death, of course. As the conflict dragged
on and the numbers of dead soldiers rose, frustration was accompanied by
a feeling of fear. In the Ustasha Youth literary journal Plava revija, Vladimir
Brodnjak attempted to caution against adolescent ardor about the heroic life
of the warrior. Youths should forget about idle dreams of achieving “immor-
tal glory.” Playing at war was not the same as being in it: the reality was much
grimmer. “But the dream is a lie / you will lie forever unknown. You will for-
get your toy soldiers / and beloved generals / you will roam wet streets / and
find in the earth the remains of the fallen / who in the dust fell. I will possibly
already be dead by then.”84 Similarly, in a poem about the life of a young sol-
dier before inspection on the parade ground, Andrija Illić wrote: “I have no
one. Neither male friends nor female friends, / neither a girlfriend nor a wife
/ I am alone with the pain of youth / and a heart that aches. . . . I watch. They
pass before my eyes / —like a long procession— / memories / imaginings /
yearnings / regrets / suspicions.”85 Nonetheless, the emphasis was on heroic
themes, particularly tributes to illustrious Ustasha death-squad and militia
commanders held up as youth role models. In a poem to Jure Francetić writ-
ten shortly after the Black Legion commander’s death in 1943, Đuro Seder,
a high school student from Banja Luka, expressed the belief that Francetić’s
blood “sanctified the ground on which it fell,” enabling Croatia to live forever
“because your spirit lives!” More reflectively, Stjepan Jakopec wrote to Mijo
Babić, struggling in death as he had in life: “The body and soul wrestle in the
ground / the body has a banquet, the soul leaves its sorrow / two stems these
are: one strangles the other / do you leave both, they are both—sterile.”86

LIFE AS A MEMBER OF THE USTASHA YOUTH

The Ustasha movement believed it was creating a new kind of youth for the
new era. According to Zdenko Blažeković, the new youth would be educated
in the virtues of “gallantry, militancy, honor, self-reliance, moral strength,
ethical thinking.” Like the ancient Greeks, he would have a healthy mind and
healthy body and would spend his time “in the countryside and fresh air.” By
traveling around the countryside, the Ustasha youth would learn to know the
beauty of his nation and culture more intimately. “To not know and not ab-
sorb the culture and cultural tastes of one’s own people means to live without
a soul and without contact with one’s own people and to absorb a foreign cul-
ture,” he claimed.87 Blažeković defined the Ustasha Youth as a secular move-
ment whose job was to promote “the brotherly cooperation and mutual life”
 106  Annihilate the Old!

of peasant, working-class, and intellectual youth in Croatia. It would go to

the villages and rescue village youth from falling under “anti-national tastes”
and instead make them the guardians of all national songs, poems, clothes,
and customs. It would also enter the factories and make a community out of
working-class youths poisoned by “Jewish-Bolshevik ideas.” Finally, intellec-
tual youth would have to abjure “all notions of privilege, adventurism, and
snobbery” and meet peasant and working-class youth after school. In such
a way, a new generation free from class and social conflict and worthy to be
the inheritors of the Ustashas’ mantle would be created.88 For the Catholic
journalist Stjepan Birac, young Croatian soldiers, “those elite young sons of
Croatia,” should be their role models. Only by following their example could
the state hope to create a new healthy generation free from the “filthy stinking
perverted” ideas of the past.89
The Ustasha regime established many different schools for youth: there
were schools for working-class Ustasha youth and peasant Ustasha youth, as
well as intellectual youth.90 The regime also established training schools for
the leaders of regional youth battalions aged between eighteen and twenty-
eight and for future Ustasha cadres. The main training schools were located in
Borovo, Makarska, and Nova Gradiška, as well as Zagreb and Bjelovar, with
plans for new schools in Kišeljak near Sarajevo and Cribvenica in the Croat
Primorje. By summer 1942 the regime claimed that over three hundred stu-
dents had passed through its elite training schools in Borovo and Makarska
alone.91 Courses at these schools were held four times a year, could last as long
as two months, and were targeted at peasant and working-class youth since
they made up the largest social group in the state. In the spring, there were
also courses for intellectual youth, although these only lasted two weeks in
order to train as many members of the intellectual Ustasha Youth as possi-
ble. Through the duration of the course, students learned various skills and
subjects: the history of Croatia and its liberation struggle, the ideology of the
Ustasha movement, political science, music, and sports. These schools were
not compulsory, and students applied to enter them: competition was fierce.
Students lived and worked as if in the army, but, as one youth explained, he
would have been “devastated” if he had not won entrance because his life’s am-
bition was to be “a real Ustasha and Ustasha hero.”92 The schools encouraged a
spirit of camaraderie not only among students but between students and their
course instructors. Students were also aware that the training schools had a
clear military purpose: to train youth as future soldiers. As Julije Makanec,
one of the Ustasha Youth’s educational ideologues, wrote: “The most sacred
moment for our course attendee is when he is given a gun for the first time.
His eyes shine with pride and joy, and with so much reverence and respect he
 Annihilate the Old!  107

accepts it in his hands, while in his eyes visibly grows the feeling that he has
something that cannot be taught, something that he must have in his blood.”93
Since Ustasha Youth training schools were designed to serve as a ped-
agogical preparation for military life, many fanatical youths went straight
from training schools to the movement’s militias and death squads.94 For oth-
ers, though, becoming a regional youth leader was an end in itself, since in
becoming camp or swarm leaders young people suddenly found themselves
with a level of power and influence they had never experienced before. Usta-
sha youth were organized in camps and swarms just as adult Ustashas were.
In order to command young Ustashas, swarm leaders had to be educated so
that they were leaders in whom young Ustashas could have complete trust. As
well as being a “model of authority,” the young swarm leader had to be “a fa-
natic of Ustasha ideas,” a “paragon” in his private life, and “unyielding” when
it came to Ustasha principles.95 Being a swarm leader was an important posi-
tion since a leader had to teach young Ustashas how to behave at camp and at
home and how to conduct themselves in the company of schoolmates. When
members got things wrong, their instruction booklet advised them, a leader
should be firm enough to show them the error of their ways, but not shout at
them. The swarm leader should consider what he could have done differently
when problems arose. Additionally, he should live with his swarm members
as “brothers” inside and outside the camp and consider them “your greatest
duty, your greatest desire, your only thought.” If he followed these rules and
there were still negative results, then he could be sure that he had “erred some-
where.”96 Ustasha Youth work-service camps, which Ustasha youths attended
as part of their compulsory labor battalion service, played a similar role in
teaching discipline and order. The work-service camps, typically lasting for
ten days, aimed to imbue youth with an ethos of work and discipline and the
joy of outdoor life. Youth at the camps could be involved in market garden-
ing, digging ditches, helping peasants, or constructing buildings and were ac-
commodated in local schools and colleges under the guidance of the school
principal in the evenings and a camp commander during the day. However,
the camps had another aim, as Milan Štriga, a camp leader, explained. They
brought youth from different backgrounds and different regions, of different
temperaments and classes, together in a spirit of comradeship and friendship.
Labor was combined with classes in the morning and leisure activities such as
singing, musical concerts, poetry readings, and talking in the afternoon and
evening, with all participants made aware of the fact that they were work-
ing for the “good of the nation, the good of the community.” More than this,
the labor camps aimed to “wipe away” divisions between peasant and urban
youth and between youths from different regions so that they were “united
 108  Annihilate the Old!

and joined together in work” and got to know “the life of the village, the life
of the nation.” By the summer of 1942 as many as seven thousand youths had
either stayed or worked at these labor camps.97
Being a member of the Ustasha Youth meant having a strong social con-
science: this meant working for social justice. Fliers and leaflets regularly
called on Ustasha Youth members to help peasants with the harvest, work
in soup kitchens, clear the snow from the streets, collect money for winter
assistance, help rebuild roads and railway tracks, and generally be respon-
sible and helpful citizens. Even very young members of the Ustasha Youth
were instructed in this principle. Ustasha Youth leaders were anxious to give
the impression that Ustasha Youth members performed these tasks willingly
and eagerly. They were the representatives of a new kind of youth, after all.98
In addition to regular newspaper stories reporting the socially useful tasks
of eager members of Ustasha Youth work battalions, the organizations’ own
journals carried front-page illustrations depicting Ustasha Youth engaged in
altruistic tasks. Ustaška uzdanica, for one, regularly showed Ustasha Youth,
always immaculate in their blue and red uniforms, volunteering on local
farms, collecting firewood in the snow for old women, assisting comrades
with their homework, and helping injured but smiling Ustasha army veterans
struggling on their crutches to cross snow-covered roads at Christmastime.99
Becoming a member of the Ustasha Youth also involved being a dutiful com-
rade and looking out for less fortunate comrades. Along with establishing
and helping to run social facilities such as soup kitchens for the general popu-
lation, they also set up these kinds of facilities for “impoverished” members
of the Ustasha Youth.
In the winter months local Ustasha Youth camps produced flyers and
leaflets and went out collecting for “winter help” for their poverty-stricken
comrades. Local citizens in towns such as Zemun, Daruvar, and Doboj, and
regions such as Zagorje and Senj, were instructed by the local Ustasha Youth
camps to donate clothes, food, and money to the cause since the young were
“the dawn of the nation” and “the force on which Ustasha Croatia was con-
structed!” At the same time, local Ustasha Youth camps such as the one in
Doboj argued that it was not only the patriotic but the social duty of all citi-
zens to donate, since “in our homeland there cannot be one child who should
be hungry or without the bare necessities of life.” The Ustasha Youth center in
Daruvar meanwhile argued that at a time when “our brothers in Russia shed
their blood and march in battle for the new Europe, and while our brothers in
Bosnia defend their ancestors’ homes from Chetnik-communist bestiality,”
donating to winter help was a duty of local citizens “toward us and the whole
of our national community.”100
An article in Ustaška mladež stressed the importance of the winter-help
 Annihilate the Old!  109

action as a demonstration of national solidarity and a tool for the transforma-

tion of Croatian social values. The campaign, it was announced, would run
from 1 to 5 November 1941, with Ustasha Youth collecting donations not only
door to door from private citizens but also from public organizations and
institutions, interpreted as an integral part of the regime’s wider campaign
for the social and economic regeneration of the nation through the “Ustasha
social construction of society.” Simultaneously, the campaign was perceived
as an educative process for Ustasha youth themselves, particularly more af-
fluent individuals. Since Ustasha youths were to be brought up in a spirit of
“social equality and unity of all classes,” based on “comradely helpfulness,
cooperation, and fellowship,” wealthier and urban Ustasha youth must be-
come acquainted with “the struggle their comrades in the village and city
lead for personal survival. They must stop thinking that they are somehow
better or more worthy because they are more beautifully dressed or wealth-
ier. The Ustasha youth will teach pride and consciousness among poverty-
stricken members and modesty and social equality among rich children.” In
fact, Ustasha youth were to be the heralds of the social revolution. They would
“spread a spirit of social equality, elevating those who have less and bringing
down to earth those who have more. A real and genuine social renaissance
will begin with the conviction, spirit, and feeling of sociability and humanity
among Ustasha youth.”101
Similarly, Vjekoslav Šišul argued in Ustaška mladež in November 1941
that social questions—especially regarding the inequality between the rich
and poor and capitalism and labor—were of the greatest importance in the
new state and inextricably tied to the question of youth. “We, the new gen-
eration,” he wrote, “should not go through life with our eyes closed. We must
have a detailed feeling for the important social issues and the suffering and
needs of our compatriots. It is precisely us, the Ustasha youth, the youth of
the Croatian future, who must understand the poor, the suffering, who must
know exactly how to value the worth of work and money. We must, with love,
accompany the workers, the peasants, and our male and female comrades in
factories, workshops, and other places of work.” The Ustasha movement was
not just a political but also a social movement and was “carrying out a mer-
ciless mission for the final confrontation with the immoral, liberal-capitalist
socioeconomic and political system. It is bringing into effect a new move-
ment of work, rights, and order.” As youths were the carrier of “the freshness
and militancy of the Ustasha ethos,” so with their strength they would “get
down to work for the great social regeneration of Croatia. Imbued with self-
sacrifice and deep social consciousness, we will harmonize our work and our
principles.”102
Through instructive short stories and cartoon strips, Ustasha Youth jour-
 110  Annihilate the Old!

nals and magazines stressed the assistance and solidarity that youth mem-
bers gave their disadvantaged comrades. In one cartoon strip entitled “This is
Comradeship!” a platoon of Ustasha youth returning from a camping week-
end decide to join together to pay for a window accidentally broken by Mari-
jan, who, though an industrious and enthusiastic member of their youth
battalion, comes from an impoverished family. “This is the spirit of comrade-
ship!” is the title and message of the cartoon.103
However, joining the Ustasha Youth also enabled members to develop
their own potential, and the list of activities Ustasha youth were able to enjoy
was extensive: there were regular sports and athletic events, flying lessons,
chess competitions, motorbike races, and mountain-climbing expeditions,
all of which were reported avidly in the party’s newspapers.104 Ustasha Youth
members could also develop their artistic aspirations at specialist Ustasha
Youth Art Schools, one of the first of which was founded in Zagreb in August
1942. There students could learn from many of the state’s most accomplished
artists, such as the actors Armand Alliger and Branko Špoljar, the athlete
Miroslav Gal, the children’s playwright Mladen Širola, and the ballet dancers
Oskar Harnoš and Ana Roje, all of whom were teachers at Ustasha Youth art
and sport academies.105
On the first anniversary of the school’s founding, its director, Mladen
Širola, summarized the aims of the school: first, ensuring that each child
was given the opportunity to develop his artistic talents; second, develop-
ing a wide appreciation of the arts among Ustasha Youth; and third, training
the next generation of cultural workers, art administrators, and teachers. The
ethos of the school’s teaching, Širola explained in an article for the state radio
magazine Hrvatski krugoval, was both individualist and collective. As well
as teaching students subjects as diverse as the harmonica, mandolin, acting,
ballet, and rhythmic dance, instructors constantly emphasized to them how
their abilities could be of benefit to wider society through the application of
“real culture.” In its first year alone, Širola announced, the school had added
its own theater school and founded a harmonica orchestra. The activities of
the school were becoming better known nationally too. Croatian state radio
dedicated an hour of children’s programming every week to performances
by students from the school. This provided them with a regular opportunity
to demonstrate their artistic progress and show how their individual talents
were contributing to wider societal aims. Moreover, demand for places meant
that the scope of the school was constantly increasing. In the coming year,
the school’s directors had decided to expand the range of subjects that could
be studied to include sculpture, painting, ceramics, photography, artisan art,
literature, and journalism, and special new studios had been constructed to
accommodate these disciplines.106
 Annihilate the Old!  111

How many of the youths who attended these schools went on to have pro-
fessional careers is not clear, although some graduates of the Ustasha Youth
arts academies did become well-known artists in postwar Yugoslavia. Al-
though the emphasis of the schools was on participation rather than cul-
tural acclaim, regime journalists consistently promoted the Ustasha Youth
art schools, especially as incubators of exciting new acting talent. “The Dis-
covery of New Acting Talent!” was the headline that accompanied one ar-
ticle about a performance by drama students of the Zagreb Ustasha Youth
Art School, in which they were joined by younger members from the State
Theater.107 The Ustasha Youth movement also produced a number of notable
young poets. One of the most important was the impressionist poet Dražen
Panjkota, who died in mysterious circumstances in Dalmatia in 1945.108 When
his first volume of poetry, Ustap u magli (A Step in the Fog), was published
in 1942, it received a rapturous reception from critics. Nikola Šabić, chap-
lain of the Black Legion death squad and literary critic, called Panjkota the
“greatest poet among our younger poets,” with “more poetry and soul in his
poems than in any other poet,” and compared him to Gabriel Garcia Lorca,
Arthur Rimbaud, Émile Zola, and Miroslav Krleža. Panjkota’s poems were
interpreted in an explicitly nationalistic manner by reviewers, but such an
interpretation was questionable. True, as an adolescent he had published his
poetry in a number of nationalist and rightist literary youth journals, regu-
larly published in Ustasha Youth literary journals, and also accepted a num-
ber of commissions from the regime to write pangyeric poems in praise of
the Ustasha Youth and the Poglavnik. In other ways, though, the sentiment
and subject of his poetry made him an incongruous troubador for the move-
ment. Despite being only in his late teens, Panjkota wrote explicitly about love
and sex. Furthermore, his acclaimed poetry collection contained a tribute to
his idol Lorca that held the fascists responsible for the playwright’s murder,
as well as poems about Spanish gypsies and the exoticism of Latin culture,
hardly subjects to endear him to the regime.109 Critics ignored all this. While
Šabić worried the poems of Croatian youth would reflect a value system that
had rightly been abandoned, one of “decadence and spiritual decline,” where
Panjkota’s poetry was concerned, he saw only purity and virtue. Although,
for example, he conceded that there were “erotic” impulses in Panjkota’s po-
ems, Sabić nonetheless insisted that the young poet portrayed women as
“comrades and sisters,” dreaming about them “as purely, idealistically, and
respectfully as he would a sister.” Ignoring the ideological ambiguity and ex-
plicit nature of his poems, he reinvented Panjkota as a combination of the
new Ustasha man—chaste, with an iron will—and the sensitive, idealistic
young nationalist artist. For him, the poet was “more a brother than a lover, a
male who calls for a woman, to be next to her so that her tenderness can treat
 112  Annihilate the Old!

his wounds of sensitivity, cooling the ardor of youth.” As for the young poet’s
ideological disposition, his Ustasha sympathies were clear: in some poems
there was the “voice of social concern; in some national glory, pain for the
native land, for the earth, which in the bloody convulsions of the recent past
has experienced a dark and bloody Golgotha. And through all the poems, the
whole anthology, there echoes the sound of deep tragedy.”110
The emphasis on the Ustasha Youth at the apparent expense of other sec-
tions of the movement—with their training schools; art, dance, and drama
academies; and summer camps—led to class and economic resentment
within some sections of the movement. When resentment was coupled with
alcohol, violent incidents sometimes took place. On 24 October 1942 two
drunk members of the Poglavnik Bodyguard Brigade, Zvonimir Brekalo,
the militia’s chaplain, and his comrade Ante Čenan, went on the rampage in
Banja Luka. Having assaulted and threatened the local Ustasha Youth leader
Vladimir Dodigović, they burst in on a group of forty Ustasha Youth learn-
ing a national dance. They swore at the students, calling them traitors who
could enjoy frivolous pursuits while Brekalo and Čenan’s comrades were dy-
ing on the battlefield, and proceeded to physically attack the two dance in-
structors, both of whom were leaders in the local Ustasha Youth Center and
one of whom was a respected young member of the State Theater in Banja
Luka. Later in the evening, Brekalo also assaulted a local citizen and a hotel
worker. How common were such incidents? Mustafa Hadžiefendić, the DIPU
investigator assigned to investigate this occurrence, suggested that they were
becoming increasingly problematic. Noting that the attacks had greatly upset
local citizens, including the parents of Ustasha Youth members, he reported
to his superiors in Zagreb that individual members of the Ustasha movement
“frequently descend into obstinacy, and their assaults and attacks on peace-
ful citizens uncomfortably resonate among the population and do absolutely
nothing for propaganda and in many cases prevent work to calm the situa-
tion, pacify people, and prepare the ground for the penetration of the Ustasha
movement among the people and work with other state elements.”111 In any
case, irrespective of how widespread the sentiments of Brekalo and Čenan
were, their prejudices were somewhat misplaced since, in fact, Ustasha Youth
theater productions tended toward agit-prop theater glorifying the Ustasha
movement and the national liberation struggle. As well as plays about the
insidious and destructive nature of Croatia’s Jews, Ustasha youths also per-
formed numerous highly ideological plays chronicling the nationalist student
struggle in the 1930s.
One of the most popular of these was Franjo Babić’s Novo pokoljenje
(The New Generation, 1943), which centered on a group of high school stu-
dents fighting both the machinations of a brutal police state and their “cow-
 Annihilate the Old!  113

ardly” school administration. Plays like these were clearly designed to have
an educational purpose: they reminded youthful audiences of the cruelty
and mendacity of the Yugoslav state and the role of high school students in
the liberation of Croatia, thereby reinforcing the idea of the national revo-
lution—and by extension the Ustasha regime—as the triumphant expres-
sion of the revolution of youth. Simultaneously, plays such as Babić’s set out a
code of selfless and rebellious conduct by which contemporary youth, includ-
ing Ustashas, should live if they wanted to honor the sacrifices of an earlier
generation. In the play, the teenage protagonists Ante Jurčić, Jože Lešić, and
Gorđana Barbalić are the archetypes of model Croatian nationalist youths of
the 1930s. They are not interested in “sport, parties, or adolescent love,” like
most teenagers. Instead, they are “firm, decisive, proud, and revolutionary”
youths, cold-blooded and unstinting in their desire for a liberated Croatian
state. The villain is Puzavac, the director of the school, who exemplifies the
“spineless face” of a regime “toady” and tries to thwart the students’ nation-
alist activism. His mendacity is echoed by that of almost every other author-
ity figure in the play, from the local policeman to the history teacher, who is
shocked to find the teenagers distributing nationalist leaflets at school in spite
of his best efforts to educate them in a “foreign” spirit. Persecuted and impris-
oned, ultimately they prevail against the older generation, and the revolution
of youth is complete. Viewing its premiere in Osijek in May 1943, in a perfor-
mance by members of the Ustasha Youth Theater School reviewers applauded
not only the moving performances of the young cast but also the writing of
the local author Babić. He had succeeded in creating an accurate prototype of
nationalist youths in 1930s Croatia, while simultaneously giving “a new face
to the students of all Croatian schools in the former state” as the conscience
of Croatian nationalism.112
Ustasha Youth members were under no illusions about how serious their
undertaking was. Even the youngest members were taught that they must
follow Ustasha ideology unquestioningly, irrespective of the consequences.
As Ante Jakaša, the commander of the Ustasha Hero, wrote in 1943, Usta-
sha youths were to be “blind followers,” “apostles,” and “fanatics of the Usta-
sha religion,” ready to destroy their enemies in a battle of “arms and blood.”
He reminded them that the Ustasha revolution was unfinished and that, if
necessary, they would be called upon to place their lives on the altar of the
homeland and “from our bones build its foundations.”113 The conduct ex-
pected of Ustasha youth was summed up in a well-known poem by Andrija
Ilić: “Don’t cry like a woman / because everything that ails you / is short and
passes / like a shadow. It’s not manly to cry / but to shout. Yes, remember. /
Shout. / Roar. / Bellow. / Endure. / Fall / and get up again / like a man!”114 In
the great Ustasha Youth gathering of May 1942, the organization’s members
 114  Annihilate the Old!

had demonstrated their loyalty to the Poglavnik and to the Ustasha regime.
Male Ustasha youths from all corners of the state, gathered in Stjepan Radić
Square, had marched in front of the Poglavnik carrying minature guns and
daggers. They had vowed that the Poglavnik’s enemies were theirs, promised
to fight to the death for the Poglavnik and “to tear out at the roots” everything
that challenged the authority of the state.115 Educational institutes established
for the orphans of Ustasha warriors and members of the Poglavnik Body-
guard ensured that male orphans were brought up “completely in the spirit
of the Ustasha principles” and would one day enter the ranks of the Ustasha
army, militias, and death squads. When journalists visited one such school in
the summer of 1942, they found young children and adolescents whose eyes
“burned with flame” and who declared that their only wish was to join the
Ustasha army and defend the homeland.116
The desire to turn children into warriors was a dominant concern of the
Ustasha regime’s organization of youth, rather than an ad hoc policy de-
termined by a lack of manpower. In early 1942, one of the commanders of
the Starčević Youth, Rudolf Pavlek, explained the thinking behind this. He
argued that the new generation’s value would be measured by its military
prowess. If the movement wished to secure the homeland and create a state
based on “social justice,” devoid of “parasitism and robbery,” then the mili-
tary training of the young was a matter of emergency: “Now or never,” in his
words.117 Ivo Babić, a member of the Poglavnik Bodyguard Student Militia,
pointed to the ancient civilizations of Athens and Sparta as precedents for the
movement’s militarization of youth: the Spartans, he explained, had raised
their children in a warlike fashion from the earliest age, and this had given
them eternal life, whereas Athens’s decline could be traced to the replacement
of the masculine principle by the rule of Ephebes. All revolutionary societies,
including revolutionary France and Bolshevik Russia, he continued, had had
legions of child warriors, and so should revolutionary Croatia. As well as en-
suring the survival of the Croatian state, this would transform the young into
model men by teaching them the values of comradely love and face-to-face
fighting.118 Were these views restricted to members of paramilitary structures
who could appreciate the need to have as many men under arms as possible?
In fact, the benefits of a militarized youth were recognized by pedagogues
too. According to one Ustasha Youth training school professor, meanwhile,
the inculcation of warrior values in youth would produce a generation im-
bued with the values of “renunciation, self-discipline, effort, obedience, and
an instinct for discipline,” as well as an understanding of equality and com-
radeship, driven by a belief in a common cause. However, far more important
was the role they would be able to play not just in the defense of the homeland
but as the nucleus of a new kind of ruthless youth, which all great regimes
 Annihilate the Old!  115

and societies throughout history had needed. Like ancient Sparta, Athens,
and Rome, Ustasha Croatia would produce a new kind of youth who would
“not only defend the homeland from attacks but who would seek out the en-
emy itself and know how to destroy it.” He envisaged “zealous youths” of
the Ustasha movement “firmly clenching their guns on their shoulders with
their muscles” and helping to purify the old “twitching” Europe of plutocracy
and democracy. Even the youngest members of the Ustasha Youth, he wrote,
should be “so attired and educated that they will be prepared to step into the
Ustasha Hero organization, and putting a gun on their shoulder will be nei-
ther strange nor arduous.”119
Given the emphasis Ustasha Youth leaders and pedagogues placed on
military training and physical exercise, it is not surprising that many of them
also believed that the authentic youth educational experience was to be found
not in training schools but in outdoor camps. Julije Makanec argued that
while Ustasha Youth members at training schools, like camps, could learn
ideological theory, singing, and team sports, as well as skills like cooking
and first aid, the best life lessons for these future Ustasha leaders would be
acquired “in discussions during excursions in the countryside.” Newspaper
reports of expeditions and rallies at campsites painted an idyllic image of
days filled with healthy physical exercise; tug-of-war competitions; commu-
nal singing on marches into the woods; and evenings around the campfire,
where youths bonded, confessed their troubles, sang songs, “demonstrated
their love toward their commanders,” and slept in tents or under the stars.
The campfire, as one young camp member explained, was the most beauti-
ful aspect of camp life, as it was around the fire that all hierarchy ceased, and
everyone, regardless of rank, sat together.120 Similar summer camps, some of
which lasted throughout the summer, were also organized to draw together
young Ustasha Youth leaders from different parts of the state. These camps
stressed equality and national unity: at one camp in August 1942 youth activ-
ists from Zagreb and Sarajevo mixed with youths from the countryside, Mus-
lims such as Tefko S. with Catholics like Zvonimir V., in a spirit of friendship,
comradeship, and mutual work. When they entered the camp, all individual
differences disappeared, as the Ustasha Youth officials became a collective
united “in a new spirit, a spirit of brotherhood, harmony, love, and work.”121

AUTHORITY AND DISSENT IN REGIONAL YOUTH CAMPS

For Ustasha youth, there were two kinds of camps: the camps in the country-
side, by the coast, and in the woods, where large numbers of Ustasha Youth
from different parts of the state gathered for rallies and excursions, and the
regular regional Ustasha Youth camps, as likely to be situated in an unused
school building or cinema as in a field in the countryside. Life in these re-
 116  Annihilate the Old!

gional youth camps was far less idyllic than it was in the camps in the coun-
tryside, which parents were permitted to visit. For a young member of a
regional Ustasha camp, there was no illusion about who was in charge: the
camps were strictly hierarchical, and the command of the camp sergeant was
gospel. In addition, the timetable of activity was strictly worked out by the
camp leader.122 By all accounts the strict life of the camps inspired a close
sense of camaraderie, and young Ustashas grew very close to their leaders,
who often became surrogate brothers. Regional Ustasha Youth camp news-
papers, which were not subject to central censorship, make this clear. For
example, when Franjo Bušić left the Mitrovica male Ustasha Youth camp to
work in Zagreb, there was genuine sadness at his farewell presentation: “Our
eyes were glassy, and we scarcely held back our tears. We couldn’t believe that
our Buša was leaving us, and we would have to work alone.”123 The departure
of Franjo Bušić for Zagreb, probably at the request of the GUS, reflected the
fact that the Ustasha Youth schools and camps gave their members otherwise
unobtainable opportunities for social mobility. Ustasha Youth leaders from
modest backgrounds who demonstrated their leadership skills at the regional
level could get noticed and, like Bušić, be promoted to an important position
in the state bureaucracy or movement. Since a seat in the Sabor was reserved
for an Ustasha Youth representative, he could perhaps even enter national
politics.124
But personal ambitions inevitably caused rivalry and competion too, es-
pecially among those who were not yet at the position of camp leader but
who aspired to be. Ustasha Youth training schools caused particular prob-
lems, and regional Ustasha Youth camp leaders increasingly complained that
course attendees returned full of “self-importance” and “swaggering around
the whole day,” barking harsh orders at miserable young camp members dur-
ing drills until they became slack and bored and even began to abandon their
basic duties. Some of them also took a dismissive attitude toward their camp
leaders, in some cases lying down as they were spoken to and “all but closing
their eyes.”125 The potential for social mobility as a result of joining the Usta-
sha Youth was recognized widely across the state, even among those groups
previously defined as national and political enemies. With the ideological
changes of 1942, especially the new line toward Serbs, Serb families in many
regions began to apply for permission for their children to join local Ustasha
Youth camps. While Jewish children were automatically excluded from join-
ing the camps, the Ustasha Youth began to accept children from Serb fami-
lies, especially those from mixed Croatian-Serb backgrounds who had been
converted to Catholicism. The same was also true of the children of some
communist families. Although this policy had backing at the highest levels of
the Ustasha organization, some officials harbored doubts as to the wisdom of
 Annihilate the Old!  117

this policy, as well as the motivations of local Serbs and communists. There
was also evidence of significant opposition to this policy from within some
sections of the Ustasha Youth organization itself. Privately, some leaders were
concerned about the risk of “entryism” and the impact the presence of chil-
dren from communist and Serb families might have on the organizations’
sense of élan and national-ideological purity. On 16 April 1943, for example,
an order was sent by Stjepan Domjanić, commander of the Zagreb Ustasha
Youth Center, to all Ustasha Youth camps and concentrations requesting
details of all members, including the names of their parents; their national-
ity at birth and currently; and their moral behavior and political and ideo-
logical beliefs, including whether they were suspected of being supporters of
the Ustasha regime or were thought to be politically disinterested, as well as
details of their intellectual and athletic achievements. Domjanić also asked
for assessments of their potential as future cadres. Increasingly, application
forms to join the organization also included obligatory details concerning
children’s religion at birth and their current religion.126
Nevertheless, Ustasha Youth camp journals also suggested that once they
had been admitted, camp members could have a lot of fun. Apart from all the
activities that one could participate in, from poetry writing to sports, there
were also excursions to the countryside or coast, competitions to enter, prizes
to be won, and dreams of an intrepid future as an Ustasha Hero or daredevil
pilot to nurture. If the Ustasha Hero youth camp at Hrvatska Mitrovica and
its leader, Valodja Rasjin, were representative, there was clearly a great deal of
good-natured teasing between youth camp members and their leaders. Camp
newspapers included endless jokes about camp members and their leaders,
interspersed with exhortations for camp members to behave. Rasjin might
have been a strict camp sergeant, but he was also prepared to be the target of
jokes and caricatures if it helped to foster a feeling of camaraderie.127 How-
ever, the regional identity of Ustasha Youth camps and the independent spirit
of many of their members also caused anxiety for central Ustasha authorities.
Some of this behavior was relatively innocuous. For example, in April 1942,
a group of Ustasha youths from one of the Brčko camps was the subject of a
complaint to the Ustasha propaganda bureau for showing, without the local
Ustasha authority’s permission, banned Hollywood films, including “Stanley
and Olio Laurel and Hardy and Charly Chaplin” movies, at their cinema club.
Likewise, Ustasha youths from a Zagreb camp were caught smoking in a local
cinema and watching adult films.128 In fact, the bad behavior of members of
the Ustasha Youth became sufficiently well-known for there to be widespread
jokes about Croatia’s “golden youth.” In one series of cartoons published in
February 1942 depicting the various reactions and habits of Zagrebians in the
face of heavy snowfalls, intellectual members of the Ustasha Youth on snow-
 118  Annihilate the Old!

clearing duties in the city were depicted smoking cigarettes, wheeling each
other around in wheelbarrows, fighting, and throwing snowballs at pass-
ersby. An accompanying poem by the satirist Jožčenko suggested that, having
caused mayhem with their snow-clearing activities, the “golden youth,” after
the snow had melted, would make similar mischief with hoses in the summer
as they had with spades in the snow.129
Some rebellious behavior was more serious. A number of regional Usta-
sha Youth camps resisted initiatives from central Ustasha Youth leaders to
admit Serbs, the children of communists, and other former outsiders. In early
1942, Franjo Trbuha wrote a seemingly strange article in Ustaška mladež that
pointed out to readers the importance of reading an article “slowly and se-
lectively,” thinking just of the words themselves and nothing else in order
to decide whether it was correct and genuine or had been written in haste.
Only when they were able to read properly would they be able to write clearly
and talk about issues in an informed manner. The question of reading ability
was “unbelievably important” and “a burning issue” in some regional Usta-
sha Youth organizations. The significance of this article only became clearer
the next month, when in a follow-up article Trbuha proposed that former
enemies of the youth movement be forgiven for past transgressions and al-
lowed to join the Ustasha Youth, pointedly reminding his young readers that
the new Croatia was a state for all Croatians, not just those who had fought
and sacrificed their lives for it. Stressing the regime’s new direction, he em-
phasized to Ustasha Youth members that they were obligated to follow the
regime leadership’s more tolerant line about allowing those “previously in
the other camp” into the youth organization.130 Nonetheless, the combination
of regional independence and ideological militancy meant that fierce rivalry
with other local camps often graduated into a state of near civil war, led and
encouraged by rival camp leaders who often accused each other of serious po-
litical transgressions.131
To make matters worse, there were numerous shortages of facilities in
many camps. In a report to the GUS following a tour of the Stara Pazova
region in February 1942, an official complained about the lack of facilities
available for youth to hold their meetings. The former Sokol building, he
complained, as well as the formerly Jewish- and Serb-owned local cinema,
had both been taken over by local Völksdeutsche leaders. Couldn’t the Usta-
sha Youth at the very least take joint ownership of this building? There was
also a shortage of intelligentsia and teachers in the region who could in-
culcate youth in an Ustasha and nationalistic spirit. As a result, the report
explained, this work had been left to the local Ustasha Youth camp leader
Krojač, who could “neither hold classes nor organize youth in the region be-
 Annihilate the Old!  119

cause he is without the necessary skills for either political propaganda or na-
tional education.”132
Reports from other regions of the state recorded a similar picture. Over-
all, resources were not being given to the Ustasha Youth organizations, and
they were finding it difficult to gain adherents or organize activities. This was
a particular problem in Dalmatia. Not only did the Italian occupation au-
thorities suppress the activities of the Ustasha movement and all expressions
of Croatian nationalism, but the movement’s activities were also restricted by
the fact that sympathies for nationalism had always been limited. Although
during the 1930s there had been an upsurge in nationalist activism by high
school students in the region, local Ustasha Youth organizations clearly had
difficulties gaining recruits. A letter from the Ustasha Youth female center
leader in Omiš, on the Centina River, to Grga Pejnović, in the GUS Office for
Propaganda, of 23 October 1941 makes this clear. Responding to the send-
ing of a brochure for Ustaša, she confessed that it would be of little use since
sales of the journal were very weak. “Here national consciousness is below
every criteria, and our journals are being bought by very few people.” Ustaša
was of little interest to those youth who were not nationally conscious, while
those who were more nationally minded, due to the official nature of its con-
tent, “will not be interested in paying money for it.” She therefore asked for
free copies of the journal to be sent for propaganda purposes so they could
be “placed in people’s hands free of charge.” In time, when the ideological
consciousness of local youths had been raised, they could charge for the jour-
nal. The camp leader also complained about the lack of camera equipment for
propaganda purposes and was informed by Pejnović in his reply—in which
he also agreed to send three hundred free copies of the journal—that she
would need to share the equipment with the neighboring male Ustasha Youth
camp in Makarska.133
However, the regional bias of the movement was not as simple as this, and
in some parts of Dalmatia, the youth organization attracted more support
than conventional wisdom suggested it should. For example, in a letter to the
central GUS in Zagreb of 28 November 1941, the Section of the Department
for Propaganda in Cetina requested “as soon as possible” “even more” propa-
ganda material, which “we urgently need” in “large quantities.” The reason
was that, despite the “very difficult situation and with very limited amounts
of material to hand,” the Ustasha youth were developing their work in this re-
gion. The letter explained the complicated situation:
From the daily newspapers one would conclude that we never sleep here but
that through numerous performances and assemblies we show to more and
more people who hate us that we will not leave here. This section of the De-
 120  Annihilate the Old!

partment for Propaganda had to take on itself the propaganda for the whole
region, in other words, the propaganda for the GUS and state propaganda
as well as—to be clear—the propaganda for the Ustasha Youth. The reason
for this is very simple: namely, we are the only ones here who can work in
an Ustasha way and who can show in an external way (i.e., in the wearing
of a uniform) that the Ustashas are still found here on the Croatian Adriatic
coast. In all locations and villages placards have been hung out: “Half a year
of the state,” “The Poglavnik with the Ustashas,” and “The Ustasha Youth—
the strength of the state.” Various brochures and leaflets like “The Poglavnik
Speaks” have been completely sold out.134

There were also concerns about the conduct of some regional Ustasha
Youth leaders. In some cases Ustasha Youth camp leaders were fired for un-
specified violations. This was the case with Josip Ružić, commander of the
Ustasha Starčević Youth camp in Primorje, whose camp comrades were in-
formed of his dismissal via a curt letter in April 1943 from Stjepan Domjanić
in Zagreb.135 In other less serious cases, Ustasha Youth camp leaders were
found to be running chaotic operations. When Dragica Žubrinić, a physical
education instructor in the State Labor Service, conducted a fact-finding tour
of female Ustasha Youth camps in central Croatia in spring 1943, she found
many camps to be in a state of disorganization and neglect, with woeful and
sometimes nonexistent leadership. (Admittedly, she also found the oppo-
site: excellent examples of well-run, vibrant, and popular camps, but this was
rarer.) The disarray in the regional Ustasha Youth organization was so ad-
vanced that in Bjelovar she returned to find her accommodation occupied by
a male Ustasha Youth official who refused to move out. As she related in her
report to the Central Command of the female Ustasha Youth, she was nearly
forced to spend the night on the streets. Among the most striking character-
istics of the worst-run and -attended camps was the complete absence of any
physical exercise, as well as utter disregard for sport or its importance on the
part of either members or leaders. Žubrinić’s findings were confirmed by the
monthly reports Labor Service Youth physical education instructors had to
submit to the Ustasha Youth Central command.136
Then there was the indolent attitude of some members of the Ustasha
Youth, complaints beginning to appear as early as 1942. In Jajce, for example,
officials wrote exasperatedly to Zagreb about the behavior of local Ustasha
youth and their “couldn’t-care-less” attitude. When a fundraising event was
organized, they observed, only eighteen youths showed up: although they had
brought placards and badges, the effort had completely failed. “I don’t know
what has got into them,” confessed one official, “but I do know that this in-
dolence is especially damaging for society.”137 These complaints appeared to
 Annihilate the Old!  121

be part of a wider discipline problem. Youths simply refused to follow the

orders of their camp leader since they knew they had the option of dropping
out of the organization permanently. Not only were youths at camp prone to
disobedience, but they were behaving in a rebellious manner toward teachers
and parents. There was real resentment at having to give up time after school
or on school holidays to attend camp when their classmates had free time to
do with as they pleased. Valodja Rasjin, camp leader in Hrvatska Mitrovica,
admonished “his dear Ustasha Heroes” for substituting an attitude of “I will”
with one of “I won’t”:
How many times have you been spoken to about the behavior of the Ustasha
Heroes toward orders, family, teachers? How many times have you been
scolded or punished for your behavior, but to no avail? You remained the
same as before. Of course, there are members who have impressed with their
good behavior, obedience, and excellence. However, there are many of you
whose behavior on the street, at home, in school, at meetings, has shown
your bad side. Many of you think that you are heroes, think that you have
a firm will when you say to every command the damned “I will not!” and
don’t know and don’t see how pathetic you are, how base and small. Remem-
ber, Ustasha Heroes, that the greatness of Ustashas lies in self-control, in the
exact and enthusiastic carrying out of commands. This “I won’t!” is noth-
ing else but an acknowledgment of weakness and impotence. A real hero
shouldn’t ever say “I won’t.” Nothing should be impossible or difficult. You
complain when a meeting carries on after 5 p.m. and you cannot go to the
cinema. You cannot sacrifice two hours in the week to build your homeland,
and have you never thought that your brothers and fathers, now with a rifle
in their hands, stand firm in the defense of eternal Croatia and could, at
any moment, be blown apart by a cannonball? They give the most precious
thing—their life—for the homeland, and you cannot even spare two hours a
week!138

But the disciplinary options open to Ustasha Youth camp leaders were
limited. As all Ustasha Youth leaders’ training handbooks pointed out, while
various disciplinary sanctions could be used, physical punishment was com-
pletely forbidden.139 What to do? Chastisment was one option, but as the
training manual for Ustasha Hope leaders explained, parents had entrusted
their children to the organization and took a “tireless” interest in their chil-
dren’s welfare; they might not take kindly to the public reprimanding of their
progeny. The handbook advised instead that young children who continu-
ously behaved badly should have their certificates of achievement taken away
and that it should be made clear to them what this meant: “Children without
these certificates cannot continue school, they cannot study, and later they
 122  Annihilate the Old!

will be deprived of all rights. If parents do not allow their children to attend
lessons, they should be financially penalized.”140
One of the main concerns of the regime was that a perceived spirit of in-
dolence was resulting in few young people joining their local Ustasha Youth
organization. True, in some towns and villages, as a report of 1943 made clear,
children and teenagers were attending Ustasha Youth camps in large num-
bers. In many others, though, there were few recruits, and on Sunday morn-
ings many camps had fewer than ten attendees. In the town of Šibenik in
Dalmatia, for instance, which in 1944 established an Ustasha Youth camp
under the leadership of Slavko Bjažić and Tona Fraganović as a result of the
lack of popular support for the regime, the ten or so youths who joined the
camp were effectively forced to meet in secret.141 This level of support was not
sustainable.
To rectify the problem of poor attendance, it appears that in 1943 the cen-
tral Ustasha Youth organization was planning a return to some aspect of
compulsory membership, although only mandatory for the very best candi-
dates, in order to protect the quality of youth members. In April 1943, Stje­
pan Domjanić sent a letter to all Ustasha youth camp leaders asking them for
details of the scholastic performance, date of birth, religion, academic apti-
tude, and ideological outlook of all high school students in order for “better
and more successful” work of the Ustasha Youth.142 Frequent requests—espe-
cially from 1943 onward—were also sent to all local camp leaders, summon-
ing them to meetings to discuss the number of their recruits, the size of their
camps, and the quality of their recruits.143
However, camp journals expressed not only the frustration of leaders
with the reluctance of children and adolescents to join the Ustasha Youth but
their dissatisfaction with the results of their work. The leaders of the male
Hrvatska Mitrovica camp, rhetorically asking their charges in the summer of
1942 what they thought they had achieved in the previous year for the camp
and the movement, came to the “unfortunate conclusion: NOTHING!”144 By
1944, the situation was becoming serious enough to dominate the commen-
tary pages of many Ustasha Youth journals. Writing in 1944 from the Sara-
jevo Ustasha Youth camp, Davorin Sanković, camp leader and editor of its
journal Naraštaj slobode, aimed to shame Ustasha Youth members into activ-
ism by defining their nonattendance as an act of national treachery, akin to
spitting on the graves of Ustasha martyrs:
Youth! Have you performed your duties toward the people and the state?
Have you fulfilled the Poglavnik’s commands and your own obligations?
Have you registered for and do you take part in the work of the Ustasha
Youth? If you don’t, how can you call yourself a Croat—how can you call
 Annihilate the Old!  123

yourself a SON of a land toward which you don’t even have enough feeling to
carry out your duty?! How can you call yourself a BROTHER and want to be
equal in law to those who, in the carrying out of their far more difficult and
strenuous duties, even give their own life?145

Ustasha Youth instructors increasingly noticed a spirit of disrespect, ag-

gression, and militant extremism even outside the camps, which threatened
to get out of control. In a sharply worded rejoinder, Ustasha Youth instructor
Luka Puljiz acknowledged that it was “ludicrous” to think that a schoolboy,
whether in his home region, school, or class, could not be “an Ustasha war-
rior, respected and acknowledged for his militancy.” However, he reminded
his students that the “militancy of the Ustasha schoolboy” could not be con-
fused with boorishness, singling out “boys who talk a lot, shout out constantly
(including national phrases), who turn their hand into a fist and, openly in
front of their class comrades, disdain their teachers owing to some supposed
mistake from their past at a time when our educational workers were human
slaves and, with regard to foreign influence, most keenly felt our national un-
happiness.” On the contrary, the model schoolboy Ustasha learned from, lis-
tened to, and obeyed the older generation, not least because the Croatian state
needed a future generation of young Ustashas who were well educated and
cultured: learned men, experts in their field. He reminded them they were
Ustashas and that “what we want and what we do surpasses all difficulties.
We carry out and complete every one of our duties. If there were no difficul-
ties, our Ustasha militancy and decisiveness would cease to exist.”146
The Ustasha regime had consciously inculcated a spirit of ideological fa-
naticism among the members of the Ustasha Youth. When in 1942 an Usta-
sha Youth member attending a youth camp said to a journalist, “If you ask a
boy if he wants a school desk or a gun for Christmas, and he says he wants
a school desk, then there is obviously something wrong with him, and it
would be advisable to get a doctor to see him as soon as possible!” one Usta-
sha trainer saw this as a manifestation of the healthy militancy of Ustasha
youth.147 Their poetry, which frequently expressed the frustration of those not
old enough to take an active role in the defense of the homeland, a constant
and nagging theme, was lauded too and widely published. When, for exam-
ple, Ilija Stanić, an Ustasha Youth member from Mostar, wrote in 1942 that
he longed to shed his blood for the salvation of the homeland, since “noth-
ing is sweeter and more beautiful” and since a homeland “warmed in blood”
was always stronger, who in the movement could argue with this? Likewise,
Tihomil Strepački, another young Ustasha Youth poet, also expressed the
yearning to sacrifice himself for the homeland. “I will wait one day more,” he
promised, “and then I will rush off into a fierce battle.”148 In their camp news-
 124  Annihilate the Old!

papers, members of the Ustasha Youth frequently imagined themselves in

their poems as heroic Ustasha warriors dying on the battlefield for the nation.
One anonymous member of the Mitrovica Ustasha Hero youth camp, writ-
ing in 1943, imagined himself as the last Ustasha, shedding his “young fresh”
blood: “And when the eyes of the last Ustasha close / when the deadly thun-
der hits us, / the Ustasha’s lips will then say: ‘For you Poglavnik and for the
homeland!’” Zdravko Marušić, another member of the Ustasha Hero youth
camp, imagined the head of a young Ustasha who has expired on the battle-
field, blown apart by bombs and guns, his blood pouring from it, watering
the earth.149
However, as the war went on, even these kinds of poems began to worry
Ustasha Youth instructors and pedagogues more and more because of what
they seemed to reveal about the wider attitudes of youth. Meanwhile, Usta-
sha Youth ideologues expressed concern that their militant, pugnacious, and
rebellious ethos could devour the regime. Catholic Ustasha Youth instruc-
tors, in particular, sensed danger. Franjo Dragičević, from the Sarajevo Usta-
sha Youth camp, expressed the anxiety that Ustasha youths appeared only to
think of struggle and war in terms of military battles and defeating the enemy,
although there were other moral battles to be fought. In his opinion, young
warriors’ friends and family “would rather hear of your honorable death on
the battlefield than see that you have been deceived by some dubious life-
style choices from which you will eternally suffer. You must eternally fight!”
Battles surely had to be pursued with guns, with the strength of muscles and
will, and through force of character, but Ustasha youth had to be “steely” in
fighting the temptations of immorality so that they and the state for which so
many Ustasha warriors had given their blood did not collapse into the “mire
of degeneracy.” If the state did collapse, what would be the point of struggle,
and if they collapsed too, how would they be able to defend it?150
Despite the regime’s best efforts, it never did manage to create a “new”
youth. Increasingly, this “new” youth reverted to the habits and behaviors
of the “old” youth, something not lost on commentators. When the young
Catholic intellectual Feliks Niedzielski was appointed Ustasha Youth com-
mander in 1944, he tried to re-create the organization as an elite moral force.
In his opinion, girls should prepare to be dutiful wives and mothers, protec-
tors of the family hearth, and boys should be uncorrupted, modest, “fearless
fighters” whose passion would be not for women with questionable morals,
but for the Croatian state.151 These aspirations were to be frustrated. By that
time, indolent, disrespectful youth, the symbol of the bourgeois decadence of
the Yugoslav state, had returned publicly to the streets of the Ustasha capital.
Newspapers complained that adolescent males were behaving disgracefully
in public places such as cinemas, theaters, and, above all, sidewalks: loitering,
 Annihilate the Old!  125

leering, and making lewd comments and jokes about women pedestrians.
“On some Zagreb streets and in some squares, these greetings have become
almost an unwritten law, and youths use them in such quantities that not one
female can pass by peacefully without receiving some ‘compliment,’ ‘witty
comment,’ or ‘impropriety,’” one commentator complained tartly in May
1944. This “Balkan” behavior, a remnant of a discredited era, should, he sug-
gested, be punished by the police and, if necessary, the culprits sentenced to
forced labor.152 The feral criminal youth gangs of the capitalist era were back,
and in the same way that many students, however tentatively, had rebelled
against the regime, their return signaled that the regime had not created a
new youth. The revolution of youth the Ustasha regime had instigated had
failed; youth had reverted and degenerated. Without youth, could the regime
regenerate the nation?
CHAPTER 3

MERCILESS WARRIORS AND

MILITANT HEROINES
Making a New Ustasha Man
and Woman

I
n December 1941 Maca Minić, a female Ustasha Youth leader, attempted
to answer two questions: What would the role of women in the new state
be, and what part would the Ustasha movement play in women’s lives? As
Mimić pointed out, since the movement had come to power, young women
had been gathered into the organization, dressed in uniforms, and placed
into military units in order to create “a new kind of woman.” In her uni-
form, instilled with military discipline, the new Ustasha woman would feel
proud and fearless, imbued with the qualities of endurance, sacrifice, and dil-
igence.1 While she rallied young women as comrades and female Ustashas to
“hold your heads high and enter into battle,” this did not mean that men and
women could be the same or equal. According to Minić, one of the greatest
mistakes made by advocates of women’s emancipation in the interwar pe-
riod was to propagate the illusion that the sexes were the same and that in
order to gain greater equality women should cast away their female virtues,
imitating the behavior of men. The female Ustasha organization would only
succeed in educating women when it had “awakened in them the maternal
instinct” and love toward the home and children. It was the role of women
to sacrifice themselves for their husbands and “to know their place.” Such
women would not feel inferior but, on the contrary, would demonstrate that
they were as important as any man, valued as his comrade as well as his wife
and the mother of his children.2

126
 Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines  127

The Ustasha regime’s contradictions regarding the roles of the sexes re-
flected wider ideological tensions within the movement. As part of a fascist
movement that glorified violent solutions to achieve its aims, women were
inevitably pushed to the margins. Many radical nationalist activists argued
that their nation had been humiliated in interwar Yugoslavia, not just in the
sense that Croatia was an oppressed nation, but insofar as their heroic tradi-
tions and manly nature had been questioned too. All that Croats had been left
with to assert their rights was the pacifistic stance of Stjepan Radić, who had
been rewarded for his endeavors with assassination. The Ustasha ideology
was the radical antithesis of this pacifism. To the “iron guard” of the tyrant
King Aleksandar, the Ustasha movement would oppose a “steel guard” to lib-
erate the homeland from his bloody rule. It aimed to replace the intellectual-
ized nervous Croatian urban man, mired in moral degeneracy and timidity,
with the violent, vengeful instincts of the Croatian peasant and the Ustasha
principles of “manly virtue.” The future Croatian state would be ruled by a
new Croatian man, the Ustasha warrior, who would not only avenge the hu-
miliation and sufferings of the past but racially and morally purify the nation.
Merciless in dealing with his enemies, he would also be the authoritarian
head of the revived patriarchal family unit, informed by the just values of the
peasant zadruga. The recourse to violence would cleanse the Croatian male of
all softness and indecision and restore his honor.3
Since the Ustasha movement had long viewed feminism and the quest for
women’s rights as the legacy of a moribund and outdated democratic era, it
also sought to return women to their rightful place in the home as wives and
mothers. However, at the heart of the Ustasha ideology was a paradox. In spite
of its emphasis on the natural maternal role of women, the Ustasha regime si-
multaneously aspired to the incarnation of a new kind of warrior woman. For
their part, female members of the movement demonstrated that they were not
content to live their lives on the sidelines of the national revolution and de-
manded the right to take an active part in it. Between 1941 and 1945, women’s
involvement in public life and the labor market actually increased. Moreover,
although men were expected to be the head of the family, the regime’s warrior
cult, with its emphasis on violent struggle, male comradeship, and disdain for
the banal certainties of bourgeois life, constantly took them away from the
family. In effect, the movement replaced the family as the center of the Usta-
sha warrior’s life.

THE NEW NATIONALIST MAN AND WOMAN

Ideas about the place of men and women in society always played an im-
portant role in Croatian nationalist visions of the future. Among the many
aspects of Yugoslav life Croatian nationalist intellectuals frequently railed
 128  Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines

against was its perceived secularizing, liberal attitude toward women. In the
1920s and 1930s, increasingly large numbers of women were seeking lives and
careers outside the home, and although they did not have the right to vote
or access to abortion, they were becoming dangerously independent, selfish,
and opinionated. The tide of feminist emancipation was a regular theme in
nationalist newspapers and intellectual journals, especially among university
students. For one female law student, writing in the pages of a nationalist stu-
dents’ journal in 1935, the modern liberal concept of female emancipation was
simply more evidence of the moral degeneracy of Yugoslavism. Comparing
feminist student meetings to those of the Komsomol, she accused feminists
of encouraging young women to work and have abortions in preference to
marriage and children. Girls today, the writer declared, had no understand-
ing of their role as women, “future mothers and educators and daughters of
the nation,” not surprising as feminists had involved them in “destructive,
immoral, antisocial, and anti-national work.”4 Similarly, the novelist Zdenka
Jušić-Šeunik declared that women’s rights had to be in harmony with “female
dignity and not oppose its sensibility.” In her opinion, motherhood should
take precedence over a career.5
But these kinds of sentiments were in direct contradiction to the aspi-
rations of many educated women in Yugoslavia, who wanted to be seen as
something more than simply a wife or mother.6 Increasingly, this was ac-
knowledged by nationalist women’s organizations themselves. Even the
Union of Women Students, formed in 1934 by nationalist students to com-
bat what they perceived as the vulnerability of “naive” female freshman stu-
dents “coming straight from the village, the provinces, and the town” to the
ideology of women’s groups, recognized that educated and urban nationalist
women shared many of the same concerns as leftist feminists.7
For years, the nationalist Croatian male had labored under the stereotype
of pacifism and compromise. Noisy and excitable as he might be, the Croa-
tian male would soon back down when presented with a compelling argu-
ment and a fist in the face. The passivity of the Croatian male was woven into
the very fabric of Yugoslav national ideology. According to Yugoslav ideo-
logues like Milan Marjanović, Yugoslavia had represented not just the com-
ing together of different southern Slav nations but also the fusing of diverse
national characters. While the Serb was ready to die, the Croat wanted to live
because he was an intellectual and hence more “contemplative, forgives more,
reacts less, is more of a skeptic, almost a cynic rather than a fanatic.”8 Like-
wise, Jovan Cvijić believed that while the Serbs had a talent for “intuition and
fantasy,” the Croats were gifted at “science, literature, and art.”9 It was pre-
cisely this anti-heroic stereotype that the Ustasha regime aimed to destroy.
 Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines  129

In popular interwar literature, the Croatian male was often shown in a

far from positive light. In the novels of writers such as Miroslav Krleža, Ivo
Kozarčanin, and Slavko Kolar, Croatian protagonists emerged as lost, alien-
ated, or suicidal. Worse, their lives were devoid of any morality and instead
personified the liberal cosmopolitan values of the cynical city dweller.10 Even
in the more nationalist populist works of writers such as Vjekoslav Majer and
Stjepko Trontl, male characters showed themselves to be cuckolds and blun-
dering idiots. In Majer’s Pepić u vremenu i prostoru (Pepić in Time and Space,
1935), the tragic hero, an innocent in the wild and ruthless concrete jungle
of Zagreb, is constantly bullied and ridiculed by his mother and the young
women she selects as suitable future wives for him. Meanwhile, in Trontl’s
Nevidljiv Tone ili Takvi su ljudi (The Invisible Toni; or, That’s Just the Way
Some Folks Are, 1933), a tribute to the values of the lower-middle-class shop-
keeping district of Zagreb, the unseen and invisible central character Toni is
distinguished by his lack of ambition and success and by the indulgence that
his father and the other patrons of the neighborhood tavern display toward
his various madcap schemes.11 Only in Mile Budak’s peasant novels were tra-
ditional patriarchal values upheld.12 Some nationalist writers and intellectu-
als did attempt to claim a heroic persona for the interwar Croatian man. For
example, the geographer Filip Lukas, writing in 1936, argued that the Dinaric
racial type was almost completely based on the racial characteristics of the
Croat male and was “completely representative of our nation.” However, such
ideas were the exception rather than the rule.13
Like their female colleagues, male nationalist students also wanted to
redefine their gender role against perceived “alien” cultural and social no-
tions. In a manifesto of 1936, one nationalist student newspaper linked the
emergence of a new kind of man to the survival of the nation. Railing against
the contemporary image of the “exhausted, worn-out” Croatian gentleman,
with his “womanly sensibilities,” “dissolute lifestyle,” and “cowardly pacifi-
cism,” it argued that out of the violence of the First World War a new man
had emerged to take his place. The new man was “a warrior, manly, militarily
educated, of rugged heart, steely will and iron discipline,” who understood
“life as a struggle, equally for the individual as for the nation,” and rejected
the ideals of pacificism, liberal democracy, and “Jewish concepts about hu-
man equality.” Conflict between this new breed of vital young men and the
“old, pre-war, decrepit, incapable” political leaders was therefore inevitable.
The old pacifist democratic world, they insisted, was dying, and the specter of
Marxism looming. The only alternative to communism and national suicide
was the nationalistic new man: “We must confront the man of the past, be-
cause he belongs in a museum!”14
 130  Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines

FROM THE CROATIAN GENTLEMAN TO THE USTASHA WARRIOR

In an essay of 1942 about the tasks of literature in Ustasha Croatia, the poet,
writer, and Ustasha Youth educator Vinko Nikolić argued that literature
could help in the incarnation of a new man, who, he argued, was integral
to the building of a new state. “This new Croatia needs also a new man,”
he wrote. “Nationalistic Croatia needs a nationalistic man. Ustasha Croa-
tia needs an Ustasha man too.”15 Manly warrior virtues were integral to be-
ing an Ustasha: it was therefore inevitable that the new man envisaged by
Nikolić and other ideologues was to be founded on these martial character-
istics. Mijo Bzik, the movement’s chief propagandist, believed that the Usta-
sha was a new kind of man for a new world order. Imbued with the qualities
of heroism, struggle, and duty, he would be “completely a man and a Croat”
and in his private and public life “combine all the new virtues of the Ustasha
with the ancient virtues of Croatians, eternal warriors, workers.” In short, he
concluded: “The Ustashas are warriors, they are men!” For Mladen Lorković,
too, the new Ustasha man embodied masculine values and “manly virtue,”
with which he would regenerate the nation.16 Ustasha ideologues argued that
as well as being a manifestation of the spirit of the Ustasha movement, like
the movement itself. the Ustasha man was rooted in historical Croatian tra-
ditions. As Zdenka Zanko, a leader of the Ustasha Women’s Vine, explained
in 1942, the new Ustasha man was “not really a new man” at all since he had
“always lived in the ideals and patriarchal traditions of the Croatian nation.”17
Many Ustasha writers believed that the prototype for the new Ustasha
man was to be found in the villages of the Lika, the harsh mountainous re-
gion popularized in Budak’s peasant sagas. Often described by Ustasha pro-
pagandists as the “Croatian Sparta,” it happened to be the birthplace of a
number of illustrious Croatians, including Ante Starčević, the nineteenth fa-
ther of the Croatian nation; Jure Francetić, the commander of the elite Black
Legion; and Ante Pavelić, the Poglavnik. In the same way that the Dinaric
range of mountains had a special significance for anthropologists in interwar
Yugoslavia searching for the “authentic” prototype of the Yugoslav, so did the
Lika region for Ustasha theorists. Ivo Bogdan, a prominent Ustasha intellec-
tual, wrote that the people of the rocky Lika region were characterized by a
rugged and fierce masculinity that reflected the arduous nature of their lives
and the harshness of the surroundings. This produced a breed of Croatian su-
permen who were healthy, strong, and heroic.18 If the Lika was the Croatian
Sparta, then it was from the men of the Lika that the nucleus of the new Croa-
tian race, a contemporary Spartan nation, would be formed. Ivo Babić, in his
commentary of February 1943 in Plava revija, pointed out that the Spartans
had defeated their “nomadic-bandit” adversaries not by numbers but through
 Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines  131

the ruthlessness and fanaticism of their violence. Integral to their success on

the battlefield had been their willingness to educate their young in martial
values from the earliest age. Like the Spartan king Leonidus, the new Ustasha
man would have to be prepared for self-annihilation so that Croatia could ex-
ist eternally.19
The new Ustasha man was a steely warrior who proved the accusations of
Croatian pacifism and unmanliness to be false. Mercilessness and violence
were key characteristics of the new man, who struck terror in the hearts of the
nation’s enemies. As Mladen Lorković wrote:
Only a few years before, the lice-infested, Balkan slaughterer had said that
we were cowards, pacifists, that we barked but did not bite. But they do
not mock us anymore but grow pale, tremble, and freeze when they think
about the day of reckoning. Because the enemies know what our ranks are,
that everything that is manly, brave, firm, healthy, severe, and honorable is
gathered under the Ustasha banner and that everything that is cowardly,
fleeting, weak, flexible, pliant, and unhealthy is excluded from the Croatian
national army. The enemies know that the Ustashas have burned all bridges
behind them, that they cannot conceive of a journey back, but only forward,
for the homeland in blood and with lead. Thus Croatians who are prepared,
as men, to look death in the eyes, gather under the Ustasha banner!20

Although party ideologues stressed the long and proud Croatian military
tradition, they believed young Croatian men had been made unmanly and
indecisive by twenty years of democracy and Yugoslavism. With the assent
of the Ustasha movement, youths would be transformed into men. How the
Ustashas believed soft young men could become merciless warriors was dem-
onstrated by the propaganda produced between 1941 and 1943 for Francetić’s
Black Legion, an elite death squad, whose first units were formed in Sara-
jevo from among local youth. When Francetić was killed in action in Decem-
ber 1942, there was an outpouring of grief among Ustasha supporters. Poems
and plays were written to honor his heroism and patriotic love. In his funeral
oration for Francetić on Sarajevo state radio, the young Ustasha function-
ary Emil Lašić emphasized his transformation from a gauche student into a
manly, rugged Ustasha warrior:
In these fateful moments, among men on whose shoulders was placed ardu-
ous duties, one young tall Ustasha soldier worked and shared these duties.
In a simple and modest Ustasha uniform, he toiled without rest or end. . . .
But at that time, no one could have known that this tall young soldier would
one day become a legendary man, a hero about whom national songs would
be sung and about whom the poorest and isolated villages in the Bosnian
 132  Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines

valleys would one day talk unceasingly. Who could have guessed that in this
stern craggy young face there hid an unmistakable hero, a divine leader of
a young heroic detachment that would for so many Croatians mean life and
freedom, defense and comfort, hope and pride?21

The Black Legion was also portrayed by the regime press as a transforming
experience for Sarajevo youth itself. After Francetić placed advertisements in
newspapers for volunteers, he was swamped with recruits. “Youths who pre-
viously loved to daydream the whole morning and were taught to be students
of the easy life now were accustomed to the strict life of the military warrior
whose bed was the ground and whose only party and dance was battle,” one
Sarajevan journalist gushed.22 Ivo Balentović, the Legionary biographer, de-
scribed them as agile youths whose “bravery glitters in their eyes.”23 After
they had joined an Ustasha death squad such as the Black Legion, young men
left their former life behind, and the militia became their new family. This
was encapsulated in an article written by the Legionary journalist Suljeman
Šakić. He recalled that young Legionaries instructed him to tell their moth-
ers not to cry if they perished: “Young Legionaries take their guns and kiss
them. ‘I have left my mother because I am going to defend the homeland, and
you, gun, you are my new mother.’”24 Becoming an Ustasha was an irrevo-
cable decision, and men could only be severed from the movement by death
or disgrace. For them, violence and killing were a rite of passage, a neces-
sary induction to the life of the Ustasha man. They were men, Franjo Bubanić
wrote in 1942, who had spurned the decorous life of the bourgeois gentleman
and looked death in the eyes: “They find themselves in every danger, in every
battle, where they daily look death in the eyes. Have you seen them? They are
not working in offices or bureaus; they are not at parties or kindergartens.
Perhaps you have seen them on the streets of our city with wooden crutches
and bandaged hands or in white clothing in hospitals or sanatoriums as they
suffer in agony while warm red blood seeps through their bandages and they
whisper: ‘I am only waiting to recover and then I will go into battle!’”25 In
becoming an Ustasha, the Croatian man was transformed in terms of not
merely his lifestyle but his personality too. The Ustasha man, Mijo Bzik
maintained, valued modesty, refusing to talk about himself. He remained an
enigma, speaking in “short and fierce sentences,” since chattering was a fe-
male trait. His was a life of manly silence. When a comrade died, the Ustasha
should not cry since enemies would consider this a sign of weakness. Instead,
he should accompany his comrade to the grave in a dignified and quiet man-
ner, “feeling a great pain for the loss of a comrade” but expressing his grief in
a “manly way” by vowing to avenge his death.26
The Ustasha movement saw a strong connection between sport and war,
 Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines  133

both of which it lauded as embodying the qualities of masculinity and ag-

gression. Writing on the occasion of the first Ustasha Youth athletics day in
August 1942, the journalist Husnija Hrustanović recalled that in the Yugoslav
era, Croatian youth had been “neglected at school, in social life, on the streets,
and in the sports arena.” This was a deliberate attack on Croatian youth; the
Yugoslav authorities knew that “nowhere was the hatred of foreigners ex-
pressed so strongly” as among them. The authorities intentionally ignored the
physical education of Croatian youths in order to make them soft and turn
them into “pansies,” incapable of liberating the homeland. But the plan had
failed, and it was Croatian Ustasha youth, he wrote, “with bombs and knives
in their hands,” who had broken “the heavy chains of slavery” and through
revolution shown the whole world that Croatia was eternal because it had a
“conscious, cultured, and militant youth, its future.” Under the Ustasha re-
gime, the new emphasis on the physical education of youths would help to
create new generations of tough manly youths. This new masculine ethos,
he stated, could already be observed in the conduct of young men and boys
at the inaugural Ustasha Youth athletics tournament, united in “one great
thought and belief,” with which they would “destroy the gravediggers of Cro-
atia wherever they appear.”27 The same reasoning applied to adult males in
the movement. Sports such as football, athletics, and skiing were an expres-
sion of the life force of the nation, party theoreticians maintained: they be-
lieved victorious sportsmen would also make valiant soldiers. Borislav Petz,
an Ustasha Youth sports instructor, argued that sport, like war, made men
into warriors. Like war, it required “self-reliance, bravery, decisiveness, mili-
tancy, and composure.”28
In an article about the footballing exploits of Croatian legionaries fight-
ing in the Soviet Union, Nova Hrvatska explained the connection between
sport and war in more detail. Sport, it wrote, helped to build a new man who
was “healthy, enthusiastic, and brave, who holds himself with optimism,
pleasure, and joy in life, who easily overcomes every life difficulty and ulti-
mately becomes a warrior for his nation.” A man steeled in the battle of sport
would demonstrate the characteristics of “courage and legendary heroism, re-
sistance, and toughness in war too.” In the current era, there was no place for
a differentiation between athletes and soldiers: “Today, the homeland and the
battlefield are one, today we are all warriors, we are all workers who toil only
for struggle, only for victory.” Miško Žebić, the state leader for physical edu-
cation and sport and a former football player himself, agreed. “Sport is not a
party,” he declared. “It is the living strength of the nation and the means by
which national strength regenerates, elevates, and develops itself, especially
among youth.” As such, he expected that “every athlete will be, above all, a
good soldier.”29
 134  Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines

While all state athletes were revered by the regime, those who combined
sporting prowess with service in the movement’s militias and army were es-
pecially lauded, even more so if they had made the ultimate sacrifice by fall-
ing in battle against the enemy. Football players such as Antun Illik, Slavin
Cindrić, August Pogačnik, and Stjepan Gagač; boxers such as Mijo Dvarić;
and athletes such as Josip Kotnik and Vičko Miošić—members of the Black
Legion and Ustasha army—were lionized in their press obituaries as model
Ustasha warriors, Croats, and athletes.30 The Ustasha press also inevitably
displayed favoritism toward those athletes and sportsmen who were active
members of the movement too. For example, in its extensive coverage of the
matches of Milan Maglica, a talented young boxer from Zagreb, the press reg-
ularly gave equal emphasis to his fierce patriotism and to his political activ-
ism, specifically his position as an Ustasha Youth leader in the Donji Grad
camp. Miroslav Gal, meanwhile, who in addition to being an athlete was
also a sergeant major in the Croatian army and official in the Ministry of the
Armed Forces Department of Sport, was voted Croatia’s best athlete in 1943
by sports journalists. Although his athletic achievements clearly played a role
in this, his appointments and his frequent commentary on a range of physical
education and ideological issues for Ustasha newspapers and journals were
also important.
Although Ustashas were meant to be the warrior avant-garde of the state,
the prototype for a new breed of men, the cult of masculinity also included all
other Croatian men, even those such as dancers, writers, and artists not en-
gaged in professions seen as especially masculine. For example, the state press
hailed the ballet dancer Oskar Harnoš for his “unbelievably manly” style of
dancing.31 Moreover, the self-image of Ustashas as men imbued with bravado
and machismo did not preclude an appreciation of the arts as long as they
were forms that emphasized masculine vigour. After the national revolution,
the Ustashas—who now constituted the political and military cadres of the
state—could no longer simply be presented as persecuted small men silently
enduring for Croatia. A more monumental and authoritative image was
called for. From 1941 onward regime poets and novelists began to transform
the prototype of the Ustasha from a persecuted victim awaiting his lonely fate
at the gallows or in prison into a revolutionary warrior and superman. The
iconography of power, domination, and aggression now superseded the imag-
ery of sacrifice and suffering that had governed Ustasha songs and poems in
the years of struggle in the 1930s. In Matija Marčinko’s Borči (Warriors, 1944)
the Ustasha warrior was part of a legion of young men with “eyes that burn
with fire,” “iron hands,” and “hard muscles that drizzle with sweat,” strid-
ing with firm steps through mud, fog, and dew.32 In Branko Klarić’s Ponor i
sunce (The Chasm and the Sun, 1942), the Ustasha warrior is a knight arisen
 Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines  135

from the earth whose footsteps “echo like an alarm” and whose invitations
are “carried like the call of fate.” Wherever he goes, the earth trembles, and
his “footprints are written with flame in the stone cliffs.”33
This manly image was reflected in the visual arts appropriated by the
movement. Sculptures and paintings showed the new Croatian man no lon-
ger as weak or nervous, but as a proletarian superman, a heroic soldier expir-
ing on the battlefield, a St. Sebastian impaled by arrows, or a Greek athlete
crowned with wreaths in triumph. In the frescoes and paintings of Jozo
Kljaković, the artist’s world of Christ and his disciples, Roman legionaries,
fishermen, bathers, and sailors, evoked an image of the new Ustasha man as a
sinewy Prometheus and holy warrior, the progenitor of a race of gods.34 Jour-
nalistic accounts similarly promoted the idea of the Ustashas as the first of
a new Croatian master race. In Dragutin D. Došen’s study of the Poglavnik
Bodyguard Brigade, he described the physical perfection of the young militia
members relaxing after their early-morning training exercises: “Some talk,
some sing, while a third group are undressed and lie on the concrete slabs.
Their young and strong bodies are burned with the sun, giving them a tanned
complexion. They lie on their stomachs and breathe deeply in the gentle sun,
which reflects onto the muscles on their backs and their broad shoulders.”35
Despite the cultural assertion of power, the movement’s journals and
newspapers were quick to point out that even the most fanatical Ustasha re-
tained a sense of compassion, gentleness, and pain, characteristics termed
“manly tenderness.” The obituaries for Krune Devčić, commander of the Po-
glavnik Bodyguard Brigade, emphasized not only his steely nature, “manly
power,” and Spartan warrior values but also “his dashing, handsome, and al-
ways smiling face,” his “beautiful and gentle eyes,” and his sculpted face that
looked “as if carved from the Velebit Mountains.”36 Likewise, Vilko Ivanić eu-
logized Francetić’s “warm and soft smile,” and Ivo Balentović, a close friend,
recalled his face as “both tender and stern in the same measure,” while “the
lines on his face told of his enduring agony—for Croatia.”37 And while the
Poglavnik headed an “iron phalanx of sun-kissed Ustasha heroes,” on his
“deeply creased and tanned face” were the signs of “great spiritual and physi-
cal torture that this humble son of a poor Bosnian village had endured for
justice and the liberation of his people.”38

DEATH AND MANLY LOVE

Moral virtue was key to the incarnation of the new Ustasha man: he was to be
not only virile but also chaste and free of all degenerate values. As such, the
Ustashas aimed to inculcate their members with a pious attitude toward sex
and relationships. A handbook for Croatian soldiers written in 1944 by Josip
Mrmić, the Ustasha army propaganda chief, reminded commanding officers
 136  Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines

that the Ustasha soldier should think about women the way he thought about
his own sister, mother, fiancée, or wife.
A healthy and settled family life is the foundation of a healthy Ustasha
movement and Ustasha state. In the army, it is also necessary to be honor-
able. Our attitude toward women has to be, in essence, especially respectful,
idealistic; it has to be sublime. We cannot and must not see some kind of
ideal or role model in those who chase women. We must not because we are
soldiers. Ideally, one should not boast about one’s sexual adventures because
this inflames the sexual fantasies of immature and inexperienced young
men. They could, at a moment of weakness, carry out an assault that would
leave an unfortunate stamp on their future, their health, and the well-being
of their family.39

The Ustasha movement imposed harsh sanctions on members found guilty of

engaging in acts of sexual deviancy such as rape, adultery, and homosexual-
ity. Numerous members of the movement were tried before its special disci-
plinary courts, to be punished for “lack of discipline, unacceptable, negligent,
and dishonest fulfillment of their duties, as well as immoral and unworthy
conduct in their private life,” with sentences ranging from expulsion from
the movement and loss of rank to execution or internment in a concentra-
tion camp. This last was the punishment handed out to three young Ustasha
police agents brought before the Zagreb disciplinary court in February 1942.
The court report held up these men’s fate as a warning to others: those Usta-
shas whose lifestyles were in “clear conflict with Ustasha principles about a
respectable life” were to have no place in the movement or in wider society.40
Inevitably, in an atmosphere of factionalism and antagonism among both in-
dividuals and interest groups in the party, activists and officials often used al-
legations of sexual immorality against rivals as a means of discrediting them.
In September 1944, Ivan Grivčić, a commissioner in the Bjelovar Croatian
Workers’ Union, and Vlado Sabolić, a local Ustasha official, accused their ri-
val Domagoj Ružičić, an Ustasha leader, of a long list of crimes. Arguably,
the most damaging of these was the allegation that he was a predatory ho-
mosexual who enjoyed inappropriate relationships with the young men and
adolescents he came into contact with at the local party branch. In his letter
to the regional party headquarters denying the allegations, Ružičić pointed
out that he had been married since he was twenty-one. He suggested that the
allegations were motivated by resentment at his success in recruiting young
members to the Party, a feat most party branches had proved themselves sin-
gularly unable to achieve.41
As far as the Ustasha movement was concerned, marriage was the only
guarantee of a morally pure life. Consequently, it used all kinds of propa-
 Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines  137

ganda to encourage men to marry. A combination of financial sanctions and

moral pressure was one approach. Ivan Topljak, an Ustasha Youth leader in
the city of Bjelovar, proposed that a tax be placed on bachelors for willfully
avoiding their marital and procreative duties. For Topljak, unmarried men
were a manifestation of the former materialistic Yugoslav era when young
people had preferred to go to cafés, bars, and parties rather than start fam-
ilies. He also linked bachelordom to a lack of masculinity, moral will, and
nationalistic fervor. Bachelors lacked virility and had “auctioned off their
Croatdom to the highest bidder.” By contrast, the life of the male Ustasha, a
manly and indestructible warrior, lay in steely renunciation, self-denial, and
resisting “those tendencies that lead to evil.” The Ustasha warrior was to be a
master of his body and live in “sexual virtue, seriousness, diligence, honor.”42
While the Ustashas never did introduce a tax against bachelors as Topljak
had suggested, they did organize public events to educate men about the dam-
aging effects of remaining single. One such anti-bachelor event took place
in March 1943 in the form of a charity football match pitting married play-
ers from Croatia’s two leading football clubs, HAŠK and Gradjanski, against
their bachelor teammates to test the validity of the regime’s ideas about the
superiority of married life. Although the team of married players was missing
many of their strongest players, they were still able to inflict a “catastrophic”
loss on their bachelor opponents, winning six to one. According to a match
report, a decisive factor in the victory of the married players was their marital
status. Being married, they “were accustomed to discipline and order.” The
wives of the married football players supported their husbands by chanting
and dancing, which caused “uproar and confusion” in the ranks of the un-
married players. Overall, the married players were “more decisive and better,
while the bachelor players roamed aimlessly around the field with the ball,
their fiancées and girlfriends powerless to encourage them.”43 Dead Ustasha
martyrs were also recruited to the marriage campaign. One example was the
Legionary-poet Pero Kojaković, who after his death on the Russian Front was
held up as a model warrior. Obituary writers and comrades argued that his
marriage at a young age and devotion to his wife were crucial to his abilities
as both a soldier and a poet.44
However, the stable married life that the Ustasha movement imagined
for the new Croat man often conflicted with life as a warrior. The Ustasha
movement began as a movement of conspiratorial terrorists. Its revolution-
ary cell structure and its secretive nature meant trust between members was
paramount. Becoming an Ustasha meant putting the cause of the revolution
above everything and swearing loyalty to death. An Ustasha was often re-
quired to change his name, abandon his family, and move abroad. In effect,
the Ustasha movement in exile became the surrogate family of its members,
 138  Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines

which taught them “iron” will and discipline, rejecting soft qualities such as
love and sentimentality. Mijo Bzik, looking back at the émigré terrorist or-
ganization in the 1930s, referred to it as the “Ustasha family,” as did another
hardliner, Josip Mrmić.45 Iron will and discipline applied to all areas of life,
including the private sphere. Thus, as an article of 1934 pointed out, women
were considered as much of a “vice” as gambling, drunkenness, and chat-
tering. Abroad in their terrorist training camps, the Ustasha leadership en-
couraged men to repress their sexual urges and channel their energy into the
activities of the movement and serving the supreme leader, Pavelić, instead.46
As with many terrorist movements, the lifestyle of the members of the move-
ment, which demanded living in close proximity with comrades, without
comforts or the company of women, produced friction and conflicts, but it
also produced an intense feeling of camaraderie that the former IRA terror-
ist Sean O’Faolain likened to having a lover.47 Bzik’s hagiography of the Usta-
sha movement noted that when Ustashas first met with the Poglavnik, their
hearts would palpitate and their bodies shake. “There was not one among us
who did not view the Poglavnik with the greatest of love,” he later recalled.48
High-ranking Ustashas frequently referred to the idea of the postpone-
ment of marriage and a private life in favor of the movement and nation.
Slavko Kvaternik, commander of the Croatian Armed Forces, told his young
recruits that in joining the Ustasha army, “you have married the Croatian
homeland.”49 In apparent contradiction to the movement’s stated belief that
marriage provided the ideal conditions for a settled and respectable life for
both civilians and soldiers, Ustasha propagandists and journalists sought to
argue that the members of their elite militias were more merciless warriors
precisely because they were young men with no familial ties, no sentimental-
ity, and few commitments. In this case, the Ustasha regime used the imagery
of a family of warrior men to foster a sense of brotherhood and solidarity
among its military units. In the Black Legion, for instance, Jure Francetić
took on the role of father to his troops, seeing his young recruits as his “sons.”
According to Ivo Balentović, the Legionary biographer, few of the Legion’s
recruits had passed their eighteenth birthday, since Francetić “wanted only
young men” for his comrades: “With much love, he saw to their upbringing.
And they loved him with a passion. These comrades got to know Jure as if
he were their natural father. He brought them up with tenderness and never
raised a hand to them.”50 For their part, young Legionaries like Josip Križanac
wrote poems of honor in which they exclaimed that they loved Francetić like
“our own father”; the editor of Križanac’s posthumously published poetry
claimed that when he perished in July 1942, Francetić’s Christian name was
the last word he uttered.51 With his own death in winter 1942, Francetić was
immortalized as one of the most important martyrs of the movement. Eight
 Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines  139

days of official mourning were declared, and he received two state funerals,
one in Zagreb and the other in his adopted city of Sarajevo. He was also the
subject of emotional and evocative poetic tributes. In Branko Klarić’s tribute
to him, the poet imagined himself standing at the grave of the deceased Black
Legion commander, around which “the native earth glistened / with your fer-
tile blood (like with young wine). . . . And you became with the passion of
Ustashas, my brother, / you sacrificed your youth, your heart, your dreams,
/ you sacrificed everything.” He was, in short, the writer’s “Ustasha, brother,
dear son, darling one, the only one.”52
In addition to a surrogate family, as Klarić’s poem suggested, members of
militias were offered an opportunity to live heroically in a spirit of camarade-
rie and male friendship. Joining a death squad, a militia, or the Ustasha army,
and thus delaying family life, was portrayed as a willful choice, made by
young men who desired a restless life full of struggle, itself a reflection of the
Ustasha movement’s anti-bourgeois mindset. In obituaries of fallen Ustashas,
the freedom from the banal routine of a mundane existence that joining a mi-
litia or the army had given them was a common motif. One of Viktor Banko’s
short stories, published in an Ustasha army recruitment leaflet of 1944, ar-
gued that only in the camaraderie and nationalistic fervor of fighting for the
nation could a young man filled with emptiness and aimlessness find fulfill-
ment and happiness: “I was a wanderer,” he recalled. “An eternal wanderer. I
was always seeking something, yearning for something. Nothing pleased me
anymore. The sun shone and blazed, but I did not feel its rays and warmth. Its
purple shades in the evening hours no longer delighted me. I didn’t smile be-
cause I was full of fear. I was not happy—I feared sorrow. Everything around
me was dark because I had no direction, no aim, no ambition.” It was only af-
ter joining the Ustasha army that he found a purpose for his life, in particular
serving the Poglavnik: “He is our leader, our father, and we are his children.”53
This was a propaganda leaflet, of course, aimed at encouraging young
men to join the army, but there were plenty of real-life examples that bol-
stered this narrative. For example, when Ivica Majnarić died in 1943, executed
by the Partisans, his comrade Ivan Čurl quoted him as saying: “I have never
been as happy as when I find myself among Ustasha warriors. I have left be-
hind all my material possessions; I have abandoned everything save my fist
and my heart, which I have placed in the service of the Poglavnik and Ustasha
Croatia.” Čurl emphasized that the bonds of friendship Majnarić had discov-
ered in the Ustasha army were an important part of his happiness. But the
desire of eighteen-year-old Majnarić to escape the everyday routine in his lo-
cal village—even as leader of his local Ustasha Youth camp—explained his
initial decision to join the Ustasha army, giving his life context and defini-
tion. “The Poglavnik and Croatia became the entire meaning of his life,” Čurl
 140  Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines

recalled.54 Similarly, when Ivan Vašarević, a seventeen-year-old apprentice

barman from Zemun, wrote to the headquarters of the army liaison agency
of the GUS for permission to leave his job and be admitted into the Usta-
sha army, he had mixed motives for wanting to join. While he recalled being
beaten by his Serb high school teacher Mile Krstelac for refusing to write an
essay affirming the brotherhood of Serbs and Croats and being forced to play
truant and hide in the woods to escape more beatings at Krstelac’s hands, he
was also desperate for an opportunity to exchange the grimy desultory re-
ality of working in a tavern for the exciting possibilities of life in the army,
surrounded by camaraderie and patriotic fervor. Dreams of heroism and sac-
rifice as well as fantasies of revenge were on Ivan Vašarević’s mind.55
As much as regime propaganda portrayed the intense camaraderie in
Ustasha death squads and military units as an important symbol of their ide-
ological commitment and fanaticism, it also served a profoundly utilitarian
purpose. Whether for a soldier on the Eastern Front, a warrior in the Ustasha
army, or a death squad member, life was tenuous, and death, when it came,
was likely to be violent. In the case of death squad units, rituals of brother-
hood were a means of bonding together often very young men engaged in
mass murder. In such a brutal environment, there was little place for senti-
mentality, and emotional ties were limited to fellow militia members. As one
young member of the Black Legion declared to the journalist Franjo Rubina:
“I do not have a girlfriend. We are all committed to each other until death.”
Describing the death of his comrade, he recalled to the reporter how, when
his friend fell in battle on the Romanija Mountains, he had cradled him in his
arms as he bled to death.
Snow fell on Romanija. So cold that we could hardly hold our rifles from
frostbite. We were exhausted. Three days and three nights we had engaged
the enemy in battles and driven them out. I stood next to my beloved friend,
with whom I worked together for Jure [Francetić]. We were always together.
We always fought for one another. Thus we stood in a military line. A
rifle fired, and my friend fell into the snow, and his fresh blood spilled out
everywhere. I cradled him in my arms, but he was living his last moments.
. . . My tears flowed . . . and he said: “Write to my mother to tell her that I
died for the Poglavnik and Croatia!” He did not say anything else. His lips
did not move, but they seemed to say to me that I should carry on, that I
should go with him.

Rubina wondered what became of the young Black Legionary he had inter-
viewed and if he, too, had “left behind a special friend who closed his eyes for
him and who would also follow his path.”56
Literary genres, especially poetry, also explored experiences of death and
 Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines  141

friendship on the battlefield, much of it written by serving soldiers. From the

point of view of the Main Directorate for Propaganda and the Armed Forces
Propaganda Office, which published much of this poetry, its simple verses
about comradeship, blood, and heroic death were functional and instructive,
extolling to other soldiers the virtues of sacrificing their lives for the home-
land. At the same time, this poetry also provided ordinary citizens with an
insight into the private thoughts of the movement’s warriors, allowing them
to glimpse the tender emotions behind the merciless and militant mindset.
Particularly influential in this regard was the poetry of Pero Kojaković, a poet
and Ustasha Legionary volunteer on the Eastern Front, promoted by the re-
gime press as the ideal soldier, poet, and man. Kojaković was perceived as
a role model for a number of reasons. As a devoted young husband, a self-
educated peasant, and a “sworn” Ustasha activist arrested on terrorism
charges in the late 1930s, his ideological consciousness and dedication to the
movement were not in doubt. In addition, he was youthful, dashing, and a
devout Catholic. Regime journalists, cultural commentators, and comrades
eulogized him as a self-sacrificing, fearless Ustasha warrior, and in Septem-
ber 1943, the regime posthumously awarded him the Silver Medal of the Po-
glavnik Ante Pavelić for Bravery.57 His death was also used as an instructive
example to other Ustasha soldiers of the way they too should die. In one of a
series of letters to a brother serving in the Ustasha army, printed in Ustaša,
an anonymous contributor pointed out to his sibling that the Legionary-poet
had even left his new bride to defend the homeland. Not for him a lovers’
holiday or a honeymoon; instead he joined the Ustasha Legion. “He loved his
family as a good son and his wife as a good and honorable husband, but his
love for the homeland and the Poglavnik was stronger than death and more
irresistible,” he wrote.58
Although Kojaković’s poems explored dying, blood, and even the desire
for death on the battlefield, the theme most critics of his poetry tended to
emphasize was its exploration of male love. For the critic Viktor Živić, what
emerged from Kojaković’s poems was his profound devotion to his comrades,
and the bloody imagery that infused his poems was simply a material ex-
tension of this intensity of feeling. As an example of this, he cited a poem in
which Kojaković witnesses the death of his best friend, “who falls beside him
and sprinkles him with his blood.” He leaves his bloody clothes on as a pre-
cious remembrance of his friend and, at the end of the poem, expresses one
final thought: “Oh, death, lift me up too / because who will tell his mother? /
Often it is better and easier / to lie beside a comrade in a grave!” Živić mar-
veled at how the poet “masterfully sketches the mystical power of his love
toward his fallen comrade” and the way in which “with such tenderness and
warm affection” he describes the grave of his dead comrade.59
 142  Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines

In his posthumous collection of poems, published by the Main Director-

ate for Propaganda in his native Dubrovnik in 1943, Kojaković’s intense emo-
tion for his comrades was expressed in poem after poem: “On the battlefield
where only death rules, / and no one knows his own last hour / and where
everything is sharp, tearful, and bitter,” the love of a soldier for a comrade “is
worth more than gold, / and it is more beautiful than the most eternally sung
poem,” one begins. Since the soldier was away from home, his comrade would
take the place of his mother, murmuring “sweet words to take away the pain,”
tending his wounds, and carrying his comrade “in whom life expires, / even
at the price that his own life is blotted out.” After he died, he would close his
comrade’s eyes and carry out his wish to avenge his death. This love is “the
love above all love; / this love is stronger than death; / while this love prevails
between us, / there is nothing that can wipe us out!”60 In Kojaković’s poetry,
death, the possibilities of the afterlife, and love are combined: the poet felt
love for graves precisely because they held the corpses of beloved comrades. In
one poem to a dead comrade he imagines visiting his lonely grave every day:
“I will sing to you, / my dear dead comrade, / because at your grave / no roses
will bloom!” He then fantasizes about falling dead in battle beside his com-
rade’s grave: “Dear friend, for me there is / nothing sweeter / than at the edge
of your grave / to fall fighting!” he proclaims.61 In another poem he writes:
Graves, I would eternally be with you, so that I can for my brothers
light small wax candles
and carry flowers!
Graves, I love you too much.
With dead brothers stands on you
the remains of a ruined heart,
my torn heart! Graves, most eagerly I stand at your edge,
there I am alone with my dear
own dead brothers
and the strength of sacrifice! Graves, while I stand guard by you,
I am weighed down by the love of my brothers!
Graves, I love you!
Graves, I don’t fear you! My only great blessing
in this world is this:
By the faraway steppes, you,
graves are my brothers!62

Živić imagined the Legionary unable to leave the graves of dead comrades
and, obsessed by them, returning to them over and over again. “No new era
or ideas will be able to minimize the shocking note of these poems, the apo-
 Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines  143

theosis of death and graves, because in them beats one eternal heart,” he
concluded.63 Manly love and intimate death not only defined the poetry of
Ustasha warriors and the statements of militia members but also reflected
the worldview of the movement’s members. The gun became the mother; the
young Legionary became the son; the death squad commander became the
father; and, in Kojaković’s poem, the grave became a brother.

THE TWO FACES OF THE NEW USTASHA WOMAN

Croatia was a mother. In Božidar Širola’s drama Majka (The Mother, 1942), an
ailing son is nursed back to health by his mother only to then join the Usta-
sha army. Although conflicted she also realizes that he is a son of the home-
land and must obey the voice of his “other mother.” A real mother “would
never prevent her son from being a faithful son to his other mother, to his
homeland, because, for the real Croatian mother, her son in becoming a sol-
dier becomes much more than he was before: with the collective mother, she
becomes a mother-heroine.”64 In the poems of Legionaries and soldiers, the
homeland was also a mother. Antun Lončar, for example, wrote of Croatia
as “the mother of all good Croats. / We are your sons and are always pre-
pared, Mama, / for your freedom and honor / our lives to give.”65 Some female
activists agreed: “Can a good child not listen to its mother when she cries
for help?” asked the leading Ustasha women’s journal, Ustaškinja, in 1942.
“Our homeland is our mother who calls for us and asks for the help of her
sons in this arduous time of war.”66 In the same way a dutiful son showed
respect and love toward his own mother, Ustasha warriors would show it to-
ward the homeland. They would be her best sons, protecting her serenity and
purity from the depredations of her savage enemies. Yet, as the reborn Croa-
tian nation was imagined as a warlike fierce nation, the symbol of the mother
was also imbued with warrior qualities, and Ustasha ideologues frequently
boasted that members of the movement had imbibed their militant Ustasha
principles in their mother’s womb.67
In the wake of the national revolution, Ustasha theorists identified the
gender question as one of the most important questions in the new state.
Within the movement, women were organized into their own separate orga-
nization, the Vine of Ustasha Women. This organization, which established
local branches throughout the state, brought women from all kinds of back-
grounds, professions, and incomes together. The Vines concerned themselves
primarily with social work and, in particular, the improvement of peasant
women’s lives. Middle-class urban Ustasha women were encouraged to spread
the ideals of cleanliness and order to the primitive villages in order to elevate
rural life and make peasant women better wives and more diligent mothers.
 144  Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines

However, women from the Vines also led various campaigns and “struggles”
against immorality and profanity. The most capable and ambitious women
had the opportunity to attend Vine leadership courses and thus attain a level
of power and influence otherwise not available to them.
Despite this, the Ustasha regime saw itself as the herald of a revived cult
of motherhood based on “ceaseless sacrifice, ceaseless denial, ceaseless effort,
and the ending of all wishes and ambitions.” In the interwar period, its ideo-
logues argued, motherhood had been degraded, denied, devalued, and “ridi-
culed.” This was tantamount to an attempt to wipe out the identity of the
nation since the mother protected Croatdom by giving new life to the nation
and bringing up a young generation filled with nationalist spirit.68 Zdenka
Žanko argued that in Yugoslavia, an anti-family, anti-mother spirit had
reigned. Women had been turned into childless “café dolls” and encouraged
to sacrifice their family for their career. In some cases, they had even been
driven by contemporary morals to abandon their children on street corners
or “calculatedly kill and criminally slaughter” their own descendants. Over-
all, “materialistic philosophies” had driven Croat women away from society.
The Ustasha ideology, by contrast, vowed to relieve women of the burden of
work and give their jobs to men. In this way, men would be able to reclaim
their role as breadwinners and restore their virility. The movement expected
women to return to their “natural role as matriarchs,” in return offering them
material help, moral support, and enduring respect.69
To rectify a state of affairs in which motherhood had been so devalued,
the Ustasha regime proposed to take control of the private lives of their citi-
zens and reeducate them in the joys of domesticity. For example, it launched
a scheme to educate prospective marriage partners on the duties of family
and marriage. Those planning to get married would need to be physically and
spiritually healthy but would also be assisted in staying faithful to their mar-
riage vows. They were also encouraged to improve domestic life themselves.
The home could not be some kind of doss-house, “an inn for the quenching
of hunger, a passing shelter from which one would impatiently step out to the
office, the workshop, or a meeting.” In such a case, the family home was “cold
and unpleasant” and life in it “nervy, rude, and sour.”70
The Ustasha regime used mass propaganda to promote motherhood. Be-
ginning in 1942, the regime introduced the Week of the Croatian Mother and
Child, a seven-day-long celebration of motherhood, with the aim of encour-
aging women to have more children and thereby increase the birthrate. Dur-
ing this week, the regime organized concerts, showed educational films on
good maternity practices at mass screenings, held competitions, and awarded
prizes to mothers who had borne exceptionally large numbers of offspring. Fe-
male members of the Ustasha Youth and the women’s Ustasha Vine were also
 Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines  145

active in organizing activities celebrating the contribution of the Croatian

mother, distributing leaflets calling on Croatian citizens to attend the week’s
celebrations in “large numbers” to show their support for those women “who
give birth to the next generation,” and collecting for poverty-stricken Croa-
tian mothers.71 Health officials also gave lectures, and the state radio trans-
mitted programs on motherhood. In a radio address of 1943, a leading expert
at the Ministry of Health, Kamilo Bresler, explained the need to support
conventional family units and ensure the social and economic protection of
mothers and children because “a nation without children is a nation with-
out a future.” He contrasted the importance the state authorities attached to
motherhood and babies with the interwar years of high infant-mortality rates
and low birthrates, which he blamed on the ills of modern democratic soci-
ety: abortions, illegitimacy, the collapse of marriage as an institution, and the
need for men and women to work. He called for a number of measures to in-
crease the birthrate and so avoid the curse of a decreasing population, known
as the “White Plague.”72 Measures he suggested included establishing sanato-
riums for sick children, advice centers, school kitchens, and social health li-
braries and providing daily milk for children.73 Josip Rasuhin, another health
official, gave a lecture on Croatian State Radio entitled “Our Demographic
Politics” in which he declared that the key to the survival of the Croatian na-
tion was for each married couple to have at least three children.74
According to the regime’s propaganda, sexual and moral vice had flour-
ished in interwar Yugoslavia. Prostitution had been tolerated, and the po-
lice had turned a blind eye to the crime of abortion. This had not only led
to the acceptance of immorality in everyday national life but had resulted
in a dramatic decline in the Croatian population. The Ustasha regime saw
as one of its primary social tasks the radical and permanent reversal of this
trend. One of the first acts of the regime was to launch a legal and propa-
ganda war against abortion. First, a new law on abortion was introduced. It
was frighteningly draconian. The anti-abortion law published on 10 June 1941
decreed that any woman who attempted to end her pregnancy by artificial
means would be sentenced to between five and ten years in prison; a woman
who had been successful in ending her pregnancy by these means could be
sentenced to life imprisonment. Doctors and midwives who performed abor-
tions faced the possibility of either life in prison, in the best-case scenario, or,
in the worst, execution. Their descendants could also be punished and any
property or personal wealth confiscated by the state. This money would then
be used to provide social care for expectant mothers.75 The only exception to
this law was in cases where the health or life of the mother was thought to be
endangered and there were no other medical alternatives. In such cases, the
doctor was not permitted to act alone: any decision to perform an abortion
 146  Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines

had to be made in a public hospital, authorized by a special medical commit-

tee. In the event an operation was deemed necessary, the details of the abor-
tion were to be made known to the Ministry of Health within twenty-four
hours, in writing. Failure to abide by these rules carried a sentence of between
ten and twenty years in prison, and only in cases where the mother’s life was
immediately threatened could a gynecologist perform an abortion without
waiting for approval from the hospital committee.76
Clearly, the regime did not want women dying unnecessarily as a result of
being denied the right to abortion, not least because while an abortion would
represent the death of one future Croatian life, the death of a young healthy
woman would represent the loss of many future Croatians. On the other hand,
the ideological mindset of the regime made it imperative to make abortion
as difficult as possible. Initially, it appears that public hospitals obeyed the
laws diligently. There were relatively few reports in the press of violations, al-
though the fates of those who did break the law were prominently reported in
the newspapers, with almost all guilty doctors receiving the death penalty or
a life sentence.77 However, it is also likely that both women and gynecologists
took advantage of the exceptions provided by the law to terminate unwanted
pregnancies, with doctors knowingly manipulating medical details to allow
desperate women to undergo abortions. The fact that the Ministry of Health
required gynecologists to diagnose serious diseases in order to administer
abortions even to such undesirable categories of women as unwed teenage
mothers and prostitutes demonstrated the importance the regime placed on
its natalist policies and the significant risk many hospitals and doctors took
in performing effectively illegal abortions.78 For some Ustasha ideologues, the
draconian laws did not go far enough. Shouldn’t the death penalty apply to all
those who carried out abortions, irrespective of the circumstances? Shouldn’t
advertisements promoting birth control also be banned? There were sugges-
tions that radical changes be made in the laws of inheritance so that the prop-
erty and wealth of families who did not have children or who, even worse,
did not want to have children reverted to the state, placed in a special fund to
assist poor families with large numbers of children. The wealth and property
of families with only one or two children could also justifiably be appropri-
ated by the state.79 As far as Ivan Topljak was concerned, women who sought
abortions were “criminals on the soil of the Croatian nation,” guilty of “kill-
ing Croatia in their womb.” Doctors and nurses who carried out such opera-
tions were “murderers of the Croatian nation,” killing babies for a few pieces
of silver. They should be sentenced to death, which, in Topljak’s opinion, was
the mildest sentence possible.80
In an official publication to mark the first six months of Ustasha rule, the
regime claimed the criminalization of abortion as one of its greatest achieve-
 Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines  147

ments.81 However, it was concerned about the effectiveness of the new law.
Was it working? In order to bolster the campaign, in May 1942 the Ministry of
Health launched a traveling exhibition propagandizing against the disastrous
consequences of abortion. Among the exhibits displayed were some from the
Institute for Forensic Medicine showing the “carved-up stomachs of dead
women who sought in a criminal way to get rid of their progeny” and mod-
els and diagrams demonstrating the ways in which an abortion could place
a woman’s life in “mortal danger.” Opening the exhibition, the minister for
health, Ivo Petrić, claimed that the policies introduced by the regime to “put
an end to this criminality that was destroying the Croatian nation” had been
one of the guiding elements of the regime’s ideological program. By bringing
into being a law that classified abortion as “murder or infanticide” and pun-
ishing its violators with the death penalty, the Croatian nation had witnessed
a dramatic increase in its population. It was amazing to think, he stated, that
only a year before, a doctor who had been educated to be a “warrior and sol-
dier” for life, even when that life was known to be useful either to the family
or society, had taken as his vocation “the murder of the healthy fruit of his
nation.” These criminals had been able to get rich from their criminal work,
“building villas and three-storied houses, buying cars, and holding banquets
and orgies.” Conscious Croats recoiled in horror that such people were able to
stroll around freely, and after April 1941 the “healthy” masses had responded
to these punishments with great enthusiasm, contributing to the Ministry of
Health’s success in raising the birthrate. Yet for all the conceit about success,
the exhibition betrayed the ineffectiveness of the campaign against abortion,
especially its unpopularity among women. Petrić acknowleged this, conced-
ing that one of the aims of the exhibition was to “demonstrate to those who
are not morally elevated or are just ignorant how legitimate the law against
abortion is.”82
In order to impress on women the disastrous consequences of having an
abortion, increasingly the regime employed other forms of propaganda, from
polemical articles and scientific scare stories to poems and short stories. In
an article of 1943 in the Ustasha movement’s almanac, Eduard Miloslavić, a
professor of medicine, warned women of the terrible fate that awaited them
as a result of abortion. In Miloslavić’s analysis, procreation was simply part of
women’s nature; women who did not have the urge to breed were unnatural
and doomed to sad lives. Worse, an abortion could easily lead to a number of
medical and psychological complications including internal injuries, induc-
ing infertility, and rendering a young woman incapable of bearing children.
Since the soul and body of the “female organism” were programmed to pro-
create as well as to be a supportive wife, what would become of such a woman?
Disaster surely lay ahead.83 In the past twenty years, Miloslavić warned, abor-
 148  Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines

tion propaganda had reached the villages, beginning to destroy them. As a

consequence, the birthrate had fallen disastrously, and the Croatian popula-
tion was declining. Those who had abortions were committing crimes against
not only their village but the nation too.84 Miloslavić stressed that women
who submitted to the surgeon’s knife were at risk of destroying their mar-
riages, ending up as partners in marriages marked by “unhappiness, quarrels,
mutual distrust,” and divorce. They were also prone to catastrophic physical
and psychological effects. In both men and women a depressive psychologi-
cal state of mind would develop and in women “frigidity and hysterical com-
plexes” too. In some women sexual excitement developed, while others “lost
all inhibitions for normal sexual lives and sank into prostitution.”85 These
warnings were accompanied by graphic medical diagrams illustrating the
precise effect of a botched abortion on both the healthy fetus and the internal
organs, including the reproductive organs, of the unfortunate mother. One
diagram showed the doctor’s scalpel missing the fetus completely and pierc-
ing instead the wall of the mother’s uterus, causing massive internal hemor-
rhaging; another showed a surgeon’s scalpel decapitating the head of a fetus,
and in a third, a fetus was strangled by its own umbilical cord as it was ripped
from the uterus. Such were the butchering arts of the abortionist. Who could
possibly defend such radical evil?
The Ustasha movement’s concern about abortion can be explained partly
by its advocacy for a return to traditional morality. However, it also reflected
the fundamental fear that the nation was in danger of dying out and being
swamped by aliens: women were having careers, Ustasha theorists argued,
and producing fewer children. In villages throughout Croatia, non-Croats
now outnumbered Croats. Feminism alone was not to blame. In the 1920s and
1930s, “cowardly and shameful” Jewish doctors had “raked in a fortune” by
carrying out abortions, engaging in the “murder of Croatian children” and
thereby helping to decimate the Croatian nation. In all, the “complete or par-
tial sterility of women” was the number-one enemy of the state and as deadly
an enemy as the Serbs and Jews.86 Indeed, some writers saw in the low birth-
rates in Croatia not just “unruly and malign fashion,” but a deliberately or-
chestrated campaign on the part of the interwar Yugoslav regime, which had
aimed at the “systematic destruction” of future Croatian generations since
their ultimate goal was “to destroy the Croatian nation and make it incapa-
ble of resistance.” Along with many other perfidious methods the Serb rulers
in Belgrade counted on the passivity of the Croatian nation “toward the de-
struction of its progeny.”87
Where scientific warnings and anti-Semitic and anti-Serb propaganda
failed, could literature succeed? In early 1943, the Ustasha Youth literary jour-
nal Plava revija published a poem by Đuro Šnajder, a twenty-three-year-old
 Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines  149

poet and soldier member of the Wehrmacht, “A Woman, a Dove, and Abor-
tion.” The poem recounted the story of a woman who had undergone an abor-
tion and the devastating psychological and physical effects this had on her,
her uterus irreparably damaged by the abortionist’s knife. Šnajder contrasted
the bloodstained violence of abortion with the pristine tranquil flight of the
dove—the “murmur of his unfurling wings” with the “death from my wings.”
The carnage of the abortionist was described in detail: the “bloody crude
rags,” the unborn child waiting for the “silver needle that will drown him,”
the hideous “milky hands” of the murdering midwife, the “sweaty white
sheets” and carbolic acid, the womb boiling over “in a volcano of black clot-
ted blood” and searing pain.88
Short stories provided another means of channelling the anti-abortion
message. In Mara Švel-Garmiršek’s 1942 short story “Ranka’s Mistake,” the
novelist explored the physical and emotional consequences for Ranka, a
young female medical student from an affluent family, of terminating a preg-
nancy. Going away to university, she quickly falls in with a bourgeois liberal
student crowd who prefer parties and skiing trips to study and hard work. Af-
ter having a failed affair with a dissolute young man from a rich family who
callously abandons her when he finds out she is pregnant, she has an illegal
abortion. Returning home to recuperate from the operation, she starts volun-
teer work at the local hospital. There, she meets and falls in love with Marijan,
a handsome young doctor. Although she wishes to be a doctor, an ambition
her mother does not understand—“It is nice to enroll at university, but that
is enough: you don’t need to torture yourself,” she exclaims—she is willing to
give up medicine for him. But in a pivotal scene at a party, he declares that
he could never marry a woman with a sexual past: “The woman is the center
of the family. A wife and a mother must be pure, and then she will be capa-
ble of creating a happy home. A man by his very nature is more vulgar, and
he cleanses himself in union with a pure woman.” After the conversation at
the party, Ranka realizes that any chance of finding happiness has gone with
the abortion: only a barren future as a career woman awaits. At the end of the
story, Ranka returns to her university studies and her shallow liberal friends,
broken.89
Women were also mobilized in the campaign against abortion. H.
Kürschner, for one, proclaimed that women should see motherhood as a
sublime calling. She lauded the punishment of “unscrupulous mothers who
commit the worst crime against their own children and the nation, profan-
ing their marriage and motherhood through artificial means.”90 But Kürscher
was a dogmatic regime ideologue and an educated middle-class woman.
The opinions of ordinary women, including those of actively revolutionary
women, were not generally recorded, except where they supported the new
 150  Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines

natalist line. One of the few whose opinions were publicized was Sofija Brajša,
a peasant woman. Brajša had been part of a delegation of women who were
honored guests of the Poglavnik during the inaugural Week of the Croatian
Mother and Child in 1942 because of the large number of children they had
given birth to. In her speech to the Poglavnik, she declared that the primary
duty of a woman was procreation. Until recently, she argued, the masses had
only vaguely understood this. The immorality spread by anti-Croatian news-
papers and literature had “poisoned our Croatian families,” and as a conse-
quence, the “national disaster” of the White Plague had devastated both the
city and the village. Brajša recalled that in the anti-family and anti-Croat Yu-
goslav era she, as the mother of twelve children, had struggled to find accom-
modation: more than once landlords had thrown her and her children onto
the streets. Thankfully, a new era had arrived. The commitment of the Usta-
sha regime to the family had been illustrated by its struggle against “the sys-
tematic killing of Croats by other Croats, murderers of the Croatian nation.”
Until recently, their destructive work had been allowed to go so far that “in
many of our most Croatian regions the melodious sound of Croat words has
fallen silent, and many Croatian homes lie abandoned.” Brajša and the other
women present were living proof that only the nation that produced large
numbers of children would survive.91
The Ustasha regime frequently linked the crime of abortion to the moral
corruption of women under the liberal capitalist system and the quest for fe-
male emancipation. As far as Ustasha ideologues were concerned, the ideal
woman, of which the new Ustasha woman would be the embodiment, was
a sacrosanct temple of virtue and purity. Female emancipation in the con-
temporary sense of the word was wrong because it was attempting to make
“mannish” women and thus was unnatural. A woman had to be a “temple of
the spirit, a hearth of faith, moral and pure.” This did not correspond to the
behavior of many Croatian women who, taught decadent and cosmopolitan
values in 1920s and 1930s Yugoslavia, preferred to dress provocatively in pub-
lic, wear makeup, and lead selfish pleasure-seeking lives. In a bid to counter
the physical manifestations of such a hedonistic mentality, in the middle of
1941, the Ustasha regime introduced laws banning female teachers or students
from wearing makeup and placing limits on the kinds of clothes women
could wear in public. Leading female Ustasha educationalists applauded. Ela
Maroš wrote that in contrast to the Yugoslav era, the new Croatia would teach
the Ustasha woman to live for her family rather than herself. She would be
“the soul of the house” and “modest in dress, dignified but proud.”92
Clerical writers were more skeptical. They frequently noted with disap-
pointment that, despite these laws, in the cities one could see women every
day with the “reddest lips and fingernails,” wearing “the most revealing and
 Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines  151

transparent clothing.” In an article in the Catholic journal Nedjelja of June

1941 one Catholic commentator linked the visibility of scantily clad women
on the streets of Zagreb to the recent laws introduced by the regime to pro-
hibit shameful images and sculptures in shops, where they had lain for years
“under the rubric of art and corrupted personal morals, where nothing could
or would be done against them.” Expressing his approval of the law that
would, he believed, signal to the corruptors of the young that their “shame-
ful and lucrative” work was at an end, he also argued that the impact of the
new law had not been felt by everyone—“not only businesses but also some
female members of households who continue to conduct themselves in the
streets in a truly scandalous way. Perhaps it would be best if the police inter-
vened so that some female habits disappeared from the streets as well as from
bars.”93 He and other Catholic journalists urged the Ustasha regime to be far
more radical in removing these “emancipated heroines” from city streets and
boulevards. The new Croatian woman, the Catholic journalist Antun Jerkov
insisted, would have to aspire to the virtues of the devout Catholic girl, with a
prayer book in her hand. Croatia did not need female champions in dancing
or sport, he argued, but “missionaries of moral holiness” exemplifying “pu-
rity, sacrifice, and love.”94 Many Catholic writers argued that the ethos of fe-
male emancipation had also provoked a crisis in the family. Marica Stanković
complained that marital unions were no longer arranged for love, but for ma-
terial advantage, out of impulse or lust. Consequently, instead of a nurtur-
ing, caring female helping the poor and the afflicted, a modern woman had
emerged, “a monstrous figure, half man and half woman, or better still nei-
ther man nor woman,” who dominated her husband, henpecking him to “a
scandalous degree, to a ruinous degree.” This modern woman swore like the
roughest male and rejected motherhood, lavishing her affections on pets and
treating the poor begging at her door “in a manner worse than dogs.” Capi-
talism, in particular, had torn woman away from the family and transformed
her into Satan. What was needed, another Catholic journalist agreed, was for
Croatian women “who will, like Neda in Budak’s San o sreći, completely sur-
render themselves to the family.”95
Few Ustasha ideologues were willing to go this far: most of them did not
agree that being a wife and mother meant that women had no wider societal
role, and they rarely framed the marital and motherly role in terms of “sur-
render.” On the contrary, as a result of their role as educators and nurturers,
Ustasha ideologues argued, women had an important social role. According
to Ustaškinja, motherhood did not mean just bringing up children, but edu-
cating them in the morals of the nation, free from urban cosmopolitan val-
ues prior to the beginning of their education in national schools. As it noted
in May 1942, the urban Ustasha mother had a particularly challenging task:
 152  Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines

“There are new duties that await the Croatian mother in the new era. Croa-
tian mothers especially in the city will have to give early to their children
the foundation of a respectable and national education so that the city and
city life cannot undermine these foundations and further good education is
not prevented. She will always bear in mind that she has given life to a child
not just to fulfill her natural role but also so that her child becomes a person
grounded in the Croatian spirit.”96
Women’s caring nature, the regime argued, was innate. From the earli-
est age boys played with soldiers and guns, while girls spent their time fuss-
ing over dolls in preparation for their humanitarian role in future life. The
public role for which the Ustasha regime was preparing women later in life
would consist not just of caring for the sick and the poor but rooting out vices
such as drunkenness, gambling, and squandering money. Girls and young
women, Maca Minić told her youthful comrades, could also have an impor-
tant civilizing influence on men, especially soldiers.97 The coarse habits of
the Ustasha warrior were a recurring theme in short stories in Ustaškinja.
In these stories the influence of a strong-willed mother, determined wife,
or virtuous young girl tamed the wild excesses of an Ustasha soldier, hus-
band, or son carousing, drinking, and behaving boorishly. Women, the sto-
ries suggested, had a mystical power to refine the rough edges of the Ustasha
warrior. In one example of this genre, a young girl in love with a “handsome,
brave” Ustasha lieutenant realizes that her infatuation with him is only
based on physical appearances and that she needs to look more deeply, par-
ticularly at his conduct toward others. Troubled by his wild ways, she goes
to church and prays to God to make him respectable. Under her influence
he eventually realizes the error of his ways. “He does not drink anymore, he
does not hang around with just anyone, and he doesn’t go to bars,” the story
concludes optimistically.98 Naturally, the reality was not as unproblematic as
this short story suggested. In trying to civilize an Ustasha warrior, a woman
risked emasculating him, depriving him of his merciless and aggressive ten-
dencies, the very qualities needed to defend the homeland. But if she did
not, Minić and other female officials suggested, she had little function in the
new society.
However, the emphasis in Ustaškinja on the uncouth ways of Ustasha war-
riors not only served to emphasize women’s idealized role in society but also
highlighted underlying anxieties in the Ustasha Women’s Vine at the way in
which belligerent and merciless tendencies were threatening to spiral out of
control. A merciless attitude against the nation’s enemies on the battlefield
was one thing, but now it threatened to affect wider society, destabilizing the
carefully demarcated relationship between the sexes. Some prominent female
activists sensed danger in the masculine ethos and the glorification of aggres-
 Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines  153

sive instincts associated with the “revolution of blood,” not least because, they
argued, this cult of violence was likely to be passed on to young boys, the next
generation of Ustasha warriors. As Maca Minić complained in the pages of
Ustaška mladež in early 1942, Croatian soldiers had lost all “spirituality” and
thought only of hatred for the enemy. They had become “coarse” and inured
to “beautiful and noble feelings.” Since the dictates of the national revolution
demanded that the younger generation be educated in how to annihilate the
enemy, a potentially destructive spirit was at work: “From this our marching
songs and national poems emerged. Swords, battles, blood. Now a revolution
of the soul has begun. A new generation of Ustasha Croatia must be positively
educated.”99
In fact, despite the desires of Catholic journalists for surrendered women,
for the model Ustasha woman, true submissiveness was reserved only for the
Poglavnik, who was portrayed by the state media as the spiritual husband
of women as well as the father of all their children.100 There are at least three
eyewitness accounts of women who traveled from their local provincial Vines
to meet the Poglavnik. Pavelić met delegations of women relatively regularly,
and these meetings were reported in the national press. However, they were
usually reported in a bland official style. In the three meetings recorded in
Ustaškinja, participants tell the story. On the first two visits recounted, in
1944, women visited Pavelić at the Sabor, and on the third occasion a busload
of women traveled to meet him at his personal Zagreb residence in January
1945, just four months before the collapse of the state. In two of the accounts,
the female writer discusses him as if he were her husband. In the first, Haris
Seitz-Oršanić recorded: “Gathered in the hall of the Sabor, we waited for our
dear Poglavnik to see and hear Him, which was our longed-for and most de-
sired wish. He came in accompanied, but we had eyes only for Him.” In an-
other, total surrender is expressed: “Our eyes drank in every line of His face,
we accompanied every movement of His, we swallowed His words, and we
felt how great he is, how near to us he is. Without words, we seek in Him relief
for our pain, encouragement for our fear, help in our difficulty. Poglavnik, we
will follow you!’”101 Irrespective of how women behaved with their husbands
and colleagues, with the Poglavnik, they were always the adoring and sub-
missive wife.
In Seitz-Oršanić’s account of meeting the Poglavnik in October 1944, as
part of a group of other Ustasha Vine women, much is made of the women she
traveled with. They were women from all walks of life: peasants, city women,
young and old. If nothing else, the Vines gave women from very different
backgrounds the chance to get to know each other and share their experi-
ences. At the Vines, a member learned how to sew, be hygienic, and influence
her husband. It was also her task to ensure that the “cult” of the domestic
 154  Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines

hearth and the idea of a social conscience were spread, to aid the poor and
wounded; to “keep vigil” over the contents of books, radios, newspapers, and
other propaganda tools; and to keep youth away from “atheism, indolence,
exhaustion, and despair.” Educated and middle-class women in the Vines
were also to elevate peasant and working-class women by teaching them taste
and delicacy. By encouraging an activist attitude and using the language of
militancy and radicalism, the Ustasha Women’s Vine, despite itself, increased
many women’s sense of independence.102
Although the Ustasha regime often argued that women in Yugoslavia had
abandoned their family duties in favor of careers, it did hold that a limited
number of careers were suitable for women: these included medicine (as doc-
tors and nurses), education (as teachers and professors), and writing (as jour-
nalists and novelists). In fact, the seemingly limited career options available
for women in the Independent State of Croatia, officially at any rate, meant
that they had a greater opportunity to make their mark. In literature, for ex-
ample, a new generation of Croatian women writers emerged. As writers,
they were allowed to be the equals of men in a way not permissible in most
other branches of public life. But here too equality was conditional. As far as
Zdenka Jušić-Šeunik was concerned, it was absurd to divide literature into
male and female spheres: often it was hard to tell if a story had been writ-
ten by a male or a female. Nevertheless, she detected a certain sexist attitude
to female literature. Women’s literature, she complained, is “frequently por-
trayed as something separate from artistic life generally, succumbing to a spe-
cial gentle criterion in the hands of some critics, yet it appears paradoxically
the case that often the demands of critics become much stricter in regard to
the literary work of women, which means that she must produce something
much better to be accepted as a collaborator in the field.”103
If women couldn’t write, they could at least be written about, especially
as mothers. Reflecting the maternal obsessions of the regime, the cult of the
mother was to be found everywhere in popular literature. In poetry antholo-
gies, novelists and poets nostalgically recalled their mothers as gentle pure
creatures, selfless in their care of their children.104 But poems about mothers
also reflected the darker aspects of maternity—the sacrifice, loss, and suffer-
ing of motherhood. In 1941, an anthology of poetry devoted to the Croatian
mother addressed a number of disturbing themes, among them abandon-
ment, matricide, bereavement, and suicide.105 One of the editors, Sida Košutić,
wrote in her introduction to the anthology that the first time a mother looked
into the cradle she abandoned the “sumptuous luxury of her femininity,
broke her sacred and silent oath, and would sacrifice her beauty, her health,
and even her life” if needed for her child. Košutić called this “the philosophy
of maternal sacrifice.”106
 Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines  155

Ustasha theoreticians argued that the maternal love God had placed in
women’s “weak bosoms” was the strongest element in the world: only death
was more powerful.107 Regime literary journals frequently published po-
ems and short stories exploring the intensely emotional bonds that existed
between Ustashas and their mothers. As one anonymous Ustasha soldier
wrote: “And you mother, in this moment / are my dearest thought— / To you,
mother, all these words / from my heart I have written down in blood. . . . You
eternally think of me / you live for me—and this life / I know you would give
for me.”108 Often these literary explorations of maternal love were intended as
much metaphorically as literally to express the Ustasha’s love for the home-
land, his true mother. Ante Bonifačić’s short story “Spomenik” (The Mon-
ument, 1943), for example, relates the tale of a young Ustasha officer, Ante
Sarata, accompanying an archaeological excavation in Bosnia, who believes
he is the reincarnation of an ancient Roman emperor, Alexander. Along
with a young archaeologist and comrade from his unit—the narrator of the
story—he discovers a monument to the emperor and his formidable mother,
Julia, something that has caused great excitement in the media, which pro-
vides updates on the progress of the dig on a daily basis. Talking of his own
mother he states that as his father died when he was very young, she means
everything to him. “I love my homeland and am as attached to it as my own
mother,” he tells his comrade. “I am a man who really cannot be separated
from his mother.”109
The movement’s preoccupation with maternal love also reflected the other
side of the tender loving mother in Ustasha iconography: the ardent Croatian
matriarch. In the movement’s militant poems and songs the matriarchal fig-
ure played a pivotal role. In the official Ustasha anthem, a brave young Usta-
sha perishes on the battlefield, telling his comrades to inform his mother that
he died a hero so she should not cry for him; in other songs, the mother vis-
its the grave of her dead Ustasha son only to be told by him from beyond the
grave to stop weeping because he died heroically. Many soldiers’ poems di-
rectly allude to the militant spirit of the Croatian mother. For Ilija Sukalić,
a young lieutenant in the Ustasha army, writing in 1944, the ardent love of
a mother passed to her son made him a warrior: “You will never know love
greater than a mother’s,” he declares in one poem, before adding in another
that the mother “instills in his heart the bravery / that since childhood has
burned in him.” Therefore, when he marches in battle, he is not only fortified
with her love but imbued with her spirit.110 This intimate martial relationship
between mother and son was also frequently explored in the obituaries and
biographies of important fallen Ustasha warriors. While in most accounts
the father stood at the sidelines, if he was present at all, the mother took cen-
ter stage as the progenitor of her son’s merciless character, the person who
 156  Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines

had molded his steely, unsentimental nature. When Krunoslav Devčić died in
battle in 1944, a commemorative article in Ustaškinja remarked on the close
relationship between mother and son: Devčić and his mother, Manda, had
loved each other with “an indestructible passion,” it reported. The stories of
the bond between Devčić and his mother emphasized the role she had played
in his militant outlook on life. When her son wrote her a letter from the Isle
of Lipari, where he was in exile in an Ustasha training camp, saying he was
lonely and he missed her, she wrote back to tell him to be a man and not give
up so easily. She would only welcome him back if he was carrying the Ustasha
banner in a free Croatia.111
Zdenka Žanko’s observation, that the new Ustasha mother was not only
the tender maternal figure but the “mother of national poems,” who “like a
female Spartan accompanies her sons into battles, fearing for their lives,”
watching over them in battle and victory, was a perfect description of Manda
Devčić, the epitome of the Ustasha mother.112 Devčić, a Likan peasant woman,
was the mother of two other Ustashas, besides Krunoslav. One of these was
Stipe Devčić, who had died in the raid on the village of Brušane in 1932, when
he blew himself up with a hand grenade rather than face capture by Yugo-
slav gendarmes. She had subsequently been persecuted by the Yugoslav au-
thorities, or so Ustasha propaganda claimed. Like the mothers of Marko
Hranilović and Matija Soldin, in a nationalist state that prided itself on being
a contemporary Sparta, she was portrayed as a fierce Spartan matriarch, de-
manding death and honor on the battlefield from her son. Manda Devčić was
proclaimed “a female warrior” and “a comrade of the Velebit Ustashas.” In in-
terviews, she talked with pride of how she gave birth to, fed, and brought up
Ustashas, passing her ardent warrior spirit onto her sons.113 Talking of Kruno-
slave, her favorite and youngest son, she said with pride: “I gave him to the
Poglavnik when he was just seventeen, and I gave him to the Croatian home-
land when I gave birth to him. I knew then that I had given him in the strug-
gle for the homeland. And every day I was prepared to hear that my Krune
had died. And, now, when I hear this has come to pass, it is everything I al-
ways hoped for. I only hope he fell as a hero, that he fell in battle!”114
The zealous Spartan Ustasha mother become a revered archetype, cele-
brated in the new nationalist poetry, which drew inspiration from the rich
epic tradition of Serbo-Croat ballads and, in particular, the monumental
Kosovo cycle. The most well-known artistic evocation of the steely Usta-
sha mother came from the pen of Vinko Nikolić. His epic ballad of 1942—
“An Ustasha Mother at the Grave of Her Martyred Son”—was an homage
to Marija Hranilović, the mother of Marko Hranilović, one of the earliest
Ustasha martyrs in the homeland. Hranilović was lauded in the Independent
State of Croatia for her declaration after her son’s execution that if had she ten
 Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines  157

sons, she would want them all to die for Croatia’s liberty.115 In Nikolić’s bal-
lad she becomes a Croatian version of the mother of the Jugovitches, drawing
strength from his death for battles to come. Visiting her son’s grave, she says
to him: “If I had ten of you sons, I would give every one for the homeland, /
with your blood I would sprinkle the wounded earth / for the earth here, the
dear soil, I would fall victim myself / so the day of our earth’s freedom will
soon dawn.” At the end of the poem, the idea of the homeland as the sec-
ond mother is inverted, and the homeland instead becomes her second son:
“Forgive me, son, do not reproach your mother / that she loves the homeland
more than her children. / Let the memory of you now rest, / and from your
blood be born new warriors!”116 She will turn her personal grief at the death
of her son into a bloody pietà of vengeance. Mater Dolorosa becomes Medea.

MILITANT FEMININITY AND THE USTASHA MOVEMENT

Motherhood, no matter how combative it could be, was not enough for some
women within the movement. Younger, actively revolutionary women espe-
cially sought a more meaningful role. Visual art—paintings, sculptures, and
drawing—free from the censorship under which literature sometimes la-
bored, demonstrated that the fervent Ustasha mother was not the only fem-
inine possibility in the Independent State of Croatia. In visual art, woman
could be the archetypal Madonna watching over Croatia, but she could also
be a bourgeois lady of leisure, an old peasant woman, a wife, a young mili-
tant worker, a female warrior, and even an object of sexual desire.117 Marijan
Trepše’s Maja, which depicted the new woman of the 1920s and 1930s, was ap-
propriated by the regime to show that the new Croatian woman of the 1940s
was truly liberated: in the factory or the field, with her white headscarf and
ardent gaze, the new Croatian woman, in addition to her life as a devoted
mother, was also an emancipated working-class heroine.118
Attitudes to the female question among members of the movement in
its years of illegality and struggle in the 1930s were not wholly encouraging.
Women were frequently mentioned in Ustaša in the same breath as drink-
ing and gambling; few women were permitted to live at training camps with
their spouses, and fewer still took an active part in terrorist activities. The
movement’s negative and generally disinterested views of women during this
period were probably not helped by the revelation in 1933 that a number of
female companions of leading Ustashas—including Gustav Perčec’s fiancée,
Jelka Pogorelec, and her sister Marija—had been for years operatives of the
Yugoslav secret service.
Despite the fact that the movement was overwhelmingly male, a few
women had played an active role in it. Ante Pavelić’s novel Lijepa plavojka
(The Beautiful Blonde, 1934) told the story of Ruža, a female Ustasha ter-
 158  Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines

rorist who clandestinely smuggles bombs and guns for the movement and
is every bit as militant as her male comrades. The novel ends with the as-
sassination of King Aleksandar, a drama in which she has taken a lead role.
Although the novel was fiction, it was based on truth: a blonde female opera-
tive had allegedly been involved in Aleksandar’s assassination. In the 1930s
Ustashas founded a women’s section called Revolutionary Ustasha Female
Action (Revolucionarna ustaška ženska akcija—RUŽA). Based in the Lika
and led by Josipa Šaban, its functions included distributing illegal leaflets,
printing newspapers, and visiting imprisoned Ustasha activists. These female
Ustashas, however, also carried out far more dangerous tasks. In addition
to smuggling arms, they considered themselves underground fighters and
like their male comrades were organized into cells and battalions. Like male
Ustashas, they carried daggers and swore allegiance to the Poglavnik until
death.119 Although most women in the movement tended to be the suffering
wife, mother, or girlfriend of an Ustasha activist, some women went to prison
for the cause; others, as the journalist Ivona Maixner pointedly reminded her
male colleagues, took an active role in the national revolution.120
With the establishment of the Ustasha state in 1941, young women in the
movement, full of revolutionary fervor, certainly did not welcome its deco-
rous ideas about woman as mother. For them, the certainties of family life
could never replace the excitement of the national struggle. Almost immedi-
ately after a revolution that was supposed to have wiped away bourgeois codes
of conduct and propriety, young women were remonstrating with the move-
ment about its attitude toward them now it was in power. For example, in Au-
gust 1941 Bosiljka Perše, a pharmacy student, complained:
And, now, how can one think of a woman as an Ustasha? In most people’s
opinion, woman’s work is in the house, in the kitchen, with the children,
with the washing, at the neighbor’s, and not . . . politics. Will a woman
raise her saber and like Ban Jelačić strike fiercely at the enemy? Is a woman
suitable for this work? . . . How many brave women have sacrificed their lives
on the altar of the Homeland for the same ideal and with the same bravery
as men have! If we take into account not only city women but include village
and city together, then the picture is clear. The fact is, in the greatest and
most arduous battles for the liberation of the Croatian nation, everywhere
there were found women who actively participated in the same Ustasha
Liberation Movement. Taking these women as role models, we will bring
up generations of Croatian female Ustashas who will be worthy women,
true to the tradition of the Croatian hearth, and who will be steely women
Ustashas, valuing the freedom of the homeland and its state borders more
than their personal or family happiness.121
 Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines  159

Perše was not alone. Many actively revolutionary young women wanted to
play a more involved role in the revolution. In response, female functionar-
ies in the youth organizations and the Ustasha hierarchy felt forced to remind
young women that men and women did not and could not have the same
roles in the movement. In September 1941, Mica, an Ustasha camp leader in
Vinkovac, advised her charges: “You must be conscious that your work will
be that of a girl, later a woman, and you should not seek to place yourself
shoulder to shoulder with men, in that field of work that belongs exclusively
to men. Among us there are fiery militant female nationalists who would have
achieved their life’s ambition if they could put Ustasha arms in their hands
and set off into battle. I accept this, but I also acknowledge, and with a heavy
heart inform you, that this is not for us.”122
Training schools for young female Ustasha officials tried to tap into this
tough, intrepid sentiment by producing a syllabus as close as possible to that
studied by Ustasha men. As well as domestic subjects such as housekeeping
and household economics, recruits were also required to learn the Ustasha
Principles, take religious studies, master the history and geography of the
state, and undergo physical exercise and paramilitary training. There was
little or no difference between the vow they took to the Poglavnik and the
one male Ustashas took. When a delegation of female Ustasha Youth trainees
from Sljeme visited the Poglavnik in June 1942 and took the Ustasha oath in
front of him, they were promising, as the course leader Vjekoslava Bubanović
pointed out, to sacrifice their own lives for the Ustasha state if necessary.
While the newspaper report of the visit suggested that it was their profound
Catholic faith that had motivated them to attend the school, the Poglavnik
pointed out that by successfully completing the course they would become
the next generation of leaders and educators in their villages; more impor-
tant, by taking an oath of loyalty to him they had become “worthy and valued
female comrades of the great, brave and heroic Ustasha Army, which, under
the Ustasha Croatian banner, storms into battle for the sake of the Croatian
nation and the Croatian state.”123
Nonetheless, female activists were not allowed to serve in the armed
forces. As a result, many Ustasha female leaders attempted to make conces-
sions to this spirit of assertiveness and frustrated activism through an at-
tempt to make domesticity and childrearing sound as combative as possible.
A woman might not be able to enlist in the armed forces or the Ustasha mili-
tias, an editorial in Ustaškinja argued, but she had been called to the “front”
to serve the homeland in the absence of fathers, fiancés, husbands, and broth-
ers on the battlefield. By demonstrating that they were as equal to this work
as their menfolk, women would show that they too were warriors: “Not with
weapons, but with spirit, not with muscles, but with the strength of her weak
 160  Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines

body, the force of her will, her determination, her devotion, her sacrifice.”124
One of the leaders of the Ustasha Women’s Vine, Professor Olga Osterman,
insisted that the role of woman as mother and educator made her “the su-
preme natural warrior for the survival and progress of the reborn Croatian
nation.”125 Younger female Ustasha ideologues argued in a similar fashion.
The female editor of the Ustasha Youth journal ŽAP in Koprivnica admitted
that while no one would demand from young female Ustashas “some kind of
noisy participation in political life or force rifles in our hands to defend the
homeland, because others have been called to this task,” young women had
been given the role of giving birth to and educating the new generation of
Croatians. In so doing, they would be fighting “shoulder to shoulder” with
their male comrades.126 The regime also made public spectacles out of the
ideal of militant femininity. At the mass rally of Ustasha Youth in front of the
Poglavnik in Zagreb in June 1942, while male Ustasha youth paraded in mili-
tary uniforms, carrying guns, knives, and hand grenades, holding banners
that read “Always prepared for the homeland!” and singing Ustasha march-
ing songs such as “Into battle, into battle!” female Ustashas greeted the Po-
glavnik waving dolls, carrying kitchen utensils and pennants, and pushing
prams above which were placards reading “We want to be little mothers!”
Even when some females marched in front of the Poglavnik, like their male
comrades, in sports outfits, it was only partly to signify the new robust and
active young Ustasha female prototype: it also aimed to emphasize that “only
healthy Croatian wives can give birth to healthy Croatian babies.” Being ath-
letic also meant being fertile.127
If mass rallies and admonishments from female functionaries did not
convince young women that military life was not for them, the regime press
could also point to the miserable lives of women who had gone into battle.
According to the testimonies of women who had joined the Partisans and
then escaped, women were abused terribly by their male comrades and, as a
result of their experiences, developed unnatural impulses. In one well-pub-
licized case, a female ex-Partisan told how the heads of women Partisans
had been forcibly shaved and how they had given birth to sickly children,
abandoned in the woods. Sensationalist newspaper reports also pointed to
the considerable number of women who had become barren after joining the
Partisans or had developed sadistic tendencies. The cruel female Partisan
commander, torturing young Ustasha soldiers and militia members, became
a familiar feature of short stories and fodder for regime nightmares.128 Usta-
sha propaganda brochures also emphasized the primitive Partisan attitudes
toward women, describing how in villages under their command women and
young girls were prevented from attending schools, going out to work, or get-
ting an education.129
 Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines  161

But whatever intentions the regime might have had, the fact was that
with large numbers of men drafted into the military between 1941 and 1945,
women entered into many spheres of public life in unprecedented numbers.
Universities became increasingly feminized as male students volunteered or
were conscripted for military duty. In the four years of the Croatian state’s
existence, the ratio of female to male students registering at the University
of Zagreb increased exponentially. By spring 1942, the number of women in
the law faculty had risen from 120 in 1941 to 727, compared to 440 men.130 In
addition, with men away at the front, women took their factory and farming
jobs. Officially, Ustasha propagandists and journalists lauded this outburst
of female emancipation. The lone peasant woman, ploughing the land while
her husband was away, “her muscles puffed up with strength, sweat dripping
down her forehead, and skilled hands directing the rudder,” set an example
that all city women should witness.131 The female section of the Ustasha Youth
placed great emphasis on the role of competitive sport in the lives of their
young members and celebrated their achievements in sports as diverse as ath-
letics, swimming, mountaineering, skiing, and skating. In fact, female Usta-
sha Youth camp leaders were regularly admonished by investigators from the
Ustasha Youth physical education department at GUS headquarters, as well
as physical education instructors with the State Labor Service in their regular
reports, for not placing emphasis on educating their young “heroines” in the
virtues of competitive sport, something that sharply contradicted the com-
plaints of Catholic journalists about the dangers of creating aggressive Ama-
zonian women.132
Regime ideologues and journalists hailed the emergence of a new Usta-
sha female worker, who “seeks honorable pay for honorable work” and, led
by the Ustasha philosophy, “passes through life with a clear head, carrying
in her soul the ideal of Ustasha comradeship” and her “great future task as
an Ustasha mother-worker.”133 For Vika Biščan, writing in February 1942, the
“woman as worker,” with her desire for work and family, her drive to earn
money to support her family, and her fortitude, was the ideal Ustasha woman:
a “resilient worker—a comrade in labor.” However, Biščan complained that
until now the Ustasha female worker had experienced “hard, monotonous”
labor in factories just as her male comrades did, that the female worker had
been underappreciated, her concerns not taken seriously. “Why does no one
ever ask her about her joy and pleasure? Why does no one ever appreciate her
work?” she asked. She hoped that in Ustasha Croatia the emergence of the
Ustasha female worker would mean that women workers would cease being
disrespected or, even worse, an “object of pity and humiliation,” but would
“take a loud active role, filled with a proud soul, a raised head, an awakened
consciousness,” helping to elevate the worth of women more generally. Why
 162  Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines

did the words “woman” and “worker” have to be two such “irreconcilable
concepts”? The new Croatia, she noted, had already made a start with the
introduction of a range of improved working conditions and social security
payments for working mothers so that work was “no longer a mark of shame
but a measure of her worth.” Although there was still a long way to go, fe-
male Ustasha workers, with “shining eyes” and “skilled hands,” were imbued
with Ustasha principles and “through life would light the torch of the Ustasha
struggle, wearing the banner of Ustasha work as a sign of Ustasha sacrifice”
and of the “greater, happier, better future of the new generation.”134 In this
light, even the Ustasha women’s ideologue Mira Dugački had to concede that
while family, home, and motherhood must be young Croatian women’s “most
sacred” duty, the new Ustasha woman would also gain through being part of
the workforce, passing through “fields and factories and offices and schools of
all sorts.” Like every female worker and peasant, she would know about her
nation as well as world affairs. Although her main task involved the protec-
tion of the family hearth, she would work with her husband as a comrade and
not a slave.135
Like Biščan, the student journalist Ivona Latković also introduced readers
to a new kind of female Ustasha persona: the Ustasha university woman who
was not content to be enrolled at university simply in pursuit of knowledge or
a husband or to engage in “empty conversations.” Rather, she was preparing
herself for her future role as a female intellectual who would be involved in
the rebuilding of the nation at war’s end.136 Role models for the militant Usta-
sha woman were to be found in the distant past as well as the revolutionary
present. Women were encouraged to emulate powerful females from the past
who had gotten the better of men, such as Katerina, the last Bosnian queen, or
Vladislava, wife of Ivan Nelipić, who defended Knin from Austro-Hungarian
forces.137 Young revolutionary women regularly produced criticisms of lib-
eral society framed in the language of female assertiveness and emancipation.
Whether lambasting the former liberal regime for treating women as decora-
tive dolls to be valued for their looks rather than their achievements or com-
plaining about the tyranny of fashion, they articulated a perspective shared
by many young women of all ideological persuasions. Danica Labas, an ac-
tivist in the movement’s youth section, reminded her readers of the damag-
ing effect on their health and psyche caused by women’s “slavery” to fashion:
from the tiny feet of Chinese women to the deep tans of Renaissance women,
this obedience to the “dictatorship” of haute couture was a badge of oppres-
sion, not liberation. That contemporary women wanted to adopt the “ridic-
ulous” fashions of today simply illustrated “how little taste and seriousness
there is in us.”138 By contrast, according to her colleague Vlasta Arnold, the
willingness of young women to put on the Ustasha uniform was an external
 Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines  163

sign of the demand that the new Ustasha woman be taken seriously on the
basis of her intellect and actions, rather than her physical appearance. Even
if young men did not find the uniform attractive, it was necessary as a sign
of the worthiness of the new woman in the new national state. It was “some-
thing new, an expression of the spirit of our epoch.”139 Regional branches of
the female Ustasha Youth were supposed to place a great emphasis on the
physical education of girls and young women in the movement. One of the
aims was to create “robust” female Ustasha leaders for the future. All girls
were meant to receive at least two hours’ physical education each week, and
attendees at female Ustasha Youth camps were given the opportunity to par-
ticipate in swimming, athletics, skiing, skating, and numerous other athletic
pursuits at both the camp and the regional level and—if they were talented—
at regional and national competitions. However, in a 1943 investigation, fe-
male exercise instructors reported to the Ustasha Youth physical education
department at GUS headquarters that these stipulations were being ignored
in many cases—a view supported by the monthly reports by colleagues in the
State Labor Service.140
Outwardly, at least, as time went on, the regime seemed to be embracing
an agenda closer to the wishes of many of its younger female activists. For ex-
ample, when the first female tram conductors began working in Sarajevo, the
Ustasha press scolded male passengers who mocked them or acted boorishly
toward them. Their reactionary attitudes and primitive behavior would have
to change because in the new Croatia women could do anything men could,
and these female conductors were the vanguard of a new generation of steely
Ustasha women.141 On a fraternal visit to Croatia, Lydia Oswald, a member of
the Hitler Youth, confirmed this impression. She wrote with admiration of
female Ustashas who spoke to each other like men: “The female commissars
from Sarajevo certainly know how to get things done!” she enthused.142 The
regime press also wrote with pride about the activities of female university
students performing their state labor service duties, something that was com-
pulsory for all undergraduates and anyone who left high school. Newspaper
reports described female university students riding tractors and cultivating
the land with sickles in their hands, a sight that “is something new for our
public.”143 Meanwhile, at the same time as the press was covering in herme-
neutic detail the first Week of the Croatian Mother and Child, reinforcing the
image of the Croatian woman as mother and wife, it also gave wide coverage
to a meeting between the Poglavnik and a delegation of young female Ustasha
trainee instructors from the Marija Pavelić State Labor Service camp in Josi-
povac, Djakovo. Painting a somewhat different picture of womanhood, they
proudly informed the Poglavnik of the many skills they had learned: plough-
ing fields with tractors; cultivating vineyards; sowing seeds; learning about
 164  Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines

manufacturing, cattle breeding, and other agricultural skills; and studying

the theoretical side of peasant economics and how to apply this theory practi-
cally. The first of its kind in the state, another camp was already under con-
struction in Karlovac.144
In her report, Lydia Oswald had implied that women in Croatia were
entering an age of widened opportunities when anything was possible. The
regime press agreed. It pointed with pride to the flattering profiles of Sara-
jevo female tram conductors in foreign magazines, which compared modern
contemporary Croatian women’s industry to women’s selfless actions in the
nation’s “heroic past.” In moments of crisis, such as the destruction of the
homeland by war and struggle, they had “heroically supported their men-
folk, serving their nation and homeland” and demonstrating their heroism
with “superhuman effort.” The current struggle demanded more effort and
sweat from women than ever before, but in return they were promised a more
meaningful role in society. “As in other countries, Croatian women are plac-
ing all their strength in the service of the nation and the homeland and there-
fore are showing that they are just as worthy warriors, that they are faithful
comrades of the heroic Croatian soldier. The Croatian woman is replacing her
husband, brother, and son in the factory, in the office, as a conductor on the
tram, in agricultural work, not to mention the other countless fields of indus-
try in which women are taking the place of men.”145 The regime press also cel-
ebrated the achievements of intellectual women who were making their mark
in the state as doctors, professors, and scientists and openly welcomed the
increased entry of females, especially Muslim women, into the university as
signaling a victory for female emancipation and the death knell of patriarchal
conservative attitudes.146
Were women really on the road to emancipation? Not really. Women’s
entry into the labor market was not perceived by the regime as a permanent
solution, but as a temporary necessity to fill a shortfall in man power. At war’s
end, it was envisaged, men would return home from the battlefield to reclaim
their former jobs, with women going back to the hearth. But that was for the
future. By 1944, so severe was the man shortage that women were being al-
lowed or conscripted into units of the Ustasha army. Most of these female
military units—for example, the Female Auxiliary Unit in the Poglavnik
Bodyguard Brigade—despite their supposed “fanaticism,” saw no military
service and simply worked as nurses for injured militia soldiers. Often news-
paper reports portrayed female military auxiliary units as a kind of marriage
bureau: these nurses would surely fall in love with their handsome young
patients and make dutiful wives for these warriors and devoted mothers for
their progeny.147
That said, the movement produced a number of Ustasha heroines who suf-
 Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines  165

fered horrible deaths at the hands of the communist enemy, dying heroically
for refusing to recant their Ustasha principles. The two most well-known
were probably Andjelka Šarić and Jelena Šantić, both of whom perished in
1942. Of Šarić, who died in the Kozara Mountains, it was said that she had
died with the letter U carved into her body.148 Others included Dinka Perajica,
Anka Šimunović, and Emilija Nagoda, in whose honor, along with Šarić, the
regime organized a solemn mass at the cathedral on the Kaptol on 10 October
1942. On the one hand, it would be hard to see these heroines as represent-
ing a new kind of militant Ustasha woman. They did not die in the heat of
military battle: both Šarić and Šantić were female Ustasha educators. More-
over, when Šantić died, her female comrades recalled her as “always gentle
when she was with us—clear, smiling, full of sacred, sincere enthusiasm for
the Ustasha movement,” and remembered that she had joined the Ustasha
movement after seeing the Poglavnik visit her native village.149 Šantić’s sense
of activism was acceptable because it was interpreted as an act of infatuation
with the Poglavnik, her savior and surrogate husband, with whom she was
portrayed as having a mystical attachment. In her last letter before her execu-
tion, she is reported to have written:
To whom shall I write before I die? To my Croatia—my Poglavnik. Po-
glavnik! I have followed you and will follow you until the last drop of my
blood for God and Croatia. I die willingly for the homeland and for you,
Poglavnik. I will pray in eternity to the good Savior for you, Poglavnik, and
Croatia. My mother, father, Andjelko, Zvonkica, Viktor, don’t cry. Your
Jelka, an Ustaškinja with her body and soul, died for the Poglavnik and
homeland, and that is an honor. Ustashas and Ustaškinje of the whole of
Croatia, go forward for God and Croatia, for the Poglavnik and the state! I
can’t go on: the cannons roar, and in a few more minutes I will be in eternity
and praying to the Savior for the Poglavnik and Croatia.150

On the other hand, one youth newspaper reported that she died like a
steely warrior, with Ustasha (i.e., manly) endurance, secure in the knowledge
that the Ustasha Youth would avenge her mercilessly in blood. Likewise, the
commemorative mass for the deceased Ustasha heroines in October 1942 eu-
logized their “noble spirits” and “heroic” bearing “steeled in battle.”151 How-
ever, other women who had demonstrated courage and militancy for the
nation were not permitted to lose any of their feminine vulnerability. Thus,
the first women to be militarily decorated for valorous service toward the
state when they had saved the lives of a number of wounded soldiers under
fire were an order of nuns, held up by Ustaškinja as model women for others
to emulate. Readers were reminded that their achievement was all the more
remarkable since they were “weak women” without weapons of their own.152
 166  Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines

Some women, though, took up arms enthusiastically. In Srebrenica, Black

Legionaries led by Franjo Sudar were surprised to be greeted by Muslim men
who told him that their wives, sisters, and daughters would be fighting along-
side them. “And really, we met Amazons with rifles,” a newspaper reported.
“They were prouder to be carrying rifles than if they were the most precious
pearls.”153 In another well-publicized case, a group of Muslim peasant women
defended their village and farmsteads from the Partisans, guns in hand. The
women of Fazlagića kula, led by Derviša Jugo, were feted as female warriors,
awarded the right to wear full military Ustasha uniforms. Jugo herself, as the
mother of two sons in the SS and the widow of an Ustasha, became a celeb-
rity. In an interview for Croatia’s leading newspaper in March 1944, she spoke
with pride of how she had instilled in her daughter the need for bravery and
fearlessness, and the female reporter herself confessed that Jugo’s story of-
fered a relief from the usual stories about women, which involved love, ro-
mance, and fashion.154 For the Ustaša journalist Zahida Sefić, the story of the
women of Fazlagića kula was a potent symbol of the emancipation of female
Muslims under the Ustasha regime. Isolated and denied the same opportu-
nities to advance as other Croat women, they had been liberated from the
shackles of patriarchy by the events at Fazlagica kula. Sefić recalled meeting
one young woman, “dressed in a male [Ustasha’s] uniform and with a gun on
her shoulder,” who recounted her hard life. The young woman proudly told
her that for seven months she had found herself carrying a gun: “I don’t sleep
at home. The battle has become our everyday life, and I swear on the memory
of my deceased mother that the bandits will not come here again as long as
just one of us remains alive. You can be sure of that!” As Sefić later enthused,
she could only gaze in admiration at the self-discipline, selflessness, and mili-
tary bearing of the young woman who rushed off to join her comrades.155
Newspapers also reported cases where Ustasha men and women died side
by side fighting against the communist enemy. Ironically, this fulfilled the
earlier claims of Ustasha functionaries to impetuous young revolutionary
women that in the new state, males and females would be equal comrades,
although clearly not quite in the way they had intended. When the young
Ustasha captain Zvonimir Dončević and his wife, Slava, met their deaths in
Nova Gradiška in 1944, defending their farmstead from “bandits,” they were
held up by the press as model “Ustasha comrades” who had made a “shining”
sacrifice, remaining true to their principles in death as much as in life. “As
he lived, so he died. Standing fearless with a gun in his hands in defense of
his ideals, until the bloody murderous hands of the bandits ended his young
and heroic life. As fate had ordained, beside him and true to him fell his life-
comrade Slava, who also, with a gun in her hand to the last minute, defended
the sacred land of her beloved home. With her example, she is written about
 Merciless Warriors and Militant Heroines  167

among the model wives of Croatian birth. Two lives—two heroes in life and
death, model Croats, are returned to the native soil. Such models are rarely
born!”156
Eventually, the prototype of the woman warrior was applied without ref-
erence to a husband. Where once maternal devotion had been obligatory, now
militancy was a revolutionary duty. It was from 1944 onward, with the state
in a process of chaos and terminal decline, that the image of the female as
Amazon became strongest. Comparing the plight of Croatia, threatened by
“wild aggression from the Balkan woods,” to that of Greece awaiting Persia,
women in the movement were finally afforded the right, as Bosiljka Perše had
demanded three years earlier, to take up arms and “abandon our propriety.”
Some Catholic journalists were appalled at this sudden manifestation of fe-
male visibility. One, writing in Nedjelja in June 1944, in an article implicitly
critical of both the regime and this new Amazonian woman, complained that
women were once again to be seen on the streets, a result of the “disastrous
mistake of the modern era that affirmed that in everything a woman is equal
to a man.” In particular, as a result of female participation in sport, a type of
“mannish woman,” physically and spiritually “unnatural,” had emerged. But
rather common was the reaction of one female commentator for Ustaškinja,
who, while shocked at seeing girls in military uniform on Zagreb’s Ilica, still
exulted in their appearance. “Their faces are fierce, tightened with winter and
defiance, burned with the wind, ever vigilant,” she wrote. “There is no trace
of female gentleness. . . . War has given them a new soul and a new uniform.
It has flung them from their hearths and ripped off their jewelry, all means
of harmless beautification. All traces of the serenity in which they once de-
lighted has disappeared from them as has boredom, dreaming, and sentimen-
tality.”157 The Ustasha woman becomes the Ustasha man.
Young Ustasha Youth members perform volunteer state labor service duties at a
work-service camp

All images are courtesy of the Služba državne sigurnosti Republičkog sekretarijata
za unutrašnje poslove Socijalističke republike Hrvatske, fond Nezavisne Države
Hrvatske, 1561 (HR-HDA, SDS, NDH, 1561).

168
169
“He is with us!” A member of the elite Poglavnik Bodyguard militia visits the freshly dug graves of fallen comrades at
Mirogoj Cemetery
170
Rally of Ustasha workers at the workers’ chamber of the Croatian Workers’ Union, the main speaker flanked by men in
overalls and carrying spades to symbolize the dignity of manual labor
171
Ustasha youth at a summer camp listen to their camp leader
172
The genocidal state: the bodies of murdered Serb civilians exhumed after the fall of the regime
173
Female students on state labor service relaxing with factory workers during their break. The headline in Hrvatski narod
reads: “Today the Croatian nation is one big family.”
174
Female pioneers: some of the first group of female tram conductors in Zagreb
175
A float accompanied by soldiers and military brass band promotes “Croatian socialism.” The figures on the side represent (from
right to left) the peasantry, the worker, and the intellectual, the three “classes” of the Ustasha state. The float instructs citizens:
“Intensify your work to shorten the war!”
176
A choral group performing a song to celebrate the state’s first anniversary in Zagreb in 1942, flanked by Ustasha guards
and the symbols of the state and regime
Citizens enter the pavilion of the Independent State of Croatia at the annual
Zagreb international fair in September 1941. The slogan beneath the exploding
grenade of the Ustasha movement reads: “For the homeland prepared!”

177
 CHAPTER 4

SOCIAL JUSTICE AND THE

CAMPAIGN FOR TASTE
Cultural Values after the
Revolution of Blood

W
“ e were confronted with a wasteland and had to build everything
from the ground up.” So recalled the regional leader of Prigorje Marko
Lamešić regarding the task confronting the Ustasha movement im-
mediately after it came to power. Speaking at an Ustasha rally in June 1942,
Lamešić, standing on a speaker’s platform adorned with flowers and rugs and
surrounded by flags and an altar for holy mass, told thousands of workers,
peasants, and party supporters that if nothing else had been achieved in the
past year other than “the complete tearing out of every foreign poison from
the soul of the Croatian nation,” this was nevertheless “the greatest deed that
could be imagined.” Today, he continued, Croatia was liberated and united,
the Croatian people marching “with equally Croatian and Ustasha steps.”
Should anyone dare to raise their hand against the motherland, he warned,
they would be “annihilated by the thousands and thousands of hands de-
fending it.” In his speech, meanwhile, Vilko Rieger, director of DIPU, linked
social and economic regeneration to Lamešić’s national revolution. The Usta-
sha movement had struggled for political liberation, he explained, because
“it is only in such a way that we can liberate ourselves in the social and eco-
nomic sense.” Yet while the Ustasha movement had destroyed the “national
prison” of Yugoslavia and ensured that it could never be rebuilt, there was
still much work to be done. “We must,” he declared, “refashion our state from
the inside.”1

178
 Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste  179

The violent war for national liberation—the tearing out at the root of ev-
ery “foreign poison” through mass murder and deportation—was thus the
beginning, not the end, in the construction of a revolutionary Ustasha state:
economic and social refashioning, as Rieger termed it, was a fundamental el-
ement in the movement’s concept of a utopian Ustasha society. For the move-
ment’s cultural visionaries, culture would be the driving force of this second
revolution. As much as popular culture could serve a utilitarian function in
popularizing the regime’s ideology among ordinary Croatian citizens, many
in the movement advocated its centrality in the remaking and regeneration of
Croatian society. Writing in early 1942, Mile Starčević, the head of the State
Institute for National Enlightenment, declared that the Ustasha movement
gave ideological expression to the literary-artistic traditions of revered nine-
teenth-century nationalist Croatian poets such as Antun Gustav Matoš, Sil-
vije Kranjčević, and Fran Galović. The Ustasha movement was a liberation
movement not just in the political and social sense of the word, he explained,
but in the cultural sense too, because education was at the heart of all na-
tional questions. In the Ustasha conception of culture, he wrote, the state was
an all-encompassing engine of national will and culture. Rather than simply
a vanguard overseeing the development of culture according to established
laws and statutes, the state should be viewed as an “active factor of culture”
because it was only through the state that the nation could “completely ex-
press its creative will.” Cultural questions were, he argued, the most impor-
tant factors in the life of the new state, above all economic, military, and
administrative concerns.2
Culture had a social function, and Ustasha cultural ideologues wished
to make it accessible to the masses. In Yugoslavia, they argued, culture had
often been the preserve of a rarefied elite, closed to ordinary people as either
spectators or participants. Theater was the symbol of a new spirit in the Croa-
tian state following the national revolution of 1941. Dušan Žanko, the director
of the Zagreb State Theater, envisaged the end of “small chamber theater for
the élite”; instead theater for the masses would embrace “in its wings 20,000
people united in delirium and faith.”3 As the most important cultural institu-
tion, Žanko wrote, theater was a symbol of a new spirit and new life in Croa-
tia following the national revolution of 1941. While the past two decades of
crisis had been “saturated with despair and dizzy footstamping in the dark
of lost humanity,” together with the “gloomy aesthetic and ethical wastelands
of foreigners,” in the new era people from “the most different backgrounds
can join together every evening in one artistic experience.”4 The Ustasha rev-
olution was framed by Žanko in explicitly artistic and cultural terms. The
national revolution could not be considered complete until a new culture had
been created, refashioning the masses and society in the image of the Ustasha
 180  Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste

movement. In fact, he argued, only a cultural and spiritual revolution would

secure the continued realization of the national revolution and regeneration
of the nation. Without a spiritual revolution, the new Ustasha man would
succumb to destructive restlessness:
This deeply spiritual revolution that has dissolved Europe and with the
flame of Ustasha violence has revived Croatia has not yet been shaken to its
roots, has not yet been been released from the silence from which poetry is
born. And the revolutionary man is there, restless, unfinished, and thirsty
for the realized, poetically attained work of his new understanding of life,
in which concepts such as God, homeland, family, order, mankind, nobility,
sacrifice, responsibility, and consciousness will again be decisive. This new
man, confused in the light of day with the old man, expects drama, but
because he expects stability, spiritual balance, and the security of principles
that demand sacrifice, he expects the drama of faith.5

Žanko was not alone in aspiring to cultural revolution: a number of the

regime’s leading intellectuals and cultural commentators also perceived the
need for such a revolution. For Stanko Vitković, writing in December 1941,
the regime’s announcement of the end of the “revolution of blood” should
not be viewed as an end in itself but as the herald of a “second” cultural rev-
olution. The promotion of both culture and cultured values—taste, good
manners, and education—among the Croatian population to create a “new
Croatian national consciousness and feeling” was an integral aspect of the
revolution.6 But who was to lead this “second” revolution, under what cir-
cumstances, and to what end? The concept of cultural revolution was prob-
lematic. The desire to create a revolutionary mass culture refashioning society
and reversing twenty years of liberalism, democratic ideals, and Yugoslav-
ism exposed the ideological tensions within both the movement itself and the
wider regime. This antagonism was, in part, reflected in a wider debate about
the movement’s role in the party’s premier intellectual newspaper, Spremnost.
For radical ideologues like Ivo Guberina, the movement was the vanguard of
the revolution. It comprised an elite group of warriors whose “Ustasha élan”
would be destroyed should it become a mass movement. Rather than be de-
fined by the “deadwood” that had “glued itself” to the movement since April
1941, such opportunists would be “painfully removed,” and the movement
would continue to be characterized by the ethos of the original émigré mem-
bers, the Poglavnik’s veterans, “his comrades from the days of struggle!” In
this way, he concluded, “the Ustasha ideology remains ours: and it remains
elite.” The journalist and propaganda chief Ivo Bogdan agreed. He advocated
that only the “most respectable, best, healthiest, and most Croatian men,”
with the “greatest consciousness and greatest feelings of responsibility,” could
 Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste  181

be gathered in it.7 Others, though, such as Julije Makanec, argued that the
movement should be of and for the masses. As proof he cited the “general
national uprising” of 10 April 1941, which had brought the Ustashas to power
and showed that the nation was imbued with Ustasha ideals. For Tias Mor-
tigjija, the Ustasha movement was simply “the political organization of the
Croatian nation, a declaration of its politics and the expression of its will.”
The idealistic aim, he concluded, must be that “every Croat becomes an Usta-
sha, that everyone is consciously imbued with the spirit of Ustasha principles,
and that they live and work in that sense.”8
Certainly, the ideological divisions were not quite as clear-cut as they ap-
peared. In fact, both hardliners who wished to retain the radical, elite ethos
of the movement and moderates who advocated a movement more attuned
to a diversity of political opinions aimed to imbue citizens with the Usta-
sha ideology, even if their vision of exactly what constituted Ustasha “ide-
ology” differed fundamentally. Hardliners such as Bogdan believed that the
entire nation should be inculcated with radical Ustasha values, harmonizing
the Ustasha ideology into everyday life and work and refashioning society in
the image of a revolutionary Ustasha vision. Simultaneously, moderates like
Mortigjija advocated that the whole nation be educated with Ustasha values.
However, in pursuing a soft line on culture, he and other representatives of
intellectual technocratic factions within the regime necessarily envisaged a
more all-encompassing “national” understanding of the Ustasha worldview.
Despite this, the debate carried out in the pages of Spremnost raised a num-
ber of fundamental but tricky questions.9 Was the Ustasha movement an or-
ganization of the revolutionary elite, or was it a movement for the masses?
Was Ustasha society to be constructed on the basis of a radical remaking
of society or something more diffuse, involving participation from a wider
range of ideological viewpoints? Ustaša was equivocal on the subject. “Now
we are building on that achieved in blood and revolution. We are construct-
ing a movement, a nation—a nation of warriors and believers, a nation of the
future, a nation of Ustashas,” it announced ambiguously in an editorial of
September 1941.10 The instincts of many hardline activists, Ustasha officials,
and ideologues was for cultural radicalism and the comprehensive remaking
of society. Yet their plans were not only constrained but, increasingly after
1942, frustrated by the emergence of less ideological, more moderate influ-
ences brought into the regime bureaucracy from outside. As a result of this
power struggle both the project to maintain the ideological purity and revo-
lutionary elan of the movement and the campaign to remake ordinary Croa-
tians through a second cultural and cultured revolution were never likely to
succeed.
 182  Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste

LITERATURE, SOCIAL EXPERIMENTATION, AND THE CROATIAN RADICAL RIGHT IN THE 1930S
Yugoslavism was an ideology of modernity; Yugoslavia saw itself as a thor-
oughly modern state. Through agricultural and social reform in the country-
side and the construction of technologically advanced cities with high-speed
transport links and advanced standards of sanitation and health care, Yu-
goslavia aimed to emulate, catch up with, and ultimately surpass the liberal
democracies, such as France and the United States, that it took as its role
models. Popular culture of all kinds aimed to express the dominating moder-
nity of state ideology. At the end of the 1920s, a younger generation of artists,
writers, and architects emerged that began to question this overwhelmingly
urban narrative of progress, stressing the social dimension of art and reflect-
ing wider concerns about the relevance of art for the ordinary worker and
peasant. Bringing art to the masses by reflecting their tastes and traditions
was a feature of discourse on both the literary and the artistic left and right.
The tone was set by a 1930 article by the writer Luka Perković in which he
stated that peasant culture was the culture of the entire nation since in the
East, unlike Western Europe, the culture of the villages had survived. The
problem of the modern world, as he saw it, was that this culture was only
weakly known since those who held political and cultural power in Yugosla-
via were the urban classes who looked to the West for their inspiration and
direction. The new culture rooted in the life of the peasant would be the new
culture of the nation, he believed.11
The interest in the life of the ordinary worker and peasant was reflected
in the emergence of a younger group of Croatian artists whose work aimed
to return to a concern with reflecting real life. Young artists such as Krsto
Hegedušić and Ivan Generalić championed a naive form of Croatian art
that depicted the life of the ordinary Croatian peasant. In 1929, they joined
with like-minded architects, painters, and sculptors in forming the “Zemlja”
group of artists, who saw part of their artistic role as challenging the pre-
vailing bourgeois trends. In their manifesto of 1929, written by the architect
Drago Ibler, they saw the ideological basis of their movement as “indepen-
dence of visual expression,” which would involve resisting “tendencies from
abroad, impressionism, neoclassicism, etc.,” to create a native art form reflect-
ing “the environment and answering to basic contemporary needs.”12 In reply
to criticisms from more established artists, one member, Đuro Tiljak, replied
that the “Zemlja” group represented young artists who wanted to “negate the
bourgeois artistic orientation,” standing against “bourgeois intellectuals who
think they understand something about art” and “respected bourgeois” art-
ists with “a hedonistic understanding of life, typical for bourgeois art.”13
As well as young artists, during the 1930s a new generation of young writ-
 Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste  183

ers came to prominence. Attacking the the “decadence” of contemporary Yu-

goslav literature, embodying the “personal and private fantasies of cosseted
salon and bourgeois writers,” they aimed to replace anarchism, solipsism,
and “individual sensations” with a form of collaborative literature that would
help to build a new world for workers and peasants.14 In their novels, writers
on the left directly challenged the modernist urban values of official Yugo-
slavism. Ivo Kozarčanin presented the city as an alienating metropolis popu-
lated by losers, depressives, alcholics, and criminals made jaded and cynical
by life and engaging in cheap love affairs and suicides.15 The satirical novels
of Slavko Kolar, meanwhile, explored the corruption of Yugoslav political life
and the morals of the educated Yugoslav middle classes, in particular their ir-
repressible desire to mimic the behavior of Western Europeans. The novels of
Miroslav Krleža presented a portrait of the arid life of the bourgeoisie, their
descent into madness an understandable reaction to the banality of contem-
porary urban life.16
These ideas resonated with the radical right too. This is not surpris-
ing since left- and right-wing writers often shared the same socially based
concerns. In the 1930s, in addition to their own works, young poets, jour-
nalists, and novelists on the radical right established a series of literary jour-
nals that introduced not just future Ustasha writers but a new generation of
Croatian writers and their visions to the public. Although hostile to the po-
litical left and fiercely anti-communist, many young writers on the radical
right often identified more strongly with contemporaries on the left such as
Kozarčanin than with established conservative and nationalist writers. Like
their left-wing counterparts, not only did they aspire to produce poetry and
novels that were closer to the kind of contemporary Spanish and French lit-
erature embodied by the likes of Lorca and Gide, but they also saw themselves
as engaged in a struggle with the older conservative literary establishment.
Young writers like Katalenić and Miličević regularly exchanged polemics
with an older generation of nationalist writers led by Petar Grgec, Ljubomir
Maraković, and Albert Haler, especially in the pages of Plava revija, accusing
them of sclerotic conservatism and redundancy. This perception of a genera-
tional struggle was shared by other young rightists. In the introduction to his
first collection of poems, Ivo Balentović complained that poets were wasting
years of their lives writing poems that were never published, poems in which
conformist literary conventions prevailed and from which workers, peasants,
and the poor were excluded. A “bon vivant literary dictatorship” had created
a “literary factory divorced from life” that favored the well connected at the
expense of what he called his “rough, arrogant, and unrefined” poems. His
collection of poetry was not only “an expression of protest against the mis-
ery and injustice in the world and homeland” but also captured a “feeling
 184  Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste

of outrage against the jeering at the poor and unemployed, the hungry and
destitute.”17 Despite their profound ideological differences, Balentović iden-
tified far more strongly with the novels of a writer like Kozarčanin: he was
emblematic of the alienation of his generation of Croatians, living in a society
where life was “more nervous, more rebellious, and in which there are more
contrasts and paradoxes.” But he also admired Kozarčanin’s rebellion against
“the small-town spirit and its capricious miserable attitude,” as well as his
commitment to the worker’s struggle for justice.18
Likewise, the young poet Vladimir Jurčić assailed the corruption of the
established nationalist literary scene in Zagreb, embodied in the nepotistic
tendency to publish inferior works by conservative clericalist novelists at the
expense of more talented younger leftist writers. The corruption of Croatian
literary clubs and journals was bad for Croatian literature, he argued, since
it had led to the promotion of the untalented and mediocre to the detriment
of talented Croatian writers. The literary critic Ljubomir Maraković, came in
for particular criticism, with Jurčić complaining that he had persuaded Ma-
tica Hrvatska to reject a collection of short stories by Novak Simić while pub-
lishing the “unliterary and dilettante novel of Zdenka Jušić-Šeunik (because
they collaborate in the same clericalist journals).”19 As a result, in the fore-
word to an anthology of poetry by three young Croatian poets, among them
Ivan Goran Kovačić and Jurčić, Mate Hanžeković could collectively describe
their poems exploring the hard lives of Croatian workers and peasants as a
“revolt” and a “protest” against contemporary capitalist society. Even though
Kovačić was writing from the leftist perspective and Jurčić writing from a
radical nationalist angle, the similarity between their poems in terms of sub-
ject matter and language reflected the fact that young writers on the left and
the radical right shared common social and cultural concerns in interwar
Yugoslavia.20
During the 1930s among radical Croatian students and young national-
ists there was an increasing interest in the life of the ordinary peasant and
a desire to return to the village and get to know the “real” Croatia. In their
poems, short stories, and novels young radical-right writers also articulated
an anti-urban, anti-capitalist, and anti-bourgeois perspective, with particular
venom reserved for the economic exploitation, moral degeneracy, and ano-
nymity of the city. In their literary journals, the countryside as the repository
for national regeneration often provided a counter-stereotype to the degen-
eration of life in the city.21 Nonetheless, older radical-right and nationalist
writers also took a renewed interest in the life of the worker and the capital-
ist system. Mile Budak, for example, who had previously written only of the
struggles of Lika peasants, in 1939 completed work on a novel addressing the
exploitation of the Croatian worker under the capitalist system. The cruel and
 Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste  185

uncaring factory owner of his novel, Križanić, was interpreted by nationalist

reviewers such as Marko Čović as a stereotype embodying all the worst char-
acteristics of bourgeois Croatian society, the novel itself deemed “a call to de-
stroy, crush, and settle accounts with all Križanićes and those with a Križanić
mentality.”22 The late 1930s also witnessed the emergence of a genre of semi-
autobiographical “authentic” social literature by self-taught nationalist work-
ers about their lives as poor and dispossessed workers, the most well-known
of whom was Ivan Softa. In his novels about life in the Croatian countryside
under Yugoslav rule, he explored the confrontation between rural patriar-
chal values in the countryside and the liberal degenerate sophistication of the
city. Softa’s first novel, a semiautobiographical account of the author’s itiner-
ant wandering as an unemployed worker in the 1930s, examined how peder-
asty, prostitution, loose morals, and a range of other vices had made their way
from the city to the village, slowly destroying it.23
Young poets who were part of the nationalist milieu did not necessarily
reject the city or the bohemian life connected with it: sometimes they em-
braced it.24 If young leftist poets like Kozarčanin could write sexually explicit
poems about evenings in bed “in the warm arms of a woman,” thinking about
“sex and wine,”25 then nationalist young poets like Zvonko Kuhar could write
poems about lazy Sunday mornings drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and
recovering from hangovers: “A black coffee, a cigarette, and tomorrow’s paper,
/ that’s all I need, night after night in this nook.”26 What they objected to was
that set of anti-national, materialistic, and cosmopolitan values associated
with the city. As Spasoje Prcović wrote in 1940, “The new Croatian generation
has placed itself before the village and not the city as its ideal. But we must
be clear what we mean! We are not pleading for primitivism or the absence
of enlightenment, nor are we against education and culture. We are only ask-
ing whether we want the principles of the village or the city and opting for
the values of the village, in other words for those positive values that the vil-
lage, as the bearer of conservatism, has protected in the Croatian nation for so
many centuries.”27 In fact, some radical nationalist writers looked with scorn
at the fashion for peasant art and literature, complaining that the village was
not being presented in a “cultured or objective” way. For Ivo Balentović, the
village was portrayed either as an “idyllic paradise” or else as “depressing, ig-
norant, and narrow minded,” a location for “debauchery, drunkenness, and
criminality.” Pouring scorn on the young leftist generation of Croatian writ-
ers and intellectuals who declared dramatically that they would go and live in
the village, he pointed out that many of them had grown up in the village, left
it for the city, and were now embracing the village again, for “purely merce-
nary and financial reasons”—all this at at a time when peasants were becom-
ing ever more sophisticated in their dress and habits.28 Vladimir Jurčić, too,
 186  Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste

savagely attacked those “mediocrities” and “parasites” who attended lavish

banquets and soirées “while at the same time trying to write social literature
without regard to their profoundly antisocial beliefs, all in the hope of ingra-
tiating themselves into the world of literature.”29
Along with a return to the village, nationalist writers envisaged an anti-
capitalist revolution, linking rapacious capitalism to an alien culture that had
invaded Croatia. From the middle of the 1920s onward, the ideology of Yu-
goslavism was being criticized not just for its national inequity but also for
its social injustice; the typical regime supporter was caricatured as a fat, idle,
bourgeois businessman. By contrast, the little man—the Croatian peasant
and worker—was eulogized as representing the best qualities of the Croatian
nation. And this little man was fated to be economically exploited by the cor-
rupt bourgeois rulers in Belgrade and their supporters. No wonder, one na-
tionalist workers’ newspaper commented on the occasion of the opening of
lavish new premises of a state bank, that the peasants reserved such hatred
for the city. Radical nationalists, and especially youth, were incensed at the
number of “foreign” banks being built in Croatia at a time when there were
no “national” banks. Looking back in 1941, Rudolf Horvat, a university pro-
fessor, recalled that the opening of so many foreign banks in Zagreb in the
1930s, far from serving the interests of ordinary Croatians, had only enabled
the Serb elite to plunder the wealth of Croatia. It was the ultimate capitalist
corruption.30
In the late 1930s, nationalist ideas were spreading in workers’ organiza-
tions. Nationalist workers’ journals called for an end to class conflicts and the
protection of working-class youth from communist corruption to retain their
“workers’ pride.” In this vision work, not proletarian struggle, was the key to
the life of the honest worker: “We work in carpenters’ and locksmiths’ facto-
ries, we work in offices and stores,” wrote Stanko Dominić in one nationalist
workers’ journal in 1937. “We work and endure because we have to live and
feed ourselves and our families. Our work is frequently arduous and without
end, but we are proud because we are workers!”31 Fascist and National So-
cialist ideas about social and economic life were also gaining in influence. In
1940, Ernest Marks, a leading member of the Worker’s Chamber of the Croa-
tian Workers’ Union (Hrvatski radnički savez—HRS), founded the Croatian
Social Institute, a research institution staffed by intellectuals, public workers,
and professors and with strong links to Robert Ley’s Institute of the German
Front of Labor.32 The institute promoted the study of “social politics,” an anti-
Marxist, anti-capitalist theory of society and economics that saw the individ-
ual as being linked to a vast organic community consisting of the family, the
professions, and the peasant zadruga and that argued that the progress of the
individual was tied to the fate of the national community. Therefore, worker
 Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste  187

and peasant poverty was damaging not just because it was iniquitous but also
because it prevented individuals from carrying out their duty to the national
community.33
The anti-Marxist workers’ movement in Croatia had always been socially
radical, and its journal frequently demanded sweeping changes to social
and economic life to benefit the worker. Workers called for industries to be
handed over to the control of Croatian workers, complaining that whenever
Croatian workers presented a list of demands to the management they were
always rejected on the grounds that the time was not right and that the busi-
ness would lose money.34 Social and economic theorists of the HRS envisaged
a radical utopia in which money would cease to have meaning. They argued,
for example, that industrial workers and office workers would be the heralds
of the new economic politics and predicted that in the society of the future
labor, not money, would be the major currency in Croatia. “Work, especially
physical work, which was for centuries subjugated and unrecognized in soci-
ety, will be the principal measurement of social worth and honor. Work will
be freed from money and the stock exchange. Gold and paper money, whose
worth is very doubtful and unstable, will not be the equivalent of work.”35 But
nationalist threats and anti-Semitism were also always present. The Croatian
worker was being exploited, the union’s journal argued, by the “unsuitable”
and “dishonorable” bosses of large and small businesses, who were not honest
and hard-working Croatians but “foreigners of all shades” who had stolen the
wealth of the nation while the Croats were sleeping. They had “crawled into
our homeland, to live off us like leeches.” They so controlled everything in the
homeland that they were even able to tell the worker when he should eat and
when he should fast. Placing the blame for the entry of these foreigners into
the nation on the complacency of the Croatian worker, it called for workers
to open their eyes, to raise their consciousness, and to “expel these parasites
from the national body because they are harming us and destroying us.”36
Salacious stories about the exploitation and mistreatment of Croatian
workers at the hands of foreigner capitalists and “speculators” were a regular
feature of the newspapers of the HRS. After publicizing one particularly no-
torious case in May 1939 in which a Croatian worker had allegedly been hos-
pitalized, the newspaper of the HRS warned that in a free Croatia, all those
“who drink the blood of Croatian workers and make their wealth off the
backs of them” would be “radically cleansed.” In the free homeland social jus-
tice would rule.37 In contrast to various speculators who had “wormed their
way into the workers’ ranks” under the banner of socialism or internation-
alism, brought up in an anti-Croatian spirit and working against the inter-
ests of the Croatian people, the HRS was committed to the nation, a patriotic
Croatian organization serving the Croatian people. The new nationalist Cro-
 188  Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste

atian worker had become “a real Croatian worker and as such is organized
to work for himself and for the Croatian nation and to expel from his ranks
once and for all the selfish, who for their own self-centered and anti-national
aims wanted to swindle the Croatian worker.”38
Similarly, in newspapers of the radical right anti-Semitism was often
framed as a struggle of toiling oppressed Croatian workers and peasants
against an exploitative class of Jewish plutocrats supported by a corrupt
Great-er Serb bourgeoisie. Stjepan Buć’s Nezavisnost attracted a cadre of
young radical-right journalists, writers, and intellectuals, many of them, like
Buć, supporters of Slavko Govedić’s overwhelmingly working-class Croatian
National Socialist Workers’ Party. Despite the educated and largely middle-
class origins of its editorial team, Nezavisnost nonetheless stressed the work-
ing-class and peasant roots of its anti-Semitic struggle and regularly printed
anti-Semitic broadsides, as well as poems by working-class and peasant read-
ers, such as the poem by Josip Klanjčić, a Zagreb factory worker, printed on
the front page of the paper in January 1940.39 The newspaper also printed ar-
ticles from local working-class readers who chronicled the exploitative be-
havior of Jewish plutocrats in Croatia’s small towns. Thus one Nezavisnost
correspondent from Požega complained that the son of a local wealthy Jewish
family, Eugen Kohn, was using leaflets expressing solidarity with the work-
ers and peasants to encourage them to buy their clothes from his father’s
clothing emporium and had given free cinema tickets to the children of some
of his workers so they would publicly praise his generosity. “Thus we have
lived to see in our Požega Jewish leaflets with a picture of the hook-nosed
Jew, Kohn. It is clear that Eugen Kohn understands the power of advertis-
ing well. He, speaking about the ‘working people,’ invites them to come into
his shop. We have had enough of the social lectures of the Jew Kohn. It is bad
enough that our poverty-stricken children sing in praise of a Jew. We sug-
gest to the Jew Kohn that on ‘the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of his
birth and the twentieth anniversary of beginning of assistance to the poor
and workers’ he atones for his insanity and patronage.”40 In a similar vein, M.
Keser argued that the settling of “Jewish Masons” in Croatia had harmed or-
dinary struggling Croatians. Small nations such as Croatia, he maintained,
had more need than larger nations to protect themselves from the influx of
foreigners and to secure bread for the workers and the peasants. It was uncon-
scionable and traitorous, he wrote, that “certain newspapers fight for the ex-
istence and prosperity of foreign elements” despite the hard living conditions
that “our people in the city and the countryside are enduring.”41 But the pa-
per’s educated intellectual social and literary commentators also stressed the
search for social and national justice in their struggle against the Jews. In a
highly critical review of Rista St. Delić’s The Jews of Yugoslavia, which sought
 Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste  189

to defend Yugoslavia’s Jews from anti-Semitic accusations, the paper’s liter-

ary critic, writing in January 1939, noted the large number of Jews in urban
centers such as Sarajevo who were doctors, lawyers, government officials, and
newspaper editors, ascribing many of the social inequalities in Yugoslav soci-
ety to the economic and professional dominance of the Jews, inequalities that
would surely disappear if the Jews were to disappear: “Today, in our country,
the Jews are in a better position than almost anywhere else. They have their
own property wealth, especially in the towns. If they were to be expelled, then
a good part of our social problems would be resolved, and the poor of Croatia
would have bread, instead of being hungry as they are today!”42
Nezavisnost was hardly unique among radical Croatian newspapers in its
obsession with the destructive influence of the Jews or in its framing of the
anti-Semitic struggle in terms of social justice for workers and peasants. One
of the most persistent anti-Semitic campaigns was launched by the short-lived
Mlada Hrvatska in the latter half of the 1930s. While it had a largely young
and intellectual readership and featured the writing of many young right-
wing Catholic novelists, poets, and journalists, it also sought to appeal to ur-
ban workers as Nezavisnost did. It regularly printed grotesque caricatures of
Jews on its front page to illustrate the menace of capitalism and the moral
and economic bankruptcy of the bourgeois Yugoslav state. The editorial be-
low one 1936 caricature of overfed Jewish plutocrats in dinner jackets warned:
“They have formed a coalition and are laughing about the nations that they
hold in their hands. Do you know these foreigners with hooked noses? If they
dare to make cattle of us, they will be greeted by the Croatian national con-
sciousness and the Croatian right fist!”43
Although the newspaper took a generally and virulently anti-Semitic line,
it reserved especial vitriol for those foreign Jews who had settled in Yugo-
slavia from the middle of the 1930s onward, fleeing Nazism. Criticizing the
Yugoslav state for allowing large numbers of Jews to seek refuge there while
most “progressive and great” states had closed their doors to the “influx of
unworthy Jewish refugees,” the newspaper sought to appeal to the social re-
sentment and fear of workers worried about how their own precarious posi-
tion might be affected by the arrival of immigrants. For Mlada Hrvatska, the
decision was a slap in the face of the ordinary worker since the “smuggled
capital” the Jewish refugees had brought with them would not be invested in
or used to elevate the Croatian “national economy.” In a period of economic
deprivation and unemployment, ordinary Croatian workers would not look
kindly on the arrival of large numbers of refugees.44 On the contrary, the fate
awaiting Croatian workers at the hand of Jews was spelled out in every edi-
tion of the newspaper. For example, in October 1936, the newspaper launched
a full-scale attack on the Jews of Vinkovac, complaining that they had effec-
 190  Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste

tively taken over control of the town, running 90 percent of its banks, busi-
nesses, and factories. This meant that the commerce and prosperity of the
town were controlled by a group of people with whom the native Croatian
population had “nothing in common, nationally, historically, or culturally.”
Why were the Jews so dominant in the economic life of towns like Vinko-
vac? The answer was simple: in regions where life was arduous and peasants
and workers toiled by the sweat of their brow to feed their families and them-
selves, there were few if any Jews. By contrast, in the rich plains of Slavonia,
there was money to be made, and Croatia had given “its tastiest morsel” to
the Jews. “But do not think that the Jews earned the morsel through callused
hands, fertilizing fields, harnessing horses and cattle to a plough, or harvest-
ing maize. No! Factories and mills—these are their fields, meadows, and prai-
ries.”45 In fact, stories of the struggle of hard-pressed Bosnian and Croatian
workers at the hands of exploitative Jewish factory owners were one of the pa-
per’s enduring features, something that one headline succinctly summarized
with the slogan: “Croatians—peasants; Jews—merchants.”46

ANTI-BOURGEOIS RHETORIC AND SOCIAL REFASHIONING

From the moment it came to power in April 1941 the Ustasha regime prom-
ised a social as well as a national revolution, with the politics of social trans-
formation an extremely important part of its ideological program: a new
era in which the former bourgeois “easy life, money, position, comforts of
all kinds, cars, lovers, all earthly goods [and] delights” would be replaced by
a revolutionary creed of work and sacrifice.47 Speaking on national radio in
May 1942, Aleksandar Seitz, an important Ustasha social theoretician, con-
firmed this. He stated that an important part of Ustasha principles included
the foundation of a new social system brought into being by the Ustasha state.
The Ustasha movement, he said, was revolutionary not just in the political
arena but in the social arena too.48 For the Ustasha movement, the national
revolution had been as much a rebellion against “foreign” capital and plu-
tocratic exploitation as political oppression. They looked back with anger at
the social injustice and poverty of the former Yugoslavia, where the poor of
Croatia had to “travel from house to house like wretches, looking for alms
and feeling that they were superfluous in their own homeland.”49 While a few
people had walked around in “the most expensive clothes, with silk shirts
and the most chic shoes,” the ordinary Croatian worker had been exploited.
Foreign employers had lived off the “blood and sweat” of the workers, leav-
ing behind them “tens of thousands of ill workers and wrecked families.” The
new state would be radically different: a state of the workers and peasants in
which they would hold the privileged positions. No longer would there be for-
eign employers who grew affluent while ordinary workers went hungry and
 Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste  191

thirsty: the workers would now control the factories. At the same time the
cultural, social, and economic life of peasants in the villages would be ele-
vated, and no peasant would be without home or hearth, go barefoot or na-
ked. Nor would he be allowed to remain uneducated or illiterate. The peasant
zadruga, the “pride and blessing of the Croatian people,” would be elevated
to “its old glory, doing away with the damaging laws of foreigners who began
to dismantle it.”50 Some radical regional Ustasha publications in Karlovac and
Banja Luka even advocated the eradication of money; they demanded that the
rich should be obliged to hand over their wealth and property for the benefit
of poor workers who were forced to labor “from the early morning to late at
night and are paid for only eight hours.”51
The origins of the Ustasha movement’s anti-bourgeois sentiments were
to be found in the Ustashas’ identity as a movement of workers and peasants
who had liberated their homeland from the chains of bourgeois ideology. Ac-
cording to Mijo Bzik, the founder members of the Ustasha émigré organiza-
tion had been Croatian workers in Europe, with “callused hands and faces
blackened by work,” who had endured “rifle butts, prisons, jails.”52 The pro-
totype of the Ustasha warrior was the simple peasant or worker. By contrast,
the enemies of the Ustasha regime were the affluent bourgeosie: the “arrogant
boss” or “sensible businessman or rich entrepreneur” whose “nose doesn’t ex-
tend out of their comfortable house”; young foolish girls “dressed up to the
nines” and dreaming of being film stars; vain bourgeois women spending
their days reading beauty magazines or attending fashion shows; and young
men with long mustaches like “Spanish toreadors,” silk dressing gowns, and
affected English manners. How could these bourgeois parasites, with such
disdain for the peasant and worker, ever be loyal to the Ustasha state? How
could they reconcile themselves to a regime in which a peasant was no longer
considered “someone who has to enter your office or factory from fear, who
does not tip his hat to you or even bow before you,” and who “does not work
for you or other similar ‘gentlemen’” but for the nation? For Ustasha theoreti-
cians like Bzik, who were part of the movement’s tough working faction, the
working man was to be idealized and placed on a pedestal. He embodied ev-
erything that was best about the Ustasha movement: comradeship, modesty,
and honesty. By contrast, the bourgeoisie were overeducated, untrustworthy,
opportunistic, and likely to betray Croatia if better times arrived.53
In an article recounting his visit to meet coal miners in June 1942 Mijo
Bzik eulogized the hard life and sacrifices of the coal miner. He argued that
in interwar Yugoslavia there had been very few in society who spared any
thought for “our honorable and suffering miners, these people who every day
spend eight hours in arduous and painstaking work, deep under the ground,
claustrophobic, wet and filthy, and frequently hungry.” The miner, working
 192  Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste

“deep in the belly of the earth,” had been forgotten by society in the interwar
period, particularly by the ruling elite, “sometimes from indifference, some-
times from fear that they would be showered with rocks or from a concern
not to snag their clothes or dirty their shoes.” The miner had been left to the
mercies of a company overseer, often a foreigner, or a “dangerous obsequious”
servant of the mine owner, who “at every turn persecuted the poverty-stricken
miner or sucked his blood.” Unlike the Yugoslav bourgeoisie, Ustashas did
not fear getting their hands dirty or going into mines to meet miners, and in
Ustasha Croatia, Bzik asserted, the miner would no longer be abandoned or
forgotten. For the Poglavnik and for every “honorable” Ustasha, the miner
would be seen as the most worthy and most highly valued worker. In fact, as
Bzik told the group of miners, in the future, Ustasha officials would regularly
go among the peasants and workers to understand their needs and problems.
By coming into contact with the “little man,” Ustasha officials would directly
get to know “our regions, our people, and our national needs.” These would
be sent back to the Poglavnik, “worker number one.” He would act to improve
the lives of ordinary working men and women. For their part, Bzik wrote, the
miners “limitlessly believed in the Poglavnik and in the Ustasha state,” and
all of them were prepared to “endure every possible sacrifice.” They would be
all the more prepared for sacrifice when they could see that “a new time has
come, that Ustasha Croatia has their interests at heart, because Ustasha offi-
cials sit in their trenches,”54
The professed working-class roots of the Ustasha movement were encap-
sulated in the Museum of the Ustasha Movement, which opened in June 1944.
A large part of the exhibition was given over to canonizing the working-class
origins of the movement among émigré Croatian workers in Europe in the
1930s, especially in Belgium. The exhibits showed that the Ustasha liberation
struggle did not just last from 6 to 10 April 1941 but had started from the in-
ception of the movement in 1929. This struggle could be seen in the flags and
banners of Ustasha organizations throughout the world, particularly among
workers in Europe and South America on display in the museum, with vari-
ous slogans and names written on them. There was only one aim in their
work: the liberation of Croatia. “In the entire museum what especially strikes
one is the toil of our European and American émigrés whose work is even
more significant if one takes into account that the majority of them are our
working men, in other words our little men, who set off into the world from
all regions of Croatia in search of bread and wages. Their selfless labors and
original creative work demonstrate the unbreakable will of our liberation
struggle in which all layers of society took part.”55
The Ustashas’ anti-bourgeois rhetoric amounted to more than a collec-
tion of revolutionary slogans or cultural symbols, however: they aimed for a
 Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste  193

social revolution leading to the creation of a workers’ and peasants’ utopia.

It is clear the regime took seriously the idea of a social revolution. A book
published in 1941 by the Main Ustasha Headquarters in Zagreb that aimed
to show how the Ustasha regime had brought social justice to Croatia stated
proudly that the Poglavnik had
settled accounts with liberalistic plutocracy, in other words the capitalist-
liberal socioeconomic system, which created the contemporary factory
proletariat and with the freedom of production did not liberate the worker
from those injustices that oppressed them, but transferred this freedom
into the hands of plutocrats, large business owners who bought workers like
every other good. We have settled accounts with this system. Never again
will Croatia return to this soulless looting system in which the main aim
was ever more profit, ever more money, and that at the price of the workers’
tears. Capitalism has been sentenced to death.

A subsequent chapter listed all the ways the Ustasha regime had created a
state fit for workers.56
The social revolution was understood as a national revolution, but this
was construed in two ways. In early 1942, the State Directorate for Regenera-
tion commissioned one of its economists, Ante Frlić, to carry out a survey on
the ownership of property in the new state. According to his findings, the na-
tion found itself in a difficult situation since most of the businesses were “in
the hands of the Jews, and many were in Serb hands too,” while the Croats
only owned the small businesses. The systemic imbalances of the economy
had been compounded, he wrote, by “a shortage of goods, waves of consum-
ers hoping to buy those goods, and a large plunge in prices and numbers of
businesses, all typical symptoms of any revolution.” Using evidence his fellow
economist Jozo Mrzljak had set out in an article in Gospodarstvo, he was able
to show that the Croats were “most weakly represented in commerce” among
all economic sectors. By contrast, the enemies of the state were proportion-
ately much better represented: Jews owned over 22 percent of businesses and
Serbs over 10 percent of all businesses and 20 percent of all financial institu-
tions. This explained the weakness and inefficiency of the economic sector in
the new state. What was necessary, Frlić wrote, was a new morally based eco-
nomic system that would address the needs of the people and the army. Thus
“foreign businesses” were placed in the hands of state-appointed commissars
from May 1941 onward, the Ustasha regime engaging in “intensive work” in
the nationalization of foreign companies through the State Directorate for
Regeneration and the appropriation of Serb and Jewish businesses and prop-
erty by the Bureau for the Office of Economic Renewal. In his report, Frlić was
anxious to stress both the social morality and the economic rationale under-
 194  Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste

pinning the regime’s nationalization process. While foreign businesses had

been taken into Croatian hands, a corporate economic system had been in-
troduced imposing strict limits on price increases since the authorities could
not look on indifferently while “the poorest layer of society remained without
bread and clothes and other goods necessary for life”; nor could they look
on while some people “enriched themselves at the expense of the nation.” Si-
multaneously, the State Directorate for Economic Regeneration, the successor
agency to the Office of Economic Renewal, established an economic police
force whose tasks included making sure that businesses were complying with
the law on prices and regulations regarding the registration of businesses. It
was on this basis that commissars were placed in all Serb and Jewish businesses
to prevent “the flight of capital and the smuggling of goods.”57 As an article
in the newspaper Nezavisna Hrvatska made clear, unlike the Jewish and Serb
plutocrats who had previously run these concerns, the newly appointed com-
missars for Serb and Jewish businesses were compelled by law to act morally
at all times: they were to refuse any kinds of financial inducements and bear
in mind that they were running the businesses in the name of the people
and as such to ensure that economic performance was maintained. Those
who intentionally sabotaged or otherwise damaged the business they were
overseeing could be imprisoned and fined a maximum of ten thousand di-
nars and in the most severe cases sentenced to death.58 Furthermore, as many
newspapers reports about the reselling of confiscated Jewish and Serb prop-
erty and goods to ordinary Croatian citizens emphasized, the fact that valu-
able items were often sold at very cheap prices meant that the man on the
street could afford them, something he would not have been able to do in the
previous capitalist era.59
Accompanying this campaign of economic destruction, regime propa-
ganda remorselessly identified both Jews and Serbs as traitorous enemies of
Croatian workers and peasants as well as the nation. In a speech in the Sa-
bor on 24 February 1942, the interior minister, Andrija Artuković, stated that
other people, above all Croatians, had been forced to serve the Jews in pursuit
of their “filthy” profits and “materialistic and grasping” ambitions. They had
turned workers against each other and, worst of all, impoverished the peas-
ant, “keeping him all the time in financial and economic dependence, in po-
litical disunity and cultural darkness, in order to be able in a given moment
to barter him as if he were goods on exchange.”60 This rhetoric was replicated
in numerous Ustasha publications. An article in Hrvatska krajina in Banja
Luka contrasted the wretched lives of starving and homeless workers, clerks
and artisans, dressed in tatty clothes and rubber boots, looking through the
hotel window at those “bourgeois dogs” and “vultures”—baptized and non-
baptized Jews—living it up with prostitutes and buying up “dozens” of
 Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste  195

houses. The confiscation and nationalization of Jewish property and its trans-
ferral to the control of Ustasha commissars would result in the transfer of all
property “stolen” from the nation by the Jews, and the state would use the
proceeds to help the poorest and to “equalize class differences.”61
Anti-Semitic brochures regularly used anecdotes to emphasize how Jew-
ish plutocrats had gained their obscene wealth and decadent, lavish lifestyles
through the sweat and toil of Croatian workers, with many of the stories high-
lighting the exploitation and abuse of female workers at the hands of mean,
grasping Jewish bosses.62 According to Vjekoslav Blaškov, a young official in
the Workers’ Chamber, the problem of the abuse of Croatian women at the
hands of Jewish employers had been known for some time. Many young girls
who had come from the countryside to be maids with Jewish families found
themselves “immediately on the streets.” This abuse justified the anti-Semitic
measures the regime had introduced, which included a ban on Jewish fami-
lies employing Croatian maids. Not only would it allow many young Aryan
women to make a contribution to the “significant bettering of our public
morals,” but it would also mean that the Jewish bourgeoisie could no longer
materially benefit from their degeneracy. Given that those most often seeking
social assistance were maids, with as many as ten thousand in Zagreb alone,
the ban on Jewish families employing maids would solve this social problem
based on “new just foundations.”63
Anti-bourgeois rhetoric also served an ideological function in legitimiz-
ing the persecution of Serbs, who were often characterized in class as well as
national terms. Throughout the summer of 1941, the regime’s anti-bourgeois
rhetoric coincided with the show trials of prominent Serb businessmen, bank
managers, tax officials, and community leaders on a number of corruption
and criminal charges, as well as conspiring against the new Croatian state.64
The writer and academic Franjo Perše argued that Jews in Yugoslavia, due to
their economic power and the friendship of the Jews and Serbs, had ensured
that the “sick illness of Jewish materialism” would become deeply rooted in
the Serb national consciousness, which shared “similar psychological char-
acteristics” with the “Jewish race.”65 The regime also argued that along with
Jewish influence, the Jewish mentality would also have to disappear. Those
who “deprived the workers of their justly deserved wages and with this plun-
dering built villas and accumulated millions in capital,” in other words those
“who are not Jews but work in the Croatian state like Jews,” would have to
embrace the conditions set out in the Ustasha Principles or face “extermina-
tion.”66 No wonder, then, that Miroslav Gal, writing in Hrvatski krugoval in
1941, argued that with the expulsion of the Serbs and the Jews from economic
life, the Croatian worker was entering a golden period. Previously, the worker
had been dependent on the goodwill of Jewish owners, but he “knew how
 196  Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste

much he could achieve with his own sweat and calluses if the Jew were elimi-
nated from the national economy! Finally the hour has come, and the Jew is
no more, and the Croat worker advances with great strides and is happy.”67
However, the social revolution was also understood as a national revolu-
tion in the sense that the Ustashas believed that there was a special Croatian
road to socialism, distinct from Marxism. Its leading theoreticians argued
that communist ideologues since Marx had overwhelmingly been members
of the urban bourgeoisie with little understanding of the peasant and worker.
How could bourgeois socialists who wore workers’ caps or adorned them-
selves in peasant clothes even though they had never so much as lifted a ham-
mer or “set foot inside a peasant house” possibly organize a peasants’ and
workers’ state? This was why their socialism was so “brutal.”68 By contrast,
Ustasha activists, poverty-stricken and hungry men from the peasantry and
the working classes, would be able to introduce a humane form of social-
ism. Under its chief ideologue, Aleksandar Seitz, Croatian socialism aimed to
place the means of production in the hands of the peasant and introduce an
economy based on corporatist and syndicalist principles. Consequently, all
trade unions were subsumed into one main syndicate, the Main Alliance of
Syndicates (Glavni savez staliških i drugi postrojbi—GSS), led by Seitz, and
all large industry was taken into the hands of the state. The nationalist HRS
chamber, led by social theorists close to the Ustasha movement, was sub-
sumed into the GSS, although formal recognition only came later.
Despite the similarities, Croatian socialism was not simply a carbon copy
of Italian fascist corporatism: it attempted to address specifically national is-
sues. It attempted to create a psychic unity among the peasant in the village,
the worker in the town, intellectuals in garrets, white-collar workers in of-
fices, and warriors on the battlefield: they were all workers in the national
community. For Seitz, writing in 1942, Croatian socialism was a political sys-
tem constructed on the idea of the new working man, “whether a worker with
the plough, a worker with the hammer, a worker with the pen, as well as those
who, with a gun in their hand, defend the homeland.” The bourgeois citizen
of interwar Europe, on the other hand, represented a “socially damaging op-
ponent” who needed to disappear. As Croatian socialism meant the cleansing
of the soul, revolutionary times demanded the “internal renewal of the Croa-
tian man,” which could only be implemented by men imbued with the Croa-
tian socialist ideal.69 As an article in Ustaša explained: “The Ustasha ideology
is not just a revolutionary ideology restricted to intervals in which the whole
of its liberation program is carried out; it is also of lasting importance and
will remain so even when the revolutionary part of its program has been real-
ized. The Ustasha ideology is an all-encompassing notion that, in its breadth,
encompasses the nation as a community, with no divisions, which comprise
 Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste  197

an organism and living essence. The Ustasha-peasant, the Ustasha-worker,

the Ustasha-soldier, the Ustasha-intellectual: all these comprise a community
in the framework of the state and the Ustasha program.”70
At the heart of Croatian socialism was the relationship among ownership,
work, and the national community. Unlike capitalism, Croatian socialism
contended that work was not a private matter, but the source of all economic
worth and the property of the national community. While under socialism
the right to ownership remained one of the foundations on which national
economic life was based, socialism, unlike liberalism, rejected the concept of
private ownership and instead viewed private property as a public good for
which the owner was responsible to the nation and the state. As far as Seitz
was concerned, the peasant relationship toward the family and the village
was an example of “harmonious relations between the demands of the indi-
vidual and the community,” and in the village Croatian socialism saw “the
biological foundation of the nation.” Economically, at least, Croatia would
resemble a collective peasant zadruga.71 Nevertheless, Croatian socialism was
designed to address specific social problems, in particular the chronic dispar-
ities of wealth and widespread poverty.
One of Seitz’s acolytes, Stjepan Tomičić, a twenty-three-year-old journal-
ist, explained in Spremnost that Croatian socialism differed from Soviet so-
cialism and Marxism in that it did not involve control by the state but rather
ownership by the national community. While the state would create social
and economic institutions and organizations providing initiatives, arbitra-
tion, and frameworks for social and economic change, these would be led—
in the spirit of socialist reform—by the national community. Nonetheless,
he also argued that socialism and nationalism were linked, noting the wide-
spread appeal of socialism around the world. Society was an organic con-
cept and knew hierarchies outside of itself, just like nationalism knew borders
between itself and other societies. As with socialism, in the modern nation-
alist society all classes and estates worked together for the good of the na-
tional community as a whole.72 Addressing the living standards and working
conditions of peasants and workers was an obvious target for social politics.
Ustasha ideologues argued that in interwar Yugoslavia, the Croatian peasant
and worker had been ignored and the people of Croatia impoverished by the
cruel economic and political programs of the Serb and Jewish bourgeoisie.
According to this interpretation, the enduring legacy of the Yugoslav state
for the Croatian man on the street had been not just political and national
persecution, but also homelessness, exploitation, low wages in factories and
mines, slum housing, starvation wages, and general impoverishment. In the
journal of Ustasha workers, Zdravko Belamarić, from Sarajevo, recalled the
housing situation for the ordinary worker in Sarajevo. In the entire twenty-
 198  Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste

three years of the Yugoslav state “not one state public building was built in the
city, except some banks,” with most workers surviving on what amounted to
slave-wage salaries. Workers’ rented accommodation was susceptible to dis-
ease and dirt; over half of workers’ dwellings possessed only one room and
a kitchen, and over one-third of workers lived in one room with their whole
family. The statistics were stark: for every one thousand children born in a
one-room flat, nearly nine hundred died in childhood.73 The transformation
of workers’ lives, including a mass building program to improve the deplor-
able living conditions many workers were allegedly forced to endure, was one
of the stated social priorities of the new regime and of Croatian socialism.74
Almost immediately after coming to power, the Ustasha regime began
the construction of workers’ colonies that would provide modern affordable
housing for the masses. On 29 April 1941, the Ministry for Social Care intro-
duced a law that put aside one hundred million dinars for a building project
aimed at the mass construction of homes for Croatian workers. In exchange
for a new home with modern amenities, a small garden, and communal lei-
sure facilities, worker families would pay a small mortgage fee and become
home owners. Under the law the mayor of Zagreb was supposed to liaise with
municipal authorities in towns and cities with large worker populations and
agree on the selection of a commissariat that would oversee the project, decid-
ing where to locate the homes, how to build them, and which designs should
be used. On 23 May 1941 the Ministry of Health established the Office for the
Construction of Homes for Croatian Worker Families. The office, led by a
director, the architect Ivo Bulić, oversaw all the technical, financial, and ad-
ministrative issues of the colony project, while the commissariat, which acted
as an advisory group to the office, had to include representatives of all towns
and cities where workers constituted a significant proportion of the popula-
tion, as well as workers’ representatives.75 The foundation stone for the first
twenty-eight-house workers’ colony, the Ante Starcević, Father of the Home-
land Workers’ Colony in Donja Dubrava, was laid by the Poglavnik on 9 June
1941. In the presence of Ivo Petrić, Ivo Bulić, Tomo Biljan, a representative
of the Zagreb branch of the Croatian Workers’ Office, and hundreds of local
workers, he expressed the wish that the foundation stone would be a “sign of
Ustasha consciousness” and the colony a “stamp of the new Ustasha system.”
In subsequent months the foundation stones of other workers’ colonies were
laid in Sisak, Capraga, and Sarajevo, and the office announced plans for simi-
lar workers’ colonies in Varaždin, Osijek, Luka, and Zagreb.76
Although party newspapers and workers’ journals often gave the impres-
sion that all workers were entitled to apply for these houses and would ben-
efit from the house-building program, in fact the eligibility rules rewarded
social and ideological conformity. In December 1942 the Ministry of Health
 Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste  199

and Social Welfare introduced new more stringent legislation setting out pre-
cisely who was entitled to apply for these houses. Essentially, workers had to
compete for a house against all other workers, according to strict criteria. All
applicants had to be citizens of the Independent State of Croatia, to have be-
longed to the working classes for at least five years, to be employed in the vi-
cinity of the homes being applied for, to have large families with children, to
be “morally and physically healthy,” to lead “orderly, frugal, respectable, and
conscientious lives according to the rules of the Croatian national commu-
nity,” and to be the owner of no significant assets. If a worker and his family
were successful in the competition and were able to secure one of the houses,
their rental agreement ran in the first instance for three years; at the end of
this period, if they had adhered to the terms of the rental agreement, they
were eligible to buy the house outright. On the other hand, the Ministry could
rescind the rental agreement if the worker did not pay the exact rent on time,
if he or his family violated the rules of the workers’ colony or did not respect
the rental property, or if the worker or members of his household engaged in
“drunkenness or an unworthy lifestyle” or violated the “honor or prosper-
ity” of the Independent State of Croatia. The social and moral eligibility crite-
ria for home ownership were mirrored in the architecture of the houses too.
They were designed in the Heimatstil style, familiar from workers’ homes in
Nazi Germany, aiming to combine the latest modern concepts about living
(e.g., electricity, running water, and sanitation) with a traditional peasant aes-
thetic. For example, the first workers’ settlement, the Ante Starčević Work-
ers’ Colony in Donja Dubrava, on the outskirts of Zagreb, was completed at
the same time as a tram-line extension connecting Dubrava to the center of
Zagreb. Yet the design for the settlement also envisaged a communal garden,
as well as a residential park for relaxation and meetings. In the middle of the
park was a statue depicting a worker on vacation.77
This vision of social utopia and economic justice ran parallel to the re-
gime’s program of economic destruction and physical eradication against
national enemies. On 18 April 1941, the official state gazette Narodne novine
published a short law ordering the confiscation of all land and property be-
longing to Serb settlers who had moved to Croatia after 1918 as a reward for
volunteering for the Serb army. The Ministry for Social Care arbitrarily de-
clared their homes and land state property, stating its intention to distrib-
ute confiscated property to deserving Croatian peasants. The former owners
were refused any compensation, effectively reducing them to homelessness.78
Later, in summer 1941, this program was extended with the foundation of the
State Directorate for Regeneration, a special department charged with over-
seeing the mass deportation of Serbs and expriopriation of their property.
The directorate’s aim, to be carried out by its own dedicated militia, was the
 200  Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste

deportation of the Serb population, including “colonists” and settlers, and na-
tionalization of their assets for the benefit of impoverished Croat peasants and
workers and the social regeneration of the nation. At around the same time,
the Ministry for Social Care, under Jožo Dumandždić, established an Insti-
tute for Colonization whose stated purpose was to settle Croatian peasants on
land confiscated by the state from nonpeasants—mostly Serbs—and to look
after the health and the educational and economic needs of the new settlers.
The institute also employed policy cadres to analyze agricultural reform pro-
posals and their possible financial implications and to more widely promote
the achievements of “internal colonization” as a means of revitalizing peasant
life. Following the establishment of the directorate and the Institute for Colo-
nization, they were inundated with applications from young anthropologists,
social scientists, and students eager to play a role in the social transforma-
tion of the Croatian countryside. Their idealism was misplaced, however. In
fact, little of the expropriated property and land was distributed to struggling
Croatian peasants and workers. Most of it ended up in the ownership of lo-
cal Ustasha officials, their relatives, and their supporters, contributing little
to national regeneration, the revitalization of the countryside, or economic
justice.79
Nonetheless, the mass construction of workers’ homes had an ideologi-
cal as well as utilitarian purpose. True, the building program did prove the
regime’s commitment to ensuring that Croatian workers, in a workers’ state,
enjoyed the same standards of housing and leisure time as the middle classes;
with light modern kitchens, front gardens, electricity, and cultural and sport-
ing amenities, these large-scale settlements, named after Croatian historical
icons or Ustasha martyrs, gave workers a welcome taste of the “good life” and
helped to inculcate state loyalty and ideological conformity. Workers who
purchased homes on the newly completed Mijo Babić Estate in Sisak or the
Eugen Kvaternik Workers’ Colony in Capraga in the summer of 1941, for ex-
ample, must have been grateful not only for their new homes but also for the
children’s parks, school, swimming pool, and sports pitches, all features of
the new estates. However, the communal vision of the estates and the range of
facilities that they provided also allowed the regime to refashion a new kind
of cultured healthy and educated worker who would appreciate the ethos of
common work and selflessness for the good of the national community.
The Ministries of Health and Social Care also introduced a range of other
social measures designed to improve the lives of workers. As early as 29 April
1941, the minister of health, Ivo Petrić, announced the establishment of the
first “social stations”—social centers providing support and advice for home-
less people in cities looking for accommodation. These social stations, which
were first established in Zagreb and then in other cities across the state, were
 Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste  201

also characterized by a strong element of social control. By providing home-

less people with accommodation, the regime, frequently nervous about spon-
taneous gatherings or autonomously mobile populations, could keep citizens’
movements under surveillance. That these stations also advised unmarried
couples who had illegitimate children how they could legitimize their unions
and offspring, one of the many moral issues the regime was concerned about,
demonstrated the ideologically coercive agenda that informed these osten-
sible social-advice centers.80 Yet despite the impetus for moral conformity,
social control, and surveillance, utopian considerations also played a role
in the wide array of social reforms introduced in the formative years of the
state. Looking back in 1943, the Ustasha workers’ journal listed the many so-
cial advances that the regime had introduced to improve the lives of ordinary
male and female workers. Drago Cerovac, an official in the Ministry for So-
cial Care, wrote that the center of the regime’s social policy had been driven
by the desire for a new social politics in the spirit of the Ustasha Principles of
1931, including laws, statutes, and orders that ensured that no worker would
be homeless; that workers would be paid sufficient wages to ensure they could
purchase more than the bare necessities; family and child benefits; protec-
tions for working-class youth and apprentices; social security payments; pro-
tection for domestic staff; unemployment benefits; and the establishment of
workers’ kitchens in cities such as Zagreb and Sarajevo. In particular, Cero-
vac boasted that the payments introduced by the state for the care of children
were more generous and more frequently paid than those in many other simi-
lar countries, like Slovakia and Italy.81
The regime also ensured that the traditional workers’ holiday of 1 May
was marked as a day to honor the labor and solidarity of workers, something
denied them, they pointed out, in the former liberal capitalist system. A leaf-
let produced by the Varaždin branch of the HRS for the May Day celebrations
and distributed by the union on 1 May called on all workers to celebrate the
“honorable and sublime” labor of all classes. Ante Pavelić, as their chief, had
“elevated our work and given us recognition for our work as brothers with
guns in their hands on the battlefields defend our sacred ancestors’ hearths,
our national culture, and our sanctity and honor. Meanwhile, we in the back-
ground dedicate our honorable work in battle for our sacred and state rights.”
Therefore, the workers’ holiday would be celebrated “worthily in all its possi-
bilities,” with “honor and respect for our respectable and honorable Croatian
work!”82 What could workers expect to see on this day of rest and celebration?
In Bjelovar, as elsewhere in the state, the promotional posters announced
that all factories and enterprises would be closed on this day, but workers
would be paid as usual. The day would provide an opportunity for factory
bosses and workers together to celebrate class harmony and the social justice
 202  Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste

brought into being by the corporate economic system and Croatian social-
ism. In Bjelovar, the cultural and agitprop offerings included a performance
of workers’ anthems by the Workers’ Academy choir, including Ivan Zajc’s
“Radnička himna” (Worker’s Hymn), and a football match between the lo-
cal HRS football team, HRS-Graničar, and the Bjelovar army school. The day
concluded with a concert celebrating in song, dance, and theater the contri-
bution of workers to the national liberation struggle and the construction of
the new state.83 The day also included a screening of The Grapes of Wrath,
which, as Vjekoslav Blaškov, reviewing it in Spremnost, pointed out, was less
a film about the desperation of the Depression and more an indictment of the
cruel injustice of American capitalism, in which “skyscrapers sprout up like
mushrooms after the rain” and “powerful magnates accumulate millions and
millions of dollars,” while “thousands and thousands of healthy and strong
men have no income, no work.”84
Inevitably this celebration, ideologues stressed, had nothing in common
with the Marxist idea of proletarian revolution, which had preyed on the iso-
lation of a certain type of worker: separated from family life, thrust into the
big anonymous city, left in insecure working conditions, and performing
work without any feelings of pride. In the capitalist era, when he had been
denied all feelings of respect and a cult of materialism had held sway, it was
no wonder he had become bitter. Unlike Marxism, which separated the strug-
gle of the proletariat from the national struggle and the national community,
Croatian socialism was true to the values of original early nineteenth-
century socialism, which envisaged building socialism within the national
community and not instead of it or above it. For Ustasha theoretician Milivoj
Magdić, a former Marxist activist, unlike Marxism, Croatian socialism saw
the realization of socialism as a national aim for all classes and groups; the
idea of the proletariat divorced workers from wider society and was simply
another manifestation of liberal “social individualism.” Unlike communist
trade unions and parties, in which the high-ranking officials had great power
and the ordinary working masses almost none and in which 1 May was the
embodiment of hatred against the bourgeoisie, under the Ustasha regime 1
May would be reclaimed so that it symbolized “the renewal of the national
community and its reconstruction on contemporary principles.” The worker
would play a leading role in this renewal, and he and the city dweller would
be joined in common work for the national community. The liberal era’s cult
of “the accumulation of material possessions” would be replaced in the “new
nationalist Europe” by the “cult of labor,” not only as a means of maintaining
living standards but also as a philosophy of life.85
In the movement’s journal, Ustaša, working-class members of the move-
ment welcomed the social revolution. Comparing the situation now to the
 Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste  203

twenty years workers had spent in the Yugoslav state, characterized by un-
employment lines, homelessness, and hunger, one Ustasha worker, writing
in the Party journal in September 1941, opined that the lives of workers had
been transformed. The regime, led by the supreme leader, was building de-
cent houses for the workers and leading it to full equality with the nation’s
other classes.86 According to Mirko Bilić, another young Ustasha worker, the
high incidence of support for the movement among émigré Croatian workers
demonstrated that the Croatian worker rejected the idea of a class war, link-
ing his rights to the national struggle. “The Croatian worker, by his feelings,
was always national because he could not imagine not having his own state,
his own Croatian national government, his movement that will once and for
all destroy the Jewish-Masonic products: capitalism and Marxism. Over-
whelmingly, the Croat worker comes from the village, and therefore from the
healthy national trunk of Croatia, which brought him up with high national
and moral principles, which are its own state and family, in other words the
most healthy foundations of an ordered state.”87 How accurately these com-
ments reflected the opinions of workers outside of the movement is open to
debate. Nevertheless, the Ustasha movement’s claim to be a party of workers
and peasants was grounded in demographic fact. As Bilić stated, the Ustasha
movement had drawn into its ranks large numbers of workers and peasants,
both in Croatia and among émigré worker communities in Europe; outside of
Croatia it had relatively few educated middle-class members. One of the first
initiatives of the Ustasha movement after its founding in the early 1930s—a
war against illiteracy in its ranks—was a reflection of the working-class and
peasant bias of its rank-and-file membership. At the same time, it was also ev-
idence of a wider campaign in the movement to elevate the lives of the worker
and peasant.
At the same time that the regime wanted to elevate the lives of its work-
ing-class and peasant members, it also wanted to instill in them respect for
the lives of its intellectual workers, while teaching those same intellectual
workers about the value of manual work. With this aim in mind the introduc-
tion of compulsory work service seemed an ideal device for the facilitation of
greater social cohesion and came to form an important part of the system of
“Croatian socialism” after the second revolution for culture, taste, and social
conscience was launched at the beginning of 1942. Obviously, from the re-
gime’s point of view the service also provided a ready source of cheap labor.
According to the draft law of early 1942, the importance of the work service,
which was compulsory for all those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-
five, lay not so much in the practical work that resulted from it but in the val-
ues with which it inculcated privileged urban youth, in particular. While the
second revolution involved elevating the poorest layer of society, the Ustasha
 204  Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste

movement’s mission to harmonize and equalize class and social differences

also meant that it aimed to teach the young Croatian elite about the life of the
ordinary worker and peasant. In this sense, then, the work service was envis-
aged as a “school for the education of Croatian youth in the national Ustasha
spirit,” harmonizing class differences, teaching youth that all work was hon-
orable and that “the manual worker is no more and no less worthy than the
intellectual worker, as they are both necessary and worthy members of the
nation and state.” All young adults had to undergo this training, and the law
and the background research documents developed by social theorists and
officials in the central GUS stressed that the children of high-ranking offi-
cials, bureaucrats, successful businessmen, and prominent members of the
movement would not be able to escape this service. Manual work, they ar-
gued, was to be held “sacred” by them and would teach them to be “children
of the Croatian soil.”88

NEW CROATIAN CINEMA AND OTHER UTOPIAN PROJECTS

Could a nationalist regime that idealized the village and the simple life of the
peasant bring modernity to national life, and if so, how? For Ustasha lead-
ers like Viktor Gutić, the struggle for modernity could not be separated from
the campaign for national purification. His ambitious plans for the trans-
formation of Banja Luka from a “small regional town into a real city of the
future”—into the state capital—were to be accomplished through the con-
struction of new roads and railway lines, the redesign of streets, and a public
building program; they thus relied on the transformation of public attitudes
as much as architecture and infrastructure. Specifically, it was necessary to
rid the city of all the customs that left the impression that the city was a me-
dieval casaba, “a common eastern-Balkan small town that in no way belongs
in the European milieu.” Standing in the way of modernization was much
that had to disappear. Anyone who walked along the streets of Banja Luka
could see many unhygienic and uncivilized remnants of “the old times”—
such as roast lamb being sold in the streets, covered by flies and dirt—that
“besmirched” the beautiful name of the city and convinced visitors that “we
are a primitive people who, owing to their conservatism, don’t belong in the
community of progressive European peoples.”89 However, an important part
of this process was, as Gutić had infamously stated in May 1941, “the grandi-
ose work for the cleansing of the Croatian Bosnian krajina of all undesirable
elements,” especially Banja Luka, involving the introduction of the “most en-
ergetic and harsh measures.” These “elements” were to be “destroyed” so that
soon “all trace of them will be wiped out.”90
But it was not always as simple as this, as far as the movement’s ideologues
were concerned: for them, modernization was a far wider concept. Although
 Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste  205

some ideologues rejected the kind of modern mentality exemplified by ur-

ban Yugoslav culture, they did not reject modernism and modern technology
themselves. On the contary, they saw modern ideas about society, science,
and mass communication not just as ideal tools for conveying their messages
to the nation, but as a means of advancing and elevating life, especially in the
villages. What they were really opposing was a set of bourgeois values and
behaviors that they associated with the worst aspects of city life. The sociolo-
gist Milan Ivšić described Yugoslavia as a corrupt democracy brought on the
backs of suffering peasants. The national revolution of 1941 had liberated the
Croatian nation not only physically, from Serb rule, but also intellectually,
from “democracy, freemasonry, and capitalist corruption.” The concept of in-
dividual rights, with its “selfishness” and “profiteering,” would be replaced by
the ethos of collective rights. Those exponents of selfish capitalism who had
done little work but had managed to build “villas and palaces and ordered
luxurious apartments” would be destroyed. Much of this was also a veiled
attack on a particular kind of liberal bourgeois intellectual who abjured
nationalism in favor of criticizing the regime. Ivšić poured scorn on bour-
geois parasites who “daily waste time in cafés dawdling and chattering, in
intrigues, in great political discussions and criticism—those who live off the
living flesh of the Croatian nation and, like bloodsuckers, suck its blood.”91
In his speech to the Croatian Sabor in February 1942, the Poglavnik had also
identified those who held these urban values as a malign phenomenon that
needed to be eradicated from the new state, comparing their lack of resolve to
the hardiness of the suffering Croatian peasant. To wild applause, he talked
derisively of “those who sit in warm rooms, who have cakes and full glasses
of wine, sitting under the protection of the armed forces and the police, and
then dare to criticize the work of those who day and night stand on guard and
carry out their duty. They criticize even though they know nothing of what
the Croatian peasant in Stolac and Hercegovina is suffering; they don’t know,
and they don’t care, as they are only interested in whether the curfew hour in
Zagreb is eleven o’clock in the evening or twelve.”92 For many members of the
movement the city remained suspiciously liberal, morally degenerate, a cos-
mopolitan cesspit of racial impurity. Ustasha newspapers regularly attacked
the city as the center of the “Jewish-foreign soul,” the “mongrel Serb-Cincar-
gypsy-Armenian race,” and “Serb-Cincar-gypsy mentality.” In order to pu-
rify the nation, the Croatian masses should look to the example of the village,
which had not been infiltrated by “foreign-Jewish” blood. Peasants should be
encouraged to migrate to the city and to renew the biology of the population
of the city, “in whose veins flows ever more foreign-Jewish blood.” Urban ar-
eas could be renewed only by new blood from the villages, untouched as they
were by Jewry, and by the elimination of Jewish blood from “the cells of our
 206  Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste

national organism” so that the Jews could not infect public life again. Only in
this way could the nation be regenerated.93
On the other hand, social theorists felt it was important that not all as-
pects of the city and modernity were rejected. There had to be a synthesis
between the modernity of the city and the traditional aspirations of the vil-
lage: together, they would form an “organic” whole. While the city benefited
from the emigration of peasants in the form of what the sociologist Eugen
Sladović called “streams of new fresh blood, new national strength, and
healthy new impulses,” the material wealth of the city, as well as its experts
in the shape of agromonists, teachers, craftsmen, veterinarians, doctors, and
scientists, would aid the village. Demagogues in the years before 10 April, in
the name of saving the identity of the village, “confidently asserted that the
village would lose its uniqueness if it took advantage of the tastes of the city,
that is to say the material and means of modern technology. As if our peas-
ant would be of lesser national consciousness if he had a tractor instead of a
plough!” But the truth was that the village had to progress and therefore had
to have railway lines, clinics, post offices, and agricultural equipment.94 Usta-
sha ideologues also recognized the limited aspirations and values that village
life could provide and the role that the city could play in preventing the vil-
lage from becoming closed. A professor writing in the student journal Alma
Mater Croatica in 1941 argued, for example, that it was particularly important
for youths from the village who had come to Zagreb to study to imbibe the
city’s cultural riches. In this way they would be “in the provinces pioneers not
only of technical but also of cultural progress, lifting them above the banality
of parochial society.”95
The Ustasha regime was under no illusions that the village was in decay.
Franjo Lačen admitted that the social reality in the villages was “very diffi-
cult,” and he wrote with disdain of those who romanticized the village and
“popularized the idea that life in our villages was ideal.” Of all the layers of
society, he continued, the village had developed most slowly because daily life
was monotonous. Peasants were not accustomed to the idea of social change
and therefore were less inclined to embrace not only the superficiality of city
life but also its innovations. As much as the cities imported degenerate ideas
to the villages and impoverished them through economic exploitation, Lačen
insisted that peasants would have to end their hostility to modern technology.
Only by using the most technologically advanced equipment, such as tractors
and mechanized ploughs, could the village be reborn. From its foundations,
the village would be remade, “from houses, farming buildings, to the most
modern peasant offices and schools.”96 Despite this, with the regime ever wor-
ried about the dangers of “alien” values finding their way into the village, this
modernization program would also ensure that the peasant would be enriched
 Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste  207

and educated not through the efforts of distant cosmopolitans importing “dis-
torted culture and morals,” but through peasants and Ustashas working in
harmony to halt the decay of the village and eradicate backwardness.97
Life in the cities could also be elevated through modern technology. Be-
tween 1941 and 1945, the regime’s social ministries, first and foremost the
Department for Construction in the Main Directorate for Public Works, for-
mulated grandiose and utopian schemes to transform the capital, Zagreb.
One such plan envisaged the creation of an underground railway system,
communal workers’ homes built in skyscrapers, and huge modern thorough-
fares; another envisaged the creation of whole new quarters to transform liv-
ing and commerce in the city. In perhaps the most ambitious plan, publicized
in May 1944, the result of a nationwide competition looking at the “city of
the future,” a group of architects planned to completely redesign Zagreb with
the construction of four railway stations across the mouth of the River Sava;
the building of apartments for office workers, peasant market gardeners, and
artisans; and the creation of manmade parks and beaches. These would be
complemented by wide streets, boulevards, and a giant central square sur-
rounded by monumental buildings, where public ceremonies and rallies
could take place. The design also included the construction of a bridge on
which would be built a railway station surrounded by a stadium, a foot-
ball pitch, and an airport for civilian planes.98 The designs for new Ustasha
centers, sanatoriums, workers’ flats, and student dorms were futuristic and
experimental, emulating the functionalism of 1920s and 1930s European ar-
chitects such as Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Josip Seissel.99
Even churches aimed to synthesize modernist tendencies, placing religious
images in a contemporary contex, and new churches combined ancient no-
tions of Christianity with avant-garde and functionalist architectural tastes
and tendencies; one example was the church of St. Anthony of Padova, built
in Zagreb in 1944.100 Clerical and Catholic organizations also embraced mo-
dernity in architecture. For example, in a letter from the Committee for the
Construction of the Basilica of the Mother of God of Lourdes in Zvonimir
Street, asking for donations of 5.5 million kuna to realize its completion, the
committee stressed the avant-garde nature of the building as one of its lead-
ing strengths. The basilica might solemnly aim to be a sacred and “monumen-
tal temple,” incorporating in its design a “national mausoleum” for eminent
Croatians, but it was absolutely of the new society: the committee’s office was
deliberately situated in “one of the most modern parts” of the city, and the
basilica designed by Josip Plečnik, a renowned modernist architect. In addi-
tion, the structure was to be completed with the assistance of the state’s best
young artists, whose paintings and frescoes would adorn its walls. Church
architecture, the letter concluded, required the “newest and most modern”
 208  Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste

designs if church buildings were to renew themselves. Whether the commit-

tee genuinely believed in avant-garde architectural designs or embraced them
as the most effective means of raising substantial amounts of capital for the
completion of its project, it seems clear that modernist sensibilities were in
the ascendant in the Ustasha state.101
No wonder, then, that, writing in 1942, the architectural critic Tihomir
Stahuljak could maintain that the utopian visions of young Croat architects
in the interwar period had been limitless: Corbusier, for many of them, “was
the point of departure rather than the aim.” For the generation that had come
to prominence between 1925 and 1930, many of their social architectural de-
signs, with their pioneering nature, had remained only on paper due to the
prevailing “terrible” political climate.102 The revolutionary state brought into
being by the Ustasha movement offered these radical architects the opportu-
nity to make their visions reality. From the start, architecture was as much
about the social transformation of space as it was about aesthetics. Architects’
plans for workers’ settlements anticipated electrification, communal cafés,
and swimming pools. Agencies and ministries such as the Ministry for So-
cial Care, the Ministry for Physical Education and the Directorate for Public
Works also announced plans to build public sports complexes and swimming
pools in the state’s cities and towns as well as the villages so that workers
could relax after a hard day’s labor. Architects’ designs were engineered to
change habits and lifestyles as well as spaces.103
Of course, not every architect or architectural critic was enamored of
modernist tendencies, and conservative critics and designers like Marijan
Božin harshly criticized it for its cosmopolitan, anti-nationalist aesthetics.
Writing in Hrvatska smotra in 1942, Božin launched a full-scale attack on
modernist architecture. Lacking any discernible national character or monu-
mentalism, he maintained, its aesthetic uniformity and rationalizing tenden-
cies did not recognize the spiritual life of the individual. Most important, its
cosmopolitan ideology, its “most important principle,” claimed to see no dif-
ferences among races, nations, and cultures. It was this guiding philosophy
against which today nations with “healthy national aspirations are fighting
with all means at their disposal.” In fact, he insisted, this imported architec-
ture not only was alien to the Croatian national soul but had been imported
with the “aim of suffocating the national artistic yearnings of the Croatian
nation, wishing to eradicate the evidence of Croatia’s suitability for indepen-
dence.” While under various occupationist regimes, including Yugoslavia,
Croatia had never enjoyed the opportunity to find its own architectural ex-
pression, now that it had been victorious in its liberation struggle, Croatian
architects should emphasize the “artistic and spiritual potential” of the Croa-
tian nation. The time was past when “a Greek Orthodox church constructed
 Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste  209

in the Byzantine style” should stand in the “most beautiful square in Zagreb”
with the aim of stressing the unity of Croats and Serbs through the impo-
sition of Serb culture. While there were still “visible reminders” of the past
mistakes of Croatian architects, “with which we are confronted daily on our
streets,” the nation stood at the threshold of a new era in which an “array of
palaces and first-rate buildings” would be constructed in Croatian towns and
cities, truly representing the spirit of the Croatian nation.104
By no means all architects who developed projects for communal living
embraced modernism. One of the most influential architects in the Ustasha
state was Aleksandar Freudenreich, an architect in the Main Directorate of
Public Works. He advocated a return to a rural and “national” form of design
that, he argued, would be more appropriate for the national community be-
ing constructed in the Ustasha state. Freudenreich’s ideas about a national ar-
chitecture were heavily influenced by the Heimatstil movement in Germany,
championed by architects like Paul Schultz-Naumberg and Paul Bonatz. Like
Heimatstil, Freudenreich’s ideas combined organic blood and soil principles
with modern ideas about living. Through architecture he aimed to realize
the Ustasha state’s vision of a synthesis between the city and the countryside,
bringing modern ideas about living to the countryside and the “authentic”
aesthetics of the countryside to the city.
Although unlike Heimatstil architects, Freudenreich did not specifi-
cally envisage his peasant-inspired dwellings as venues for mass ideological
events, he did develop a set of construction principles governing the design
of “buildings for communal experiences.”105 In his guide to the design and
construction of communal buildings, Prosvjetna ognjište (Educational Cen-
ters), Freudenreich explained that Ustasha social and national ideology was
one of the key influences behind his educational centers: the idea of the in-
dividual as a cell—in time, space, and blood—of the wider organic national
community. He envisaged an authentic Croatian national art that should be
planted in even the most distant parts of the nation. Idealizing the Croatian
peasant, complete and close to nature and the land, in contrast to the artifi-
cial nature of the city dweller, he argued that national construction should
be intimately tied to peasant and village life and resist foreign influence as
an enemy of this regenerated national architecture. On the basis of these aes-
thetic and ideological principles, throughout 1942 and 1943, Freudenreich de-
signed a number of educational and social centers. But his perspective was
embraced by an established and emerging modernist generation of Croa-
tian architects, a number of whom contributed to Prosvjetna ognjišta. More
important, across the state the influence of his architectural guidelines for
communal living and working in the national community were evident in
numerous building projects initiated by the Department of Public Works: in
 210  Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste

engineering, mining and agricultural polytechnics, syndicate cultural halls,

Ustasha training academies, economic institutes and think tanks, schools for
peasant economy, and a range of government buildings. Despite the tradi-
tionalism of Freudenreich’s ideas, the modernist tendency was apparent too.
His blueprints for educational centers, as well as those of his many imitators,
almost always limited their “organic” aesthetic values to the exterior shell of
the building. Inside, they were as functionalist as the most avant-garde Le
Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe construction.106 However, it was celluloid
that offered the most exciting possibilities for social experimentation. True,
the Ustasha movement opposed cinema’s cosmopolitan and commercial ar-
chetypes: in newspapers, the cinemagoer was often caricatured as a frivolous
bourgeois young female who had imbibed not just Yugoslav but also Ameri-
can culture in its entirety.107 But they were going to create a new cinema. In
1941, like all other businesses, cinemas were taken into state ownership. Many
of these cinemas had been run by American studio affiliates owned by Jews
and Serbs. They were now stripped of their businesses, with no compensa-
tion. In the same year, the first state department for cinematic art, the Com-
missariat for Film, was established, initially within the Ministry of National
Education and later in the Main Directorate for Propaganda.108 At the same
time, the State Film Institute, Hrvatski slikopis (Croatia Film), was founded.
Headed by the former avant-garde writer Marijan Mikac, the institute had six
departments, including a department for mobile cinema, a monthly journal,
and three cinemas. Funded by the state, it was exempt from tax regulations.109
Initially, the majority of the films made in the new Croatian cinema were
news and documentary films. Apart from a regular weekly newsreel, “Croatia
in Words and Pictures,” propaganda films about the Poglavnik, the new state,
and the Ustasha movement were produced. Some of these educational and
documentary films won international awards: Branko Marjanović’s expres-
sionist black-and-white drama-documentary Straža na Drini (The Guard on
the Drina), celebrating the role of the Black Legion in the “cleansing” of East-
ern Bosnia from Serb communist “hordes,” won the gold medal for best doc-
umentary film at the La Biennale di Venezia in 1942.110 At the beginning, the
premises of the new Croatian cinema were less than grand, comprising a tiny
office in Preradović Street. Far from feeling at a disadvantage, the Ustasha
movement’s cinematic commissars welcomed the humble beginnings of their
industry. This provided another means by which the Croatian state could
compare itself favorably to the old Yugoslav kingdom. Mikac, in particular,
argued that in the Yugoslav era, cinema, despite its greater wealth, had been
in the hands of those with “no cultural or professional knowledge.” In the
twenty-three years of its existence, cinema in Yugoslavia had failed to achieve
anything significant. When Croatian cinema was founded in 1941, it was
 Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste  211

starting from scratch; Yugoslav cinema had not bequeathed it so much as one
camera.111 Mikac blamed this neglect on the foreign, Jewish, and “plutocratic”
owners of Croat cinema and film production companies, who had treated
cinema as purely an economic concern, excluding “the masters of world cin-
ematic production.”112 By contrast, the new Croatian cinema would be a so-
cial force bringing together the old and the young, the rich and the poor, and
involving the collaboration of the people. Freed from the need for profit, it
could serve the people’s “social and artistic needs” and spread education and
“cultured attitudes.” To this end, cinemas would be built in remote locations
and financed by making everyone pay an admission fee to cinemas, including
high-ranking state officials. Croatian cinema also dreamed of a grand new
film studio—the dream factory—complete with orchestral rooms, sound-
proof studios, and facilities for the filming of underwater shots.113 Though the
state’s film commissars frequently talked about cinema’s artistic and cultural
potential as the “art form of our new era” and “a new spirit of expression and
a new order” in the world, ultimately the new Croatian cinema embodied na-
tional regeneration in celluloid form.114
The State Institute for Film, like many cultural institutions, placed prior-
ity on ensuring that there was no Serb or Jewish influence in the industry. A
revolutionary national cinema could only be created if it was truly national.
This was a concern of the regime too. As well as appointing investigators in
the State Institute for Film, it also established a cinema section within RAV-
SIGUR to ensure not only that Serbs and Jews were stripped of all entitle-
ments to own cinemas but that the films the state produced and licensed were
devoid of any Jewish and Serb artistic contribution or subject matter, con-
forming to prevailing state ideology. There was constant confusion about
the draconian nature of these laws, what could be shown, and how literally
the laws should be interpreted. In January 1942, the Directorate for Propa-
ganda received a letter from Mikac concerning the film Doctor Semmelweiss,
a French biopic based on the life of the eighteenth-century Austrian gyne-
cologist. He wanted to know the truth behind the claims that both Ignatz
Semmelweiss, the protagonist of the film, and the actor playing the lead role,
French actor Harry Baur, were Jewish and therefore whether he could con-
tinue to permit the film to be shown. He pointed out that although it had
been twice asserted by Croatian journalists that Baur was Jewish, he was now
working for a German film company in Berlin. Similarly, he had also heard
that reports purporting that Semmelweiss was Jewish “are not accurate.” In
reply, Stanko Radošević, a cinematic investigator for RAVSIGUR, stated that
according to his own research and talks with the expert gynecologist Dr.
Vidaković, the likelihood was that Semmelweiss was an unbaptized Jew, but
that since Semmelweiss and his work had been the subject of public praise by
 212  Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste

the Nazis, he should be considered an Aryan. He recommended that the film

continue being shown.115
Besides this, though, cinema had an important social function too. In
order to bring the latest films and cinereels to remote towns and villages,
Croatia Film’s mobile cinema department, under the auspices of first DIPU
and later the Main Directorate for Propaganda, traveled around the state all
year long. Croatia Film saw its mobile unit as performing a socially pioneer-
ing function, not only bringing technological advance to remote villages but
giving ordinary peasants a previously unimaginable opportunity to keep in
touch with national and world events. “Although it is already the twentieth
century,” Hrvatski slikopis pointed out, “a century of technical progress em-
bedded in life, our villages lived the life of our ancestors. It was not until
the founding of the Independent State of Croatia that they felt the blessings
of contemporaneity.” The belief in the potential of cinema to play a role in
the modernization of both life and attitudes in the village was one shared by
DIPU. When the first mobile cinematic unit was established in the summer
of 1942, DIPU heralded the bringing of films into remote villages as not only
an important social and cultural achievement but a key educational policy
too. A press release from the Croatian Information Bureau (Hrvatski dojavni
ured—HDU) asserted that in no other state in Europe had the screening of
films in remote villages and communities been so expertly organized as in
the Ustasha state. By the summer of 1942 two mobile vans with generators
had been purchased by DIPU’s film staff in order to travel to remote villages
that lacked their own electricity supply and give the inhabitants cinematic
presentations; three more vans were due to arrive from Germany in the near
future. Croatia Film also had four devices for the screening of cinematic pre-
sentations in villages that had independent electricity supplies. The continu-
ing development of its mobile unit, the HDU report argued, demonstrated
the ambition of Croatia Film to carry culture and education to the “most far-
flung Croatian village.” It also demonstrated the great concern of the authori-
ties “for our village and the desire for it to come closer to the city and the
world beyond our borders. Thus a window to the world has been opened to
our villages.” The importance DIPU placed on mobile cinema was demon-
strated by the fact that among the assembled journalists and foreign guests in
attendance at the first such presentation for the village were Marko Lamešić,
the regional chief; Zvonko Kovačević, a regional Ustasha center leader; and
Vilko Rieger, director of DIPU.116
Inevitably, though, the mobile film unit also served a vital propaganda
purpose: for example, a film about Ante Starčević, entitled Otac domovine
(Father of the Homeland, 1942), was taken to villages and towns so its inhab-
itants could get to know his ideas better. Cinema also provided an opportu-
 Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste  213

nity “to carry the work of the second Ante (Pavelić) to thousands of villages
and towns.”117 At the same time, the fact that most newspapers did not reach
the Bosnian and Croatian public outside the main cities, combined with the
fact of widespread illiteracy, meant that film potentially was the most imme-
diate and effective form of propaganda for the regime.118
Despite this, the efforts of state cinema were not always successful. People
tended to watch what they wanted to watch, and outside Zagreb, that meant
feature films, not the ideological documentaries and newsreels that predom-
inated under the Ustasha regime. In many parts of Bosnia, as one corre-
spondent complained in January 1944, “many worthy and important weekly
documentary films remain unseen by the majority of citizens, who rarely at-
tend cinema screenings.” This meant many ordinary people would not “get
to know the warriors and national heroes who courageously defend the free-
dom of the nation and state independence on the battlefield with a gun in
their hand.”119 There were also numerous complaints from Ustasha officials
posted to the countryside or small towns regarding the lack of culture. In a
fairly typical letter of January 1942, one official in Jajce in Bosnia wrote to the
State Secretariat for Propaganda stating that a cinema of some kind urgently
needed to be established there to communicate the regime’s message as well
as to compensate for cultural aridity. “Leaving aside wartime conditions, it is
very difficult to live in a place where there is no cinema and theater nor in-
deed any cultural institutions at all,” he complained.120
The regime persisted with its plans for Croatian cinema. As early as 1942,
Tito Strozzi had produced Croatia’s first cinematic drama, the experimental
Barok u Hrvatskoj (Baroque in Croatia, 1942), which told the story of Count
Janko Drašković, an aristocratic politician who advocated a South Slav state
and whose 1832 Disertacija, elaborating his vision of progressive social and
political reform, was the first modern Croatian political treatise. The allu-
sions to the regime were clear. In the film, the aged count looks back on his
eventful life, and at one point a portrait of his wife seems to come to life.
However, it was not until 1943 that Croatian cinema produced its one and
only full-length feature film, Oktavijan Miletić’s Lisinski. This film told the
life story of Vatroslav Lisinski, the composer of the first Croatian opera. Orig-
inally, officials in the Main Directorate for Propaganda had wanted Miletić
to make a film about the life of Starčević. Contemporary subjects were also
considered, such as Franjo Fuis’s script for a film about the dramatic every-
day lives of the inhabitants of Lonjsko polje. However, since a short cultural
film about Lisinski was already being planned by Hrvatski slikopis, its direc-
tor, Marijan Mikac, asked Miletić to direct a full-length feature film on the
subject. Written by the young journalist and film critic Milan Katić, the film
script concentrated on the last fourteen years in the life of the composer.121
 214  Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste

Although Lisinski was a musical and included lavish symphonic perfor-

mances by the Croatian National Orchestra, which introduced and ended the
film, it was also structured by themes and historical events that mirrored the re-
gime’s own nationalistic narratives. Set during the era of Illyrianism and the
Croatian national awakening in the mid-nineteenth century, the film, which
linked the professional life of Lisinski to the wider political life of the nation,
was characterized by a number of common themes: an idealistic and rebel-
lious nationalistic youth fighting against a corrupt anti-national older genera-
tion; exile from the homeland; bloody sacrifice and suffering in the name of
liberation; and the regenerating qualities of religion and the countryside. A
number of dramatic set pieces also resonated: not only the massacre of youth
activists from the People’s Party by troops of the Hungarian ban of Croatia
on 29 July 1845 in St. Mark’s Square but also Lisinski’s physical illness, ex-
acerbated by his cruel treatment at the hands of the corrupt and compliant
musical elite and his religious retreat to Marija Bistrica among the uncor-
rupted peasantry. Indeed, according to Mikac, one of the main reasons for
commissioning this film was not only that it told the story of the composer of
the first Croatian opera but also that “it represents one of the most fateful pe-
riods, from which emerges the roots of the contemporary Croatian national
consciousness.” The fact of Lisinski’s Jewish origins and the disdain Ustasha
ideologues generally felt toward the Illyrian movement were ignored by Croa-
tia Film and not publicly discussed; however, the Ustasha police did engage
in a series of angry correspondence with Hrvatski slikopis in private regard-
ing the potential of the film to undermine official anti-Semitic narratives.122
Filming began in the spring of 1943 in Zagreb at the National Theater,
as well as on location in Maksimir, Marija Bistrica, Samobor, and Podused.
From the moment filming was announced, national newspapers featured
regular articles about the cast, the director, and the progress of filming. The
very fact that a full-length feature film was being made was presented as a
triumph for Croatia against insurmountable odds. According to Hrvatski
list, the suggestion that the Croatian state should make a feature film “gen-
erated astonishment and defeatism. This is impossible! With our resources,
it is completely out of the question! But the desire for creation—possibly
the most likeable part of the story—was so strong that we decided to make
the impossible possible. Words turned into deeds.” This was even more so,
the newspaper stressed, given the inherent difficulties confronting the state in
making the film: the lack of film studios and locations suitable for key scenes;
the choice of actors; the difficulties of filming on location; coordinating the
large numbers of background actors, singers, dancers, and extras, as well as
the large numbers of experts, technicians, and film workers required for this
lavish production.123
 Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste  215

In common with its policy of attempting to bring art to the masses and
involve ordinary citizens in the creative process, in July 1943, during location
filming at the National Theater in Zagreb, ordinary members of the public
were invited to attend a concert of Lisinski’s music—which formed the open-
ing section of the film—playing the role of audience members. Special tick-
ets were distributed to members of the public, and they were asked to attend
the filming “wearing dark suits, formal dress if possible.” However, the fact
that members of Zagreb’s cultural and artistic community, as well as uni-
versity and high school students, were particularly encouraged to attend the
filming rather than peasants and workers, most of whom presumably did not
own evening wear, did tend to lessen the populist impact of the invitation
somewhat.124
Lisinski, which starred Branko Špoljar as Lisinski, Srebrenka Jurinac as
a countess who finances his compositions, and Lidija Dominković as his fi-
ancée, premiered at the Cinema Europa on 9 April 1944 to coincide with the
third anniversary of the state and was attended by leading state dignitaries.
Press publicity was obligatory since investigators in the journalistic section
of the Main Directorate for Propaganda had sent a circular to all newspaper
editors at the beginning of July 1944 requiring them to print regular articles
about Lisinski, at least one of which was prewritten.125 In spite of this, most
critics were genuinely appreciative of the finished product. It opened to ec-
static reviews from usually skeptical critics such as Ljubomir Maraković and
Vladimir Kovačić, who praised the film’s acting, cinematography, writing,
and music; only a minority of reviews, such as the rather scathing and luke-
warm one in Spremnost, deviated from the overwhelmingly complimentary
line.126 The film itself contained some memorable images and scenes. One
particularly powerful scene was the depiction of the 29 July 1845 massacre
of Croatian youths in St. Mark’s Square; the film also made effective experi-
mental use of voiceover, by the actor Tomislav Tanhofer. An array of comic
characters and grotesques served to lighten the tragic nature of the biopic.
At the same time, critics were impressed by the technical achievement of the
state simply in producing a complex, full-length film at all, identifying it as an
important cultural milestone. Both Maraković and Kovačić noted the enthu-
siasm that the film had generated among the public not only at the premiere
but at every performance after its general release; for Kovačić especially, this
was a sign of the urgent cultural need for the development of Croatian cin-
ema. Ultimately, the film proved to be both commercially popular and suc-
cessful, running in Zagreb cinemas for an unprecedented three months. It
was subsequently shown across the state in a number of other cities including
Karlovac, Osijek, Mostar, and Split.127
Party officials represented the film as not only an extraordinary cul-
 216  Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste

tural achievement but an important ideological milestone as well. Writing in

Hrvatski slikopis, the poet and Ustasha Youth instructor Vinko Nikolić called
the film “the crowning glory” of Croatian cinema, which had filled the hearts
of the film community with “ecstatic excitement.” What was more, he added,
it had been made very cheaply, as befitted the socially radical Ustasha state:
“Where are the Croatian cinematic studios, the celluloid palaces, the ‘work-
shops,’ the apparatus, the lights, the curtains, the costumes, the actors?” he
asked. “Of all of these things, Croatian cinema had little except perhaps the
most limited and most essential. But still! . . . There was a group of people
with so much courage, determination, and creative aspirations.” Also writ-
ing in Hrvatski slikopis, Milan Katić was likewise keen to draw links between
the themes of this historical biopic and the state’s cultural aims and ideol-
ogy. Katić observed that the film “speaks to us about the militant ardor of
the Croatian youth of this period, speaks to us about the noble bearing of the
great movement of idealists whose only aim was the elevation and develop-
ment of Croatian culture.” Others too could not ignore the fact that the film’s
plot gave prominence to the events of 1845, when “the blood of Croat youth
was shed,” and to Lisinski’s creative crisis and spiritual resurrection at Marija
Bistrica, an important religious symbol for the Ustasha movement and tradi-
tionally nationalists more generally.128
Right up until the collapse of the state, new Croatian cinema was con-
ceiving new plans. In July 1944, in an attempt to improve the quality of Croa-
tian films, a competition was launched to find new screenplays and ideas for
films. Croatia could never hope to match European cinema in the quantity
of films it made, it was argued, but it could match them in terms of quality if
technical aspects of filmmaking in Croatia were improved. Entries were clas-
sified under cultural films and feature films. Some of the feature-film scripts
awarded prizes were, on the surface, light frothy comedies: one screenplay, for
instance, told the parallel stories of two young lovers thwarted by the “malice,
selfishness, and intrigues” of others. Another was about a society bachelor
who hates marriage and children but learns to love both, a message that, if
nothing else, appealed to the prevailing discourse of family values and tra-
ditional morals. Other entries addressed more obviously national themes.129
In his review of the entries, the chairman of the voting jury, Marijan Mikac,
stressed the wide participation in the competition, including everyone from
professional writers and intellectuals to students and workers. As important
for him, however, was the large number of entries that either came from re-
gional writers or addressed regional themes, most written by ordinary mem-
bers of the public: chemists, shop workers, students, and manual laborers.
As another commentator had pointed out, entries had been received from all
over the country: Zagreb, Varaždin, Sisak, Sarajevo, Derventa, and Kutina. If
 Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste  217

a wider cross section of the public visited the cinema, he wrote, they would be
able to see their lives as well as the life of their region reflected back to them.130
Many of the successful feature-film scripts also had a strong regional or
ideological emphasis. For example, Milan Maranović’s script, “Ljubav u pla-
nine” (Love in the Valleys), a story of ill-fated love between two young people,
was set against the backdrop of the Slavonian woods of Psunja and Papuka.
Alice Horn’s “Ašikovanje” (Flirtation), by contrast, was set in rural Bosnia
and told the story of Zejina, an oppressed young Muslim woman who aban-
dons the quiet life of a wife in the countryside to live a life less ordinary in
the “urban zoo.” The exciting life she imagines for herself in Sarajevo is not
matched by the reality of her new existence, which she finds brutal and alien-
ating and a source of “constant struggle and disappointment.” As a result of
her isolation, though, she rediscovers her Bosnian patriotism and love of the
natural beauty of her home region, expressed in renditions of traditional Bos-
nian folk music, the sevdalinka. The screenplay, a combination of the national
and the social, was a cautionary tale about pursuing shallow dreams in the
metropolis and a paean to the virtues of village life. Branko Bellan’s win-
ning entry, on the other hand, explored the alien cosmopolitan values of the
city and their incompatability with a nationalist consciousness. The story of a
prodigal son living in America, and Americanized in “the worst sense of the
word,” returning to visit his family in rural Dalmatia, Bellan’s story relates
how the son falls in love with his doctor brother’s girlfriend. After his love
is unrequited, he returns to America, leaving his family for good. Although
the message of the screenplay might have been interpreted ambiguously, the
proposed title of the screenplay—“Deracinated”—suggested that having long
lived in the urban metropolis and having lost his rural and therefore national
consciousness, the protagonist no longer had a place in his native homeland.
The prodigal son has become another rootless cosmopolitan.131

USTASHA CITIZENS AND THE ACQUISITION OF TASTE

It was not enough for Ustasha soldiers, workers, and peasants to have digni-
fied work, enough food to eat, somewhere clean to live, and modern enter-
tainment and conveniences: the Ustasha regime also believed they needed
culture, education, and taste. In the state in which the Ustasha movement
came to power, well over a quarter of the population was functionally illit-
erate.132 In May 1941, the war against illiteracy was brought to the entire na-
tion with the introduction of a law to promote literacy among the masses.
The Ministry of National Education hoped that within a period of six years
everyone under the age of fifty would be able to read and write. The law in-
structed local authorities to establish special colleges and schools for this
purpose. The rules for students were strict, and there were stern sanctions
 218  Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste

for disobedience in class and nonattendance. However, in a state with a rela-

tively low level of literacy and a shortage of qualified teachers, even before the
law was introduced, many educationalists were debating how best to proceed
with the campaign, with some suggesting that women would make ideal lit-
eracy instructors.133 At the beginning of August, this campaign was extended
to all members of the regime’s military.134 In order to encourage soldiers and
paramilitary members to read and become more cultured, the regime also
opened a series of Ustasha libraries and bookstores for them. In July 1943, for
example, an Ustasha library and bookstore was opened in Zagreb by Božidar
Kavran, head of the local Ustasha center. According to Kavran, the library
and bookstore would be a fiery “hearth” of Ustasha thought. Handing over
the key, he instructed the library director Stanko Budnić to protect the read-
ing rooms and permit access only to those Ustashas who embodied Ustasha
ideology. In a mirror of this rather militant speech, Budnić, on accepting the
key, told Kavran: “Acting deputy, this order will be fulfilled!” Waiting crowds
of Ustasha activists and soldiers “poured” into the library to access its jour-
nals, books, and newspapers.135 Similar Ustasha bookstores and libraries were
opened for members of the movement, especially its soldiers and centers in
other Ustasha camps throughout the state.136
The Ustasha regime also promoted the cultural activities of its soldiers
and paramilitary members, as well as ordinary members of the movement,
through regular special radio programs performed by Croatian soldiers for
their comrades. The last of these took place in April 1945 at the Croatian
Workers’ Chamber, rather than a radio studio, when singers, musicians, or-
chestras, and above all soldiers gave a concert for Croatian soldiers. As the
program notes stated: “All those soldiers and their musical compositions,
which our soldiers and other listeners have listened to countless times in reg-
ular radio performances for Croatian soldiers, will take part. This time they
will directly—and not just through the microphone—sing, play, and enter-
tain their comrades and fellow warriors. A soldier—to a soldier is the slogan
of this performance.” The performers included not just popular civilian per-
formers such as Viktor Glovatzky and his guitar band, the guitar duo Kovač
and Kras, and the singers Ana Mol and Rajka Vlasta but also the matinee
singer and Domobran officer Andrija Konč; the singing duo of sublieuten-
ant Jozić and squad leader Brozović, yearning for the blue Adriatic and a
cherished Catholic chapel; the soloist Jasim Alagić, the platoon leader of the
educational section of the Croatian navy, singing a song about Jajce; a na-
val chorus singing traditional Dalmatian songs; and the air force corporal
Kramarić in a duet about a blonde maiden with the female presenter Fanita,
accompanied by musicians from the Croatian air force orchestra. There was
also an instrumental from the Tamburitza players of the army’s educational
 Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste  219

battle unit. The final song, sung by all the contributors, was appropriately en-
titled “Youth will have its fling!”137
In spite of its scorn for bourgeois values and delicacy, the Ustasha regime
was always keen to make the daily toil of the worker, and the worker him-
self, more cultured. In October 1941, a radio program especially for workers
began; for its first broadcast on 15 October, workers in factories, shops, and
offices across Croatia stopped working to listen to the announcer proclaim
that the workers’ victory in Croatia was a victory over the “Jewish-capital-
ist owners” of the old regime. The aim of the new radio program, the an-
nouncer explained, was to make the worker feel at home in his own nation,
no longer exploited by Jews and foreigners, as when “his blood was drained
and his strength sapped, when workers were slaves and a lumpen layer, when
they were placed in the greatest misery and lived the barest of existences.”138
The Ustasha regime constructed gyms and exercise halls in factories and
businesses, paid for by the businesses themselves, with specially trained in-
structors. Workers’ journals, showing photographs of happy workers sitting
in public rooms listening to workers’ radio or participating in mass exercise
programs, lauded the transformation of working conditions. What a con-
trast, Miroslav Gal wrote, to the situation in the former Yugoslavia: “The time
has ceased when gentleman directors built a tennis court around the factory
and their closest colleagues arranged dates on them and other nonsense! And
what did the worker get from this beautiful ground? Nothing except a reduc-
tion in wages to pay for the repair of this pitch!” Now the pitches were being
used for the physical development and education of the workers and for the
kind of social progress that Jewish factory owners had never wanted to allow.
Physical fitness, Gal was convinced, was the key to the improvement of work-
ers’ everyday lives in factories, in mines, or on the shop floor. In the Ustasha
state, the worker would be able to “strengthen his muscles” and thereby have
the strength to improve his working conditions.139
Radio was an obvious medium for the transmission of this new cultural
enlightenment. Radovan Latković, the director of programs at Croatian Ra-
dio, vowed to elevate radio above the rarefied status it had enjoyed in Yugo-
slavia, where it had been a plaything of “Jews and plutocrats,” and make it the
property of the whole Croatian nation, united in a “spirit of Croatian prin-
ciples and Ustasha ideology.”140 The radio had played an important part in the
national revolution, so the Ustasha movement argued. It was Ustasha radio
that had broken through the “silence of the graveyard in which the Croatian
people lived” at the beginning of April 1941 in the guise of Radio Velebit, in-
forming the population of the imminent liberation of the nation. Croatian
hearts had “pounded from excitement and pleasure” when they heard the
voice of the first free Croatian radio station, which “spoke the truth to mil-
 220  Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste

lions of Croatians about Croatia” and provided them with directions about
what to do during the coming revolution. By 5 April, listening to their ra-
dios, they heard the Ustasha Main Headquarters declare, “Into battle, into
battle,” signaling the call to join the battle units of the Ustasha movement and
liberate the nation, affecting the resurrection of the Croatian nation-state.
Records, statements about Ustasha principles, and songs filled the airways,
and the program went on until midnight, ending with the words “For the
Homeland prepared!” and “Long live Ante Pavelić!” It was at this moment,
Hrvatski krugoval argued, that it became clear to the Croatian people that
the national revolution for which “we had all waited so long and yearned so
ardently” had begun. The radio gave strength and determination to Croatia’s
warriors and the embryonic Croatian liberation army. It was also the radio
that was responsible for giving the directions that led to the “general national
uprising that broke out after the beginning of the war in all parts of the Croa-
tian homeland.” From the homeland embroiled in rebellion and revolution
came “the voice of imminent victory,” which announced the return of the
Poglavnik at the head of his elite Ustasha unit. On 10 April, the day of the
national revolution, Zagreb radio came back into Croatian hands and, at five
that evening, reported the “most sacred and greatest moment” in Croatian
history to Croatians and the entire world: the establishment of the Indepen-
dent State of Croatia—“the realization of the eternal yearning of all Croats.”
Ultimately, the Ustasha revolution was a thoroughly modern one as far as the
Ustasha regime was concerned—achieved through the use of modern forms
of communication as much as by force of arms.141
Clearly, radio played an important function in social and national control
and was a key element of the system of persecution and marginalization of
Jews and Serbs. After it came to power in 1941, one of the first acts of the Usta-
sha regime was to introduce a law insisting that Jews and Serbs hand over
all radio equipment; the law also banned them from listening to Croatian
neighbors’ radios and banned Croatians from sharing radio news with Jew-
ish and Serb friends. The penalties for disobeying this law included execution
and imprisonment. Following the mass confiscation of Serb and Jewish ra-
dios in the spring by the Secretariat for State Propaganda, officials there were
inundated with requests for the use of spare radios from ordinary citizens —
soldiers, housewives, teachers, students, peasants, and workers— invariably
emphasizing their honorable conduct and ideological loyalty to the new re-
gime; regional party leaders and organizations also submitted large numbers
of applications for the purchase of radios. Fairly typical was an application of
2 June 1942 from Drago Žubetić, a Croatian soldier. He explained that as an
“honorable Croat nationalist” he had been “really persecuted” in the Yugo-
slav era and now requested one of the radios “confiscated from those Serbs
 Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste  221

and Jews.” Regional Ustasha camp leaders—as the adjutant of the Šid Ustasha
camp did in June 1941—wrote to the directorate asking to purchase confis-
cated radios both for camp activities and for respected and trusted members
of the local community.142 As far as the cultural ideologues of the Ustasha
movement were concerned, however, radio could serve as a coercive tool in
a far broader sense. In particular, they believed that the mass communica-
tion capabilities of radio made it an especially useful medium for the dis-
semination of the Ustasha message. The remit of radio programs on Croatian
Radio was incredibly wide ranging, encompassing educational and cultural
programs; state news; and specially commissioned programs to celebrate the
anniversary of the founding of the state or to commemorate such solemn
occasions as the Day of the Dead, the Day of the Croatian Martyr, and the
funerals of illustrious Ustashas. There were also various musical programs,
scheduled for peasant and worker women, as well as special broadcasts for
Croatian workers in factories. Recordings of concerts, plays, and interviews
with opera singers, actors, and popular singers and bands were also an in-
tegral part of the radio schedule. To bring the radio to more Croatians, new
stations were built in Sarajevo, Banja Luka, and Dubrovnik. By the first anni-
versary of the state, thousands of citizens could hear the official celebrations
from the cathedral in Zagreb even if they could not be there.143
At the same time, radio also had a strong social function that could be
utilized in the regime’s campaign of making the population cultured and
more refined. Croatian Radio was used for the dissemination of the educa-
tional and lecture programs of the People’s University, a peasants’ and work-
ers’ university located in Zagreb and other major cities. The radio program
allowed workers and peasants who could not attend the university to study
from home. But sociability was also built into radio scheduling. Croatian Ra-
dio encouraged the active participation of its listeners and acknowledged that
their opinions mattered. Not only were listeners persuaded to provide feed-
back in the form of letters of praise or encouragement, but there were also
special radio programs devoted to the musical choices of interested listeners.
State radio in Croatia also conducted surveys into the likes and dislikes of
listeners so it could provide better service in the future. This was an early ex-
ample of cultural democracy in Croatia, and the often unreasonable letters of
listeners and the irreverent replies of the station editors became a staple fea-
ture of radio programming.144
In order to popularize literature, especially poetry, Ustasha cultural com-
missars also organized a series of radio evenings during which well-known
poets and writers recited their poetry for a program of public literary eve-
nings. This gave new readers and the wider public an opportunity to become
acquainted with the work of these writers and for those who had already read
 222  Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste

their works to feel “the breathing of the artists themselves, who in any case
are always the most authoritative interpreters of their feelings and inten-
tions.” From the point of view of Croatian radio and the regime’s cultural
architects, these planned evenings would fulfill the aim of spreading lyrical
art to the masses and, at the same time, enable them to become “better and
more deeply acquainted” with the best of Croatian literature. As the direc-
tors of Croatian radio made clear, this was not the first radio program to try
and popularize Croatian literature; other regular earlier programs, such as
Literary Profiles, which discussed the careers of leading Croatian poets and
novelists, and From Croatian Literature, had served the same purpose, en-
compassing not just presentations from studios but also public concerts.
Somewhat surreally, given the impending collapse of the state in April 1945,
Croatian radio program schedulers and directors announced a series of eve-
ning programs leading up to the summer months that showcased Croatian
literary talent: the first, taking place on 4 April in the Croatian Musical In-
stitute at 5 o’clock in the evening, would be a performance by leading Croa-
tian writers of poems “that talk about their homeland” and that would be
called “The Croatian Earth”; the second would be entitled “For the Nation”
and the third “Contemporary Croatian Poetry,” in which “listeners would
get to know how contemporary Croatian poets are experiencing today’s real-
ity.” And so listeners were not already exhausted from the extended length of
these performances, the poets would also be collaborating in a literary eve-
ning accompanied by the Croatian Radio Chamber Orchestra, “which will,
with excerpts from Croatian national melodies, give musical support to the
reciting of artists’ poems. And this will create a harmonious unity of music
and words.” Under the circumstances, Croatian Radio could not say precisely
who would be appearing, but it promised that “this endeavor to spread Croa-
tian culture and art will carry on despite all difficulties that affect current life.
It expects from the Croatian public that it will appreciate this endeavor and
will eagerly welcome this appearance by Croatian writers.”145
The cultural visionaries of the Ustasha movement believed that theater
could also be brought closer to the people through the creation of new forms
accessible both financially and intellectually to the ordinary man on the
street: people’s drama. Ahmed Muradbegović, director of the Sarajevo State
Theater, argued that real people’s drama was encapsulated in Henrik Ibsen’s
Peer Gynt, which embodied Norway’s “most essential racial characteristics.”
In the Croatian context, he cited plays such as Ogriznović’s Hasangačić, Jo-
sip Kozor’s Požar strasti, and Ivan Gundulić’s Dubravka, which had seeped
into the “essence of our national soul.”146 But Dušan Žanko’s idea of a “new
art: an art for the many,” went beyond the reform of theater repertoire and
 Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste  223

involved numerous approaches to increase the popularity of theater: people’s

theater companies led by young actors and producing accessible works for
the general public were created, admission prices for theaters were slashed
so that workers and students could see the latest productions, and many re-
gional theaters held special performances on Sundays for peasants and work-
ers at the newly founded people’s universities as well as for injured soldiers
and Ustashas. The aim, as Muradbegović told an interviewer, was to create a
situation in which everyone had an opportunity to visit the theater and see it
not as a luxury but as an essential part of their spiritual and cultural life.147
Volunteer theater companies also toured the state, promoting people’s drama
and popular art.148
Some, such as the theater impresario Bruno Gavella, disputed the con-
cept. There was no more a special type of people’s art than there was a spe-
cial kind of children’s art, he asserted. Recalling his own tours presenting
Shakespeare among peasants in the Croatian countryside in the 1930s and
early 1940s, he remembered that they had had little difficulty understanding
Hamlet and were able to relate it to their everyday life. Although not schol-
arly, their interpretations were more indicative of the national character than
any kind of people’s art could possibly be. As an example, Gavella noted that
the character of Ophelia and the “erotic advances” of Hamlet passed them by
totally unnoticed. This reflected, Gavella believed, the “absence of eroticism”
characterizing Croatian national poetry. At his performances in the country-
side, usually at least one peasant would stand up to exclaim that he had found
the theater version very different and much better than the film version and
intended to attend the theater more. For Gavella, taking art to the people did
not mean creating a separate people’s culture, but rather bringing ordinary
people into contact with “genuine” existing culture.149
Nevertheless, even Gavella recognized that, with the arrival of the Usta-
sha movement, a new kind of drama had emerged. In contrast to much of
the drama on the Zagreb stage, consisting of “sentimental bourgeois dramas”
and iconoclastic satires that had “no idea what it would build in place of these
ruins,” the new drama would be based on the concept of the “new tragedy,” at
whose center would be a new fallible hero who would not so much fight with
others as struggle with himself. This new drama would liberate the actor, who
would find a “true sincere pathos” and no longer be “a slave of stylistic experi-
ments or a slave of pathetic imitations of naturalism.” Instead, he would “be
free to create what only he can create: a new home, a new theater.”150
In August 1942, the Ministry for the State Treasury developed a new stat-
ute for the HRS that defined it as constituent part of the GSS and the official
organization for workers within the Ustasha movement.151 A few days after
 224  Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste

this, an announcement was placed in the main party newspaper advertising

a series of evening concerts to be given by the GSS from 20 to 22 August
1942 at its open-air theater on St. Katarina’s Square, Zagreb, in celebration of
the constitution of the HRS. The concert, featuring theater, music, and dance
performances for workers, was entitled “Art for the People.” The tickets for
the event were sold by the Cultural-Educational Society of the HRS, and the
organizers encouraged all HRS commissioners and representatives to pur-
chase tickets for their workers. As Hrvatski narod explained, the aim of the
concert was to enable workers to become better acquainted with cultural and
artistic creation so that in the future they would want to actively take part
in it. “Since previous performances for the working class have developed in
them a feeling for beauty and goodness, the Croatian working class has good
taste and feels the need to regularly attend cultural-historical performances,
which have become a part of its life.”152
Nevertheless, the same party newspaper also argued that the lack of ac-
cess to art among the working class was important not just for the working
class but for the viability of a national art itself. Not only was an art inac-
cessible to workers symptomatic of inherent social inequality, but art could
never be representative of one particular group if it was not also somehow
connected to wider society. When art emerged from the national community
and reflected its characteristics, it remained an integral part of the commu-
nity’s cultural experience. In the newly constructed national community, all
resources should be used to “eliminate the last remnants of the liberal social
system, which pushed a great part of the nation, including workers, onto the
margins of society.” Limiting his social, economic, and educational horizons,
it taught the worker that cultural production “had not only no importance
but no value either.” Since Marxists, in particular, had been able to use the
worker’s dissatisfaction and marginalization against both the state and the
spiritual ethos of the nation from which he emerged, returning the worker to
art and culture therefore meant returning him to the national community, an
important aspect of the program to regenerate the nation:
If today we are going to give art back to the people—in this case the
worker—then equally we don’t want to only elevate his taste, to improve his
education, widen his spiritual horizons, but first of all give back to him the
possibility of artistic experience and life as an expression of the spirituality
of his national and entire humanity. In this way we want to return artistic
experience to the national community as a whole, from which it some time
ago emerged and from which it was artificially separated. And if today in
our state ever more obvious activities aimed at returning art to the people
 Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste  225

are being set in motion, then equally we have set out on a path leading to the
spiritual regeneration of the nation.153

For the worker and peasant masses to be truly cultured, though, it was
not enough that they enjoy the new cultural possibilities on offer; the Direc-
torate for National Enlightenment also wanted them to express themselves.
The directorate introduced a range of affirmative-action initiatives to encour-
age their participation in all aspects of artistic life. They were invited to au-
dition for people’s theater companies and to be singers and actors on state
radio; competitions to find new people’s dramas were established, and the
State Institute for Film invited the general public to submit film scripts. The
productions of the theater company of the HRS were also prominently re-
viewed in the leading Ustasha cultural journals.154 This receptive cultural en-
vironment witnessed the emergence of a number of playwrights, novelists,
and poets from worker and peasant backgrounds. Rather than examine life
in the Independent State of Croatia, many of them focused on the national-
ist worker’s struggle in interwar capitalist Yugoslavia. Plays were an obvious
medium, due to their directness and drama, their ability to create simple and
easily recognizable archetypes, and the possibility of popular participation in
the story being told. One of the most celebrated plays was Zvonimir Veljačić’s
Borba za pravo (The Struggle for Justice, 1943), set in the period between 1930
and 1940, telling the story of a group of factory workers, members of the HRS,
struggling against the cruel indifference and exploitation of their bosses.155
When Veljačić’s play was performed in the Workers’ Chamber for the first
time in 1944 by the theater section of the HRS, Ljubomir Maraković hailed it
for showing the “the misery of the workers and the invisibility and selfishness
of the capitalist managers and landlords,” as well as the “decisiveness” of the
workers in initiating a struggle for justice. Nevertheless, he pointed out that
the play’s emphasis on the struggle between the workers and the bosses might
lead some people to mistakenly conclude that this was a play about the class
struggle rather than one about struggle between the patriotic and nationalis-
tic workers of an enslaved nation and the bosses and managers, directors and
controllers, of big finance and capital.156
Less ambiguous were the narratives contained in the oeuvre of work-
ing-class novelists, poets, and writers like the poet Matija Pavlović, the play-
wright Franjo Babić, and the young social-realist novelist Ivan Triplat. Their
novels, poems, and short stories combined explicitly nationalistic discourses
and themes with elegies to the toiling Croatian peasant and worker, strug-
gling to survive the cruelties of capitalist society and the alienation of the big
city in the Yugoslav 1930s. While Pavlović’s poetry addressed mostly patri-
 226  Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste

otic rather than social themes, and Babić was already an established journal-
ist in his native Osijek, Triplat, whose work included both novels and short
stories, was a paradigmatic people’s writer. According to the bibliographi-
cal note accompanying his 1943 novel Krug: Roman iz suvremenog Zagreba
(Circle: A Novel about Contemporary Zagreb), originally written in 1939, he
had variously worked as a clerk, physical education instructor, packer, jani-
tor, and factory worker, along with enduring long periods of unemployment.
His writing addressed the realities of the worker’s struggle for survival and
authentic national values in the midst of bourgeois decadence and capitalist
inequity. Triplat himself had his own personal narrative of struggle against
the literary and theater establishment to get his work published. “I have been
writing for ten years,” he noted, “remaining completely anonymous and un-
acknowledged. I collaborated with some of ‘our’ journals, which published
a few of my things but did not pay me or did not publish or even return my
manuscripts.” His novel Krug, he continued, had been written “in the diffi-
cult years between 1938 and 1939,” at a time when he was searching for people
who would “understand me, help me, and publish me,” something he had fi-
nally found, he stated, in the publishing house of Matica Hrvatska. Although
he also published a number of novels and short stories either with other pub-
lishing houses or independently, one of the aims of the bibliographical note
was to emphasize that only in the Independent State of Croatia, under the
Ustasha regime, could marginalized writers like Triplat, from nationalist
working-class backgrounds, be allowed to develop their literary talents.157
However, the worker-artist who came to the greatest prominence was
the itinerant laborer Ivan Softa. This had little to do with his writing: unlike
Pavlović, Babić, and Triplat, for example, Softa published no major works be-
tween 1941 and 1945. His novels had been published in the growing nation-
alist atmosphere of Croatia in the late 1930s. During the years of Ustasha
rule, he turned his hand to writing polemical articles as well as the occa-
sional short story, combining his writing with a position as chief librarian at
the Ustasha movement’s central library in Zagreb. Nonetheless, he became
an important cultural figure for the Ustasha regime due to his image as a
paradigmatic struggling worker and self-taught writer ignored by the bour-
geois Yugoslav literary scene. Nationalist literary reviewers ascribed the fact
that Softa’s work had been “neglected, forgotten, and unacknowledged” in the
1930s to his genuine worker’s life of poverty and unemployment. Most writers
who wrote about the working class, it was argued, did so from a fashionable
middle-class Marxist perspective. He, in contrast, was writing about his own
life. He had also been persecuted, wrote Marko Čović, because of his “na-
tional Ustasha conscience and struggle for a new better world, for the estab-
lishment of social justice, for a new Croatia.”158 The second reason that Softa
 Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste  227

was prominent was because of his outspoken ideas about workers’ literature,
which echoed the regime’s view. He was sharply critical of social novels that
addressed the lives of workers, not least because so many of them were writ-
ten by people who had no knowledge or understanding of them. He argued
that while the “naturalist” approach tended to paint an entirely negative view
of the lives of the working classes, emphasizing their fecklessness, stupidity,
and moral defectiveness, their drunkenness and violence, too frequently the
“social-realist” approach—the most appropriate literary device for workers’
literature—was characterized by political propaganda, sloganeering, and sen-
timentality. Only when literature was “cleansed” of agitprop, and depictions
of workers’ lives were created from the context of the entire national commu-
nity rather than from a specific workers’ perspective, would writers be able to
illuminate the life of the worker and elevate the “cultural level of workers.”159
Unlike the naturalists and social realists, those writing the new social lit-
erature—the “new realism,” as he called it—would be objective, showing not
only what Softa called “the beautiful side of life” but also “the injustice in
the social community and unjust relations between the classes.” Their works
would show that the workers were neither “stupid morons” and “moral defec-
tives who fritter away their earnings every weekend” nor “bloodthirsty revo-
lutionaries who have no other interests save for the destruction of the existing
society”; rather, the working class was “one of the most important and con-
structive elements of the society in which it lives, and it is conscious of its
duty as well as its rights.” While the exaggeration of the differences between
the classes might have been understandable in the “former social chaos,
which reached its zenith in the previous decade,” the new realism would have
to reflect the new social ideology of work as “the greatest social worth.” Since
the Croatian worker now occupied “one of the most important positions” in
literature, the new social literature would have to reflect all “the positive qual-
ities he contributes to the national community in which he lives.”160
In Ustasha journals, workers and peasants had an unparalleled opportu-
nity to make their literary mark, and the party journal called for all Ustashas
with writing talent to make themselves known. The only stipulation was that
articles should be “short, clear, accessible, and comprehensible to the com-
mon man. . . . No know-it-alls, no somnambulism, no puns!”161 Although po-
litical articles by peasants and workers were relatively uncommon, they did
write poems and short stories, usually simple in style, patriotic in nature,
and aggressive in tone. “Ustashas!” one poem began. “We will never / give
our beautiful Homeland to the cut-throats.”162 Another vowed: “The blood of
the enemy / let it from now on flow. / The Croat will not be a slave for any-
one.”163 People’s literature did not generally meet with the approval of literary
critics, some of whom even produced biting satires about it,164 but this was
 228  Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste

not the point. Giving workers and peasants the opportunity to write about
their feelings, hopes, and fears was good propaganda as far as the regime was
concerned. Additionally, it fulfilled the regime’s vision of a society in which
the educated and cultured would not have special privileges; in which work-
ers and peasants would be the dominant class of a new organic society; and
in which everyone, irrespective of position and education, would be treated
equally.
Nor did the opportunities to express themselves only apply to peasants
and workers: soldiers were also encouraged to use their literary and artistic
talents. The various Ustasha educational and cultural ministries promoted
the literature, art, and poetry of soldiers, paramilitary members, and activ-
ists. It staged a number of art exhibitions of soldiers’ work, and its cultural
journals asked if there was a special kind of Croatian soldiers’ art, deciding
that indeed there was. A genre of soldiers’ poetry emerged that was frequently
published in soldiers’ newspapers such as Vojnik and military educational
pamphlets, as well as in individual poetry collections written by soldiers ded-
icated to exploring the warrior’s experience on the battlefield. Aside from the
iconic Pero Kojaković, probably the most well-known of the soldier-poets
was Josip Križanac, the Legionary poet whose posthumously published po-
etry gloried in the destructive but “righteous” power of the Legionaries, as
well as the comradeship of life in the Legion and Francetić’s “fatherly” love.165
Other ordinary soldiers followed in his wake, contributing to a distinctive
genre of soldiers’ poetry that was concerned with heroism on the battlefield;
comradely love; and above all rituals of death and graves, particularly from
1944 onward, as the state faced imminent annihilation.166
Ustasha literary journals also organized literary competitions to popu-
larize soldiers’ experiences. One such competition was held by Ustaša jour-
nal in the winter of 1942. Its aim, its editors claimed, was to hear the stories
of Ustasha soldiers on the battlefield. “For a number of years members of the
Ustasha army have found themselves in struggles in all corners of Ustasha
Croatia. The sublime heroism of individuals and units has been established,
and they have written the most celebrated pages of Ustasha history,” an edi-
torial stated. So this heroism and struggle would not be forgotten, the editors
decided to hold a competition to find the best literary or artistic interpreta-
tion of the struggle or the life of the Ustasha army, with a first prize of two
thousand kunas and a second prize of one and a half thousand kunas.167 Ac-
cording to the organizers of the competition, it was open not just to soldiers
and members of Ustasha paramilitary squads but also to journalists, war re-
porters, civil servants, and officials who had witnessed the work of the Usta-
sha army. What should they write about? “You must write about the battles
and heroism of our soldiers, about their struggles with bandits, their lives,
 Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste  229

their exercises, their lives in the barracks, and so on, in fact everything that
is integral to the life of the Ustasha army. In the composition you must es-
pecially emphasize and select the most sacred examples, the most beautiful
battles, and the strongest victories.” Each composition was to be at least four
pages long. Perhaps not anticipating a large number of entries from serving
soldiers, the organizers added at the end: “Members and friends of the Usta-
sha army, write about your struggles and your life. All of you take part in our
prize competition.”168
However, only one of the prize-winning entries was actually written by
a serving member of the Ustasha army, Ante Prnjak’s “Death or Victory,”
which received third prize. The winning entry was written by the journal-
ist and war reporter Vilim Peroš, and the runner-up was Krešimir Golik, a
young filmmaker and corporal in the propaganda unit of the Ustasha army.
Both of their submissions, unlike Prnjak’s, were fiction, not reportage.169 For
the most part, poems and other literary contributions by soldiers, despite the
rhetoric of the editors, were not generally embraced by the regime’s literary
journals: their work was more widely published in their own journals, literary
collections, and pamphlets or military handbooks. Of those Ustasha soldiers’
contributions that did make it into Ustaša, the majority were obituaries of
comrades, descriptions of life on the front line told from a strictly journalistic
perspective, and battle reports of Ustasha units prevailing against the odds.
There were also, occasionally, ideological articles from army propaganda
chiefs like Josip Mrmić.170 In fact, the one journalist and writer to emerge
from the ranks of the Ustasha army was Marijan Žibrat, actually an Usta-
sha Youth swarm leader selected to take part in military training exercises as
part of his preparation for elite leadership in the army. Written under the pen
name “M. Z.,” his interviews with soldiers, reports from military training ex-
ercises, and short stories glorifying the intrepid exploits of the Ustasha army
and heroic actions of bomb-wielding Ustasha Youth were a regular feature of
Ustaša in its latter years.171
Perhaps in part to rectify this glaring deficit in a journal designed to be
of and for the movement’s members, beginning in 1943 a semiregular column
from the editors started to appear in which they gave public feedback to pro-
spective contributors explaining why they had accepted or rejected unsolic-
ited submissions. Their comments were often dimissive, even of professional
writers’ work, but their criticisms of soldiers’ compositions seemed especially
harsh. For example, a soldier from the Fourth Combat Unit in Bjelovar was
informed that his poem was unsuitable; another soldier, Ante Đurković, was
advised to avoid profound subjects and to “concentrate on shorter, simple,
and lighter things”; one hopeful contributor who used the nom de plume “A
Warrior” found his poem rejected on the basis that poems were rarely pub-
 230  Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste

lished in Ustaša and that those that were needed to be carefully selected.172
Another, Josip Janeš, found his submissions constantly rejected by the jour-
nal: “What you have sent us is still not suitable for publication and needs to
be worked on further. Get in touch again.”173 Despite the desire of the regime
to encourage soldiers to relate their stories and feelings, the message was that
while the experiences of ordinary soldiers and their enthusiasm were laud-
able, their expression was best left in the hands of professional writers. Sol-
diers had not yet acquired delicacy and taste.
Of course, culture was of no use unless it could be viewed by an audience
that was itself civilized and refined. The Ustasha regime therefore endeavored
to make all areas of public and cultural life refined, and this applied as much,
if not more, to the state’s sporting icons and cultural stars as to ordinary citi-
zens. One prominent target in the campaign for cultured values was football
and, in particular, football players. In Ustasha iconography, football players,
with their warrior values on the field of battle, team ethos, and pride in the
nation, encapsulated the values of the new state. The movement itself could
provide numerous examples of football players who had given their lives for
the greater good of the party and state. One role model was Slavin Ćindrić, a
former star striker for Zagreb-HAŠK, HSK-Concordia, and HSK Gradjanski,
an Ustasha activist in the late 1930s who had perished at the rank of Ustasha
sublieutenant in the Black Legion militia. A sports journalist remembered
him as one of the most talented football players of his generation, but at the
same time politically “fanatical and militant.” He recalled how in the late
1930s, as a player, he had refused to collaborate with the then-rulers and their
“anti-Croatian sports organizations, and he carried on this struggle until he
had left the football pitch.” During one football match he had raised the Croa-
tian flag and torn up the Yugoslav one. “It was important for him that as an
athlete he did not just concentrate on improving his ball skills but also led a
political struggle on the football pitch at the same time.” Likewise, his Black
Legionary comrade the Sarajevo-SAŠK striker August Pogačnik was glorified
for his “heroic actions against the bandits on Romanija.”174
Another role model was Antun Ilik, who had played for a number of teams,
including Zagreb-HAŠK, Osijek-Gradjanski, and HSK-Viktorija. As a medi-
cal student, he had been a youth leader in nationalist workers’ organizations
and a health and sports adviser at the Croatian Workers’ Chamber. Imme-
diately following the establishment of the Croatian state in 1941, rather than
stand idly by “with folded arms,” he had helped to found the Ustasha army
and “swarmed through the liberated homeland” in the struggle against “the
sworn enemy of the Croatian nation,” brave, selfless, and a “model warrior
athlete.” Shortly afterward he was promoted to the rank of commander and
qualified as a doctor of medicine, illustrating that in his “ceaseless struggle”
 Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste  231

for the homeland he did not have to curtail his academic studies, demon-
strating through his example how a “steely warrior with iron energy and per-
sistent desire can achieve everything.” Like these role models, young men
should be upright and selfless, committed to the revolution, and imbued with
worker and nationalist activist zeal; they should desire to play football as a
hobby, a passion, and a patriotic duty.175 Some regional party organizations
similarly eulogized the rebellious nationalism of Croatian sportsmen. In June
1941, the Ustasha center in Banja Luka announced plans for the purification
of football, to change it from the “Augean stable” that it had become in the
1930s, contaminated with the stench of Serb and Jewish influence. One of the
first acts of the new authorities was the annulment of all punishments levied
against sportsmen and sports organizations in Croatia before 1941 as a re-
sult of their ideological support and activism on behalf of the Ustasha move-
ment. “Intellectual propagators of anti-national assaults,” by contrast, would
be prosecuted, and Jews, Serbs, and communists were barred from partici-
pation in sporting life. As a result of this strict “new order” in “our sporting
life,” young, “conscientious” Croatian sportsmen like Ćindrić and Ilik would
have the opportunity to “exonerate themselves and once again take part on
the sports field.” In effect, this created a privileged class of football players by
virtue of their past and present ideological activism. manifested in their in-
subordinate behavior on the pitch.176
As well as nationalist fervor, the Ministry of Physical Education wanted
to ingrain the amateur nature of football into the national psyche and to re-
inforce the idea that football was a sport for the cultured nationalist worker.
In September 1943, the ministry initiated an annual tournament called the
“Workers’ Game,” which gathered together the state’s leading workers’ teams.
Organized by one of the most successful workers’ teams, HSK-Osijek, and
held at its stadium, the event was opened by the minister for sport, Miško
Žebić, a former football player himself, who read out a message of goodwill
from the Poglavnik. The tournament pitted the leading workers’ teams, such
as Osijek, Gradjanski, Concordia, and Grafičar, against the state’s leading
“bourgeois” teams, such as Sarajevo-SAŠK and Gradjanski’s nemesis, Zagreb-
HAŠK, both of them university teams with a largely educated middle-class
support base. Through the competition of workers’ and bourgeois teams, one
aim of the tournament was to show the sporting prowess of workers’ teams.
However, another was to demonstrate the “Croatian workers’ consciousness
and the connection of all Croatian workers,” in particular football players.177
The approval the Ustasha movement had demonstrated toward rebellious
but nationally “conscientious” players did not apply to the conduct of football
players in the Ustasha state: they were expected to be polite and respectful
at all times. However, as insubordination on the football pitch increasingly
 232  Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste

came to be perceived as a challenge to the state as well as the referee, state and
party agencies acted decisively. By late 1944, with party hardliners again dom-
inant in an Ustasha state on a “total war” footing, football players’ supposedly
insubordinate behavior—their refusal to respect the referee or accept match
defeats—became an urgent policy issue for the Ministry of Physical Educa-
tion. At the end of 1944, the Croatian Football Union introduced a strict code
of conduct for its members. In early 1945, the new hardline commissioner of
the state leadership for physical education and sport (Državni vodstvo za
tjelesni odgoj i šport—DVTOŠ), Zdenko Blažeković, introduced a law stipu-
lating that in the case of players walking off the pitch or their conduct stop-
ping a match, they would be suspended and their team punished with the loss
of the match. If any further matches could not be played due to the suspen-
sion of important players, these matches would also be recorded as defeats. 178
In an interview with Hrvatski športski list in February 1945, he vowed to tackle
lack of discipline on the field of play. He pointed out that numerous strict laws
had already been introduced against indiscipline in matches and that these
legal statutes would “liquidate everything that is harmful and damages the
progress of Croatian sport.” The most important thing, Blažeković insisted,
was that the referees were able to maintain discipline, and he promised to
maximize their authority. That the regime was serious about the problem of
indiscipline in sport more generally was made clear by the slate of draco-
nian laws introduced at the end of 1944 and beginning of 1945. Blažeković
insisted that DVTOŠ had introduced these laws to address the problem of
indiscipline among sportsmen both on and off the sports field. In particular,
he was keen to ensure that Croatian athletes did not financially benefit from
their activities, and DVTOŠ implemented harsh statutes criminalizing mon-
etary and material rewards for sportsmen, outlawed paid sporting competi-
tions, and excluded from club competitions athletes who left one sporting
club for another for monetary reasons, as well as the clubs themselves. “Croa-
tian sport is amateur sport, and as such it will remain,” he promised.179 In the
same month, the sports pages of Hrvatski narod carried a report about the
punishment handed out to the boxer Franjo Sljivak, who had taken part in an
unlicensed paid bout. Despite being a state champion, a member of the Her-
cules boxing club in Zagreb, and author of a popular book for boys about how
to become a boxer, he was banned from competition by the Croatian Boxing
Union for a year.180
Blažeković made it clear that the campaign to improve the conduct of
football players and other sportsmen and the determination of DVTOŠ to
eradicate all traces of professionalism and profit in sport were not merely
part of the regime’s program to inculcate citizens with cultured and anti-
capitalist values but also a means by which the state could enforce ideologi-
 Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste  233

cal conformity and a reflection of the state’s increasing concern and paranoia
about seditious and fifth-column activities, even in sports clubs. “One thing
is certain,” he declared, “and that is I want Croatian sport to be nationalized
in its entirety. We want to destroy and exclude from sport all those elements
which damage it.” Sport should not be an aim in itself but “a means of a na-
tional-Ustasha education.” As such, it could be used to exclude those athletes
who were ideologically suspect. “Everyone who is an athlete and who feels
and thinks like a Croatian athlete will be able to collaborate with us in Croa-
tian sport. Whoever does not possess these moral and national characteris-
tics will not be able to work with us in the construction of Croatian sport,”
he confirmed. Turning to the question of monetary reward and creeping ma-
terialism, he vowed that in the future he envisioned, “there will no longer be
instances where someone, because of his exceptional sporting prowess, is able
to exploit the community when the community is already looking after its
talented members.” Instead, he promised “strictly to ensure a national edu-
cation for sportsmen.” This inculcation of national ideology in athletes was
to start young. DVTOŠ, he announced, had instituted plans to place young
athletes under the supervision of the Ustasha Youth. As a result of the unique
developmental pressures on young athletes, a representative of the Ustasha
Youth would be embedded inside every sports club with youth members to
ensure “a proper education for young athletes.”181
The conduct of state football players was by no means the only concern
for DVTOŠ: Blažeković’s nationalization program aimed at the reeducation
of spectators too. “Insofar as sport will be the means of a physical and spiri-
tual education it has relevance for us today. For us, today, however, it is a
form of education as much for the spectators as for the athletes,” he argued.
Blažeković’s comment reflected a perception in DVTOŠ that spectators were
becoming similarly unruly and ill-disciplined and in need of education and
control. They were insulting the referee, running onto the pitch, and boo-
ing the opposition. Such things could not be tolerated, and club supporters
were instructed to leave the referee in peace, even when he made mistakes,
and even applaud if the opposition won. Stern warnings by Blažeković and
DVTOŠ were printed regularly in the daily party newspapers: spectators who
did not heed these warnings could expect to be banned from the football sta-
dium permanently.182 It is hard to say if anyone was really paying attention
anymore: uncultured behavior seemed to be everywhere. It was not just at
football matches that citizens were behaving with a deplorable lack of de-
corum. Radio journals aimed to educate their listeners in the art of using
a wireless discerningly. They advised their readers to use the wireless spar-
ingly so that it remained a pleasure: constant listening was simply vulgar.
The campaign was not a success: as late as 1945, journals were complaining
 234  Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste

that listeners still did not know how to use their wirelesses in an informed
manner.183 And, noting sadly the contrast between the behavior of Croatian
theater audiences and that he had encountered elsewhere in Europe, Ahmed
Muradbegović used his editorial comment in the Sarajevo State Theater’s of-
ficial journal to complain about the conduct of Sarajevo’s audiences. While,
as a result of the national revolution, theater now had “the most faithful and
loyal public whom we have won over to the theater,” ranging from “those with
workers’ callused hands to those with the most pronounced artistic tastes,”
widening social access to culture had brought with it behavioral problems.
Too many of those who made up the new audiences simply did not know how
to behave:
If, for example, a performance [is] arranged for Croatian workers, students,
young people . . . and it just so happens that such an audience does not
have sufficient respect for the ambience of the theater, that it is late for the
performance, that it talks throughout the performance, that it expresses
certain audible remarks, that it moves around from place to place, or it
laughs during the most tragic scenes or applauds at moments that are most
inappropriate, then a bad reputation is acquired not only by the audience but
by the whole of the community to which it belongs.184

Muradbegović reminded theater audiences that the theater was not “cre-
ated by the State to be some run-of the-mill kindergarten simply for leisure.”
Rather, it was a bearer of beautiful noble thoughts, “a temple of art and cul-
ture” for “the higher moral and ethical renewal of the people in our Indepen-
dent State of Croatia,” or as Dušan Žanko, director of Croatian State Theater,
claimed, “second only to a religious shrine as a temple of sacredness.”185 Vlad-
imir Jurčić agreed. With the creation of the Independent State of Croatia,
a new theatrical audience had been born, “perhaps the most respectful and
loyal ever.” However, he too felt duty-bound to remind the audience how to
conduct themselves. “The visitor must behave himself,” he warned. “He must
leave at home all those distasteful habits that accompany his enjoyment of a
cinematic presentation. It needs to be pointed out that the cinema is a kind
of kindergarten, a modern vaudeville, while the theater is a temple of art, an
educational institute for the whole nation.”186
Some of the campaign to make ordinary citizens more cultured had a re-
gional agenda in which the center, Zagreb, was to teach the provinces how
to behave. For example, when Katica Pašalić and Mila Buljević, two young
female tram conductors working in Sarajevo, were interviewed for a Zagreb
newspaper in the spring of 1943, the reporter made numerous negative obser-
vations about the uncultured behavior of Sarajevans compared to Zagrebians.
For her part, Mila confessed to being at her “wit’s end” with her new job. In
 Social Justice and the Campaign for Taste  235

addition to the crushing, pushing, shoving, and constant complaints, the fe-
male conductors had to track down errant passengers who had not paid, who
refused to pay, or who pretended that they had paid when they had not. Even
the tickets appeared designed to cause confusion, unlike the simple ones in
Zagreb. “The passengers are hard to deal with. They object, and we have nu-
merous problems with them. Some of them want to come into the carriage
with large trunks. Some of them want to bring on huge packages; others want
to bring on bags of coal. . . . It is a struggle just to cope with them,” Katica
complained, while the reporter, noting that passengers were allowed to smoke
in the carriages, wondered if the presence of female tram conductors might
have a positive effect in bringing Sarajevo up to the more cultured standards
of Zagreb.187
Ultimately, the Ustasha campaign to create a society with more cultured
values was extended to almost every aspect of daily life. It was used to curb
“uncultured” practices as serious as selling goods through the black mar-
ket, for which the death penalty was imposed and to which members of the
movement sometimes fell victim, or as seemingly trivial as failing to clear
snow from one’s doorstep, for which fines were levied.188 As far as the regime
was concerned, there were no trivial “uncultured” behaviors. By and large,
however, the campaign failed. In fact, the very first edition of Spremnost car-
ried an amusing montage of satirical cartoons and an acerbic commentary
by the satirical diarist Jožčenko detailing the kind of inconsiderate, selfish,
dishonest behavior ordinary citizens were capable of when the city ground
to a halt in the snow: male drivers deliberately veering into puddles of slush
to soak smartly dressed young women, commuters hanging off the sides of
trams in their desperation to get to work, pedestrians crossing roads oblivi-
ous to the traffic, workers using the excuse of being snowed in as a reason
to spend the day in a café or bar. In one cartoon only does the snow bring
a positive outcome. In the scene, a thinly dressed peasant berates a rotund
bourgeois woman in a fur coat, muffler, and hat for her self-importance while
they wait for a tram. The caption reads: “Equality at the tram stop: no one will
be going anywhere.”189 This was in February 1942, but the fact that satirical
sketches mining similar territory were appearing as late as January 1945, at a
time when citizens were still being punished for the same uncivilized behav-
ior, demonstrates the lack of progress the regime had made in the incarnation
of a new set of “cultured” principles.190
CHAPTER 5

BETWEEN ANNIHILATION
AND REGENERATION
Literature, Language, and
National Revolution

O
n 5 December 1941, in the cultural pages of Hrvatski narod, the novelist
Zlatko Milković drew attention to a matinee performance at the Croa-
tian National Theater of readings of the works of the younger generation
of poets by famous Croatian actors and actresses, students from the acting
school, and the poets themselves. Among the poets taking part were Frano
Alfirević, Gabrijel Cvitan, Dobriša Cesarić, Vinko Nikolić, Ante Bonifačić,
Vinko Kos, and Olinko Delorko. Although the poets were very different in
their style of writing and the kinds of subjects they explored in verse, they
were united in being young and ambitious and, in many cases, supporters of
the Ustasha regime. According to Milković, they represented “a new dawn
of Croatian poetry” and “the best young Croatian poets.” These names, he
wrote, “have given a decisive characteristic to our artistic creation, creating
a unique view of the world and building notions that today we discern in the
spiritual creation of our nation.” In a speech preceding the poetry reading,
Dušan Žanko emphasized “the significance and importance of Croatian po-
etry, its meaning through the decades’ struggle for the liberation of Croatia,
as well as its significance today when the dream of Croatian statehood and
a free and great homeland has been achieved, in which poetry as well as all
other branches of art can develop unhindered.”1
For the Ustasha regime, 1941 marked the death of one form of literary ex-
pression and the birth of a new one. In the same way that regime adherents

236
 Between Annihilation and Regeneration  237

believed that an older political generation had made way for a younger one,
so the new Croatia heralded a new younger generation of poets and writers,
who had first emerged in the interwar period. The emblematic figure of the
new artistic spirit was Mile Budak, particularly his series of novels Ognjište
(The Hearth, 1931–38), about patriarchal life in the Lika Mountains. The play-
wright Vojmil Rabadan called Mile Budak’s Ognjište “the ideological credo
and victorious hymn of the new Croatia” and compared its characters to
those in Trojan legends. This cycle of novels, he wrote, was “the most im-
portant event in modern Croat literature,” and for Croat nationalists it had
provided “a psalm of faith in the freedom and victory of the soul” in a time
of cultural and political pressure. In his novels such as Na ponorima (On the
Abyss, 1932), meanwhile, Budak correctly identified Jews and Serbs as those
“responsible for Croatian misery and advocate[d] a return to the village,”
while in San o sreći (A Dream about Happiness, 1940), he showed “love to-
wards women and the homeland.”2 But new literary expression went much
further than this. According to Dušan Žanko, the new artistic spirit was
symbolized not just in the 1941 theater adaptation of Ognjište by Tito Strozzi
or Rabadan’s play Zora uskrsnuće (Dawn of the Resurrection, 1941), a paean
to the national revolution. It could also be seen in the numerous new plays by
both young and established Croatian playwrights being performed by state
theater companies in Sarajevo and Zagreb and in regional theaters. For Janko
Žanetić, Croatian literature was “another link in our history; it is not another
part or even only one of its chapters. It is the second edition of our long Gol-
gotha, our suffering and denial, our struggle and principles—our history. In
it one can read Sufflay’s spiral of history, in it one can see all our ascent and
collapse, in it one can see mirrored the waves of our history.” In the new Cro-
atia, he wrote, a new young generation would be the interpreters of the Croat
literary experience, not carrying “the sick illusions of old bohemians and the
‘modern’ poems of manipulated youth” or the “stamp of dark and tortured
youth.”3
In 1942, the Society of Croatian Writers (Društvo hrvatskih književnika—
DHK) published an anthology of verse devoted to the works of a new gener-
ation of poets, Between Two Wars. The anthology had been published, the
DHK wrote in the foreword, so that these poets could express their gratitude
to the “warriors and victors” whose sacrifices had enabled not only the cre-
ation of an independent Croatia but also the rebirth of Croat literature. In
this collection designed to reflect the richness of contemporary Croatian lit-
erature, each poet had been asked to select his ten most representative poems.
One of the aims of the collection was to educate a younger generation still at
school and to teach them that “our literary production did not end with the
older generation of poets studied at school” and that the “successors of Marko
 238  Between Annihilation and Regeneration

Marulić are alive and creating.”4 Not all critics were impressed by the anthol-
ogy. Reviewing the poems in Hrvatska revija, literary critic Radoslav Glavas,
while welcoming the fact that most of the young poets had stuck to a native
Croatian style, expressed doubts regarding the quality of most of the poetry;
in his opinion, only a few contributors, such as Ivan Goran Kovačić, Luka
Perković, and Dobriša Cesarić, would prove to produce future poetry of any
artistic worth. However, more important, he felt the title did not accurately
reflect the contents of the book. It was not a book of the generation of poets
between two world wars but of the generation who had matured and devel-
oped in the period between the two wars but who had only emerged as po-
ets in the past decade and a half. “That the collection Between Two Wars is a
picture of contemporary poetry of the past ten to fifteen years and not a pan-
orama of poetry between the two wars is illustrated by the fact that the book
contains no contributions from expressionist poets who emerged directly af-
ter the end of the First World War (Krleža, Tin Ujević, Krklec, Cesarec, A.
B. Simić),” he remarked testily. “Therefore, this book does not represent the
whole of one poetic generation but just one link in a chain.”5
By contrast, in Spremnost, Ante Bonifačić praised the pristine nature of
the “new Croatian literature,” as exemplified by these poems. According to
Bonifačić, two-thirds of the poets in the collection emphasized “a patriar-
chal connection with the homeland, from which flows national strength and
national resistance,” and a “blood and soil” mentality, which protected them
from communist influence and, in their health and youth, from the “Jewish
spirit” that everywhere tried to remove art from its native soil and “from its
connection with the heart of the nation.” Thanks to this generation’s endeav-
ors, Croatian “specificity” was more visible than ever: “The fact that these
poems emerged in an era when by all possible means there was an attempt to
create a ‘Yugoslav’ literature is the best evidence of how Croatian literature in
these turbulent years protected its special structure, shape, and motifs and its
unique poetic language.” He also noted that eight of these young poets were
employed in the state’s cultural ministries and agencies and that only two did
not work for the state in some capacity. In this sense, the state was becoming
the main transmitter of literature. While he emphasized that not one poet
had enjoyed privileges “either as a writer or as a result of his civil service work
constructing Croatian literature,” the Main Directorate for National Enlight-
enment had already announced steps to ensure that poets “increasingly re-
ceive recognition and value in the national state and national community.”6
This was only partially true, however. While some of the young poets could
accurately be described as poetic voices of radical nationalism, others could
not. The anthology included Ivan Goran Kovačić, for example, who was ini-
tially a supporter of the regime and was lauded in the Ustasha cultural press
 Between Annihilation and Regeneration  239

as one of Croatia’s brightest young poets, but who by December 1942, along
with Vladimir Nazor, another poet initially supportive of the regime, had fled
to Partisan territory. The collection also included works from the poet and
novelist Ivo Kozarčanin, who was both a leftist and dead.

THE DUTIES OF THE WRITER IN THE USTASHA STATE

What were to be the roles and duties of the writer in the Ustasha state? De-
scribing his own student activism in the late 1930s in the pages of Hrvatska re-
vija, Marko Čović remembered contemptuously the talented but “frequently
defeatist, weak, and anational” writers who had not supported the liberation
struggle of the Ustasha movement. Čović—a novelist and hardline cultural
adviser to Mile Budak—recalled that in those years he had frequently asked
himself how Croatia could have produced such “decrepit and pathetic” crea-
tures, who, in their literary work, “spat unsparingly on the purest demands
of an oppressed nation”; some had even become “open enemies of the ardu-
ous, bloody, and monumental struggle” of the Ustasha movement. No won-
der that “the sacred temple of Croatian literature and culture” had become
“desecrated” by so many “unhealthy disfigurements” nor that among writers
there were “so many weeds and so much filth.” It was thanks to Blaž Jurišić,
the editor of Hrvatska revija, and the young student activists around him,
that the movement’s “revolutionary” ideology of “struggle, toil, and sacrifice”
had converted writers to the Ustasha liberation cause and “washed away the
shame of their unworthy colleagues.” Now the Ustasha state had in its ranks
“whole Pleiades of healthy and protected talents” who would propagate the
Ustasha ideology among their fellow citizens, led by Hrvatska revija, “the
guidebook of contemporary Ustasha literature.”7
According to Čović, the Ustasha state was entitled to place onerous du-
ties on the writer. Since the state had provided writers with conditions for
artistic freedom as a result of the Ustasha movement’s liberation struggle,
they must sacrifice themselves for the Ustasha state in a period of construc-
tion and regeneration: “We are fighting but not destroying!” he exclaimed.
“We are fighting so that we do not lose and so that we protect all that which
we have bloodily fought for, to construct and reinforce the structure that we
constructed at the cost of immeasurable sacrifices! Until yesterday our daily
command was: destroy and crush! Now our daily command is build and pro-
tect. Until yesterday our primary characteristic was militancy and sacrifice!
Now our main characteristic is duty and sacrifice! This is the command of the
Ustasha state; this is the daily command of Ustasha Croatia, which applies to
all Croatians and applies also to all writers.” He reminded Croatian writers
of the many privileges that they had received in the first year of the Ustasha
state: “Croatian writers are no longer on the street: they are not unemployed
 240  Between Annihilation and Regeneration

anymore, they are not hungry, and they do not have to look for trifling char-
ity to save their bare lives as they had to do until today. The Ustasha state has
looked after its sons, its chosen sons, who have begun to take their rightful
place in this Ustasha state, the place that belongs to all of them.” Therefore,
now was not a time to make demands; it was an era of duty and sacrifice in
which Croatian writers had to be aware of their “unfulfilled duties.” As the
source of national strength and national health, the writer was to be the “pri-
mary interpreter” of the movement’s ideas, the “primary constructor” of a
new man and new Croatia, and a faithful collaborator in the national and
spiritual regeneration. As a result, “liberated and purified from everything
that is unimportant and irrelevant, momentary and transient,” he could di-
rect all his literary power toward the elevation of the nation’s values, “its past
and present, its suffering and agonies, its living and its dead, its blood and its
life.” Only in this way could writers remain “true and worthy sons of their
own nation, true and worthy sons of human society,” and “legitimize their
artistic existence and right to life.”8
While Ustasha cultural ideologues and spokesmen penned regular vitri-
olic broadsides in the party’s literary and intellectual journals against writ-
ers who actively resisted the regime and the state, they reserved their greatest
contempt for those novelists, poets, and intellectuals who had either initially
embraced the new cultural and political values before disillusionment set in
or who passively accepted the regime but failed to become party members.
In Spremnost in December 1942, Čović identified two classes of Croatian na-
tional intelligentsia: “idealists and warriors as the first class and schemers and
careerists, weaklings, as the second class.” This second class of national intel-
lectuals, who preferred to “live for comfort” rather than “sacrifice themselves
and perish for this Croatia,” loved their state “because it is only the Croatian
national state that has allowed all the members of this second class the same
things that the national state allows all its intelligentsia.” But this second class
had not believed in the Ustasha ideology enough to join the movement for-
mally because of their “petit bourgeois prejudice” and cowardice. He poured
scorn on their refusal to grasp the opportunity offered to them to stand at the
head of Ustasha organizations and disseminate Ustasha ideology, principles,
and ideas and pointed out that while these “opportunists and weaklings” pro-
vided self-pitying excuses for failing to join the movement, they did so at a
time when thousands of Croatians were daily sacrificing their lives, blood,
and youth in defense of the state: “There have been opportunities in our state!
Too many opportunities to register in the Ustasha movement,” he exclaimed.
“What there has not been, even today, is enough love and courage, enough
heart, bravery, preparedness, enough honor, Croatian honor, among those
Croatian intellectuals and would-be intellectuals who have never become ac-
 Between Annihilation and Regeneration  241

customed to sacrifice.”9 When the news of the death of the young Croatian
poet Ivan Goran Kovačić was announced, there was a vitriolic reaction from
the party’s cultural critics. Kovačić had initially been feted as one of the most
gifted young poets in the state and had written a number of poems in honor
of the regime, before escaping to Partisan territory to join the communist-
led resistance movement. When the news of his death at the hands of Serbian
Chetniks was announced in 1943, the critic Verus, dripping with disdain,
compared his fate to that of his fellow Marxist the writer and intellectual Au-
gust Cesarec, executed by the regime for his alleged involvement in an armed
uprising against the state. While he had sympathy for Cesarec, who had died,
he wrote that “as a result of the tragic atmosphere of the Second World War”
and his own rigid ideology, Kovačić deserved little sympathy: “Both were
writers, both Marxists, both Croatians, but while August Cesarec’s death car-
ries in itself an aspect of tragedy, in the case of Ivan Goran Kovačić’s death
this is not true. His death does not affect one. It leaves one cold.”10
Despite the overtly aggressive, heroic, anti-bourgeois and Spartan nature
of the state’s cultural values, the regime endeavored to appropriate a number
of literary and artistic trends that, on the surface, sat uneasily with official
cultural policy, especially among cultural hardliners. One of these was bohe-
mianism. Writers could not agree on whether the bohemian artist was a posi-
tive nonconformist role model or a baleful reminder of the liberal capitalist.
For the essayist Ivo Ladika, the bohemian attitude to life perfectly suited the
outlook of the artist, a necessary antedote to the “philistine, hair-splitting,
narrow-minded citizen. For the bourgeois, the small-town dweller, his house,
his home, his wife, his apartment, and the key to his apartment are every-
thing.” By contrast, the bohemian was no “robot” or “man-machine” of mod-
ern capitalist society. Possessing nothing of his own, he was a cosmopolitan,
ambivalent about the local and parochial, a world traveler. Although to the
outside world he appeared to be a tramp or an unemployed loafer, he was ac-
tually a “visionary” who just happened to be an artist.11 Writing in Plava re-
vija, Ante Bonifačić took a rather sterner view. He categorically rejected the
bohemian artist as completely unsuitable for the era. In the same way that
the “totalitarian Ustasha understanding of life” did not distinguish between
spiritual and material progess, the individual and the collective, or the na-
tional and the universal “organism,” the writer could not be separated from
society: “The wider societal human role of the writer should not any more
mean escaping from life in smoke, alcohol, in bohemianism. It is tragic that
we live in an age of surrogates who do not possess any vitality. Living the life
of vagabonds rather than sailors, pilots, or warriors, they exchange these pri-
mordial activities for flight and salvation in words. Our society cannot toler-
ate bohemianism: in it it sees the remnants of a sick bourgeois romanticism of
 242  Between Annihilation and Regeneration

the nineteenth century, when children toiled and workers died in gutters.”12
Paradoxically, the regime’s anti-bourgeois ideology also enabled the state
to appropriate a number of bohemian avant-garde artists on the basis that
the latter’s nonconformist ideas and behavior complemented the movement’s
own “rebellious” ideology. One striking example of this cultural assimilation
was the surrealist poet Tin Ujević, hailed by the regime’s cultural ideologues
despite his early Yugoslavism and his bohemian lifestyle. Commentators in
the party’s literary and intellectual journals and newspapers wrote admiring
tributes to his decadent, surrealist writing and unconventional eccentric atti-
tudes; even Catholic writers who had previously hated his oeuvre now looked
at it from a new perspective. The critic and poet Ivo Lendić, who a few years
before had condemned Ujević’s individualistic, antireligious, and anarchic
tendencies, now lauded him as “the most superior contemporary Croat poet
and erudite,” one who had immeasurably enriched Croatian literature. Stu-
dent literary critics also leaped to his defense.13 Aside from permitting his po-
ems to be published in various party newspapers and journals—something
over which few writers and artists, in fact, had a choice—Ujević, like many
writers, collaborated in various Ustasha cultural and literary journals. In
truth, Ujević’s stance, and that of many other poets, was dictated by mate-
rial necessity far more than ideological sympathy. Most artists, like the wider
population, lived in conditions of extreme economic and material poverty—
not to mention in an atmosphere of perpetual fear—and the money and se-
curity they earned from contributing to Ustasha cultural journals, writing
laudatory poems and essays for the regime, editing cultural sections of daily
newspapers, or entering the numerous annual literary competitions and
awards organized by party newspapers or state ministries was a vital source
of income.
Ustasha intellectuals and cultural critics also claimed the work of a younger
generation of poets whose writing concentrated on social rather than national
themes. The poems of Dobriša Cesarec, which focused on the arduous lives
of Croatian workers, were frequently published in Ustasha workers’ journals
since they replicated the state’s ideas about the new Ustasha worker.14 Ironi-
cally, the writer perhaps most glorified by the regime was the young leftist
poet and novelist Ivo Kozarčanin. Although his poems and novels explored
promiscuous sex, women, alienation, and suicide, he nevertheless found an
honored posthumous place in the Ustasha pantheon. In 1940, Kozarčanin
had been accidentally shot by a Serb gendarme after wandering into an army
barracks. After his death, nationalist youth wrote numerous poems in his
honor. As the writer Stanko Gasparović pointed out in a December 1940 re-
view in the literary journal Omladina, radical-right youth identified strongly
with Kozarčanin in part because in his novels and poems of alienation from
 Between Annihilation and Regeneration  243

urban life, criticism of social inequality, attacks on bourgeois hypocrisy, psy-

chological torment, and death, he reflected the same themes that they were
exploring in their own literature: “Of all the words, the most frequently used
by Kozarčanin are ‘dead,’ ‘eyes,’ ‘darkness,’ ‘difficult,’ ‘heart,’ ‘quiet,’ ‘black,’
‘sorrowful,’ ‘night,’ ‘pain,’ ‘soul,’ ‘tears,’ ‘blood.’”15 After his death, Milo-
van Adamović wrote in the same journal, his poetry and novels would be-
come even more powerful, provoking youth to think even more obsessively
about the meaning of his work. While Adamović was convinced his liter-
ary achievements would stand as a testament to his talent and greatness, the
writer also believed that he would continue to write for Croatia from beyond
the grave: “The grave is a silent workshop in which death is transformed into
life because while the body in this sanctified place sleeps eternal dreams, the
soul, which rises to heaven, accompanies us on every step. And Kozarčanin’s
soul through his work will stream into our memories. His ‘dead eyes’ that
have fallen into a deep sleep are sweet balm for the pain of the soul and re-
fresh the young but tired body.”16
A year later, the Independent State of Croatia hailed him as one in a litany
of national artistic workers cut down in his youth and at the height of his tal-
ent by the tyrants in Belgrade just months before Croatia was liberated. A
few months after Kozarčanin’s death, Mirko Vutuc wrote a commemorative
poem for him in Hrvatska revija. Addressing Kozarčanin as if he were still
alive, Vutuc asks, “Was the first night in the grave hard for you? / Do you hear
the spring rain as it murmurs in the night / and has it already visited your
corpse and moistened your eyes?” He tells the dead poet that it is now spring
and that the flowers and tree blossoms are in bloom: “Will you tell us, Ivo,
which one of us, / when the first golden rays of sun appears, / should be first to
visit you?”17 The need to commemorate Kozarčanin’s death, and the address
beyond the grave, reflected the regime’s sacral understanding of politics.
The desire to pay tribute to a tragic young writer also served a utilitarian
ideological purpose: contrasting an artificial and brutal Yugoslav state that
killed its young writers with a new state—the Independent State of Croatia
—that honored them. The state media announced with great pride that
Kozarčanin’s gendarme “assassin,” a young soldier called Miljo Jovanović,
had been caught, but speculation over the death of the young poet and who
was ultimately to blame for it continued for months. In an article of August
1942, for example, the writer Ante Maršić asked who had really made a victim
of Ivo Kozarčanin. At the time of his death, Maršić recalled, it was reported
by the authorities that his shooting had been legal, a typically “arrogant byz-
antine lie from the Serbian rulers” and “barbaric oppressors.” For Maršić,
Kozarčanin was a symbol as much as anything else of the murderous inten-
tions of not just one Serb soldier, but an entire people. While he was a “tal-
 244  Between Annihilation and Regeneration

ented and politically aware” writer, his real significance lay in his status as
one more testimonial to the “bestiality committed by a representative of the
half-civilized, uneducated Serb masses.” In the murder of yet another young
Croatian writer, the Serb masses had expressed their enmity toward “the
spirit of Western Europe and, above all, everything that is integrally Croa-
tian, including the essence of Croatian instinctive interior life.”18
But beyond the utilitarian uses or sacral worship of Kozarčanin, there was
a belief among younger writers that they were kindred spirits. For Zdravko
Brajković, writing in Ustaška mladež, the tragedy of Kozarčanin’s death was
his unfulfilled potential, which rendered him “incompletely formed” and
ultimately just “a torso.” However, beyond this he praised the “clots of bi-
zarreness and cruelty” in his poetry, as well as the writer’s disdain for the
“strutting and self-promotion of ungifted nontalents” and his “struggle for
the dignity of the writer.” In his poems of death and novels of alienation from
bourgeois life, his visions of apocalypse as well as his social conscience and
his opposition to injustice, Ustasha activists and artists saw a reflection of
their own outsider status.19

“LITERATURE FOR AN ERA OF COMRADES AND WARRIORS”

Culture wars in the Ustasha state not only pitted the militancy of party hard-
liners against the cultural soft line of moderates but also represented a gen-
erational struggle. Nowhere was this more evident than in the debate about
the form, shape, and content of literature in the Ustasha state and whether,
indeed, there was a specific Ustasha literature. Young poets and novelists en-
ergized, as Zlatko Milković put it, “by new ideas and new views of the world”
clashed with a more conservative generation of nationalist critics.20 While
young writers and poets such as Zdravko Brajković, Zvonimir Katalenić,
Vladimir Miličević, and Andrija Ilić viewed the experimental literary gen-
eration that had produced Ujević, Nazor, and Krleža as providing role models
and literary geniuses, they exchanged regular polemics in the pages of liter-
ary journals with the conservative literary generation born in between. Young
radical nationalist novelists and poets were full of enthusiasm about giving
a concrete literary form to their new perspectives and ideals. The vision of a
new revolutionary literature for a state in permanent, heroic rebellion against
decadent liberal Yugoslav values was exemplified in its most bombastic form
in Vinko Nikolić’s essay of 1942. In it, Nikolić argued that the regime aimed
to construct a “new nationalistic Ustasha literature for a new nationalistic
Ustasha Croatia” and a new Ustasha man. The resurrection of the Croatian
state and the Croatian warrior went hand in hand with the creation of a new
kind of literature, he wrote. Croatian literature was heading down new paths,
he declared, and Croatian writers were creating “a new nationalistic litera-
 Between Annihilation and Regeneration  245

ture,” leading to the “creation of a new nationalistic man.” In this new litera-
ture there would be no place for the moribund interwar bourgeois literature.
It would have to disappear:
There cannot be anymore in Croatian literature the kind of depressive
Nehajev leftist, an Andrijašević or other negative individual, and even less
Krleža’s degenerates, sluts, and drunks. Nor can there be allowed to exist
in our new man various individuals created in sick imaginations, as in
Kozarac’s Duka Begović, a type of eroticized man for whom sex is his guid-
ing principle. Nor is it possible in this era to have heroes of various novels
who destroy the will for life, destroy zeal, imagining a release in spiritual
or physical suicide. We cannot and we should not because this would sin
against our people and our state if young people were to be given such
books. Thus, to sum up: for new Croatia—a new literature! This is our cry!
This is our religion! This is our slogan, our principle! This is our banner!21

When Nikolić’s anthology of Ustasha poetry Lovori (Wreaths), a collec-

tion of nationalistic poems showcasing the work of a new generation of young
poets was published in 1943, Nikolić cited it as an ideal example of the liter-
ary form the revolutionary Ustasha culture should take. As Nikolić wrote,
the cultural aims of the Ustasha movement would only be achieved when a
new genre of Ustasha literature had been incarnated, popularized by poets
and writers imbued with Ustasha ideas, and spread among ordinary people:
“To put the issue more explicitly: the question is not the national, nationalis-
tic, Ustasha contents of our Croatian literature, but the national, nationalis-
tic, Ustasha soul of our poets. Through a nationalist Ustasha soul we will get
an Ustasha literature. More precisely: when we get an Ustasha spirit, we will
also get an Ustasha literature. The Ustasha soul cannot remain elusive, out-
side or beyond Ustasha reality, but this Ustasha soul, imbued with contem-
porary reality—which it experiences profoundly in itself as an active part of
the national struggle—will begin to shake and reverberate with Ustasha sub-
stance. This will then also be an art form and not—as to underestimate the
idea—only patriotism, laments, abbreviations. Thus: not Ustasha literature
from above, with directions or orders, but the Ustasha soul from below.” The
challenge, he wrote, was to cultivate Ustasha literature, which was artistically
powerful as well as ideologically consistent. Lovori was a testament to the lyr-
icism as well as the patriotism of the new Ustasha verse, evidence of the “vi-
tality” of Ustasha ideology. He conceded that many of the poems were “more
patriotic than artistic, more clarion calls and inscriptions than poetry, more
manifestations than poems,” examples of the poems written by Croatian po-
ets for “victors and warriors as an expression of their gratitude, patriotism,
and love.” While they had a “beautiful and praiseworthy” goal in assisting
 246  Between Annihilation and Regeneration

the future Ustasha education of youth, they also aimed to elicit an immedi-
ate emotional response: “When we read these poems, dear banners flutter in
our souls, tears of emotion gush out of our eyes. These poems are Croatian
banners. . . . They are radiant flags that bleed and glisten with wounds and
tears.” Nonetheless, the Ustasha soul would only be constructed and “per-
fected” when “our new poetry,” created by talented individuals, “is close to
real art and, at the same time, not far from patriotism.” Until such time, there
could be no harmony “inside our souls, which are sometimes more Ustasha
than artistic and vice versa.”22
Ante Bonifačić, writing in Plava revija in March 1942, had similar ideas.
For him, cultural politics in the shape of the new literature meant a heroic,
militant kind of writing. Bonifačić argued that the social emphasis of the new
literature meant that the poet would no longer try to escape from life but
would be intimately connected to it. “Such a poet will fly, throw bombs, melt
down ships, give speeches,” ensuring that nothing that was part of human ex-
istence was alien to him. The dynamic era of struggle and sacrifice in which
writers of his generation were living necessitated literary dynamism and a
militant outlook. But literature could be only one function of the writer: “We
must endeavor to absorb in ourselves all other activities in the life of the na-
tion. We must endeavor to express the beauty of every labor, every enthusi-
asm, every sacrifice.” Previously, writers could only extol the words; now they
could extol the “profound reality and activity” that stood behind these words
and, therefore, connect literature to real life. “We are living through a golden
period of our nation,” he wrote, “one great renaissance that has awakened in
us all kinds of instincts, yearnings, and energies. . . . Every stone, every piece
of land conquered, is only done so through blood and soul. Here we need a
thousand conversations in a thousand books bringing to life the past and re-
alizing all the national yearnings of our epoch so that we are inflamed with
desire and our hearts are lit up with enthusiasm. Around us step forward he-
roes as if in an epic era. Without words, often without names, these heroes
legitimate our right to life and existence. If we are not Achilles, we aspire to
be Homer.” For Bonifačić, in an era of total war, the writer himself became a
warrior: “In whose hand God has placed a pen, he has given him a wonderful
weapon, which, as for every warrior, death can only strengthen. In this radi-
ant struggle, there is a feeling of comradeship. . . . Our era is one of comrades
and warriors joined in a mutual struggle to the death.”23
The young writer Zvonimir Katalenić had more complex ideas about the
form a revolutionary national literature might take. In an essay of August
1941 in Hrvatska revija, he set out his vision of a “poetry of the national soul.”
On the one hand, he advocated that the writer and artist should be cosmo-
politan. Nonetheless, he also argued that artistic cosmopolitanism generally
 Between Annihilation and Regeneration  247

lacked any “serious interest in national life and the national soul” and signi-
fied acceptance of foreign artistic tendencies and beliefs. Furthermore, it was
championed by “snobs” who looked with disdain on “our small towns and
villages and ‘small town mud’ and provincial misery.” Although at one stage
they had been needed as an antidote to “listless conservative tastes,” with
their intellectual “strutting,” they had quickly become a manifestation of the
“defective and sick nature of our artistic life.” Even “sadder and more mis-
erable,” since they represented “sterility and immobility of the worst kind,”
were “semieducated” conservative writers, “mediocrities” who believed that
“we can learn nothing from Europe” and who labeled everything they did not
like or understand “degenerate and ridiculous.” As a result of their influence,
“tragic Pleiades” of Croatia’s writers and artists, such as Matoš, A. B. Šimić,
and Račić, had sunk into insanity, died young, or met some other misera-
ble fate, so criminally had they been treated by conservative cultural circles.
For Katalenić the way out of this impasse was through the construction of a
“healthy” Croatian literature and art consisting of a compromise of extremes:
“Radicalism and tradition! The search for the new in the old, the creation of a
new dimensionalism, a new sense of the world from which we have emerged
and in which we live. The uncovering of the sacred in themes about our land,
our aromas, colors, and noises. The regeneration of decadence, which in its
agonies threatened to turn art into mathematics or chaos.” He envisaged a
new national literature “condensing the lyrics and music of the cornfields,
the oak trees, the rapids and river flows,” as well as the sad intimate life of
the town; it would explore the national psyche and its “special melancholy
of cursing, drunkenness, fervor, which makes us a hero in the great tragedy
of our life and our nation.” An unsentimental picture of real life in the nation,
“with its joy and pain, its diverse forms and elemental power”—as opposed to
an idealized version of it—was “the hidden poetry of the land and its soul,”
he maintained. In short, the new literature would combine “the rhythms and
rhyme of Ujević, the pioneering canvases of Račić and Kraljević (followed by
Babić, Bečić, and others) and the breathless marble and bronze of Meštrović
and Augustinčić. Such a sensibility leads to a study of the national racial soul
and the construction of a national expression, not only as a motif and tech-
nique but as a mystical internal force, a specific Croatian soul.”24

ORGANIZING CULTURAL LIFE IN THE NEW STATE

For Croatian nationalist artists, the establishment of the Independent State
of Croatia was welcomed as a liberation from cultural oppression. Look-
ing back at the first six months of cultural life under the new regime, Zlatko
Milković wrote that Croatian writers were now free to express themselves af-
ter twenty years of oppression in the “shackles of an enemy culture.”25 For
 248  Between Annihilation and Regeneration

Ante Bonifačić the establishment of the Croatian state represented the op-
portunity to reverse twenty years of liberalism. in which “every connection to
the nation and tradition was interpreted as remnants of an uncivilized past”
and in which those who wanted to be considered civilized and progressive
had to “enjoy wild black music, primitive black dancing, idiotic degenerate
verses, and the manifestos of various progressive movements.”26 Bonifačić’s
and Milković’s remarks were an exaggeration. Far from being in the shack-
les of an enemy culture, many cultural institutions in Croatia were already
dominated by radical nationalists by 1941. For example, the leading cultural
institution in Croatia, Matica Hrvatska, had become sufficiently nationalist
by 1940 for the Ban of Croatia, Ivan Subašić, to place it under the control of
a commissariat. One of the first acts of the Ustasha movement after coming
to power was to hand back power to the board of directors, most of whom,
in any case, were Ustasha sympathizers.27 Nor was it only radical nationalist
artists who accommodated themselves to the new regime. Since many Croats
who were not Ustasha supporters had also welcomed the creation of an inde-
pendent Croatia, it was natural that many artists should do the same. Unlike
Nazi Germany, where art was subject to strict ideological interference based
not just on content but also on form, in Croatia, as in fascist Italy, art and lit-
erature were not subject to a rigid aesthetic form. Art and literature in the
Independent State of Croatia could be modernist, traditionalist, surrealist,
neorealist, bohemian, or sacral: as long as it did not challenge the regime or
express “anti-national” sentiments, any kind of artistic and literary expres-
sion was deemed acceptable. In addition, early on the regime strove to gain
the support or at least the acquiesence of artists and writers, promising that
“worthy” literary and artistic endeavors would be “valued and rewarded.”
The state’s cultural institutions and propaganda agencies organized competi-
tions to find the best poems, essays, novels, plays, and paintings, providing a
vital source of income for artists at a time of economic chaos. The most pres-
tigious of these was the St. Ante Prizes, established by the State Institute for
National Enlightenment in 1942 and awarded on 13 June each year.28
Carrying monetary prizes up to the value of 20,000 kunas, which in-
creased to 25,000 kunas the following year, these state initiatives were emu-
lated by the large publishing companies and cultural societies like Matica
Hrvatska. The larger mass-circulation newspapers followed suit. Literary and
musical awards were also presented on 16 October by the Zagreb authorities
to mark the anniversary of Zagreb’s recognition as a free city. While some
awards were narrowly conceived, others were wide ranging. The awards dis-
tributed by the Croatian Publishing and Bibliographical Institute, named the
August Šenoa Awards after the Croatian poet, included categories of prizes
for travel writing, essays about national life and national peasant culture,
 Between Annihilation and Regeneration  249

literary work intended for the young, and art history essays.29 Generally,
prizes were awarded to poems, plays, operas, music, visual arts, and novels
that the Ustasha regime thought would bring it prestige; agitprop Ustasha
literary works went unrewarded, while writers known for their ambiva-
lence and even opposition to the regime were recipients of awards. For ex-
ample, in 1944 the poet Gustav Krklec was awarded the St. Ante prize for
his contribution to Croatian poetry; by contrast, Zlatko Milković, one of the
most political of a new generation of radical young writers, never won an
award. In fact, the social-realist agitprop novels of authors such as Milković,
Mara Švel-Gamiršek, and Zdenka Jušić-Šeunik were reviewed quite neg-
atively in the literary journals despite the acknowledgment by the critic
Ljubomir Maraković that Tamnica, Švel-Gamiršek’s Hrast, and Jušić-Šeunik’s
Jedna žena represented three of the “most important and most recent” exam-
ples of the new genre of “political-patriotic” literature.30 The attitude of the
regime toward writers was complicated in other ways too. The Ministry of
Education introduced a law in November 1941 that aimed to protect the com-
mercial rights of authors through the foundation of the Independent State
Institute for the Protection of Authors’ Rights. The remit of the institute was
not limited to the intellectual and commercial rights of authors but extended
to all commercially published work, including theater productions, films,
radio productions, and musicals. The institution, led by a director and in-
cluding accountants, clerical staff, and expert advisers, including composers
and playwrights, charged a commission of 5–10 percent for Croatian authors
but 30–50 percent for foreign authors.31 On the other hand, the regime didn’t
respect the principle of intellectual property and appropriated the work of
dead artists as well as that of living artists as its own. In June 1941, the educa-
tion ministry introduced a statute that arbitrarily declared that the Ustasha
movement had exclusive commercial rights to the works of Eugen Kvaternik
and Ante Starčević. Not surprisingly, state artists had little control over how
their work was used.32
As part of its program to transform the cultural sphere, the Ustasha re-
gime created an extensive network of propaganda and censorship agencies
that went through a number of name changes and transformations. The first
of these agencies was the State Secretariat for Propaganda and Youth En-
lightenment (Državni tajništvo za propagandu i prosvječivanje omladine),
founded in April 1941 and renamed the State Secretariat for Propaganda
(Državni tajničtvo za promičbu) in June the same year. In January 1942,
the secretariat was replaced by the State Investigative and Propaganda Of-
fice (Državni izvještajni i promičbeni ured—DIPU). DIPU regulated book
publishing, newspapers, film, radio, and other forms of propaganda. It also
had the power to punish those who did not obey its authority with sanctions
 250  Between Annihilation and Regeneration

ranging from three months’ imprisonment and fines of 100,000 kunas to per-
manent closure of an individual’s business. DIPU established three regional
offices in Sarajevo, Karlovac, and Zemun, each led by a director. DIPU had six
basic departments: internal propaganda, external propaganda, journalism,
film, photography, and a design office. Its remit also included the censorship
of theater productions and radio. After it took over the duties of the Director-
ate for Film, it introduced a range of repressive cultural policies, including a
restriction on the foreign ownership of cinemas. Attached to DIPU was the
Croatian State Newspaper Office (Hrvatska izvjestajna služba—HIS). Led by
Mijo Bzik, it placed strict limitations on what could be printed in newspapers.
There was also a special department for poetry, headed by the poet Krunoslav
Quien. In October 1942 DIPU was renamed the Main Directorate for Propa-
ganda (Glavno ravnateljstvo za promičbu) and placed under the control of
the Ministry of National Education. The Main Directorate for Propaganda
retained the basic structure of DIPU and most of its staff although its director
changed frequently.33
While some artists engaged enthusiastically with the regime, the well-
developed surveillance and propaganda system and the difficult economic
conditions ensured that most artists and writers publicly complied with the
regime. Where artists and writers demonstrated open resistance to the state,
the threat of deportation to concentration camp, imprisonment, and even ex-
ecution—as well as the promise of rehabilitation—was an effective tool in en-
forcing conformity. In a courageous article in Hrvatska revija, Antun Barac
argued that it was the moral right of the artist to remain silent and main-
tain his integrity in times of crisis and conflict. “There are times when, to
the serious person, writing seems an insignificant and almost unworthy oc-
cupation,” he wrote.34 Writing the wrong thing could also be deadly. A spe-
cial propaganda division in the State Prosecutor’s Office was empowered to
impose the death penalty for all books or leaflets that advocated “violence
against state authorities or generally threaten[ed] public order and peace” or
incited change achieved through “crime, violence,” or any kind of “terror-
ism.”35 In addition, books written in the Cyrillic script or Serbian and the
works of a swathe of eminent novelists including Miroslav Krleža, John Dos
Passos, Maxim Gorky, and August Cesarec, as well as “all other Marxist and
pro-Yugoslav Anglophile” writing, were deemed dangerous enough to public
order to be banned.36
Aside from arbitrarily banning books, the regime had a well-developed
system of censorship to prevent the production of books of which it did not
approve. In April 1941, the regime founded a censorship committee in the
State Secretariat for Propaganda and Youth Enlightenment whose job was
to decide which books could be published. Led by clericalist writers, activ-
 Between Annihilation and Regeneration  251

ists, and intellectuals such as Ustasha Youth ideologue Grga Pejnović, poet
Branko Klarić, and Catholic intellectuals and journalists such as Mijo Tolj
and Ivo Bogdan, as well as the economist Vilko Rieger, subsequent director of
DIPU, the committee made numerous arbitrary decisions that by extension
brought the regime into conflict with its ostensible German allies. Some of
the choices were easy to understand. For example, committee officials agreed
to ban novels and films that promoted the idea that abortion, euthanasia, and
other eugenic methods could be used in the creation of a racially improved
society since it violated central Catholic beliefs about the sanctity of life. This
was also in line with regime thinking on the subject. But overall, the commit-
tee’s moral, aesthetic, and literary judgments were frequently idiosyncratic,
obscure, and quixotic and as likely to be governed by such practical concerns
as a lack of paper as by high-minded ideological reservations. For example,
W. St. Reymont’s The Vampire was banned in 1944 due to the fact that it pro-
moted “spiritualism,” which the censors thought would be too alarming for
the general public to cope with in light of the state’s political-military set-
backs and the advance of Soviet troops. The novels of the American Thorn-
ton Wilder, meanwhile, were banned for their perceived anti-Catholic stance.
Richard Huch’s The Case of Doctor Deruga was barely allowed to pass though
it had no expressly anti-Catholic stance. Nonetheless, its explorations of aris-
tocratic libertinism and free love, despite their essentially tame nature, were
too much for the censor, who wrote in the margin: “Not in any way a suitable
educative suggestion for the reader!” On the other hand, the novel Christina,
about the seventeenth-century Swedish queen, was censored not because the
historical personality defied many of the gender and sexual conventions of
her time, even if that fact did the novel few favors in the eyes of the regime’s
cultural arbiters, but for another reason entirely. Since she had converted to
Catholicism in Rome, it was felt this might insult Protestant Germans, in-
cluding officials from the officially atheist Nazi occupation powers.37
The state’s propaganda agencies were characterized by frequent changes in
directors as well as names. For example, the State Secretariat for Propaganda
was initially led by Ivan Oršanić until he was replaced by Josip Milković: both
of them were radical and uncompromising Ustashas. After the establishment
of DIPU in early 1942, the young economist Vilko Rieger succeeded to the
post of propaganda head. Director until October 1943, he brought in admin-
istrators, journalists, and intellctuals who were either identified with moder-
ate ideological positions within the regime or, in many cases, liberal thinkers
who were not supporters of the regime at all. This all changed in late 1943. Yet
another personnel reorganization saw Rieger replaced as head of the renamed
Main Directorate for Propaganda with the radical Bogdan, who was enthusi-
astically supported by similarly uncompromising officials such as Tolj, Bzik
 252  Between Annihilation and Regeneration

and Josip Mrmić. The directorate itself was very large and had a wide remit to
regulate and ensure ideological compliance in all areas of popular culture. As
well as its censorship department, it also included individual departments for
numerous aspects of cultural and propaganda life, including cinema and the
press, propaganda, the economy, political education, journalism, print and
books, and photography. These departments were staffed by a retinue of in-
vestigators—some of whom were young writers and artists themselves—who
were tasked with ensuring popular culture followed the new cultural norms.
In reality, despite its remit to enforce cultural compliance, the directorate was
systematically chaotic. While it was characterized by zealotry and ideological
rigidity, it was also plagued by inconsistency, personal rivalry, incompetence,
and confusion. Although its young, educated investigators were expected
to adhere to the militant ideological line of their director, countless inqui-
ries went unanswered, because the directorate’s youthful investigators either
did not know the answer or could not be bothered. At other times, whether
motivated by ideological fervor, professional resentment, or plain ambition,
they went too far, acting beyond their appointed roles. The monolithic na-
ture of the directorate, which did not generally experience the same extent of
personnel change and political evolution as other government departments,
especially after 1943, meant that the ideological preconditions for social mo-
bility were magnified: as a result, professional and capable investigators and
bureaucrats quickly adopted a cynical or apathetic attitude while more am-
bitious or ideological colleagues operated in an often zealous and extremist
manner in order to prove their ability and potential for promotion.
One of the most important tasks of the state’s propaganda agencies was
controlling what newspapers and journals could write about and how they
could write it. Beginning in August 1941, officials in the State Secretariat for
Propaganda sent out letters to all legal state and party publications request-
ing details of their finances, board of directors, and editors. By October, all
state publications had been registered with the secretariat, some taken into
direct state ownership. This enabled the secretariat and its successor agen-
cies to exert a significant measure of control over print journalism. At the
same time, the secretariat put a restrictive ideological framework into opera-
tion. The order Bzik sent to all newspaper editors during the crisis of the late
summer of 1941, after the announcement of the appointment of new regional
Ustasha leaders, was typical: Bzik instructed the editors to “emphasize the
heroism, selflessness, belief, modesty, and life of the Ustashas in exile, who,
through many years in the greatest hardship, lived in the Ustasha camps, al-
ways true and faithful to the Poglavnik and the sublime idea of the freedom
and independence of the Independent State of Croatia.” They were to “only
lightly touch on the fact that, along with the many good Ustashas, there were
 Between Annihilation and Regeneration  253

also some self-styled Ustashas who committed deeds that are in complete
opposition to the Ustasha Principles and that real Ustashas never would.”38
Although the state propaganda agencies, especially DIPU and the Main Di-
rectorate for Propaganda, did ban many books and censored news reports,
they increasingly lost their powers of intimidation, and Croatian journalists
became steadily bolder in challenging their decisions. From 1943 onward es-
pecially, newspaper editors not only attacked the heavy-handed behavior of
the directorate but also pressed for the right to report accurately and objec-
tively about events in the homeland: they were, they complained, fed up with
“castrated propaganda” about nonexistent Ustasha victories. As one journal-
ist, working on a daily Ustasha newspaper in Sarajevo, commented in 1943:
“The people are evermore fearful; they are falling prey to the suggestions of
enemy propaganda and are losing faith in everything. Everyone believes that
the authority of the state has collapsed. The Orthodox Serbs now openly sup-
port opposition groups.”39
Paranoia was an important feature of the Ustasha state’s propaganda
agencies, as it was of the Ustasha propaganda system generally. It was fre-
quently concerned that a favorable impression of the movement and its poli-
cies be maintained and that the reality of the regime’s policies toward Serbs,
Jews, and other enemies of the state not be made widely known. This anxi-
ety was demonstrated by a letter DIPU investigators sent to all newspapers
in summer 1942, forbidding any discussion of Vjekoslav Luburić’s Ustasha
Defense Service and what they euphemistically called its “collection cen-
ters.” Some people, the investigators complained, had sent details about this
elite unit to the newspapers with good intentions “to show them in a favor-
able light to the general public.” But neither the newspapers nor those helpful
members of the general public had detailed knowledge of the work of the ser-
vice, and such details did not belong in mass-circulation newspapers.40
Numerous apparently ideologically consistent books written by journal-
ists and novelists who were members of the movement or in many cases em-
ployees of its propaganda and cultural departments were also censored either
for providing ill-advised personal details about the Poglavnik and his entou-
rage or for providing public confirmation of policies and practices—toward
minorities in particular—that the regime wished to keep secret. Authors also
found their work blocked for revealing aspects of state life that the state pro-
paganda agencies wanted to keep secret. For example, in May 1944 officials at
the Main Directorate for Propaganda banned an account of life behind the
doors of a Domobran training school, written by a young army cadet and
edited by a leading Ustasha journalist, despite the positive impression it gave
of military training. The Main Directorate for Propaganda also increasingly
fined and instigated prosecutions against renowned state publishing compa-
 254  Between Annihilation and Regeneration

nies, primarily for publishing books on contentious issues without permis-

sion, even those written by leading Ustasha ideologues, but secondarily for
“unnecessarily squandering precious state paper resources” in violation of
existing laws.41
This condition of permanent vigiliance extended to censorship of even
the movement’s own journals. Some of these were only censored occasion-
ally. For example, on 3 April 1942 Hasan Šuljak, a DIPU censor, sent an or-
der to the publishers of the Ustasha Youth literary journal Hrvatska mladost
instructing them to destroy all unsold copies of their current issue on ac-
count of a poem to which the bureau had taken great offense. Others, such
as the cultural journal Spremnost, founded in early 1942, were increasingly
regular targets. In early 1942, under the chief editorial remit of Ivo Bogdan,
it was radical and hardline, taking an absolutist Ustasha line. After Bogdan’s
replacement by his fellow editor, the journalist and commentator Tias Mor-
tigjija, in early 1943, it adopted a more moderate attitude, especially toward
the Serb question, in line with changes in the regime itself. Under its second
editor it became increasingly independent in thought and content and, ac-
cording to Mortigjija himself, a “nationalistic journal” that aimed at gain-
ing a wide readership through an emphasis on cultural and ethical questions
rather than party or ideological dogmas. It went so far as to print articles or
caricatures without asking permission. This caused profound suspicion and
hostility toward both Mortigjija and the journal among more hardline fac-
tions of the party and bureaucracy, particularly within the Main Directorate
for Propaganda. For instance, in 1943 Tolj, as head of the directorate’s depart-
ment for newspapers, wrote to Mortigjija after he had printed some illustra-
tions without asking permission of the censors first: “Please inform me who
drew these pictures, who wrote the bylines for them, and what purpose these
sketches served. What was the special purpose?? Please inform this office in
writing before six o’clock this evening.” On more than one occasion the jour-
nal contained material sufficiently inflammatory for the whole edition to be
pulped.42 Until the middle of 1944, Spremnost was associated with the dissi-
dent faction of moderates led by Mladen Lorković, Ante Vokić, and the em-
bryonic Plug group. Following Mortigjija’s dismissal in December 1944, in
the wake of the purge of dissident elements within the party associated with
Lorković and Vokić, the newly appointed USS commander Franjo Nevistić, a
supporter of the hardline faction, was made editor and immediately took the
journal back to its radical roots.
Not all censorship was imposed from above. In the nationalist euphoria
of 1941, censorship was as frequently initiated by ideologically sympathetic
activists as it was the result of directives from officials. For example, in late
1941, the editor of the Catholic youth journal Hrvatska straža, accompanied
 Between Annihilation and Regeneration  255

by the police and a group of students armed with a register, carried out the
confiscation of all copies of André Gide novels in Osijek’s bookshops and li-
braries; likewise, militant regional Ustasha Youth leaders led independent
campaigns to confiscate and burn illicit books after gaining approval from
the State Secretariat for Propaganda and Youth Enlightenment to destroy all
books with contents directed “against the interests of the Croatian nation”
in cities and towns including Sarajevo, Vinkovac, and Bjelovar. According to
local news reports, book burnings were being carried out by citizens and the
movement’s activists, especially its youth activists, across the state to eradi-
cate literature not conforming to the “new spirit, the spirit of the nation, the
spirit of sacredness, respect, morality, strength, and faith.” In short, as Usta-
sha Youth leader Ðuro Balaković stated in Vinkovac, in words that became a
slogan of the new cultural politics in the first few months after April 1941: “All
that isn’t in harmony with this spirit—on the fire!”43
Inevitably, like many aspects of life in the Ustasha state, the initial hard-
line and militant cultural politics—including the censoring and terrorizing
of artists and writers deemed to be hostile to the state—gradually gave way
to something more pragmatic. In the wake of the second revolution and the
emergence of more moderate factions advocating a softer cultural line, the
direction of cultural politics began to evolve. One of the most visible signs
of this evolution was the attempt by the state’s cultural ministries to bring
previously censored and banned artists and writers into collaboration with
the party and the state. One of the earliest public declarations of this policy
was expressed in an article by Marko Čović in a lengthy essay in Spremnost
to mark the first anniversary of the state. Čović—perceived as something of
a cultural hardliner—launched a mea culpa against the cultural excesses of
younger militant members of the movement. Writing as a former spokesman
of this group, he conceded that from time to time the movement had for-
gotten national ideals and too often been captivated by the purity of revo-
lutionary Ustasha ideology; it had sought to reject everything perceived as
harming this cultural purification. The conditions under which activists such
as he had worked were so difficult, he recalled, that, “permanently accompa-
nied by threats, persecution, sacrifice, bloodied and dead bodies” and carried
away by the “immeasurable admiration” for their ideas about purification,
they had momentarily forgotten that they should embrace “even those who
on first sight looked unworthy and incomprehensible.” This especially applied
to youth of his generation, who “in our breathless and splendid youthfulness”
had been “fierce guards” and “uncorrupted warriors for liberation” but had
forgotten that “every Croat, even the worst, becomes and remains a citizen
of our Independent State of Croatia, an equal member of our community, an
important factor in its construction, in its fortification, in its progress.”44
 256  Between Annihilation and Regeneration

Čović acknowledged that there were still some in the Ustasha ranks who
did not understand this cultural “Ustasha broadmindedness”; there might
even emerge some purifiers who were so zealous that they “wanted to wipe
away all Croatian literature, from the first to the last.” However, truth was on
the side of the Ustasha state since many of those who had not previously been
supporters had embraced the new state. Initially Ustasha literature had been
forced to fight against national enemies and destroy them, he explained. But
Ustasha writers were no longer destroying but building, knowing “that ev-
ery Croat is important and every Croatian writer is a part of the 1,000-year
totality that we call Croatian literature.” On the one hand, Čović sought to
emphasize the positive aspects of Ustasha cultural politics: as a result of its
affirmative action policies, a new generation of young writers had emerged
writing a new form of literature that was a reflection of the national revolu-
tion and an expression of the spiritual life of the nation. The cultural revo-
lution, which had made ordinary citizens active agents in the state’s radical
cultural politics, had given voice to a generation of citizen-artists, who were
previously “unemployed and rejected, hungry, naked and ill, unknown and
unacknowledged.” Representatives of a new generation of artists, producing
“Croatian and Ustasha work” and far from a distant artistic elite, were ordi-
nary people who combined artistic evocations of the “liberation idea” with
everyday working lives. In this sense, their lives were indistinguishable from
the lives of those other artists whom the Ustasha regime wanted to attract
into the ranks of national poets and writers and who should be the most en-
thusiastic “troubadours” of its liberationist ideology. The ultimate cultural
aim of the state, he insisted, was to reconcile the leftist novelist Miroslav
Krleža—whose work was banned at the time—and the Ustasha minister and
novelist Mile Budak. Čović called on him to return to Croatian literature,
support the state’s conception of Croatianess and carry out his duty to the na-
tion which had given him his literary talents. “With Budak and Krleža for the
enrichment of Croatian literature!” he suggested, should be the new cultural
slogan of the state.45
Yet, as with the new line toward the Serbs, the introduction of a “softer
line” on cultural politics heralded by Čović’s article was never comprehen-
sively applied. While Ustasha cultural ministries and agencies did introduce
less rigidly ideological, censorious, and uncompromising cultural policies,
encouraging a wider range of artists and writers to collaborate in cultural in-
stitutions and agencies, it was always less than total and was resisted by cul-
tural hardliners in the regime who remained in influential positions in the
state’s cultural ministries. In fact, this article proved sufficiently controversial
that Čović found himself censored. On 23 April, DIPU officials sent a strongly
worded order to the editors of Spremnost ordering an embargo on the sale of
 Between Annihilation and Regeneration  257

and the destruction of any remaining copies of the 10 April edition. This or-
der was to be enforced by the Ustasha police, who were sent a copy of the let-
ter and were ordered to transfer all remaining copies of Spremnost to DIPU.46

UTOPIAN VISIONS OF A NEW LANGUAGE

The Ustasha movement’s program of June 1942 stated that the aim of the re-
gime was to transform society: in the “Ustasha state created by the Poglavnik
and the Ustashas, ordinary Croatians must think like Ustashas, speak like
Ustashas, and—most important—act like Ustashas. In other words, the
whole life of the Independent State of Croatia must be Ustasha based.”47 Usta-
sha ideologues and intellectuals believed that the movement’s cultural, so-
cial, and national revolution, imbued with anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois
ideas, required a revolutionary language to express these new ways of think-
ing, speaking, and writing. This idea took two basic forms. One manifesta-
tion was the emergence of a militant anti-capitalist language that sought to
redefine social relationships and thinking. Out went the language of liberal-
ism, democracy, and capitalism: terms such as “manager,” “boss,” and “gen-
tleman,” associated with a plutocratic past, became terms of abuse and were
replaced with the radical language of cells, camps, communes, commissars,
commissariats, and adjutants. Every ideologically conscious member of the
state was redefined as a worker, irrespective of whether he was an intellectual,
peasant, or factory worker. But ideology defined social class. Hence, nation-
alist and Ustasha intellectuals were categorized as “intellectual workers,” but
liberal intellectuals perceived as being disloyal to the state were condemned
as members of the bourgeoisie, “Anglophiles,” and the chattering intelligent­
sia. Likewise, all men—no matter what their profession or function—were
classified as “warriors”; terms like “citizen” denoted disloyalty and belonged
only to those who clung to the old bourgeois way of doing things, repre-
sented by Yugoslavia. The regime also adopted an aggressive language of pu-
rification: cultural life was dominated by the violent language of “cleansing,”
“annihilation,” “blood,” and “death” and concepts such as “morality,” “mar-
tyrdom,” “sacrifice,” “torture,” and “crucifixion.” Ordinary citizens were ex-
pected to live up to the ideals encapsulated in this language, and the regime
used the language of threats and punishment as well as paranoia to control
social interaction, attitudes, and behavior: the masses were there to be com-
manded, not asked: exclamation marks replaced full stops; aberrant capital
letters were everywhere in belligerent public statements. Streets, squares, ad-
vertising placards, and torchlit processions were dominated by the regime’s
simple and aggressive slogans, which instructed citizens on how to behave:
“Help is not just an act of mercy—it is a duty too!” ordered a banner adorn-
ing an archway at a rally for the state charity Pomoč. “To work! Intensify your
 258  Between Annihilation and Regeneration

work to shorten the war!” a series of posters told factory workers. “All for one,
one for all!” stated an advertising placard calling on laborers, peasants, and
intellectual workers to work together for the good of the state. Another, pro-
moting support for injured Ustasha soldiers, entitled “And blood for Croatia,”
was largely self explanatory.
How successful was this language of duty, sacrifice, and militancy? How
many people embraced the values it represented? If party ideologues were to
be believed, not very many. One simple way to differentiate between those
who embraced the values of the national revolution and those who did not,
they observed, was to note who persisted in using the old liberal-era Yugo-
slav greetings and those who embraced the new revolutionary greeting: “For
the Homeland? Prepared!”48 Ustasha officials noted on tours through the state
that the new greetings were not being respected, especially by schoolteachers
and pupils, even in areas where there was strong support for the movement
and despite the fact that strict instructions regarding the new greetings had
been provided by Mile Budak in October 1941. This was also noticed in July
1941 by Jure Francetić, an Ustasha commissar in Sarajevo who felt it necessary
to issue a circular to Sarajevo state offices on the importance of using Ustasha
greetings and language.49 In 1944, Mijo Bzik asked, furiously: “Do you still
greet each other with ‘Nice to meet you’? This is a sure sign that you have been
brought up in a servile fashion and that you are a slave. Are you still ‘kiss-
ing’ hands even though it isn’t the done thing anymore? Perhaps you would
be prepared to kiss a foot if it meant that you wouldn’t have to be—prepared
for the homeland!!! This kind of person is, in every era, an obedient slave or
‘humble.’ This type of person belongs to a species of reptiles (subcategory:
fawning crawler).”50 Throughout the life of the Independent State of Croatia,
there were consistent complaints and reprimands in the Ustasha press attest-
ing to the refusal of ordinary citizens to use the new greetings. As late as 1944,
national newspapers were warning their readership that “in the Independent
State of Croatia there exists only one greeting: For the homeland—prepared!”
Members of the movement were likewise regularly reminded, as Hrvatska
ognjište did repeatedly in March 1943, that this was also their greeting, sug-
gesting that many activists were not using it either.51 As another newspaper
made clear on New Year 1942, it was a question not just of ideological pu-
rity but of national pride: “FOR THE HOMELAND PREPARED! This is the
greeting of every conscious Croat man and woman. Foreign types of greeting
such as ‘Your faithful servant,’ ‘Your humble servant,’ ‘My respects,’ and so on
fail to suit not only the spirit of the Croatian language but the human dignity
that should adorn every Croat. Therefore, our greeting should be everywhere
only: For the Homeland prepared!”52
These admonishments were also published in public leaflets and flyers by
 Between Annihilation and Regeneration  259

various regional Ustasha authorities.53 DIPU even went as far as to assess how
many citizens were using the greeting, asking its bureaucrats and investiga-
tors to find out if telephone subscribers used the greeting “Prepared!” when
they answered the phone. Some of those who did not had their phones taken
away.54 Nonetheless, some commentators optimistically heralded the insti-
tutionalization of the new greetings in everyday writing and speech, with
one declaring hopefully in 1942 that “today, above all in general communi-
cation, traditional closing salutations have been replaced with the Ustasha
greeting ‘For the homeland prepared!’” While the campaign for the inculca-
tion of a new revolutionary greeting among the general public was strongest
between 1941 and 1942, by 1944, with the return of Ustasha ideological and
cultural radicalism, the campaign was relaunched with renewed fanaticism.
Therefore, in an article of August 1944, one language ideologue writing in the
newspaper Nova Hrvatska was convinced of the campaign’s success, if not
among the general public then at least in the commercial sphere: “Finally, we
must mention that in commercial life, less and less do we hear on the tele-
phone the word ‘hello,’ and in place of this foreign word our word ‘spremno’
has already become common. And the duty to exclude the word ‘hello’ from
telephone conversations has been willingly accepted, and how could it not be
when we have the beautiful and appropriate word ‘spremno’?”55
The other route to a new language involved a campaign of language “pu-
rification” that envisaged the removal of all foreign words and expressions
from the Croatian language, in particular Serb ones (“serbisms”). The at-
tempt at language purification was not unique to the Ustasha regime. In fact,
it had long been an important aspect of cultural politics in both fascist Italy
and Nazi Germany, which aimed to cleanse language of both ideologically
unacceptable words and foreign “barbarisms.” Nor did the campaign for the
remaking of the Croatian language emerge with the establishment of the state
in 1941: it could be traced back to the beginning of the 1920s. While there
were many Croatian linguists who initially supported the idea of a common
literary language of the Serbs and the Croats, as early as 1921 some Croatian
linguists were complaining about the way in which the Croatian language
had increasingly become subject to Serb hegemony. Vladimir Rožić published
an article entitled “In Battle for the Croatian Language!” arguing that Croa-
tian writers had adopted too many linguistic expressions from Belgrade writ-
ers and journalists. In 1923 the linguist Nikola Andrić accused Belgrade of
“corrupting” the Croatian language. These complaints intensified after the
introduction of language reforms by linguist Aleksandar Belić and the es-
tablishment of the royal dictatorship in the early 1930s. In 1937, Croat lin-
guists set up their own philological journal and organization called Hrvatski
jezik (The Croatian Language) committed to the eradication of “bad influ-
 260  Between Annihilation and Regeneration

ences” and “non-Croatian expressions” in the “struggle for the protection of

the Croatian character of the language.”56 In 1940 the Movement for the Croa-
tian Language (Pokret za hrvatski jezik) was founded, among whose mem-
bers were the young linguists Petar Guberina and Kruno Krstić.57 In the same
year Guberina and Krstić produced a study in which they set out the main
differences between the Serb and Croat “languages.” They argued that the
Croatian language had unique “phonetic, morphological, syntactical, stylis-
tic, and style characteristics” that were the exclusive property of the Croatian
people, reflecting cultural, social, literary, and linguistic values that united
the Croatian nation. A feeling for language meant that the Croatian people
rejected “as foreign everything that is not in harmony with these feelings or
the spirit of the language.” Since 1918, they continued, the Croatian nation
had experienced as foreign “every word that came from Belgrade” and had
fought a “united struggle” against these words, especially Serb words, Serb
forms, and Serb styles, which were “in opposition to the spirit of the Croatian
language.”58
The Ustasha movement perceived the Croatian language as a key marker
of national identity, arguing that it was inherently linked to national survival:
the nation that did not protect the purity of its language was fated to die out.
In 1941 the Ministry of Education introduced a series of laws bringing into be-
ing an “official” Croatian literary language, “etymological script” (korienski
pravopis), which, according to a statute of June 1941, suited “the spirit of the
Croatian language.” The basic principle of this language was that language
should be based on etymology rather than phonetics: words should be spelled
according to their root rather than on the basis of their pronunciation.59 Then
in August 1941, Mile Budak introduced a law that outlined the rules govern-
ing the purification of the Croatian language and the return to an original
“pure” script. The literary language was, Budak insisted, the language that
Starčević had used, the “original and unique language of the Croatian nation
that cannot be exchanged for any other language, dialect, vernacular, or mu-
tual national tongue.” It was the “property of the nation” and “must not be
distorted or deformed.” The use, in speech or writing, of foreign words was
outlawed, with the only exceptions made for words with no Croatian alterna-
tive.60 Foreign street names were forbidden, and all branches of education and
culture, such as cinemas, theater, and radio, were compelled to adhere to the
new laws.
However, Budak’s Ministry of Education went further, replacing not only
Serb words but hundreds of Western-derivated words associated with mod-
ern twentieth-century technology. The word radio, for example, was replaced
with krugoval; telefon with brzoglas; automobil with samovoz; tramvaj with
 Between Annihilation and Regeneration  261

munjovoz. In order to popularize these words among the general public, those
working in state administration and the military as well as the movement’s
activists were subject to regular language lessons published in youth maga-
zines, the movement’s official journal, and military newspapers and alma-
nacs. Youth magazines, through the use of games introduced by characters
such as Aunt Marija, taught children how we “throw out foreign elements”
from the language and make it pure. In military magazines, soldiers were
presented with long lists of vocabulary, with one side populated by words not
to be used and and the other side by acceptable Croatian alternatives. Ustasha
intellectuals ideologically interested in the reform of the Croatian language
and the purging of the language of all foreign words periodically provided
lists of acceptable words in the regime’s intellectual journals. Daniel Crljen,
for one, wrote a series of newspaper columns providing the general public
with lists of “foreign” words, many of them borrowed from English, which
did not “suit the spirit of the Croatian language, especially foreign words bor-
rowed from foreign languages.”61
The linguistic laws also attempted to standardize the Croatian language.
For example, in August 1941 the Ministry of Education introduced a law re-
stricting the use of regional dialects, especially the Kajkavian and Čakavian
dialects of northern Croatia and Dalmatia, commonly used by Croat writ-
ers in poetry, literature, and dialogue in novels. From now on it had to be
clearly marked and a glossary of unfamiliar words provided. This restric-
tion affected many of the most ideologically committed literary supporters
of the Ustasha regime, such as the poet Vinko Kos, who often wrote in the
kajkavian dialect. In the future, the Croatian language was to be based on the
Iljekavian variation of the Štokavian dialect. Additionally, the law aimed to
standardize spelling and grammar. Croatians were no longer allowed to use
da (that) with the present tense to indicate future intentions; in many cases
the sibilant sound ž was to be used in place of š, t in place of d, and b in place
of p in prefixes, and the long vowel sound je was to be replaced with ie so
that words such as vijeka (century) became vieka. This also applied to place
names and towns such as Osijek, which was to be written as “Osiek” in the
future. Nonetheless, the Ministry of National Education stressed that the new
rules were not “in any way a forced change, but simply an attempt to legal-
ize existing Croatian habits.”62 These linguistic changes were to be overseen
by a newly appointed Croatian State Bureau for Language (Hrvatski državni
ured za jezik—HDUJ). The bureau was headed by a group of young nation-
alist linguists who arbitrated on all language problems under the auspices of
the Ministry of National Education.63 The ministry gave the HDUJ control
over the imposition of the new language rules in all national institutions and
 262  Between Annihilation and Regeneration

also charged it with promoting the new linguistic changes; developing addi-
tional linguistic reforms; and providing advice to writers, legislators, and the
general public on the use of the Croatian language.64
As well as a language bureau, in August the Ministry of Education, an-
nounced the establishment of a commissariat for language. Its role involved
monitoring the purification of the Croatian language and the introduction
of the etymological script and ensuring that all organizations and businesses
complied with the language laws. To this end, it was allowed to levy a range of
draconian punishments for transgressors “in defense of the purity of the Cro-
atian language and script.” The commissariat was also tasked with removing
words, including foreign ones, that did not suit the “spirit” of the Croatian
language, replacing them with acceptable Croatian alternatives. The commis-
sariat was further charged with developing new rules regarding the etymo-
logical script. From time to time, the Poglavnik’s private office also issued
circulars to state departments drawing attention to the most flagrant and ba-
sic errors still taking place in newspapers, journals, and government offices.
One circular of September 1941 issued to officials in the State Secretariat for
Propaganda drew their attention to a list of “foreign” words still being used
departmentally and the “authentic” words that should replace them, express-
ing disappointment that “those who should be paying the greatest attention
to the purity of the Croatian language” should commit so many “unforgiv-
able mistakes” and use so many “Balkan disfigurements” in their writing. Of-
ficials drafting laws, reports, and propaganda articles reached such a wide
cross section of the national community that they had the greatest capacity
to “corrupt” the language. Therefore, the circular vowed, the state would lead
“the strongest and most resolute proceedings” against those who “consciously
violate” language purification laws. Whoever attempted to “disfigure our lan-
guage,” whether intentionally or from “willful negligence,” would be consid-
ered to be “engaging in an act of sabotage.”65
Nonetheless, most language activity involved the HDUJ. Headed by the
linguists Krune Krstić, Antun Klaić, Petar Guberina, and Franjo Cipra, it
technically enjoyed the power to police language in schools, books, theater,
cinema, commerce, and newspapers. It was to “purify” the language for pub-
lic use and offer advice to writers, officials, and public companies; it was also
engaged in the scrutiny of legal language. Its advice was to be published in
newspapers free of charge, and all companies and businesses that the bureau
identified as using incorrect grammar and language were compelled to follow
its advice; only companies that had their own approved language administra-
tor were free of the bureau’s oversight. On the other hand, if the language laws
and strictures of the bureau were violated, the Ustasha Police was empowered
to intervene, and fines could be handed out.66 Individually and collectively,
 Between Annihilation and Regeneration  263

its experts wrote a series of detailed handbooks about rules for the new offi-
cial language aimed at editors, writers, and the intelligentsia. In its bulletins
printed in the regime’s daily newspapers, the HDUJ’s linguists produced up-
dates on the progress of the language changes, the new rules and new areas
for reform aimed at the masses even if, in practice, no language changes could
be implemented without the permission of the education ministry. From the
beginning, the general population’s participation in the purification of the
Croatian language was an important characteristic of the project, something
the bureau actively encouraged. For example, in 1942 Krstić appealed through
the pages of Nova Hrvatska for assistance in the search for a new word to re-
place the common word for a stamp (marka), which Krstić claimed was of Slo-
venian origin, in favor of one that “comes from the nation.”67 The prize for the
winning entry was a large collection of postage stamps, and there were nearly
two hundred suggestions. At the same time, encouraging public participation
caused its own problems since the opinions of ordinary citizens participating
in language debates were not only often far more radical than even the bureau
wanted to be but expressed implicit criticism of the failure of the HDUJ, and
therefore the regime, to realize its own aspirations. Frequently, advice from
citizens contradicted advice from linguistic experts. identifying expressions
and words as “enemies of the Croatian language,” which the bureau’s own
semiregular “language notes” columns in daily newspapers did not. As such,
amateur advice was often accompanied by editorial warnings emphasizing
the bureau’s authority.68
Language purification was part of a wider mechanism of cultural poli-
tics aimed at the eradication of all traces of a Serb presence—and, from the
point of view of the Ustasha movement, Serb contamination—in the state.
One of the most visible symbols of the ideological and national purification
of everyday life was the renaming of public spaces. Under Ustasha rule, the
names of sports clubs, streets, squares, and societies were arbitrarily changed
to ones that reflected the ethos of the national revolution. As well as renam-
ing streets and squares after medieval Croatian rulers such as King Zvoni-
mir and Tomislav or the movement’s claimed ideological antecedents, Ante
Starčević and Eugen Kvaternik, local Ustasha councils and authorities re-
named squares and streets after the movement’s leading personalities, above
all the Poglavnik, or its litany of martyrs. As a result, the cartography of some
towns was transformed overnight: in Slavonski brod, on one day, twenty cen-
tral public squares and streets were renamed, including the central piazza,
which was to be known as Ustasha Square.69
An important part of this campaign was the removal of all place names
that indicated a Serb presence. Regional Ustasha councils arbitrarily assigned
streets, squares, and public buildings Croatian names; monuments erected
 264  Between Annihilation and Regeneration

to Serb kings and historical figures were torn down. For example, in Mitro-
vica, Marko Kraljević Street and King Peter Avenue had became Mijo Babić
Street and Antun Pogorelec Avenue by May 1941. However, place names also
changed in more fundamental ways. Ustasha municipal councils introduced
statutes croaticizing entire villages and hamlets, often following the depor-
tation or murder of the village’s Serb inhabitants. For example, in autumn
1941 the Bjelovar Ustasha authorities changed the villages of Srpska kapela
and Srpsko polje to Hrvatska kapela and Hrvatsko polje. Furthermore, after
regional Ustasha authorities appropriated Serb and Jewish businesses in the
spring of 1941, one of their first acts was to replace shop and business signs
written in Cyrillic with signs in the Latin alphabet and Jewish names with
Croatian ones. As early as 23 April 1941 Hrvatska krajina in Banja Luka tri-
umphantly predicted that from now on the Bosnian town would have “purely
Croatian and national signs” and that the “slightest signs of Serbdom, Byzan-
tium, and Balkanism” would disappear. To make sure, the Ustasha council
imposed a fine of 5,000 dinars and jail sentences of thirty days for all busi-
nesses or individuals who violated these laws.70
That language purification served the same aim was made clear by Mile
Budak in October 1941. In a speech to Croatian journalists about the role of
schools in the Independent State of Croatia, he explicitly linked the regime’s
campaign of language purification to its campaign of removing all foreign
influences: “Through twenty-two years in Yugoslavia, the Serbs corrupted
and perverted everything that was Croatian, especially Croatian culture, lan-
guage, and literature. In the linguistic sphere, they brought every kind of bar-
barism, especially Turkish expressions, in order to eliminate good Croatian
expressions and replace them with ones characteristic of the Serb language.”
This still remained an important part of the language program in 1943. Speak-
ing to teachers from the Syndicate of Croatian Teaching Societies in May of
that year, the Poglavnik stated that the Croatian language was the greatest
asset of the Croatian nation: the nation that did not protect its language was
doomed to extinction. However, it had experienced the most terrible “peril”
in the previous two decades, a threat that Croatian teachers had heroically
resisted. Through books, documents, and newspapers, Croatia’s enemies had
attempted to “create a monstrosity; they attempted to entangle the Croatian
language with foreign words, to distort the Croatian language with impos-
sible monstrous forms” and make it Balkan. They had used their baleful in-
fluence to create a language that was alien to the linguistic expression of the
Croatian nation and in doing so destroy the Croatian nation. It was therefore
the duty of teachers to return Croatian to its “pure, uncorrupted” origins. In
the meantime, he told the teachers: “We are tearing out foreign expressions,
which directly insult the heart and eyes of Croats; we are eliminating writing
 Between Annihilation and Regeneration  265

and speech that have been given to our language by those who have no feeling
for their own language.” 71
The Serbs were not the only group targeted by the state’s linguistic re-
forms. The bureau also discussed linguistic changes in light of the intro-
duction of Aryan race laws in August 1941, publishing a language note that
sought to establish the proper Croatian term for Aryan Croats.72 On the sur-
face, the bureau’s young linguists were anxious to remain strictly scholarly
and separate themselves from the wider political issues language purification
raised. Kruno Krstić even went as far as to argue that the campaign to pu-
rify the Croatian language had nothing to do with the regime’s policy toward
Serbs: “Although for some people this might seem superfluous,” he somewhat
unconvincingly insisted in 1942, “I must emphasize that the purification of
the Croatian language from Serbisms is in no way an act of political confron-
tation with the Serbs or an endeavor to imagine differences where there are
none in order to create a gulf between the Croatian and the Serbian literary
languages.” On the contrary, differences in the literary languages were an ab-
solute reality that serious scientific study had proved. In fact, at the heart of
language purification, he argued, was the regeneration of the Croatian lan-
guage and the redefinition of Croatian identity: “It is a confrontation with
ourselves, a scientific undertaking that allows us to know what belongs in our
own Croatian language in the literary sense of the word and what does not.”73
Despite this claim, one of the primary objectives of language purifica-
tion was the cleansing of Croatian discourse from all manifestations of what
Krstić called “serbisms.” Krstić defined “serbisms” as all words that had been
forced on Croatia by the Belgrade regime. But he also argued that words that
had been “commonly used” by the Croatians before the founding of the Yu-
goslav kingdom could not be considered “serbisms” even if they had come
from Serbia since they had already become the spiritual property of the “edu-
cated part of the Croatian nation.” The failure to differentiate between these
kinds of assimilated words and blatant “serbisms” by some amateur linguists,
Krstić maintained, had led to a situation in which many good Croatian words
had been expelled and “serbisms” retained. On the contrary, many words
“that we feel are serbisms today are nothing other than words from old lit-
erature or Croatian štokavian regions; therefore such words, which we Croats
have either forgotten or left out of our modern literary language, the Serbs
have borrowed from us or taken from the štokavian regions, where the Serbs
and Croats spoke them equally.”74
Franjo Cipra agreed, arguing that in their zeal to rid the Croatian lan-
guage of “barbarisms” and foreign words, current linguists should not make
the mistake that Croatian linguists from the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries had, tearing out good Croatian words as “barbarisms” and replac-
 266  Between Annihilation and Regeneration

ing them with foreign “serbisms.” In an atmosphere of confusion and experi-

mentation, he warned, fatal errors could easily be made. Therefore, linguists
and all those interested in language purification should ensure that only
words that were “badly constructed” or “slavishly introduced from foreign
languages” were defined as “barbarisms,” in other words, Serb expressions
and words. Indeed, after 1918, he maintained, far worse barbarisms had en-
tered the Croatian language than the ones that earlier linguists had mis-
takenly tried to root out. “A flood of new barbarisms from the East, from
Belgrade, swarmed into the language that was given to us by our new masters.
These new barbarisms, far more dangerous for the language than the old ones,
were serbisms—or perhaps to identify them more accurately, Belgradisms.” It
was against these that the bureau and the public needed to struggle: vigilance
should be shown against them since they were persistent and primitivized the
Croatian language. “Look,” he concluded, “it is against these barbarisms that
today’s linguistic movement fights the hardest, those barbarisms that profes-
sors Guberina and Krstić warned against in great detail in their book. This
struggle is one of the main tasks of the Croatian State Bureau for Language.”75
Krstić blamed the mistakes and excesses of linguistic cleansing on the
actions of overzealous individuals. The process of language purification had
involved the participation of a wide spectrum of the population, with “wildly
varying language origins and unequal language knowledge,” resulting in
“numerous errors and much confusion.” The confusion was so great that in
many cases proposals had been issued that led to the driving out of a pure
Croatian word and its substitution by a Serb one. One of the most glaring
examples of how a lack of linguistic knowledge, relying on “popular feeling”
and “a minimum of scientific criteria,” could lead language purification down
the “wrong path” was a small privately published book of late 1941, a minidic-
tionary of “the most common foreign words and serbisms,” which had incor-
rectly identified many good Croatian words as foreign or Serb. In deciding
what was Serb and what Croat in literary language, many used “subjective
criteria that could be summed up in the phrase: ‘it seems to me.’” Instead, mak-
ing a sharp distinction between what he perceived to be emotional populist
ideas about language purification and detached scholarly knowledge, Krstić
argued that an informed decision about such complex language questions
could only be made by someone who had read a lot, consulted academic dic-
tionaries, used objective sources, spoken to linguistic experts, and was famil-
iar with different dialects of the Croatian language. When in doubt, caution
was the best strategy. This zealotry regarding the elimination of “serbisms.”
he complained, had not even had the desired effect of purifying the language:
the old habits continued. “I am bound to remark that, generally, the language
is being weakly purified of serbisms; people have learned the list of serbisms
 Between Annihilation and Regeneration  267

by heart and tend to use this list when they write and speak. Much more suc-
cess—and the only real purification of the language—will emerge from pas-
sionate submergence in the Croatian language.”76
In order to recitify overzealous popular initiatives, the bureau launched
various forms of propaganda to educate the public. Starting in May 1941, the
bureau’s linguists began a regular language program on Croatian Radio en-
titled For the Croatian Language. The program lasted approximately thirty
minutes and was aired every Wednesday evening. Each week until Febru-
ary 1943, when it ceased transmission, one of the bureau’s linguists explained
some aspect of linguistics—for example, the differences between literary Ser-
bian and Croatian; when it was appropriate to use kajkavian and čakavian;
and suggestions for the substitution of Serbian words with Croatian alter-
natives. As listener democracy gained on Croatian Radio, the bureau’s lin-
guists gave special lectures about areas of language that listeners had asked
for more information about: for example, the use of punctuation, when to
use capital and lower-case letters, and general linguistic advice. One of the
aims of the program was to provide weekly lectures that would “awaken the
Croatian linguistic consciousness among a wide national audience and, espe-
cially, [increase] awareness of the purification of the language from enforced
and imposed serbisms.”77 The bureau’s linguists also regularly published ar-
ticles, opinion pieces, and advice in daily newspapers, intellectual journals,
and linguistics journals, including Spremnost, which, as Antun Klaić pointed
out, was “a newspaper that, above all, reaches the most educated layer of the
population.”78
By 1943, the bureau’s activities, outside of academic journals, became less
visible, and like many cultural experiments under the Ustasha regime, it lost
its early utopian fervor. Enthusiasm for language reform among the public
also appears to have evaporated rapidly. After 1942 there was an increasing
tendency for ordinary Croatians to ignore language laws, as Ustasha jour-
nals implicitly acknowledged. One of the major problems with the language
laws was their complex nature. Even the bureau’s rulings on the use of simple
words were difficult to understand. A good example of this was a “language
note” that appeared in Hrvatski narod in July 1942:
Newspapers write about the destruction of the “vjestački” [artificial]
Versailles creation. Vješt, vještina, and vještak are good Croatian words. but
vjestački in the meaning of “artificial” is a Serb word. In Croatian one says
umjetni, which, to be sure, must be differentiated from umjetnički. Vjestački
in Croatian means that which pertains to an expert [vještak] or in relation to
an expert—e.g., an expert opinion [vjestački minjenje], that is, the thoughts
of an expert [misljenje vjestačka]. The concept of vještak is sometimes near
 268  Between Annihilation and Regeneration

to that of masterly [majstorski] and sometimes to the concept of expert

[strucnjački]. But the Versailles creation is neither one nor the other, but
really an artificial [umjetni] creation.79

Increasingly, the bureau’s linguists became frustrated by the slow pace of

change in language issues in public discourse, institutions, and especially
the media. Through their “language notes” bulletins, they frequently com-
plained that language laws were being ignored: “In our newspapers, one still
constantly finds mistakes in the most basic principles. Thus, one finds that
article 6 of the Law about the Croatian Language, which explicitly states that
one should not use ‘that’ with the present tense in place of the indefinite verb
form for the future tense, is being defied,” one typical language note in Nova
Hrvatska tetchily complained in February 1942.80 Complaints from the bu-
reau were supported by warnings from within the regime itself. Thus a stern
reprimand appeared on the front page of Hrvatski narod from the Croa-
tian government in May 1942 about continued incorrect use of the Croatian
language:
We repeat our warning that one should not use the word lice [person] in
place of the word osoba and the word izhrana [food] in place of prehrana.
Despite this, many of these words are used in conversation and writing and
even in official documents. We would like to warn people that we will no
longer tolerate anyone using them in official documents or in newspaper
articles and that indifference and negligence in the use of these words will
be dealt with in a responsible way. The Croatian expression is osoba and not
lice, prehrana and not izhrana.81

These kinds of warnings did not have a great impact, and in July 1942 the
Ministry of National Education introduced a law forbidding the incorrect use
of the word lice. The law promised that those officials or journalists who vio-
lated this law would be subject to “disciplinary” measures.82 But this law was
no more effective, and in 1943 there were still regular reports in the regime
press lambasting people for continued incorrect use of the word and violation
of the statutes. Anecdotal evidence, at least, suggests that ordinary citizens
were not only confused by the linguistic laws: they were also indifferent, even
hostile, to the absurdity and complexity of rules that made even a shopping
expedition an exhausting and frustrating ordeal. One way in which this hos-
tility manifested itself was in the deliberate distortion of meanings. Writing
in his diary in 1943, Josip Horvat recorded with amusement the various ways
in which the linguistic rules had been rendered ridiculous through subver-
sion: “I was at Mama’s, then I went to the parfumerija [perfume store]—or, to
be more exact, the mirisnica [scent shop]; lately, these linguistic monstrosities
 Between Annihilation and Regeneration  269

have begun to disappear and have, more accurately, taken on a completely

different meaning from the one originally intended by their creator. These
days, people use mirisnica in the sense of zahod [toilet] and promičba [propa-
ganda] in the sense of šverc [black marketeering].”83 In any case, by the middle
of 1942 the work of the bureau was effectively sidelined as the regime’s com-
mitment to language purification declined. Nonetheless, the bureau’s young
linguists continued their work undeterred, publishing in scholarly journals,
presenting academic papers, and producing numerous books, but within four
years that was roughly the scope of their influence.84
In 1944, the regime attempted to relaunch its language project. Both the
various cultural ministries, such as the Ministries of National Enlightenment
and National Education, and amateur linguistic advisers began to take more
interest in the continued incorrect use of language, and their complaints
grew ever louder. A range of legal initiatives was also introduced by the re-
gime. On 26 July that year, in the wake of a law strengthening the ban on the
use of un-Croatian names in companies, societies, institutions, and organiza-
tions, the two leading regime daily newspapers published a testy anonymous
article that attempted to explain the benefits and aims of the new law—pri-
marily making shop fronts and commercial signage more comprehensible—
and at the same time expressed dissatisfaction that such a law had proven to
be necessary owing to businesses’ failure to respect the new language norms.
The anonymous linguist complained:
Why do people write centralni biro [head office] when the Croatian is
središnja poslovna, why frižerski salon [the hairdressers’] when the Croatian
is brijačnica, češljaona, or brijačka dvorana? Why agencija [agency] when in
Croatian one can say zastupstvo or posredničtvo, why štamparija [printers]
when the beautiful word tiskara exists, why koncesionirani [concessionaires]
when we have povlašteni, why industrija sanitetskih artikla [industrial
sanitary article] when Croatian opts for veleobrt zdravstvenih predmeta?
Why would one call it a špecerajska radnja [grocery store] when it is clear
that neither small businessmen nor any of their customers actually know
what špeceraj [grocery] means? Who among the general public knows what
a galanterijska roba [haberdasher’s shop] is and what a bižuterija [jewelry
store] is? Why do the peasants suffer from agrarnim produktima” [agricul-
tural products] when zemaljski proizvodi is comprehensible to them, and so
on and so on?85

The linguistic adviser promised that the multiple mistakes and errors in
signs and inscriptions on businesses and institutions would be quickly eradi-
cated and purified of all foreign words. He also defended his and other lin-
guists’ concern with language purification at a time of conflict and national
 270  Between Annihilation and Regeneration

revolution: “If someone were to ask me why I had nothing better to do in this
war than to purify the language, I would ask him back with some justifica-
tion why he had nothing better to do in this war than polish his shoes. And
yet he continues to polish his shoes.”86 Despite such interventions, the issue of
commercial language purification did not go away, and daily newspapers con-
tinued to print regular articles threatening new laws or calling for the purifi-
cation of the wording used on shop fronts so it fit the “spirit” of the new era.87
Party newspapers also expressed frustrations with the slow pace of language
reform, their complaints often including implicit criticisms of the very lin-
guistic experts whose role it had been to oversee the language changes. In an
editorial in Nova Hrvatska of January 1945, accompanying a series of articles
by the journalist Antun Šenda about the future of language purification, the
editors made clear that, irrespective of what Šenda might write, as far as they
were concerned, the project of language purification was far from realized
and would only be successful with increased popular as well as elite participa-
tion. It could not rely only on journalists, intellectuals, and language experts:
There cannot be any break in this work. In fact, we need to work harder
because we still come across mistakes that despite all efforts have not been
eliminated. There is still negligence and carelessness. There is still not suf-
ficient work in the perfection of the Croatian language. We still come across
words that are only vaguely Croatian but that are really foreign. Far too
rarely do we think in individual cases: how would a real Croatian express
this? All too often in the purging of foreign words they are replaced hastily
with neologisms that are not in harmony with the spirit of the Croatian
language instead of proper words being found.88

In 1945, the regime made a final attempt to relaunch the project to purify
the Croatian language. With a return to the radical ethos of the revolution of
blood in 1941, the purification of the Croatian language was once more linked
to the survival of the national identity. Sometime in early 1945, the Main Di-
rectorate for Propaganda published a short pamphlet entitled “Za pravilnost
i čistoću hrvatskog jezika” (For the Regularization and Purification of the
Croatian Language). Declaring the Croatian language the “most sacred object
of the Croatian nation,” the brochure stressed the difficulties the regime and
nation had faced in the eradication of foreign words and expressions and the
work that still needed to be done to properly purify it. For years, it declared,
“our beautiful Croatian language” had been “corrupted” by foreigners, with
“beautiful” Croatian words replaced by “deformed” foreign and alien words,
incorrect and irregular word forms, and “badly constructed sentences.” This
had been part of the Serbian dictatorship’s political campaign to annihilate
the Croatian identity. The Poglavnik, after coming to power and establish-
 Between Annihilation and Regeneration  271

ing a regenerated Independent State of Croatia, had realized that language

purification was one of the most “sacred undertakings” of the new state and
the national duty of every “conscious” Croat citizen. The brochure empha-
sized the responsibility of newspapers and government officials to ensure
that Croatians wrote in a purely Croatian spirit, chastising them for their
tardy efforts in the past. “In this great work of Croatian language purifica-
tion, Croatian journalism must set an example that must be always and in
every sense the most faithful expression of the Croatian soul, followed by of-
ficials creating documents in the purest literary language. Unfortunately, de-
spite many efforts in newspapers, books, and editorial collections, one still
comes across many incorrect forms and foreign words that must completely
disappear from our speech.” At the end, the brochure contained a list of for-
eign words as well as the “most typical and coarsest” phrases and linguistic
and grammatical mistakes frequently encountered in books and newspapers,
complaining of the “wave” of “repulsive foreign words” that needed to be
“rooted out” of the Croatian language.89 While the brochure’s authors con-
ceded that the principles of etymological script were difficult to understand,
they nonetheless confidently insisted that its principles were consistent. As a
“deep knowledge of language is not required to accurately and correctly write
it,” this was no excuse for the fact that “we often come across even the most
basic words incorrectly written.” In fact, the complexity of the language rules
was directly related to the ultimate failure of the campaign of language pu-
rification. Yet the role that the often impenetrable linguistic laws and regula-
tions played in the project’s inability to incarnate a new language was evident.
By 1945, language rules had become so complicated, and so many linguistic
issues remained unresolved, that even newspaper editors were publicly ask-
ing for clarification.90

REVOLUTIONARY USTASHA ART

A national revolution needed a national culture. Almost immediately after
10 April the regime and its artistic collaborators set about creating a new cul-
ture that would immortalize both the regime and the state it had brought
into being. Along with the national anthem, “Our Beautiful Homeland,” the
Ustasha anthem, “A Rifle Fires” (“Puška puca”), written by the Poglavnik in
1931, about a young Ustasha warrior dying on the battlefield, became compul-
sory at all public events in the state and abroad. The Ustasha army marching
song “The Croatian Victory Song” (“Pjesma hrvatske pobjede”), with lyrics
by the poet Jerko Skračić and a melody by the famed composer and conductor
Lovro Matičić, also a sergeant-major in the Ustasha army, became an unof-
ficial state anthem.91 The regime engaged the sculptor August Augustinčić to
immortalize the Poglavnik and his wife in bronze relief, and another, Rudolf
 272  Between Annihilation and Regeneration

Švagel-Lešić, created stone carvings of Ante Starčević and Eugen Kvaternik—

both of whom the Ustasha movement claimed as ideological prophets—as
well as busts of Ante Pavelić and Jure Francetić to stand in the entrance hall
of the Main Ustasha Headquarters. These busts aimed to remind citizens, or
at least those who visited GUS headquarters, of the paleogenetic roots of the
movement: the bearer of a political ideology that at once possessed perma-
nence and a future and also was linked to great national icons from history.92
Perhaps for this purpose, the Ustasha regime founded a museum of the Inde-
pendent State of Croatia and an archive of the Ustasha movement constantly
watched over by an Ustasha honor guard.93
Throughout history, visual art has played a crucial role in the representa-
tion and definition of political movements, especially revolutionary ones.94
However, for a state with a relatively low literacy level, the regime surprisingly
did not really embrace images or rely on them to convey political messages:
it preferred slogans, propaganda posters, and the imaginative possibilities of
poetry. The cult of personality of the Poglavnik, for example, owed far more
to poetry and radio than it did to painting and sculpture. But this does not
mean the regime did not appreciate the potential of visual art for propaganda
purposes. Beginning in September 1941, the state organized an annual art ex-
hibition for sculptors and painters at the Art Pavilion in Tomislav Square.
The second exhibition of artists in the Independent State of Croatia in No-
vember 1942, for example, comprised the work of seventy Croatian sculp-
tors and painters, such as Vanja Radauš, August Augustinčić, Ljubo Babić,
and Jerolim Miše. Many critics interpreted these annual exhibitions as ex-
amples of not only national artistic rebirth but a new attitude toward art. In
his review of the second exhibition of artists, art critic Ante Padovan, writ-
ing in Spremnost, praised it for elevating cultural standards in the state and
thereby bringing pride to both art lovers and ordinary citizens. The success
of the exhibition, he wrote, would have been an achievement in peacetime,
but in a time of war it was even more remarkable. It demonstrated the state’s
“cultural originality and vitality, completely in harmony with the yearnings
of the European West,” and showed that Croatian culture—older, Padovan
insisted, than the national cultures of many other European states—had,
through centuries of foreign occupation, displayed “superhuman strength to
shape its unique spiritual physiognomy.” This second exhibition, he observed,
as a showcase for new Croatian art, also illustrated the way in which art was
becoming more accessible to ordinary citizens. Commenting on the kinds of
visitors to the exhibition, Padovan noted that numerous visitors were dressed
in peasant clothing. In contrast to previous years, when they had not com-
prehended the “strange” artistic “innovations,” looking at them with “cold
expressions,” it was clear that at this exhibition “whole swathes of the nation
 Between Annihilation and Regeneration  273

understand their artists. This is undoubted proof that today our fine art has
found its way into the heart of the nation, understanding it, and carries out its
duties [toward it].” The exhibition was an event of “first-class cultural impor-
tance” for the nation, a testament to the witness of artists for whom “even the
most fateful events” could not “draw the chisel from their hand or wrest away
their creative paintbrush.” What is more, it was witness to the “indescribable”
achievements and vitality of the artists, a cultural confidence that “radiated
in the heads of those native citizens who climbed the steps of the Art Pavil-
lion to enjoy the fruits of our artists.”95
Although the state attempted to co-opt leading Croatian artists such as
Ivan Meštrović, Vanja Radauš, and Ljubo Babić, with varying degrees of suc-
cess, it produced very little explicitly political art. There were exceptions,
however. Mladen Veža’s The Victims of Sibinj depicted an infamous massacre
of Croatian peasants by Yugoslav gendarmes in 1935, showing the peasants
dressed in traditional white frocks and black waistcoats, bayoneted by grin-
ning gendarmes: the white of the peasants’ dress suggests purity, whereas the
gendarmes are shrouded in darkness. The culture of oppression and death in
Yugoslavia was likewise portrayed in Ljubo Babić’s 20 June 1928, which evoked
the streets of Zagreb in the aftermath of the assassination of Stjepan Radić:
it portrays a dead and deserted city in which menacing gendarmes, rifles
on their backs, patrol the streets. Both of these were frequently reprinted in
Ustasha cultural publications such as Vinko Nikolić’s Hrvatska domovina.96
Stanko Radanović Žrnovački and Walter Neugebauer’s The Liberation of
Croatia and Gustav Likan’s social-realist 10 April 1941 were more authentic
depictions of the new national revolutionary ethos since they were produced
by artists who were committed supporters of the regime and prolific propa-
gandists for it. In Neugebauer and Žrnovački’s image, the two comic-strip il-
lustrators depicted a peasant woman representing Croatia, trapped in a dark
dungeon representing Yugoslavia, liberated by a phalanx of Ustasha soldiers
and the Poglavnik himself, bearing the torch of freedom. In the lefthand cor-
ner, a group of Ustasha warriors break the last chains of bondage enslaving
the Croat people. The Poglavnik is accompanied by female Ustashas, symbol-
izing the collaboration of women in the liberation struggle. In Likan’s pic-
ture, one of a series of social-realist images Likan painted of the new state,
liberated citizens march through the streets of Zagreb with flags and banners.
The future of the state, meanwhile, was portrayed in the work of another rad-
ical young artist, expressionist painter Ivan Topolčić’s Ustasha Youth—The
Hope of Croatia, a portrait of two teenage Ustasha girls that aimed to capture
the militant spirit of the Ustasha Youth organization. Dressed in military
uniforms, the two young women in the painting express the steely resolution
of the new generation of Ustashas.97
 274  Between Annihilation and Regeneration

When the Zagreb Ustasha Center purchased Veža’s The Victims of Sibinj
in order to preserve it for the nation, Nova Hrvatska identified Veža’s, Babić’s,
and Likan’s paintings as examples of the new revolutionary Ustasha art. In
an editorial, it argued that the martyred struggle of Croatia had inspired the
nation’s artists. As the most “elite sons of their nation,” they could not stand
on the sidelines “during their nation’s fateful effort of liberation and indepen-
dence,” but instead “experienced our national life with their art and patriotic
souls.” Croatian artists, whether literary or figurative, saved the Croatian fu-
ture, Croatian history, and Croatian art with “their artistic pen, paintbrush,
or chisel.” As examples of the visual art that had expressed the nation’s “mar-
tyred yearning for liberation,” the paintings of Likan, Babić, and Veža went
beyond the purely artistic since they demonstrated the vitality of the Ustasha
ideology. In the future, it proposed, a national museum should be founded
to exhibit all the art inspired by the national Ustasha revolution. In this way,
future generations would be inspired by the national liberation war’s sources
of strength and heroism as well as its beauty, more profoundly understanding
the inseparability of art and life. They would know that “there are no subjects
that would be out of limits for our art, and patriotic content in art can be real
art when it emerges from an artistic soul.” Finally, a museum would provide
a complete picture of the nationalistic efforts of Croatian artists “who many
times placed their chisels and paintbrushes in the service of the Homeland,
conscious that in serving the Homeland at the same time they were serving
art.”98
Possibly the most visible cultural symbol of the regime were the por-
traits of the Poglavnik displayed in every public building. Mass festivals were
yet another symbol of the new order. Each year on 10 April, the regime held
statewide festivals to give thanks for the Independent State of Croatia. Spe-
cial church services were held, lectures were given in public halls, children
wrote special essays and poems, large-scale political rallies were organized,
and entertainments and festivities were planned. Yet this public culture was
of no use if it was not embraced by ordinary citizens as part of their everyday
value system. Here the evidence is contradictory. In areas where resistance to
the Ustasha regime was strongest, festivals and ceremonies lacked popular
participation not only because public opinion was overwhelmingly hostile to
the regime but also because those who did support the regime were reluctant
to express their opinions openly. In a report of May 1943 from Josip Stiglić, a
local Ustasha official in Sinj, to the Main Bureau of Propaganda, he admitted
that the celebrations had a “very official character” due to Partisan threats.
Although officials had printed fliers just in case, the Italian army had closed
off the streets, and local people had not joined in the celebrations. In some
areas and regions of the state, the atmosphere was different. Writing from
 Between Annihilation and Regeneration  275

Tuzla in May 1942, Feliks Niedzielski, the assistant governor of the region,
reported that while citizens had not embraced all aspects of the new culture,
the 10 April festivities had been commemorated by “twenty thousand people”
who were “openly delighted.”99 The same dynamic applied to portraits of the
Poglavnik. In Ustasha strongholds, portraits of the Poglavnik and symbols of
the Ustasha movement were on display in all public buildings, while in hos-
tile regions, there were few such symbols, even in state schools. Officials sadly
noted the lack of pictures of the Poglavnik on display in schools, offices, and
public buildings, even in parts of the Zagreb region.100 On the other hand, the
State Propaganda Office was inundated with requests from ordinary citizens
through the state for images of the Poglavnik, leading officials to comment
that there were not sufficient images to meet demand.101
From the beginning, poetry expressed the militancy and steely resolve of
the new state, its warriors, and the revolution of blood, confirming the writer
Petar Grgec’s maxim that poetry had been “the greatest national plebescite”
of the Croatian nation.102 The mood was set by the official Ustasha hymn, pro-
viding an iconic image of the Ustasha warrior. “A Rifle Fires” told the story
of a young warrior who expires heroically for the homeland: “A rifle fires, a
cannon bellows. / It thunders like thunder,” the song begins. Then the young
Ustasha is mortally injured: “He doesn’t fear the bellow of the gun / nor the
yelp of the cannon. / Homeland, freedom, true love / Are the medicine for his
wounds. A gun fires, a cannon roars. / He tastes battle. / The young Ustasha
on the battlefield / Expires from his wounds.”103 Yet the mythic and poetic in-
carnation of the Ustasha warrior, although striking, was drowned out by the
far more numerous poems celebrating the establishment of the new state as
the reward to the whole Croatian nation for its suffering and sacrifice. Since
novels did not address everyday life in the new state, poetry became a barom-
eter of fortunes. The younger generation of poets, which Vinko Nikolić and
Zlatko Milković had feted as the voice of a new nationalist generation, took a
leading role. In the 1930s, in an era of international and ideological conflict,
poets, in addition to dreaming of social utopia, produced poetry like that of
their left-wing contemporaries, in which a longing for return to the home-
land was framed in imagery of violence, blood, and death. In Jure Pavičić’s
1935 poetry anthology Wounds, the poet combined mourning for the death
of Croatia with aggression and visions of apocalypse. In one poem, fanta-
sizing about the death of a hated Yugoslav policeman, he warns the brute’s
friends who weep around his dead body: “All of them are in hysterics, and
fear is at the center, because the bell / tolls, and the corpse is falling apart
and his last breath is rotten. The sick / bodies embrace around him, and their
cry is desperate.” With lip-smacking relish, he looks forward to the funeral:
“The funeral of all of them has been prepared! Come, oh worms of the whole
 276  Between Annihilation and Regeneration

/ world, and—have a good meal!”104 Similarly violent were Ivo Balentović’s

visions. “Let’s have a bloody dance,” he begins one poem, “against our will.
/ And all descend into a black pit, after the white hope of something / More
Beautiful and Better.” There will be no return from this bloody dance, which
will be a “repulsive mash of human bones and blood.” In his most political
poem, he linked the events of 1936 with the betrayal of the Croatian nation.
The “bestial treachery of 1936” passes, and “many lives are carried away, many
youths dragged away / by a paragraph about the defense of some kind of fic-
tion that was dreamed up by the devil.” While the poet sees the youth as the
hope of the nation, it is also a curse: “A new year has come again, with new
hopes and new miseries. / And the old are dying and curse and mention again
the youth / and leave everything for us young. / Let us slaughter, bite, and stab
ourselves, / until we, like they, leave the stage.”105 These characteristics were to
become ever more evident in the years ahead.
Initially, the creation of the Independent State of Croatia was interpreted
as a resurrection, or even divine intervention. Throughout the life span of the
state, poetry exulted the Poglavnik as a contemporary messiah, the Second
Coming who had freed Croatia from slavery and established a glorious New
Jerusalem. The young Catholic poet Jakša Erčegović makes this comparison
explicitly in a poem published just six days after the national revolution. Ad-
dressing God, he writes: “You sent us Him, for whom our spirits are on fire.
. . . You sent word among the nations / that You still celebrate one nation,
free, greater. / You sent us Him—the victor / before the triumphal units of
Gvožd, Rakovica, Sibinj, Senj, the sleep of the resurrected hero.” From this
day, “wreathed in sunshine, / our nights will not be so stern, nor our pain so
feverish as before / when there wasn’t Him for whom our hearts roar.”106 The
Catholic poet Branko Klarić writes of the Poglavnik’s new era, as late as 1944,
on the third anniversary of the state’s founding: “From old ruins grew a ma-
jestic temple, / pride built it, blood built it, / and the flame of his heart.” The
enemies of this new state were, he wrote, evil and the embodiment of Satan
himself.107
In early poetic compositions, Croatia is a nation resurrected. Although
the idea of the creation of the Independent State of Croatia as a resurrection
persisted after 1941, it was especially visible in the poetry written in the wake
of the national revolution or for important state anniversaries, and even here
the suffering of the past was commemorated as much as the euphoria of na-
tional liberation. Thus, for a giant publication marking the first anniversary
of the state, Vladimir Jurčić wrote that throughout its one thousand years,
Croatia had been enslaved, the nation a communal grave, “with a fate similar
to Christ’s.” Yet the tenth of April 1941 represents a mythic redemption: “On
the holy day of Good Friday, tyranny imploded, Croatian resurrected,” he
 Between Annihilation and Regeneration  277

writes.108 In Jerko Skračić’s vision of the new Croatia, “Trumpets blast / bells
toll / flowers bloom / the day has dawned / slavery has been crushed, the Usta-
sha army / of many martyrs has achieved its dream.” Croatia’s freedom, born
“from blood,” heralds the arrival of the Poglavnik, brought to the Croatians
by Providence, whose “holy vows will be our command.” But Skračić, like
Jurčić, also remembered the terrible costs of liberation. In his poem published
three days after the national revolution, he recalls: “we waited in agony, we
struggled a long time / the whole Homeland was one grave.”109
In this atmosphere of nationalistic fervor, in the first few months of the
new state, members of the general public also put pen to paper. The mythol-
ogy of suffering in Yugoslavia could be expressed in terms of simple religious
joy. “All the hearts of the oppressed Croat peasants / waited for You / the sun
and the fields waited for You / and Croatian flowers / with a wreath crowned
your victorious head / the bearer of freedom—joy of a new, new happiness,”
one citizen wrote about the Poglavnik. These amateur poets could recount
the sacrifices of the Croats in the days of liberation: “Banners with proud sac-
rifices fly / On them in blood glistens a prayer: ‘Poglavnik the First / give us a
resurrection with You / find love to warm us.’ / Toward you and God prayers
soar: ‘May the sun warm the native son!”110 Popular enthusiasm for the new
state could provoke ugly sentiment, however. In one poem, the young Serb
King Peter is portrayed as a coward escaping to Jerusalem. In another poem,
a writer gloats over the German invasion of Serbia, mocking the Kosovo
myth. “Everything has passed like a dream, / Vidovdan has fallen! / Where
is Dušan’s empire?” he asks.111 In Matija Pavlović’s anthology of patriotic po-
litical verse, there is a poem of praise to the German bombing of Belgrade:
“Bravo, bravo, bravo / and Salonika has now just fallen. / In the quiet, in the
middle of peace / Belgrade is bombed. / It continues to Niš / the Serbs are fall-
ing like raindrops. / Fly in German fighter bomber birds, / and let them be
bombed.” Later on, he delights in images of the Serbs leaving Serbia, especially
Peter and his “gypsy” dynasty, their retreat the “harvest of their misdeeds.”
He asks: “What kind of people are these? / Shortly I will answer you, darling.
/ They are gypsies, who love to dance / and oppress respectable people.” He
reminds his readers that while the Croatians suffered and starved with barely
a dinar in their pocket, while “our callused hands worked, / they were in Bel-
grade / with champagne eternally cold.” Therefore, he would stand “forever
with a gun” in defense of the Croatian homeland, “achieved in blood and tor-
ture / and zealous national hands,” against the murderers of Belgrade.112
In the early euphoric months, ordinary members of the public wrote to
the Poglavnik, sending him poems they had written in honor of the new
state and its rulers. In one poem, a young writer from Dalmatia, thirteen-
year-old Petar Josipov, the son of an Ustasha undergoing military training
 278  Between Annihilation and Regeneration

in Germany, asked the Poglavnik for permission to have his poem published
in the national press, promising to be a warrior for Croatia just as his father
had been in the 1930s, fearing neither “the gun nor the knife.” In one part of
his poem, he exults in the punishment being meted out to “Serb cutthroats”
and “bloody Belgrade” with divine intervention and the help of God: “For
the Serb, you are an angry wound. / Long live our left hand, / When it kills
the Serb Hadjuk. / He was without respect. / Constantly, the Serbs grabbed
the best positions, / And the Serbs aimed to serbianize the weak. / For the
Croats they are traitors. / Traitors did not have any rights. / You thought that
the Croat was sleeping, / but the Croats have awoken from their dreams.”113
At the other end of the demographic spectrum, a war veteran and invalid,
Josip Zukec from Zagreb, also sent a poem he had composed in honor of the
national revolution after reading in the newspaper that “poems about the old
and new battles of Croatia are being sought and that, with the approval of
the Poglavnik, they will be set to music.” Like that of his young compatriot,
his poem stressed the bloodthirstiness of the government in Belgrade and
the oppression the Croatian nation had endured under the “gypsy dynasty.”
In the first poem he sent, “The Collapse of the Serbs,” he described how, as
the bombs rained down on Belgrade, “missing neither the old nor children,”
they had a message that read: “Here Serbs, saying thanks / this for your last
king.” His poem gloried in the destruction of the Serb capital after the Ger-
man bombing: “Early dawn when the sun comes out / Belgrade lies in flames
/ streets flow with Serb blood.” Zukec describes the contrasting joyous atmo-
sphere in Croatia, where “we see the Croatian Ustashas / carrying out the sa-
cred work of Pavelić / with your healthy bodies.” Meanwhile, the miserable
cringing Serb dynasty had been allowed to escape to “hide in Palestine with
tons of gold by ‘English lords’ as well as the ‘European Jewish traitors.’”114
In the beginning, euphoric ecstasy and national awakening were stressed
in official poetry. Vladimir Nazor instructs poets to capture the national
mood: “To hell with all these zithers and mandolins!” For him, a poet is not
a “flower on which a butterfly drowses” but “the roots underneath the earth”
that feed the national revolution. Poets should therefore “smash foreign
flutes” and “shun” foreign things and learn to act and write in a Croatian way.
“Scorn whoever fattened us with / Honey cakes: / We must be barbarians, /
But we will be ourselves!”115 Mirko Slade-Šilović writes: “From the shackles
of slavery, a day has bloomed / red / white / and blue, / made with fortune.”116
Branko Klarić proclaims: “Today I am so happy. / . . . My step is joyful. / This
is not an illusion. / And it is not a dream. / There goes a man, / a free man.”117
With the arrival of the Ustasha regime, all suffering was over. Ivo Lendić de-
scribes how “The sun shines as never before over Croatia. . . . / The sorrow,
the sorrow of thousands disappears, snow melts with the coming of spring!”118
 Between Annihilation and Regeneration  279

Meanwhile, Ante Jakšić wrote an epic poem envisaging the Croatian nation
as a body. “Blessed are the hands that touched your head / with a crown of
celebrated glory / in these blessed moments, / blessed are the hands for the
honor of this great deed: / that a series of fertile fields sprang up.” With the
liberation of the homeland the presence of the foreigners could be expunged.
“Your eyes shine with tears that for ten centuries alone / looked dark with
suffering / and the blood of native children / and for ten centuries with sor-
row your heart bowed down / and your eyes could not drain / the violence of
the foreign worm.” After the nation rose in revolution and liberation, the na-
tional body was reunited. “And now again when your body is gleaming in the
sun / and a fierce movement toward the future / your visage looks proud,” he
concludes.119
There is a remembrance of the nation’s torturous past under Serb rule
and the sufferings of its youthful nationalist martyrs. Memories of impris-
onment in the 1930s are explored in Gabrijel Cvitan’s “The Poem of a Slave”
and in Vinko Nikolić’s “The Crucifixion of Croatia, 1918—1928—19 . . . ,” both
as lived reality and as a symbol of the Yugoslav state. In Cvitan’s poem, the
poet decays and rots alone in his “fetid cell” as the hungry bedbugs devour
him. The days of imprisonment are “treacherous steps, / over which I silently
climb.” Outside is a world where “spring awakes, / birds sing and the earth
smells,” while inside he is shackled. “Like an animal in a cage / I drag the
iron chains around.” The poet uses spring as a metaphor for his lost youth. As
the prison cell takes away his “strength and beauty,” he realizes: “For others,
the sun shines, and for me it darkens. / While it lives in death—I dead—still
live.”120 In Nikolić’s poem, the Croatian nation is in chains: “Shooting, hang-
ing, a volley of gunfire—a crucifixion without end or hope. / The years of our
youth pass without any kind of pleasure. . . . / Life passes. We grow old, we
youths suffer—without youth.” However, there is also hope in this suffering:
“In chains, we dream about freedom” and “our holy Croatia!” For this sacred
aim, the youth of Croatia will sacrifice their lives: “We love her boundlessly
and for it would give our lives: / for the land of our grandfathers and fathers—
we, the young generation.”121 In Vladimir Jurčić’s “Ballad about the Blood of
the Martyred Seven” and “For the Martyrs of Šenj,” the poet commemorates
the nationalist youths who were shot by gendarmes in 1937 allegedly because
they were singing poems about a free Croatia and whose blood, according to
Ustasha ideologues, fortified later generations with national consciousness.
These “ten warm-hearted young bodies / are now ten black graves,” but like
an army, they march fearlessly into battle and are “our salvation.” Their “holy
poem” provides a clear contrast with “the bullet of the Chetnik.”122 In Jurčić’s
view, the lives of these young martyrs are tied to the destiny of the state over
which they watch. “When Croatia was ruined, they breathed out / when Cro-
 280  Between Annihilation and Regeneration

atia was wiped off the map / they breathed out—/ and in blood they wrote ev-
erything.” Andrija Ilić writes about them as the progenitors of a nation-state
that has achieved freedom with “bombs, knives, and guns” and a movement
that defends the homeland in blood: “The land is soaked with your sacred
blood, / a new Ustasha race is created.” After they died, he explains, their
souls continued to live, looking on as “animals / lift Croats onto the shameful
gallows, / as young Ustasha lives perish.” The national revolution is the result
of their blood sacrifice.123
The early joyous mood fell away quickly, and poets emphasized the effects
of war on ordinary people, especially the large numbers of refugees created
by conflict. The young poet Dražen Panjkota asks: “How much more blood
will have to bloom in this brook / of innocent people of blood and flesh, / how
many more people will luxuriously fall / and collapse into the grave with-
out a cross, without a coffin!”124 Vinko Kos describes the journey of the refu-
gee: “They did not leave anything, even though their bundles / are pitiful and
small. They carry everything at a glance.”125 Jerko Skračić imagines that he
himself is a refugee, relating everyday conversations. In one of his poems,
an old peasant reminiscences with his son about his olive tree: “With what
love I nourished it / but hate uprooted me and threw me out.” In another a
peasant woman dreams of returning to her old home but when told by her
son that soon she will be going home, she replies that things will never be
the same because her children are no longer alive. Things cannot go back to
the way they were before.126 In an award-winning poem of April 1944, Milan
Dunavski asks God to return the refugees to their homes: “Do these people
know, why they stood in line: / this sad youth who is trapped by his dreams
/ and this blond handsome young man, who calls for his grandmother / and
the one who weeps silently, and soon will be completely gray haired.” He asks
who protects them from the “roar of the machine gun” and who guards their
abandoned villages and homesteads as they travel through “empty fields and
forests of birchwood and beech.” And he ponders: “Why does this land of
wretches who carry it in their hearts, / lose all thought for it and lose their
precious belongings? / Why has everything, everything for them become an
illusion and a lie, / which before was life, the joy of the sun and dew?” Instead,
the refugees find themselves trudging through “the glistening snow” in the
woods and seeking shelter as they pass through villages. “This is not salva-
tion,” he protests. “They cannot forget their home, their fathers, their moth-
ers, their sons: / this crucified land is our homeland, / which was frequently
wounded and tortured itself for us.”127
From 1944 onward, when Croatia was bombed by Allied planes, the suf-
fering of the poet, silent witness to the destruction of the nation, is another
theme. Zvonimir Katalenić is in mourning: “I am sad today as if something
 Between Annihilation and Regeneration  281

broke in the world, / and I remained alone to grieve over this.” Vinko Kos is
resigned to the fact that Croatia is being dismantled: “Everything is past. / The
teachings of the guardian angel cannot / save any longer the cities / that are
being destroyed.”128 Blind fury and dismay at this turn of events are common
emotions. Jure Pavičić assails the nation’s enemies as “Pontius Pilates,” “dis-
gusting louses,” and “repulsive reptiles.” He asks: “How can you sing songs to
our faces and horribly kill us behind our backs? / Have you committed so lit-
tle evil, have you spilled so little innocent Croatian blood? Do you want more?
/ No, no there will be no more! / We know you well, and even better which
songs we will sing back to you!” For the satirist Jožčenko, Stalin’s hand is be-
hind the bombing of Croatia; he is a contemporary Zeus throwing thunder-
bolts down on Croatia, the beautiful Athens. Frano Alfirević, too, relates the
obliteration of towns and villages in Croatia through the story of Zeus, who
destroyed Daedalus and Icarus’s first airplane because they wanted to go be-
yond the limits of natural power. He showed that he loved humans more than
“blank fighter planes” when he “knocked down” the first airplane. Alfirević
also mentions Ivan the Terrible, who decapitated the first Russian pilot who
flew down from a church tower. Although his cruelty could not be justified,
“he had the admirable idea that a human is not a bird / or airborne excava-
tor, / but a noble medium between the sky and the earth.” He yearns to have
been born in an era before planes; in the current modern age he sees only “the
shadows of ruins, / ghostly walls, fires, buildings destroyed, / where a child is
looking for its mother, the mother for the son, / they seek a crushed hand or
foot, / half mad and sleepy / in a moment of bloody shadowy silence, / a father
or a wife, / asking why from the depths.” With their sophisticated modernity,
fighter pilots and their cargo are destroying not just society but history too—
they are a terrifying vision of the future: “Why was I born, knights of the air
/ to see churches destroyed, built over centuries, / palaces, facades, columns, /
shining centuries that cannot be repeated / ruins, / everything is full of dark-
ness, / and our future comes from the air.”129
In the poetry of radical nationalist and Ustasha writers, desperation re-
solves itself in one of two ways: through death or religion. Josip Velebit re-
members his dead father who perished in the Great War, while Vinko Kos
presciently imagines his own death that must come and the funeral and
mourning that will follow. “I know that I must die,” he begins. He imag-
ines his grieving family gathering at graveside and the sights and sounds of
the grave: “I will listen to the songs of birds flying overhead, / that for some
time enthralled me, a solitary child / at the edge of the silent forest, but fell
dead, / because time dictated it, and awaits me there too.”130 Jerko Skračić
also appears to be saying goodbye, in this case to his passionate youth and
the dreams he had then. To his son he writes: “In my youth, darling child,
 282  Between Annihilation and Regeneration

/ strongly roared the thunder / frequently fights broke out / there was a lot
of lightning!”131 In the midst of chaos and destruction, Ante Trešić-Pavičić
writes that he hears souls strumming harps, which he interprets as “the pre-
lude to death.”132 Ivan Raoš surveys the destroyed homes and villages in his
home region and notes poignantly that “the graves are full of crosses / —two
of them from our house—it makes me shudder to think that so recently /
these souls were living.” His final thoughts are for the crucifixes that mark the
graves of the dead: “Extinguishing, obliterating, terrifying, / the darkness is
so near to us: / before the gaunt gulf, / the crucifixes don’t shriek.”133 From the
start, regime poets dwelled on the heroic lonely moment of the death of the
Ustasha on the battlefield, dying, as Vlado Vlaisavljević put it, as “a cascade
of blood gushes from his mouth.”134 The deceased soldier and his communi-
cation with the living from the grave are another favorite theme of the era’s
poetry. Vinko Kos writes to one dead soldier who has perished far from the
homeland as if he were still alive: “Surely you yearn in your grave and dream
of a return / in the hope that those whom you left sad are waiting for you?” he
asks.135 The literary vogue for poetry about graves became so pronounced that
in some poems the grave is not the instrument through which the dead speak,
but a living thing itself. For Zvonimir Katalenić, “The strange subterranean
calls— / these graves whisper . . . / In the green branches of the barberry tree
/ some unknown ancestor. The graves talk, / and the decomposed soil of the
earth carries the news.”136 For some poets, this was going too far. Jerko Skračić
urges his fellow poets: “Don’t talk to me constantly about graves, comrades. /
Don’t mention crosses, cypresses, shadows. / Be good, comrades who want to
live, / who don’t think about death, don’t want wreaths. Because life is for us
and we must live, / we must fight in this storm. / We must travel toward the
goal far, far away, / to sail, to sail, comrades, against the current.”137 The young
critic Vladimir Kolbas-Lidov, reviewing Gustav Krklec’s blood-infused po-
etry collection Tamnica vremena, retorted that while Krklec’s poems are in-
deed informed by a spirit of “tired resignation and powerless fatalism” and
burning with a “bloody vision of the globe,” such poems were needed now, an
accurate “illustration and echo” of the times: “short as breath, like an alarm
beating on a contemporary timepiece, like the winding sound of the most
beautiful strains of eternal music.”138 Most poets ignored Skračić’s plea. Po-
etry became more bloody and suffused with images of annihilation as the
state deteriorated. In the poetic imagination of Željko Jambrešić, for instance,
writing in Ustaša in early 1945, the River Drina has been transformed into a
sea of blood:
Night. Dark. Gloom.
On the Drina floats a bloody trail . . .
 Between Annihilation and Regeneration  283

The bank smashed

from waves of blood.
A naked stone
slowly crumbles.
In the depths
falls
our swindled hopes.
The Drina murmurs
an old log echoes in it
and with the river rolls
new fresh blood.139

The decomposition and degeneration of dead bodies is also an important

theme. In a poem of 1945 Ismet Žunić imagines himself as the body of a man
who has been blown to bits by a bomb and gazes on the sights and sounds of
his former existence, the nauseous smell and gruesome sight of the mutilated
putrifying body contrasting with the beauty of the Bosnian countryside and
the mundanity of continuing life:
In the bloody ruins of our hearth
in the vegetable patch are bits of hands and a head,
a broken chain, a pole, a sickle and straw. . . .
The bird flutters into my head ever more strongly
(it comes from fear, pain, or apathy).
The blood cells pecked out are ever sweeter,
and tremble from heavenly death.

Pieces of my body will perhaps tomorrow

hang suspended from tree branches or lie on paving stones
and a hungry dog will jealously growl
at ravens and interested passersby.
Of a heart, which if a roadsweeper were to trample on it,
he would not regret he did not notice it.140

Religion, with its cycle of birth, death, and resurrection, is the last consol-
ing refuge. Nikola Šop asks Jesus to stay with him eternally no matter what
may befall him. Branko Klarić, meanwhile, observes the pain of the city and
the aimless lives of its citizens while the Madonna stands in front of Zagreb
Cathedral—which celebrates her own assumption—offering blessings.141 Re-
ligious themes about the punishment and salvation of the nation came early.
However, as the state disintegrated into apocalyptic collapse, religious themes
came to predominate, along with death. By 1944, Catholic poets such as
Branko Klarić were asking the Virgin Mary for help. They painted a tragic
 284  Between Annihilation and Regeneration

picture of the homeland: “Our homes have been destroyed, like altars in the
days of the torture of the Christians / and like our souls / the air is full of
deadly roars.” He reminds her: “My Croatian Homeland never denied your
dear Son. / Thus it is just and merciful that you lead it to salvation / from
this oil and fire.”142 Did the Virgin Mary hear his prayers? He does not say. In
other cases, religious themes could be instructional. In another poem, Klarić
imagines Christ speaking to pedestrians on the streets of Zagreb and asking
them why they have abandoned him and fallen away from his teachings. Al-
though the poet is alone, in the hour of the Croatian nation’s hour of need,
when “a storm spreads over you / and you seek salvation everywhere,” Christ
reminds the Croats that they are still his children. As bombs fall on Croatia,
a thought: Have the people deserved it for their moral fall from grace? No.
However, unlike Jesus, Klarić believes that Croatia is being crucified for its
own sins. Only by returning to God can the Croatian nation be saved.143 At
Easter 1945, Vinko Nikolić desperately appeals to God to save Croatia from
annihilation. As Croatian church bells “tearfully” toll for Croatia, grieving in
the valleys and the mountains, and as Croatian mothers “shed their bloody
tears for their sons” and sing out laments of “poison and pain,” he begs: “Show
mercy on us, God!” He prays that “not in vain flowed out the rivers of blood
/ That Croats for their own lives shed.” Throughout history, Croats had been
stepped over like the most miserable “worm,” buffeted by tragedy, but they
love their towns, villages, and ploughed fields and will defend the “sanctity of
our Croatian borders” on the Drina and the blue Adriatic: “I ask You in the
name of the multitude of graves of our best youths, / Who perished for the
freedom of others! / To bless the fruit of our blood and tears, that countless
numbers of them gave / For the prosperity of their people!”144
Only in the poetry of Matija Marčinko does the defiance remain, the poet
greeting the impending national apocalypse as an opportunity to test the
steeliness of his own character. “Is there anyone who has not beaten me?” he
asks in 1944. “The sky threatens me with lightning / when I greet it. / In this
mass of good fortune / I am alone, abandoned, deserted, completely myself.”
However, he will endure to the end: “In this darkness full of rain and mud, in
the midst of the alarm / that trumpets, / there remains for me only the torch
of inflamed eyes / and—despite everything—resolutely ground teeth.”145 Four
months later, he attempts to rally the nation in a final bloody defense of the
nation, led by Ustasha warriors, whom he immortalized in an earlier poem:
“Pick up the heavy cudgel,” he implores his readers. “The cry of your tram-
pled-over fields and villages in flames is calling you.” People whose homes
have been turned to fiery ashes “look with tired eyes and offer you bloody
hands,” and the nation is tired. “But we are not so exhausted / that the tears of
 Between Annihilation and Regeneration  285

these millions do not affect us.” He instructs the nation: “Lift up the old ban-
ners. Let the sun on them / write with purple flames the words of new victo-
ries” because “a whole nation is calling you in defense.”146
On 10 April 1945, the last anniversary of the state, Ustasha newspapers
were punctuated with poems foreshadowing the reckoning awaiting Croatia.
In Hrvatski narod, the poet Nikola Marjanović contrasts the horrible fate that
awaited his generation of radical nationalists with the passing of the seasons
in the Croatian countryside. Even after Croatia has fallen to communism, the
sun will continue to shine from behind the “bitter tears of shed blood,” but
their mothers will never know if “we were the first to die or the last.” Bombs,
oil, and rain will fall down on them, their chests blown apart by bullets; dead,
never again will they return to their home region. The fruits of the sown fields,
across the native mountains and through the blooming fields, will ripen once
more while “we dead are hidden under the earth”; their mothers will die from
misery knowing their vanished sons are no longer alive. Only years later will
the truth emerge from the earth. “One day our bones will shake, / owing to
a heavy insult and as a sign of protest, / the work of heroic glory, then will be
raised, / a marble monument to the unknown hero.”147 Likewise, the poet and
critic Stanko Gasparović imagines his own death, looking back nostalgically
to his childhood, “the crazy debauchery in the distant warm summer / and
the fantastic pleasure of the accompanying hours of youth.” But the happy
memories of summer days sitting by the harbor cannot last, “suffocated” by
memories of the present day and the darkness that “comes through the door”
accompanied by circles of “white specters” and “icy calm.” Love in him has
already ceased, replaced by the “solitude of the dead.” But in death there is
gleaming radiance: “Strange images / are lost and disappear, and then before
death / show me once more in complete radiance / the bloody clarity of the
day and the clear translucent night. / Just once more before death I will sink
into the limitless past. / But I know old wounds will never be healed and I
console myself. / A time of forgetting will come when the past will no longer
torture me / in which like a stone stands written: / that once upon a time I
loved limitlessly, lost my heart, and died in my soul.”148
A poem by the young poet Dražen Panjkota—who, according to his
friend Zdravko Brajković, writing in late 1944, died on the coast in his native
Dalmatia shortly after it was liberated by the Partisans while completing his
second anthology of poetry, Život za Dalmacija—described the eerie peace of
Dalmatia: “The old piano sinks into quietness / and the last chord fades into
silence / and it seems to me / that the tired yellow hands of the dead master /
select the sad sound / of a wounded nation / and that quietly it trembles like a
plucked-out heart / my Dalmatia. / Peace. The old piano sinks into darkness.
 286  Between Annihilation and Regeneration

/ The last chord sinks into silence.” What Panjkota was really referring to in
this poem is not clear, but Hrvatski narod interpreted it as an elegy for a lost
Dalmatia and a comment on the fear of the Croatian population under com-
munist rule—a harbinger of what was to come in the rest of Croatia.149
The final poetic emotion is willing sacrifice. Vinko Nikolić, in the last
poem he would publish as an Ustasha Youth instructor, imagines a final glo-
rious sacrifice for the nation. Although he loves life and his youth, he prays
to God that his “sacred love for the homeland” will be the strongest love of
all. “Is my love worth more than the freedom of the homeland?” he asks. “Oh,
I am prepared to die, let my nation, happy, live.” Poet, cultural commissar,
Ustasha Youth ideologue: all of this is ephemeral. He asks for God’s help to
“perish like a knight, in the storm of battle or at the barricades,” on his lips
“a last chant for the eternal Croatia.” Then he can peacefully die because “my
nation, saved, lives!”150

WRITING NATIONAL REGENERATION

The “second” revolution—of culture and good manners—was shot through
with notions of the first revolution. The campaign for culture and civilized
values was predicated on the nation being morally and nationally decontami-
nated: only through consciously ridding itself of the populations responsible
for the introduction of primitive Balkan habits could the nation rediscover
its cultured roots. The symbiotic link between the “revolution of blood” and
the “revolution of the soul,” between violent national purification and the cul-
tural politics of national construction, was integral to cultural politics. Viktor
Gutić made this link clear in an announcement of August 1941 about a com-
petition for the construction of a statue in honor of Ante Starčević in the cen-
ter of Banja Luka. The venue selected for the monument was to be the newly
named Square of April 10. At that time the square was still the site of the Serb
Orthodox Cathedral, virtually razed to the ground by German bombers five
months earlier. According to Gutić, the “former Greek Eastern” cathedral
would have to be “completely destroyed.” Part of the rationale was aesthetics,
he insisted. By ordering the cathedral’s destruction, not only could a “great
monument be raised to the Father of the Homeland, Dr. Ante Starčević,” but
the city center would enjoy “a much more beautiful view because until now
‘the house of spite’ had been forcibly squeezed between two delightful build-
ings and spoiled the whole view of an otherwise very beautiful part of Banja
Luka.” The derogatory reference to the ruined cathedral exposed the role the
monument’s construction had played as part of a wider attempt to destroy all
traces of the Serb community: Gutić praised Emil Soravia, the local builder
commissioned to demolish the cathedral, for using a series of detonations so
 Between Annihilation and Regeneration  287

the last traces of it were removed in the quickest possible time.151 The local
newspaper, Hrvatska krajina, explained the significance of the destruction of
one monument and the construction of another:
This is yet more evidence of how much thought and care have been
employed in wiping away the last traces of the “house of spite,” which,
constructed in the center of Banja Luka, aimed to give the impression of
Banja Luka as an explicitly Serb city. Now the work for its destruction is
completed in its entirety. The whole of the space on which it was found has
been cleansed of the smallest remains so that finally one can approach the
realization of the project of regional chief Dr. Viktor Gutić, who in one
speech promised the erection of a monument to the Father of the Homeland
in the very place of the destroyed symbol of Great Serb ideology and Great
Serb hegemony.152

This integral relationship between the two revolutions was found in all
cultural forms, especially literature. The inaugural 1942 edition of Ustaški
godišnjak, the Ustasha movement’s literary almanac, was dominated by short
stories reconstructing the Ustasha struggle. The tone was set by the cover of
the almanac, which depicted a young Ustasha soldier liberating himself by
smashing the chains in which he was imprisoned in Yugoslavia. Similarly,
in many of these stories, the coming of the national revolution was framed
in the context of the suffering of the nation under a brutal alien occupation
regime. Only through restorative violence and the shedding of blood could
the nation be liberated and regenerated. At the same time, these short sto-
ries emphasized the morally, socially, and culturally regenerative aspects of
the national revolution, contrasting the degenerate urban bourgeois values
of the former Serb regime with the organic rural nationalism of the Croa-
tian peasantry and the Ustasha movement, whose cult of violence, vengeance,
and blood had emerged, as if by osmosis, from the native soil. In one of Jure
Pavičić’s short stories, the protagonist, Juko, a peasant whose suffering at the
hands of sadistic Serbian gendarmes turns him into an Ustasha revolution-
ary, declares that those guilty of national betrayal are a gaping wound on the
national organism for which the only solution is strong medicine.153 Zlatko
Milković’s contribution in the same journal tells the story of an old peasant
whose farm is appropriated by Serbian gendarmes after he fails to pay the in-
iquitous land taxes levied by the Yugoslav regime on Croatian peasants. In
harrowing detail, Milković describes Japica’s last morning on the land he has
cultivated for most of his eighty years. As he tells his son, it is the piece of land
on which he was born and the piece of land on which he aims to die: “This
land was ours thousands of years ago and eighty years ago and now. It knows
 288  Between Annihilation and Regeneration

all our pain and misery, all our pleasure and joy, we were born on it and we
will die on it. . . . Son, do you see this soil? You were born here and I was too.
. . . This is ours . . . ours . . . ours.” Japica then leaves to cultivate the last fur-
row he will ever plough, and at that moment he is no longer a “weak old man
with shaking hands,” but with superhuman strength, he lifts up the plough
and starts ploughing with the kind of love only reserved for a living thing.154
After a Yugoslav gendarme approaches Japica and orders him to stop
ploughing because the field no longer belongs to him, motifs of blood and
visions of death take over the story: Japica’s eyes “water with blood,” the
sun is “flooded with blood,” and the whole world “becomes red like blood.”
With phenomenal force, the old peasant lifts the plough in the air. It falls and
smashes on the head of the gendarme, who crashes “bloodily” to the ground.
Japica falls to the earth, telling his grandson he is thirsty. As the boy races to
fetch his grandfather some water, he notices that his face “is covered in the
blood that spurted from the gendarme’s head,” and when he returns Japica
is “stretched out, stiff and cold . . . death has come for him.” In the last scene,
the grandson races through the “greasy, bloody” soil to find his father, but
the land draws him like a magnet and will not leave him alone: “It holds him,
it clings to these dead, to the blood that greases this furrow here. . . . From
above the sun has fallen and from below the earth. Their old bloody but still
dear native soil.”155 The soil, watered with the blood and the bones of peasants,
belongs to Croatians alone, and alien elements and national traitors will be
dealt with mercilessly.
Another slight variation on this theme was Jozo Blažanov’s novella Un-
der a Foreign Roof, published in 1944. Exploring the tribulations of the Croa-
tian peasant trying to survive in Zagreb on the eve of national revolution in
1941, this story contrasts the innocent national idealism of the peasant hero,
Štefa, with the corruption of exploitative capitalist bosses, in particular the
crafty Jews, the most loyal servants of the decomposing Yugoslav state. With
Štefa working all hours in the factory where he has managed to find work
and his wife, Mira, practically a prisoner in the dark and dank apartment
with their young children, life appears to be infinitely more restrictive than
it was when they were living in the village. The novella chronicles the various
stages of the liberation struggle, as the Croatian people win first autonomy
and then liberation in the Independent State of Croatia. However, the story
not only concentrates on the activities of Štefa, who is conscripted into the
hated Serb army on the eve of the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia, but also de-
scribes in some detail the man from whom he and Mira rent their miserable
apartment. “Uncle” Mita is a typical product of the urban mentality who will
support the prevailing ideology, whatever that happens to be. He cheerfully
evicts Mira and the children from their apartment, muttering good riddance
 Between Annihilation and Regeneration  289

to their “cursed children” and speaking approvingly of the Yugoslav authori-

ties. Yet when Štefa returns in the heat of national revolution as a member of
an Ustasha peasant battalion to liberate the city from Serb control and orders
Mita to replace his Yugoslav flag with a Croatian one, he equally readily ac-
cedes. Nonetheless, Štefa warns him: “From now on you are living under a
Croatian roof!” The alien mindset of urban dwellers such as Mita as well as
the city’s alien populations will be cleansed in the new Croatia and the city
transformed from a decadent labyrinth into an Ustasha metropolis.156
Under a Foreign Roof, with its periodization and exploration of life in
the midst of national revolution, was something of an anomaly. Few liter-
ary works addressed the national struggle in the period prior to 1941; fewer
still explored life under the Ustasha regime, and almost none explored both
periods. Lack of paper was undoubtedly one issue, but the short duration of
the Independent State of Croatia and its transitory nature were probably also
factors. Some critics, such as Radoslav Glavas, of course, had another theory.
Writing in Hrvatska smotra to mark the first anniversary of the state, he ar-
gued that the failure of writers to address the national revolution and every-
day life in the Ustasha state, given the “inexhaustible” and rich material it
offered for creativity, was driven by disloyalty and ungratefulness. Likening
the Croatian state to a skeleton that writers now needed to coat in “succulent
contents,” he insisted that the task of the new as well as future generations
of writers was to actively contribute to the construction of Croatian state-
hood. Writers, he warned, could choose only one of two paths: either serve
their state by writing works in which “the whole of our recent reality will be
included—a Croatian people in a liberated homeland” or “stand on the side-
lines” and betray it.157 One of the few novels to address these themes was a
social-realist novel by Mara Švel-Gamiršek: Hrast (The Oak Tree), published
in 1942, explored many of the same ideas as Blažanov’s short story had. De-
spite its themes of Ustasha struggle and national revolution as seen through
the eyes of a patriotic young peasant couple, Marko and Nada Ivanatić, Švel-
Gamiršek’s Hrast was not well received. Tomislav Pavić complained that Švel-
Gamiršek’s novel failed to demonstrate a deep understanding of the difficul-
ties of life, a well-developed conflict, or believable characters. He also criti-
cized the contrived nature of many of the key scenes in the novel, singling
out Nada’s visit to a freemasons’ temple in Belgrade. “Everyone knows it
would never be that easy or straightforward to go into their temple and see
what they do there,” he argued.158 Meanwhile, Ljubomir Maraković, perhaps
slightly unfairly, criticized the novel for the unheroic portrayal of its leading
protagonists. Švel-Gamiršek’s novel, he wrote, did not portray the struggle
in the political arena or the nationalist-revolutionary Ustasha struggle. In-
stead, it concentrated on rural socioeconomic problems, with the protago-
 290  Between Annihilation and Regeneration

nists listening passively to events on their radios. Therefore, it did not give an
authentic impression of what happened in Croatia in the late 1930s and early
1940s despite its documentary style. On the contrary, its social-realist take
and “documentary realism” did not “sit in a harmonious whole with the po-
etic language of the novel.”159 Nevertheless, Hrast was perhaps the most com-
plete literary study of the Ustasha struggle and its impact on the homeland
and the masses. Using the metaphor of the birth and death cycles of an oak
tree as a symbol of Croatia, it tells the story of how Marko and Nada, their
family, friends, and neighbors, fight for both social and national justice in
their village and for Croatia. The themes of the novel—the cruelty of the Ser-
bian regime, the greed and duplicity of Jews, the alien and artificial nature of
the cosmopolitan city, the regenerative qualities of Croatian peasant life, and
the restorative power of violent national purification—make it the paradig-
matic novel of Ustasha Croatia.160
The quest of the Ivnatić family for justice is based around their desire
to increase the productivity of their farm. To do this, they are required to
secure a loan from a bank in Belgrade. It is while on a trip to Belgrade that
Nada meets an old school friend, Vera, who lives the life of an emancipated
city woman. The reason for this soon becomes clear: she has recently become
divorced from her husband, Fedor, a bohemian poet and writer. As Vera tells
it, Fedor has fallen in with a sexually dissolute artistic crowd and left her for
another woman. “Don’t pity me, Nada,” she protests at one point. “I have my
hobbies and my work.” But it is a hollow claim. Hers is effectively a miserable
life. In Švel-Gamiršek’s novel, Vera and her wrecked life, which includes the
death of her infant son, are a symbol not just of the degeneracy of urban life
but also of its brutality. Underneath its gleaming skyscrapers and smart bou-
tiques, life in the city is barren and empty. By contrast, Nada, when asked by
her friend what she does, can only reply: “I have not really got much to say
about myself. I have two sons, a husband whom I love, and I live in a village.
That is all.” Yet this modest ambition provides for Nada a contented life, while
sophisticated, unhappy Vera has lost not only her husband but also her child
(108–9).
Everything about Nada’s visit to Belgrade to secure a loan disgusts her,
exposing the degenerate nature of life in the city: an official at the Ministry of
Agriculture propositions her even though he knows she is married; the secre-
taries she encounters are frivolous and lazy; she visits the cinema and sees a
tiresome Marlene Dietrich film, but she walks out halfway through, bored by
its emptiness and ennui. Returning to the village is, not surprisingly, a wel-
come relief: “When the train passed the bridge and left the luxurious lit-up
city, Nada breathed a sigh of relief and felt how peace and sleep slowly came
to her” (119).
 Between Annihilation and Regeneration  291

In the novel, the foreign nature of Belgrade does not just highlight the dif-
ferences between urban Serbs and rural Croats but also serves to represent
the way in which the Serbs have embraced a cosmopolitan culture. When her
husband, a peasant activist, returns to Belgrade after an absence of twelve
years to visit the bank, he is even less enamored with the city than his wife
was. Remembering Belgrade from his youth, he is appalled by the changes
that have taken place. Sitting in the Café Moscow drinking a cup of coffee,
he stares out of the window, repulsed by the decadence of the people and the
cosmopolitan nature of a city in which different races and cultures live side by
side. Looking around at the other customers in the café, he notices that
at the table next to his, they spoke Greek and at another Hungarian, and . . .
in one corner, a black man sat drinking tea. No, this was not the Belgrade of
Nušić—as Marko remembered—a provincial city with an oriental character;
the center of the city gave an impression of an international citadel that
had wiped away all its special traditions. . . . These Babylonian towers of the
nouveau riche did not please Marko, did not mean as much as one morning
on the cherished land. . . . He felt physically as if a wave of hatred rose in him
above this modern Sodom, which called itself the capital city of Yugoslavia.
(89–90)

In fact, in the novel the degenerate and racially contaminated nature of the
city is presented as the binary opposite of the Croatian countryside, mired
in poverty and deliberately neglected by the regime, as it is the heart of the
nation:
Somewhere in the cities they built skyscrapers and dreamed about asphalt-
ing the roads and motorization, sport and cultural life, and somewhere
unwhitewashed and unkempt peasant houses rotted and were destroyed,
wheels cracked under potholed roads. Somewhere women recuperated their
tired limbs at public baths from energetic sports or dancing at nightclubs,
looking after their slim figures so their fur coats would fit them. Somewhere
tired, thin horses stopped pulling the plough and looked at their exhausted
masters, as somewhere else modern automobiles, black and awkward as
huge bumblebees, glided over asphalt. Somewhere Mother Croatia silently
wept about her unhappy children, both the born and the unborn. (161)

One of the most insidious aspects of Belgrade is its domination by Jew-

ish business and culture. The fact that so many of the people whom Nada and
Marko meet on their visits to Belgrade like to use French and American ex-
pressions demonstrates that a toxic cosmopolitan spirit has seeped into the
mentality of its inhabitants. If Yugoslavia is the Jewish Eldorado, then Bel-
grade is its citadel. When Marko visits Belgrade for a meeting with the direc-
 292  Between Annihilation and Regeneration

tor of the bank, he airily dismisses Marko’s request for a loan and afterward
sits at his desk, listening to radio music from London and drinking strong,
sweet liqueur. With a contented smile on his face, he reads a passage from
the Talmud that informs him that Jews should lend money to “Goys” at high
rates of interest because “the Goy was made to be the servant of the Jew,” and
he “must fight against the Goy without ceasing until his destruction, until
we rule all nations” (168). At this point his heavily made-up wife interrupts
and reminds him that the film they are planning to see is beginning soon
and she doesn’t want to be late: “Coiffeured marbled hair, heavy eyes, a small
hooked nose and fat red lipstick mouth—she peeped through the door while
her fingers, adorned with precious and gleaming jewels, nervously squeezed
the doorknob” (168).
The cabinet secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture whom Nada meets is
similar. Sitting in the waiting room along with two other gentlemen who are
also there to see him, she overhears their conversation about the secretary.
According to them, he is a Jew who has not only converted to Orthodoxy but
is a member of a militant Serbian nationalist youth group: “during one dem-
onstration in Zagreb, I think, he destroyed a statue sacred to the Croats” (114).
In Belgrade, Jews succeed while ordinary hardworking peasants suffer. Such
men are naturally effeminate. As the secretary opens the double white doors
to his office, Nada notices his “bald head and wide forehead, long hooked
nose, soft womanly lips, and small eyes that gently smiled from black-rimmed
glasses.” She also observes how “the well-cut suit made from rough English
fabric spread around his shoulders, which made it unclear if he was hunch-
backed or straight but could not conceal his wide, womanly shaped curves.
‘Hermaphrodite!’ Nada thought and with disgust lowered her gaze” (114).
In the novel, the Serbs are depicted as spiritual Jews themselves, people
who exhibit all the worst Jewish character traits. After King Aleksandar’s as-
sassination, Nada describes him as a Serb Shylock, the embodiment of “all
the craftiness, hypocrisy, shrewdness that Serbs sought and expected in their
leaders in this state . . . a Byzantine, a tyrant, a usurer, and a criminal” (168).
His death is seen as justified Croatian revenge for the assassination of the
Croatian peasant party leader Stjepan Radić and a harbinger of future vio-
lence. At a clandestine meeting one party member Andrija Blaž reminds his
colleagues: “And now listen! You know well the aim our struggle is working
toward. My brothers, between us I can say: this is the one thing which we
all want: to destroy the Serbs.” Looking ahead to the forthcoming elections,
meanwhile, Marko tells assembled activists that the electoral struggle is one
they need to win to inflict “a moral defeat on the Serbs in our native land, to
demonstrate that we intend to be masters in our home.” To objections from a
fellow party activist Jole Šumarev that the Serbs will not leave power even if
 Between Annihilation and Regeneration  293

they lose an election, Marko insists: “Once again, we must win, and when we
win, we will become moral masters of our internal borders and will be pre-
pared for a final confrontation.” At this, an old man, Granddad Lovro, rises
from his bed and walks to the table in the center of the room. Acknowledging
that he is old and will not live to see a liberated Croatia, he predicts: “I have
lived through much of this good and evil. Foreign masters ruled in a foreign
way. They were here and then they left—ha, ha—they disappeared as if the
wind had carried them away, and Croatia remained with the graves of its old
and the strength of its youth” (153–54).
As the novel climaxes, chaos reigns in the homeland. The novel builds to
a crescendo at Easter 1941 with the invasion of Yugoslavia by Nazi Germany
and the beginning of the Croatian national revolution. What will happen?
Marko and Nada do not know, but Marko is sure that the Serbs are plan-
ning to exterminate the Croatian nation and that the Croats need to be pre-
pared. As he tells his coworkers: “The Germans need not fear Yugoslavia, but
we must fear the Serbs if this war does not quickly end, and we will be pre-
pared for them in every way, because I do not know of any hatred as ancient
as the hatred of the Serbs for the Croats.” The small radio to which Ljubomir
Maraković had referred so dismissively is relied on increasingly by the family
as their only means of contact with the Ustasha movement. Marko is arrested
for political reasons but, after the intervention of a Croatian gendarme, is re-
leased and heads straight home to give his sons three hand grenades to use
in the event of attack from Serbian soldiers. Marko decides that he can stay
at home listening to the radio no longer and sets out to play his part in the
national revolution. As hordes of Chetniks descend on Croatia, their sadism
and bestiality driving terrified peasants from their homes, women dressed in
black, their eyes red from weeping, gather in the local church to pray for sal-
vation. Oblivious to this, in her kitchen Nada is preparing the family lunch,
hoping that Marko might be home to eat it with them. Suddenly, her younger
son bursts into the kitchen with tears in his eyes to ask her how she can be
preparing family lunch when terrible events are happening on the streets of
Croatia. He informs her that “black Chetniks are coming and slaughtering
women and children” (183, 197). After ordering her son to stay at home she
goes out with the intention of finding her husband. As she walks the streets
she is confronted by the terrible consequences of twenty years of Serbian rule:
weeping women from Dalmatia and refugees begging to be saved; women
expelled from their homes breastfeeding their children in the streets; young
children shaking with fear and terror; adolescents with pitchforks and old
men with scythes to defend their homes from Chetnik attacks. Only old
women are resigned to their fate, too weak to flee the violence that is coming.
Suddenly, Nada spies Marko in the crowd, dirty from nights spent living in
 294  Between Annihilation and Regeneration

the open air, wearing a hat with a Croatian tricolor, and carrying a hand gre-
nade in his pocket. When she asks him what has happened, he tells her not
to panic: “Alarming news has arrived, but it appears that the Chetniks have
been blown to pieces in the woods” (197). It seems to Nada that the village
has been saved through God’s intervention. All that remains of the Chetnik
forces is one decimated unit: “Thin and exhausted horses, emaciated, tired
men in shabby uniforms. The guards led the Serbian soldiers into the village.
They were pallid, unshaven, and their eyes radiated hatred and menace while,
with a mocking smile, they said something to the guard” (198). The fate of
the captured Serbian soldiers can only be guessed at, but whatever it is, they
deserved it. Nada and Marko are reunited and listen at the family hearth to
Slavko Kvaternik announce the foundation of the Independent State of Croa-
tia and vow to expel the despised Serbs from their beautiful homeland. In
the final scene nature is in equilibrium with political events. Now in liber-
ated Croatia, Nada and Marko sit under the swaying oak tree in the shade
of the warm summer sun, watching their sons till the regenerated purified
Croatian land. Like the oak tree that can thrive in rocky ground, put down
strong roots, and survive fire, storm, and lightning, the Croatian nation has
prevailed against the violence, torture, and injustice to which it has been sub-
jected. Ultimately, Hrast is a vision of annihilation foretold.
CHAPTER 6

“AN UNCEASING SEA OF

BLOOD AND VICTIMS”
The Cultural Politics of Martyrdom
and Moral Rebirth

W
riting in May 1941, Ivan Šarić, bishop of Sarajevo, nostalgically recol-
lected his clandestine meetings with Ustashas in South America in the
1930s. He recalled the Ustashas he had met as “good and self-sacrificing
believers, men of God and the nation.” For their part, he wrote, the Ustashas
were attached to their priestly followers. In their priests, he wrote, Ustashas
saw a reflection of the nation and themselves.1 In fact, such faithful sons of
the Catholic Church were they that, while incarcerated on the Island of Li-
pari, they built a church in which the local bishop blessed them, coming to
see them as model Catholic men.2 Many Catholic commentators echoed these
sentiments. Writing in Vrhbosna in April 1942, on the first anniversary of the
state, Dragutin Kamber, a priest and Ustasha official in Bosnia, stated that
the Catholic Church had welcomed the creation of the state with ecstasy be-
cause it knew that “hundreds of thousands of Ustashas” were the best Catho-
lic believers.3 For the Catholic journalist Antun Jerkov, meanwhile, Ustasha
soldiers were the most pious children of God, fighting for the victory of his
morality. He described a soldier he had seen in the Shrine of the Immacu-
late Heart, his head bowed, carrying a rosary and prayer book in his callused
hands, gazing at the altar: “In the convulsions and torture on the cross of the
crucifixion of Croatia, a generation arrived in the world by the will of Provi-
dence. God’s avengers, heroic and noble, who in Christ’s name accepted the
struggle for the victory of His principles and the freedom of the Croat Home-

295
 296  “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”

land. The greatest sons of our nation arrived to fight until complete victory.”
The Catholic faith of the Ustashas enabled them to die with a smile on their
face as Christ the King “lifted high the Croatian banner baptized in sprinkled
Ustasha blood.”4
At the same time there was a sharp contrast between the extreme violence
of Ustasha death squad members and their professed Catholic piety. Usta-
sha propaganda proudly declared that the most zealous members of Ustasha
militias were seminary students and undergraduates of the theological fac-
ulty in Zagreb. These were the “nests” of the “seminary generation,” Ustaša
declared, from which had emerged the new generation of Ustasha warriors.5
However, despite the apparent contradiction, the regime’s extreme violence
and its pietistic outlook were inextricably linked. Its ideology glorified vio-
lence and killing as well as self-sacrifice and self-denial, and its rituals and
imagery were infused with the mystic and sacral language of martyrdom,
death, and resurrection. Although the Ustasha movement was not religious
or led by priests, it nonetheless saw itself as a crusading organization that
would return the nation to moral purity and virtue, reversing twenty years of
Yugoslav liberal secularism. Through its cult of death, influenced by Balkan
rituals of death, burial, and mourning, it created a form of “village Cathol-
icism” combining pagan customs with Roman Catholic traditions to form
a new set of legitimizing rituals and ceremonies. Irrespective of its secular
aims, the Ustasha regime’s mystical rites and festivals, apocalyptic language,
and glorification of martyrdom and death reflected a religious attitude to life
common to all fascist movements.
Nevertheless, the sacral elements of the regime’s cultural politics—the
cult of death and self-consciously religious image—also had strongly instru-
mentalizing uses. Through invoking the sufferings of Ustasha martyrs, the
regime aimed to remind ordinary Croatians of the indignity and injustices
the nation had endured in interwar Yugoslavia. The inculcation of a public
culture of commemoration involving mass ceremonies in which the entire
population could take part provided the regime with a collective means of le-
gitimation. Through ritualized demonstrations of mourning such as the Day
of the Dead and the Day of the Croatian Martyr, the Ustasha regime was not
merely enacting the symbolic burial of interwar Yugoslavia but also reinforc-
ing popular perceptions and memories of oppression under Serbian rule; it
was also institutionalizing the monumental sacrifices Ustasha martyrs had
made for national liberation. These served to reinforce the national myth, as-
siduously propagated by the regime, that throughout its history Croatia had
only managed to liberate itself through the sacrifice and blood of its national
leaders, something to which all Croats should aspire. Through public partici-
pation in the sacralization of politics, the masses would be bound by a shared
 “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”  297

destiny to the regime and its martyrs. That said, the fact that this sacraliz-
ing discourse, ritual, and imagery never essentially evolved or modified itself,
even in the aftermath of the ideological changes between late 1941 and mid-
1942, suggested that perhaps of all forms of cultural politics it most accurately
reflected the worldview of the movement.

USTASHAS AS WARRIORS, MARTYRS, AND AVENGING ANGELS

Since the 1930s, the Ustasha movement had portrayed its warriors as a le-
gion of avenging angels who would violently liberate their nation from god-
lessness, Sodom, and national oppression. Croatia had to be liberated from
Serbian “occupation” not simply because Serb rule was tyrannical and cruel
but also because of its immorality and degenerate liberal ideals. Croatia, the
movement’s leaders and ideologues argued, had spent two decades in the
prison of Greater Serbia, subject to moral corruption and degeneration and
drowning in a sea of pornography and filth. The movement’s national revo-
lution would enact a purgatorial spiritual renewal. In an article of April 1934
in Ustaša, Ante Pavelić railed against the “barbaric culture and gypsy civi-
lization” of the Belgrade regime, accusing it of spreading “bestial” values in
“godly” Croatia.6 The Ustasha army, he promised, would launch a struggle to
cleanse Croatia of such impurity. The purification of Croatia would necessar-
ily be violent. Leading Ustashas such as Mijo Babić explained that the Serbs,
through their occupation of Croatia, had betrayed the Croatians as Judas
had Jesus and could expect only the same cruel fate. The Ustasha movement
would launch a “bloody and brutal struggle” in which the blood of its ene-
mies would “flow into rivers and streams” and Ustasha bombs would “scatter
its bones like dust.” This was the “great and sacred” aim of all Ustashas.7 In
article after leaflet it warned that Croatia’s cleansing could not be inaugurated
with a prayer book or a rosary: instead Ustashas would use those “cold im-
plements that have warmed the Ustashas in battle”—the crucifix, the dagger,
and the hand grenade, their “holy trinity.”8 As Babić warned in lurid detail
in 1932, on the Day of Judgment the Ustashas would not refrain “from kill-
ing because when the order to spill blood is issued, rivers of blood will flow.”
The movement’s warriors would use “dedication, guns, bombs, and the sharp
knives of the Croat Ustashas to clear and cut out all that is rotten from the
healthy Croat, the corpses of traitors,” in pursuit of their sacred cause. “Those
who drink the blood of the Croatian nation,” he warned, “should be slaugh-
tered so that their evil never reappears again among the Croats.”9
The Ustasha movement painted a harrowing picture of life under Greater
Serbian “tyranny.” The crimes and misdeeds committed against the Croa-
tian nation amounted to a campaign of terror: the Croatians were living in
a prison and facing extermination through the destruction of their religion,
 298  “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”

culture, and language and through the torture and annihilation of the best
sons of the fatherland at the hands of the batons and bayonets of King Alek-
sandar’s gendarmes. The violence of the Yugoslav state was demonstrated not
only in the suffering of the Croatian masses but also in the martyrs created
by the Ustasha movement in its struggle for an independent state. One of
the first such martyrs was Franjo Zrinski, arrested after the assassination of
the newspaper proprietor Mirko Neudorfer, accused of assisting in his mur-
der and planting bombs on railway tracks. According to Ustaša, before be-
ing hanged in the early dawn in Belgrade, he was “horribly tortured.” His
execution was irrefutable evidence of Belgrade’s desire “to exterminate the
most nationally conscious and militant sons of Croatia.” He was likened to
an early Christian saint, bearing the hours before his execution with courage,
fortified by the Ustasha faith, and “blessing the Croat liberation struggle with
his young martyred blood.” The “blood of such martyrs,” his obituary con-
cluded, was the seed of national freedom.10
The violent activities of Ustasha terrorists between 1929 and 1941 created
a number of other martyrs for the movement, including Marko Hranilović,
Matija Soldin, and Ivan Rošić, all executed for terrorist activity following
show trials in the 1930s. Perhaps the most famous prewar martyr of all was
Stipe Devčić, who took part in the failed Ustasha raid on a police station in
Brušane and blew himself up with his hand grenade rather than face the
“ignominy” of surrender. For this gruesome act, he not only found himself
hailed in the Ustasha press as the most celebrated of martyrs but set a stan-
dard for self-sacrifice by which other Ustashas would be judged.11 However,
all Ustashas were supposed to pass through a period of suffering and self-
denial, in the same way that Jesus and early Christian saints had, in order
to be considered real Ustashas. While its members were in exile in terrorist
training camps, the Ustasha movement introduced a strict moral code in an
attempt to ensure that it would produce steely warriors who were disciplined
and ruthless. On Lipari, among the vices banned were drinking, womaniz-
ing, gambling, avarice, materialism, deceit, boastfulness and pride, coward-
liness and fear, vanity and short-temperedness, and chattering. According to
the Ustasha Principles, womanizing was no less an evil than drinking alcohol
since the warrior who thought only of chasing women would be distracted
from the national struggle; in addition, the enemy could use women to cor-
rupt especially young and impressionable members of the movement.12 In-
stead, young Ustashas were supposed to live in moral rectitude and absolute
asceticism. From these years of struggle, testing, and sacrifice would emerge
a spiritually cleansed new man, capable of liberating the nation.13 The Usta-
sha terrorists’ sense of moralism and fanatical devotion to the cause at the
expense of all else was reflected in a number of novels written about the Usta-
 “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”  299

sha movement in the 1930s. In the most famous, Lijepa plavojka (The Beauti-
ful Blonde), written by Pavelić in 1934, one of the protagonists, Pališa, cares
about nothing except the movement, declaring to new recruits that the na-
tional cause needs men of “great self-sacrifice and steely character,” ruthless
and fanatical. The greatest danger to Ustashas, he declares, is the opposite
sex: “Women are the devil. They are always in collusion with the enemy.”14
The initiation ceremony for the swearing-in of new members deliberately
evoked this ethos of self-denial. The prospective Ustasha took a “sacred” oath
to “Almighty God” before an altar bearing the crucifix, a candle, a hand gre-
nade, and a dagger. Once a member, he was joined to the movement for life, af-
firming his “desire for ceaseless suffering, toil, and sacrifice—even death—for
the Poglavnik and the homeland.” The new recruit stepped forward shouting
“I am ready!” and the camp leader gave a short speech in which he reiter-
ated the importance of the oath, explaining that once he had entered into the
Ustasha movement, an Ustasha stopped living for himself and instead dedi-
cated his life to the movement. At the end of the ceremony the recruit vowed,
“I swear to Almighty God and all that is sacred to me that I will uphold the
Ustasha Principles and obey its laws and unconditionally carry out the com-
mands of the Poglavnik and that I will strictly protect every secret command
and not betray them to anyone. . . . I am conscious of my responsibility for ev-
ery act and admission and, imbued with conviction, am aware that if I should
err against this oath, I will, according to the Ustasha constitution, receive the
death sentence. So help me God! Amen!”15 As an article of Christmas 1941 in
Ustaša explained, the mystical and religious aspects of the ceremony were
crucial. The presence of the crucifix reminded “the Ustasha before whom he
took his oath. Before the cross, he serves the nation as a holy and grave act.
The crucifix emboldens the Ustasha to carry out the honorable deed that he
was assigned by the Poglavnik and the Ustasha movement. On the cross, he
sees the Christ figure who sacrificed himself for others. And it is the duty of
the Ustasha to work for the salvation of others.”16
Sometimes during these ceremonies Ustasha commanders even made a
direct comparison between the party oath and the keeping of the Ten Com-
mandments: “When we were still in school our teachers and parents taught us
the Ten Commandments,” explained one Poglavnik Bodyguard militia colo-
nel to a unit of recruits at their swearing-in ceremony in November 1942. “The
third commandment says: ‘Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain.’ To-
day it is time for us to remember it. Today, you solemnly swear before God,
before other men, and before your superiors, and therefore the names of the
greatest and holiest bear witness to your decision, your preparedness, your
love for the Poglavnik and the Independent State of Croatia. The Ustasha oath
is witness of your maturity and manly strength. The oath is the most impor-
 300  “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”

tant act in our nation and one to which we appeal to Almighty God as a wit-
ness of our work.”17
The idea of sacrifice and testing also played an important role in the Usta-
sha regime’s propaganda, especially among its Catholic and clerical propa-
gandists. One theological student, Antun Vrbić, writing in April 1942, called
the Ustasha movement not merely a political organization but a great moral
banner. “It is based on the self-mutilation and contemplation of the individ-
ual for the good of the community,” he observed. It was no wonder so many
Ustashas had preferred to be “incarcerated” on Lipari, where they starved to
death, he wrote, rather than return to Croatia, their homeland, and “renounce
their travails.”18 Indeed, the period of testing for some young Ustashas proved
to be too much, and they perished in exile, dying as restless, unfulfilled mar-
tyrs in a barren faraway land:
How difficult it was to die there in the sunny south on the Isle of Lipari
and on Sicily, to die filled with a living yearning for the native soil: this
is perhaps something only those closest to the Poglavnik and who have
experienced the weight of the tragedy of their comrades can know, those
who were captivated by the liberation war. In these moments, death was
difficult when life called for struggle and when one’s people awaited their
liberators. Death meant being deprived of liberation and struggle, and while
the nation endured its most difficult moments, they died with a hidden and
unfulfilled yearning.19

Another Catholic intellectual, the Ustasha Youth leader and director of the
GUS propaganda office Grga Pejnović, portrayed the Ustasha warrior in
semireligious terms as akin to a medieval Christian martyr-saint. When the
Ustasha took the oath of loyalty to the movement, he believed, he effectively
renounced the material world and swore that he would live life according
to the principles of the movement, thus sacrificing himself for the common
good. He was the most conscious son of the nation, who “deeply believed, in
his soul and body, in serving for eternity, that the life of one’s nation is ex-
tended into eternity because the greatest idea of statehood is christened in
death and blood and what is christened in blood conquers eternity.” Com-
paring fallen Ustashas to early martyrs such as Jeanne D’Arc, Silvio Relico,
and the Spartan warriors who fell at Thermopylae, Pejnović portrayed them
as progenitors of “living faith” and godliness, demonstrating the “holiness of
the ideas for which they had to perish.” In the same way the Holy Land had
been consecrated by the blood of Christian martyrs, the idea of an indepen-
dent Croatia “has been and is being dedicated in Ustasha blood, founded on
martyrs’ graves.”20
From the beginning the Ustasha movement saw itself as a kind of reli-
 “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”  301

gion. As early as 1934 Joža Milković argued that the movement bore “all the
characteristics of a separate religion” and likened its members’ core beliefs
in “God, Croatia, and the Poglavnik” to the Holy Trinity. The motif of the
Ustasha movement as a political religion appeared repeatedly in the writings
of the movement’s youth activists after the establishment of the Ustasha state
too. According to Milivoj Karamarko, the ideal Ustasha embodied the most
idealistic and best qualities of the nation. “The Ustasha ideology is not just a
political philosophy—in this sense the Ustasha ideology is a principle for life,
it is a religion,” he declared. “A religion because it demands morals—and the
religiosity of its followers—and because only a higher godly sanction can ob-
ligate and fulfill the human character.” For the Ustasha, work and life were
a “constant test and purification.”21 Niko Zekanović, then a zealous Ustasha
Youth commentator, also saw the Ustasha ideology as a faith, one that drew
its inspiration from both the past and present and one so invincible that it
could overcome any evil. Meanwhile, Vinko Nikolić declared the Indepen-
dent State of Croatia to be not just an ideology but an article of faith. “Our
religion is the Independent State of Croatia!” he wrote in September 1941. “We
are all believers in this divine faith of ours!”22
The second revolution was also defined in religious terms as the begin-
ning of a new life. If the national revolutionary past had been defined by the
sacrifice of blood, then it had also opened up “new visions, clear as the blue-
ness of our sky,” and “the start of a new life in the creative strength of revolu-
tionary dynamism, in the strength of a new man, a man of life and the future,
a man of the Ustasha revolution.” As the first part of the Ustasha revolution
ended, and the revolution turned to blood and ideas and then a new kind
of man, it became his religion and a sacred program for life: “To create and
build! This is the complete program of revolution; this is the program of apos-
tles and warriors wrapped in the mysticism of blood. This mysticism is re-
vealed in the construction of the Ustasha movement, revealed in the shadow
of the Poglavnik’s name. We have passed through revolutionary blood, and
now we are living through the revolution of the soul, the revolution of man,
and the revolution of the construction of the movement.”23

THE MORALITY OF THE NEW USTASHA RELIGION

Writing in late 1941, Franjo Trbuha, an Ustasha Youth theoretician, argued
that the Ustasha revolution was a deeply spiritual one. While many revo-
lutions sought to change material reality, the Ustasha revolution sought to
change man from inside through moral regeneration and the incarnation of
a “primordial man.”24 His statement and those of other youth activists re-
garding the Ustasha revolution emphasized two important ideological ele-
ments of the Ustasha movement: first, the mystical belief that the creation of
 302  “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”

an independent Croatia would herald the nation’s moral regeneration and,

second, the conviction that this regeneration represented the triumph of en-
ergetic youthful militancy over tired liberal democracy. In the regenerated
Croatian state, they imagined, nationalist, patriarchal, and traditional val-
ues would replace moral degeneracy and cosmopolitanism. Zealous Ustasha
intellectuals like the young Muslim writer Halid Čausević compared regen-
erated Croatia to the decomposing, morally contaminated Babylon that had
been Yugoslavia:
On the ruins of an artificial and worm-ridden state creation, whose miser-
able end is unique in the annals of world history, on the orders of divine
Providence, a new and young Independent State of Croatia has arisen.
. . . In this apocalyptic and difficult struggle, many individuals lost hope,
their spirits collapsed, and they despaired, but the Croatian nation did not
collapse because it believed, it fanatically believed, in eternal justice and
the arrival of a great male liberator. . . . Carrying a torch at the head of an
iron phalanx of sun-kissed Ustasha heroes, the Poglavnik arrived. On the
Poglavnik’s deeply creased and tanned face the signs of great spiritual and
physical torture that this humble son of a poor Bosnian village had endured
for justice and the liberation of his people were visible.25

While for Grga Pejnović, the creation of an independent Croatian state

meant liberation from “Sodom and Gomorrah” and arrival in the “promised
land,” Božidar Kavran likened the struggle and liberation of the movement
to the biblical Golgotha. Divine providence had ordained that Croatia should
be resurrected on the rotten ruins of the Yugoslav Babylon on Easter Sunday,
the very day of the resurrection of the Savior. Like Christ, the Croats had set
off on their own Way of the Cross to the Promised Land. “Who could count
all the stations of the Croatian Golgotha, who could count all the precious
victims who placed their lives on the altar of the homeland and the nation?”
he asked. After enduring an artificial state creation that had collapsed like a
Tower of Babel, the Independent State of Croatia was resurrected on its ruins,
“redeemed in the rivers of blood and the hecatombs of victims of earlier and
current generations.”26
For Ustasha ideologues, April 1941 marked liberation from both national
and moral enslavement; it was an opportunity to remake their world, one of-
ten conceived in mystical and semireligious terms. Marijan Velnić remem-
bered that in the years before the national revolution a younger generation
had hoisted the red, white, and blue flag with “a bomb in the middle” and
taken midnight oaths to Croatia “accompanied by the dagger and the gun,”
meeting in secret “like the first Christians.” Now, with the resurrection of the
nation, the Ustasha regime needed to affect a second, moral resurrection, the
 “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”  303

“resurrection of the new man the new Croatia is seeking,” he declared. “We
must resurrect and become new men” who are “strong, reconstructed, unself-
ish,” guided by a new morality.27 In his essay of 1942 Vinko Nikolić envisaged
this resurrected new man as a fanatical believer in the Ustasha faith:
The Poglavnik’s Croatia must get a man of his spirit. Of his thoughts. Of his
heart. Of his heroism. We must create a generation, a new Ustasha genera-
tion that will have its Ustasha faith and that will unshakably and firmly
believe in its Ustasha faith; that will live for this faith, work for it, and—if
necessary—die for this Ustasha faith too. In this faith to be a believer, a
zealot, a fanatic, this wonderful faith. Fanatics of the Poglavnik’s faith,
zealots of the faith, who will never ask but obey, never rest but work. We
need such a faith, Croatian zealotry, Croatian fanaticism, which, with equal
pleasure, works with friends and fights enemies, delights in the family, fights
on the barricades, and protects our borders.28

In order to create this new morality and this new moral man, the Ustasha
regime introduced a series of draconian moral laws by which the new state
would be governed. Vices such as abortion, contraception, and prostitution
were banned, as was the display of obscene images in shop windows, journals,
and newspapers. Begging was also outlawed, and the authorities launched
a war against drunkenness, stipulating that all taverns had to be closed by
nine o’clock, that no one under eighteen could enter them, and that women
who worked in them could not sit with male customers. Additionally, taverns
that allowed customers to become drunk would be fined. Andrija Artuković,
the minister for the interior, also outlawed playing cards for money, specifi-
cally to address what he perceived as a culture of immorality that had spread
from the city to the village.29 The regime also launched a campaign to eradi-
cate swearing and cursing both throughout the nation and within the Usta-
sha movement itself. While punishments for Croatian citizens amounted to
prison and a fine, the GUS stipulated that members of the movement or any
administration bureaucrats accused of swearing should be placed before the
Ustasha disciplinary court, which technically had the power to impose the
death penalty against those found guilty.30
In some regions Ustasha authorities went much further and introduced
their own laws: for example, banning revealing female swimming costumes
or women smoking or wearing makeup at offices. More often, though, re-
gional Ustasha leaders simply levied more draconian sentences for existing
offenses. Viktor Gutić introduced his own harsh sentences for drunkenness,
and in Banja Luka those found drunk on the streets or in taverns could be
sentenced to six months’ hard labor; taverns where such drunkenness oc-
curred could be fined 20,000 dinars and their owners have their businesses
 304  “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”

confiscated. In Sarajevo, meanwhile, women who violated the law regarding

sitting alone with male clientele in taverns and bars were subject to arrest
and imprisonment.31 In Bjelovar, in November 1941, the Ustasha authorities
issued a proclamation informing the public that not only could barmaids not
sit with male customers in taverns but that all “disorderly conduct,” including
“the smashing of bottles, screaming, quarrels,” and musicians playing their
music from table to table, was henceforth outlawed. Those patrons caught vi-
olating the laws would be banned from all local hostelries, and tavern owners
could have their establishments closed down.32
The state’s laws were based on the Ustasha movement’s own strict moral
code and its members’ self-image as virtuous and chaste warriors. The “Du-
ties of the [Ustasha] Member,” published in 1941, included the stipulation
that members reject “atheism, swearing, curses, drunkenness, unworthiness,
disharmony, lies, and profanities,” as well as “un-Ustasha parties, cards and
gambling, visiting dubious bars, and anything that would harm the reputa-
tion of the Ustasha movement.” Ustashas were warned that if they had pro-
vided false information in their declarations, they would be stripped of their
position and “thrown out of Croatian society, branded as unworthy.”33 Usta-
sha ideologues and journalists wrote prolifically on the moral duties of the
Ustasha and the consequences of not living up to them. According to Mijo
Bzik, the new man fashioned by the Ustasha ideology must be a man of “re-
sponsibility, duty, work, struggle, respect, heroism, and zealotry,” rejecting all
curses “because this shames our nation.” He was not to be “drunk, shouldn’t
frequent doubtful nighttime parties or mix in dubious female company”; the
whole of his personal life was to be founded on the family.34 Youth leader Ivan
Topljak was blunter, assailing men who dishonored patriarchal family life by
consorting in bars with “women with dark and repulsive pasts.”35 During the
campaign to purge the movement of renegade Ustashas in autumn 1941, Bzik
declared a war against Ustashas who led immoral private lives at a time when
real Ustashas were perishing in the thousands. He warned them that Ustasha
Croatia would not put up with “those dishononorable men about town” who
surrounded themselves in their offices with “teams of young attractive typ-
ists” or who, several times a day, left work to visit the tavern. “Especially it
will not stand for those whose desire is to make merry and carouse in night-
time establishments, bang bottles, make toasts, fondle barmaids, and throw
around cash. We know there are some of them in Zagreb and the regions, and
it will hurt them when the Ustasha hand finally gets hold of them!”36
In August 1942, the movement published a set of regulations that set out
the duties and proper behaviors of its members. Arguing that faith in God
and fidelity to family life were the foundation of a happy, healthy life, the law
stipulated that only honorable men could be Ustashas:
 “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”  305

The Ustasha movement is a respectable movement. The Ustasha movement

aims that every one of its members, every supporter, and every member
of the Croatian national community is conscious that the foundations of
an orderly, healthy, content, and happy life are faith and family. Thus: (a)
in its membership it accepts only respectable, honest, uncorrupted people
and good and honest Croats; (b) it is cleansing from the nation godlessness,
cursing, swearing, drunkenness, immorality, disharmony, lies, and profan-
ity; (c) it promotes in the people a willingness to sacrifice for the common
good without the expectation of reward; (d) it fights against a frivolous and
shallow understanding of life, and it protects the sanctity of the family and
marriage; (e) it places on a pedestal women and mothers, and it protects and
defends the honor and the reputation of maidens.37

Arguably, though, the greater target of the regime’s moral strictures was
women. Officially, the regime aimed to create not just a new Ustasha woman
who would be the ideal wife and mother, but a woman imbued with moral-
ity and virtue. Many of the laws, regulations, statutes, and broadsides against
immorality were aimed unmistakably at the policing of female behavior;
women bore the brunt of the majority of polemics against vice, and the habits
of young women were a particular preoccupation of the press. Women were
subject to a number of legal constraints in the name of moral guardianship:
while the law against prostitution affected relatively few women, the laws
against abortion and the wearing of makeup by female teachers and students
affected many. Polemical attacks on women who did not adhere to the prin-
ciples of the new moral woman were frequent. Ivan Topljak chastised girls
who wore cosmetics. “Don’t smear your face with Jewish rouge, don’t powder
your face with foundation bought from Jewish stores, don’t lacquer your nails
with poisonous unnatural colors,” he thundered.38 They also suffered sharp
criticism at the hands of Catholic journalists. Antun Jerkov, who had al-
ready set out the modestly dressed, pure, and pious young Catholic girl as the
prototype of new Croatian femininity, called on young women to abandon
“makeup, perfumes, immodest clothing, dancing, and parties,” the symbols
of emanicipated modern womanhood. Marica Stanković lamented the fact
that instead of Jerkov’s ideal, the young women she encountered on the streets
of Zagreb and other cities were “dressed up, heavily made-up, and idle.”39 The
state of undress of young Croatian women was of particular concern to Cath-
olic journalists, something they frequently referred to as a “cult of the flesh.”
From their perspective, as one of them wrote in August 1941, a fashion for
near nakedness was spreading. “Especially in the warmer months,” he wrote,
“we see that there exists and is growing in popularity among females a gen-
eral nakedness and competition to see who looks better—in other words, who
 306  “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”

is worst. One would see complete nudity had it not been banned by law. In
any case, they conceal only those parts of their body that they most urgently
have to so that they don’t face legal consequences.” He called for prison for
these “typically frivolous mothers and daughters” who “enjoy and take plea-
sure in their work.” Things had become so bad that even religious mothers
and daughters had become slaves to fashion and, while lighting one candle for
the Savior, were also lighting one for the “satanic cult” of fashion. He asked
whether the regime, which had so “praiseworthily” stood up to “purify the
mange from the sheep pen” by banning makeup for female students, could
not also use a large broom as soon as possible to “sweep away this harmless,
hygienic, and charming trash from the Croatian nation.”40
However, these hopes were to be disappointed: young women, as the per-
sistent complaints of both Ustasha ideologues and Catholic commentators
made clear, simply ignored the regime’s purity strictures. In his grand opus
of 1944, no less a figure than Mijo Bzik singled out shallow, heavily made-up
young woman more interested in fashion magazines and cosmetics than ide-
ology as yet one more depressing manifestation of the reemergence of the de-
generate liberalism of the Yugoslav 1930s. He argued that such women were
to be seen everywhere: “on the train, tram, in the streets, church, and else-
where,” suggesting that no matter how draconian these laws might be, they
were powerless against the pleasure of a yard of tulle or tube of lipstick, es-
pecially in economically desperate times when such things were freely avail-
able on the black market if nowhere else.41 In fact, the moral strictures were
breaking down everywhere, it seemed, as ordinary people stubbornly pur-
sued simple diversionary indulgences. Large numbers of city taverns, for ex-
ample, continued to be fined not just for serving drunk customers or allowing
women to drink alone but also for failing to adhere to laws designed to control
prices and incomes. A sweeping citywide inspection by the Ustasha economic
supervisory police in May 1942 found that many inns in Zagreb were centers
of immorality and illegality, with two-thirds of them having been caught for
a variety of offenses. Owners were punished with fines, prison sentences, and
even deportation to concentration camps. In some cases, they were threat-
ened with the temporary or permanent closure of their businesses or the ap-
pointment of commissioners to oversee them or instigate the liquidation of
their assets.42 There were also numerous complaints in the press about the re-
turn of begging to the streets of the major cities. As Nova Hrvatska grumbled
in February 1942, “professional beggars” had returned to the capital to resume
their “parasitical lives in the way they used to,” despite the fact that there was
work for everyone who wanted it. The city authorities, it urged, would have
to use the “most draconian measures to cleanse the city from those lazybones
who do absolutely nothing to enhance the reputation of the city.”43
 “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”  307

By 1944, Catholic commentators like Rudolf Travnić were assessing the

moral condition of the state’s citizens mordantly. Young people in particu-
lar, they complained, had no interest in either the church or its moral stric-
tures and were abandoning it as soon as they had left school and no longer
had to attend. Instead, they had been gripped by materialistic and decadent
ideals, preferring to go to halls and dance to “negro jazz music.” Despite the
fact that dancing was banned in the Independent State of Croatia, many eve-
ning dancing venues continued to exist clandestinely. Now corrupted youths
danced more than ever before and indulged in activities that simply could
not be mentioned. The souls of these youths, contaminated by decadence
and godlessness, urgently needed to be saved, although, as Travnić admitted,
Catholic groups faced an uphill struggle in this regard.44 Parents and teachers
also expressed concern about the increasing profanity and immorality their
children and students were being exposed to in letters and reports to officials
in the Ministry of National Education. In a fairly typical letter of February
1943, for example, Franjo Jović, a high school teacher in Bjelovar, wrote to
the ministry to complain that his students were gaining admittance to state
cinemas to watch films portraying “prostitution” and “nudity.” Why were
children being allowed to watch these films when they had been publicly con-
demned by the Ustasha Youth? He added that an outraged colleague had even
unwittingly taken his son to see these films. What he didn’t ask but possibly
should have was why teenagers were sneaking into cinemas to watch them.45
The campaign against swearing was less than successful too, at least as far
as Catholic organizations were concerned. As early as 1942, Katolički tjednik
was complaining that the citizens of no other country in the world, with the
exception of Italy, swore as much as the Croatians. Declaring that the “pa-
per war” against swearing and profanity had failed, it called for the church
to lead a real religious war and create a movement against swearing. Cro-
atia, it asserted, could not be a new and better state without such a move-
ment.46 In 1944, clerical organizations decided to take matters into their
own hands. Archbishop Alozije Stepinac, primate of Croatia, together with
the Circle of Catholic Men from the Catholic Action society, organized the
Movement against Swearing. The movement was comprised of two types of
members: regular members who supported the struggle against swearing
through promotional and awareness-raising activities and a militant “fight-
ing” unit called the Army of Jesus’ Heart against Swearing, whose symbol
was a dragon pierced by a sword. The Movement against Swearing was a cru-
sading movement against bad language. Its militant activists declared a war
against profanity and with the ambivalent support of the Ustasha police—
since it highlighted the failure of the regime and its police in this regard—or-
ganized a Week against Swearing to combat this “repulsive” manifestation of
 308  “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”

secularism, a symptom, its spokesman Dragutin Hren asserted, of a “foreign”

mentality. Its members held meetings, handed out leaflets in the streets, put
up posters, and gave lectures on the dangers of this vice.47 Hren also utilized
various forms of propaganda in the struggle. In his book Incendiary Lan-
guage, published in 1944, he called for a “national struggle” against swear-
ing, which, he argued, was a betrayal of the homeland; he appealed to wives
to challenge their husbands, and even report them to the police, if they came
home from the tavern and used bad language, since being drunk could be no
excuse; he claimed that the problem of swearing was now so chronic that the
first word many Croatian infants spoke was a curse word. The movement’s
army also took direct action. Seeing themselves as warriors as much as Usta-
sha soldiers and militia members did, in their case against vice and evil, they
formed themselves into fighting units struggling for “holiness and sublime
feelings” on the one hand and the destruction of the “abomination” of curs-
ing on the other. Bearing a cross and the slogan “For the Honor of God and
the Salvation of the Nation,” they patrolled the streets, arresting guilty and
“degenerate” members of the public and handing the “incorrigible and in-
solent” offenders to the Ustasha police for punishment. In spite of this, Hren
was forced to admit in his book chronicling the movement, neither they nor
the Ustasha police ever did succeed in eradicating swearing.48

SERBS, JEWS, AND “SHAMEFUL” HABITS

In 1942, two years before the creation of the Movement against Swearing, Stje-
pan Flodin, a Catholic commentator, had controversially argued that cursing
was deeply ingrained in the Croatian national character: this was surely one
reason for the failure of the legislation to combat swearing. “We are a cursing
nation,” he wrote. “In Croatia, the great and the insignificant all swear.” An-
other commentator went further, arguing that the Ustasha state itself, not the
Balkan influence of the Serbs, was responsible for creating the conditions in
which culture had been abandoned and in which the “barbarism” and “im-
morality” of cursing could flourish.49 This was not a view that found favor
with many Ustasha theoreticians. Like many social and cultural questions,
private virtue and public morality were frequently linked to foreign habits,
a legacy of Croatian enslavement in the former Yugoslavia. In Antun Vrbić’s
view, pleasure-seeking and sexual license were uncivilized Balkan practices
that had no place in a movement that claimed sexual piety and asceticism as
defining characteristics of its warriors:
The Ustasha must not do anything that will satisfy his personal urges; the
Ustashas have a duty to sacrifice their pleasure for work, for labor, for the na-
tion, and for the state. Everyone should be a prototype of diligence; everyone
 “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”  309

must be self-sacrificing, good-spirited, honorable, and moral. Whoever sits

in cafés, salons, or bars does not belong in the Ustasha movement. Whoever
celebrates slavas, whoever mocks justice, whoever attends parties and gives
vent to his affinity for Balkan gypsy music and smashes plates, is not an
Ustasha and is an enemy of the Croatian people because this corrupts his
blood and his soul!50

Many ideologues were more explicit. They fervently believed that all the
immoral practices the regime was legislating against were remnants not only
of the former Yugoslav but also of the alien Serb and Jewish influence in Croa-
tia, which had aimed to destroy the Croatian identity through Balkanization.
For them, moral regeneration also meant national purification. Prostitution
was a prime example. When the regime opened the anti-Semitic exhibition at
the Strossmayer Pavilion in Zagreb in May 1942, the exhibits and the accom-
panying pamphlet placed a great deal of emphasis on the moral corruption
of ordinary working Croatian women at the hands of the Jews. Exhibition
documents related the rape of young Croatian women at the hands of Jew-
ish pimps and brothel madams. Prostitution, according to the pamphlet, was
a specialty of Jews, a form of “white slavery” to which all Croatian women
who toiled hard were vulnerable. “Cabaret artists, female artists, waitresses,
maids, slowly but surely became prostitutes. If a female singer wanted to earn
her wage, she had to satisfy the desires of all the guests. It was the same with
waitresses and female musicians in taverns, and it was rare to see old maids
serving in Jewish houses. The Jews exclusively took young women who served
for their entertainment or that of their sons.” When these young women
became pregnant, they were forced to have abortions, even as late as seven
months. In 1930s Zagreb, according to the pamphlet, four out of six brothels
were owned by Jews, with a similar situation in towns such as Osijek and Ze-
mun.51 The film accompanying the exhibition highlighted the way Croatian
women had been sold into sex slavery by the Jews. In one poignant sequence,
against a backdrop of mournful matinee film music and graphic pictures, the
narrator informed his audience how sharp-suited Jewish pimps had picked
up vulnerable Croatian girls with their heads full of foolish dreams, seduced
them, and then sold them into a sordid life of brothels and prostitution. They
had fallen for the blandishments of their Jewish captors because they felt
they had nothing else left to lose. But after being installed in the brothel, they
were paraded in front of the Jewish madam, her son, and the other owners of
the brothel, reduced to the status of commodities. “The owners of the public
house choose ‘new wares’ for their ‘business.’ For these girls there really is
no way back now!”52 News stories also emphasized the involvement of Jews
in the prostitution business. After the arrest and imprisonment of one pros-
 310  “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”

titute, Fanika Martinčić, accused of using her apartment as a brothel, the lo-
cal Ustasha newspaper Hrvatski glas identified her close business relationship
with local Jews, as well as the indifference of the Yugoslav authorities to the
complaints of Croatian citizens: the authorities had enabled her to continue
her immoral trade.53
Likewise, the law banning swearing identified it as a direct consequence
of “the [Serbs’] attempt to balkanize the Croats.” This included not just blas-
phemy and “shameful cursing” at mothers, fathers, and other family mem-
bers but also “pronounced vulgarities of every kind.” Worse, this vulgarity
had been embraced by urban and rural youth, “who are especially exposed
to this enemy manifestation.” In order to tear out this “shameful and dis-
gusting habit at its roots,” all public authorities were to “keep vigil” and en-
sure that every profaner was reported to the relevant police authorities, who
would sentence him to thirty days in jail and, in the event of a repeat offense,
to two months in prison. The law demanded that citizens report to the police
“all those who curse and utter vulgarities because only in this way will the
shameful habit of cursing be completely torn out at its roots from the Croa-
tian nation.”54
For the young radical intellectual Josip Frajtić, writing in Hrvatska gruda,
it was clear who was to blame. “The Serbs have left us an inheritance, a repul-
sive, disgusting, and completely undesired inheritance,” he complained. Not
one nation in the world exhibited “so many disgusting, shameful, and sin-
ful habits and curses” as the Serbs did. Soon, all “honorable and upstanding”
Croats would see the need to “shake off all those unwanted Serb inheritances”
and “with an embarrassed expression on his face will regret each swear word
that passes unconsciously” from his lips.55 In fact, most morally degenera-
tive vices ailing the Croatian nation could be ascribed to Serb influence:
“indolence, bribery, conspiracy, betrayal, arson, deception, [and] false accu-
sations” were all specialties of the Serbs, as were “Cincar voraciousness” and
“gypsy extortion.” Unfortunately, while the national revolution had buried
Serb tyranny, the effects of moral degeneracy persisted. In Yugoslavia, Frajtić
explained, promotion in politics or the professions had depended on vices
such as bribery and conspiracy, shrouding people in “filth and shame.” Con-
sequently, the homeland had been “irrevocably soiled” by its experience in
the “decaying, abortive, and gaudy” Yugoslavia, whose “repulsive sins” per-
sisted in the behavior of some Croats. However, as a result of the campaign of
moral regeneration and national purification launched by the Poglavnik and
his Ustashas—his “most faithful warriors” and the “best sons of the home-
land”—all this “evil and ugliness” would “disappear.” Most important, the
“undesired inheritance of evil, ugliness, dishonesty, and malice” would be re-
turned to those from whom it came, who would take their immorality with
 “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”  311

them as they disappeared from the nation permanently. “We don’t want it
and won’t have it.”56
The idea of purifying the nation of the contaminating presence of Serbs
was an important motif of Ustasha propaganda. If one concept appeared re-
peatedly in Ustasha discourse, it was the concept of cleanliness. Mijo Bzik,
for instance, compared the movement to a broom that would be “merciless,”
clearing away everything that “contaminates the healthy national body.” In
the Independent State of Croatia, there would be “clean rooms, clean halls,
clean steps, clean courtyards, towns, villages, and hamlets,” he vowed.57 When
in April 1942 a party of leading Ustasha officials, including foreign minis-
ter Mladen Lorković, Eugen Dido Kvaternik, and Jure Francetić, took a train
tour through Eastern Bosnia to see the areas recently ruthlessly “cleansed”
of their Serb population by Francetić’s Black Legion, what struck them, as
Lorković related in a subsequent radio address, was the cleanliness of the re-
gion. Now, there was no more of this “Balkan filth and dirt, a picture of com-
plete negligence and chaos.” Instead, the view from the train window offered
a pleasing picture of a “completely harmonious orderly land.” With all traces
of the Serb presence in the region removed, the railway stations were now
“hygienic and orderly,” the soldiers and armed militias standing in front of
them “offering a beautiful picture” of cleanliness and progress.58 For his part,
Reverend Ivo Guberina compared the campaign to remove the Serbs from
Croatian land in the form of mass murder and deportation to an operation
by a doctor to remove poison from the national body. The Serb minority, he
wrote in the intellectual journal Hrvatska smotra in 1942, had been given the
task in interwar Yugoslavia of “destroying the state and national organism of
Croatia.” Unsuitable for life and the role that providence had given them, they
instead chose to remain in the Croatian organism “without changing their
anti-Croatian tendencies one little bit.” The solution, he wrote, was to “surgi-
cally remove this poison from the organism. The Ustasha movement has been
given the task of carrying out this work and using the tools that serve every
doctor who is carrying out an operation. Where necessary, he makes the inci-
sion.” The poison would have to be removed from the organism if the organ-
ism were to survive; if it remained, it would end up destroying the organism
and taking it over.59
Inevitably, the regime also linked Jews to moral contamination and the
spreading of culturally degenerate values. With their domination of business,
the Jews had taken over cinema, using it as a powerful propaganda weapon.
“How much the morality of our youth suffered we don’t have to say,” Hrvatski
narod exclaimed in an editorial of May 1942. With their “repulsive acts,” in-
cluding the spreading of “immoral” literature and films and other materials,
Jews wanted to “destroy the virtuous reputation of the Croats.” The news­
 312  “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”

paper added that the Jews had also used their control of the publishing in-
dustry to spread pornography. No wonder that when the apartments of Jews
were raided following the confiscation of their property, the Ustasha police
did not find “one good book by our most respected writers.”60 Ustasha social
theorists also accused Jews of destroying traditional family life. Thus, Vjeko-
slav Blaškov argued that the family had been the first target of the Jews: “In
the destruction of society, the Jews first rained blows down on the family. The
family, as the founding cell in the social life of the nation, had to be materially
and morally destroyed. Working families had to be pushed to the edge of ma-
terial collapse, which led to their moral degeneracy, while families from the
middle classes had to be morally destroyed through free love, the easy avail-
ability of divorce, and the constant comforts of life.” Wherever Jews settled,
Aryan families immediately felt their toxic moral influence. Family, nation,
and all “natural social institutions,” Blaškov argued, could only freely develop
if all Jewish influence was destroyed. Consequently, no measure instigated
against the Jews could be deemed inhuman “if one bears in mind the unlim-
ited evil that Jewry has committed in the world.”61
Ustasha newspapers regularly stressed the moral dimensions of the state’s
campaign of “racial purity,” designating it the only means by which the moral
and racial worth of the national community could be protected. According
to an editorial in Sarajevski novi list, the regime should “prevent the malign
influence mixed breeds, which always come from less worthy mothers, might
have in public life.” This was all the more urgent, it argued, in the arrang-
ing of marriages. In order to protect the “purity of the race for all time” and
eradicate all “negative influences,” ordinary Croatians would have to listen
to the “voice of our blood” and ensure they only married other racially pure
Croatians; otherwise the nation would degenerate.62 The consequences of not
following this advice were spelled out by Ivan Topljak. Mixed marriages, he
argued, were a tragedy not only for those who entered into them but also
for the homeland, which “is the recipient of this degeneracy (especially mar-
riage with the Orthodox).” What was worse was that “very few children from
mixed marriages are brought up in a Croatian nationalist environment, ex-
cept where the grandparents or wet nurses are uncompromising nationalists.”
The nation-state that permitted such impure unions was surely condemned
to fatal moral as well as national decay.63

THE USTASHA WARRIOR AS SECULAR SAINT AND MARTYR

The founding myth of the Ustasha state was the suffering and martyrdom of
the nation in Yugoslavia. At the same time, this martyrdom was presented
as the mystical and essential source of the nation’s power. Without the sacri-
fice of martyrs, Ustasha theoreticians reasoned, an independent state would
 “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”  313

have been impossible: only through death was the nation reborn and regener-
ated. Writing on the occasion of the death of Jure Francetić, the priest Nikola
Šabić likened Croatia to “a splendid temple whose foundations are built on
the bones of martyred heroes and whose rocks are lubricated with a volcanic
mixture of the blood and sweat of the great multitudes.” Francetić, then, was
one of countless martyrs who had fallen dead for a free homeland: “Lifting
their eyes to Rakovica, they thought of the Uskoks, the pirates, the Ustashas;
they summoned Petar Svačić, Gubec, and Javor, the young heroes Soldin,
Mijo Babić, and [Milan] Luetić, and many more. There are whole litanies of
martyrs who offered up their lives so that their homeland could live.”64 Jure
Prpić, a member of the Ustasha University Center and a philosophy under-
graduate, was even more explicit. Blood, he argued, was the “eternal guaran-
tee of our prosperous future” and dead Ustasha warriors an “eternal legion
of the dead” who would accompany the living nation on its journey through
history. “We need more victims! We need more blood!” he concluded.65
For Ustasha ideologues, blood was the living expression of the warrior
values of the nation. Simply put, blood was life.66 They believed that the sacri-
fices of dead martyrs, especially their spilled blood, were passed to the nation
in perpetuity. In this sense, death was vital for the survival of the nation. Con-
sequently, Ustasha warriors were portrayed as being not only prepared but
eager to go to their deaths for the survival of Croatia. The Ustasha journalist
Aleksandar Žibrat argued that, from the earliest days, the Ustasha warrior
had been under sentence of death not only because his vow to the Poglavnik
committed him to uphold the “merciless” Ustasha laws or face execution but
also because Ustasha ideology sought from its warriors “pitiless” sacrifices.
“Death lay over the head of every Ustasha,” he wrote. “Death connected them
to their vows, and they scorned it.” This was attested to by the “fields of Usta-
sha graves,” the last resting place of those young warriors who had expired
on the battlefield with the words of the “sacred” Ustasha anthem on their
lips, going to their deaths “without a sigh, without words.” However, since
the movement’s ideologues also believed that Ustasha warriors continued to
live beyond the grave, marching with the victorious living legions would be
whole legions of dead soldiers who had lost their heads to “enemy hordes” or
who had died in battle “breast to breast with the bloodthirsty enemy” on the
altar of the homeland. “Before the living Ustashas march the cells of deceased
warriors, who proved their willingness for the homeland at the cost of their
lives,” he wrote. “These heroes are eternally with us, with their nation, with
their brothers.”67
Ustasha newspapers were regularly punctuated with stories of Ustasha
martyrs willingly going to their executions. After Mijo Babić was killed by
Serb rebels in Hercegovina in July 1941, in the midst of a campaign of mass
 314  “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”

murder against the local Serb population, while serving as a batallion leader
of the Ustasha Defense Force militia, his obituary held him up as the arche-
type of the self-sacrificing Ustasha martyr who “sets off to his death as if go-
ing to a wedding” and as a model for all other Ustasha warriors. Just as he had
heroically suffered under the rifle butts and gallows of King Aleksandar, now
the Ustasha would ignore the tears of his mother and the wail of his children:
“The Ustasha is not a rabbit, nor an old woman, nor a member of the more
polite classes. The Ustasha is a warrior who, in his battles, fights until the end.
One after the other he fights heroically in an Ustasha way; one after the other
he dies and gives his life in the foundation and building of the Independent
State of Croatia.” Moreover, Babić, in the view of one of the countless obitu-
aries published in his honor, had achieved his lifetime’s ambition of dying for
the homeland.68
The eulogization of the sacrifice of Ustasha martyrs began almost from
the moment the new state was established. On 19 April 1941, the newspaper
of the Bjeljina Ustasha movement, Hrvatski branik, was already announcing
with pride that “everywhere the Ustashas are in a hurry. They’re giving their
lives, their blood; they gamble, playing Russian roulette with their lives, all
the better and more quickly to secure our power so the blood of the Croat
national organism begins to flow through every part of national and histori-
cal Croatia.”69 Ustaša, meanwhile, stated that “the Ustashas have sacrificed
themselves, the Ustashas are sacrificing themselves, the Ustashas are eternal
victims. Decisively and militantly they leave in the first units, bravely and he-
roically they die.”70 Unlike many aspects of cultural life under the Ustasha re-
gime, the cult of self-sacrifice and heroic death never really changed, although
it did increase or decrease in intensity depending on the dominant discourse.
During the ideological and cultural “soft” line between 1942 and 1944, when
cultural values were being promoted, it was relatively less prominent. By 1944,
partly as a result of the ever more fragile predicament of the state and the
greater numbers of Ustasha militia members perishing in battle, and also as a
mobilizing device, the cult of martyrdom returned with a vengeance. A news-
paper report in Nova Hrvatska about the defense of Banja Luka in early 1944,
for instance, noted that local men who had volunteered with the Ustasha
army to defend the town displayed not just “cold-blooded and decisive” ruth-
lessness in dealing with the enemy, as was typical in such reports, but also ea-
gerness to die: “No one cared about himself; comrades sought no shelter, but
instead rushed at the enemy decisively and mercilessly as soon as they were
given the chance. They frequently heard the following cry: ‘What do I care
about my own head? I would eagerly sacrifice it for Croatia!’ or: ‘Poglavnik, I
give you my life, I eagerly die for Croatia!’ It is understandable that the rebels
couldn’t withstand a struggle with such decisive warriors.”71
 “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”  315

As far as the eulogies of many Ustasha martyrs were concerned, their

deaths were ordained not just by personal intention but also by divine provi-
dence. When Nikola Jurišić, a young GUS commissar, perished in 1942, one
of his friends, writing in Ustaša, recalled that after the Croatian state was
founded, this commander of an Ustasha Youth battalion told his comrades
that “for me there would be no greater joy than to consecrate my loyalty to
my Ustasha beliefs, to the homeland, and to the Poglavnik in blood.” Accord-
ing to his friend, “on hearing this, the men cried, and a time was assigned for
the desired happiness of our Nikola to be fulfilled.” On 9 April 1942, exactly
a year later, he died in ecstasy fighting the national enemy on the battlefield.
With Ustasha songs on his lips, “Nikola Jurišić left on his last journey, smil-
ing, clear, and decisive,” and fell heroically. As he lay dying, he uttered his
last words to a comrade: “My brother, my only wish was to perish for the Po-
glavnik and Croatia.”72 According to Ante Zelić, a former classmate, despite
his “physical weakness and the apathy of Croatian political life, Nikola, in his
determined militant demeanor, looked like a great martyr willing to sacrifice
his life.” For Zelić, Jurišić was even more fatal for his enemies dead than he
had been alive. All those who thought that with his death they could curtail
Croatian freedom should know that they would find steely resistance in “the
imperishable soul of the Ustasha Nikola Jurišić, a soul that will always live in
countless Croatian Ustasha units.”73 This fanatical zeal to die for the nation,
the regime insisted, applied not just to elite Ustasha warriors but also to the
cadets of the regular Croatian army. A group of cadets from the army train-
ing academy interviewed for the Croatian army journal Hrvatski domobran
in May 1942 stated that they never felt more alive than at the training acad-
emy. In the words of one young recruit, the academy was a “tower of pure
Croatdom” from which emerged soldiers who did not fear death: “We have
only one wish: that we don’t die at home, but that our blood is spilled for Cro-
atia and our bones lifted into the pantheon of Croatdom.”74
Along with his eagerness to die, the Ustasha martyr was distinguished by
his suffering at the hands of the nation’s enemies—Serb Chetniks and Parti-
sans. Both the popular press and the movement’s journals frequently relayed
horrifying tales of the suffering, torture, and humiliation Ustashas had en-
dured. Integral to these stories were the courage and fortitude of the Ustasha
martyr, who withstood the sadistic torture of Serb or communist hordes, re-
maining true to his Ustasha principles and dying eagerly for the Poglavnik. A
typical example of this was journalist Franjo Rubina’s account of the death of
the young Ustasha warrior Ivan Kukoranović, who was captured by a group
of maddened and barbaric Serb women at Petrovo Selo, stripped naked, and
roasted on a lamb spit. As he was mocked for his faith in the Ustasha ideol-
ogy, his last words were: “I am burning for Croatia and the Poglavnik!” At the
 316  “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”

end, his body had been reduced to blackened cinders.75 The young Legionary
Josip Križanac met a similarly grisly end. According to his biographer, the
journalist Vilim Peroš, he was captured by “bandits” in Bujgojno in July 1942
and also roasted on an open fire. Remaining defiant and brave until the end,
his last words were: “Long live the Independent State of Croatia! Long live
the Poglavnik! Long live Jure!”76 In many of these kinds of stories the inher-
ent moral purity and innocent national idealism of the tortured young war-
riors were contrasted with the degeneracy of their persecutors, distinguished
by their “miserable” human appearance, “distorted” expressions, and primi-
tive conduct, including cursing. Newspaper accounts as well as Ustasha pro-
pagandists particularly emphasized the moral degeneracy of the Partisans,
led by Jews, in whose ranks the poison of “decadence, wild music, and filth”
reigned. Emblematic of the Partisans’ degeneracy, ideologues like Julije
Makanec argued, was their recruiting of women. Denied their proper func-
tion as mothers and wives, and in many cases ex-prostitutes, female Partisans
were merciless, unstable women who had rejected their feminine instincts
and maternal role. In the numerous stories of young Ustasha warriors tor-
tured, mutilated, or roasted alive on open fires by Serb harridans and sadistic
female Partisans, their cruelty and immorality are contrasted with the purity
and chastity of the dying Ustasha warrior, burned to a crisp or mutilated,
but with his crucifix intact around his neck and love letters and photographs
from his beloved in his breast pocket.77
In addition, there were numerous stories of Ustashas who chose to com-
mit suicide either to save their comrades or to thwart the enemy. One of the
best known of these stories involved the death of a young Legionary com-
rade of Jure Francetić who blew himself up to save his commander, an act
that allegedly provoked the Black Legion commander to exclaim: “I have lost
a son!”78 Poems and stories were also written about Ustasha suicide bomb-
ing. One of the most explicit descriptions of the death of an Ustasha suicide
bomber came in the form of a poem published in the Sarajevo newspaper Os-
vit in October 1942. When the Muslim Ustasha corporal Mustafa Kavazović
perished during a battle with Serb Chetniks in October 1942, the newspa-
per reported that rather than fall into enemy hands, he decided, already
wounded, to throw one bomb at the enemy and blow himself up with the
other, with the enemy left to find only pieces of his dead body on the battle-
field. Some days later, Osvit proudly published a poem written in his honor by
his sister, Asija Čemerlić-Kavazović. In the poem, she lauded his selfless act
of suicide and wrote in lurid detail of his mutilated body and the “fountain-
head” of his blood that his comrades would follow.79
There were also literary explorations of the cult of the Ustasha suicide
bomber, mutilating his body as an act of ideological commitment and moral
 “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”  317

purity for the good of the nation and the movement. While many of these
stories were written by professional journalists, reporters, and young poets
and writers in the Ustasha Youth, members of Ustasha militias and the Usta-
sha army also penned pieces in this literary genre. Even if their efforts rarely
made it out of the pages of army handbooks and literary collections, this did
not matter: to a large extent they were instructive and educative anyway, de-
signed to provide a model of fanaticism and single-minded ruthlessness ac-
cording to which all members of the armed forces should live. A common
feature of these pieces was the regenerative role, as they saw it, that this vio-
lent and bloody act played in restoring the organic rhythms of Croatian soil
and nature. “His Final Duty,” for instance, was written by a young Ustasha
army soldier in honor of his comrade Captain B. Published in an Ustasha
army educational book in 1944, this piece, with its central theme of regen-
eration achieved through purgatorial and cleansing violence, makes obvi-
ous metaphorical allusions to the Ustasha regime’s revolution of blood, in the
process of being relaunched at the time of publication:
Using every last inch of his might, he shot the last bullet from his gun and
collapsed behind the tree. Already, the first bandits were approaching. He
took the hand grenade out of his rucksack, beat it on the tree, and pushed it
under his shirt. When the first bandits approached him, he pulled out the
trigger. None of the documentation that could help them would fall into
the hands of the bandits. Ustasha Captain B. had performed his last duty.
The moon again hid behind the clouds. Everywhere there was peace and
tranquility, only the tall silvery black spruces billowing high in the air.80

At the same time, these stories—both literary and journalistic—delib-

erately evoked biblical stories of martyrdom and served to elevate Ustasha
warriors to the status of secular saints, dying in a variety of gruesome and
torturous ways for their faith and exulting in their suffering. Frequently, pro-
pagandists made an explicit rather than an implicit link between the sorrows
of Ustasha warriors and Catholic saints; on occasion, however, Ustasha mar-
tyrs were even compared to Christ, something that provoked considerable
unease within some sections of the regime bureaucracy. The commemoration
of Stipe Javor, one of the most revered of the movement’s martyrs in the late
1930s, illustrated the tensions underpinning the sacralization of politics and
the cultural politics of commemoration in the Independent State of Croatia.
Javor, the founder of the first Ustasha cell among working-class nationalist
youths, was, like many other of the movement’s martyrs, eulogized by Usta-
sha writers in semimystical language as a “believer and martyr, for whom
fate had ordained this hard Golgotha.”81 Sometimes Javor’s stoic behavior was
even compared to Christ’s. According to a university professor writing in
 318  “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”

Ustaša on the anniversary of his death in February 1942, Javor had been able
to withstand the beatings he endured in prison only because, like Christ, he
was a fanatic: “His bones were broken, his flesh was torn off, his blood cor-
roded, his lips fell silent, and his heart cried out: ‘Freedom to the nation, to
the Croatian nation.’” The spilled blood of Javor was “sacred like a holy relic,”
and his body was bathed in an “eternal light” that presaged that he was “ap-
proaching holiness.” Javor, like other Ustasha martyrs, he concluded, would
enter the pantheon, on which would be erected a monument with the words:
“Here rest the best and greatest sons of the Croatian nation, its martyrs, who
with their heroism contributed to the resurrection of Croatia.”82
Popular poetry also picked up the image of the Ustasha warrior as self-
sacrificing martyr. Stjepko Trontl’s iconic “An Ustasha Grave” emphasized
the Ustasha warrior’s love for the homeland, his courage, and his destiny of
suffering and death: “He was with those who did not lose faith in God or jus-
tice.” A self-sacrificing warrior, when he dies he still thinks of others: “—the
only thought. / ‘Do not cry for me, mother!’ / thus the son wrote.” The final
stanza informs us that although he is dead, “He is with us!” In the poem, the
journey of birth, struggle, death, and resurrection underlines the tortured
life of the Ustasha warrior. It is nothing exceptional: it is merely his fate.83
Some poems, reflecting the tastes and prejudices of regime propagandists,
also depicted the Ustasha warrior not just as a contemporary martyr but as a
Christlike figure suffering on the cross for Croatia’s resurrection. In another
of his poems, Trontl describes how “bloody seeds were sown in the dark /
and on our path thorns sprang up” during the “barren” period of Yugosla-
via when “the oppressors hanged our Ustashas under the gallows.” But in the
mist a new dawn is emerging: “It was the beat of your heart that streamed
through the land / it reverberated in breasts / and sometimes of our world /
and with those who scattered their oppressors like chaff in the storm of war
/ you raised up the tormented mother and child of the crucified martyr / and
cut down the Ustasha son from the cross.”84
When Stanislav Polonijo, an Ustasha journalist and history undergradu-
ate, attempted to follow this line of thought through to its logical conclusion,
he was sternly admonished. In an Ustaša editorial to mark the anniversary of
Javor’s death in February 1942, he contended that Javor actually was Christ.
For Polonijo, the Ustasha ideology represented “sacrifice and suffering, de-
struction and endurance.” In this scenario, the Ustashas were faithful pil-
grims “coming with our crosses to the Croatian Golgotha” and on Good
Friday “gazing at the first reflection of our resurrection.” Logically, there-
fore, Javor—due to his sacrifices for the nation and the fact he had suffered
like “crucified Christ” and was an “apostle of revolution,” able to communi-
cate with the living after his death—should surely be considered the “Usta-
 “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”  319

sha Christ.”85 The portrayal of Javor as a contemporary Christ did not go

unnoticed by officials in the regime and led to some disquiet, attracting the
attention of investigators from the journalistic section of the Ustasha Super-
visory Service. Polonijo might be a loyal member of the Ustasha student or-
ganization, a tireless journalist, and the brother of the Ustasha martyr Ante
Polonijo, but in the opinion of one investigator, in his weekly media review,
his characterization of Javor was in “extremely bad taste.” Apparently, poets
could get away with such hyperbole; journalists could not.86
Despite these reservations, the commemoration of the suffering of Usta-
sha martyrs both in 1930s Yugoslavia and at the hands of communist “ban-
dits” and Serb nationalist Chetniks after 1941 was used by the regime in an
attempt to mobilize popular opinion and provide ideological legitimation for
its campaign of mass murder and deportation. Funerals of fallen Ustashas
were often extravagant ceremonies of collective mourning and ritual symbol-
ism. When Josip Gesler, a member of the Poglavnik Bodyguard, fell in battle
against Serb rebels in Bosnia in July 1941, his body was paraded on flower-
strewn trains through the villages of Bosnia before reaching its final resting
place in his native village. His obituary in Ustaša noted that Gesler’s death
had provoked weeping throughout Bosanska Krajina, especially among his
young comrades. His obituary and the funeral that preceded it held up his vi-
olent death as an illustrative example to both Ustasha activists and ordinary
people not just of Gesler’s courage but also of the perfidy of the Serb rebels
who had killed him and, by extension, the Serb population.87 The funeral cer-
emony for Mijo Babić was even more elaborate and infused with mourning
and calls for revenge. Prior to his interment at Mirogoj, his body was taken
on a tour of Bosnia and Hercegovina, a requiem held in his honor at Sara-
jevo’s Catholic cathedral. The funeral cortege was accompanied by a phalanx
of Ustasha youth, and the service was conducted by the priest Božidar Brale,
a sworn member of both the movement and the Black Legion. He called for
absolution for the soul of Babić and for our “dear Mijo” to stay with them for-
ever. At this point, according to newspaper accounts, many Ustashas broke
down in tears since only eight days previously he had worshipped at this ca-
thedral, strong and healthy. On its journey through Bosnia, his funeral cor-
tege stopped in Banja Luka so local people could pay homage to this Ustasha
warrior who had died at the “criminal hands” of the “sworn enemies” of the
Croatian nation while carrying out his “sacred duty”: protecting his brothers
in Hercegovina threatened by Serb bandits. At midnight on the evening of 5
July the remains of Babić arrived by car in Banja Luka, where, after being re-
ceived by dignitaries from the local Ustasha movement, his coffin was greeted
by thousands of patriotic Banja Lukans. As one local newspaper reported: “It
was touching to see in the black of the night frail gray-haired old people with
 320  “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”

their children and grandchildren. Young and old, men and women, every-
one had come in the blindness of the night to welcome the Ustasha hero and
with tears in their eyes to pay their last respects and wish him eternal rest. All
those present were deeply affected by the tragic turn of events and, trembling,
awaited the arrival of the automobile, which was delayed for two hours.” Af-
ter the automobile arrived, “young Ustashas paid their respects to the fallen
hero and model with the raising of a thousand arms in a sign of welcome to
the body of the hero.”88
After this the body of Babić, accompanied by Jure Francetić, was taken
to the Catholic cathedral for a special candle-lit ceremony. Torches were
lit across the city, and “silent prayers emanated from many lips in front of
the throne of the Almighty for the salvation of soul of the hero Mijo Babić.”
Speeches were given by the city’s mayor, songs were sung, a prayer was read
by Cardinal Nikola Bilogrivić, and chants of “Long live Mijo Babić!” filled the
air. After two hours the “sad ceremony” was finished, and the cortege moved
out of the city in the night, accompanied by “the warm prayers of all those
present” and a “sacred vow” from local youth that Mijo Babić, “the model-
warrior and hero,” would be avenged: “Already two hours have passed, but
all remain as if frozen in their place. There is lively commentary on the lat-
est events. One can hear the gnashing of teeth [and see] the glow in the eye of
many Croats who express their readiness to take Mijo Babić’s place and, like
him, heroically fight against the sworn enemy. There have been enough vic-
tims, there has been enough consideration, there has been enough destruc-
tion. The shed blood of Croatian warriors cries out for revenge. Out of all
the fallen heroes, the most difficult has been the sacrifice of our unforgot-
ten hero, the commander and unit leader of the Poglavnik’s Ustasha Battal-
ion—Mijo Babić.”89 Finally, after a funeral in Zagreb, the coffin was placed on
a train, traveling to its final resting place in the national martyrs’ cemetery
at Mirogoj. As the body was lowered into the ground, the official report in
Hrvatski narod noted, the ten thousand Ustashas present were visibly moved
at the scene: “The twitching muscles on the faces of the Ustashas who were
present at this sad act, their warm and sad gaze into the distance, and their
thunderous slogan ‘Glory to him!’ were the words of farewell from comrades,
warriors, and the best of their generation.”90
The funeral of Babić’s close comrade Antun Pogorelec, who had fallen in
battle alongside him, was similarly instrumentalized by Ustasha officials, ac-
tivists, and propagandists to mobilize vengeful sentiments against the Serb
population. Local newspapers reported on the crowds of people who had
lined up outside the house of the Ustasha center leader in Banja Luka, hop-
ing to catch a glimpse of the corpse of the slain warrior. In his funeral oration
 “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”  321

for Pogorelec, Viktor Gutić used the dead Ustasha’s open coffin to admon-
ish those Croatians who had been “weak” and shown too much tolerance
toward the Serbs: “Looking at the coffin of the horribly murdered Ustasha
warrior, the Ustasha leader most animatedly showed how the Serbs did not
deserve any consideration because they belonged to a criminal tribe that in
every way wanted to inflict all the more blows on the Croatian nation even
when the Croats were considerate and tolerant toward them.” For twenty-two
years, he said, the Croats had been tortured by the Serbs but had turned the
other cheek. This would come to an end now since the Serbs were a tribe in-
capable of consideration and instead lay in wait to ambush and “horribly kill
Croats” and “torture and murder our women and children.” Addressing the
slain Pogorelec directly, Gutić promised him: “Your blood will be avenged!”91
Singling out a group of Pogorelec’s young death-squad comrades among the
mourners, he asked rhetorically:
Ask these young Ustashas who for two days have paid homage to their fallen
role models if they think of mercy or if their young souls long for revenge.
Have you seen the flame in their eye when they took part in prayers for the
salvation of the souls of Ustasha heroes who as pioneers first trod the thorny
path to fight for the freedom and honor of the Croatian nation? They are
struggling and conquering. Instead of—tired and exhausted—resting on
their laurels, they are always the first to leave the peace of their home and
go to help their persecuted brothers. Their noble souls could not bear to
remain deaf to the screams of the Hercegovinan Croats who groaned under
the violence of the furious Chetniks and therefore set out on a great journey
from which some of them returned with pierced breasts, extinguished eyes,
and exhausted hands. . . . Those who remain will continue bringing death
and destruction to the bandits all the while they have not destroyed them or
do not end up among their comrades with pierced breasts.92

In its editorial, Hrvatska krajina came to a similar conclusion: “Do those

who murdered the Ustasha hero Mijo Babić deserve consideration? Do those
among whose numbers were found the murderers of Antun Pogorelec and
Ustasha heroes have the right to consideration?” No, the paper concluded,
there could be no mercy for those who, “like bandits, flee in packs to the val-
leys and ambush Ustasha heroes in the carrying out of their sacred Ustasha
duty.” On the contrary, the “posthumous remains” of Pogorelec should serve
as “a memento for the fainthearted who tried to defend distant relatives or
conationals, by whose hands Mijo Babić and Antun Pogorelec fell.” This was
how the majority of ordinary Croatians felt; it was also the opinion of those
who “in recent years of suffering and misery have felt all the evil and fury of
 322  “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”

the Serbian savagery.” Rather than show mercy, the Ustasha regime should
“quickly and decisively crush this snake because otherwise it will perfidiously
bite and inject its filthy poison.”93
Along with his commander, Mijo Babić, Pogorelec was celebrated in
the Ustasha press as a contemporary saint. Babić and Pogorelec were, in the
words of Hrvatski radio list, martyrs whose “two wreaths of thorns crowned
the Independent State of Croatia.” Surrounded by photographs of their fu-
neral processions and burial ceremonies at Mirogoj, grieving relatives, and
hard-bitten but heartbroken Ustasha comrades, the two central portraits of
Babić and Pogorelec in their Ustasha uniforms were framed by borders of
thorns.94 In later years, on the anniversaries of their deaths, the two were cel-
ebrated as contemporary Spartan warriors who had died together, sacrificing
their lives for each other and together watching over the Croatian nation in
the afterlife. United in death as they had been in life, like Jesus Christ, they
had trodden the path to martyrdom.95

REGENERATIVE VIOLENCE AND NATIONAL PURIFICATION

Purification was meant in more than one way. As well as keeping himself per-
sonally virtuous, the Ustasha warrior could also purify and cleanse his soul
through regenerative violence. At a parade for new Ustasha army recruits in
June 1941, celebrating the completion of their training, Colonel Slavko Kvater-
nik told them that while the state had many enemies, “not just Jews and other
foreigners” but also all those who engaged in profiteering or smuggling, the
life of the Ustasha soldier should be above reproach. He should be disciplined
and nationally conscious and should uphold and be a symbol of the honor, or-
der, and industry of the Croatian state. He informed the new recruits that “if
it is necessary, I will go over the barricades with you. I am prepared to wade
up to my knees in blood if it is necessary for the salvation of the Homeland.”
The clear inference was that they should be prepared to do the same.96 As
well as commemorating warriors’ self-sacrificing conduct and praising their
sexual chastity and moral purity, the movement’s ideologues and journals
also valorized their righteous violence and mercilessness, portraying their in-
duction into the movement as a rite of passage that required them to cleanse
their souls not only of all impure thoughts but of all sentimentality and ten-
derness too. Ustasha writers and propaganda officials readily identified the
movement’s militia members with the sixteenth-century blood-soaked brig-
ands the Uskoks of Senj, whose knives had represented terror for the ene-
mies of Croatia. Vjekoslav Šišul declared Senj to be a “hornet’s nest of Ustasha
ideology.”97 The regime celebrated the Uskoks’ legacy as feared pirates and
brigands, whose blood, in the words of Žarko Brzić, writing in the Ustasha
almanac of 1942, “first christened the sea and merged with them in eternity”
 “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”  323

and whose sacrifices were “testament that the whole of our history would be
an unceasing sea of blood and victims.” Yet while Brzić admired the Uskoks’
fortitude in overcoming the chains and torture of the occupying forces, he—
and by extension the regime—also drew inspiration from their bloodthirsti-
ness and barbarism and from the fact that “fearlessness was their jugular vein
and blood their daily bread.” For Brzić, through its warriors, the Ustasha re-
gime was reviving the blood-soaked traditions of the glorious Uskok past.
This was an intrinsically moral kind of brutality, a “vision of the past” res-
urrected for the future. “We are again proud that we glorify this barbarism
that knew how to protect the sanctity of the home and the hearth, that was
not afraid of death when it was a question of the greatest ideals and the most
sacred of things,” he wrote. “We will again be barbarians of the new age, bar-
barians who limitlessly love, save, and protect what is ours. Pirates, warriors,
destroyers, witnesses of our toughness and rebellious vitality, the mission of
our forefathers. We descend to the depths at the bottom of the sea, onto the
seaweed and the algae, which, like a mother lovingly caring for her offspring,
kisses and conceals, caresses and protects the torsos and bloody wounded
corpses of brigands.”98
According to propagandists, as well as continuing the barbaric traditions
of the Uskoks, the mercilessness and recourse to purifying violence of Ustasha
warriors were a result of the depredations of Croatia’s national enemies: the
Ustasha was driven by a desire to avenge the sufferings of his people. His was
a morally regenerative violence, through which the Croatian nation would be
cleansed of foreign savages and the nation reborn. Aleksandar Žibrat, for in-
stance, portrayed the ruthless violence of the Ustashas as a moral campaign
to liberate suffering Croatian peasants from bestial Serb bandits engaged in
“destruction, plunder, and murder” against defenseless citizens. In his vision,
ordinary citizens wailed to Ustasha warriors for assistance as Serb Chetniks
danced a “bloody kolo” around the corpses of their victims. The Ustashas,
arriving as liberators, “prowl the woods like lions, exterminating the ban-
dits.” Žibrat left his readers in no doubt as to the bloodiness of the battle, evi-
dence that the Ustasha warrior was the “most terrible avenger.” In particular,
Žibrat singled out the fanaticism of the Black Legion, portraying it as a force
of nature: “Individual legions have achieved immortal glory in the most ter-
rible conditions. In its poetry, the nation celebrates Francetić’s Black Legion.
Battle after battle rises, victory after victory. The unconquerable Kozara falls
under the Ustasha storm. Romanija is already cleansed, and only seven brave
Domobrans and Ustashas were needed to take Fruška Gora and purify it all,
without any losses on their side.”99
Of all the Ustasha militias and death squads, the Black Legion was the
one most connected with the eulogization of regenerative violence, carrying
 324  “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”

with it an aura of death and fanaticism. One Legionary journalist described it

as being “like a black ghost on winter snow,” marching “decisively, heroically,
disdaining death and all its enemies who began to throw away their rifles and
retreat into the forest in the hope that this would save them from the annihi-
lation of the Ustashas.”100 As a death squad used to crush Serb-led revolts in
Eastern Bosnia, gaining a reputation for its ruthless conduct toward the Serb
communities living in the region, especially between 1941 and early 1942, the
Black Legion was glorified by Ustasha writers as a unit embodying the best
principles of self-sacrificing martyrdom, regenerative violence, and merci-
less youth. The journalist Ivo Balentović, the Legion’s chronicler and a close
friend of Francetić, christened the Legion a “unit of invincible youth.” He
spent months living with the Legionaries, witnessing their brutal “cleansing”
operations against Serb communities. Balentović’s account, hugely popular
at the time, eulogized their fanaticism and violence, shot through with the
imagery of death and annihilation. Writing of the Legion’s violent campaign
in the Romanija Mountains and other places in Bosnia, he recalled “bloody
Romanija. Foča in flames, in blood.”101 He also wrote graphic descriptions of
the bodies of dead Legionaries. In a report about the death of one young Le-
gionary following a “cleansing” expedition in Foča, published in Spremnost
in February 1942, he wrote: “Edhem is dead. On the snow, red carnations have
bloomed. They are red carnations of his blood. Edhem has been killed. He
is dead. In an image of sorrow I see how his shining eyes glitter with death.
Dead eyes. A dead man. A dead comrade.” Later, eating warm soup with Ed-
hem’s comrades after another fierce battle, his thoughts again return to his
dead comrade and his final resting place: “I remember the dead eyes of my
Edhem. He lies somewhere in an icy grave. Somewhere in Foča. I am far away
from him. These are the valleys of Ozren. I am traveling to Brčko. And there
I will have a piece of his heart. I am going there. Icy graves. Snowy graves.”102
His colleague Sulejman Sakić, another Legionary journalist, described how
the young Legionaries left Sarajevo with their “fierce” commander, singing
songs of death to the melodies of sevdalinkas and chanting the motto “Vic-
tory or death!” before liberating villagers in Hercegovina with their “bloody
knives and bombs.” Due to the superhuman efforts of the Legionaries, the
bandits had “found their graves in the bare Hercegovinan Mountains and the
cold River Neretva.”103
The Legion, in addition to its main fighting unit, also contained a num-
ber of other divisions. One of these was a motorcycle division; another was
a railroad division, whose bloody actions against resistance groups and the
communities that supported them were also idealized by journalists. In a
feature about the Legion’s railroad division published in Hrvatski narod
in March 1943, the young militia members the journalist had encountered
 “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”  325

were described as an “impenetrable phalanx of Ustashas storming to cleanse

Croatia of enemies,” heroes “with fierce eyes who don’t fear death,” wearing
helmets, the name of the Poglavnik on their lips and love for Ustasha Croatia
in their hearts. United in battle and everywhere singing “thunderous” songs
as they traveled around the country, the young soldiers were armed with
guns, bombs, and hand grenades. They told the journalist of battles where
the ground had been covered with the corpses of dead Partisan bandits,
half-naked animals who lived in the woods. The young warriors spoke of
“cleansing their souls” and “becoming great” in the midst of these battles of
destruction, annihilating the enemy as grenades “sang songs of death.”104
This discourse was not limited to the Black Legion: the violent exploits of
other militias and death squads were similarly glorified. Dragutin Došen, the
official chronicler of the Poglavnik Bodyguard and a war reporter, described
one battle in the Croatian Zagorje in 1944 between members of the militia, on
holiday there, and “bandits from the woods,” who attacked them in a context
in which they assumed the militia men would be defenseless. Došen lovingly
described the annihilation meted out to the Partisans. They were, he wrote,
executed like “slaughterhouse strays” as guns “yelped” above their heads:
The streets began to run with blood; every ten meters there lay another
corpse of a barefoot naked Partisan. The hours passed by, and already by
five o’clock on the evening of the sixth and seventh of July, the streets of the
town were dominated by an ever more bloody and difficult battle. Dawn be-
gan to break. The streets of the town left a terrible sight. There were exploded
heads and the half-naked bodies of misled wretches covered in blood. All
their efforts remained in vain. Everyone who came into the town became
booty for Ustasha muscles and Ustasha guns, and on the wires and in the
shining cornfields around the town lay nearly two hundred other wretches.
who, without success, had sacrificed their lives and become victims and food
for Ustasha arms, leaving their blood and bodies as a pledge of the Croatian
reality against which they had fought so hard.105

Bloody, regenerative violence was not only the prerogative of journalist

and writers. It also reflected the mindset of some soldiers and commanders.
The Black Legion commander Francetić frequently made public pronounce-
ments that left citizens in no doubt regarding the violent methods the Le-
gion would use against the state’s enemies. In an interview published in the
newspaper Nova Hrvatska in December 1941, shortly before the operation in
the Romanija Mountains, he warned that those Serb villagers who refused
to give up their arms or who supported the “bandits” would suffer the con-
sequences. The Legionaries had enough arms and “plenty of decisiveness”
and would show little sentimentality to those who harmed the Croatian peo-
 326  “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”

ple: if everything had to be destroyed in order to save the nation, then this is
what the Ustashas would do. Those who had not yet experienced the touch
of “firm Ustasha hands” should be under no illusions about the punishment
that awaited them: “Our belief in the Poglavnik, our love for him and the
Croatian nation, has brought us to the fanatical decision to scorn every dif-
ficulty, including our own lives, for the realization of the final solution.”106 In
a subsequent interview on the eve of another of the Legion’s most infamous
operations, the assault against the local Serb population of the Kozara Moun-
tains, accompanied by German troops, which culminated in the execution of
thousands of Serb men and the incarceration of thousands more women and
children, Francetić told Osvit that his Legionaries were preparing their final
death blows against “the Jewish-communist hydra that has dug its claws into
the eastern region of Croatian Bosnia.” Since the propaganda of the commu-
nists had succeeded in misleading a majority of the local Serb population into
committing “criminal acts against the state,” the “most drastic means” would
have to be employed against them.107 His warning was reiterated in dramatic
fashion by the young poet Ismet Zunić, an ardent propagandist for the re-
gime and an admirer of Francetić. In his article about the Legion published
in Ustaša mladež in April 1942, he exhilarated in the coming annihilation,
which he likened to a day of judgment for the offenders’ former misdeeds:
Good Friday, he wrote, had dawned for Serbs, Jew-Masons, and communists,
and the Legion would ensure that their “repulsive hateful foreignness” was
“destroyed, suffocated, and killed.” This “nest of dragons of the purest Croat
blood, gathered under the arrogant Ustasha banner whose head flag-bearer is
the dragon of dragons, Jure Francetić” would ensure that the “twelfth hour of
your filthy life has come.” The Legion, he wrote, was preparing a “requiem”
for them, with the “raging whirring of Ustasha bullets” their funeral music
and the dust from hand grenades their graves.108
Such comments from a commander and from a propagandist for an elite
death squad might be expected, given the extreme nature of their outlook.
However, ordinary young soldiers shared similarly apocalyptic attitudes. As
Ivan Marković, a young army marksman writing in Hrvatski vojnik, the Cro-
atian army journal, in April 1945, reminded his comrades: “A nation born in
blood, a nation that has grown and died in blood, a nation that has created
the bloodiest but also the most celebrated history in Europe,” could maintain
its geopolitical position. In an atmosphere of impending collapse, he could
only see a bloody and vicious apocalypse for the enemy. The “cruel ravines
of the mountains of Bosnia-Hercegovina, the light beaches of our Adriatic,
the rich and fruitful rolling valleys of Slavonia and Srijem, the green hills of
Zagorje, as well as the hard and barren naked peaks of Lika,” were “warmed
 “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”  327

with the blood of Croatian heroes and warriors” and could only be defended
with such.109
When Marković’s comments were published, the state was one month
away from extinction, with most of it already in communist hands and the
hierarchy of the regime—to the extent to which it still existed—preparing for
flight while its soldiers and warriors made one last heroic stand. Nonethe-
less, the embrace of purgatorial violence as a kind of collective cleansing of
the soul was integral to both the Ustasha regime’s discourse and its outlook
throughout its rule. Expressed not just by individual military commanders,
soldiers, or journalists but by the regime’s propaganda outlets too, this as-
pect of cultural and ideological politics never essentially changed. Thus in
August 1941, after an armed attack by communist insurgents that had left
several members of the Ustasha student guard wounded, Ustasha journalists
gave full expression to their belief in the nationally regenerative force of vio-
lence, linking notions of racial and intellectual degeneration to the need for
a bloody purification. As the newspaper Hrvatski branik in Bjijelina pointed
out in its editorial of August 1941:
We will protect [the nation] from all those who have remained in our
home as Balkan trash, as the most terrible reminder of our twenty years of
enslavement. We will protect it from all those who want to return it to the
old days of Great Serb tyranny, we will protect it from all those who seek
the resolution of our bloody events in communism. From all these elements
we will protect our holy freedom; from all these elements we will cleanse
Croatia. We have begun a life-and-death struggle against them, those who
persecuted and cursed us, those who killed us, but we prevailed, and we will
suffocate their rebellion in blood. In blood we will drown their destruction.
We never feared blood when it was necessary to give it, so we won’t be afraid
when we have to take it from them. Blood for blood!110

“THE CULT OF THE DEAD IS THE CULT OF THE LIVING!”

In Ustasha Croatia, the ideals of sacrifice and death culminated in a number
of public days of mourning and commemoration. These included a Day for
the Remembrance of Dead Croatian Students to commemorate those nation-
alist students who had perished in the struggle for a Croatian state and a Day
for the Remembrance of the Martyrs of Senj to remember the ten Crusader
youths shot dead by Yugoslav gendarmes in 1937. Unsurprisingly for a move-
ment that saw itself as the incarnation of a reborn Croatian warrior nation, the
Ustasha regime also introduced days of mourning to mark the sacrifice and
heroism of Croatian soldiers during the First World War. Wherever possible
 328  “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”

this was linked to an anti-Yugoslav and, therefore, Croatian nationalist con-

sciousness on the part of its martyrs. One example of this was the annual cer-
emony to honor those Croatian soldiers who had refused to join the Yugoslav
Legion in 1916 as prisoners of war in Russia. Their grisly fate—after troops led
by Captain Milorad Majstorović rebelled, they were executed and their bod-
ies thrown into the icy waters of the Odessa Sea—made them ideal Ustasha
martyrs, and three of them, Ivan Iveković, Gjuro Dumbrović, and Josip Pol-
jak, were especially honored.111 Yet soldiers did not necessarily have to die to
become martyr-saints. The uprising of Croatian soldiers in Jelačić Square on
5 December 1918, when a unit of soldiers rose up against the declaration of a
Yugoslav state, became one of the most sacrosanct dates in the Ustasha calen-
dar. In the 1920s, radical nationalist youth groups had sometimes portrayed
the rebellious soldiers as saviors, their bodies pierced by bullets and bayo-
nets. Their blood had awoken Croatians to the danger of Yugoslavism and
saved the “holy and uncorrupted name of Croatia.”112 For Mijo Bzik, the up-
rising amounted to the first manifestation of the Ustasha struggle, a rejection
of those “Serboslavs, criminals, traitors and imbeciles” who had consigned
Croatia to Serb slavery after thirty-one days of national freedom following
the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The Jelačić Square uprising, he
wrote, was both “the most heroic demonstration of Croatian resistance” to “a
shameful act” and the “first dawn of the Ustasha ideology,” which “allowed
the drunk to sober up and the blind to see.” Tragically, this proto-Ustasha
uprising had been “drowned in blood” by the Serbs, with fourteen Croatian
graves opening “the way to a rosary of Ustasha martyrs through the next
twenty-two years” and marking the path to “new calvaries, new hells, new
prisons, new terrible blood sacrifices, and new rosaries of Croatian martyrs,”
with the heaviest crosses carried “boldly and patiently” by Ustasha martyrs.113
Despite such a romantic interpretation, in reality, there appears to have been
scant popular support for the uprising and far less bloodshed than national-
ist accounts alleged. According to Hrvatska rijeć, reporting on 6 December,
many of the rebels had been drunk at the time of the insurgency; only thir-
teen people had died, most of them soldiers. Furthermore, the rebellion had
been crushed not by the Serb army but by Croatian naval and police units or-
dered into action by the Yugoslav National Council in Zagreb. The attempted
putsch had also enjoyed little popular support, and on 5 December thousands
of Croatians—led by high school and university students—had come onto
the capital’s streets and other cities to demonstrate their support for the new
Yugoslav state. Far from being self-sacrificing martyrs, Hrvatska rijeć added,
a number of the insurrectionary soldiers had been contrite afterward, apolo-
gizing to the National Council and receiving lenient sentences in return.114
Despite this unpromising pedigree, the regime presented the uprising in
 “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”  329

a typically mystical fashion, as befitted an event it aspired to incorporate into

the pantheon of Croatian suffering. It was a day on which, Franjo Trbuha
wrote in Ustaša in December 1941, the nation had been “baptized in blood,”
Jelačić Square strewn with the bodies of dead Croatian sons. As the terrible
introduction to twenty years of struggle with the “bloody” Serb dynasty, he
argued, this day could not be forgotten, nor could the suffering and humilia-
tion of 5 December.115 The regime declared 5 December a holiday in honor of
the sacrifices of the renegade Croatian soldiers. It named an elite legion for
them and organized a reception with the Poglavnik for surviving veterans
of the unit. For their part, the veterans established a committee of enquiry
to honor the Ustasha revolution and to reveal the “truth” about the uprising.
The regime also dealt with the problematic aspects of the rebellion in a pre-
dictable fashion: although there had been at least one Jewish member of the
unit, Artur Weintraub, the regime emphasiszed the role “Masonic and Jew-
ish cliques” had played in aiding the repression of the uprising. In so doing
they “ordained the slavery of Croatia, placing it in the hands of the bloody
Karadjordjevic dynasty.” After reviewing the matter, the committee came to
similar conclusions, establishing that the small number of Croatians involved
in crushing the rebellion had been aided by Jews such as Josip Golder and
Leopold Deutsch, from whose apartment windows the national guard had
shot at and killed insurrectionaries and citizens. Similarly, Jelisaveta Horvat,
the president of the Organization of Croatian Women, explained that the ap-
parently popular opposition to the uprising was, in fact, nothing of the kind.
Rather, the masses had been manipulated by “foreign elements” and a small
number of “insane” Croats who persuaded people to come onto the streets in
support of the new state.116
On the occasion of the first commemoration of the uprising, on 5 Decem-
ber 1941, in Tomislav Square, the Poglavnik spoke of the “revolutionaries’”
Croatian blood and formally inducted them into the military ranks of the
movement. In his speech, Ivan Perečić, the commander of the unit named
in their honor, called the actions of the revolutionaries the first act of resis-
tance by the Croatian nation to the violence of the Serbs. On 5 December,
the “blood of noble victims was spilled, and this once more wetted the Cro-
atian earth and fed the tree of Croatian ideology and fortified it.”117 It was
also on the first commemoration that the bones of the “martyr Domobrans”
were transferred, in black coffins with inscriptions, to the national cemetery
of Mirogoj and consecrated in the presence not only of members of the unit
created in their honor and young members of the Ustasha training school
but also of their grieving surviving relatives. Among the latter was Lucija
Gasparović, the mother of twenty-one-year-old Marko Gasparović. After a
funeral requiem and solemn march to Mirogoj, the coffins were lowered into
 330  “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”

their final resting place as a choir sang mournful funereal songs and dignitar-
ies paid their last respects to the deceased soldiers. A short speech was given
by Jelisaveta Horvat, whose organization had paid for the reburial. This was
followed by a speech from a veteran who addressed his dead comrades di-
rectly, telling them their “bones can now rest in this free Croatian soil and sit
with the bones of your comrades who followed your example,” as the “eter-
nal yearning” for a liberated Croatian state had been realized. They deserved
their place in the pantheon of Ustasha martyrs as “Ustasha martyrs of fifth of
December” who were “eternally with us!”118
The reference to the eternal existence of the Ustasha martyr whose soul
continued to live beyond the grave highlighted a belief central to the two
most important days of mourning in the state: the Day of the Dead and the
Day of the Croatian Martyr. The Day of the Dead, which was observed each
year on 1 November, honored all those who had sacrificed their lives for the
Ustasha movement, both before and after April 1941. The Day of the Dead was
not an Ustasha invention: this is the traditional Catholic All Soul’s Day, on
which the living commemorate and communicate with the dead. However,
the Ustasha regime appropriated it, fashioning it into a synthetic symbol of its
sacralized worldview, combining Catholic ritual with modern fascist politics.
The tone for the day was set by the front cover of the commemorative issue
of Ustaša marking the first Day of the Dead in November 1941. Below a pho-
tograph of a freshly dug Ustasha martyr’s grave was the slogan: “On the Day
of the Dead . . . these are the foundations of Ustasha Croatia.”119 In her study
of the rituals surrounding the cult of death in rural Romanian society, Gail
Kligman describes ritual as a “dramatic form of symbolic action that articu-
lates the relationship between a symbolically constructed order of meanings
and a system of interpersonal and institutional relationships,” addressing
“existential anxieties as well as the practical complexities of everyday life.” At
a political level, such rituals help a state legitimate its cultural heritage while
allowing the community that practices such rituals to express resistance to
that legitimizing process in a politically and ideologically acceptable man-
ner.120 The Day of the Dead was similarly conceived, combining Catholic ritu-
als with older, rural, pre-Christian Balkan ones to create a set of rituals and
religious practices that represented a kind of village Catholicism.121 On the
Day of the Dead all businesses in Zagreb were closed as a sign of respect. On
a specially commissioned radio program, actors recited funeral poetry, in-
cluding Stjepko Trontl’s paean to martyrdom “An Ustasha Grave.” Regime
and state officials, as well as movement activists, made a pilgrimage to Ante
Starčević’s grave at Šeštine, aiming not only to create a spiritual connection
between themselves and Starčević but also emphasizing the paleogenetic
roots of the movement. However, the main ritual of the day involved the walk
 “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”  331

to the national cemetery of Mirogoj to honor all those Ustasha martyrs who
had died for the cause of a free Croatia.
Visitors to the graves of these illustrious fallen warriors included not just
state and regime officials but also comrades of the dead and ordinary mem-
bers of the public. Novi list described how, from the early hours of the morn-
ing, citizens arrived in the thousands, crammed on trams traveling from
Langov Square to Mirogoj, “the city of the dead.” At the entrance to the cem-
etery peasant women sold crucifixes, candles, flowers, roasted chestnuts, and
sweets; women from the women’s section of the Croatian Peasant Party of-
fered signs bearing the message “The living live in honor of the dead!” to hang
over the graves of deceased relatives, proceeds going to the “suffering” Croa-
tian masses in Hercegovina and the Lika.122 This viewpoint was replicated in
a number of regional ceremonies to mark the Day of the Dead. An order from
the Ustasha governor of Zagorje, for instance, announced that at a time when
“our brothers in Bosnia and Hercegovina are suffering as victims of Chetnik-
communist bands and making such great sacrifices on the altar of freedom,”
they needed help. Therefore, the local Ustasha authorities had decided that,
instead of laying flowers and wreaths on the graves of “our dearest and most
precious dead, we are placing a sign with the words: ‘The living live in honor
of the dead.’” All patriotic citizens, it instructed, should buy a sign in aid of
the homeland, thereby contributing to the construction of “the new Croa-
tia.”123 Novi list claimed that “an enormous” number of civilians visited the
graves of fallen Ustasha warriors, whose “heroic bodies are buried in beauti-
fully ordered graves.” It described how in the “solemn silence citizens stood
at the side of the graves, paying their respects to those who sacrificed their
lives for the realization of the national ideal. Under the gentle beating of hail
stones, mixed with rain, they lit candles, the glow of which illuminated the
deeds of those who are found under the marble crosses, on which is engraved
the great U sign, under which they fought for the liberation of Croatia.” Along
with an honor guard from the Poglavnik Bodyguard militia for illustrious
martyrs such as Mijo Babić, there was also a communal grave, marked with
a wooden cross, symbolizing all those Ustasha warriors who had died in un-
marked places. Despite the modest nature of this grave, Novi list stressed that
individual Ustasha units and officials visited the dead Ustashas’ communal
cross throughout the day to pay their respects “to fallen comrades whose
bodies are buried in numerous graves throughout the homeland.”124
For the Ustasha regime, graves had a mystical power. They believed that
the graves of dead heroes connected the past and the present, containing the
essence of the national spirit. Such graves held the unseen power to protect
the nation, and therefore, “whoever honors the dead also cares for the liv-
ing.” This reflected the Ustasha view that the grave was a natural part of the
 332  “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”

Ustasha warrior’s journey. In his 1942 study of the ideology of the Ustasha
movement, Mijo Bzik contrasted two photographs that he believed expressed
the essence of its ethos: the first a sacred altar and crucifix before which the
Ustasha warrior took his oath; the second a grave festooned with flowers and
a huge crucifix, the resting place of the Ustasha warrior. This, according to
Bzik, represented “the life journey of the Ustasha warrior.”125 On the third
Day of the Dead in 1943, Zlatko Milković called graves “beacons on the jour-
ney of national liberation.” At the graves of dead soldiers, Ustasha ideologues
claimed, one could feel the call of Croatdom. As one writer put it: “We stand
on these graves that represent the dead. For us, however, they represent life.
A life that speaks to us about sacrifice, renunciation, the enthusiasm of Croat
youth who fell in battle but who live on.”126 It was hardly surprising, then, that
on this day in 1943, Božidar Kavran declared over the radio in a speech intro-
duced by Chopin’s Death March that “the cult of the dead is the cult of the
living.” According to Kavran, they had to fall as the first victims of the Inde-
pendent State of Croatia since Croatian history had dictated that as “the best
and the most faithful they be given the most arduous but also the most sacred
task, which they didn’t refuse but, full of consciousness, full of enthusiasm,
accepted as the greatest reward that life could give them: death.” Their bones
were “scattered everywhere,” and they had “erected monuments” to Croatia
that could never be wiped away: “The dear Croatian earth was baptized in the
blood of our blood. They sanctified it by perishing for the indivisible, whole,
and independent homeland.” In so doing, they had become immortal and
“died to live among us stronger than they had in life.” Yet, if the graves of
dead Ustasha martyrs at Mirogoj embodied a mystical connection between
the living and the dead, then in a certain sense the dead were also stron-
ger than the living since they were “bearers of militancy” who had sacrificed
themselves for the sake of later generations.127
The Day of of the Dead was a day on which to commemorate not just
those Ustasha martyrs who had died for the state since April 1941 but also
those who had died before the liberation of Croatia had been achieved. This
included those who had been executed in Yugoslavia’s gallows, had been tor-
tured to death in its prisons, or who had blown themselves up with hand gre-
nades to avoid capture by hated Serb gendarmes, but it also included those
who had perished in exile, expiring with tuberculosis in santoriums in Sic-
ily while their nation experienced its own Golgotha and “great drops of rain
dripped on to black crosses like the tears of the people and like the tears of the
land over the tragedy of Croatia.”128 However, Ustasha theorists believed that
even from these restless souls, denied the opportunity to sacrifice their lives
for the nation on the battlefield, a supernatural force passed to the nation like
a “holy testament”129 and that in fact all deceased Ustasha martyrs watched
 “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”  333

over the nation. As Ustaša commented in 1941, at the graves of dead Usta-
sha warriors, mourners experienced the “mystery of martyrdom”—the feel-
ing that dead Ustashas were with them. “They are with us in freedom! They
are with us in Ustasha Croatia! Our martyrs are with us! They are with us!”130
This last slogan became the cri de coeur of all Ustasha funerals, signifying the
idea that a spiritual legion of Ustashas was joined to living ones.
If the Day of the Dead commemorated the dynamic sacrifices of the
state’s elite warriors, the Day of the Croatian Martyr brought together the
pantheon of Croatian victims who, throughout the centuries, had perished
for their homeland’s right to be free. Unlike that of the Day of the Dead, the
date of the Day of the Croatian Martyr had national resonance, falling on
20 June each year—the day Croatian Peasant Party leader Stjepan Radić was
shot in the Yugoslav parliament. All Croatians throughout history who had
fought in some way for the idea of an independent Croatia were considered
to be national martyrs: King Tomislav, who had presided over a golden age
in medieval Croatia; the nobles Nikola Zrinski and Krsto Frankopan, who
had risen up against Austro-Hungarian rule; the seventeenth-century peas-
ant rebel Matija Gubec; Radić; and, inevitably, the long list of fallen Ustashas.
Milan Šufflay, murdered by Yugoslav government agents in 1934, was eulo-
gized as the Ustasha movement’s “priest and prophet,” a gentleman scholar
prepared to sacrifice his own life for the truth, “bathe it in his own blood,
and bloodily give it to the nation, the world, and science.”131 Eugen Kvater-
nik, meanwhile, Stanislav Polonijo wrote in the 1942 Anthology of Croatian
Students, had a special place in “our pantheon of national immortals” as “a
living prophet and apostle of Ustasha ideas.”132 Milivoj Karamarko identified
Rakovica as the original first national revolution and 10 April as the second
revolution. Arguing for a mystical symbiotic link between Rakovica and the
Ustasha revolution, he held that if faith in Rakovica failed, so too would the
Ustasha state. Rakovica was “a kind of mystical prophetic manifestation,” and
the foundation of the Independent State of Croatia was really the “redemp-
tion of Rakovica.” Indeed, hadn’t the “cult of blood” of the second Ustasha
revolution of 1941 essentially recognized the “apostolic significance” of the
first Rakovica revolution of 1871 by making the 11 October anniversary of the
uprising into a national holiday and thereby “sanctifying” it to the status of
a cult? In the same way as the Rakovica martyrs had sacrificed their lives for
the homeland in past centuries, so today “our martyrdom is our greatness
and heavenly gift” and a “heroic crucifixion.”133
The buildup to the Day of the Croatian Martyr lasted for days, with cov-
erage in the national press intensifying the sense of anticipation. On the
morning of the first commemoration in 1941, Hrvatski narod printed a com-
memorative edition in which the front page, framed in black, was dominated
 334  “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”

by a portrait of the slain Radić. Stressing the importance of suffering as a re-

demptive act on the journey of national liberation, its editorial proclaimed:
There is no force that can defeat ideals behind which shed tears and spilled
blood stand, behind which the graves of martyrs stand. The graves scream,
they roar! The rich gallery of all our martyrs, from Petar Svačić to Stjepan
Radić and Petar Kvaternik, the bones of all our martyrs have been conse-
crated and offered up to the Croat earth, the Croat nation, to our seas, our
forests, our fields, rivers, lakes, vines, our olive trees and groves. The nation
celebrates them and carries memories of them in their hearts. Matija Gubec,
Zrinski and Frankopan, and Šufflay searching for sun and exhaling air in
the seconds before the criminals’ batons fell on his cranium. The Ustasha
Begović, like a lover, writing verses to Croatia on the last night before his
death!! Soldin, Rošić, Hranilović, and Oreb under the gallows, chanting for
Croatia. In their stupidity, Croatia’s enemies executed her sons, creating new
martyrs, strengthening her. Croatia, with such divine victims, had to suc-
ceed. Now we ask: how could anyone doubt the fanaticism of the Poglavnik,
as he believed in Croatia, seeing such beauty, so many sacrifices and young
lives laid on the altar of the Homeland??134

As a mark of respect, all shops and businesses were closed; buildings were
to be draped with black flags from dawn to dusk, as was the national cemetery
of Mirogoj; flowers were placed on the catafalque at Zrinjevac, with an honor
guard standing watch over it. At eight o’clock a memorial service was held
for all Croatia’s martyrs at the Cathedral of the Assumption of the Blessed
Virgin Mary. Prominent positions in the cathedral were given to relatives of
recently deceased martyrs, such as Radić’s widow and children, as well as to
the families of Ustasha martyrs such as Matija Soldin and Marko Hranilović.
After the service at the Kaptol, relatives walked in a procession to Mirogoj,
accompanied by Ustasha officials, youth groups, and leading cultural figures,
to visit the graves of the fallen. These were draped in black cloth and adorned
with wreaths.135 At midday, at the sound of the first cannon, all trains, trams,
cars, and pedestrians came to a halt, individuals raising their right hands in
“a symbol of honor to the Croatian martyrs” and observing one minute of si-
lence. In the evening there was a program of music on state radio: during the
music the names of individual martyrs were read out, and a group of Usta-
shas called out in reply: “He is with us!”136 According to the commentary in
Hrvatski narod, the bones and blood of dead martyrs gave the Croatian na-
tion its strength and had resulted in its resurrection: “These bones, which are
part of us and with which we are intimately connected in blood, become a sa-
cred power in the moments when they fall for idealism. They refresh our peo-
ple, lift them up, they are the source of inspiration, they warn of unfulfilled
 “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”  335

oaths, a force against which no battle is possible. The dead everywhere and in
every sense really are stronger than the living. The spirit of the martyr is the
one that prevails. The summit of his martyrdom is death.”137
The day was characterized by somber imagery: the route the procession
took to the cemetery was lined by citizens dressed in black funeral clothing,
signifying that the nation was in mourning for the sufferings of the past; the
state officials’ walk up the steep hill to the cemetery at Mirogoj demonstrated
that these leaders, despite their power, not only felt humility and admira-
tion in the face of such historical fortitude but also came from the masses
and were one with them; the presence of youth, meanwhile, showed that the
bloody Calvary of Croatia’s martyrs had not been in vain, having given birth
to a regenerated, independent, and youthful Croatia. Youth, it was empha-
sized, were the new martyrs of the nation, dying for Croatia and, in so doing,
honoring the tribulations of their illustrious ancestors. Above all, the Day
of the Croatian Martyr joined the history of the nation to the destiny of the
Ustasha regime. The souls of Croatia’s martyrs who had, throughout its his-
tory, sacrificed their lives in the struggle for independence were now at peace,
their graves pacified because “the graves of all those heroes who with their
sacrifices, their bones that rotted in the many prisons, cells, fields, and woods
where they lost their lives, have built the firm foundations of a free Croatia.”138
The commemoration of the dead served obvious utilitarian purposes.
Linking the regime to Croatia’s tortured past provided it with legitimacy,
identifying it with both the nation and historical inevitability. Some regime
commentators argued that this symbolic link should be institutionalized
through propaganda, education, and the construction of monuments. For
one commentator writing in Novi list in June 1941, commemorating Croatia’s
martyrs was not sufficient. They needed to be remembered in a visible way
in schools and public spaces. School textbooks, he suggested, should present
students with pictures of the major Croatian martyrs and short summaries
of their lives. These should be produced in great numbers and distributed
throughout the state. Squares and streets in towns and villages should also
carry the names of local martyrs so that no Croat town was without “Pe-
tar Zrinski Street, Krsto Frankopan Street, Eugen Kvaternik Street, Stjepan
Radić Street, Milan Šufflay Street, Stipe Javor Street, and so on.” But for last-
ing effect what was demanded was the construction of a permanent monu-
ment to the nation’s martyrs:
The best thing would be if, in the center of Zagreb, there could be found a
place, suitable and honorable, where our martyrs could be buried together
so that they would be always with us and always remind us of our duty: to
love the homeland, love the Poglavnik, and be prepared for all sacrifices for
 336  “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”

the native soil. This place would be a shrine of the whole Croatian nation, a
place where soldiers and Ustashas would take their oaths, drawing youths
from the length and breadth of the state; from it an unceasing Ustasha spirit
would flow throughout the whole of the Independent State of Croatia and to
all regions wherever there are Croats.139

Mass rituals of mourning, such as the Day of the Dead and the Day of
the Croatian Martyr, not only reminded citizens of the injustices of Serb rule
and the sacrifices Ustasha martyrs had made for liberation but also served to
demonize collective national enemies such as the Serbs and Jews as agents of
oppression and potential fifth columnists seeking to drag Croatians back to
the terror of the past. The link between the regime’s campaign of mass mur-
der and the ritualized commemoration of martyrdom and sacrifice was made
clear in a commentary by Vilim Peroš to mark the second Day of the Croatian
Martyr. Writing on 20 June 1942, he pointed out that Radić’s assassination
had not been a crime against one man, but against the entire “robbed, mis-
used, tortured, and killed” nation, convincing its citizens that freedom could
not “and would not be achieved with tambourines and songs but with knives
and hand grenades. Blood could be avenged only with blood!” By connecting
rituals of mourning and suffering to the glorification of Ustasha violence, the
regime not only aimed to legitimate its campaign of mass murder and perse-
cution but to effectively implicate large sections of the population, who could
only escape the collective nature of the ceremonies through seeming betrayal
and defiling the memory of martyrs.140
The elevation of dead Ustashas and historical personalities to the status of
sanctified and beatified martyrs also served a functional purpose within the
movement itself, presenting its activists, officials, and soldiers with virtuous
examples against whom their own conduct would be judged. The memory
and imagery of dead Ustashas, their saintly, ethereal images staring down
from countless newspapers, journals, and public posters, acted not just as a
mobilizing inspiration but also as an instructive guide for their own conduct
and destiny. They were duty bound, as the regime’s ideologues constantly re-
minded them, to live up to the example of martyrs. In a radio address on the
eve of the Day of the Dead in 1943, Danijel Crljen stated that, for him, visit-
ing the “fresh graves of martyrs and heroes” who had shed “blood and sweat”
represented a kind of insurance policy for the living who would one day join
them. On this day, not only were the words and deeds of the living revealed,
but their innermost thoughts and feelings also became clear. Nothing was
hidden from those who had “passed into eternity”: they were watching to en-
sure that all the actions of the living were directed toward the benefit of the
cause for which they had given their lives. “Directing our thoughts to their
 “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”  337

graves and prayers to God for their souls, we shouldn’t forget that, one day, we
will have to account before them when we, too, pass into eternity. Therefore,
we must ensure that our dead heroes and martyrs don’t announce themselves
discontented with their community. May our thoughts for the dead, who ac-
cording to the divine Ustasha phrase remain eternally with us, be accompa-
nied by a firm resolution that with our work and struggle we will be worthy of
their sacrifice,” he cautioned listeners.141
But utilitarianism was only one side of the story. The commemoration
of the dead and the sacralization of politics was an important aspect of the
movement’s aesthetic and ideological worldview; it was taken very seriously.
Personnel working in GUS and state propaganda institutions were expected
to be present at all the commemoration ceremonies, and in the week leading
up to the Day of the Croatian Martyr, the Department for Administrative Af-
fairs in GUS sent out orders for attendance to all departmental directors, who
in turn distributed these orders to their staff. Confirmation of attendance had
to be guaranteed by individual signature. On 19 June 1942 Grga Pejnović for-
warded just such an order to all his staff. According to the notice sent from
the GUS Department for Administrative Affairs, all officials and policy ad-
visers were to attend the eight o’clock ceremony of remembrance at the ca-
thedral and afterward assemble at the GUS headquarters so that they could
“corporately” walk together to the catafalque at Zrinjevac and “pay their re-
spects to our fallen martyrs.”142
On an aesthetic level, regime officials provided clear guidelines defining
the way the rituals of death were to be conducted. In a lecture of Novem-
ber 1941, Mile Budak emphasized the “symbolism and aestheticization” of
the burial of the dead, condemning “the burning of bodies in crematoria.”143
In Varaždin, the leader of the local Ustasha camp, Ivo Medeković, provided
mourners with detailed instructions for laying flowers and lighting candles
and avoiding social faux pas. In particular, he called for more order and “re-
straint” on the Day of the Dead: for example, mourners should not light can-
dles in “ostentatious proportions” but should exhibit “sensible thrift” in order
to keep the “sumptuously lit graves of richer individuals [from] showing up
the more modestly lit graves of less affluent citizens.” At most only two wax
candles or lamps should be placed by a graveside.144 In anticipation of the Day
of the Dead, administrative staff of the chapel at Mirogoj, meanwhile, pro-
duced an extensive card-index system detailing the locations of the graves of
140,000 individuals. Mourners could consult the card index if they could not
find the grave they were looking for. At the same time, the card index also al-
lowed the local Ustasha movement to monitor who had paid the cemetery to
place flowers and candles on graves and to which of the 140,000 graves me-
 338  “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”

morials had been sent. All this indicated a level of planning that went beyond
mere instrumentalization.145
Unlike many aspects of cultural and ideological policy, the cultural poli-
tics of sacralization and the commemoration of the dead never essentially
altered. In June 1943 the Day of the Croatian Martyr was renamed the Day
of Croatian Sacrifice, perhaps to emphasize both the lives the movement’s
martyrs had given and continued to give to the homeland and what might be
expected of ordinary Croatians, with the sacrifices of anonymous citizens,
always present, now brought from the background to center stage. In an edi-
torial of 20 June 1944, for example, Marko Čović stated that the Day of Croa-
tian Sacrifice was a day on which to remember the “countless unrecorded,
unknown, and unremembered victims of the small Croatian nation, ordinary
people who gave their blood and became victims for a free Croatia.” This was
an egalitarian day that belonged equally to Croatian leaders, revolutionar-
ies, Ustasha warriors, and the worker and peasant masses.146 Otherwise, the
discourse and aesthetics of sacrifice, death, and martyrdom remained unal-
tered.147 The Day of the Dead was also widened to honor the dead outside the
movement, although it remained an occasion imbued with ideas about the
power of graves and the dead, if anything intensifying in rhetoric on what
was to be the last such day, in November 1944.148 The sacralization of politics
represented by the cult of the dead, martyrdom, and graves was thus, unlike
so much else in the Ustasha state, not contingent, contested, or negotiable: it
was intrinsic and fundamental.
The commemoration of the dead also reflected the sacral mindset of many
members of the movement, especially those in militias and death squads
who communicated with dead comrades in the form of letters, obituaries,
and funeral eulogies. Sometimes this took a strictly hierachical, top-down
form, driven by propaganda concerns and instrumentalizing aims. For ex-
ample, in a eulogy for his old comrade Antun Pogorelec, commander Božidar
Čerovski, head of the Ustasha police, addressed him directly. In the belief
that he lived beyond the grave, “keeping vigil” over the nation, he asked him
to greet fellow Ustasha martyrs as well as to pray for his living comrades.149
While his speech might have expressed genuine emotion, it was also likely
aimed at mobilizing Čerovski’s young militia men. But communication with
the dead was widespread in the movement at a much more diffuse level and
became a common feature of tributes to dead commanders from the men
they had led. After Francetić died in 1942, his soldiers wrote letters to him,
some of them published in the Sarajevan press. “You are not dead for us, nor
will you ever die,” one young legionary wrote to Francetić in Sarajevski novi
list in March 1943, four months after his death. “But your strong and great
 “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”  339

spirit still proudly toils in the first ranks of our Black Legion. We are aware of
this and faithfully carry out your commands because we are convinced that
you are present during our labors.”150 Likewise, members of Ustasha militias
also wrote letters to dead contemporaries. Thus, in April 1944, members of
the thirteenth student unit of the Poglavnik Bodyguard composed the fol-
lowing collective letter to Lieutenant Božidar Baća:
Božidar, we stand full of determination to continue the journey that we set
out on together with You! You showed us the way it must end because Fate
had chosen You, and You didn’t cry and whine, but you accepted this fate
for yourself. Božidar, we are proud of you and are not crying because tears
would take away the strength to ascend the rugged and magnificent path of
your heroic journey. Your death echoes with the voice of victorious fanfare
and fills us with an indescribable fervor to never become tired! We will
fearlessly follow you! Today this will of ours is stronger than ever! Thank
you, Božidar! From now on, you lead, and we will never betray you! Your
Ustasha comrades.151

BLOODY RELICS AND DEATH POETRY

The sacral elements of regime discourse were also reflected in the cultural
sphere: writers, poets, and activists brought concepts of blood, sacrifice, the
afterlife, and regenerative violence into the artistic mainstream. The cultural
politics of sacralization was both consciously promoted by the movement and
embraced by many of its activists. As a result, like communication with the
dead, it both served the functional purpose of regime legitimization and—in
allowing poets, activists, militia men, and soldiers a cultural sphere in which
they could explore issues of life, death, and violence—reflected the mentality
and outlook of many of its supporters. In 1944, GUS established a Museum
of the Ustasha movement in Zagreb to commemorate the bloody sacrifices
of the movement and its martyrs. While the founding of the museum aimed
to suggest the movement’s permanence and paleogenetic roots, it also acted
as a focus for the institutionalization and reinforcement of the state’s sacral
myths. Opened on 20 June 1944 to mark the fourth Day of the Croatian Mar-
tyr, the museum exhibits emphasized the shed blood, martyrdom, and strug-
gle of the movement’s warriors not just with the Serb oppressors but also
with their own souls, selflessness triumphing over mere material concerns.
In a chamber honoring the movement’s martyrs, a large cabinet dedicated
to the life of Mijo Babić prominently displayed the blood-streaked uniform
in which he had died, as well as his weapons; another showcased the blood-
stained police clubs with which Serb gendarmes had beaten Ustasha activists
 340  “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”

in the 1930s; it also exhibited the hand grenades, machine guns, and the knife
that “deceased Ustasha commander” Jure Francetić had used to take part in
the 1932 Velebit Uprising.152
In literature, the cultural politics of sacralization also saw the emergence
of a genre of literary expression that, with its fascination with death, blood,
and the power of the afterlife, was sometimes admiringly labeled “death po-
etry” by some cultural critics. Some of this death poetry was produced by
the circle of nationalist young poets who came to prominence after 1941. The
poetry in Wreaths, the 1943 anthology of poetry edited by Vinko Nikolić, for
example, was dominated by varieties of death poetry. Wreaths was an impor-
tant anthology because, as Nikolić pointed out, it was designed to introduce
both foreign and Croatian readers to the new genre of Ustasha poetry that
Nikolić had demanded be adopted as the prevailing cultural expression of
the new state and to the cohort of radical young poets who had so enthusi-
astically embraced it.153 In a poem Nikola Šabić dedicated to one of the first
Ustasha martyrs of the new state, Nikola Luetić, killed on 10 April 1941, the
resurrection of Croatia can be measured in graves and bones: the national
oppression of the 1920s and 1930s, characterized by “the bones of martyrs,
powder in dark graves,” is replaced by “the miracle of resurrection in the glis-
tening eyes.” But this is also “the glistening image of the resurrected Christ /
consecrating his martyred bones.”154
Meanwhile, Mate Ostojić’s poem “He Is with Us!” uses the Ustasha vale-
dictory cry and the national cemetery of Mirogoj as literary devices through
which to explore ideas about death and the afterlife. Ostojić wanders around
the graves of Ustasha warriors and martyrs in Mirogoj: “Here I am in the
wonderful silent Mirogoj / in this city of the dead / I see here the past and
the future / I look at the monuments, the crosses, the arcades.” Although the
cemetery is quiet and peaceful, the dead are not at rest: he can sense their
presence: “I can hear the dear voices of the deceased / as if to me dear ac-
quaintances are calling / asking me what is happening in the world.” Look-
ing upon a “new freshly dug grave / with a patriotic beautiful new sign,” he
notes that it brings to mind “the slogan of the Ustasha hero: / your soul lives
eternally, you are always with us!”155 Despite this, Branko Klarić declares that
Ustashas have been misrepresented. In apparent contradiction to not only the
poem he wrote in tribute to Francetić—comparing his blood to young wine—
and also to the cultural and ideological program of the movement’s literary
production, he boldly declares: “We don’t carry torches for bloody conflagra-
tions / our poems are not poems of death rattles. / In place of blood, confla-
grations, the rope / our beacons will light the dark sky.” What values, then,
does the movement stand for? “We are full of enthusiasm that radiates / we
 “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”  341

have fervor that flies / around our eyes, the light of pleasure / the sun is the
jewel in our skin.” Despite this, even though they want to learn from life,
“we are prepared to perish,” which, although he does not say as much, means
learning from death.156
At the same time as they described the power of graves and the spirit of
sacrifice, poets also glorified the morally regenerative qualities of violence.
One example was a collection of poems by Mijo Matić and Jure Matić, pub-
lished in 1942. Part of the cohort of “people’s writers” emerging in response to
the regime’s affirmative-action cultural politics, the Matić brothers were dif-
ferentiated by the fact that rather than writing plays or novels about the lives
of peasants and workers, they composed epic poems about Ustasha martyrs.
One of their poems was dedicated to the “struggle” of Francetić’s “black legion
of angels.” In it, perfidious Serb and Jewish Partisans and Chetniks, slaugh-
tering “our best sons” as well as women and children, are decimated by the
Legionaries’ guns, knives, and bombs: “Jure has sealed their fate / they were
killed in a completely Ustasha way / their dead were pulled away on carts.” In
another, they relate the brutal Ustasha cleansing operation on Kozara through
the eyes of a raw young Legionary recruit who describes the exhilaration of
battle and the bravery and mercilessness of the Black Legion. He excitedly de-
scribes how the Legion, its members spending the night in a trench, “defended
itself with bombs, / with sharp knives, with powerful guns.” As the “rifle fires
and sharp bullets whiz,” the “bombs turn to dust, the knives pierce,” and the
region becomes the “grave of the Partisans,” who fall like flies in the thou-
sands, receiving “deserved” punishment, “buried in the black earth.” None-
theless, the poems also emphasize the self-sacrificing nature of the young
Legionaries and their role as saviors of the nation. Thus the poets describe
how “Francetić gathered our precious youth / gathered for a sacred undertak-
ing / to avenge us on our enemies / we saw how they sang / marching through
the Sarajevo streets / going into battle, to stand at the Drina.”157
Much of the most visceral and vivid death poetry came from the pens of
young militia and death-squad members and soldiers. In his collection of po-
ems about life in the Black Legion, the young Legionary poet Josip Križanac
eulogized the allure of regenerative violence, writing with pride of the Legion’s
cleansing actions. In the Serb village of Bratunac, he explains, “all the crimi-
nals that were there / lost their lives”; as the Legionaries strode toward the
River Drina, “the criminals fall like funeral wreaths.” His poems also explore
the power of death, the afterlife, and graves, themes given poignancy by the
fact that his poetry was published posthumously: “And now grass grows on
the graves / of our young Ustasha heroes / God, let them always in death give
/ us strength and happy progress!”158 Visions of annihilation were also a com-
 342  “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”

mon feature of the poetry of soldiers serving in both the professional Ustasha
and the regular Croatian army. Always present, such poetry arguably became
a key literary genre from 1944 onward. In a poem of February 1945, for ex-
ample, Corporal Antun Bojčić called on his comrades to embrace death: “Let
hateful foreigners take this land!? / No! You will annihilate them!”159 Nev-
ertheless, themes of heroic death dominated. Clearly, many of these poems
served an educative instructive purpose and were published in army training
handbooks and journals as well as daily newspapers. They used the motif of
an existence beyond the grave and the principle of comradely love as means
of regulating the behavior of soldiers. However, they also reflected the apoca-
lyptic mindset of many soldiers and activists in the movement, represent-
ing a means by which soldiers could communicate with dead comrades and
friends. In typical poems of this genre, some of which were also published
in daily newspapers, a soldier stands by the grave of a dead comrade whose
voice emerges from the grave to instruct his friend to steel himself so he too
can perish for the homeland, thus completing the same journey. In Stjepko
Janković’s elegy published in Hrvatski list in January 1944, the poet, a Croa-
tian army soldier, stands at his comrade’s grave, a simple wooden cross with
his helmet on top, marking the spot where “his blood warmed the earth.” The
grave is his final bed, surrounded by a thick veil of fog, “hard, dark, dry” like
a cold blanket: “Above the burial mound of the moist earth,” Janković writes,
“with silent pain in my soul / I stand! / My thoughts are painful, / my lips
move: / Warrior! / I will follow your journey!”160
Undoubtedly the most celebrated and analyzed exponent of death poetry
was Pero Kojaković, whose prolific literary output expressed most completely
and viscerally the tropes of the regime’s sacralized cultural politics: martyr-
dom, moral renewal, the power of graves, and the regenerative qualities of
blood and violence. In one of his best-known poems, “Never!” fresh blood on
the “endless cape of snow” gives new life: “The blood is still fresh, a wonderful
color, / like a red poppy: / Look! A new flower blooms there!” In this case he is
describing the shed blood of a fatally wounded young comrade whose blood
has seeped into his own uniform and whom he holds in his arms as he lies
dying: “From deep wounds, wide, sharply / The red blood flowed; / I see: the
young life extinguished.”161 Kojaković’s poems also glorified the selflessness
and heroism of the Ustasha by framing him not only as a patriotic warrior
going eagerly to death for the homeland but also as a crusader sacrificing his
life for mystical, religious ideals. In a poem addressed to the Legion’s chap-
lain, Kojaković writes that they are going into “holy battle” against the “black
forces of Hell” for “God and for our own people.” He asks the chaplain for
strength and for “Manna from heaven” for the apocalyptic battle ahead: “Let
 “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”  343

the enemy units rise / and let the battle be terrible— / with songs we will per-
ish for God and the Homeland!” In another poem, he compares his fallen
Ustasha comrades to the mythical Spartan warriors of Thermopylae, a “wall
of faith, sons of blood-drenched fields,” protecting Western Christian cul-
ture from “the red specter” of barbarous communism just as the Spartans
had protected Europe from the Persians. They represent a “new rock of Ther-
mopylae,” a Europe built on dead Croatian soldiers’ corpses.162 In a third he
instructs his young comrades to live in sexual chastity and virtue. Reminding
one young Legionary that the soul is only healthy if the body is, he advises
him: “When endeavors strain you, manly grit your teeth / don’t cause trouble,
keep your mouth shut / flee from pleasure because this is a danger. / For a
moment of pleasure, the price is eternity. / The homeland needs strength not
beasts / nor one more dead idiot.”163
Just as frequently, though, his poems combined religious allusions with
eulogies to bloody killing. In his literary vision, Ustashas were warriors sent
by God to purify the nation not only by sacrificing their own lives but by
annihilating the enemy too. Kojaković reverently describes the bloody deeds
of the Ustasha warrior defending Croatia from its “mortal enemy” and go-
ing “to death with songs alone.” Despite the fact that the “holy” Ustasha has
been “sent from God” as a “savior,” alone on Velebit Mountain with his “le-
thal bombs / and frequently bloody knife,” he promises a dying comrade that,
though “envious” of his death, he will annihilate the enemy, becoming the
“avenger of his clan,” or else face “eternal damnation.”164 Not for nothing did
Viktor Zivić admiringly liken this Legionary to a “poet of death.” Central to
Kojaković’s iconic status was the letter he had written to his wife envisioning
his own death, posthumously elevated to the status of a reliquary. In his re-
view of Kojaković’s poetry, published in Spremnost, Živić cited this letter as
evidence of the eagerness with which the Legionary poet had embraced dy-
ing. “As if it was a normal function, Pero Kojaković set off like a cannonball
to his death. And his last letter on the day of his annihilation had the same
importance since it ended: ‘On the day of my death.’”165 Likewise, the Catholic
youth movement of which he had been a zealous member reprinted the letter
in its journal. Accompanying it was a commentary by a comrade visualizing
the moment of Kojaković’s death: “I thought about this letter for a long time.
And in my soul the dead crusader Pero Kojaković appeared. I saw him. He is
lying in a bunker. Dead, pallid, stiff. His lips can no longer speak, his heart
has stopped beating. He has died.” Yet, it concluded, for Kojaković, death was
easier because Jesus, in addition to his Ustasha brothers, was with him. Un-
derneath his uniform and gun he was a “crusader, a Catholic, an apostle.”166
Kojaković, the poet who in his verses so often described himself alone gazing
 344  “An Unceasing Sea of Blood and Victims”

into the graves of comrades, was now in a communal grave with his com-
rades, watched by others. The poet who had glorified death as a regenerating
force had, through his enormous posthumous fame, fulfilled the destiny set
out for the Ustasha warrior: as part of a secret legion of the dead, he could
protect the nation with a force he never could in life.
 CONCLUSION

B
y the end of 1944, an apocalyptic spirit reigned in the capital. The In-
dependent State of Croatia was close to collapse, and in fact, the control
of the Ustasha regime throughout the state was so limited that the Po-
glavnik earned himself the dubious sobriquet the “Mayor of Zagreb.” As the
state deteriorated, divisions among the Ustasha hierarchy became increas-
ingly public and their rhetoric ever more extreme; they began to see ene-
mies everywhere, especially in their own ranks. In September 1944, Mladen
Lorković, at the time interior minister, and Ante Vokić, by then an Ustasha
general and armed forces minister, had been arrested in Zagreb, accused of
planning a coup against the Poglavnik. Placed before the court of the Po-
glavnik Bodyguard Battalion, they were stripped of their rank in the mili-
tia and incarcerated in Lepoglava prison under the guard of the battalion’s
commander Vjekoslav Servatzy, who had also led their prosecution. Zealous
Ustasha youth leaders demanded their execution. The arrest of Vokić and
Lorković heralded a ruthless purge of the movement and the summary execu-
tion of all those considered disloyal to the regime, in particular those associ-
ated with the “moderate” faction of the movement. A wave of terror swept the
state as the pugnacious émigré faction returned with a vengeance and took
revenge for two years in which, as they saw it, ideological purity had been cast
aside in favor of a mushy consensus promoted by a febrile intellectual elite.1
Erih Lišak, a militant young hardliner, was appointed head of RAVSIGUR; a

345
 346 Conclusion

second hardliner Viktor Tomić, the ruthless former Ustasha police commis-
sar in Srijem, arrested at the height of the new course for attempting to assas-
sinate Lorković, returned from exile in Hungary and was brought back into
the inner circle. He was appointed both a colonel in the Ustasha army and
director of its Investigative Department. Ivo Herenčić, likewise brought back
to Zagreb in spring 1944 and tasked by RAVSIGUR’s security department
with uncovering the conspiracy, was appointed head of the Ustasha army
center. Most ominously perhaps, Vjekoslav Luburić, already commander of
the Ustasha Defense Force, emerged with enhanced influence following this
power struggle, eventually—in May 1945, after the Poglavnik and his retinue
had fled—being made supreme head of the armed forces.
Along with military and political leaders such as Vokić and Lorković, by
the end of that year, prominent student leaders from the Plug group—includ-
ing Zdravko Brajković, Milivoj Karamarko, and Vlado Miličević—and young
poets strongly associated with it, such as Zvonimir Katalenić, were arrested
and imprisoned, some of them in Lepoglava. A similar fate befell leading rep-
resentatives of the intellectual circle associated with Spremnost, including for
a short while Tias Mortigjija himself. For the second time, the Ustasha proj-
ect was relaunched, this time with a return to the original guiding principles
of the “revolution of blood.”2 In a speech at the Workers’ Chamber on 8 Sep-
tember 1944, the Poglavnik railed against all those traitorous members of the
Ustasha movement, “plunderers, destroyers, and murderers” of Croatia, who,
he alleged, were conspiring with “Great Serb Chetniks” against the state. He
promised they would be destroyed.3 As part of the return to the program of
the revolution of blood, the regime launched a renewed war against the Serbs.
In autumn 1944, two new elite Ustasha units were formed for this purpose;
at the same time the regular Croatian army was subsumed into the profes-
sional and more radicalized Ustasha army, with a combined fighting strength
of two hundred thousand men. To bridge the gulf between the mentality of
the two armies, the educational department of the Ustasha army, led by Jo-
sip Mrmić, initiated a campaign to imbue Croatian army units with an Usta-
sha political education and ethos. In its official recruitment handbooks the
Ustasha army idealized the merging of the two Croatian armies, with poems
written in honor of the event. In reality, the increasing number of reports in
the Ustasha press noting the executions of regular Croatian soldiers who had
deserted the Ustasha army for the Partisans, while meant to strike terror into
those young army recruits thinking of deserting, also exposed the extent of
the ideological gulf that separated the two armies and revealed the rapidity
with which the state was collapsing.
With the leadership now surrounded by hardliners and existing in a paral-
lel, hermetically sealed world, the regime’s journalists tried to rally the nation
 Conclusion  347

with a call to unity: only this could avert national extinction. On the fifteenth
anniversary of the founding of the Ustasha movement, the Ustasha journalist
Božo Šarkanj called on the entire nation to mobilize in defense of the home-
land. The values of the Ustasha man—encapsulated in the traditional answer
(“Prepared!”) to the Poglavnik’s question (“For the homeland?”)—now had to
be shared by all society. The whole nation had to join the merciless struggle
against the enemies of the state and the threat from the Communist East. It
was a question, Šarkanj wrote, of national survival.4 The regime’s propagan-
dists aimed to strike terror into citizens by evoking harrowing memories of
interwar Yugoslavia. Ivo Šarinić reminded his readers that Yugoslavia had
been a state in which “the most idealistic Croatian warriors were dragged
in chains through prisons, jails, courtrooms, Courts for the Defense of the
State, the prison of Glavnjača, this symbol of the cultural and legal degener-
acy and criminality of the Serbian mentality and soul—in which the greatest
Croatian idealists were dragged to the gallows, in which, in their thousands,
in Croatian villages, and towns patriotic and politically conscious Croatian
peasants and workers were killed.”5 Ustasha journals evoked bitter memories
of the 1930s and the Great Depression. Writing in Ustaša in December 1944,
Marijan Žibrat reminded his readers of the social inequity of Yugoslavia, il-
lustrated with photographs of hungry unemployed Croatian workers lining
up miserably outside soup kitchens or sleeping on park benches. If the “vam-
pire of Yugoslavia” returned, he warned, the social inequality with which it
was associated would also return. Underneath their communist proletariat
slogans, the Partisans were led by the same Serbian and Jewish plutocrats and
capitalists who had brought such misery and inflicted such exploitation on
the Croatian worker in interwar Yugoslavia.6
In fact, life in communist Yugoslavia would be even worse than it had
been in 1930s Yugoslavia, Ustasha propagandists warned. The Great Serb ide-
ology would reign supreme, and the Catholic Church would be destroyed; the
Croatian identity would be obliterated and the Croatian people face biologi-
cal extermination. As allies of Nazi Germany, the Croatians would be pun-
ished collectively as war criminals, and even their national heroes, such as
Starčević, Gubec, and Kvaternik, would be declared fascists and criminals.7
More than this, the entire nature of traditional rural Croat life would be de-
stroyed. The regime painted a nightmare world of children forcibly separated
from their parents; of peasant zadrugas transformed into kolkhozes and fam-
ilies forced onto the road; of peasants transported as slave labor to the Urals
and Siberia. To make their point, journals and newspapers were filled with
reports of gruesome atrocities committed by godless Partisans against Cath-
olic priests, Croatia’s “spiritual leaders and best sons,” as well as against “our
Ustashas, our heroes, our martyrs.” In order to emphasize the viciously anti-
 348 Conclusion

Croatian nature of the Partisans and the gruesome fate that awaited the na-
tion, Ustasha newspapers detailed the horrible fate that had been meted out
not only to those Croats who had opposed communist rule but even to those
naive Croats who had supported the Partisans. This was intended to send a
warning to all ordinary citizens to rally behind the regime as the only protec-
tion against the certain depredations of the Partisans.8
One of the enduring themes of the regime regarding the Partisans was
their alien nature. In the regime’s final months, it organized rallies and pub-
lic demonstrations by intellectuals, students, workers, and peasants in sup-
port of both the state and the movement, presented as the last line of defense
against the “savagery” of the Bolshevik “hordes.” At a mass rally of 10 March,
for example, attended by intellectuals, students, priests, and artists, speaker
after speaker stood up to declare his intention never to surrender to the com-
munists. From the podium, the rector of Zagreb University, Stjepan Horvat,
vowed that the Croatian nation would never allow the return of Yugoslavia.
Behind him a banner read: “We don’t want to die from Chetnik knives or Par-
tisan cartridges; nor do we want to end our lives in some huge concentration
camp!”9 The regime also announced plans for a final resistance: it created na-
tional militias and enlisted workers to dig trenches and bunkers, vowing that
should the Partisans invade the state, its citizens would take to the hills and
spearhead a national resistance movement that would use guerrilla tactics to
defeat the occupying enemy.10 As the novelist Marko Čović reminded readers
of Hrvatski narod, it had been the fate of Croats through the ages to struggle
in defense of their homeland’s freedom. The Croats had only earned their
right to an independent state through struggle, lost lives, and martyrdom,
as the rampart on which their enemies “crushed their teeth, bled, exhausted
themselves, and fell.”11 There was also recourse to the violent apocalyptic lan-
guage that had characterized the movement’s first year in power, with an edi-
torial in Ustaša expressing regret at the movement’s stupidity in not sending
an Ustasha legion to “devastate and butcher” Serbia when it had the chance.
Calling on a higher celestial court to judge the Partisans, it reminded the en-
emy that “he who lives by the sword dies by the sword.”12
Ustasha newspapers continued to insist that a Croatian state still existed,
with the moment of final victory over its enemies closer than ever, but read-
ing between the lines of official discourse revealed a very different story.13 Re-
ports in Vojnik and other Ustasha army newspapers describing woods full
of fighters organizing “a decisive war and nationwide uprising against the
Partisan ‘authorities’” merely illustrated how dramatically the situation had
changed: the Partisan guerrillas were now, for the most part, the government,
and the Ustasha regime’s militias were the insurgents, just as they had been
in the 1930s.14 Inspired by the regime’s defiant narrative and fueled by their
 Conclusion  349

own ideological fervor, many Ustasha militia members and soldiers fought
fanatically to the end, making the ultimate sacrifice for a hopeless cause in ar-
eas now as inhospitable to the movement as Banja Luka, Vitrovica, and Dal-
matia.15 The last celebration of 10 April was pervaded by an atmosphere of
apocalypse, impending doom, and terror. That year, the medal of the Crown
of King Zvonimir, the highest military honor, was awarded not to live Usta-
sha warriors but to dead ones—Marko Hranilović, Ivan Rosić, Stipe Javor,
and Jure Francetić—in recognition of their suffering and sacrifice during the
period of Serbian “terror.”16 To mark the occasion, Ustaša published a spe-
cial commemorative edition recalling the prominent Ustasha martyrs who
had died for the cause of a liberated Croatia in the past four years. Framed by
photographs of deceased young men in their Ustasha uniforms, the journal
declared that a state created through bloody struggle would not be given up
lightly: the Ustasha movement and its warriors would fight mercilessly to the
end: “We have paid a heavy price. In lives, in blood, in fate, in the happiness
of our greatest and most worthy. And blood cannot be wiped away by any
kind of agreement or talks, irrespective of which land they might take place
in, whether they are simply discussed, written down, or signed.”17
Irrespective of this militant talk, the fact was that plans for the evacua-
tion of high-ranking regime officials and their families, as well as bureau-
crats, intellectual and cultural supporters and sympathizers, and members
of the movement, had been planned long before May 1945, even if it was only
at the beginning of that month that large numbers of them began to travel by
train and convoy toward the Croatian border with Austria. The long convoys
of regime officials and personnel were also joined not just by the regime’s
supporters but also by hundreds of thousands of Croatians. Some of these
were people compromised by their or a family member’s collaboration or in-
volvement with the regime and justifiably apprehensive of what communist
rule might bring. But in many other cases, they were simply ordinary citizens
fearful of their fate under the rule of a Partisan or Yugoslav government. One
of the last groups of supporters to leave the territory of the Independent State
of Croatia were members of the Ustasha student organization, who left on the
last train, close to midnight, on the evening of 6 and 7 May 1945 from Zagreb
central station, along with wounded members of the Poglavnik Bodyguard.
Ultimately, many of them were executed by the Partisans after they were
turned back at the Austrian border and handed over by British forces. Before
this, though, there was a Götterdämmerung of another kind. As members
of Ustasha militias retreated from the state they had vowed to defend to the
last drop of blood, they determined that the Partisans would inherit a waste-
land of ashes. In the middle of April, Ustasha Defense Force staff who ran
Jasenovac-Stara Gradiška concentration camp made plans, under Luburić’s
 350 Conclusion

instructions, for a final liquidation of the inmates. Camp guards took groups
of prisoners across the River Sava every day to be murdered, while others
were slaughtered in the camp, their bodies eviscerated or thrown down wells.
The few who weren’t able to escape in the uprising of 22 April 1945 were mur-
dered en masse prior to mining the complex. Retreating through the town
of Jasenovac, the Ustasha Defense Force razed it to the ground. As they fled
through cities and towns such as Osijek and Sisak, Ustasha militias ransacked
them, murdering citizens who refused to leave with them. In Sarajevo, mean-
while, between February and April 1945 Vjekoslav Luburić ordered the ex-
ecution of at least three hundred citizens in Sarajevo. The culmination of this
was the hanging of fifty-five townspeople between the nights of 27 and 28
March. Hanged on Marindvor, their bodies were left on display on the build-
ings stretching from the tobacco factory to the Agricultural Museum, where
Ćiro Truhelka, the “apostle” of Croatian racial and cultural claims to Bosnia,
had once been director.18 One of their last acts—again initiated on the orders
of Luburić’s forces—was the execution of the Ustasha dissidents arrested the
previous autumn and winter. With the execution of Lorković and Vokić, and
the violent purging of the Plug students and the Spremnost intellectuals, the
movement that had launched a campaign of mass murder in the name of na-
tional regeneration was now directing its violence not just against the Croa-
tian nation but against its own past and its future. By 11 May, the state that
had honored the cult of death and dying was itself dead.
The Ustasha movement’s leading ideologues and intellectuals, as well as
its grassroots activists, only imperfectly understood fascist theory; fascist
ideas were never fully evolved in the Independent State of Croatia. Neverthe-
less, it is also clear that, like many other East European right-radical parties
and movements, the Ustasha movement was strongly influenced by fascist
ideology. Therefore, rather than being examined through the occluded lens
of East European politics, it is arguably only within the broader, more inter-
disciplinary framework of comparative European fascism that the Ustasha
regime’s ideology, policies, and historical legacy can be understood, ana-
lyzed, and ultimately moved from marginal interest to mainstream study. By
thinking about what was common to all fascist and radical-right regimes in
interwar Europe, we can consider what was “exceptional” about them too.
Moreover, for the historian, examining the Ustasha regime through the prism
of comparative European fascism expands dramatically the range of innova-
tive and exciting methodologies available to study the past: anthropological,
cultural, social, economic, and “from below,” as well as interdisciplinary per-
spectives. Whether alone or combined, these are common—possibly even ge-
neric—approaches to the study of many European fascist regimes, states, and
radical-right ideologies, whether in Western or Eastern Europe. Why should
 Conclusion  351

the study of the Ustasha regime and the Independent State of Croatia be any
different in this regard? On the contrary, the comparative approach illustrates
how effectively diverse ways of intepreting the past can be applied to the case
of Croatian radical-right politics in the 1930s and 1940s.
What was fascism? Fascism’s adherents, as Ze’ev Sternhell noted in a sem-
inal essay of 1976, saw fascism as a new civiliation. Visions of a modern tech-
nological dynamic society were at its heart.19 For its admirers, like the French
novelist Pierre Drieu La Rochelle and theorists such as Corrado de Vita, it was
an ideology of new life holding out the promise of a future society built on the
virtues of action and speed.20 During the 1932 exhibition to mark the tenth an-
niversary of the fascist revolution, Italian Fascism’s modernist and dynamic
ethos was on full display. Despite the diverse backgrounds of the artists and
architects involved, the exhibition was distinguished by its avant-garde aes-
thetics. Young rationalist architects such as Adalberto Libera and Mario Di
Renzi and modernist artists like Mario Sironi transformed the Palazzo delle
Exposizioni and its interior into a revolutionary building: bare, geometrical,
like a machine, observed the official guidebook, celebrating the exhibition as
a modernist revolutionary triumph and a symbol of the new society created
in Italy. So impressed with the design was the Duce that he declared that the
permanent Museum of the Fascist Revolution would have to be constructed
in a similarly “modern monumental” style.21 This modernist vision of fascism
did not go uncontested, however. Artists such as Sironi battled for suprem-
acy with conservative art critics like Roberto Farinacci, who saw fascism as
an opportunity to return to traditional Italianità.22 These debates were about
more than painting and aesthetic style: they went to the heart of what fascism
was supposed to be. Young Italian fascist writers coming to maturity in the
1930s thought they had the answer, viewing fascism as a “third way” between
capitalism and communism. In their novels, they explained their vision of
a new moral order and modernity that would amount to a spiritual revolu-
tion.23 In the late 1920s and early 1930s a younger generation of fascists, led
by intellectuals from the Novismo and Anti-Idealist groups, championed the
refashioning of fascism according to what they percieved as its revolutionary
roots, intellectual free thinking and artistic experimentalism.
One of the major concerns of fascists everywhere was the shape of the
new society. Fascist ideology presented itself as a rebellion against respect-
ability and was both anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist. Drieu La Rochelle, a
supporter of Jacques Doriot’s Workers’ Party, defined the party’s mission as
the creation of a “syndicalist republic” in which “there will be no more bour-
geois, there will be nothing except men,” and the “monstrous experiment”
of capitalism represented by banks, rich industrialists, and financial trusts
would be destroyed.24 Leon Degrelle’s Catholic Rex Movement also railed
 352 Conclusion

against “rapacious financiers” and “oligarchic, inhuman, profiteering hyper-

capitalists.”25 Sometimes, this anti-bourgeois rhetoric was used in a purely in-
strumental fashion, with the opponents of fascism and anti-Semitism linked
to foreign, rapacious capitalism. In fascist France, for example, on the eve of
the Allied invasion, anti-capitalist imagery was utilized in the defense of the
nation: Joseph Darnand, the ruthless head of the Milice, called on his men to
abandon their wives and children and join the struggle against the “Anglo-
Saxon” invaders because, as he explained, the “bourgeois way of life is over,”
and his Milice should not be afraid to “live dangerously.” For his part, Marcel
Déat, the Vichy minister for labor and national solidarity and the leader of the
fascist National Popular Rally-Labor Social Front, wrote in his party newspa-
per that the “militants” of the party and all “revolutionary forces” should give
their lives “for the nation, against the Jews,” and for “social justice, against
trusts and capitalism.” Citing the party’s “socialist and revolutionary” pro-
gram, he called on all workers, whether in factory, field, or office, to join the
Milice to defend their hard-won workers’ rights, repelling the invasion by “fi-
nancial oligarchs,” “international capitalists and plutocrats,” friends of “the
millionaire Jews,” and the representatives of “trusts, of holdings.”26
Yet fascism amounted to more than just a collection of anti-bourgeois slo-
gans; it involved a plan for the reordering of economic and social relations
in a corporate syndicalist direction first explained by the fascist ideologue
Giovanni Gentile.27 The idea of a syndicalist and anti-capitalist utopia was
shared widely in fascist parties, not surprising since many of their leaders had
begun their political careers on the left. Thus Déat, the former parliamentary
secretary of the French Section of the Workers’ International, called for the
creation of a mass “anti-capitalist alliance” that would involve not just work-
ers and peasants but also struggling artisans. He expressed the hope that as
economic organization progressed, the active economic function of private
capital would disappear.28 Inevitably, designs for living played an important
part in this vision. Architecture and architectural visions, in particular, were
to play an important role in the creation of this utopian society. Architects
such as Le Corbusier in France, Mies van der Rohe and Emil Fahrenkampf in
Germany, and Guiseppe Teragni, Adalberto Libera, and Mario De Renzi in
Italy enthusiastically set out their utopian visions of fascist communal living
in the 1920s and 1930s.29
A second key component of fascism was youth. Through the energy and
dynamism of youth, fascists believed, the nation-state could be regenerated.
In both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany great emphasis was placed on the
education of the young, who were viewed as the nucleus of a future elite. At
the same time, as the defining symbol of the fascist revolution, the instincts
 Conclusion  353

of youth were infallible. Perceiving the Nazi revolution as essentially a re-

bellion of a younger generation against their bourgeois parents, the Hitler
Youth leader Baldur von Schirach declared that “youth is, in a higher sense,
always right.”30 Before joining, each member of the Hitler Youth had to an-
swer a questionnaire that set out the obstacles placed in the way of young peo-
ple joining the Hitler Youth, including parents and teachers. In this way, the
Nazi Party interposed itself between the youth and the family as a rival court
of appeal.31 But youthfulness, according to fascism, was about more than be-
ing merely chronologically young. Although the majority of those who joined
interwar fascist movements tended to be young, von Schirach argued that
youth was also a state of mind and attitude as much as the body. Irrespective
of age, Nazis always remained young and their revolution youthful, imbued
with intrepidity and elan. Theirs was a revolution that destroyed the corrup-
tion, betrayal, and complacency of an old “decrepit” generation whose resis-
tance to new ideas was destroying the healthy nation.32
However, the fascist cult of youth was inherently contradictory. Fascism
needed the image of youthful energy, and hence the involvement of the mil-
itant young, not only to legitimize itself as a rebirth of nation and society
but also to renew itself for the next generation. The danger was that at some
point in the future this youthful militancy might be channeled into resis-
tance to fascism, taking it in directions the leadership did not want it to go.
This is what happened in Fascist Italy, where the Fascist Party’s self-image as
a movement of the young clashed with its increasing conservatism after 1922
and the emergence of a second generation of fascists impatient to return to
revolutionary fascist principles. Looking with disdain at the bureaucratic and
authoritarian attitudes of the official fascist youth organizations, young in-
tellectuals from the Novismo group, calling for the free play of fascist ideas,
sought the “transformation of the regime into a universal movement, inspired
by the values of youth.” Returning to the principles of 1919 would be a first
step in recapturing the initial dynamism of fascism, which appeared “dis-
tinctly lacking in the ranks of a generation grown old and flabby in power.”33
But the solutions offered by the party reinforced conformity, creating a co-
hort of young party activists “full of their own self-importance.” The party
theorist Guiseppe Bottai confessed that the party’s youth groups were a bu-
reaucratic deformation contrary to “youth’s heightened spirit of subversion,”
while other commentators pointed out that because these youth groups dis-
couraged independent ideas, many young fascists lacked both the character
and the training to think for themselves. According to the young fascist jour-
nalist Romano Bilenchi, even idealistic young fascists had become apathetic
toward fascist ideology, instead favoring ambition devoid of principle. Italian
 354 Conclusion

youth, Bilenchi wrote, “couldn’t care less” about theoretical discussions and
had “forged a new, rather more convenient ‘so what’ attitude, so that ‘getting
into a position not to care about anything’ has become the fashionable goal.”34
A similar problem existed in the Nazi Party. While the history of youth
resistance to Nazism from within in its own ranks in the late 1930s and early
1940s is well-known, prior to 1933 there were also numerous youth challenges
to party authority, especially after 1925, when the party hierarchy deviated
ever more from its original radical social program. In a letter to Hitler of 22
May 1925 from the leader of one regional Nazi youth branch, its members
pointed out that they had formally requested permission to join the German
Communist Party, so unhappy were they with the conservative socioeco-
nomic agenda the Nazi Party had adopted. Rejecting the distinction between
Jewish and non-Jewish capital, the youth leader stressed the international di-
mension of the party’s struggle against capitalism: “We must become a real
workers’ party, or the whole movement will fail. Does the National Social-
ist German Workers’ Party know that rapacious capital can only be fought
on an international basis, that the ‘breaking of interest slavery’ can only be
solved by international rules? How then do our aims differ from those of the
communists?”35
The position of men and women in the new fascist society was another
ideological aspect that exposed the ideological tensions underneath the pub-
lic discourse. Officially, fascist ideologues aimed to return to a warrior soci-
ety of male action and women adhering to their “natural” role as wives and
mothers. In Italy, the ideas of the futurist writer F. T. Marianetti had had an
important influence on early fascist thinking. On the one hand, Marianetti
argued that marriage was “an enemy of each and every daring heroism.” He
condemned the “rampant stupidity” of women and the “devoted imbecility”
of men, which led, in his opinion to the “sterility of the race.” In the name
of the Italian race and a virile futurist Italy, he demanded “ardent males and
inseminated females.” Paradoxically, the futurists’ disdain for bourgois mar-
ried life and advocacy of free love also liberated women from matrimonial
obligations which, according to Marianetti, had reduced them to the status of
prostitutes.36 For their part, female futurists like Valerie St. Point lauded the
militant role played by female queens, princesses, Amazons, warriors, and
rulers throughout the centuries, urging women to emulate them. She even
proposed getting rid of the categories of male and female.37 This ambiguity
was inherent in the Fascist Party. The early Italian Fascist Party had sup-
ported the cause of female suffrage and the right of women to hold office and
had encouraged women to pursue careers. This situation began to change in
the late 1920s. With economic depression and a perceived need to increase the
size of the population, Fascist Italy introduced a range of policies to encour-
 Conclusion  355

age women to leave work, return to the home, and produce more children.
From the beginning of the 1930s onward, female employment was restricted,
and preference for employment in the public sector was increasingly given to
men. A law of 1939 restricted women’s employment to 10 percent of the work-
force in private and state industry.38
The popular narrative also changed. By 1934, there were regular attacks
on working women. As far as Mussolini was concerned, working women
were not only in danger of becoming men and denying their maternal role
but were also the main cause of male unemployment, thus depriving the Ital-
ian man of his virility. In his 1938 study of the politics of the family, the so-
ciologist Ferdinando Loffredo neatly summed up the regime’s attitude to
female emancipation: “The woman who leaves her domestic surroundings to
go to work even when it is not completely necessary; the promiscuous woman
who goes around the streets, on trains, on buses with a man, who lives in fac-
tories, in offices, must become an object of scorn even more than she should
become an object of legal prohibition.”39 Although all working women were
criticized, educated and intellectual women were particularly attacked.40 In
response to this unpopularity, party propagandists sought to increase the ap-
peal of the sanctions on female employment and education among women,
especially female students, by framing them in the language of female eman-
cipation. Italian women were truly liberated, Manlio Pompei argued, because
unlike modern career women in the United States or Europe, their life in the
home meant that they were not slaves to fashion or in danger of becoming
“brainless mannequins.”41 But the promotion of domesticity was not success-
ful. Women did not have more babies, and the number of women entering the
professions increased, no matter how modestly.
The figure of the virile, aggressive new man who would be both the van-
guard and the protector of the fascist revolution was similarly problematic.
Fascist ideologues saw in the new man a symbol of the facist revolution who
would destroy bourgeois values. For Stelio Bonavita, fascism had created “new
men of courage, fearless and tough, for whom dedication to the cause is not
an act of servility but of strength, in which the supreme good is not the ‘con-
tentment’ of the bourgeois man, but something more lasting, stronger, more
profound.”42 In the beginning the fascist new man was personified in the Ital-
ian Squadistri. Mario Carlo wrote that with his “ardent-proud guileless eyes,”
his “sensual and energetic mouth ready to kiss with passion, sing out sweetly
and command imperiously,” and his “sober-virile athletic elegance,” this man
was ready to “run, fight, escape, dance, and arouse a crowd.”43 By the 1930s,
fascist leaders had crushed such talk. The Italian fascist Blackshirt would no
longer be talked about in such sensual terms. By the middle of the 1920s, the
government had placed levies on Italian bachelors, with politicians like Carlo
 356 Conclusion

Sforza identifying the Fascist Party as an “irresistible moral force” that would
declare war on all those who “desert the marital bed” and did not use their
potential power to have children.44
What was true for the Italian Fascist Party was even more so for the Nazi
Party. After taking power in 1933, it introduced new regulations to restrict
the number of women who could attend universities and effectively excluded
women from positions in government. In the labor market, too, it attempted
to reduce the number of female employees; marriage loans and family allow-
ances were designed to encourage them to return to the home. These plans
collided with the demands of economics since by the middle of the 1930s the
state was short of workers. In the period between 1933 and 1945 the numbers
of women in full-time employment rose steadily. Subsequently, the German
Labor Front began to extol the benefits of female labor.45
Given the important role women had played in the Nazi Party’s years of
struggle, leading Nazis were alive to the need to frame calls for a return to
female domesticity in the language of militancy, just as Italian fascists had.
At a party rally of 1939, for example, Hitler compared women’s “struggle” to
bring children into the world to men’s struggle on the battlefield. In their
war against the excesses of high fashion, along with attacking it for distract-
ing women from their maternal and marital role, party ideologues also as-
sailed it for trivializing women. They favorably contrasted the seriousness of
Nazi women with their “decadent and overly delicate” Weimar-era predeces-
sors.46 The Nazi regime championed a new kind of German woman, athletic
and healthy, while some Nazi leaders on the social revolutionary wing of the
party championed the ideal of feminine independence. Josef Goebbels, for
one, launched a series of attacks against the provincial “bed-sniffing” atti-
tudes of conservatives in the party, who, he complained, wanted to organize
the lives of German women according to the rules of “community life in a
nunnery” rather than a modern state. German women should have the free-
dom to smoke, drink, go out unchaperoned, dress up, and bob their hair.47
Nazi women themselves also organized resistance to the regime’s conser-
vative policies. In 1934, a prominent group of Nazi feminists wrote an open
letter in protest to Hitler, with one, Irmgard Reichenau, harshly criticizing
the “unilateral male domination” of the new Germany and the valorization
of women’s maternal role. In spite of all the rhetoric, she wrote, the new la-
bor laws effectively ended women’s participation in public life. “By excluding
women from all influential and intellectually demanding posts, one automat-
ically brands her as something inferior and of minor status. No amount of
glorification can disguise that.”48
As in fascist Italy, the idea of a new man was also integral to Nazi ideol-
ogy. Since the late nineteenth century, German völkisch leaders had dreamed
 Conclusion  357

of building a martial society, the Männerbund, in which the values of ca-

maraderie, heroism, and male friendship would be dominant. The idea of a
male society gained added legitimacy in the völkisch community as a result
of the close bonds German soldiers had formed during the First World War
and in the postwar nationalist Freikorp paramilitary units, not least because
First World War and Freikorp veterans formed a significant proportion of
the Nazi Party in the early 1920s. Party ideologues combined this with the
Männerbund ideal as the basis for their new state: the Männerstaat. In this,
they saw historical precedence. Heinrich Himmler was just one who argued
that throughout its history, German society had been organized on the basis
of male camaraderie. Some leading Nazi ideologues went as far as to sug-
gest that the Männerbund ideal superceded the family unit. In 1934 Alfred
Bäumler, the director of the Political Institute at the University of Berlin, ar-
gued that the Männerbund was a superior form of social organization since it
liberated men from the harmful influence of bourgeois conventionality. The
Nazis, Bäumler wrote, needed to create a male society separate from women
in which men could assert their masculinity; without a state built on the prin-
ciples of male friendship, men would inevitably sink into philistinism and
eroticism. Should Germany desire to be great again, it would need to return
to this kind of societal organization.49
Nazi officials were alarmed. In the same year Bäumler wrote his study,
Heinrich Himmler and Richard Heydrich both warned of an overmasculin-
ization of the party, with Himmler going as far as to suggest that the party
had trodden the path to homosexuality. The party’s leading feminists also
sensed danger: Lydia Gottschewski complained that the party was increas-
ingly becoming an “eroticized Männerbund,” adding that it had adopted a
“woman-hating direction.”50 This conflict highlighted a contradiction at the
heart of National Socialism and fascist movements generally. Fascism, with
its anti-bourgeois ideology, railed against the “limited aspirations, the feeble-
ness, and the mediocre inspiration bourgeois family life can offer the indi-
vidual.” At the same time as fascists upheld the virtues of masculine vigor
and male camraderie, however, they also wished to return to the ideals of
the patriarchal family unit, which, they contended, had been undermined by
liberalism. But their ideology of virile struggle and rebellion against bour-
geois respectability militated against the stability of family life. Conflict was
inevitable.
Finally, fascism, with its emphasis on suffering and martyrdom, was
steeped in the imagery of religion. In fascist ideology the state was the “im-
manent spirit of the nation” that linked the living with the “names of those
who have died for its existence.” Mussolini argued that fascism was a religion
and a “living faith” that espoused “holiness and heroism.” The fascist, he ex-
 358 Conclusion

plained, conceived of life as “duty and struggle and conquest.” Like the lives
of medieval ascetics, the fascist’s existence should be “serious, austere, reli-
gious.”51 The idea of fascism as a secular state religion was institutionalized
in numerous fascist ceremonies, from funeral services for fallen comrades to
swearing-in ceremonies mimicking religious ritual and liturgy. Italian fas-
cists spoke of the “rejuvenating and fecundating blood of martyrs,” and the
dead militia man was raised to the position of a saint and hero, his blood giv-
ing life to the nation and feeding its rebirth.52 Nevertheless, the idea of fas-
cism as a new religion went beyond rhetoric and became an integral part of
the state’s value system. In the late 1920s, for example, Mussolini’s son Vit-
torio established a School of Fascist Mysticism that aimed to educate the next
generation of fascist officials and leaders in the principles of fascist religion.
How deeply ingrained it became in state and party mythology was illustrated
at the Museum of the Fascist Revolution. The climactic room in the museum,
the “Martyrs’ Sanctuary,” consisted of a crypt commemorating fascism’s
martyrs. Illuminated in blue light, the young architects Libera and Antonio
Valente had erected a cupola with the word “Present!” at its center a crucifix
with the fascist oath: “For the immortal homeland.” Along the bottom of the
cupola were arranged the pennants of the Squadristi, each bearing the name
of a fallen fascist martyr from whom a new squad had emerged. This symbol-
ized the ever-present nature of the dead Squadistri martyrs among the living,
both fascist citizens and comrades.53 This cult of martyrdom and sacrifice
was also reflected in the posthumous poems of fascist Squadristi and students
glorifying sacrifice and martyrdom and the bloody death in the cause of the
Fascist revolution.54
Simultaneously, Giuseppe Bottai’s conception of fascism as a means of
continuing the struggle of the First World War and using its spirit as the basis
of a secular religion meant aggression was also a central element of the ideol-
ogy. The violent activities of the fascist Squadistri—whose bloody, dripping
bandages were emblazoned with the motto “Me ne frego!”—were framed in
the language of moral purification, cleansing the national body of contami-
nation and degeneration. Violence, Mussolini argued, was not only utilitar-
ian, achieving for fascism in forty-eight hours what otherwise could only
have been achieved in “forty years of preaching and propaganda.” It could
also be morally sanctioned when it was systematic and in the service of a
cause, in this case national and political regeneration. “When our violence is
resolving a gangrenous situation,” he said in a speech of 1919, “it is moral, sac-
rosanct, and necessary.”55
Nazi Germany also produced a pantheon of martyrs and its own civic
religion, making use of the iconography of religion and biblical allusions to
sacrifice, martyrdom, and resurrection. It created a series of rituals and cer-
 Conclusion  359

emonies honoring Nazi martyrs such as Horst Wessel and Herbert Norkus.
As in Fascist Italy, countless books were produced to commemorate the litany
of immortal Nazi martyrs. In their memory, party members were instructed
to “live, to sacrifice, and, when it is necessary, to die!” for the principles of
National Socialism.56 The most important day in the Nazi calendar was 9 No-
vember, when the party commemorated the “Immortals” who had perished
for the party in 1923 at Feldherrnhalle, described as a “station in the Ger-
manic passion.” In 1933 a temple was built to house the bodies of the martyrs,
which were reburied there in a solemn ceremony.57
While partly instrumentalist, the Nazi cult of martyrdom also reflected
notions about death and sacrifice shared more widely by committed National
Socialists, such as soldiers in the German army. Karl Nitsche, a young Su-
deten factory worker and aspiring writer, enlisted for the German army, de-
claring in a letter to his local newspaper that although “I am still very young
. . . I know very well what is at stake today, and I know too that we will all
postpone everything for our Greater Germany and our victory.” Just twenty
when he died, his biographer Josef Schneider noted, he had “sacrificed his life
for immortal Germany,” but his posthumously published collection of po-
etry would be a “living monument,” allowing him to exist beyond the grave.
Nitsche’s poetry itself was shot through with allusions to death and sacri-
fice. In a poem about the battle at Wyszogrod, he wrote of the bloody corpses
of soldiers in rivers who “fight and perish for the Führer and Reich” with
“blood on their lips,” their faces bleached. “In Wyszogrod, in Wyszogrod /
death rages!”58
Fascism held out the promise of a spiritual as well as political revolution
for a Europe sinking in a sea of immorality. In his novel Gilles (1939) Drieu La
Rochelle’s eponymous protagonist complained that Europe was “slowly going
to rack and ruin, devastated by war, alcoholism, venereal diseases,” and towns
full of “cinemas and cafés, brothels, newspapers, stock exchanges, political
parties, and army barracks.” Paris, in particular, had become a center for “bo-
hemian intellectuals, fast livers, male homosexuals, the paintings of Picasso
. . . music halls, casinos on the beach, Catholic novelists,” and Jews.59 Fascism
aimed to sweep away this urban degeneracy and morally renew the nation.
But this was easier said than done, since moral renewal could easily be mis-
construed as bourgeois respectability. This was the scenario that threatened
in Fascist Italy. Ideologues such as Corrado Petrone conceded that the regime
had to protect “private and political morals,” but they also increasingly com-
plained in the 1930s about the emergence of a strain of puritanism in public
life. Regardless of whether fascism had a spiritual dimension, Petrone argued,
it was above all a “magnificent and hazardous adventure” governed by one
moral alone: heroism. Italians did not need to be educated in the values of
 360 Conclusion

servility, pedantry, and small-minded puritanism. Instead, they should ide-

alize courage, “ardent youth,” beauty, “virile virtue,” love, friendship, and ge-
nius. Moral hygiene negated all these ideas, including the spirit of sacrifice
inherent to fascism.60
Nazi Germany faced similar ideological contradictions. While the Nazi
Party was committed to ridding Germany of the “degenerate” morals it as-
sociated with the urban Jewish cosmopolitian spirit, it scorned bourgeois
moral concerns, including those of the Catholic Church.61 In a speech of 1934
to party workers, Josef Goebbels went as far as to complain that a few people
wanted “not only to stipulate and determine the great moral principles gov-
erning our national life but also over and above that to dictate the private
individual’s code of purely personal views,” in effect forming some kind of
“chastity committees” and turning Germany into a “wilderness of carping
and hypocrisy.” He insisted that the National Socialist state should aim to
bring joy to people’s lives if it expected sacrifices from them: a city of four
million people, he reasoned, could not be “administered from the perspec-
tive of bourgeois morality.”62 How this radical anti-moralistic stance might
be synthesized with the party’s struggle against degenerate values was never
explained. Nevertheless, it was on the basis of these often contradictory and
frequently problematic cultural and social ideas that national revolution was
to be forged, the ultimate aim of all fascist movements.

THE USTASHA REGIME AND NATIONAL REVOLUTION

The Ustasha movement shared many of these fascist visions and similarly
used cultural politics in the pursuit of national regeneration. The movement’s
activists always insisted that the events of 10 April 1941 constituted a national
revolution. That day marked not only the date on which the Croatian nation
had been liberated from the chains of an oppressive and artificial Yugoslav
state but also the beginning of a new epoch in which Croatian writers, art-
ists, and intellectuals would free themselves from a foreign culture, and the
Ustasha regime would liberate the nation from an alien mentality. In place of
degenerate liberalism, capitalism, and parliamentary democracy, it aimed to
construct a truly independent nation-state and a new revolutionary national-
ist culture through the purification and eradication of all poisonous cultural
and social influences and the removal—through extermination, expulsion,
and forced assimilation—of those populations it deemed responsible for
these unwanted cultural “invasions.” Cultural politics, in all its forms, played
a central role in the construction and legitimation of the national revolution.
The construction of an anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist society; the creation
of a new Ustasha warrior man and maternal woman; the cleansing of national
society from moral degeneracy; the founding of a new secular state religion
 Conclusion  361

based on martyrdom, sacrifice, and rebirth, binding the nation together; and
a cult of youth in which the energy, dynamism, and fanaticism of the young,
as well as the aesthetics of youth, would be harnessed in the cause of national
revolution: these were to be the foundations of the Independent State of Croa-
tia under the Ustasha regime. Cultural politics would form an integral part of
the project for national regeneration, while legitimizing both the regime and
the national revolution it had brought into being.
The functional role that cultural politics played under the Ustasha regime
not just in creating popular legitimacy for the regime but in mobilizing sup-
port for its campaign of mass murder meant that the direction of cultural
policies was not only shaped by racial politics and the regime’s campaign of
mass murder and persecution but was also destined to be contentious, con-
tested, and subject to adaptation and change. In the same way that political
pressures from above and below, as well as practical considerations, forced
frequent adaptations in the regime’s policies toward the Serbs (although not
the Jews and gypsies), so the regime was also forced to modify many of its
cultural and social policies too. The new soft line in race and culture therefore
emerged symbiotically. As with the regime’s Serb policy, the soft line in cul-
ture exposed sharp divisions and, later, resentments within the movement.
The four years of Ustasha rule were characterized by a series of internal power
struggles among rival factions vying for influence and dominance. This fac-
tionalism was reflected in the shifting and often contradictory nature of Usta-
sha cultural policy, which veered from utopian radicalism to conservative
retrenchment and back again. In its first six months, the regime embarked
on a national, racial, social, and cultural program that aimed at the complete
transformation of life in Croatia. By autumn 1941, when the catastrophic ef-
fects of the campaign of mass murder and national revolution had brought
the state nearly to collapse, the leadership, under pressure from its Italian
and German allies and from within the Ustasha movement itself, moved in
a more “moderate” direction. Marginalizing the pugnacious working-class
émigré elite and bolstered by its intellectual, moderate faction, it attempted
to introduce a wider diversity of opinion into the regime, giving greater influ-
ence to the moderate faction and bringing intellectuals, artists, experts, and
bureaucrats into state ministries, regime agencies, and cultural organizations
who had never been Ustasha movement members or even members of nation-
alist organizations.
Moderation brought its own problems. Disillusionment within the ranks
of the movement set in early, and resistance became widespread. The re-
gime’s effective abandonment of its campaign of mass murder and depor-
tation against the Serbs in the autumn of 1941 and the superceding of the
“revolution of blood” with a “second” cultural revolution to make the na-
 362 Conclusion

tion “cultured” were rejected by many activists in the movement who simply
ignored the change in leadership direction and continued as if nothing had
changed. This was exhibited both from “below” by many grassroots activists
and militia members and from “above” by regional Ustasha leaders and com-
manders; it detrimentally affected the success of the regime in seeking a rap-
prochement with the Serb community that it had formerly persecuted. There
was also discontent among the regime’s young cultural officials and artists re-
garding the new moderate course in the cultural field, especially among those
who identified with the movement’s radical faction and resented the abrupt
termination of their ambitious and utopian cultural projects.
There was also generational dissent, manifested in growing discord in the
ranks of revolutionary students regarding the regime’s cultural and social
politics. Many Ustasha students, although by no means all, became increas-
ingly frustrated with both the ideological conservatism of the regime and, at
the same time, its dogmatism and hostility to new ideas. They expressed im-
patience to have influence on state policy. From the beginning of 1943 onward
they became vocal in their criticisms. They presented the regime hierarchy
with a list of complaints about growing corruption in public life, the failure of
the regime to enact the social revolution it had promised, the dull regimenta-
tion of university life, and the onerous nature of their military duty. Although
committed supporters of the regime and in no sense “liberal,” conscious of
their position as the embryonic Ustasha elite, they were full of heretical uto-
pian ideas about a future state in which state ideology would be dominated
not by discussions about national and religious identity, but by a much wider
and more complex conception of social relations. This was especially true of
the Plug group of students. Yet while their ideas provoked fierce criticism,
censure, and—over time—suppression from above, in the form of hardline
regime officials and student commissars as well as more ideologically fanati-
cal students, they were also the focus of attacks from below by younger, zeal-
ous Ustasha Youth activists who interpreted the complaints of the students as
evidence of insufficient idealistic commitment.
There were also problems with younger, actively revolutionary women in
the movement. They came to resent what they perceived as a lack of status in
public life, actively challenging the assumptions of older, more conservative
female officials that their appointed role was to marry and have children. As
with the soft line on the Serbs that began to take shape in February 1942 and
was abruptly halted in the summer of 1944, the new line on culture was never
more than a strategic and contingent pause. Like the evolution of the Ustasha
regime’s policy intiative toward the Serb “problem,” the new cultural politics
of the “revolution of the soul” was only ever partially applied: even during the
 Conclusion  363

period of more consensual cultural politics and the campaign for “cultured”
values, there was plenty of radicalism both on and just under the surface. By
the middle of 1944, racial, cultural, and social life under the Ustasha regime
had returned to its original revolutionary principles. With the relaunch of the
regime’s campaign of annihilation against aliens, foreigners, and the enemy
within, many utopian cultural projects that had long been abandoned were
also relaunched with a vengeance.
For the Ustasha regime cultural politics was a key element in remaking
society in the image of the national revolution. As such, the fortunes of ra-
cial politics and cultural politics closely mirrored each other. Additionally,
cultural politics served a clear instrumentalist function, providing a means
through which to legitimize the existence of the regime and popularize its
policies, in particular its campaign for the purification of society from all un-
wanted national and racial groups, socially negative practices, and moral de-
generacy. In the persona of the new Ustasha warrior man and the cult of the
Croatian mother, traditional gender roles corrupted by twenty years of lib-
eralism and Yugoslavism could be restored. Similarly, the mass ceremonies
and rituals of mourning and commemoration to remember the sacrifices of
the Ustasha movement aimed to mobilize the population behind the regime’s
campaign of mass murder. However, cultural politics was not exclusively
functionalist: it also reflected the thinking, at particular times, of the regime,
its ideologues, its activists, and its supporters, demonstrating the ideological
divisions and personal and professional rivalries within the movement and
the ways in which these shifted over time. Ultimately, though, cultural poli-
tics served to communicate the Ustasha regime’s ideas about race and society
to a wider audience: it reproduced not only the way individuals and groups
within the regime perceived the world but the manner in which they wanted
it to be presented.
Examining cultural politics under the Ustasha regime provides an im-
portant insight into its worldview in all its complexity. Yet such an examina-
tion does not mean obscuring or ignoring the terror it perpetrated. Even if
such a dubious aim were desirable, it would be impossible. As this book has
illustrated, the regime’s cultural and racial politics, epitomized in its cam-
paigns of mass murder, deportation, persecution, and forced assimilation,
were inextricably linked to wider cultural politics in a variety of ways. Thus,
the study of Ustasha cultural politics in fact helps to explain and illuminate
the terror. In order to better understand the Ustasha regime—especially its
murderous policies—it is necessary to see it from the inside out, as George
Mosse advocated. The Ustashas were not merely a savage horde of sadistic
young men. Many of the movement’s activists and ideologues, and even its
 364 Conclusion

militia and death-squad commanders and footsoldiers, believed they were

ushering in a better society in which the Croatian nation would not only re-
gain its independence after centuries of enslavement but be saved from decay
and degeneration. Under Ustasha eyes, visions of annihilation were repro-
duced as fantasies of regeneration.
 NOTES

The following abbreviations are used in the notes for frequently cited sources.

AJ Arhiv Jugoslavije OPA Optužnica Pavelić-Artuković

ANDH Arhiv Nezavisne Države OZDZ Odeljak za državnu zaštitu
Hrvatske
PVNDH Presedništvo vlade NDH
AVI Arhiv vojničke istorije
RSUP Republički sekretarijat
BH Banovina Hrvatska unutrašnjih poslova
BVBH Banska vlast Banovine Hrvatske SRH Socijalistička Republika
GRP Glavno ravnateljstvo za Hrvatska
promičbu UHOP Ustaša—hrvatski oslobodilački
GUS Glavni Ustaški Stan pokret

GUZ Glavni udružbeni zapisnik UM Ustaška mladež

HDA Hrvatski državni arhiv UMin Ured Ministarstva

HIS Hrvatska izvještajna služba UNS Ustaška nadzorna služba

JT Javno tužilaštvo USS Ustaški sveučilisni stožer

MNP Ministarstvo narodne prosvjete UZP Ured za promičbu

MUP Ministarstvo unutrašnje poslove VA Vojnički arhiv

MZ Ministarstvo zdravlja ZDS Zapovijedništvo državna

savezničara
NARA National Archives and Records
Administration, Washington, ZKRZ Zemaljska komisija za utvrdi-
D.C. vanje ratnih zločina okupatora i
njihovih pomogača
NDH Nezavisna Država Hrvatska
ZŠ Zbirka štampata

365
 366  Notes to Pages 1–3

INTRODUCTION
1. “Zagrebački zbor kao ogledalo hrvatskog gospodarskog života,” Nova Hrvatska, 7
June 1942.
2. “Zagrebački zbor kao ogledalo hrvatskog gospodarskog života”; “Njihov prijašni rad
bila je politika—sadašnja naša politika jest rad,” Hrvatski narod, 9 Sept. 1942. Although
significant numbers of anti-fascist Croatians and Muslims (as well as other persecuted
groups, such as homosexuals and freemasons) were incarcerated or killed in Jasenovac
and other concentration camps, the vast majority of victims came from the three
previously mentioned groups.
3. Mijo Bzik, Ustaški pogledi (Zagreb: Glavni ravnateljstva za promičba, 1944), 18.
4. “Sreći ti Božić i nova godine hrvatski narode!” Ustaša, Dec. 1940, 1.
5. Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (London: Everyman’s
Library, 1992), 176, 347.
6. Hanns Johst, Schlageter (Munich: Albert Langen, 1934), 26.
7. Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 133;
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 37.
8. The classic works are Ladislaus Hory and Martin Broszat, Der kroatische Ustascha-
Staat, 1941–1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsches Verlags Anstalt, 1965); Fikreta Jelić-Butić, Ustaše
i Nezavisna Država Hrvatska (Zagreb: Liber, 1977); and Bogdan Krizman, Ante Pavelić i
Ustaše (Zagreb: Globus, 1978). English-language studies include Jozo Tomasevich, War
and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration (Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 2002); and Tomislav Dulić, Utopias of Nation: Local Mass Killing in
Bosnia and Hercegovina, 1941–1942 (Uppsala: University of Uppsala Press, 2005).
9. There are some notable exceptions. See, e.g., Stanko Lašić, Krležologija ili povijest
kritičke misli o Miroslavu Krleži: Miroslav Krleža i Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, 10.
4. 1941 - 8. 5. 1945, vol. 3 (Zagreb: Globus, 1989); Marko Samardžija, Hrvatski jezik u
Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatske (Zagreb: Hrvatska sveučilišna naklada, 1992); Samardžija,
Jezični purizam u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj (Zagreb: Hrvatska sveučilišna naklada,
1993); Fadil Ademović, Novinstvo i ustaška propaganda u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj:
Stampa i radio u Bosna i Hercegovina, 1941–1945 (Sarajevo: Media Centar, 2000); Nada
Kišić-Kolanović, “Islamska varijanta u morfologiji kulture Nezavisne Države Hrvatske,
1941–1945 god.,” Časopis za suvremene povijest 39, no. 1 (2007): 63–95; Trpimir Macan,
Spremnost, 1942–1945 (Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska, 1998); Zdenka Turcinec, “Cenzura u
Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj,” Vjesnik bibliotekara Hrvatske, 3: 2000.
10. See, e.g., Ana Antić, “Fascism under Pressure: Influence of Marxist Discourse on
the Ideological Redefinition of the Croatian Fascist Movement, 1941–1944,” East European
Politics and Societies 24 (Feb. 2010): 116–58; Hrvoje Klašić, “Društveni život u Sisku u
vrijeme drugog svjetskog rata,” Časopis za suvremene povijest 3, no. 32 (2000): 527–45;
Branimir Donat, Društvo žrtovanih hrvatskih pjesnika (Zagreb: Dom, 1998); Dubravko
Jelčić, “Kulturni život u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj,” Časopis za suvremene povijest 27,
no. 3 (1995): 521–27; Nikola Barić and Vladimir Geiger, “Odjeci i obiljezovanja 5 prosinca
1918 u Nezavisne Države Hrvatske,” Časopis za suvremene povijest 34, no. 3 (2002): 833–52.
11. Useful discussions of the cultural approach to the history of fascism include Ze’ev
 Notes to Pages 3–12  367

Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution,
trans. David Maisel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); George Mosse,
“Introduction: The Genesis of Fascism,” Journal of Contemporary History 1, no. 1 (1966):
1–13; Roger Griffin, “The Primacy of Culture: The Current Growth (or Manufacture)
of Consensus within Fascist Studies,” Journal of Contemporary History 37, no. 1 (2002):
21–43.
12. Sergio Luzzatto, “The Political Culture of Fascist Italy,” History and Theory 8, no. 2,
(1999): 317–35.
13. George Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Towards a General Theory of Fascism (New
York: Howard Fertig, 1999), x–xii.
14. Julije Makanec, “Evropski okvir hrvatske politike,” in Hrvatski vidici: Nacionalno-
politički eseji (Zagreb: Hrvatska školska knjiga, 1944), 18–23.
15. T. S. Eliot, Notes towards a Definition of Culture (London: Faber, 1948), 31.
16. Aleksa Djilas, The Contested Country: Yugoslav Unity and Communist Revolution,
1919–1953 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 115.
17. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (London: Polity Press, 1989), 91–92.
18. Historians of the Ustasha movement in the 1930s have not been able to agree on the
date of its foundation. Cf. James J. Sadkovich, “Italian Support for Croatian Separatism,
1927–1937” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1987); and Mario Jareb, Ustaško-
domobranski pokret od nastanka do travnja 1941. godine (Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 2006).
19. The Ustasha Principles are discussed in more detail in Danijel Crljen, Načela
hrvatskog ustaškog pokreta (Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska, 1942).
20. Jelka Pogorelec, Tajne emigrantskih zločina (Zagreb: Novosti, 1933), esp. 25–30.
21. Vladko Maček, In the Struggle for Freedom, trans. Elizabeth and Stjepan Gaži (New
York: Robert Speller and Sons, 1957), 230.
22. Aleksandar Žibrat, “Ein illegaler Ustascha berichtet,” Deutsche Zeitung in Kroatien,
10 Apr. 1942.
23. John J. Meilly, “The Ustaše Coup D’Etat: Report to the USA Secretary of State,”
Zagreb, 13 June 1941, HDA, NDH, NARA, 850H.00/1309/544.
24. See, e.g., “Ulicama oslobodjenog Zagrebu,” Hrvatski narod, 10 Apr. 1941;
“Zagrepčani su sudjelovali u svečanim časovima,” Hrvatski narod, 11 Apr. 1941.
25. A detailed description of the structure of the Ustasha state is provided in Rafael
Landikušić, Priručnik o političkoj i sudbenoj podjeli Nezavisne Države Hrvatske (Zagreb:
Vlastita naklada, 1942). See also Ferdo Čulinović, “Organizacija vlasti i oružane snage u
‘Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj,’” Vojnoistorijski glasnik 3, no. 19 (1968): 136–38; Jelić-
Butić, Ustaše i Nezavisna Država Hrvatska (Zagreb: Liber, 1978), 25–26; Jelić-Butić,
“Prilog proučavanje djelatnosti ustaša do 1941,” Časopis za suvremene povijest 1, nos. 1–2
(1969): 62.
26. “Van s njima!” Ustaša, 19 July 1941, 1; “Zakonska odredba o nadopuni zakonske
odredbe o prijekim sudovima od 17 svibnja 1941 i zakonske odredbe o pokretnom
prijekom sudu od 24 lipnja 1941,” Narodne novine, 10 July 1941. See also, e.g., the order
from the Ustasha police in Zagreb of 14 Sept. 1941 that there was to be no walking on the
streets after 9 p.m., with all bars, cinemas, and theaters to be closed and concerts to be
finished by that time; HDA, NDH, ZŠ, 102.10/104.36.
 368  Notes to Pages 12–18

27. See, e.g., Vladimir Radić, “Tri susreta s Poglavnikom,” Hrvatski narod, 1 July 1941;
Milica Devčić-Radić, “Temelji Države Hrvatske i seljačka politika,” Hrvatski narod, 1
Nov. 1941; Marija Radić Vladimirova, “U tuđini,” Božićnica, 1942, 203.
28. See, e.g., the applications of June–Aug. 1941 from local Croatian Peasant
Party branches in Brod, Radovani, Petravlija, and Nova Slanka to formally join
the Ustasha movement: HDA, NDH, HIS, 2400-3199/3/2478/49; HDA, NDH, HIS,
31/9961/1503-1995/1911/1912; HDA, NDH, HIS, 31/9961/1925; HDA, NDH, MUP, 1036-
10296/304/223/6641.
29. See, e.g., the letter of 23 Aug. 1941 from representatives of thirty-three hundred
workers from the Brod branch of the Croatian Workers’ Union pledging their loyalty to
the new state: HDA, NDH, HIS, 31/9961/1925.
30. See, e.g., the order from Marijan Nikšić, Zagreb police chief, 8 May 1941, HDA,
NDH, ZŠ, 102.10/109.20; and the order from Slavko Kvaternik, 7 June 1941, HDA, NDH,
ZŠ, 102.10/103.144. A similar order was also issued by Božidar Gregl, Ustasha police chief
in Varaždin, 12 July 1941, HDA, NDH, ZŠ, 102.10/unnumbered.
31. See, e.g., the order from the director of the Ustasha police in Varaždin, 15 June 1941,
HDA, NDH, ZŠ, 102.10/99.115.
32. See, e.g., the warning from the Ustasha adjutant in Doboj, 25 June 1941, HDA,
NDH, ZŠ, 102.10/ 474.1941.
33. See, e.g., “Židovi u bivšoj Jugoslaviji,” Hrvatski branik, 10 May 1941; “Križevački
židovi pozvani na rad,” Novi list, 1 July 1941.
34. “Zakonska odredba o rasnoj pripadnosti,” XLV-67 Z., Narodne novine, 30 Apr. 1941.
35. “Triumfalan put stožernika dr. Viktora Gutića u Sanski Most,” Hrvatska krajina, 30
May 1941.
36. “Uredit ćemo ova država kako propisuju ustaška načela,” Hrvatski narod, 6 June
1941; “Značajan politički govor ministra dra Lorkovića,” Hrvatski narod, 28 July 1941.
37. “Nove Hrvatske i o onima koji mute u inozemstvu,” Novi list, 3 June 1941.
38. “Doglavnik dr. Budak o seljačkog politici Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj,” Novi list,
4 Aug. 1941.
39. “O Srbima i četničkom bandama,” Vihor, 7 Sept. 1941.
40. “Uredit ćemo ova država kako propisuju ustaška načela.”
41. “Značajan politički govor ministra dra Lorkovića.”
42. “Dosje Vladimira Zidovca, poslanika NDH u Sofiju, Zapisnici sa saslušanja,” HDA,
SDS-RSUP, SRH, 013. 0.56; testimony of Ljubo Miloš, 20 May 1946, HDA, JT, SRH, OPA,
128.1421.
43. “Poslije osam i pol stoljeća uskrsla je nova Hrvatska,” Hrvatski narod, 14 Apr. 1941.
44. A., “Posjet Stožernika dr. Viktora Gutića Franjevačkom samostanu na Petrićevcu,”
Hrvatska krajina, 14 May 1941.
45. “Stožernik dr. Viktor Gutić dobio je naročite pohvale sa Najvišeg mjesta za svoj
dosadašnji rad,” Hrvatska krajina, 28 May 1941.
46. On the Ustasha campaign of mass murder, see, e.g., Danilo Tunguz Perović,
Stradanje Srba u Hercegovini za vreme Nezavisne Države Hrvatske (Novi Sad: Dobriša
knjiga, 2006); Nikola Živković and Petar Kačavenda, eds., Srbi u Nezavisnoj Državi
Hrvatskoj (Belgrade: Institut za savremenu istoriju, 1998); Vladimir Dedijer and Antun
 Notes to Pages 18–25  369

Miletić, eds., Proterivanje Stradanje Srba sa ognjišta, 1941–1945: Svedočanstva (Belgrade:

Rad, 1989).
47. On the fate of Serb children under the Ustasha regime and the establishment of
children’s camps generally, see, e.g., Petar Stanivuković, Dece logorima smrti (Belgrade:
Rad, 1988); Dragoje Lukić, Deca na lomaći rata u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj, 1941–1945:
Jasenovac—sistem logora smrti (Belgrade: Mužej žrtava genocida i Savezni zavod za
statistiku, 1996); Lukić, Rat i djeca Kozare (Belgrade: Književne novine, 1980); and Zora
Delić Skiba, with Jovan Kesar, intro. Dragoje Lukić, Djetinstvo moje ukrađeno (Prijedor:
Nacionalni Park Kozara, 1983).
48. Cf. Bogoljub Kočović, Žrtve drugog svetskog rata u Jugoslaviji (London: Naše
Delo, 1985), esp. 181–84; Vladimir Žerjavić, Gubici stanovništva u drugom svjetskom
ratu (Zagreb: Jugoslovensko viktimloško društvo, 1989), esp. 73–75; Tomislav Dulić,
“Mass Killing in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941–1945: A Case for Comparative
Research,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 3 (2006): esp. 271–72.
49. Report from Petar Blašković, 21 June 1941, AJ, AVI, NDH, 84/46/2.
50. Report by Marko Roša, 18 June 1941, AJ, AVI, NDH, 110–577, 42/10/41.
51. Speech by Ante Pavelić, 28 June 1941, to Ustasha regional officials, reprinted in
Ante Pavelic, “Poglavnik je dao smjernice velikim županima i ustaškim dužnostnicima
za provedbu ustaških načela u upravnoj politici,” 30 June 1941, Poglavnik govori (Zagreb:
Glavni Ustaški Stan, 1941), 44.
52. “Zakonska odredba o ustaskom stegovnom i kazenom sudu u Zagrebu,” Narodne
novine, 20 Aug. 1941.
53. Bu., “Ustaški stegovni sud,” Ustaša, 25 Jan. 1942, 3; “Nove osude prijekog suda,”
Hrvatska gruda, 15 June 1941.
54. “Mnogo su krivo razumjeli,” Ustaša, 7 Sept. 1941, 1.
55. M. Bzik, “Ustaska će Hrvatska s njima obračunati!” Ustaša, 10 May 1942, 1; M. K.
“Sud će biti bolan i neumoljiv,” Ustaša, 17 Aug. 1941, 1.
56. Leaflet from Bujgojno Ustasha camp, Nov. 1941, HDA, NDH, ZŠ, 102.10/103.85.
57. “Nastavlja se revolucija Ustaškog pokreta,” Ustaša, 30 Sept. 1941, 1.
58. Mark Biondich, “Religion and Nation in Wartime Croatia: Reflections on the
Ustaša Policy of Forced Religious Conversions, 1941–1942,” Slavonic and East European
Review 83, no. 1 (2005): 71–116; Dulić, “Mass Killings in the Independent State of Croatia,”
268.
59. A useful regional study of this process is provided in Emily Greble-Balić, “When
Croatia Needed Serbs: Nationalism and Genocide in Sarajevo,” Slavic Review 68, no. 1
(2009): 116–38.
60. The most comprehensive analysis of Lorković’s career and ideology is Nada Kišić-
Kolanović’s Mladen Lorković: Minister Urotnik (Zagreb: Golden Marketing, 1998).
61. See leaflet from the Petrinja Ustasha camp, undated but probably Dec. 1941, HDA,
ZŠ, 102.10/96.94; “Propisnik o zadaci, ustrojstvo, radu i smjernicama ‘Ustaše’—hrvatskog
oslobodilačkog pokreta,” Narodne novine, 11 Aug. 1942; “Upisivanje u Ustaški pokret,”
Hrvatska rieč, 20 June 1942.
62. Jelčić, “Kulturni život u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj,” 521–22, 524; Antić, “Fascism
under Pressure,” 116, 129, 139.
 370  Notes to Pages 26–34

63. See Narcisa Lengel-Krizman, Genocid nad Romina: Jasenovac 1942 (Zagreb:
Spomen-područje Jasenovac, 2003), 34–37.
64. “Hrvatski državni sabor—brzopisni zapisnik III sjednice hrvatskog sabora
Nezavisne Države Hrvatske dne 24 veljača 1942,” Narodne novine, 25 Feb. 1942. Of the
estimated thirty-four thousand Jews living in the territory of the Independent State of
Croatia, perhaps as few as seven thousand survived. Cf. Kočović, Žrtve drugog svetskog
rata, 182; Žerjavić, Gubici stanovništva u drugom svjetskom ratu, 73–75; Dulić, “Mass
Killing in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941–1945,” 271–72.
65. Report from Arthur Haeffner to Glaise von Horsteneau, 19 Nov. 1942, HDA, NDH,
NARA, T-501, 265/224.
66. Report from Glaise von Horstenau, 14 Sept. 1943, HDA, NDH, NARA, T-501,
264/968; Report from Glaise von Horstenau, 27 Sept. 1943, HDA, NDH, NARA, T-501,
268/82.

CHAPTER 1. THE GENERATION OF STRUGGLE

1. “Veliki dan hrvatske omladine: Sveučilištarci-Ustaše položili zavjet vjernosti
Poglavniku dru Anti Paveliću,” Hrvatski narod, 25 Apr. 1941.
2. “Veliki dan hrvatske omladine: Sveučilištarci-Ustaše položili zavjet vjernosti
Poglavniku dru Anti Paveliću,” Hrvatski narod, 25 Apr. 1941.
3. Ladislav Žimbrek, “Omladinski glasnik: nova omladina,” Nova Evropa, 1 Feb. 1923,
7: 4, 406.
4. “Materialno i zdravstvene prilike,” in Godišnjak hrvatskog sveučilišta u Zagrebu za
školske godine 1933/34 do 1938/39 (Zagreb: Narodna tiskara, 1940), 41.
5. Žimbrek, “Škola i život,” Nova Evropa 3, no. 6 (11 May 1921): 217–20; Stevan Jakšić,
“Omladina u krizu,” Nova Evropa 3, no. 6 (11 May 1921): 212–17.
6. Jakšić, “Omladina u krizu,” 212–17.
7. Vasilj Popović, “Student i politika,” Javnost 2, no. 3 (18 Jan. 1936): 51.
8. Vladimir Mintas, “Naš učeća omladina,” Nezavisnost, 12 May 1939.
9. Jakšić, “Stanje omladine na selu,” Javnost 2, no. 48 (5 Aug. 1936): 1022–23.
10. M. Pražić, “Naša omladina i njezine perspektive,” Javnost 29, no. 2 (18 July 1936):
648–52; Pražić, “Naša omladina na raskrsnici,” Javnost 2, no. 3 (2 Feb. 1936): 108–10.
11. V[ladimir] Čorović, “O hiperprodukciji intelektualaca,” Javnost 2, no. 1 (4 Jan. 1936):
1–2.
12. Julija Bošković, “Mi i naša intelektualna omladina,” Javnost 10, no. 2 (7 Mar. 1936):
227–28.
13. “Nasilja na sveučilištima u drzavi SHS,” Obzor, 15 Dec. 1924.
14. Stanislav Šimić, “Klerikalci na poslu,” Knjizevnik 5, no. 7 (1934): 186–91.
15. R. K., “Noževi i jaja u službi ‘hrvatske nauke,’” Knijzevnik 10 (1937): 32–35; “Slobode
nauke na sociološkom seminaru,” Rakovica 2 (1937): 2.
16. “Metimo pred svojim pragom!” Orač, 23 May 1936. A detailed description of the
evolution of radical student politics on both the left and the right at the University of
Zagreb in the late 1920s to the late 1930s is provided in Vojo Rajčević, Revolucionarni
omladinski pokret u Hrvatskoj, 1929–1941 (Zagreb: CDD, 1980), esp. 148–63.
 Notes to Pages 34–41  371

17. “Klub medicinara zagrebačkog sveučilišta zbog ljevičarske uprave isključen je iz

Medjuklubskog odbora sveučilištaraca,” Novosti, 19 Dec. 1939.
18. Rajčević, Revolucionarni omladinski pokret, 160.
19. Ibid.
20. Vladko Maček, “Cijeli hrvatski narod danas je organiziran u HSS,” in Mirko
Glojnarić, ed., Vođa govori . . . ličnost, izjave, govori i politički rad vođe Hrvata (Zagreb:
Danica, 1936), 283–85.
21. “Osveta je naša,” Hrvatski domobran, 16 Nov. 1928.
22. Bzik, Ustaška borba od prvih dana ustaškoga rada do poglavnikova odlaska u
emigraciju: Počeći i bit ustaškoga pokreta (Zagreb: Glavni ustaški stan, 1942), 90.
23. “Krvavi 1 prosinac,” Hrvatski domobran, 5 Dec. 1928.
24. “Zanimljiva preizborna preuvranja u stručnom klubu medicinski zagrebačkog
sveučilište,” Novosti, 1 Dec. 1939.
25. “Živila ‘Slobodna’ Hrvatska?” Mlada Hrvatska, 8 Dec. 1936, 1: 13, 1.
26. “Politika Srba u Hrvatskoj,” Rakovica 1, no. 1 (1936): 2–3; “Ideologija Beogradu,”
Rakovica 1, no. 1 (1936): 3; “Srbi i komunisti na obrani demokratije,” Rakovica 1, no. 1
(1936): 4.
27. Janko Škrbin, “Socijalno pitanje Sveučilišta, dr. A Štampar i mi . . . ,” Uskok 1, no. 1
(Feb. 1940): 1–2.
28. Grga Ereš and Muhamed Hadžijahić et al., “Ne damo Bosnu!” Nezavisna Hrvatska
Država, 3 June 1939.
29. “Naša borba i naša zahtjevi,” Alma mater, 26 Mar. 1936, 5.
30. Zvonimir Topali, “Opravdanje seljačke države,” in Emil Lašić, ed., Zbornik hrvatske
omladine Herceg-Bosne (Sarajevo: Krančević, 1938), 10–15.
31. Vilko Rieger, “Glavni preuvjet naše gospodarske obnove,” Almanah hrvatskih
sveučilištaraca (Zagreb: Sveučilišni pododbor Matice Hrvatske, 1938), 97–102; Emil Lašić,
“Naše suprotnosti,” in Lašić, Zbornik hrvatske omladine Herceg-Bosne, 7–9; “Potreba
socijalnog i ekonomskog studija,” Uskok, Feb. 1940, 1: 1.
32. Kamilo Križanić, “Prva rijeć,” in Mile Starčević, ed., Lirika gruda (Zagreb:
Tipografija, 1934), 3–7.
33. “Tko izaziva sukobe?” Rakovica 2 (1937): 3.
34. See, e.g., “Novi putevi,” Alma mater, 26 Mar. 1936; “Intelektualac i rad za narod,”
Hrvatski akademicar, 15 Dec. 1937.
35. Marko Čović, “Lirika hrvatskih sveučilištaraca,” in Marko Čović, ed., Lirika
hrvatskih sveučlištaraca (Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska, 1939), 7–14.
36. Stanko Hondl, “Koje nove zgrade treba sveučilište?” Alma Mater Croatica 2, no. 9
(Sept. 1937): 15–16; Edo Šen, “Izgradnja techničkoga fakulteta,” Alma Mater Croatica 1, no.
1 (Jan. 1935): 132–41.
37. Rudolf Horvat, “Progroni hrvatskih sveučilištaraca g. 1940,” in Hrvatska na
mučilištu (Zagreb: Kulturno-historijsko društvo “Hrvatski rodoljub,” 1942), 616–18;
director of Lepoglava prison to the Office of the Ban of the Croatian Banovina, 29 Nov.
1940, HDA, BVBH, 17.84/1941.
38. R. Antunović, “Osvrt na izbore u stručnim klubovima,” Uskok, Feb. 1940, 8.
 372  Notes to Pages 41–46

39. See also the Ustasha Movement files of Veljko Flego, Anzelmo Čepo, and Marcel
Filipe, members of the Ustasha Student Guard, HDA, NDH, UHOP, GUS, 11/1945/1922.
40. “Borba protiv Frankovaca,” Srp i čekić 1, no. 2 (Jan.–Feb. 1941): 132–35.
41. Police report on law student Mladen Markovic and recommendation for intern-
ment in Lepoglava, 18 Jan. 1941, HDA, BH, BVBH, XX Robija, 60.430/40.
42. Marko Veršić, “Misli o nastavi,” Alma Mater Croatica 5, no. 2 (Oct. 1941): 78.
43. “Zakonska odredba o Hrvatskom Sveučilištu, CCCLIX-1433-Z.-1941,” Narodne
novine, 13 May 1941; W., “Temeljite promjene na hrvatskom sveučilištu,” Hrvatski narod,
15 May 1941; “Veliki i povijesni dan Hrvatskog Sveučilišta,” Hrvatski narod, 16 May 1941.
44. Mile Budak, “Prošlost i budućnost hrvatskog sveučilišta,” Alma Mater Croatica 5,
no. 1 (Sept. 1941): 1–2.
45. Ibid. See also “Zakonska odredba o aktivnoj nastavničkog službi profesora
sveučilišta i visokih škola s polažajem sveučilišnoj fakulteta, LXVI-100-z-p./1941,”
Narodne novine, 12 May 1941.
46. That the Ustasha Student Center rapidly did become an elite rather than a mass
organization is suggested by the number of applications that were turned down. None-
theless, thousands of students were still members of the movement’s student organiza-
tion. See, e.g., the application files for the academic year of 1941–42, which include large
numbers of rejected application forms: HDA, NDH, UHOP, GUS, Ustaški sveučilištarci
stožer, 17.249/7195–7263.
47. “Pred gradom velikog i modernog doma sveučilištaraca: razgovor sa zapovijed-
nikom Ustaškog stožera Zdenkom Blažekovićom,” Novi list, 19 Oct. 1941.
48. Ibid.
49. “Novo školsko godište hrvatskog sveučilišta,” Alma Mater Croatica 5, no. 3 (Nov.
1941): 117.
50. “Preporod i uloga hrvatskog sveučilišta kao vrhovne naučne ustanove u novoj
Hrvatskoj,” Nova Hrvatska, 10 Apr. 1942.
51. “Novo školsko godište hrvatskog sveučilišta,” Alma Mater Croatica 5, no. 3 (Nov.
1941): 117.
52. Meilly, “The Ustaše Coup D’Etat,” HDA, NDH, NARA, 850H.00/1309/544.
53. “Veličanstva smotra pred hrvatskim sveučilištem,” Hrvatski narod, 13 Apr. 1941.
54. “Preporod i uloga hrvatskog sveučilišta kao vrhovne naučne ustanove u novoj
Hrvatska,” Nova Hrvatska, 10 Apr. 1942; “Ustaške postrojbe—branić NDH,” Ustaša, 10
Aug. 1941, 5.
55. “Preporod i uloga hrvatskog sveučilišta kod osnivanje ustaškog pokreta,” Nova
Hrvatska, 10 Apr. 1942; “Uloga pravaške omladine kod osnivanje ustaškog pokreta,” Nova
Hrvatska, 7 Feb. 1942; “Poglavnik medju ustašama sveučilištarcima,” Hrvatski list, 14 July
1944.
56. “Hrvatsko sveučilište u borbi i stvaranju,” Hrvatski narod, 22 Jan. 1942.
57. Mile Budak, “Omladina je izvršila svoju dužnost,” Ustaška mladež, 3 Aug. 1941, 6;
Jure Pavičić, “Ustaše sveučilištarci,” Ustaška mladež, 24 Aug. 1941, 5; Mladen Lorković,
“Od ustaškog sveučilišta do ustaške Hrvatske,” Alma Mater Croatica 5, no. 7 (Feb. 1942):
241–42.
 Notes to Pages 47–53  373

58. M. K., “Novi ustaški djački rad,” Ustaša, 24 Aug. 1941; “Veličina i vrijednost djela
hrvatske sveučilišne mladeži,” Alma Mater Croatica 5, no. 1 (Sept. 1941): 1–2.
59. “Trinaest satâ hrvatskih sveučilištaraca,” Ustaša, 1 Feb. 1942; “O ustaškom
sveučilišnom satu,” Ustaša, 26 Oct. 1941, 3.
60. A. Ž., “Sveučilište prednjači u borbi,”Ustaša, 15 Mar. 1943, 10.
61. Ibid.
62. Ilija Medaković, “Božić u tamnici,” Rakovica, 24 Dec. 1941; “Prva godišta 27
studenog 1940,” Alma Mater Croatica 5, no. 4 (Dec. 1941): 165–66.
63. Jerko Skračić, Pod drugom ključom: Sjećanja na život ustaških zatočenika u
Lepoglavi 1940 i 1941 godine (Zagreb: Naklada autora, 1942), 3–4.
64. Zlatko Milković, “Novi poredak—nova generacija,” ŽAP, 27 Sept. 1941, 1.
65. Zlatko Milković, Tamnica: Fragmenat naših mladih života (Zagreb: Belka, 1942),
291–92.
66. Ljubomir Maraković, “Današnja hrvatska književnost,” Hrvatska revija 16, no. 8
(Aug. 1943): 427.
67. Djuro Kokša, “Zlatko Milković: ‘Tamnica,’” Hrvatska smotra 10, nos. 7–8 (July–
Aug. 1942): 489–93; Tomislav Pavić, “Književni lik Zlatko Milkovića,” Naša doba, 13 Feb.
1943. See also A. R. Buerov, “Zlatko Milković: Tamnica,” Hrvatska revija 15, no. 10 (1942):
549–50.
68. Vlado Miličević, “Tamnica,” Plava revija 2, nos. 6–7 (Mar.–Apr. 1942): 301–2.
69. T. P., “Naše žrtva—naša vjera i snaga: U spomen ustaši Petru Bubalu,” Nova
Hrvatska, 18 Apr. 1944.
70. S. V., “Jakob Horvat—zastavnik PTS-a,” Nova Hrvatska, 31 Jan. 1945.
71. M. Velnić, “Uz dogodaj i razgovor s našim ranjenim sveučilištaraca,” Ustaška
mladež, 24 Aug. 1941, 7. The front cover of that edition of the youth journal included a
photo montage of the wounded Ustasha students recuperating in the hospital.
72. Husnija Hrustanović, “Mi i oni,” Nova Hrvatska, 31 Jan. 1945.
73. Gustav Stöckelle, Vom Ende zum Anfang: Erlebnisse und Erkenntnisse Nationalso-
zialistichen (Graz: Moser, 1949), 33. This event was witnessed by Stockelle, at the time an
Austrian diplomat in Croatia.
74. Report from Muharem Aganović on the shooting of Serbs in Trebinja by members
of the Ustasha Student Militia, VII, VA, ANDH, k.143A, reg. br.12/1–1, 1 June 1941.
75. “Zapisnik od 8 Avgusta 1942. godine,” HDA, NRH, ZKRZ, GUZ, 1776-1664/14;
“Iskaz Radeke Milana, profesora i katihete iz Karlovaca,” HDA, NRH, ZKRZ, GUZ,
1776-1664/5-61.
76. Muhamed Hadžijahić, “Nacionalna orientacija muslimana Bosne i Hercegovine,”
Zbornik hrvatskih sveučilištaraca 1 (1942): 127–32.
77. Smail Balić, “Dva istoka u Hrvatskoj,” in Zbornik hrvatskih sveučlištaraca, 7–12.
78. Vatroslav Murvar, “O podrijetlu pučanstva bosanske Hrvatske,” Plava revija 2, no.
4 (Jan. 1942): 128–32.
79. Vatroslav Murvar, “Ustaška vjera,” Ustaški godišnjak 1 (1942): 82–85.
80. “Stipendija sveučilištarcima,” Alma Mater Croatica 5–6 (Jan.–Feb. 1942): 171. How-
ever, the scholarships were limited and had to be collected from the University Ustasha
organization. Thus, it appears, they were also a tool of political and ideological control.
 374  Notes to Pages 53–60

81. S. Prcović, “Sveučilišne družtvovne ustanove,” Ustaška mladež, 24 Aug. 1941, 3.

82. “Sveučilište družtvovne ustanove,” Ustaška mladež, 15 Oct. 1941, 54; “Sprovod
ustaše-sveučilištaraca ustaškog zastavnika Josipa Blažeka,” Hrvatski narod, 28 Mar. 1943;
“Ustaša-sveučilištarac Josip Blažek pol0žio je svoj život kao ustaški zastavnik u borbi
protiv odmetnika,” Nova Hrvatska, 25 Mar. 1943.
83. See, e.g., “Zakonska odredba o vojničkoj prednaobrazbi i radnoj službi mladosti,”
LXIII-95-z.p.-1941, Narodne novine, 3 May 1941.
84. “Naše sveučilištarke u svome radu po tvornicama, upoznavaju se sa životom
radnika,” Nova Hrvatska, 31 July 1942.
85. For example, Vjekoslav Šišul and Andrija Ilić, both law students, and Stanislav
Polonijo, a student of philosophy, were well-known writers, essayists, poets, and
influential propaganda officials in GUS between 1941 and 1945. See their personal and
correspondence files in HDA, NDH, UHOP, GUS, 2.249.
86. “Primanje pitomaca u častničku škole Ustaške vojnice,” Nova Hrvatska, 31 July
1942.
87. Release notice from Grga Pejnović to Ilić, 15 Jun. 1942, HDA, NDH, HOP-GUS,
Ured za promičbu, 3.249, 4-657/574-I-1942. See also examples of his work published after
this date: Andrija Ilić, “Tri sličice,” Ustaški godišnjak 2 (1943): 159; Ilić, “Molitva hrvatskih
sveucilištaraca,” “Naša gruda,” “Bili smo gusari,” and “Senjskim žrtavama,” in Vinko
Nikolić, ed., Lovori: Novije hrvatske rodoljubne pjesme (Zagreb: Velebit, 1943), 72, 94,
96–98; O.Š, “Lutanja: Zbirke pjesme Andrije Ilića,” Spremnost, 12 Dec. 1942.
88. “Sveučilištarci,” Hrvatski narod, 25 Apr. 1944.
89. Milivoj Magdić, “Stvaranje političke elite,” Spremnost, 20 Apr. 1944.
90. Third-year student Slavko Kaštela to the UNS, 2 Nov. 1942, HDA, NDH, UNS,
2.248/3268/1942; “Ico,” agent 13, a student undercover UNS agent at the Zagreb School of
Commerce, to the Supervisory Service, 16 Apr. 1942, HDA, NDH, UNS, 2.248/376/16/1942.
91. Supporting documents for Marcel Filipe in application to join the UNS, dated 19
Nov. 1941, 17 Feb. 1942, 21 Mar. 1942, HDA, NDH, UHOP, GUS, 2/249: documents 272/42,
T-175/41, and 58/42.
92. See, e.g., the application forms and personal files of student members of the UNS
Dinko Soljačić and Antun Vargić: HDA, NDH, USHOP, GUS, 12/249, dated 6 Jan. 1942
and 30 Mar. 1944, respectively, documents 74/72 and 718/1-1944.
93. “Hrvatsko sveučilište je visoko dizalo stijeg hrvatske državnosti,” Nova Hrvatska,
10 Apr. 1942.
94. See, e.g., “Poziv sveučlištaracima Dalmatincima,” Nova Hrvatska, 28 Dec. 1941.
95. Velimir Pustajec, “Ustroji sveučilištaraca,” Plava revija 3, nos. 1–2 (Jan.–Mar. 1943):
20–21.
96. Pustajec, “Ustroji sveučilištaraca,” 22.
97. Pustajec, “Ustroji sveučilištaraca,” 23–25.
98. Testimony of Ante Moškov, 20 May 1947, HDA, RSUP, SRH, 013/058.
99. “Hrvatski sveučilištarci pred novim zadatćima,” Hrvatski narod, 25 Nov. 1942.
100. See, e.g., Stanko Belić, a student in the technical faculty and member of the
Poglavnik Bodyguard, to the USS, 6 Oct. 1941, HDA, NDH, GUS, UHOP, 5, T-208/1941.
 Notes to Pages 60–68  375

101. See, e.g., head of the GUS in Sarajevo to the armed forces in Zagreb, requesting
postponement of military service for Albert Pregornik, an official in the print depart-
ment of the Office for Propaganda of the GUS and a member of the Ustasha University
military unit, Oct. 1941, HDA, NDH, UHOP, GUS, 2.249.326.I.1941.
102. Zlatko Majtin, “Rat i sveučilištne nauke,” Hrvatski narod, 21 Apr. 1944.
103. Zdravko Brajković, “Borac i djak,”Plug, 5 Mar. 1944, 3.
104. “Zakonska odredba o danu Ustaša sveučilištaraca i podjelivanju nagrada školskoj
mladeži,” Narodne novine, 15 Apr. 1942.
105. Zdenko Blažeković, “Poziv ustaškog sveučilišnog stožera,” Nova Hrvatska, 24 Apr.
1942; Blažeković, “Važan poziv ustaškog sveučilišnog stožera,” Hrvatski narod, 23 Apr.
1942.
106. “Naš ponos i naša snaga,” Nova Hrvatska, 26 Apr. 1942.
107. “Živa vjera u Poglavnika i Nezavisnu Državu Hrvatsku,” Nova Hrvatska, 26 Apr.
1942.
108. “Poglavnik prima izaslanstvo sveučilišnog stožera,” Nova Hrvatska, 26 Apr. 1943.
109. “Sveučilištarci ustaše ispunili su svoju dužnost,” Nova Hrvatska, 26 Apr. 1943.
110. “Naredba Ministarstva od 16 siečnja 1943 broj 122.127-1942 o svršanju nauka i
pokušaja ispiti onih slusača Hrvatskog Sveučilište i visokih škola koji su, vršeći narodna
služba, bili spriečeni u redovitom polažanja predavanja i pologanja izpiti,” 130-D.V.-1943,
Narodne novine, 19 Jan. 1943.
111. See, e.g., Reference for Slavko Mihl, 13 Oct. 1941, T-207/41, HDA, UHOP, UM,
16.249; references for Stanko Belić and Đorde Marojević, undated, 72/43, HDA, NDH,
Ustaša-HOP, UM, 16.249; references for Stanko Belić and Đorde Marojević, undated,
72/43, HDA, NDH, UHOP, UM, 16.249.
112. Stanko Belić to the USS, 6 Oct. 1941, HDA, UHOP, UM, 16.249, 17/8111; references
for Ivan Tumbas, 569/42, and Stjepan Branilović, T-139/41, HDA, UHOP, UM, 16.249.
113. “Život na sveučilištu,” Plug, 25 Mar. 1944, 4.
114. Milivoj Karamarko, “Moćni u misli na državu,” Plug, 25 Feb. 1944, 5; Zvonimir
Katalenić, “Posmrtni vojnički časti” and “U mjestu pogreba vijenac,” Plug, 25 Feb.
1944, 6–7; “Ured za naukovnu pomoć sveučilištaracima-vojnicima otvorio je Ustaški
sveučilištni stožer,” Nova Hrvatska, 16 Apr. 1944.
115. Jakov Ivaštinović, “Gladan sam dok otac kolje hranjenike” and “Na Badnjak sam
daleko od kuće,” in Zbornik hrvatskih sveučilištaraca, 187–98.
116. Andrija Ilić, “Pismo seoskom prijatelju,” in Ilić, Lutanja (Zagreb: Matice hrvatskih
akademičara, 1942), 42.
117. Janko Žanetić, “Tamnički nokturno,” in Zbornik hrvatskih sveučilištaraca, 207.
118. The last set of application forms were processed in Mar. 1945 for the academic
year 1944–45. In the last intake, in comparison to the first intake for the academic year
1941–42, there were relatively fewer students already active in the Ustasha movement—
such as in the Ustasha Youth—or radical-right organizations generally, with many
applicants having no prior political activism. See HDA, NDH, UHOP, GUS, USS, 17.249.
119. Višeslav Breža, “Temelj rada je udaren,” Plug, 5 May 1944.
120. Ibid.
 376  Notes to Pages 68–76

121. “Rezolucija naše intelektualne omladine,” Spremnost, 30 Apr. 1944; “Rezolucija

hrvatskih sveučilištaraca,” Plug, 5 May 1944.
122. Rezolucija hrvatskih sveučilištaraca na radnom zborovanju uoči dana 25.iv.1944
donesa (Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska sveučilištaraca akademičara, 1944), n.p.
123. Ibid.
124. Emil Medvedović, “Razvoj sveučilišta u Sarajevo,” Plug, 1 June 1944.
125. Karamarko, “Protiv konfesionalne politike,” Plug, 25 Apr. 1944.
126. “Smjernice organizacije i rada hrvatskih sveučilištaraca,” Hrvatski narod, 30 Apr.
1944.
127. Jure Prpić, “Za okupljanje svih akademskih snaga,” Plug, 20 Sept. 1944.
128. Prpić, “Za okupljanje svih akademskih snaga.”
129. Karamarko, “Tko smije izostati?” Plug, 5 Mar. 1944.
130. Karamarko, “Ovaj je naraštaj,” Plug, 20 Sept. 1944; Višeslav Breža, “Načelo sloga,”
Plug, 20 Sept. 1944.
131. Breza, “Temelj rada je udaren,” Plug, 5 May 1944, 1.
132. Franjo Nevistić, “Integralno Hrvatstvo,” Spremnost, 22 Oct. 1944.
133. Ibid.
134. Ibid.
135. “Dan sveučilištaraca,” Plug, 25 Apr. 1944, 1.
136. Zrinko Nikolić, “Mladost na bedemu države,” Plug, 5 Apr. 1944.
137. Blažeković granted permission to student leaders in May 1943. Initially, the
newspaper was to be called—somewhat ambiguously—Samosviest (Self-Consciousness).
See Karamarko to Blažeković, 12 Apr. 1943, and Blažeković’s reply, 23 May 1943, HDA,
NDH, GRP, 44.237/N/21/43, 44.237/N/22/43.
138. “Pismo uredništva,” Plug, 5 Mar. 1944, 1; Karamarko, “Plužimo brazde,” Plug, 20
Feb. 1944, 1.
139. Uredništvo, “Pismo uredništva,” Plug, 25 Oct. 1944, 4. The best analysis of the Plug
collaborators can be found in Lašić, Krležologija, 273–75. He argues that, despite lasting
less than a year, Plug of its era was the most influential literary journal in Yugoslavia not
only because it introduced a generation of future Yugoslav artists, essayists, and poets
but also because of the cultural experimentalism and quality of the journal, especially in
poetry.
140. Franjo Trbuha, “Novi oblik borbe ‘starih i mladih,’” Plug, 5 May 1944, 2.
141. Zdravko Brajković, “Brodolomci plove u mrtvi zaton,” in Zbornik hrvatskih
sveučilištaraca, 13–19.
142. J[akov] Ivaštinović, “Uz rub jedne knjige,” Plug, 15 July 1944, 6.
143. Vlado Miličević, “Pokušaj ocjene naše književne stvarnosti,” Plug, 1 Aug. 1944, 3;
Lašić , Krležologija, 275.
144. Ibid.
145. Zdravko Brajković, “Brodolomci plove u mrtvi zaton,” in Zbornik hrvatskih
sveučilištaraca, 13–19.
146. Miličević, “Pokušaj ocjene naše književne stvarnosti.”
147. Niko Zekanović, “Odkrivanje jednog naraštaja,” Plug, 25 Feb. 1944, 3.
148. Ibid.
 Notes to Pages 77–86  377

149. Leaflet from students at the University of Zagreb, 12 Aug. 1944, reprinted in Hory
and Broszat, Der kroatische Ustascha-Staat, 1941–1945, 165.
150. Karamarko, “Tko smije izostati?” Plug, 5 Feb. 1944.
151. Karamarko, “U konačnom obračunu,” Plug, 20 Aug. 1944.
152. Karamarko, “Mač i uljanica,” Plug, 25 Dec. 1944.
153. Hrvoje Matković, “Razgovor s dr. Jerem Jarebom u povodu 80. Godišnjica njegova
života,” Časopis za suvremene povijest 3 (2008): 718–19.
154. “Hrvatski sveučilištarci,” Ustaša, 8 Apr. 1945, 14–15.
155. Franjo Nevistić, “Put sveučlištaraca u 1945,” Hrvatski narod, 3 Jan. 1945.

CHAPTER 2. ANNIHILATE THE OLD!

1. “Biti vječno mlad znači biti Ustaša,” Ustaša, 7 June 1942, 4; “Ideje, misli i život,”
Rakovica, 29 Oct. 1941, 2.
2. J.P., “Ustaški pokret—pokret mladosti,” Ustaša, 23 Dec. 1941, 9.
3. Janko Zanetić, ”Nova mladež i hrvatska književnost,” Ustaška mladež, 23 Dec. 1941,
11.
4. Marko Čović, “Mladi i stari,” Ustaška mladež (Christmas 1941): 3.
5. Ibid, 4.
6. Branko Fištrović, “Obnova Hrvatske omladine,” ŽAP, 27 Sept. 1941.
7. Vojo Rajčević, Revolucionarni omladinski pokret u Hrvatskoj, 1918–1928 (Zagreb:
CDD, 1980), 115–207.
8. Mijo Bzik, “Hrvatska omladina,” in Fran Arbes, ed., Kalendar Pravaš za godina 1929
(Zagreb: Hrvatska prava, 1929), 95–101.
9. “Uoči osnivanja ustaških postrojbi,” Ustaša, 2 Jan. 1942, 4; Stanislav Polonijo,
“Ustaštvo—apoteza Rakovice,” Zbornik hrvatskih sveučilištaraca 1 (1942): 221–22.
10. “Borba za opstanak,” Hrvatski domobran, 16 Nov. 1928.
11. “Hrvatska omladina je progovorila,” Starčević, 2 Oct. 1928; “Hrvatska omladina za
rastavu,” Starčević, Aug. 1928.
12. “Ideja pravaške mladosti,” Starčević, Feb. 1928.
13. “Falange složne hrvatske mladosti rastvorite svoja prsa!” Hrvatski domobran, 16
Nov. 1928; “Priprivaljamo se za konačni obracun,” Hrvatski domobran, 16 Nov. 1928.
14. “Uništavanje hrvatskog imena na srednim školama,” Hrvatski domobran, 5 Dec.
1928.
15. See, e.g., “Izvještaj o dogadaju u gimnaziju i varoši u Šibeniku,” 16 Oct. 1939, HDA,
BH, BVBH, 7.71/39; “Spomen-ploča u Splitu-zamazana,” 23 Jan. 1941, HDA, BH, BVBH,
9.60/41; “Incidenti u kinematografu u Splitu za vrijeme prikazivanja filma ‘Historijski
dani,’” 14 Mar. 1940, HDA, BH, BVBH, 38.14/40; “Incidenti na Narodnom trgu u Splitu na
Silvestrovo,” 1 Jan. 1940, HDA, BH, BVBH, 10.41/40.
16. In Šibenik these included Milivoj Karamarko and Karamarko’s class comrade
Ustasha Youth journalist and ideologue Jere Jareb. See Matković, “Razgovor s dr. Jerem
Jarebom,” 715.
17. Janko Škrbin, “Tražimo nacionalni odgoj u srednjim školama,” Uskok 1, no. 1 (Feb.
1940): 5.
 378  Notes to Pages 86–90

18. Some contributors, such as Ivan Raoš and Duško Kečkemet, went on to become
important intellectual and literary personalities in their own right in both Ustasha Croa-
tia and Communist Yugoslavia. See Miroslav Vaupotić, “Časopisi hrvatske književnost,”
Zadarska revija 13, no. 3 (1964): 236–39.
19. See, e.g., Jerko Skračić, “Braco,” Matoš 1, no. 1 (1940): 7–20; Stanko Vitković,
“Povratak,” in Almanah hrvatskih sveučilištaraca (Zagreb: Urednički odbor hrvatskih
sveučilištaraca, 1938), 149–60; Jure Prpić, “Marko se vratio,” Matoš 2, no. 1 (Apr. 1940):
49–52.
20. Skračić, “Hrvatski kolporteri,” Matoš, 1 July 1940, 54–58.
21. “Predavanje u Hrvatskom Seljačkom domu dr. Ante Cividini i dr. Ive Protulipca,” 6
Nov. 1939, NDH, HDA, BVBH, OZDZ, 6/52808.
22. “Uspomene na zaprijeke uzdruživanja hrvatske omladine u velikosrpskoj državi,”
Novi list, 5 Aug. 1941; Matija Perković, “Živili hrvatski skaut!” Lički Hrvat 2, no. 2 (21 Jan.
1938): 1.
23. See, e.g., a leaflet of 12 Dec. 1941 advertising the first meeting of the Zenica branch
of the female Ustasha Youth: HDA, NDH, ZŠ, 102.10/908.159.
24. Mile Budak, “Novi duh u školi,” Nedjelja, 21 Sept. 1941.
25. Radovan Latković, “Smisao ustaštva,” Ustaški godišnjak 1 (1942): 99–100.
26. Z.S., “Odnos dužnostnike prema učiteljima,” Ustaška uzdanica 1, no. 1 (1 Dec. 1941):
16.
27. See, e.g., the leaflet of 26 July 1941 announcing that the Croatian Hero would step
into the ranks of Ustasha Youth in Ogulin: HDA, NDH, ZŠ, 102.10/6/123. This resistance
might have been caused in part by a contradictory statute introduced in Apr. 1941 by
Slavko Kvaternik placing the Croatian Hero under the command of the Croatian armed
forces and stating that the paramilitary organization would continue to function for
“the well-being of Croat youth.” See “Zapovijed vrhovnog zapovijednika cjelopkupne
Hrvatske oružane sile,” Narodne novine, 19 Apr. 1941.
28. “Propisnik o zadaći, ustrojstvo, radu i smjernicama ‘Ustaše.’”
29. Jakob Horvat, “Borbe ustaške mladeži u Varaždin,” Ustaška mladež, 16 Dec. 1941, 5.
30. “Propunjen je broj ustaških omladinaca,” Hrvatska krajina, 6 May 1941; Zdenko
Blažeković, Mladež i država (Zagreb: Zapovijedništvo Ustaške mladeži, 1944), 139–49.
Blažeković improbably claimed that the Ustasha Youth, in addition to 500,000 rank-
and-file members, had 35,000 functionaries; “Ustaške mladež pokoljenje nove Hrvatske,”
Hrvatska rieć, 10 Apr. 1945, asserted that it had 180 commissars and 545 commanders and
that 1,310 members had passed through its training schools.
31. “Odredba o osnutku i ustrojstvo ustaške mladeži,” Narodne novine, 4 Nov. 1941.
32. Leaflet of 4 Nov. 1941 from Dubrovnik Ustasha Youth camp leader Vinko Sablić:
HDA, NDH, ZŠ, 102.10/96/156. See also similar leaflets from Palima Rubin, female
Ustasha Youth leader in the Dubrovnik camp, on 2 Dec. 1941; from Dolores Bračanović
and Marko Scalloti of the Dubrovnik Ustasha Youth Center, on Nov. 1941; and from Ante
Boras, leader of the Petrinja Ustasha camp, n.d., 102.10/96/146, 102.10/96/15, 102.10/96/119,
102.10/96/94.
33. Unnumbered leaflet from Ante Boras, leader of Ustasha Youth camp in Petrinja,
from 6 Dec. 1941: HDA, NDH, ZŠ, 102.10.
 Notes to Pages 91–98  379

34. “Propisnik o zadaći, ustrojstvo, radu i smjernicama ‘Ustaše.’”

35. Memorandum from Lavroslav Koprivnjak to all Ustasha Youth camps and concen-
trations in the Prigorje region, 19 Apr. 1943, HDA, NDH, GRP, 44.237, 1084/43.
36. Franjo Trbuha, “Mladež današnje vrieme,” Ustaška mladež (Christmas 1941): 8, 10.
37. See, e.g., “ZAP!” Naš list, 22 Apr. 1944.
38. “Herojska pobuna hrvatske vojske u Bjelovaru,” Hrvatski narod, 16 Apr. 1941.
39. Janko Škrbin, “Ustaška srednjoškolska mladež,” Hrvatski krugoval, 20 Jan. 1942, 3.
40. Dragutin Korčamaroš, “Srednja škola,” Nezavisna Hrvatska, 14 June 1941.
41. S.P., “Prošlo su vremena . . . ,” Naš rad, 6 Sept. 1941.
42. Omer Zurabdić-Mirov, “Tražimo prva mjesta u novoj smjeni,” Ustaška mladež
(Easter 1942): 1; Zdravko Radić, “Pravo novog naraštaja,” Ustaška mladež, 5 July 1942, 3;
Branko Fištrović, “Obnova Hrvatske omladine,” ŽAP, 27 Sept. 1941, 2.
43. F.T., “Tko ne može biti primljen u Ustaški pokret,” Ustaška mladež, 1 Mar. 1943, 9.
44. “Državu i ustaštvo smiju predstvaljati samo idealiste,” Ustaški mladež, 15 July 1942, 7.
45. Branimir Rogić, “Tko je odgovoran?” Ustaška mladež, 18 Jan. 1942, 2–3.
46. “Narodni div i junak Jure vitez Francetić,” Ustaška mladež, 1 May 1943, 3.
47. Grga Pejnović, “Moralna snaga ustaškog pokreta,” Ustaška mladež, 18 Jan. 1942, 3.
48. M. Juraga, “Butovna krv,” Ustaška mladež, 31 May 1942, 7.
49. Milivoj Karamarko, “Vojnička krv,” Ustaška mladež, 23 Nov. 1941, 1.
50. Jure Boroje, “Snaga i volje naše mladeži,” Ustaška mladež, 15 Feb. 1941, 2.
51. Bozidar Novaković, “Kriminalitet medju radničkom mladež,” Ustaška mladež, 14
Sept. 1941, 5.
52. V.E., “Sto čita mladež?” Naš rad, 6 Sept. 1941.
53. “Zaplijena protohrvatskih knjiga,” Katolički tjednik, 25 May 1941; “Ćišćenje u
vinkovačkim knjižara,” Novi list, 17 May 1941; Duro Balaković, “Ćišćenje od pogubne
literature,” Hrvatski branik, 17 May 1941.
54. “Zaplijene i uništene sve protuhrvatske i nemoralne knjiga,” Hrvatski glas, 30 May
1941.
55. Pejnović, “Moralna snaga ustaškog pokreta,” 3.
56. Jure Boroje, “Prodor grčko-istočnjaštvo u Hercegovini,” Plava revija 11, nos. 2–3
(Nov.–Dec. 1941): 93–96.
57. Z[vonimir], Radić, “Mi prema židovima,” Ustaška mladež, 9 Dec. 1941, 11.
58. Testimony of Stjepan Kolesar, 24 June 1952. HDA, SRH, JT, OPA, 128. 1421,
32/1952/2; “Izvještaj o progonima Srba u srezu Karlovac,” HDA, NRH, ZKRZ, GUZ, 1776-
1664/5-61; “Zapisnik od 20 jula 1941. godine,” HDA, NRH, ZKRZ, GUZ, 1776-1664/5-61;
“Zapisnik od 8 Avgusta 1942. godine,” HDA, NRH, ZKRZ, GUZ, 1776-1664/14.
59. See, e.g. Zwf., “Židovi među nama,” Posavska Hrvatska, 23 Aug. 1941; Zwf., “Mimi-
krija Židova,” Posavska Hrvatska, 9 Aug. 1941; Zeno Wolf, “Židovi! Svoje je Davidovo
zvijezda slabi!” Posavska Hrvatska, 21 July 1941. On the Serbs see, e.g., Kš., “U državi
Hrvatskoj nema Srpskog naroda,” Posavska Hrvatska, 23 July 1941; Ante Oršanić, “Vlasi
i ‘Srbi’ u Posavskoj Hrvatskoj,” Posavska Hrvatska, 23 July 1941. A fuller description
of Pusztay’s and Wolf’s careers can be found in Hrvoje Čapo and Ðorđe Mihovilović,
“Preobrazbi lista Posavska Hrvatska u glasilo ustaškog režima,” Radovi 34–35 (2004).
60. H., “Hrvatska mladež u Narodnoj zaštiti,” Ustaska mladež, 23 Nov. 1941, 6.
 380  Notes to Pages 99–104

61. Spectator, “Stari i mladi u javnom životu,” Osvit, 15 Aug. 1942.

62. “Odlazak g. Drag. Đurića iz Požege,” Vihor, 15 Dec. 1941, 7.
63. Zdenko Blažeković, “Uzvikivanje poklike ‘Ante’ mjesto Poglavnik,” 5 July 1943,
HDA, UHOP, UM, ST, 16.245, 2007/43; Vjekoslav Mink to Vilko Rieger, 28 Aug. 1942,
83/42; Rieger to Tomislav Bulat, 18 Sept. 1942, 14921/42, Tomislav Bulat to Vilko Rieger, 18
Sept. 1942, b.b, all HDA, NDH, GRP, 6.237.
64. Zurabdić-Mirov, “Tražimo prva mjesta u novoj smjeni”; Hermann Proebst,
“Jasenovac nije ljecilište ni mučilište,” Spremnost, 8 Feb. 1942. A vivid account of the teen-
age activism of Rover is provided in Marko Marković, Jure i Boban: Povijest Crne Legije
(Zagreb: MBF, 2003), 45–47.
65. Balentović, “Godišnjica borbe i uspjeha,” Crna legija, 68.
66. “Francetićev duh ne može umrieti . . . ,” Novi list, 1 Apr. 1943.
67. “Mlada poglavnikova garda,” Hrvatski narod, 7 Oct. 1942.
68. See, e.g., “Tri nove žrtve,” Ustaška mladež, 1 Sept. 1942, 7–8; “Tri nova groba—tri
nova mučenika,” Ustaška mladež, 29 Mar. 1942, 3–4.
69. “Uz brojne žrtve u Bihaću i šestorica duznoštila ustaške mladezi polažilo je svoje
živote na oltar domovine za vrijeme strahovlade odmetnika,” Nova Hrvatska, 22 Apr.
1943.
70. “Hrvatska mladost je uviek bila ponos roda svog . . . ,” Ustaška mladež, 1 June 1943,
5.
71. See, e.g., Jelena Šantić, “Posljedna poruka,” Ustaškinja 2, no. 10 (10 Jan. 1944): 6;
“Mučeništvo Andjelka Šarić,” Ustaša, 31 Jan. 1943, 4; D. I., “Ustaškinja Andjelka Šarić,”
Ustaška mladež, 19 July 1943, 6; “Borbe junaštva i pobjede naših,” Ustaša, 24 Jan. 1943, 12.
72. Milenko Barbarić, “Ustaši Omeru Jahiću,” Ustaška mladež, 10 Apr. 1944, 5.
73. Mustafa Gaćo, “Pad Srbije i postanak Nezavisne Države Hrvatske,” HDA, NDH,
MNP, Ured ministarstvo, 1/2835, 28 Aug. 1941.
74. Gabrijel Kolenić, “Ustaša sam,” Naš rad, 27 Sept. 1941.
75. Rudolf Strugar, “Uvodna rieć,” in Strugar, ed., Lirika požeske mladosti (Požega:
Logor Muške Ustaške mladeži, 1944), 3–6.
76. Vladimir Ferenczffy, “Staljingradskim borcima,” in Strugar, Lirika požeske
mladosti, 9.
77. Slavko Lerman, “Mrtvom bratu” and “Još samo,” in Strugar, Lirika požeske
mladosti, 21.
78. Branko Živković, “Tuga” and ”Narode moj,” in Strugar, Lirika požeske mladosti,
33–34.
79. Dragutin Gašpar, “Neznanom heroju Hrvatske,” in Strugar, Lirika požeske
mladosti, 12.
80. Zvonimir Bajsić, “Poginulim mladićima,” Hrvatska mladost 27, nos. 9–10 (May–
June 1944): 276.
81. Luka Puljiz, “Stara me putovi zovu . . . ,” in Draga zemlja (Sarajevo: Ustaška
mladež, 1944), 14–15.
82. Alozije Lutz, “Dolazak smrt,” Ustaška mladež, 16 Aug. 1942, 8; El-Pe; “Susret sa
smrti,” Naraštaj slobode 3, no. 8 (10 May 1944): 6.
 Notes to Pages 105–110  381

83. Vera Franz, “Bezimeni heroj,” Naraštaj slobode 3, no. 8 (10 May 1944): 7.
84. Vladimir Brodnjak, “Balada o dječaku koji se igra olovnim vojnicima,” Plava revija
3, no. 3 (Feb. 1943): 100.
85. Andrija Ilić, “Pred pozorem,” Plava revija 2, nos. 9–10 (June–July 1942): 431.
86. Đuro Seder, “Palim hrvatskim borcima: U spomen Jurja viteza Francetića,”
Hrvatska mladost 26, nos. 3–4 (June 1943): 121; Stjepan Jakopec, “Sion Golgote,” Plava
revija 2, no. 1, (Oct. 1941): 4.
87. Blažeković, Mladež i država, 73–78.
88. Ibid., 171–87.
89. Stjepan Birac, “Hrvatska u novim generacijama,” Nedjelja, 6 July 1941.
90. See, e.g., “U Gjurgjevcu se osniva Škola selja­čke ustaške mladeži,” Hrvatski narod,
22 Jan. 1942; “Rad ustaškog pokreta na odgoju radničke mladeži,” Hrvatski narod, 16 July
1942.
91. “Mladež u radu za društvovnu pravdu,” Hrvatski narod, 2 June 1942.
92. “U stezi, vježbi, radu i pjesmi: škola koja pripravlja sretnu budućnost hrvatske
zemlje,” Nova Hrvatska, 11 Feb. 1942.
93. Dr. Julije Makanec, “Odgoj vodja ustaške mladeži,” Plava revija 3, nos. 1–2, (Jan.–
Feb. 1943): 1–5; P. B., “Dužnostički tečaj,” Naraštaj slobode 2, no. 6 (1942): 1–2.
94. See, e.g., C., “Bili smo u školi ustaške mladeži,” Ustaška mladež, 10 Apr. 1944, 10.
95. Rudolf Pavlek, “Individualni odgoj rojnika,” Ustaški junak 1, no. 1 (Oct. 1941): 14,
“Kakav mora biti rojnik?” Ustaški junak 1, no. 1 (Oct. 1941): 17.
96. Fux K., “O vladanju ustaškoj junaka,” Ustaski junak 1, no. 1 (Oct. 1941): 19–20;
Dj. K., “Rojnik ustaškog junaka,” Ustaški junak 1, no. 3 (Jan. 1942): 109–10.
97. “Radna služba Ustaške mladeži ujedinjuje i povezuje svu Hrvatsku mladost,”
Hrvatski narod, 28 May 1942; “Mladež u radu za društvovnu pravdu,” Hrvatski narod, 2
June 1942.
98. See, e.g., Davorin Sanković, “Zašto organiziramo Ustašku mladež,” Naraštaj
slobode 1, no. 1 (10 Apr. 1942): 2.
99. OHS, “Ustaška mladež u Mostaru radi,” Nova Hrvatska, 10 Jan. 1942. See also, e.g.,
the front covers of Ustaška uzdanica for 1, no. 3 (1 Nov. 1941), 1, no. 4 (15 Nov. 1941), 1, no.
8 (15 Jan. 1942), 1, no. 9 (1 Feb. 1942), 1, no. 10 (15 Feb. 1942), 1, no. 15 (1 May 1942), 1, nos.
19–20 (1 July 1942).
100. See, e.g., the following “winter help” leaflets from Ustasha Youth camps, centers,
and organizations: 29 Oct. 1941 from the Ustasha Youth in Zemun; 9 Dec. 1941 from the
male Ustasha Youth center in Senj; 2 Nov. 1941 petition from the Ustasha Youth in Doboj;
order for winter help from Ustasha Youth organizations in Zagorje; Nov. 1941 leaflet from
Ustasha Youth center in Daruvar: HDA, NDH, ŽS, 102.10/96.2, 102.10/776/11, 102.10/96/17,
102.10/99/19, 102.10/96/181/26.
101. “Zimska pomoć ustaške mladež,” Ustaška mladež, 9 Nov. 1941, 3.
102. Vj. Šisul, “Ustaška mladež i društvovna pitanja,” Ustaška mladež, 9 Nov. 1941, 13.
103. “To je drugarstvo!” Hrvatski narod, 14 May 1943.
104. See, e.g., “Slikopis i mladež,” Ustaška mladež, 22 Apr. 1944, 6; Husnija
Hrustinović, “Na mjesta!—Pozor!—Hitac! . . .” Ustaška mladež, 15 Sept. 1942, 10; “Pakraca
ustaška mladež leti nad Zagrebom,” Ustaška mladež, 15 July 1943, 7.
 382  Notes to Pages 110–116

105. “Umjetnička škola ustaške mladeži,” Hrvatski narod, 27 Jan. 1943; Ivan Raoš, “Pola
satu medju našim mladim i najmladim u umjetničkoj školi ustaške mladeži,” Hrvatski
narod, 12 Dec. 1944.
106. M.Š., “Umjetnička škola Ustaške mladeži,” Hrvatski krugoval, 29 Aug. 1943, 15.
107. “Javna predavanja umjetničke škole ustaške mladeži,” Hrvatski narod, 28 Sept.
1943; “Odkrivanje novih glumačkih talenata!” Hrvatski narod, 28 Sept. 1943. The Yugoslav
literary critic Miroslav Vaupotić, then a student of the Ustasha Youth Artistic School in
Zagreb, took a leading role in this theatrical production. Another student performer was
Slavko Andres, later a director of spaghetti Westerns.
108. Others included the impressionist poets Đuro Šnajder, Radovan Ivšić, and Josip
Pusztay.
109. Dražen Panjkota, Ustap u magli (Zagreb: Belka, 1942), esp. “Iz Madrida” and
“Granada,” 83, 85, which explore the Spanish Civil War and the death of his idol, Lorca.
110. Nikola Šabić, “Naše pokoljenje u lirici najmladih,” Plava revija 3, no. 3 (Mar. 1943):
91–96.
111. Mustafa Hadžiefendić, “Izvještaj ponašanju ustaškog dušobrižnika Zvonimir
Brekale,” 29 Oct. 1941, HDA, NDH, GRP, 2.237/1942, T.63/42.
112. “Dva dana prije predstave,” Hrvatski list, 5 May 1943; “Novo pokoljenje,” Hrvatski
list, 9 May 1943.
113. Ante Jakaša, “Naša pobjeda ovisi o nama,” Ustaški junak 1, no. 1 (Apr. 1943): 4; “U,”
Ustaški junak 2, no. 1 (June 1943): 3.
114. Andrija Ilić, “Prijatelju,” Ustaška mladež, 7 Sept. 1942, 8.
115. “Velebni mimohod Ustaške mladeži pred Poglavnikom,” Hrvatski narod, 8 June
1942.
116. “Odgojni zavod za djecu ustaških boraca i za ustašku siročad,” Hrvatski narod, 16
May 1942.
117. Rudolf Pavlek, “Sada ili nikada,” Starčevićeva mladež 1, no. 2 (Jan. 1942): 41–42.
118. Ivo Babić, “Potreba i znančenje vojne prednaobrazdbe,” Plava revija 3, no. 3 (Feb.
1943): 65–74.
119. Prof. M. S., “Hrvatska Ustaška mladež pod oružjem,” Ustaški junak 1, no. 1 (Oct.
1941): 15–16.
120. Julije Makanec, “Ustaška mladež—važan čimbenik odgoja našeg pokoljenja,”
Hrvatski narod, 10 Apr. 1942; “Taboravanje dužnostika ustaške mladeži,” Hrvatski narod,
5 Aug. 1942; Z., “Šatori uz Rijeku,” Ustaška mladež, 1 Sept. 1942, 3.
121. See, e.g., “Ustaška mladež iz ciele Države na zajedničkom logorovanju provodi
ljetne praznike na zraku i suncu i sprema se za budući rad u ustaškim postrojbama,”
Nova Hrvatska, 7 Aug. 1942.
122. Tomislav Rolf, “Predvojnički naobrazba ustaške mladeži,” Ustaški junak 1, no. 2 (21
Jan. 1942): 1–2.
123. “Razstanak s tabornikom,” Ustaški junak 5, no. 1 (n.d).
124. Emil Medveldović, “Hrvatska mladost prije i sada,” Ustaška mladež, 26 Apr. 1942, 7.
125. Valodja, “Naši rojnici-tecajci,” Ustaški junak 3, no. 1 (May 1943); Valodja, “Priča
omalom Ivici,” Ustaški junak 3, no. 1 (May 1943).
 Notes to Pages 117–124  383

126. Memorandum from Stjepan Domjanić, 16 Apr. 1943, HDA, UHOP, UM, Stožer,
16.249, 21-56/43. See also “Izvještaj s posjete u Staroj Pazovi 29. ožjuka 1942,” HDA, NDH,
GUS, UZP, 3, unnumbered.
127. See, e.g., Zijan, “Nište sigurno znale . . . ,” Ustaški junak 4, no. 1 (June 1943).
128. HDA, NDH, GRP, 27/257/10346; HDA, NDH, GRP, 27/257/10346/5407.
129. “Naš bieli Zagreb,” Spremnost, 7 Feb. 1942; “O snijegu zimskim radostima,”
Spremnost, 7 Feb. 1942; Jožčenko, “Sniježna lirika u riječi i sliči,” Spremnost, 7 Feb. 1942.
130. Franjo Trbuha, “Počnimo—pa dokle dodjemo?” Ustaška mladež, 16 Jan. 1942, 5–6;
Trbuha, “O onima koji su bili u drugom taboru,” Ustaška mladež, 1 Feb. 1942, 4–5.
131. See, e.g., Valodja, “Skupstina,” Ustaški junak 1, no. 1 (Apr. 1943).
132. “Izvještaj s posjete u Staroj Pazovi 29. ožjuka 1942.”
133. Female Cetina Ustasha camp leader to GUS official Grga Pejnović in Zagreb, 23
Oct. 1941, HDA, NDH, UHOP, GUS, 2.249/37/41; reply from Grga Pejnović, 30 Oct. 1941,
311. I.1941.
134. Section of the Department for Propaganda in Cetina to the GUS in Zagreb, 28
Nov. 1941, HDA, NDH, USHOP, GUS, 2.249/514/41.
135. Stjepan Domjanić to the Primorje Ustasha Starčević Youth Camp, 16 Apr. 1943,
UHOP, GUS, UM, 16.249/134/43.
136. See the report from Dragica Žubrinić following her tour of Ustasha Youth camps
in Bjelovar, Križevci, and Koprivnica in Apr. 1943. See also the monthly reports from
female physical education trainers Mira Kren and Branka Šrepel to the central command
of the female Ustasha Youth in the same period, HDA, NDH, UHOP, GUS, 4.249/1942,
docs. 383/43, 240/43. 405/43.
137. See, e.g., letter of 6 Jan. 1942 to the State Secretariat for Propaganda, HDA, NDH,
GRP, 1/237/1/42; undated report from the DIPU, HDA, NDH, HIS, 27/237/10346; letter of
28 Apr. 1942 to Ustasha Youth Camp 4 in Zagreb, HDA, NDH, GRP, 27/237/5407.
138. Valođa, “Dragi ustaški junaci!” Ustaški junak 3, no. 1 (May 1943).
139. “Postupak s djecom,” Ustaška uzdanica 1, no. 1 (1 Dec. 1941): 17.
140. Ibid.
141. Nikola Barić, “Šibenik pod upravnom Nezavisne Države Hrvatske,” Časopis za
suvremene povijest 35, no. 2 (2003): 513–44; “Izvješće o promičbenom radu,” 15 June 1942,
HDA, NDH, MNP, 572/1943.
142. Domjanić to all Ustasha Youth camp leaders, 26 Apr. 1943, UHOP, GUS, UM,
16.249/132/43.
143. See, e.g., the circular sent from the Zagreb Ustasha Youth center leadership to all
regional Ustasha Youth camp leaders in spring 1943, UHOP, GUS, UM, 16.249/186/43.
144. Uredničtvo, “Svršetak jedne godine našeg rada,” Ustaški junak 5, no. 1 (n.d.).
145. Davorin Sanković, “Mladiću!” Naraštaj slobode 3, no. 2 (1 June 1944): 1.
146. Luka Puljiz, “Priznanje borčima!” Naraštaj slobode 3, no. 5 (15 Mar. 1944): 4–5.
147. Rolf, “Predvojnički naobrazba ustaške mladeži,” 1–2.
148. Ilija Stanić, “Ustaša sam ja,” Hrvatska mladost 25, no. 5 (Jan. 1942): 147; Tihomil
Strepački, “Prije 10. Travnja 1941,” Ustaški junak 1, no. 1 (Apr. 1943).
149. Ustaški junak iz Hrv. Mitrovice, “Zadnji Ustaša,” Ustaški junak 1, no. 1 (Apr. 1943);
Zdravko Marušić, “Palim omladincima,” Ustaški junak 1, no. 1 (Apr. 1943).
 384  Notes to Pages 124–132

150. Franjo Dragičević, “Mladiću—bori se!” Naraštaj slobode 3, no. 5 (15 Mar. 1944): 6.
151. Feliks Niedzielski, “Odgojamo novog hrvatskog čovjeka: Značaja, rodoljuba i
ustaša,” Nova Hrvatska, 30 July 1944; Niedzielski, “Šta hoće Ustaška mladeži?” Hrvatski
narod, 29 July 1944.
152. “Na prisilan rad s razuzdanom mladeži!” Hrvatski narod, 5 May 1944.

CHAPTER 3. MERCILESS WARRIORS AND MILITANT HEROINES

1. Maca Minić, “Uloga i vrijednost žene,” Ustaški mladež, 16 Dec. 1941, 1.
2. Ibid.
3. Dr. Ante Pavelić, “Čelična garda,” Grič, 16 July 1932.
4. “Ženski pokret i studenice,” Alma mater 1, no. 2 (11 Apr. 1935): 2.
5. “Ne kolektivizam, već zajednice,” Mlada Hrvatska, 11 Apr. 1937; Zdenka Jušić-
Šeunik, “Ženskoj omladini,” Mlada Hrvatska, 5 Sept. 1936.
6. Serafina Poljanec, “O ženi kao javnoj radnici,” Javnost 2, no. 37 (2 Feb. 1936): 806–8.
7. “Važnost Udruženja sveučilištarki,” Hrvatska gruda, 12 Feb. 1935.
8. Milan Marjanović, Narod koji nastaje: Zašto i kako se formira srpski-hrvatsko narod
(Rijeka: G. Trbojević, 1913), 57–58.
9. Jovan Cvjić, “Osnovi jugoslovenske civilizacije,” Nova Evropa 7, no. 1 (1 Nov. 1922):
212–18.
10. See, e.g., Slavko Kolar, Jesmo ili nismo (Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska, 1933); Kolar,
Mi smo za pravice (Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska, 1936); Miroslav Krleža, Povratak Filipa
Latinovića (Zagreb: Biblioteka nezavisnih pisaca, 1938); Krleža, Na rubu pametu (Zagreb:
Minerva, 1932); Ivo Kozarčanin, Tuđa žena (Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska, 1937); Kozarčanin,
Sam čo vjek (Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska, 1933).
11. Vjekoslav Majer, U vrtlogu gradu (Pepić u vremenu i prostoru) (Zagreb: Matica
Hrvatska, 1938); Stjepko Trontl, Nevidljiv Tone ili Takvi su ljudi (Zagreb: Matica
Hrvatska, 1933).
12. Mile Budak, Ognjište, vols. 1–3 (Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska, 1934–37).
13. Filip Lukas, “Kako beogradska Javnost služi ‘istini’ i ‘kulturi,’” Hrvatska revija 10
(1937): 560–61.
14. “Program hrvatske omladine,” Hrvatska zemlja, 20 Mar. 1936, 2.
15. Vinko Nikolić, “Za novu Hrvatsku - nova književnost,” Ustaški godišnjak 1 (1942):
191–96.
16. Bzik, Ustaški pogledi, 20; Mladen Lorković, “Muške vrline—temelj ustaškog
pokreta,” Ustaški godišnjak 1 (1942): 88–90.
17. Zdenka Žanko, “Majka u svietlu ustaštva,” Ustaškinja 1, no. 8 (10 Oct. 1941): 2.
18. Ivo Bogdan, “Naš Poglavnik,” Spremnost, 10 Apr. 1942.
19. Ivo Babić, “Potreba i značenje vojne prednaobrazbe,” Plava revija, 3 Feb. 1943,
66–67.
20. Lorković, “Muške vrline,” 90.
21. Emil Lašić, “Francetićev duh ne može umrijeti . . . ,” Naraštaj slobode 2, no. 7 (14, 10
Apr. 1943): 4.
22. “Crna legija i njezine borbe,” Hrvatski narod, 3 Mar. 1943.
 Notes to Pages 132–137  385

23. Ivo Balentović, “Borbe u snijegu i leda,” in Balentović, Crna legija: Odredi nepobije-
dive mladosti (Zagreb: Ustaška mladež, 1942), 11.
24. Suljeman Šakić, “Tragom junačke borbe,” in Balentović, Crna legija, 22.
25. Franjo Bubanić, Ljudi koji gledaju smrt u oči (Zagreb: Ustaša, 1942), 5–6.
26. Mijo Bzik, “Ustaša Mijo Babić je pao u borbi,” Ustaša, 19 July 1941.
27. Husnija Hrustanović, “Na mjesta!—Pozor!—Hitac . . . ,” Ustaška mladež, 15 Sept.
1942, 7.
28. Borislav Petz, Odjel za tjelovežba i sport, skrizaljka za ocjenjivanje posledaka u
atletici sa 6 crteza (Zagreb: Zapovijedništvo Ustaške mladeži i Glavni Ustaški Stan,
1944), v.
29. “Dobri sportaši—dobri vojnici,” Nova Hrvatska, 28 Mar. 1943.
30. “Uspomeni palih junaka športaša,” Nova Hrvatska, 31 Oct. 1943; “Hrvatski
športaši junaci Crne Legije,” Hrvatski narod, 8 Oct. 1943; “Sprovod ustaškog dupovnika
i hrvatskog športaša, Slavina Cindrić,” Nova Hrvatska, 2 May 1943; “Kotnik ranjen:
Ozliedu je zadobio u borbi s odmetnica,” Hrvatski narod, 4 Mar. 1944; “Poginuo je
hrvatski profesionalni šakački prvak svih skupina Mijo Dvarić,” Hrvatski narod, 23 Apr.
1944.
31. Antun Sedlar, “Meister des klassischens Balletts,” Neue Ordnung, 19 May 1942.
32. Matija Marčinko, “Borči,” Hrvatski narod, 18 June 1944.
33. Branko Klarić, “Ponor i sunce,” Hrvatski narod, 10 Apr. 1942.
34. See, e.g., Franjo Kršinić, “Ribari” and “Sveti Sebastijan,” Hrvatska revija, 6, June
1943; Jozo Kljaković, “Posljedne večera,” “Zaštitnici grada Zagreba,” and “Uskurnuce,”
Hrvatsko kolo (1943); Kljaković, “Jematava II,” in Druga izložba hrvatskih umjetnika u
Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj (Zagreb: Galerija umjetnosti, 1942), 15; Kljaković, “Kupanje”
and “Ribari,” Hrvatsko kolo (1943); Vanja Radauš, “Ranjenik,” Hrvatska revija 15, no. 12
(Dec. 1942); Ivo Lozica, “Veslač,” Hrvatska revija 15, no. 7 (July 1942).
35. Dragutin D. Došen, Poglavnikovi tjelesni sdrugovi (Zagreb: n.p., 1944), 27.
36. Mijo Bzik, “Naš nezaboravni Krune,” Ustaša, 27 Feb. 1944, 3–5; “U spomen viteza
Krune Devčić,” Hrvatski narod, 9 Feb. 1945.
37. Vilko Ivančić, “Vitežko srdce,” Nova Hrvatska, Easter 1944; Ivo Balentović,
“Francetić—legendarni junak nove Hrvatske,” Hrvatski krugoval, 4 Apr. 1943, 3.
38. Halid Čausević, “Za dom!” Novi behar 14, nos. 1–2 (15 May 1941): 6–7.
39. Josip Mrmić, Hrvatski častnik i njegov vojnik (Zagreb: Odgojni odjel ministarstva
oružanih snaga, 1944), 22–23.
40. “Agenti ustaškog redarstva upućeni u sabirni i radni logor u Jasenovacu,” Nova
Hrvatska, 22 Feb. 1942. See also, e.g., “Strielan ustaški dužnostnik,” Ustaša, 17 Aug. 1941,
1; “Osude ustaškog stožernog stegovnog suda stožera grad Zagreb,” Hrvatski narod, 23
Apr. 1943.
41. Domagoj Ružičić to the Bjelovar branch of GUS, 4 Sept. 1944, HDA, UHOP, Upisni
listovi stožera, 1941–1945, V.9.48/44.
42. Ivan Topljak, “Stare rane treba liječiti,” Nezavisna Hrvatska, 14 June 1941.
43. P., “Velik uspjeh brojnih športskih priredaba u korist ‘Pomoći,’” Nova Hrvatska, 23
Mar. 1943.
 386  Notes to Pages 137–145

44. “Hrvatski legionar: Uspomene najmilijeg druga i uzor Ustaša legionar,” Spremnost
2 (Feb. 1943).
45. Mijo Bzik, Ustaška borba od prvih dana ustaškoga rada do poglavnikova odlaska
u emigraciju: Počeći i bit ustaškoga pokreta (Zagreb: Glavni ustaški stan, 1942), 43;
Lieutenant-Colonel Josip Mrmić, “Božić ustaske obitelji,” Ustaša, 23 Dec. 1943, 11–12.
46. “Ustaške vrline,” Ustaša, Jan.–Feb. 1934.
47. Seán O’Faolain, Vive Moi! An Autobiography (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1965),
135.
48. Mijo Bzik, Ustaška pobjeda u danima ustanka i oslobodjenja (Zagreb: Glavni
ustaški stan, 1943), 23.
49. “Svečana prisega djaka-novaka u Varaždinu,” Hrvatski narod, 3 Oct. 1942.
50. Balentović, “Francetić—legendarni junak nove Hrvatske,” 3.
51. Josip Križanac, Junačka djela Jure viteza Francetića u stihovima, ed. Vilim Peroš
(Zagreb: Nova Hrvatska, 1943), 49–50, 54–55.
52. Branko Klarić, “Ustaši koji je pao,” Hrvatski narod, 4 Apr. 1943.
53. Viktor Banko, “Ustaše su spremni!” in Ustaške se vojska diže . . . (Zagreb: Odgojni
odjel Ministarstva oružanih snaga, 1944), 11–14.
54. Leg. Ivan Čurl, “Ustaša Ivica Majnarić—svijetli primjer goranske mladosti,”
Ustaša, 2 May 1943, 12.
55. Ivan Vašarević to GUS, 1 Jan. 1942, HDA, NDH, UHOP, GUS, ZDS, 7.249, unnum-
bered/42.
56. Franjo Rubina, “I Podravina daje svoje snage,” Nova Hrvatska, 18 June 1944.
57. “Poglavnik posmrtno odlikovao ustaša-legionara Peru Kojakovića,” Hrvatski
narod, 8 Sept. 1943.
58. “Pisma hrvatskom vojniku,” Ustaša, 14 Feb. 1943, 14–15.
59. Pero Kojaković, “Nikad!” in Pjesme legionara (Dubrovnik: Glavno ravnateljstvo
za promičbu, 1943), 24; Viktor Živić, “Prilikom godišnjice smrti i izlazka zbirke pjesama
ustaše-legionara Pera Kojakovića,” Spremnost, 5 Sept. 1943.
60. Kojaković, “Drugarska ljubav na bojištu,” in Pjesme legionara, 70.
61. Kojaković, “Mrtvome drugu,” Pjesme legionara, 55.
62. Kojaković, “Ljubim vas, grobovi!” in Pjesme legionara, 68.
63. Živić, “Prilikom godišnjice smrti i izlazka zbirke pjesama.”
64. “Hrvati u borbu,” Hrvatski narod, 27 Oct. 1942.
65. Capt. Antun Lončar, “Za čast i slobode,” in Pjesme hrvatskih vojnika, 12.
66. “Žena uz borča,” Ustaškinja 1, no. 6 (10 Sept. 1942): 10–11.
67. Crljen, Načela ustaškog pokreta, 112–17.
68. Irina Javor, “Majka čuvarica Hrvatstva,” Ustaškinja 1, no. 3 (10 May 1942): 10–11.
69. Žanko, “Majka u svietlu ustaštva.”
70. “Obitelj je najbitnji činbenik u preporodu naroda,” Nova Hrvatska, 28 May 1943.
71. See, e.g., the leaflets produced by the Ustasha female Vine in Doboj and the female
Ustasha Youth camp in Varaždin to mark the inaugural Week of the Croatian Mother
and Child in 1942: leaflet dated 31 May 1942 from Doboj Ustasha Vine, HDA, NDH, ZŠ,
102.10/98.109; leaflet dated 26 May 1941 from female Ustasha Youth camp in Varaždin,
HDA, NDH, ZŠ, 102.10/108.51.
 Notes to Pages 145–152  387

72. Kamilo Bresler, “Društvovna zaštita ustaške majke i djete,” Hrvatski narod, 4 June
1942.
73. Ibid.
74. Josip Rasuhin, “Hrvatski narod ne će nikada izmurijeti!” Hrvatski narod, 9 June
1942.
75. “Zakonska odredba o zabrani i kažnajavanju uzrokovanog pometnuća i o preki-
danju trudnoće,” Narodne novine, 10 June 1941.
76. “Zakonska odredba o zabrani i kažnajavanju uzrokovanog pometnuća”; “Zakonska
odredba o promjeni i nadopuni zakonske odredbe o zabrani i kažnajavanju uzrokovanog
pometnuca i o prekidanju trudnoće broj LXXXIII-149-Z. p.-1941. od 10. lipnja 1941,”
Narodne novine, 28 Aug. 1941.
77. See, e.g., Ivo Petrić, “Znatan porast poroda kao posljedica mjere protiv pometnuća,”
Nova Hrvatska, 1 May 1942.
78. See, e.g., the reports sent from regional hospitals in Banja Luka, Bjelovar, and
Rebro to the Ministry of Health in autumn 1941: “Zapisnik,” 14 Sept. 1941, HDA, NDH,
UMin, MZ, 226.2978/41; “Zapisnik,” 4 Aug. 1941, HDA, NDH, UMin, MZ, 226.818/1941;
“Zapisnik,” n.d., HDA, NDH, UMin, MZ, 226.919/1941; “Zapisnik,” 11 Aug. 1941, HDA,
NDH, UMin, MZ, 226.908/1941.
79. “Neprijatelj Nezavisne Države Hrvatske broj 1,” Hrvatska krajina, 25 May 1941.
80. Ivan Topljak, “Stare rane treba liječiti,” Nezavisna Hrvatska, 14 June 1941.
81. “Poglavnikove riječi postaju djelo,” Poglavnik radi i izagradjuje (Zagreb: Glavni
Ustaški Stan, 1941), 36–37.
82. Petrić, “Znatan porast poroda kao posljedica mjere protiv pometnuća.”
83. Prof. Dr. E. L. Miloslavić, “Kobno spriečavanje poroda,” Ustaški godišnjak 2 (1943):
222.
84. Ibid., 228.
85. Ibid., 229.
86. “Neprijatelj Nezavisne Države Hrvatske broj 1,” Hrvatska krajina, 25 May 1941.
87. “Nestat će bijela kuga,” Hrvatska krajina, 15 Aug. 1941.
88. Đuro Šnajder, “Žena, golub i abortus,” Plava revija 3, nos. 1–2 (Jan.–Mar. 1943): 43.
89. Mara Švel-Gamiršek, “Rankin grijeh,” in Portreti nepoznatih žena (Zagreb: Matica
Hrvatska, 1942), 239.
90. H. Kürschner, “Žena u obitelj,” Ustaškinja 3, no. 6 (10 Sept. 1944): 20.
91. “Hrvatska država bit će sigurno državu hrvatskih majki i hrvatske djece,” Hrvatski
narod, 6 June 1942.
92. Ela Maroš, “Uloga hrvatske školovane žene u današnjici,” Ustaškinja 3, no. 8 (10
Oct. 1944): 32–37.
93. “Nestanak besramnih slika i kipova,” Katolički list, 3 June 1941.
94. Antun Jerkov, “Uloga žene u Državi Hrvatskoj,” Nedjelja, 17 Aug. 1941.
95. Marica Stanković, “Ženska omladina u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj,” Nedjelja, 4
May 1941; D.J.D., “Protoprirodna emancipacija,” Nedjelja, 9 Oct. 1941.
96. “Naša mati prema našoj novoj školi,” Ustaškinja 1, no. 3 (May 1942): 230.
97. Maca Minić, “Uloga žene,” Ustaška mladež (Easter 1942): 5.
98. “Velika ljubav male djevojice,” Ustaškinja 3, no. 7 (10 Oct. 1944): 4.
 388  Notes to Pages 153–157

99. Minić, “Uloga žene,” 5.

100. One example: before the execution of her husband, Ustasha sergeant Luka
Biondić, by the Partisans, Katica Biondić said to her daughter Mica: “Don’t cry, my
daughter. If you have lost a father, you still have a mother and the father of us all, you
have the Poglavnik!” Franjo Rubina, Tri mjesecom pod crvenom zviezdom: S “Vražijom
divizijom” za partizana po Grmeću (Zagreb: Nova Hrvatska, 1943), 67–68.
101. “Najljepsi časovi moga života,” Ustaškinja 2, no. 10 (10 Jan. 1944): 6–7; Haris Seitz-
Oršanić, “Poglavnik je primio Hrvatice-Ustaškinje,” Ustaškinja 3, no. 7 (10 Oct. 1944):
6–7; “Poglavnice, sliedemo Te!” Ustaškinja 3, nos. 10–12 (Jan.–Mar. 1945): 12–13.
102. Maroš, “Uloga hrvatske školovane žene,” 32–37; “Zadaća žene u hrvatskom
ustaškom pokretu,” Ustaškinja 2, no. 10 (10 Jan. 1944): 4.
103. Zdenka Jušić-Šeunik, “Žene u hrvatskoj književnost,” Ustaški godišnjak 1 (1942):
345–48.
104. See, e.g., Frano Alfirević, “Majci,” Hrvatsko kolo (1942): 83–84; Kojaković,
“Majko!” in Pjesme legionara, 21; Vinko Kos, “Mama mene špota,” in Lada (Zagreb:
HIBZ, 1944), 26; Marijan Matijasević, “Pismo majci,” in Lirika (Samobor: Dragutin
Spuster, 1941), 42; Ton Smerdel, “Mužej moje majke,” Hrvatska revija 17, no. 7 (1944): 357.
105. See, e.g., Nikola Polić, “Majka samoubice,” Danko Andelinović, “Majka,” Zdenko
Štambuk, “Posljedne majčino pismo,” Drago Gervais, “Za sinom,” and Gabrijel Cvitan,
“Susret s majkom,” all in Sida Kosutić and Vinko Nikolić, eds., Hrvatska majka u pjesmi
(Zagreb: Hrvatski ženski list, 1941), 35–36, 61, 64, 76.
106. Kosutić, “Uvod,” in Kosutić and Nikolić, Hrvatska majka u pjesmi, n.p.
107. “Majka,” Ustaškinja 2, no. 3 (10 June 1943): 20.
108. B. V., “Ranjeni ustaša majci,” Ustaškinja 3, no. 2 (10 May 1944): 25.
109. Antun Bonifačić, “Spomenik,” Spremnost, 25 Apr. 1943. In some publications, the
author’s first name is “Antun.” I’ve retained this in the notes and bibliography, but I have
used the form “Ante” in the text.
110. Lieut. Ilija Sukalić, “Hrvatska majka” and “Uz kolievku,” in Pjesme hrvatskih
vojnika, 5, 14.
111. “Mati i sin,” Ustaškinja 3, no. 2 (10 May 1944): 21–22.
112. Žanko, “Majka u svietlu ustaštva.”
113. “Ustaška majka—Manda Devčić,” Ustaškinja 1, no. 3 (10 May 1942): 6–7; “Manda
Devčić” and “Lička žena u ustaškoj mladeži,” Ustaška mladež, 31 Aug. 1941, 6–7.
114. “U spomen viteza Krune Devčić,” Hrvatski narod, 9 Feb. 1945.
115. “Majka mučenice o sinovima mučenicima,” Novi list, 20 June 1941: interview with
Marija Hranilović and Katica Soldin.
116. Vinko Nikolić, “Ustaška majka nad grobom sina mučenika,” Ustaša, 30 May 1943, 1.
117. See, e.g., Frano Kršinić, “Majke i dijete,” Hrvatska revija 16, no. 6 (June 1943); Vilko
Šeferov, “Sjećanje,” Hrvatsko kolo (1941); Ismet Mujezinović, “Moja žena,” Hrvatsko kolo
(1941); Josip Crnobori, “Portret gospode Ev,” Hrvatska revija 14, no. 10 (Oct. 1941); Gustav
Likan, “Portret gospode B.L.,” Hrvatska revija 14, no. 7 (July 1941); Anton Meždjić,
“Seljanka,” Hrvatsko kolo (1941); Mirko Rački, “Streljačica,” Hrvatska revija 17, nos. 11–12
(Nov.–Dec. 1944).
 Notes to Pages 157–164  389

118. Marijan Trepše, “Maja,” in Filip Lukas, ed., Nasa domovina, vol. 2 (Zagreb: Glavni
Ustaški: Stan, 1943).
119. HURA, “RUŽA,” Ustaška mladež, 7 Sept. 1941, 4.
120. Ivona Maixner, “Hrvatska žena u borbi i radu,” Ustaša, 10 Aug. 1941, 11.
121. Bosiljka Perše, “Žene Ustaše,” Ustaška mladež, 3 Aug. 1941, 3–4.
122. Mica, “Ustaška djevojka,” Naš rad, 20 Sept. 1941,2.
123. “Nitko ne kadar,” Hrvatski narod, 4 June 1942.
124. “Žena uz borca,” Ustaškinja 1, no. 6 (10 Sept. 1942): 3
125. Olga Osterman, “Žena u novoj hrvatskoj državi,” Ustaškinja 1, no. 1 (10 Apr. 1942): 5.
126. Urednica, “Mi djevojka u ustaškom pokretu,” ŽAP, 13 Sept. 1941, 2.
127. “Svaka Hrvatica mora biti u prvom redu majka, prava hrvatska majka,” Nova
Hrvatska, 4 June 1943.
128. See, e.g., “Ne želim nikome, da prodje kroz ovo kalvariju,” Nova Hrvatska, 1 Aug.
1943.
129. See, e.g., Rubina, Tri mjeseca pod crvenom zviezdom, 21–22.
130. “Novo školsko godište hrvatskog sveučilišta,” Alma mater Croatica 5, no. 3 (Nov.
1941): 117; Jaroslav Šidak, “Sveučilište za vrijeme rata i okupacije,” in Spomenica u povodu
proslava 300 godišnijice sveučilišta u Zagrebu, 177.
131. “Jedna je žena orala,” in Kroz ustaška Hrvatska: Progovorio je pozdravski seljak i
radnik (Zagreb: Tipografija, 1941), 26–27.
132. See, e.g., the reports of physical education trainers Mira Kren, 3 Apr. 1943, Branka
Šrepel, 13 Apr. 1943, and Dragica Zubrinić, 13 Apr. 1943, after visits to local female Ustasha
Youth camps in Bjelovar, Križevci, and Koprivnica: HDA, UHOP, GUS, 4.249/1942, nos.
383/43, 240/43, 405/43.
133. “Ustaška radnica,” Hrvatski narod, 11 June 1942.
134. Vika Biščan, “Mi, Hrvatske Radnice,” Ustaška mladež, 1 Feb. 1942, 7–8.
135. Mira Dugački, “Ženska mladež u novoj Hrvatskoj,” Ustaška mladež, 3 Aug. 1941.
136. Ivona Latković, “Sveučilištarke u zvanju,” Plug, 5 Mar. 1944, 3.
137. Lovre Katić, “Žena u doba hrvatskih narodnih vladara,” Hrvatsko kolo (1942):
234–44; “Hrvatska žena u povijesti i narodnog predaji,” Ustaškinja 2, no. 1 (10 Apr. 1943):
20–22.
138. D. Labas, “Moda svira—mi plesemo!” Ustaška mladež, 4 Jan. 1942, 7.
139. V.A., “Djevojka u odori,” Ustaška mladež, 1 Feb. 1942, 16.
140. Again, see the series of reports cited in n. 132, this chapter.
141. “Prve ženske kondukterke na čestovnoj zelježnici,” Hrvatski narod, 23 Apr. 1943.
142. Lydia Oswald, “Kroatische reise,” Neue Ordnung, 26 July 1942.
143. “Naša ženska intelektualna mladež,” Spremnost, 15 Aug. 1942.
144. “Obaveznice logora Radne Službe Ženske Ustaške Mladeže,” Hrvatski narod, 2
June 1942.
145. “Kroatische Frauen im Arbeit zum Sieg,” Wiener Illustrierte 8 (22 Aug. 1942): 15–16;
“Hrvatske žene u radu za pobjedu,” Nova Hrvatska, 7 Aug. 1943.
146. See, e.g., “Prve Hrvatice-Muslimanke sa sveučilištnom iz obranbom,” Alma Mater
Croatica 7 (Jan.–Apr. 1944): 5–8; “Prvi muslimanske profesorica na fakultetu medicinu,”
Osvit, 23 June 1943.
 390  Notes to Pages 164–183

147. “Ženska pomoćna služba PTS-a,” Hrvatski narod, 26 Jan. 1944.

148. “Borbe, junaštva i pobjede nasih,” Ustaša, 24 Jan. 1943, 12; “Mučenistvo Andjelka
Šarić,” Ustaša, 31 Jan. 1943, 15.
149. “U spomen ustaškinje Jelene Šantić,” Ustaškinja 2, no. 8 (10 Nov. 1943): 6.
150. Jelena Šantić, “Posljedna poruka,” Ustaškinja 2, no. 10 (10 Jan. 1944): 3.
151. Husnija Hrustanović, “Žrtva Jelene Šantić,” Ustaška mladež, 1 Feb. 1943;
“Svečanom zadušnice za poginule dužnostnice ženske ustaške mladeži,” Hrvatski narod,
11 Oct. 1942.
152. “Odlikovanje junakinje,” Ustaškinja 1, no. 9 (10 Dec. 1942): 5.
153. “Dvadeset i osam dana kraj krvave Drine,” Hrvatski narod, 29 Feb. 1944.
154. “Žena-milicionar iz Fazlagića kula,” Hrvatski narod, 30 Mar. 1944. See also “Duh
Kule Fazlagića,” Osvit, 13 June 1944.
155. Zahida Sefić, “Fazalagića kula je dokaz,” Ustaša, 20 June 1944, 6–7.
156. “Dvie svietle žrtve na polju časti i slave,” Nova Hrvatska, 6 Feb. 1944.
157. R. K., “Žene na ulici,” Nedjelja, 9 Sept. 1944; “Pismo o borbenim ženama,”
Ustaškinja 4, no. 1 (10 Apr. 1944): 4.

CHAPTER 4. SOCIAL JUSTICE AND THE CAMPAIGN FOR TASTE

1. “Iz duše hrvatskog naroda iskorjenjen je svaki tudjinski otrov,” Nova Hrvatska, 9
June 1942.
2. Mile Starčević, “Ustaška država i kulturno-prosvjetna djelatnost,” Prosvjetni život
1–2 (1942): 4–8.
3. Dušan Žanko, “Nova doba kažalisne umjetnosti,” Hrvatska sarajevska pozornica 8,
no. 2 (15 Dec. 1942): 122–23.
4. Dušan Žanko, “Hrvatsko državno kazalište u Zagrebu,” Naša domovina 2: 521–24.
5. Ibid.
6. Stanko Vitković, “Druga revolucija,” Hrvatska smotra 12 (1941): 623–24.
7. Guberina, “Naše Ustaštvo,” and Ivo Bogdan, “Ustaštvo i Ustaše,” Spremnost, 1 Feb.
1942.
8. Julije Makanec, “Put hrvatskoga naroda do slobode,” Spremnost, 3 Nov. 1942; Tias
Mortigjija, “Hrvatska intelektualna mladež u oslobodilačkog borbi,” Spremnost, 16 Apr.
1942.
9. A comprehensive discussion of these debates can be found in Mačan, Spremnost,
33–40.
10. “Nastavlja se revolucija Ustaškog pokreta,” Ustaša, 30 Sept. 1941, 1.
11. Luka Perković, “Naše selo i naši seljački književnici,” Književnik 3, no. 6 (May 1930):
244–51.
12. Drago Ibler, “Udruženje likovnih umjetnika ‘Zemlja,’” Književnik 2, no. 7 (July
1929): 267.
13. Đuro Tiljak, “Izložba Babić-Bečić-Miše,” Književnik 5, no. 1 (Jan. 1932): 22–25;
Tiljak, “Izložbe i kritičari,” Književnik 6, no. 3 (Mar. 1933): 121–23.
14. Milan Đurman, “Slučaj Miloša Crnjanskog,” Književnik 4, no. 5 (Apr. 1932): 158–59.
15. Kožarcanin, Sam čovjek; Kožarcanin, Tudja žena.
 Notes to Pages 183–188  391

16. See, e.g., Kolar, Jesmo ili nismo; Kolar, Mi smo za pravice; Krleža, Povratak Filip
Latinowicza; Krleža, Na rubu pametu.
17. Ivo Balentović, “Uvod,” in Krvavi ples (Vinkovac: Pododbor Matice Hrvatske, 1939),
2–3.
18. Balentović, “Rijeć o Kozarčanin,” Hrvatska smotra 6, no. 11 (Nov. 1938): 575–78.
19. Vladimir Jurčić, “Dokumenti,” in Kako su umirali hrvatski književnici i umjetnosti,
1846–1936 (Zagreb: Naklada autora, 1936), 135–39.
20. Mate Hanžeković, ed., Hitrec-Jurčić-Kovačić: Lirika 1932 (Zagreb: Gaj, 1932), 1–3.
21. See, e.g., Antun Bonifačić, Krv majke zemlje (Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska, 1935), esp.
34–37, 189–219; Vladimir Jurčić, U metropolu (Sisak: Vjekoslav Pelc, 1932), esp. “Nedeljno
popodne osamljene sluškinje” and “Pored kavane,” 20, 22.
22. Mile Budak, Direktor Krizanić: Rodoljub i dobrotvor (Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska,
1938), esp. 3–26; Marko Čović, “Budakov društveni roman,” Hrvatska revija 12, no. 4
(1939): 204–6.
23. Ivan Softa, Na česti (Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska, 1936); Softa, Dani jada i glada
(Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska, 1937); Softa, Nemirni mir (Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska, 1939).
24. See e.g., Ivo Ladika, “Ljubav,” Hrvatsko kolo (1937): 279.
25. Ivo Kozarčanin, “U krilu žene,” in Izmedju dva rata, 251.
26. Zvonko Kuhar, “Kavana i restauracija,” Hrvatsko kolo (1937): 281.
27. Spasoje Prcović, “Nekoliko naših sociljalnih načela,” Plava revija 1, no. 1 (Sept.
1940): 13–17.
28. Ivo Balentović, “Vraćanje selu,” Hrvatska smotra 3, nos. 7–8 (July–Aug. 1934):
345–47.
29. Jurčić, “U znaku D.H.K., P.E.N.—kluba i drugih odbora,” in Kako su umirali
hrvatski književnici, 127–29.
30. Rudolf Horvat, “Državna Hipotekarna banka g. 1938,” “Beogradska ‘Čaršija,’” and
“Privilegovana Agragana banka,” in Hrvatska na mučilištu (Zagreb: Kulturno-historijsko
društvo ‘Hrvatski-rodoljub, 1942), 474–75, 484–85, 574–75.
31. See, e.g., Stanko Dominić, “Ne revolucija, već pravda,” Socijalni rad 10 (Sept. 1937);
“Naša radnička čast,” Socijalni rad 11 (Oct. 1937).
32. “Osnovan hrvatski socijalni institut,” Hrvatski radnik, 12 Dec. 1940; “Hrvatski
socijalni institut,” Hrvatski radnik (Christmas 1940).
33. “Hrvatski socijalni institut,” Hrvatski radnik (Christmas 1940).
34. Radnik Hrvat, “Dajte tvornice radništvu!” Hrvatski radnik, 11 Feb. 1922.
35. O. V., “Uloga radništva u suvremenom narodnom životu,” Hrvatski radnik
(Christmas 1940).
36. “Uzmimo naše dobro u naše ruke!” Hrvatski radnik, 11 Feb. 1922, 1.
37. O.V., “Špekulanti,” Hrvatski radnik, 26 Sept. 1940; D. M. Z. “Istina o djelovanju Ing.
J. Wonka u Siverić,” Hrvatski radnik, 11 May 1939.
38. “Uzdaj se u se i u svoje kljuse!” Hrvatski radnik, 11 Feb. 1922.
39. Josip Klanjčić, “Ne ćemo tuđince za vođe,” Nezavisnost, 19 Jan. 1940.
40. Hrvatski Nacionalist, “Ludovanje jednog sina ‘izabranog naroda,’” Nezavisnost, 4
June 1938.
 392  Notes to Pages 188–195

41. M. Keser, “Dok naš narod ostavlja svoj kućni prag, doseljeni tudjinci jedu njegove
kruh,” Nezavisnost, 4 May 1938.
42. “Jevreji u Jugoslavije,” Nezavisnost, 12 Jan. 1939.
43. “Živila ‘Slobodna Hrvatska’?” Mlada Hrvatska, 8 Dec. 1936.
44. “Njemački židovi i hrvatsko narodno gospodarstvo,” Mlada Hrvatska, 6 Oct. 1936.
45. “Naši židovski gradovi Vinkovci,” Mlada Hrvatska, 3 Nov. 1936.
46. “Hrvati—seljaci, židovi—trgovci,” Mlada Hrvatska, 21 Feb. 1937.
47. “Nova doba u Hrvatskoj,” Hrvatski narod, 25 Aug. 1942.
48. Aleksandar Seitz, “Društvovna revolucija ustaskog pokreta,” Nova Hrvatska, 3 May
1942.
49. Bozidar Kavran, “Ustaška nacela i društvovna pitanja,” Hrvatski list, 9 Jan. 1944.
50. Ibid.
51. “Ustaška načela se ostvaraju,” Hrvatska krajina, 18 May 1941; Urednik, “Naša
prva riječ,” Z. F., “Tako je to i na Illovcu, čovječe dragi!” and J., “Karlovačka gradska
ekonomija,” Savjest Karlovca 1, no. 1 (21 June 1941): 1, 6–7, 9–10.
52. Mijo Bzik, Ustaška pobjeda u danima ustanka i oslobodjenja (Zagreb: Glavni
ustaški stan, 1942), 14. See also Poglavnik radi i izgradjuje (Zagreb: Glavni Ustaški Stan,
1942), esp. 18–62.
53. Mijo Bzik, Ustaški pogledi (Zagreb: Glavni Ustaški Stan, 1943), 75–109.
54. Mijo Bzik, “Naši dragi rudari,” Ustaša, 10 June 1942, 3.
55. “Kroz pismohranu ustaškog pokreta,” Ustaša, 20 June 1944, 9.
56. “Poglavnik i radni narod” and “Poglavnikove riječi postaju djelo,” in Poglavnik radi
i izagradjuje, 16, 24–39.
57. Ante Frlić, “Unutarnja trgovina,” HDA, NDH, Ponova, Židovski odsjek, opći spisi,
441/1942, 1–6; Jozo Mrzljak, “Da li je hrv. gospodarstvo bilo u hrvatskim rukama?”
Gospodarstvo (Christmas 1941).
58. “Dužnosti povjerenika u židovskom i srbskim podužecima,” Nezavisna Hrvatska,
12 July 1941.
59. “Veliko znanimanje gradjanstva za rasprodaja židovskih stvari,” Nova Hrvatska, 18
Mar. 1942.
60. “Hrvatski državni sabor—brzopisni zapisnik III sjednice hrvatskog sabora
Nezavisne Države Hrvatske dne 24 veljača 1942,” Narodne novine, 25 Feb. 1942.
61. “Ustaška načela se ostvaruju,” Hrvatska krajina, 18 May 1941.
62. Anonymous, Srušena je moć židova (Zagreb: Čitaj i zapamti, 1942), 2.
63. B., “Učinjen je kraj židovskom izrablivanju djevojaka arijske krvi,” Novi list, 8 May
1941; “Primjer židovskog izrabljivanja naših ljudi,” Novi list, 3 July 1941.
64. See, e.g., “Ubojici Dordi Radivojši održat će se sudjenje 26 lipnja,” Hrvatska
krajina, 6 June 1941; “Ubojica i pronevjeritelj Dorde Radivojša,” Hrvatska krajina, 27 May
1941; “Uhićen velik broj četnika i bivših političara u hrvatskoj pokrajini,” Hrvatski narod,
29 Apr. 1941; “Hrvatska vojska na putu u Bosni stigla je u Sarajevo,” Hrvatski narod, 29
Apr. 1941; “Tragovima pustošenja srpskih četnika,” Hrvatski narod, 1 May 1941.
65. Franjo Perše, “Moral ‘Kajmakčalanaca’: Pismo srbskog častnika židovu Sternu,”
Spremnost, 18 Oct. 1942.
 Notes to Pages 195–202  393

66. “Poglavnik i radni narod,” 18; “Poglavnikove riječi postaju djelo,” 36–37.
67. Miroslav Gal, “Sportski i tjelesni razvoj hrvatskoj radnika,” Hrvatski krugoval, 19
Oct. 1941, 2–3.
68. Bzik, Ustaški pogledi, 114–18; Vjekoslav Blaškov, “Narodna radna zajednica,”
Hrvatski radnik: Kalendar godišnjak za godinu 1943, 120.
69. Aleksandar Seitz, “Predgovor,” Put do hrvatskog sozializma: Govori i članci
državnog savezničara (Zagreb: Glavna saveza staliških i drugi postrojbi, 1943), 13, 24,
26–31, 38–39.
70. “Hrvatski radnik u Ustaškom pokretu,” Ustaša, 4 Jan. 1941, 1.
71. Seitz, “Predgovor,” Put do hrvatskog sozializma, 34–35.
72. Stjepan Tomičić, “Hrvatski socializam,” Spremnost, 28 Nov. 1942.
73. Zdravko Belamarić, “Gradnja radničkih domova u Bosni i Hercegovini,” Hrvatski
radnik, 25 July 1941.
74. Ibid.
75. “Zakonska odredba o gradnji hrvatskih radničkih obiteljskih kuća,” Narodne
novine, 29 Apr. 1941; “Zakonska odredba o osnivanje Ureda za izgradnju hrvatskih
radničkih obiteljskih domova,” CXIII-20-2-p.-1941, Narodne novine, 23 May 1941.
76. “Poglavnikov govor hrvatskim radnicima prigodom posvete temeljnog kamena
za gradnju prvog hrvatskog radničkog naselja ‘Oča domovine dr. Ante Starčevića,”
Poglavnik govori, 29–30; “Radničko naselje ‘Eugen Kvaternik’ kraj Capraga,” Hrvatski
narod, 4 July 1941; “Novo naselje nosi ime Eugena Kvaternika,” Novi list, 3 July 1941;
“Godina dana rada na polju javnih radova u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj,” “Poglavnik
je odredio da se sunda, gdje ima radnika, dižu radnički domovi,” and “Javni radovi u
Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj: Nove zgrade,” all in Ivo Balentović, ed., Spomen-knjiga
prve obljetnice Nezavisne Države Hrvatske 10.4.41–10.4.42 (Zagreb: Državni izvještajni i
promičbeni ured, 1942), 303–6; M. V., “Hrvatski radnik jučer i danas,” Ustaška mladež, 9
Dec. 1941, 7.
77. “Zakonska odredba o dodjelievanje hrvatskih radničkih obiteljskih doma,”
Narodne novine, 19 Dec. 1942.
78. “Zakonska odredba o nekretninama t.zv. dobrovoljaca,” Narodne novine, 18 Apr.
1941.
79. See, e.g., letters of application from Krunoslav Stjepan Soldo and Zvonimir Maričić
to the State Directorate for Renewal, 7 July and 30 May 1941, HDA, NDH, Drzavni
ravnateljstvo za ponovo, vjerski odsjek, opći spisi, nos. 447/141/127/41 and 447/141/34/41;
confidential report by the UNS, 12 Feb. 1942, HDA, NDH, UNS, 1.248, VT8/42.
80. “Rješenje o uredjenju socialne stanice,” Narodne novine, 29 Apr. 1941.
81. Drago Cerovac, “Temeljne misli družtovne politike u Ustaškoj državi,” in Hrvatski
radnik: Kalendar godišnjak za godinu 1943, 190–207.
82. Leaflet of the Croatian Workers’ Union in Varaždin, 1 May 1944, HDA, NDH, ZŠ,
102.10, unnumbered.
83. 1 May workers’ celebration schedule from the Croatian Workers’ Union, 25 Apr.
1944, HDA, NDH, ZŠ, 102.10, unnumbered.
84. Vjekoslav Blaškov, “Raj Amerika,” Spremnost, 14 Feb. 1942.
 394  Notes to Pages 202–209

85. M. M. [Milivoj Magdić], “Prvi svibanj kao državni blagdan u ustaškoj Hrvatskoj,
Hrvatski radnik: Kalendar godišnjak za godinu 1943, 111–15.
86. M. V., “Hrvatski radnik jučer i danas,” Ustaša, 21 Sept. 1941, 8.
87. Mirko Bilić, “Hrvatski radnik za ustaski pokret,” Ustaška mladež, 12 Aug. 1941, 41.
88. “Zakonska odredba o Državnog Radnoj službi,” HDA, NDH, UHOP, GUS, 1942,
11/249, unnumbered and undated; “Zadaća radne službe u Državi Hrvatskoj,” HDA,
NDH, UHOP, GUS, 1942, 11/249, unnumbered and undated.
89. “S bilježnicom u ruci kroz čaršiju . . . Nova moderna Banja Luka traži da se
odreknemo nekih loših navika i običaja kod nas se malo pazi na higeniju i estetiku,”
Hrvatska krajina, 6 July 1941.
90. “Stožernik dr. Viktor Gutić dobio je naročite pohvale sa Najvišeg mjesta za svoj
dosadašnji rad,” Hrvatska krajina, 28 May 1941.
91. Milan Ivšić, “Nova Hrvatska—novi čovjek,” Hrvatska smotra 11, no. 6 (June 1942):
369–77.
92. Poglavnik saboru i narodu: Govor na završnog saborskoj sjednici 28 veljače 1942
(Zagreb: Merkantile, 1942), 56–57.
93. “Povijestna važnost zakonskih odredba o zaštiti arijske krvi,” Hrvatski branik, 10
May 1941.
94. “Selo i grad,” Hrvatska gruda, 14 Feb. 1942.
95. Professor N. N., “Sveucilištarči i umjetničke izlozbe,” Alma Mater Croatica 5, no. 4
(Dec. 1941): 172.
96. Franjo Lačen, “Rad, radnici i seljaci u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj,” Ustaški
godišnjak 1 (1942): 165–71.
97. Božidar Kavran, “Ustaška načela i društvovna pitanja,” Hrvatski list, 9 Jan. 1944;
“Kulturno-prosvjetno podizanje selo,” Hrvatski narod, 27 Oct. 1942. The regime believed
this could be achieved in six years.
98. “Desetgodišnja osnova za uredjenje ulica na području grada Zagreba,” Hrvatski
narod, 6 July 1941; “Budući kolodvori grada Zagreba,” Hrvatski narod, 25 July 1942.
99. See, e.g., Drago Ibler, “Projekt podružnice osigurnaja radnika u Mostaru” and
“Stanbena grada,” and Zdenko Strižić, “Projekt sanatorija za tuberkulozu” all in Naša
domovina 2 (1943).
100. See, e.g., “Crkva sv. Antuna Padovanskoga na sv. Duhu u Zagrebu,” Hrvatski
narod, 10 Apr. 1944.
101. See the letter from the Committee, 15 May 1944, HDA, ZŠ, 102.10/24/36.
102. Tihomir Stahuljak, “Arhitektura u XX. stoljeću u Hrvatskoj,” in Filip Lukas, ed.,
Naša domovina (Zagreb: Glavni Ustaški Stan, 1943), 1: 713–14.
103. Slavo Svoboda, “Hrvatski šport u službi naroda i domovine,” Nova Hrvatska,
Christmas 1942; “Osnova za izgradnju hrvatskih radničkih naselja,” Nova Hrvatska, 10
Apr. 1942.
104. Marijan Božin, “Moderna arhitektura i Hrvatska,” Hrvatska smotra, 10, no. 5 (May
1942): 296–304.
105. See Aleksandar Freudenreich, Prosvjetna ognjišta: Priručnik za poticanje na
gradenje, osnivanje i izgradnju družtvenih domova s dvoranama u Hrvatskoj (Zagreb:
Glavno ravnateljstvo za obće narodno prosvjetljvanje, 1943); Freudenreich, “Prosvjetna
 Notes to Pages 210–215  395

ognjište,” Prosvjetni život 1, nos. 4–5 (Oct.–Nov. 1942): 168–76; Krešimir Galović, “Dom,
krv, tlo: Arhitektura u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj, 1941–1945,” Vijenac 227 (14 Dec.
2002): 1–11.
106. For one early example of this aesthetic, see O. R., “Na proljeće počinje gradnja
hrvatskog mesarskog doma u Ivkančevoj ulici,” Hrvatski narod, 8 Feb. 1942; see also
Galović, “Prosvjetna ognjista i domovi kulture,” 5–9.
107. See, e.g., Iris, “Idemo u slikokazi!” Hrvatski narod, 15 Jan. 1945.
108. Marijan Mikac, Tri godine hrvatskog slikopisa (Zagreb: Hrvatski slikopis, 1944),
22–28. In 1942 there were 154 cinemas in the state with 52,390 seats. This included 22 in
Zagreb; 5 each in Osijek and Sarajevo; and 3 each in Zemun, Brod, and Mitrovica. See
Ademović, Novinstvo i ustaška propaganda, 86.
109. Ademović, Novinstvo i ustaška propaganda, 32–34.
110. “Stigla je medalja, kojom je odlikovan naš dokumentarni slikopis, ‘Straži na
Drini,’” Hrvatski slikopis 2, no. 6 (1 May 1943): 3; “Prva hrvatska slikopisna izvedba,”
Hrvatski narod, 4 Feb. 1943.
111. Mikac, Tri godine hrvatskog slikopisa, 22–23; Mikac, “Početci hrvatskog slikopisa,”
Hrvatski slikopis 1, no. 1 (15 May 1942): 2.
112. Mikac, “Početci hrvatskog slikopisa,” Hrvatski slikopis 1, no. 1 (15 May 1942): 2.
113. Davor Jerković, “Slikopis—umjetnost našeg doba,” Hrvatski slikopis 2, no. 3 (15
Aug. 1942): 4; “Pred novim razdobljem hrvatskog slikopisa,” Hrvatski slikopis 2, no. 2 (1
Feb. 1943).
114. Jerković, “Slikopis—umjetnost našega doba,” 4; Mikac, “Početci hrvatskog
slikopisa,” Hrvatski slikopis 1, no. 1 (15 May 1942): 2.
115. Marijan Mikac to the Section for Internal Propaganda in the DIPU, 31 Jan. 1942,
HDA, NDH, GRP, 9.237/3399; report from Stanko Radošević, Section for Cinema,
RAVSIGUR, 2 Mar. 1942, HDA, NDH, GRP, 9.237, unnumbered.
116. “Prosvjetni slikopis u narodu,” Hrvatski slikopis 2, no. 1 (15 May 1942): 4; “Putujući
slikokaz u selu koje nema električnu struju,” Hrvatski narod, 3 June 1942.
117. “Uz ovogodišnje Antunova,” Hrvatski slikopis, 15 June 1942, 3.
118. Ademović, Novinstvo i ustaška propaganda, 86.
119. “Kako nas domaći slikopisni tjednik prima hrvatska pokrajina,” Hrvatski slikopis
3, no. 2 (1 Feb. 1944): 3.
120. Unsigned letter of 6 Jan. 1942 to DIPU, HDA, NDH, GRP, 1.237/VT 1/1941.
121. Danijel Rafaelić, “‘Lisinski’: Prvi hrvatski zvučni dugometražni igrani film,”
Lisinski (Zagreb: Hrvatska kinoteka, 2009), 3.
122. “Naš slikopis o Lisinskom,” Hrvatski list, 29 July 1943; Rafaelić, “‘Lisinski’ 3;
Hrvatska kinoteka Hrvatskog Državnog Arhiva, Zagreb Nezavisna Država Hrvatska,
“Lisinski,” AJ, 5723.
123. “Naš slikopis o Lisinskom,” Hrvatski list, 29 July 1943.
124. “Javno snimanje slikopisa ‘Lisinski,’” Hrvatski narod, 30 July 1943.
125. See, e.g., letter from Viktor Zabić to editors of Nova Hrvatska and Hrvatski narod,
2 July 1944, HDA, NDH, GRP, 44.237/IV/22/59/44.
126. “Lisinski slikopis o skladitelju prve hrvatske opera,” Spremnost, 17 Apr. 1944.
127. Ljubomir Maraković, “‘Lisinski’: Prvi hrvatski izvorni zvučni slikopis,” Hrvatski
 396  Notes to Pages 216–223

narod, 16 Apr. 1944; Vladimir Kovačić, “Prvi hrvatski glasbeni slikopis ‘Lisinski,’” Nova
Hrvatska, 16 Apr. 1944. See also Rafaelić, “‘Lisinski,’” 4–5.
128. V. N., “Pred praizvedbom slikopisa ‘Lisinski,’” Hrvatski slikopis 3, no. 4 (1 Apr.
1944): 5; Milan Katić, “Zašto snimamo slikopis ‘Lisinski,’” Hrvatski slikopis 2, no. 8 (1 Aug.
1943): 3; “Kratak sadrzaj slikopisa ‘Lisinski,’” Hrvatski slikopis 2, no. 8 (1 Aug. 1943): 2.
129. “Završen natječaj, ‘Hrvatskog slikopisa,’” Hrvatski slikopis 4, nos. 1–2 (Feb. 1945): 4.
130. Petrica J., untitled article, Hrvatski slikopis 4, nos. 1–2 (Feb. 1945): 4.
131. “Na posao za naš slikopis,” Hrvatski slikopis 3, no. 7 (1 July 1944): 2; “Završen
natječaj ‘Hrvatski slikopis,’” Hrvatski slikopis 4, nos. 1–2 (Feb. 1945): 3.
132. Dragoljub J. Tasić, “Uvod,” in Definitivi rezultati popis stanovištva od 31 Marta 1931
godine, vol. 2: Prisutno stanovništvo po pismenih i starosti (Belgrade: Državna štamparija,
1938), v–vii.
133. Ivan Sušić, “Nacrt osnove o organizaciji analfebetski tečajeva,” Hrvatska krajina,
20 May 1941; “Zakonska odredba o širenju pismenosti u narodu i održavanja tećaj evi za
nepismene, CCXC-1354-Z.p.-1941,” Narodne novine, 11 Sept. 1941.
134. See, e.g., “U Hrvatskoj ne će biti nepismenih vojnika,” Novi list, 5 Aug. 1941.
135. “Otvorenje ustaške čitaonice i knjižnice u Zagrebu,” Hrvatski list, 27 July 1943;
“Jučer je otvorena čitaonica Ustaškog stožera Zagreb,” Nova Hrvatska, 27 July 1943.
136. See, e.g., a report dated 28 Apr. 1942 detailing plans for an Ustasha library and
bookstore at the Bjelovar branch of GUS: HDA, NDH, UHOP, GUS, 1942, 3.249/1942.
137. “Hrvatski krugoval—hrvatskim vojnicima,” Hrvatski krugoval, 1–15 Apr. 1945, 12.
138. “Emisija za hrvatske radnika,” Hrvatski krugoval, 19 Oct. 1941, 8.
139. Gal, “Športski i tjelesni razvoj hrvatskoj radnika,” 2–3.
140. Radovan Latković, “Krugoval—svojina čitavog naroda,” Hrvatski radio list, 5 Oct.
1941, 3.
141. “Krugoval u ustaškoj borbi,” Hrvatski krugoval, 1–15 Apr. 1945, 8.
142. Application from Drago Žubetić, 2 June 1942 for a confiscated radio: HDA, NDH,
GRP, 27.237/429/42; letter from an adjutant of the Šid Ustasha camp to the State Director-
ate for Propaganda, 27 June 1941, requesting ownership of radios confiscated from local
Serbs and Jews stored at the regional post office for honorable local citizens: HDA, NDH,
PV, GRP, 90/941/3.237. There were possibly thousands of similar applications.
143. “Raspored,” Hrvatski krugoval, 5 Apr. 1942, 12.
144. See, e.g., “Slušaci pisite nam,” Hrvatski krugoval, 8–21 June 1944, 15; “Sudjeljute
u skladbima po želji slušaca,” Hrvatski krugoval, 6–19 Oct. 1944, 13; “Obljavljujemo
rezultate aktete,” Hrvatski krugoval, 9–22 Oct. 1944, 12–13, 6–19 Nov. 1944, 14–15, and 20
Nov.–6 Dec. 1944, 13–14; Zvonimir Verin, “Razgovoramo s vama . . . ,” Hrvatski krugoval,
9–22 Oct. 1944, 11.
145. “Književne večeri Hrvatskog krugovala,” Hrvatski krugoval, 1–15 Apr. 1945, 8.
146. Branko Gavella, “Posebna ‘pučka’ ili jedna jedina umjetnost?”Hrvatska sarajevska
pozornica 2, no. 20 (1 July 1943): 295; Ahmed Muradbegović, “Pučka drama,”Hrvatska
sarajevska pozornica 8 (1941–42): 1–2.
147. Ahmed Muradbegović, “10 travnja 1943,” Hrvatska sarajevska pozornica 2, nos.
15–16 (1 Apr. 1943): 227–28; Dušan Žanko, “Novo doba kažalistne umjetnosti,” Hrvatska
sarajevska pozornica 2, no. 8 (15 Dec. 1942): 122–23.
 Notes to Pages 223–229  397

148. “20-godišnjica Matice Hrvatskih Kažalistne Dobrovoljaca,” Hrvatska sarajevska

pozornica 2, no. 12 (15 Dec. 1943): 169–70.
149. Branko Gavella, “Hamlet pred seljacima,” Spremnost, 27 June 1943.
150. Gavella, “Ideja novog kažalista,” Hrvatska sarajevska pozornica 2, no. 11 (1 Feb.
1943): 153–56.
151. “Propisnik Hrvatskog radničkog savez,” 1838–1942, Narodne novine, 17 Aug. 1942;
“Osnova se ‘Hrvatskog radnički savez’ kao stališka postrojba radnika u okviru hrvatskog
ustaškog oslobodilačkog pokreta,” Hrvatski narod, 19 Aug. 1942.
152. “Umjetnost narodu,” Hrvatski narod, 19 Aug. 1942; “Umjetničke priredbe za
hrvatsko radničtvo,” Hrvatski narod, 20 Aug. 1942.
153. “Umjetnost se vraća narodu: Prilikom umjetničkih priredaba za hrvatsko
radničtvo na trgu svete Katarine u Zagrebu,” Hrvatski narod, 21 Aug. 1942.
154. “Radnici kao glumci,” Hrvatski list, 29 Jan. 1943; “Nagradene glume,” Gluma 1,
no. 11 (Nov. 1944): 29; “Prvi tečaja za kažalistne-dobrovoljačke glumce Matice Hrvatske
Kažalistnih Dobrovoljaca,” Gluma 1, no. 3 (Nov. 1943): 31–32; “Dva natjecaja krugovalne
drame,” Hrvatski krugovalne, 8 Oct. 1944; “Na posao za naš slikopis,” Hrvatski slikopis 3,
no. 7 (1 July 1944): 3.
155. “Borba za pravo,” Hrvatski radnik, 4 Feb. 1944.
156. Ljubomir Maraković, “Borba za pravo,” Spremnost, 6 Feb. 1944.
157. Ivan Triplat, Krug: Roman iz suvremenog Zagreba (Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska,
1943), bibliographical note, n.p. See also Triplat, Novele i humoreske (Zagreb: n.p, 1941);
Triplat, Panoptikum: Roman jednoga samotnika (Zagreb: Naše nove knjige, 1942); Triplat,
Marionete: novele (Zagreb: Vlastita naklada, 1945).
158. Marko Čović, “Ivan Softa—Radnik, književnik, Ustaša,” Nova Hrvatska, 31 Dec.
1941.
159. Ivan Softa, “Radnik u umjetnosti,” Hrvatski radnik, 13 June 1943.
160. Ibid.
161. “Piše hrvatski i ustaški!” Ustaša, 3 July 1941, 4.
162. Matija Pavlović, Ustasha worker, “Ustaše!” Ustaša, 9 Jan. 1944, 3.
163. Toma Gloznić, Ustasha peasant, “Sunce slobode,” Ustaša, 24 Aug. 1941, 5.
164. See, e.g., Ly-Tai-Fu, “Lirski protop: Nekoliko sličica s mjesta katastrofe,” Hrvatski
narod, 28 Jan. 1945.
165. See Križanac, Junačka djela Jure vitez Francetića u stihovima, esp. 25–45.
166. See, e.g., Corp. Antun Bojčić, “Borčima!” Hrvatski vojnik, 22 Feb. 1945, 4;
Domobran Stjepko Janković, “Nad jednim grobom . . . !” Hrvatski list, 14 Jan. 1944; Corp.
Stjepan Matoničkim, “Grobni humak,” Pjesme hrvatskih vojnika (Zagreb: Odgojni odjel
ministarstva oruzanih snaga, 1944), 12.
167. “Nagrađni natječaj uredničtva ‘Ustaše,’” Ustaša, 15 Nov. 1942, 16.
168. Ibid.
169. Ante Prnjak, Ustasha soldier, “Smrt ili pobjeda,” Ustaša, 8 Jan. 1943, 4–5.
170. See, e.g., B., “Živi mrtvac,” Ustaša, 15 Jan. 1943, 4–5; Capt. I. K., “Junaci iz školi u
Cisti,” Ustaša, 24 Feb. 1943, 13; Capt. Mate Penavić, “Iz bilježnice jednog borca,” Ustaša,
30 June 1943, 14–15; Ustaša Stjepan Petričeć, “Nismo se bojali smrti . . . ,” Ustaša, 6 Aug.
1943, 10–11; Platoon Leader M. E., “Uviek spremni za borbu,” Ustaša, 17 Sept. 1943, 9;
 398  Notes to Pages 229–235

Legionary Ivan Čurl, “Ustaša Ivica Majnarić—svietli primjer goranske mladosti,” Ustaša,
2 May 1943, 12; Mrmić, “Božić ustaske obitelji.”
171. Some examples of his work: Ustasha Hero swarm leader M. Žibrat, “Dva sata na
straži,” Ustaša, 13 Sept. 1943, 10–11; P. I. M. Ž., “Na juriš, braćo . . . ,” Ustaša, 7 July 1943,
14–16; M. Ž., “Jedan vojničar,” Ustaša, 2 May 1943, 7; M. Ž., “Bomba,” Ustaša, 11 Feb.
1943, 7.
172. “Odgovaramo suradnicima,” Ustaša, Christmas 1944, 15.
173. “Odgovaramo suradnicima,” Ustaša, 9 July 1944, 16.
174. “U spomen hrvatskog borca i športaša Slavina Ćindrića,” Nova Hrvatska, 2
May 1943; “Sprovod ustaška dupovnika i hrvatskog športaša, Slavina Cindrića,” Nova
Hrvatska, 2 May 1943; “Hrvatski športaša športaši junaci Crne Legije,” Hrvatski narod, 8
Oct. 1943. Ironically, in the 1920s Cindrić was an idol of Yugoslav football after scoring a
hat trick in his debut against Bulgaria in 1926.
175. “. . . Dr. Antun Ilik,” Nova Hrvatska, 2 Oct. 1943; “Dali svoj život za Poglavnika
i domovina,” Hrvatski narod, 3 Oct. 1943; “U spomen palih junaka športaša,” Nova
Hrvatska, 31 Oct. 1943.
176. “Banja lučki ‘Hadjuk’ promenio ime u ‘Hrvoje,’” Hrvatski narod, 17 May 1941.
177. “Radnici vas pozivanju nas radnički igre,” Hrvatski narod, 4 Sept. 1943; “Poglavnik
pozdravlja radnike—športasa okupljene na radničkim igrama,” Hrvatski narod, 9 Sept.
1943. Many of the state’s leading footballers played for Gradjanski, including the strikers
Anton Lešnik and Franjo Wölfl and the goalkeeper Franjo Glaser.
178. “Hrvatski nogometski savez,” Hrvatski šport, 25 Oct. 1944; Zdenko Blazeković,
“Prekid nogometnih utakmica,” Hrvatski narod, 15 Feb. 1945.
179. “‘Želim hrvatski šport podpuno nacionalizirati,’ rekao je povjerenik za šport
Zdenko Blažeković,” Hrvatski šport, 7 Feb. 1945; “Športsko novinstvo treba djelovati
odgojno,” Hrvatski šport, 10 Feb. 1945; “Važne odluke povjerenika državnog vodstva
tjelesnog odgoja i športa,” Hrvatski narod, 4 Feb. 1945; “Odluke povjerenika za šport,”
Hrvatski šport, 2 Mar. 1945.
180. “Šakači Slivak i Jurišić kažnieni zabranom nastupa,” Hrvatski narod, 4 Feb. 1945.
181. “‘Želim hrvatski šport podpuno nacionalizirati’”; “Športsko novinstvo treba
djelovati odgojno.”
182. “Sudjelovanje gledalaca u športskim borbama,” Nova Hrvatska, 4 Apr. 1943.
183. “Kako treba slušati krugoval,” Hrvatski krugoval, 12–25 Feb. 1945; “Kako treba
slušati krugoval,” Hrvatski krugoval, 8–21 June 1944.
184. Ahmed Muradbegović, “Publika i kažaliste,” Hrvatska sarajevska pozornica 11
(25 Jan. 1942): 6; Muradbegović, “10 travnja 1943,” Kažalisni list 15–16, no. 2 (1 Apr. 1943):
227–28.
185. Muradbegovic, “Sarajevsko kažaliste i njegova publika,” Hrvatska sarajevska
pozornica 4 (1941–42): 1–2.
186. Vladimir Jurčić, “Razmatranja o kažalistu i kažalistom obćinstvu,” Hrvatska
sarajevska pozornica 2, nos. 15–16 (1 Apr. 1943): 229–32.
187. “Prve ženske kondukterke na čestovnoj željeznici,” Hrvatski narod, 23 Apr. 1943.
188. See, e.g., “Smrtna osuda pokretnog priekog suda Adolf i Teodor Šafar strieljani,”
Hrvatski narod, 19 Aug. 1942.
 Notes to Pages 235–245  399

189. “Naš bieli Zagreb”; Jožčenko, “O snijegu zimskim radostima.”

190. See, e.g., Iris, “Ulice se cište,” Hrvatski narod, 18 Jan. 1945; “Zagrepčani cište
snijeg,” Nova Hrvatska, 13 Jan. 1945; “Kažnjeni zbog necišćenja snijeg,” Hrvatski narod, 10
Feb. 1945.

CHAPTER 5. BETWEEN ANNIHILATION AND REGENERATION

1. Zm [Zlatko Milković], “Jutro hrvatske lirike,” Hrvatski narod, 6 Dec. 1941.
2. Vojmil Rabadan, ed., Ognjište (Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska, 1941), 79–91.
3. Janko Zanetić, “Nova mladež i hrvatska književnost,” Ustaška mladež, 23 Dec. 1941,
1.
4. “Uvodna bilješka,” Izmedju dva rata: Novija hrvatska lirika (Zagreb: Društvo
hrvatskih književnika, 1942), 9.
5. A.R. Buerov, “Novija hrvatska lirika,” Hrvatska revija 16, no. 5 (May 1943): 283. A. R.
Buerov was the pen name of Radoslav Glavas.
6. Ante Bonfačić, “Izraz dvadesetgodišnje stvarnosti,” Spremnost, 10 Jan. 1943.
7. Marko Čović, “Hrvatska revija u suvremenoj hrvatskoj književnosti,” Hrvatska
revija 14, no. 5 (May 1941): 235–38.
8. Marko Čović, “Dužnost književnica u ustaškoj državi,” Hrvatska revija 15, no. 3
(Mar. 1942): 113–15.
9. Čović, “Dva razreda hrvatskih inteligencija,” Spremnost, 12 Dec. 1942.
10. Verus, “Odgovornost hrvatskog intelektualca: Povodom jednog zaloštnog slučnja,”
Spremnost, 26 Sept. 1943.
11. Ivo Ladika, “Umjetnici i bohemi,” Hrvatska revija 16, no. 8 (Aug. 1943): 446–48.
12. Antun Bonifačić, “Na vratima nove književnosti,” Plava revija 2, no. 8 (May 1942):
306.
13. Examples of Ujević’s work published by Ustasha journals and newspapers include
“Fetiši, ljubavi i predmetima,” Hrvatska revija 14, no. 4 (Apr. 1941): 182; “Glasba vjetra
u noćnome stabla,” Hrvatski narod, 10 Apr. 1944; “Poniženja ljepote” and “Selidbe,”
both Hrvatsko kolo (1941): 64–65, 67; Ivo Lendić, “Tin Ujević navršio 50 godinu života,”
Hrvatski narod, 6 July 1941; “Tin u Beogradu,” Hrvatski narod, 10 July 1943.
14. See, e.g., Dobriša Cesaric, “Vagonasi,” in Hrvatski radnik: Kalendar godisnjak za
godine 1943, 109–10.
15. Stanko Gasparović, “In memoriam hrvatskom književniku Ivi Kozarčaninu,”
Omladina 24, no. 4 (Dec. 1940): 135–36.
16. Milovan Adamović, “Pjesnik,” Omladina 24, no. 4 (Dec. 1940): 136.
17. Mirko Vutuc, “Na grobu kad nikog drugog nema (Žrtvi hrvatske tragike),”
Hrvatska revija 14, no. 7 (July 1941): 368.
18. Ante Maršić, “Čije je žrtva pokojni Ivo Kozarčanin?” Spremnost, 8 Feb. 1942.
19. Zdravko Brajković, “Razrasli torso,” Ustaška mladež, 9 Feb. 1942, 9–10.
20. Zlatko Milković, “Novele Vlade Vlaisavljevića,” Hrvatski ženski list 3 (Oct. 1941): 13.
21. Vinko Nikolić, “Hrvatska književnost na novim putevima,” in Nacionalni zadatci
književnosti: Književni nacionalno-odgojni članci (Zagreb: Hrvatska školska knjižnica,
1944), 162–66; Nikolić, “Za novu Hrvatsku,” 195–96.
 400  Notes to Pages 246–254

22. Vinko Nikolić, “Ustaško poglavlje: hrvatskog rodoljubnog pjesničtva,” in Nikolić,

ed., Lovori (Zagreb: Velebit, 1943), 117–22.
23. Bonifačić, “Na vratima nove književnosti,” 305–10.
24. Zvonimir Katalenić, “Tipovi, ukusi i kristaliziranje poezije narodne duše,”
Hrvatska revija 14, no. 8 (Aug. 1941): 413–14; Katalenić, “Iz prošlosti u budućnost,” Plava
revija 2, nos. 2–3 (Oct.–Dec. 1941): 70.
25. Zlatko Milković, “Pola godine Nezavisne Države Hrvatske: Hrvatska književnost u
posljednih šest mjeseca književna djelatnost u novoj Hrvatskoj,” Hrvatski narod, 16 Aug.
1941.
26. Antun Bonifačić, “Kako su trovali hrvatske duše,” Ustaški godišnjak 1 (1942):
199–201.
27. The suppression of the nationalist activities of Matica Hrvatska is recounted in Blaž
Jurišić, “Komesarijat u Matici Hrvatskoj,” Hrvatska revija 14, no. 5 (May 1941): 264–68.
28. “U novoj Hrvatskoj bit će književni i kulturni rad dostojno cijenjen i nagradjen,”
Novi list, 6 June 1941.
29. H., “O književnim nagradama,” Vienac 36, no. 4 (June 1944): 92–96.
30. Maraković, “Današnja hrvatska književnost,” 428.
31. “Zakonska odredba o državnom zavodu za zaštitu autorskih prava na podrucju
Nezavisne Države Hrvatske, CDXXIII-1760-z-1941,” Narodne novine, 25 Nov. 1941.
32. See “Zakonska odredba o autorskom prava na djela Dr Eugen Kvaternik i Dr Ante
Starčevića,” Narodne novine, 15 June 1941.
33. “Zakonska odredba o Državnom izvještajnom i promičbenom uredu, XXX-III-
231-z.-1942,” Narodne novine, 24 Jan. 1942; “Naredba ministra narodne prosvjete od 29
listopada 1942. broj U.m. 2736 o ukidanju Državnog izvještajnog i promičbenog uredu,”
Narodne novine, 29 Oct. 1942.
34. Antun Barac, “Sloboda šutnje,” Hrvatska revija 16, no. 10 (Oct. 1943): 549–56.
35. Ivo Hergešić, “O nakladnom radu i cenzuri pod ustaškim režimom,” Republika 3,
no. 1 (1945): 215–22.
36. HDA, NDH, MUP, 3.30/223/151.
37. Hergešić, “O nakladnom radu i cenzuri,” 215–22.
38. Mijo Bzik to state newspaper editors, 28 Aug. 1941: HDA, NDH, HIS, 18.31/996/262-
497.
39. HDA, NDH, GRP, 1.237/1942-5/VT/1/156; HDA, NDH, GRP, 44.237/11755/43; see also
series of letters sent to national and party newspapers and journals between Aug. and
Oct. 1941 by officials in the State Secretariat for Propaganda: HDA, NDH, GRP, 46.247.
40. See, e.g., the order from the directorate’s investigators to all newspapers to
all newspapers and the letters of 30 July 1942 and 3 Aug. 1942: HDA, NDH, GRP,
30/237/2088/42 and 12064/42.
41. Jerko Skračić’s autobiographical Pod drugom ključom, which mentioned personal
details about a number of regime officials, was banned by DIPU, as was Kerubin Šegvić’s
U prvim mjesecima stvaranja Nezavisne Države Hrvatske, because it mentioned measures
taken against Serbs in the first few months of the state; in Feb. 1943 the Main Directorate
for Propaganda instructed the Ustasha police to prosecute the publishing company Tipo-
 Notes to Pages 254–259  401

grafija not only for illegally printing Ivo Korsky’s Hrvati i Srbi but also for wasting paper
unnecessarily. Za vratima domobranske središnije škole, meanwhile, written by a young
soldier and edited by Dragutin Došen, was banned by the Main Directorate for Propa-
ganda in May 1944. See DIPU letter regarding Pod drugom ključom, 25 June 1942, HDA,
NDH, GRP, 46.247, 1003/42; decision of the censorship committee regarding Šegvić’s
book, HDA, NDH, GRP, 30.237/36/43; director of the Main Directorate for Propaganda to
the Ustasha police in the case of Tipografija, 26 Feb. 1943, HDA, NDH, GRP, 45.237/IV/24;
the decision of the censorship committee of 5 May 1944 regarding Došen’s book, HDA,
NDH, GRP, 45.237/2477/4.
42. Hasan Šuljak to Hrvatska mladost, 3 Apr. 1942, HDA, NDH, GRP, 46.247, 731/42;
Tolj to Mortigjija, 12 May 1943, HDA, NDH, GRP, 44.237/6629/43.
43. “Čišćenje u vinkovačkim knjižara,” Novi list, 17 May 1941; Đuro Balaković,
“Ćišćenje od pogubne literature,” Hrvatski branik, 17 May 1941; State Secretariat for
Propaganda to Emil Medvedović, 2 May 1941, HDA, NDH, GRP, 28.237/3/21.
44. Marko Čović, “Strujana u suvremenoj hrvatskoj književnosti: Od hrvatskog
književnika Mile Budaka do hrvatskog književnika Miroslave Krleža,” Spremnost, 10
Apr. 1942.
45. Čović, “Strujana u suvremenoj hrvatskoj književnosti: Od hrvatskog književnika
Mile Budaka do hrvatskog književnika Miroslave Krleža.”
46. DIPU to editors of Spremnost, 23 Apr. 1942, HDA, NDH, GRP, 46.247, 6115/42.
47. “Propisnik o zadaći, ustrojstvo, radu i smjernicama ‘Ustaše’—hrvatskog
oslobodilačkog pokreta,” Narodne novine, 13 July 1942. This section on language owes
an enormous debt to the scholarship of Marko Samardžija, in particular his two already
cited books. A number of the primary sources cited below first appeared in his studies.
In most cases I have gone back to the original sources and so have cited them here. All
translations, unless otherwise stated, are my own.
48. HDA, NDH, GRP, 1.237/1942–5/VT/358/42.
49. See, e.g., Feliks Niedzielski to the president’s government in Tuzla, 13 May 1942,
HDA, NDH, GRP, VT, 1.237/358/42; Mile Budak, “Pozdravljanje u srednjim i gradanjskim
školama,” 21 Oct. 1941, HDA, NDH, MNP, UM, 1.232/1941; Vilko Rieger, untitled report, 6
Oct. 1941, HDA, NDH, UHOP, GUS, 11.249/ 5354/41.
50. Bzik, Ustaški pogledi, 99.
51. “U Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj postoji samo jedan pozdrav: Za dom—spremni!”
Hrvatska ognjište, 1 Apr. 1943; “U Poglavnikovoj Hrvatskoj pozdravlja se jedino ustaškim
pozdravom: Za dom—spremni!” Hrvatska ognjište, 23 Apr. 1943; “Naš pozdrav je: Za
dom—spremni!” Hrvatska ognjište, 25 Mar. 1943.
52. “Za dom spremni!” Hrvatska gruda, 1 Jan. 1942.
53. See, e.g., the undated leaflet from the Ustasha camp of Petrinja, HDA, NDH, ZŠ,
102.10/96.119.
54. Josip Horvat, diary entry for 12 Aug. 1942, in Horvat, Živjeti u Hrvatskoj, 1941–1945
(Zagreb: Liber, 1990), 129.
55. “Poštovanje,” Nova Hrvatska, 14 Feb. 1942; “Čisti hrvatski jezik na nadpisnim
pločama,” Nova Hrvatska, 20 Aug. 1944.
 402  Notes to Pages 260–267

56. Nikola Andrić, “Beograd nam kvari jezik,” Obzor, 15 June 1923. See also Andrić,
“Koje nam beogradske rijeći ne trebaju,” Hrvatsko kolo 8, no. 22 (1927): 344–56; Vladimir
Rožić, “Na odbranu hrvatskog jezika!” Nastavni vjesnik 30 (1921): 394.
57. A. B. Klaić, “Die kroatische Schriftsprache und Rechtschreibung,” Neue Ordnung,
14 Feb. 1943.
58. Petar Guberina and Kruno Krstić, Razlike izmedju hrvatskoga i srpskoga književnog
jezika (Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska, 1940).
59. “Ministarstva naredba o hrvatskom pravopisu,” Narodne novine, 23 June 1941.
60. “Zakonska odredba o hrvatskom jeziku, o njegovoj čištoći i o pravopisu,” Narodne
novine, 14 Aug. 1941.
61. See, e.g., Teta Marija, “Odbačimo tuđine,” Nova Hrvatska za djecu, 4 Apr. 1943;
“Hrvatski korienski pravopis,” in Hrvatski vojnik: Godišnjak za 1944 godine, 234–37.
See also A. B. Klaić, Koriensko pisanje (Zagreb: Hrvatski ured za jezik, 1942); D[aniel]
C[rljen], “Hrvatske narodne rieči—mjesto tuđica (primjere iz Poglavnikove knjige
‘Strahote zabluda’),” Nova Hrvatska, 18 Aug. 1941.
62. Klaić, Koriensko pisanje, 12.
63. “Zakonska odredba o osnivanju Hrvatskog državnog ureda za jezik, XXXIV-46-Z.-
P. 477-Z. p.-1941,” Narodne novine, 28 Apr. 1941.
64. “Provedbenu naredbu k zakonskoj odredbi o osnivanju Hrvatskog državnog ureda
za jezik, 477-Z. p.-1941,” Narodne novine, 12 July 1941.
65. “Zakonska odredba o hrvatskom jeziku, o njegovoj ćistoći i o pravopisu, CCLIX-
z.p.-1941,” Narodne novine, 14 Aug. 1941; “Odredba Poglavnikova: Okružnica o čistoći
Hrvatskog jezika,” 2 Oct. 1941, HDA, NDH, GRP, 4.234, 12273/144/1941.
66. “Provedbena naredaba k zakonskoj odredbi o osnivanju Hrvatskoga državnog
ureda za jezik 477-Z. p.-1941,” Narodne novine, 12 July 1941.
67. Krstić, “Pronađite najbolji hrvatski izraz za rijeć ‘marka,’” Nova Hrvatska, 31 Jan.
1942.
68. See, e.g., “Neprijatelji hrvatskog jezika,” Hrvatski narod, 12 June 1941; “Kukolj u
hrvatskom jeziku,” Hrvatski narod, 1 Aug. 1941.
69. “Promjena naziva ulicama,” Posavska Hrvatska, 23 July 1941.
70. “Nova imena ulica i trgova u Mitrovica,” Hrvatski narod, 17 May 1941; “Naredba o
promjeni imena sela i katastralne obćine Srpsko polje i Srpska kapela u Hrvatsko polje
i Hrvatska kapela,” Narodne Novine, 4 Oct. 1941; “Brisu se srpski i balkanski natpisi,”
Hrvatska krajina, 23 Apr. 1941.
71. “Škola u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj,” Nova Hrvatska, 11 Oct. 1941; “Naša stečenu
državu ne će nam nitko oduzeti!” Nova Hrvatska, 11 May 1943.
72. “Arijci ili arijevci?” Hrvatski narod, 14 Aug. 1941.
73. Krstić, “Pitanje srbizma,” Alma Mater Croatica 5, nos. 8–9 (Apr.–May 1942): 299.
74. Ibid., 297.
75. Franjo Cipra, “Barbarizmi u hrvatskom jeziku nekad i danas,” Alma mater Croatica
5, no. 2 (Oct. 1941): 53–57.
76. Krstić, “Pitanje srbizma,” 297–98.
77. “Za hrvatski jezik,” Hrvatski narod, 9 May 1941.
78. Antun Klaić, “Zašto korienski pravopis?” Spremnost, 15 May 1942.
 Notes to Pages 268–274  403

79. “Vjestački,” Nova Hrvatska, 11 Apr. 1942.

80. “Jezične bilješke,” Nova Hrvatska, 8 Feb. 1942.
81. “Upozorenje,” Hrvatski narod, 27 May 1941.
82. “Upotreba naziva ‘lice,’” Narodne novine, 6 July 1942.
83. See, e.g., “Hrvatski jezik,” Nova Hrvatska, 7 Aug. 1943; Horvat, diary entry, 13 Oct.
1944, in Horvat, Živjeti u Hrvatskoj, 157.
84. See, e.g., Franjo Čipra, Kruno Krstić, and Antun Klaić, eds., Hrvatski pravopis
(Zagreb: Hrvatski ured za jezik, 1944).
85. “Čistoća u imenima tvrdki i poduzeća,” Hrvatski narod and Nova Hrvatska, 27
July 1944; “Odredba o usklađenju tvrdki odnosno imena poduzeća, družtava, zavoda
i ustanova s propisima o hrvatskom jeziku, o njegovoj čistoći i o pravopisu,” Narodne
novine, 28 July 1944.
86. “Čistoća u imenima tvrdki i poduzeća.”
87. See, e.g., “Za čistoću jezika,” Hrvatski narod, 1 Aug. 1944; “Hrvatski jezik mora
biti ćist od tuđica,” Nova Hrvatska, 1 Aug. 1944; “Promjena nadpisa u duhu hrvatskog
jezika,” Nova Hrvatska, 3 Aug. 1944; “Zagreb će doskora osvanuti s pravilnim hrvatskim
nadpisima,” Nova Hrvatska, 11 Aug. 1944; “Čisti hrvatski jezik na nadpisnim pločnama,”
Nova Hrvatska, 20 Aug. 1944.
88. Antun Šenda, “Za čistoću jezik,” Hrvatski narod, 18 Jan. 1945; editorial, Hrvatski
narod, 18 Jan. 1945.
89. Za pravilnost i čistoću hrvatskog jezika (Zagreb: Glavno ravnateljstvo za promičbu,
1945), 3–4.
90. See, e.g., “Hrvatski jezik u športu,” Hrvatski narod, 8 Feb. 1945.
91. Jerko Skračić, “Pjesma hrvatske pobjede,” Hrvatski narod, 13 Apr. 1941.
92. “Nova popršja narodnih velikana,” Hrvatski list, 17 Jan. 1943.
93. Antun Bauer, “Galerije i muzeji,” Nasa Domovina 2 (1943): 1014–25; “Zakonska
odredba o ratnom arhivu i mužeju Nezavisne Državne Hrvatske,” Narodne novine, 26
May 1941; “Kroz pismohranu ustaškog pokreta,” Ustaša, 20 June 1944, 8–9.
94. David Freeburg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 41–53.
95. See, e.g., the paintings in the catalog of the Second Exhibition of Croatian Artists
in the Independent State of Croatia: Druga izložba hrvatskih umjetnika u Nezavisnoj
Državi Hrvatskoj, 23 XI–13 XII 1942; Ante Padovan, “Hrvatska likovna umjetnosti 1942,”
Spremnost, 6 Dec. 1942.
96. Mladen Veža, “Sibinjske žrtve,” in Hrvatska domovina; Ljubo Babić, “20 Lipnja
1928,” in Hrvatska domovina. Printings of Babić’s painting were frequently accompanied
by Nikola Šop’s poem “Molitva za mrtvu ulicu” or Josip Velebit, “Uz Babičev crtež.” It
was reprinted in Šop’s collected poems in 1943. See Nikola Šop, “Molitva za mrtvu ulicu,”
in Za kasnim stolom: pjesme (Zagreb: HIBZ, 1943), 11; Josip Velebit, “Uz Babičev crtež,”
Hrvatska domovina, 116.
97. S. R. Zrnovački and Walter Neugebauer, “Oslobodenje Hrvatske,” Nova Hrvatska,
printed 11 Mar. 1942; Ivan Topolčić, “Ustaške mladeži—uzdanica Hrvatske,” 20 Jan. 1942;
Gustav Likan, “10 travnja 1941,” in Hrvatska domovina.
98. “Odraz Ustaške borbe u Hrvatskoj umjetnosti,” Nova Hrvatska, 27 Oct. 1942.
 404  Notes to Pages 275–279

However, Babić’s painting was completed in the 1930s and was never intended as a
political statement.
99. Josip Stiglić to the Main Commissariat for Propaganda, 15 May 1943, HDA, NDH,
GRP, VT, 1/237’/118/43; Feliks Niedzielski to the president’s government in Tuzla, 13 May
1942, HDA, NDH, GRP, VT, 1/237/358/42.
100. Mile Budak, “Pozdravljanje u srednjim i gradanjskim školama,” 21 Oct. 1941,
HDA, NDH, MNP, UM, 1/2322/1941; Vilko Rieger, untitled report, 6 Oct. 1941, HDA,
NDH, UHOP, GUS, 11/5354/41; “Slika poglavnika—izvješavanje u pučkim školama,” 10
Dec. 1941, HDA, NDH, MNP, UM, 1/3065/1941.
101. See, e.g., the requests of various individuals in HDA, NDH, UHOP, GUS, 7/955/41,
312/41, 25 June 1941, 648/41, 4 June 1941, 1190/41, 4 July 1941.
102. Petar Grgec, “Plebescit za hrvatsku državu u narodnim pjesama,” Nova Hrvatska,
25 May 1944.
103. Ante Pavelić [Poglavnik] “Puška puca [Ustaška himna],” in Hratu u birbi: vojničk
godišnjak za 1944 godine, 5. “A Rifle Fires” was the alternative and original name for the
“Utasha Anthem” and was preferred when published in military journals.
104. Juraj [Jure] Pavičić, “Smrt pandura,” in Rane (Zagreb: Vlastita naklada, 1935), 6–7.
105. Balentović, “Bilješka pri kraju” and “Hiljadudevetstotridesetšesta,” Krvavi ples 16
(1939): 51–53.
106. Jaksa Erčegović, “Cantata u proljeće,” Hrvatski narod, 16 Apr. 1941.
107. Branko Klarić, “Geniju Hrvatske,” Hrvatski list, 14 July 1944. See also, e.g., Salih
Baljić, “Poglavniku,” Nova Hrvatska, 10 Apr. 1942; Cvjetko Škarpa, “Poglavnik,” Hrvatska
domovina, 297–98.
108. Vladimir Jurčić, “Uskrsnuće Hrvatske,” in Spomen-knjiga prve obljetnice Neza-
visne Države Hrvatske, 10.iv.41–10.iv.42 (Zagreb: Državni i izvjestajni ured, 1942), n.p.
109. Skračić, “Pjesma hrvatske pobjede.
110. Mlada Hrvatica, “Cijela Te Hrvatska čekala,” Hrvatski narod, 14 Apr. 1941; M., “Da
rode sunce radosti sine,” Hrvatski narod, 14 Apr. 1941.
111. Anonymous, “Beograd-Jerusalem,” Hrvatski narod, 25 Apr. 1941; Zyr Xapula,
“Vidovdanske poskočnice,” Hrvatski narod, 28 June 1941.
112. Matija Pavlović, “Beograd se bombardira!” “Spremni!” and “Senjske žrtve,” in Za
dom spremni! Poezija ljubavi svjoj domovini (Sarajevo: Nova tiskara, 1941), 20–21, 30–37.
113. Petar Josipov Porinja, “ŽAP: Pisma Nezavisne Državne borbe Poglavnika” and
accompanying letter, 8 Aug. 1941, HDA, NDH, GRP, PVNDH, 27/232/6964/1941.
114. Josip Zukec, “Propasti Srba” and accompanying letter, 30 Aug. 1941, HDA, NDH,
GRP, PVNDH, 27/232/2964/1941.
115. Vladimir Nazor, “Poruka pjesnicima,” Hrvatska revija 15, no. 1 (Jan. 1942): 1.
116. Mirko Slade-Šilović, “Prvi dan,” Hrvatska revija 14, no. 4 (Apr. 1941): 263.
117. Klarić, “Koraci radosti,” Hrvatska revija, 14, no. 6 (June 1941): 308.
118. Ivo Lendić, “Hrvatski alleluja!” in Hrvatska domovina, 292–93.
119. Ante Jakšić, “Hrvatskom narodu,” Hrvatska revija 15, no. 2 (Mar. 1942): 128–29.
120. Gabrijel Cvitan, “Pjesme robijaša,” in Hrvatska domovina, 256.
121. Vinko Nikolić, “Raspeta Hrvatska, 1918—19 28—19 . . . (1934),” in Hrvatska
domovina, 261.
 Notes to Pages 279–287  405

122. Jurčić, “Balada o krvi sedmorice,” in Hrvatska domovina, 122.

123. Andrija Ilić, “Senjskim žrtvama,” in Nikolić, Lovori, 26–27; Jurčić, “Senjskim
žrtvama,” Nova Hrvatska, 9 June 1943.
124. Dražen Panjkota, “Sudbina,” in Ustap u magli, 91.
125. Vinko Kos, “Putnici,” Nova Hrvatska, 18 Feb. 1944.
126. Skračić, “Moj otac pobjegao iz sela” and “Svakidašniji razgovor,” both in Stihovi
(Zagreb: Matični tiskarsko-nakladni zavod, Jan. 1945), n.p.
127. Milan Dunavski, “Pjesma o odbjeglim ljudima,” Hrvatski narod, 30 Apr. 1944.
128. Vinko Kos, “Glad,” Hrvatski narod, 22 Feb. 1945; Zvonimir Katalenić, “Gradine
koje se ruše,” Hrvatska revija 1, nos. 10–2 (Oct. 1944–Jan. 1945): 334.
129. Pavičić, “Junacima zaplotnjacima,” Ustaški godišnjak 2 (1943): 56; Jožcenko,
“Skobielasomahija,” Hrvatski narod, 18 Jan. 1945; Frano Alfirević, “Protuzrakaplovna
plajba,” Nova Hrvatska, 28 May 1944.
130. Josip Velebit, “Djete bez otca pjeva,” Nova Hrvatska, Easter 1944; Kos, “Pjesma o
smrti,” Hrvatska revija 16, no. 7 (1943): 444–45.
131. Skračić, “Nova pjesma,” in Stihovi, n.p.
132. Ante Tresić-Pavičić, “Preludij smrti,” Hrvatska revija 16, no. 10 (Oct. 1943): 345.
133. Ivan Raoš, “Pusto ognjište,” Hrvatska revija 15, no. 6 (June 1942): 231.
134. Vlado Vlaisavljević, “Smrt ranjenika,” Hrvatska revija 15, no. 9 (Sept. 1942): 498.
135. Kos, “Na groblju (vojnicima palim u tuđini),” in Hrvatska domovina, 344.
136. Zvonimir Katalenić, “Grobovi govore,” Hrvatska revija 15, no. 6 (June 1942): 292.
137. Skračić, “Protivnim strujama,” Ustaški godišnjak 1 (1942): 54.
138. Gustav Krklec, Tamnica vremena, 1939–1941 (Zagreb: HIBZ, 1944), esp. 1, 8, 13,
19, 38: 7, 14, 19, 25, 44; Vladimir Kolbas-Lidov, “Krklecova ‘Tamnica vremena,’” Nova
Hrvatska, 21 Jan. 1945.
139. Zeljko Jambrešić, “Krvava Drina,” Ustasa, 18 Feb. 1945, 1.
140. Ismet Žunić, “Smrt srdca,” in Narodna uzdanica za 1945 godina, 110.
141. Nikola Šop, “Ostani, Isuse!” in Za kasnim stolom, 17–18; Branko Klarić, “Gospa
pred katedralom,” Hrvatsko kolo (1943): 209–10.
142. Klarić, “Molitva velike večeri,” Nedjelja, 21 July 1944.
143. Klarić, “Krist govori prolaznicima na ulici,” Spremnost, Easter 1945.
144. Nikolić, “Molitva na hrvatskom razbojištu,” Hrvatski krugoval, 1–15 Apr. 1945, 10.
145. “Matija Marčinko, “Prkos,” Hrvatska revija 17, no. 10 (Oct. 1944): 432.
146. Marčinko, “Pjesma naših dana,” Hrvatski narod, 11 Feb. 1945.
147. Nikola Marjanović, “Za slavu i domovinu,” Hrvatski narod, 10 Apr. 1945.
148. Stanko Gasparović, “Prije smrti,” Hrvatski narod, 10 Apr. 1945.
149. Dražen Panjkota, “Pjesma progranika,” Plug, 25 Dec. 1944, with accompanying
note from Zdravko Brajković; Panjkota, “Mrtvom majstoru,” Hrvatski narod, 10 Apr.
1945.
150. Nikolić, “Molitva da hrabro umirem za Hrvatsku,” Hrvatski narod, 10 Apr. 1945.
151. “Natječaj za spomenik Dr. Anti Starčeviću u Banjoj Luci,” Hrvatska krajina, 8 Aug.
1941.
152. “Uskoro će gradjenje spomenika Ocu Domovine Dru. Anti Starčeviću na Trgu 10
Travnja,” Hrvatska krajina, 9 Aug. 1941.
 406  Notes to Pages 287–300

153. Pavičić, “Ispovijed: krvava crtica iz ličkoga seljačkog života za vrijeme srpske
vladavine,” Ustaški godišnjak 1 (1942): 283–90; see also, in this issue, Pavičić, “Izgonaši,”
127–52.
154. Zlatko Milković, “Na posljednjoj brazdi,” Ustaški godišnjak 1 (1942): 274–75.
155. Ibid., 276–78.
156. Jozo Blažanov, Pod tuđom krovom (Zagreb: Nova Hrvatska, 1944), 33.
157. A. R. Buerov, “Književnici u Državi Hrvatskoj,” Hrvatska smotra 10, nos. 3–4
(Mar.–Apr. 1942): 205–10.
158. Tomislav Pavić, “Hrast,” Nova doba, 23 Jan. 1943.
159. Maraković, “Današnja hrvatska književnost,” 428.
160. Mara Švel-Gamiršek, Hrast (Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska, 1942). All subsequent
quotes are from this novel unless otherwise indicated.

CHAPTER 6. “AN UNCEASING SEA OF BLOOD AND VICTIMS”

1. Ivan ev. Šarić, “Bog i Hrvati!” Katolički tjednik, 18 May 1941.
2. Ivan ev. Šarić, “Z.A.P.,” Sarajevski novi list, 10 Apr. 1942.
3. Dragutin Kamber, “Prva godišnjica Nezavisne Države Hrvatske,” Vrhbosna 56, nos.
3–4 (Mar.–Apr. 1942).
4. A. Jerkov, “Krist i Hrvatska,” Nedjelja, 6 July 1941.
5. “Krug revolucionara započinje najborbenije razdoblje u svojoj djelatnosti kad
katacombe u Kaptolu postaje pravo stjecište urote,” Ustaša, 28 June 1942, 3.
6. Poglavnik, “Možemo i tamo!” Ustaša, Apr. 1934, 1.
7. Poglavnik, “I mi konja za trku imamo!” Ustaša, Jan. 1934, 1; Mijo Babić, “Neka znadu
oni, kojih se tiče!” Ustaša, Sept. 1932, 2.
8. “U znaku kriza, noža i samokresa,” Ustaša, 19 Dec. 1941, 2.
9. Mijo Babić, “Neki znade oni kojih se tiće!” Ustaša, Sept. 1932; “Ustaše na delu,”
Ustaša, Nov. 1932.
10. “Slava ustaši Franji Zrinskome!” Ustaša, Apr. 1934, 2.
11. “Brušani,” Ustaša, Aug. 1932, 2; Franjo Bubarić, Seljaštvo i ustaški pokret (Zagreb:
Glavni Ustaški Stan, 1942), 35–40.
12. “Ustaške vrline,” Ustaša, Jan.–Feb. 1932.
13. “Ustaške vrline,” Ustaša, Oct. 1932, 2–3.
14. Ante Pavelić, Liepa plavojka: Roman iz borbe hrvatskoga naroda za slobodu i
nezavisnost (Sicily: Glavni Ustaški Stan, 1934), 88–89.
15. “Propisnik o zadaći, ustrojstvo, radu i smjernicama ustaše hrvatskog
oslobodilačkog pokreta,” 13 Aug. 1941, in Josip Junašević and Matija Belić, eds., Zbornik
zakona i naredaba Nezavisne Države Hrvatske, vol. 2, 1942 (Zagreb: Državno vijeće, 1943),
1034.
16. “U znaku kriza, noža i samokresa,” Ustaša, 19 Dec. 1941, 2.
17. “Novi satovi, nove bojne i nove snage,” Hrvatski narod, 13 Nov. 1942.
18. Antun Vrbić, “Poglavniko djelo,” Vrhbosna 56, nos. 3–4 (Mar.–Apr. 1942): 147–50.
19. “Smrt medju nosiocima oslobodjenja,” Ustaša, 2 Nov. 1941, 2.
20. G. P., “Ustaše su žrtva domovine,” Ustaša, 18 July 1941, 10.
 Notes to Pages 301–307  407

21. Joža Milković, “Naše trojstvo,” in Nezavisna Hrvatska Država, godišnjak za 1934
(Buenos Aires: W. Broenner, 1934), 44–45; M.K., “Sud će biti bolan i neumoljiv.”
22. Niko Zekanović, “Naša vjera,” Ustaška mladež, 16 Nov. 1941, 1–2; Vinko Nikolić,
“Mi smo vjernici,” Ustaška mladež, 28 Sept. 1941, 1–2.
23. “Nastavlja se revolucija Ustaškog pokreta,” Ustaša, 30 Sept. 1941, 1.
24. Trbuha, “Mladež današnje vrieme,” 8, 10.
25. Halid Čausević, “Za dom!” Novi behar 14, nos. 1–2 (15 May 1941): 6–7.
26. Grga Pejnović, “Dr Ante Starčević,” Ustaški godišnjak 2 (1943): 85–90; Božidar
Kavran, “U Golgoti leži veličanstvo smrti i misteriji uzkrsnuća,” Nova Hrvatska, Easter
1944.
27. Marijan Velnić, “Naše prvo i drugo uskrsnuće,” Ustaša, 15 Jan. 1942, 20.
28. Nikolić, “Za novu Hrvatsku,” 192.
29. See, e.g., “Naredaba o zabrani davanje alkoholnih pića pripitim osobama, Narodne
novine, 15 July 1941; “Zabrana ženskom osoblju u lokalima,” Katolički tjednik, 15 June
1941; “Nestanak besramnih slika i kipova,” Katolički tjednik, 15 June 1941; “Naredba o
suzbijanju kletve,” Narodne novine, 5 July 1941; “Gradsko poglavarstvo vodi energiciju
akciju protiv prosjačena na zagrebačkom ulicama,” Hrvatski narod, 7 May 1941.
30. “Naredba 678–2. p.-1941” and “Naredba 679. z. p.-1941,” Narodne novine, 14 July
1941.
31. “Redarstvene naredba za kupaće i kupačiće” and “Stroge kazne za pijance,”
Katolički tjednik, 20 July 1941; “Zabrana ženskom osoblju u lokalima,” Sarajevski novi list,
10 June 1941.
32. Bjelovar Ustasha police leaflet, 25 Nov. 1941, HDA, NDH, ZŠ, 102.10/105.107.
33. See “Izjava Ustaše, prije nego što će preuzeti dužnost u ustaškom pokretu,” Ustaša,
7 July 1941, 14.
34. Bzik, Ustaški pogledi, 21–23.
35. Topljak, “Stare rane treba liječiti.”
36. Bzik, “Ustaska će Hrvatska s njima obračunati!”
37. “Propisnik o zadaći, ustrojstvu, radu i smjernicama Ustaše—hrvatskog oslobodi-
lackog pokreta.”
38. Topljak, “Stare rane treba liječiti.”
39. Stanković, “Ženska omladina u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj”; Jerkov, “Uloga žene
u Državi Hrvatskoj.”
40. D. J. D., “Tragom nudizma,” Nedjelja, 3 Aug. 1941.
41. Bzik, Ustaški pogledi, 55–57.
42. See, e.g., “Gospodarsko redarstvo kaznilo zagrebačke gostioničare,” Nova
Hrvatska, 5 June 1942. Altogether there were fines to the value of 1,920,000 kunas, 118
days of imprisonment, and three months in concentration camps for proprietors; 178
days lost to tavern closure; the confiscation of three bars; and the appointment of two
commissars.
43. “Čišćenje grad od prosjaka,” Nova Hrvatska, 22 Feb. 1942.
44. Rudolf Travinić, “Spasimo ih!” Nedjelja, 6 Mar. 1944.
45. Franjo Jović to the Ministry of National Education, 17 Feb. 1943, HDA, NDH, GRP,
9.237/1943-5/193.
 408  Notes to Pages 307–316

46. “Psovka, psvoka!” Katolički tjednik, 18 Jan. 1942.

47. “Tjedna borbe protiv psvoke i kletve,” Hrvatski narod, 28 Mar. 1944; “Borba protiv
psvoke i kletve,” Gospodarstvo, 12 Sept. 1944; Dragutin Hren, Zapaljen jezik (Zagreb:
Nadbiskupije kancelarije katoličke ackije, 1944), 55–61.
48. Hren, Zapaljen jezik, 33, 37, 55–61.
49. Stjepan Flodin, “Psovačka fronta,” Kalendar Srca Isusova i Marijina 1 (1942):
134–43; Dr. Ins., “Balkanizacija ili demoralizacija,” Katolički list, 1 Mar. 1942. See also “I to
je pod kući,” Katolički list, 18 July 1943.
50. Vrbić, “Poglavničko djelo,” 49–50.
51. Židovi: Izlošba o razvoju židovstra i njihovog rušilačkog rada u Hrvatskoj prije 10.iv.
41– rješenje židovskog pitanja u NDH (Zagreb: Državni i promičbeni ured, 1942), 20–21.
52. “Kako se stvaraju izložbe,” Hrvatski slikopis, 132, HDA, NDH, Fotografska i
kinematska archiva, 4.33/63/1942.
53. “Odlučne mjere za suzbijanje nemorala,” Hrvatski glas, 6 June 1941.
54. “Naredba 678–2. p.-1941” and “Naredba 679. z. p.-1941.”
55. Josip Frajtić, “Neželjena baština,” Hrvatska gruda, 26 Sept. 1941.
56. Ibid.
57. Bzik, Ustaški pogledi, 106.
58. Mladen Lorković, “Ustaška straža na Drini,” Hrvatski narod, 26 Apr. 1942.
59. Ivo Guberina, “Ustaštvo i katolizam,” Hrvatska smotra 11, nos. 7–10 (July–Oct.
1943): 439–40.
60. “Dokumentarna otkrica o djelovanju Židova,” Hrvatski narod, 2 May 1942.
61. Vjekoslav Blaškov, “Židovi su kroz cijelu povijest čovječanstva smatrani nepri-
jateljima svakog naroda,” Hrvatski radnik, 15 May 1941, 3.
62. “Čistoća rase,” Sarajevski novi list, 24 Mar. 1943.
63. Topljak, “Stare rane treba liječiti.”
64. Nikola Šabić, “Smisao i veličina žrtve,” Hrvatski krugoval, 4 Apr. 1943, 4.
65. Jure Prpić, “Naše žrtve,” Ustaški godišnjak 2 (1943): 91–97.
66. Karamarko, “Vojnička krv,” 1.
67. Aleksandar Žibrat, “Ustaška vojnica,” Ustaški godišnjak 2 (1943): 372.
68. “On ne žali krvce vrele,” Ustaša, 19 July 1941, 1; Pe, “Mijo Babić svjetao primjer
idealnog ustaškog borca,” Hrvatski narod, 3 July 1943.
69. “Uskrsnuće hrvatske Drine,” Hrvatski branik, 19 Apr. 1941, 1.
70. “Nove borbe, novi grobovi,” Ustaša, 17 Aug. 1941, 4.
71. “Junačka odbrana Banje Luke: S pjesnom na ustnama borci Bosansku Gradišku od
ogorčenih napadaja partizanskih pobunjenika,” Nova Hrvatska, 12 Jan. 1944.
72. Bu., “Jedina mi želja bila da poginem za Poglavnika!” Ustaša, 3 May 1942, 3.
73. Ante F. Zelić, “Sjećanje na Nikolu Jurišića,” Hrvatski narod, 22 May 1942.
74. “Svijestne odluke akademičara Domobranske akademije,” Hrvatski Domobran 2,
no. 5 (May 1942): 2; “Ustaska svijet pitomaca Domobranske akademije,” Hrvatski narod,
28 May 1942.
75. Rubina, Tri mjesecom pod crvenom zviezdom, 94–99.
76. Peroš, “Život i djela pjesnika Josipa Križanca,” in Junačka djela Jure viteza
Francetića, 51–55.
 Notes to Pages 316–325  409

77. Makanec, “Europski duh i Marxizam” and “Komunisti značaj partizanstva,” in

Hrvatski vidici, 24–30, 122–36. See also, e.g., Crljen, Načela hrvatskog ustaškog pokreta,
61–67, 98–111; Rubina, Tri mjeseca pod crvenom zviezdom, 96–97.
78. “Izgubio sam sina!” Hrvatski narod, 3 Apr. 1943.
79. “Kako Hrvat gine . . . ,” Osvit, 19 Oct. 1942; Asija Čemerlić-Kavazović, “Spomen
mome junačkom bratu, Mustafi Kavazović,” Osvit, 10 Nov. 1942.
80. Anon., “Zadnja usluga,” in Ustaška se vojska diže . . . (Zagreb: Odgojni odjel
Ministarstva oružanih snaga, 1944), 19–20.
81. S. P., “Ispovijed jednog mučenika,” Ustaša, 29 Feb. 1942, 5.
82. V. L., “Vrijednost žrtve u političkog borbi,” Ustaša, 29 Feb. 1942, 12.
83. Stjepko Trontl, “Ustaški grob,” Hrvatska revija 14, no. 10 (1941): 507.
84. Trontl, “U velike dane,” Hrvatska revija 14, no. 4 (Apr. 1941): 233–34.
85. P. O., “Mučenik, vjernik i Ustaša Stipe Javor,” Ustaša, 29 Feb. 1942, 1.
86. “Kratki pregled novinstva,” 26 Mar. 1942, HDA, NDH, UNS, 2.248/18/497/42.
87. “Nove borbe—novi grobovi,” Ustaša, 17 Aug. 1941, 9.
88. “Počast banjalučkih Hrvata palom Ustaši Miji Babiću koji je junački pao u borbi sa
srpskim četnicima,” Hrvatska krajina, 6 July 1941.
89. Ibid.
90. “Dirljiv pogreb ustaše Mije Babića,” Hrvatski narod, 6 July 1941.
91. “Prema ubojićama ne smije biti obzira,” Hrvatska Krajina, 9 July 1941.
92. “Nekoliko tisuća Banjalučana odalo je počast palom heroju Anti Pogorelecu,”
Hrvatska Krajina, 9 July 1941; “Prema ubojićama ne smije biti obzira.”
93. “Prema ubojićama ne smije biti obzira.”
94. “Počast banjalučkih Hrvata palom Ustaši Miji Babiću”; “Dva trnca vijenca,”
Hrvatski radio list, 20 July 1941. The pair was also the topic of epic poetry commemorat-
ing their “heroic” deaths. See, e.g., Ante Lugonjić, Junačka smrt ustaše Mije Babića i Ante
Pogoreleca i njihova ustaških drugova (Zagreb: Glavni Ustaški Stan, 1941).
95. See, e.g., “Navršilo se pol godine od smrti: Mije Babića i Antun Pogoreleca,” Nova
Hrvatska, 31 Jan. 1942, which was published on the six-month anniversary of their deaths.
96. “Tko nosi vojničku odoru, ne smije se baviti političkom,” Katolički tjednik, 15 June
1941, 13.
97. Vj[ekoslav] Šišul, “Senj—uskočko i ustaško gnjizedo,” Ustaški godišnjak 2 (1943):
177.
98. Žarko Brzić, “Vizija prošlosti,” Ustaški godišnjak 1 (1942): 209–11.
99. Žibrat, “Ustaška vojnica,” 360–71.
100. “Podignut će si opet novi dom u kojem znam da ću živjeti sretnije i zadovljnije
nego što sam živio prije . . . ,” Hrvatski narod, 2 July 1942.
101. Balentović, “Godišnjica borbe i uspjeha,” Crna legija, 65–81.
102. Balentović, “S borcima na sniežnim planinama od Romanije do Ozrena,”
Spremnost, 28 Feb. 1942.
103. Sulejman Sakić, “‘Crna legija’ junaka Jure Francetića,” Osvit, 13 Sept. 1942.
104. “Borbom i pjesnom ustaška vojnica izpisuje najljepše stranice hrvatske
oslobodilačke borbe,” Hrvatski narod, 12 Mar. 1943.
105. Dragutin Došen, “To je P.T.S.!” Hrvatski list, 14 July 1944.
 410  Notes to Pages 326–334

106. “Uništavanje četničkih banda u Bosni: Izjava ustaškog bojnika Jure Francetića,”
Nova Hrvatska, 23 Dec. 1941.
107. “Utvrdena je povijesna granica na Drini,” Osvit, 17 May 1942.
108. Ismet Žunić, “Južni Hrvati u oslobodjenoj domovine,” Ustaška mladež, 26 Apr.
1942, 4–5.
109. Strielac-đak Ivan Marković, “Srdca pobjedju . . . ,” Hrvatski vojnik 5, no. 14 (10 Apr.
1945): 5–6.
110. “Ustaška rijeć,” Hrvatski branik, 9 Aug. 1941.
111. “Odesa—hrvatski Katyn,” Spremnost, 9 May 1943.
112. “5 prosinac 1918,” Hrvatski domobran, 5 Dec. 1928; “Nad grobovima žrtvama 5
prosinac 1918,” Hrvatski domobran, 13 Dec. 1928.
113. Mijo Bzik, “Četrnaest godina ustaške borbe,” Ustaški godišnjak 2 (1943): 102–8.
114. See, e.g., “Jučerašniji dan u Zagrebu,” Hrvatska rijeć, 6 Dec. 1918.
115. F. Trbuha, “5 prosinaca 1918,” Ustaša, 5 Dec. 1941, 3. See also “Prvi ustaške žrtve,”
Ustaša, 3 Aug. 1941, 9.
116. “Istina o 5 prosinaca 1918,” Ustaša, 17 Aug. 1941, 5.
117. “Poglavnikov govor ustašama revolucionarni od 5.xii.1918,” Hrvatski narod, 6 Dec.
1941.
118. R. V., “Svečani prenos kostiju žrtava 5 prosinca 1918,” Hrvatski narod, 6 Dec. 1941.
119. “Na Dan mrtvih . . . Ovi su temelje ustaške Hrvatske,” Ustaša, 2 Nov. 1941, front
cover.
120. Gail Kligman, The Wedding of the Dead: Ritual, Poetics and Popular Culture in
Transylvania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 10–15, 156.
121. Regarding rituals of death in village Catholicism, see, e.g., Marju Torp-Kõivupuu,
“The Transformation of the Death Cult over Time: The Example of the Burial Customs in
the Historic Võruuma County,” Folklore 22, no. 1 (2003): 1023–64.
122. “Nepregledne povorke gradjana hodocašte grobovima,” Novi list, 3 Nov. 1941.
123. Public announcement by the governor of Zagorje, 1 Nov. 1941, HDA, NDH, ZŠ,
102.10/99.146.
124. “Nepregledne povorke gradjana hodocašte grobovima.”
125. Bzik, Ustaški pogledi, 47.
126. “Hrvatski narod nad grobovima svojih junaka,” Hrvatski narod, 3 Nov. 1943.
127. Božidar Kavran, “Kult mrtvih je kult živih,” Hrvatski narod, 3 Nov. 1943.
128. P. O., “Pred sjenom mučenika na dan mrtvih,” Ustaša, 2 Nov. 1941, 3.
129. B. U., “Vriednost ustaških žrtava,” Ustaša, 2 Nov. 1941, 1.
130. P. O., “Dva mučenika, dva junaka,” Ustaša, 2 Nov. 1941, 3.
131. Grga Pejnović, “Dr Milan Šufflay,” Ustaški godišnjak 2 (1943) 65–70; P. O., “Šufflay—
naš žrec i vidovnjak,” Ustaša, 2 Nov. 1941, 7.
132. Polonijo, “Ustaštvo—apoteza Rakovice,” 240–44.
133. Milivoj Karamarko, “Kult Rakovice,” Ustaški godišnjak 1 (1942): 61–64.
134. “Sveti dan hrvatskoga naroda,” Hrvatski narod, 20 June 1941.
135. “Dan hrvatskih mučenika,” Hrvatski narod, 21 June 1941.
136. “U slavi uspomene na hrvatske mučenike,” Hrvatski narod, 20 June 1942; “Tok
 Notes to Pages 335–342  411

svečanosti na dan uspomene ustaških mučenika,” Hrvatski narod, 20 June 1942; “Svečano
polaganje vijenca na odar hrvatskih mučenika,” Hrvatski narod, 20 June 1942.
137. “Iz krvi hrvatskih mučenika uskrsnula ustaška Nezavisne Države Hrvatske,”
Hrvatski narod, 20 June 1942.
138. Ibid.
139. “Slava mučenicima koji su pali za Hrvatsku,” Novi list, 20 June 1941.
140. Vilim Peroš, “Zločin od 20 lipnja uperen je proti cijelom hrvatskom narodu,”
Nova Hrvatska, 20 June 1942.
141. Dani[j]el Crljen, “Grobovi hrvatskih junaka—nepresušivi izvor snage hrvatskih
pokoljenja,” Nova Hrvatska, 31 Oct. 1943.
142. Grga Pejnović, “Zadušnice za hrvatske mučenike,” 19 June 1942, HDA, NDH, GUS,
Ured za promičbu, 3.249, 4-657.
143. “Predavanje doglavnika ministra nastave dra Mile Budaka o Dušnom dana,” Novi
list, 3 Nov. 1941.
144. See order from Ivo Medeković of Varaždin Ustasha camp, 2 Nov. 1941, HDA,
NDH, ZŠ, 102.10/99.368.
145. “Predavanje doglavnika ministra nastave dra Mile Budaka o Dušnom dana.”
146. Marko Čović, “Hrvatske žrtve,” Hrvatski narod, 20 June 1944.
147. See, e.g., Vilim Peroš, “Iz grobni humaka naših mrtvih mučenika struji izvor
novih snaga, nade i vjere u veliku i sretnu budućnost hrvatskog naroda,” Nova Hrvatska,
20 June 1943; “Cijeli hrvatskih narod poklonio se s dubom poštovanjem sjenama
hrvatskih boraca i mučenika,” Nova Hrvatska, 21 June 1942.
148. See, e.g., “Hrvatski narod nad grobovima svojih junaka,” Hrvatski narod, 3 Nov.
1944.
149. Božidar Čerovski, “Junački je poginuo ustaša Antun Pogorelec,” Hrvatski narod, 7
Aug. 1941.
150. S. I., “In memoriam pukovnika Juri Francetića,” Sarajevski novi list, 31 Mar. 1943.
151. [Drug iz borbe], “Ustaški porucnik PTS-a Božidar Bača pao na polju casti i slave,”
Nova Hrvatska, 18 Apr. 1944.
152. “Kroz pismohranu ustaškog pokreta,” 8. There is no evidence that Jure Francetić
actually took part in the Velebit uprising.
153. Vinko Nikolić, ed., Lovori: Novije hrvatske rodoljubne pjesme (Zagreb: Velebit,
1943), 3. Among the poems printed in the collection were Andrija Ilić’s “Senjskim
žrtvama” and Vladimir Jurčić’s “Senjskim žrtvama” (26–27).
154. Nikola Šabić, “Uskrs, 1941,” in Nikolić, Lovori, 21.
155. Mate Ostojić, “S nama!” in Nikolić, Lovori, 84–85.
156. Klarić, “Mi Ustaše,” in Nikolić, Lovori, 110.
157. Mijo Matić and Jure Matić, “Borba ustaškog pukovnika Jure Francetića,” in
Borba ustaškog pukovnika Jure Francetića i njegove Crne legije s odmetnicama u Bosni
i Hercegovini (Zagreb: Merkantile, 1942), 4–14; Matić and Matić, “Mučenje Hrvata na
Kozari, Prijedoru i okolici Prijedora,” in Mučenje Hrvata na Kozari, u Prijedoru i okolici
Prijedora (Zagreb: Merkantile, 1942), 9–30.
158. Križanac, Junačka djela Jure vitez Francetića u stihovima, 25–26, 45.
159. Corp. Antun Bojčić, “Borčima!” Hrvatski vojnik, 22 Feb. 1945.
 412  Notes to Pages 342–350

160. Domobran Stjepko Janković, “Nad jednim grobom . . . !” Hrvatski list, 14 Jan. 1944.
161. Kojaković, “Nikad!” in Pjesme legionara, 24.
162. Kojaković, “Duhovniku Legije” and “Grobovi drugara,” in Pjesme legionara, 14, 42.
163. Kojaković, “Mladem drugu,” in Pjesme legionara, 57.
164. Kojaković, “Ustaša,” in Pjesme legionara, 9.
165. Živić, “Prilikom godišnjice smrti i izlazka zbirke pjesama.”
166. “Kad križar umire,” Nedjelja, 13 Dec. 1942 (my emphasis). Kojaković’s letter was
also prominently printed in numerous national newspapers after his death. See, e.g.,
“Posljedna poruka Pera Kojakovića,” Novi list, 4 Nov. 1942.

CONCLUSION
1. The details of the Lorković-Vokić affair are discussed in Krizman, Ustaše i treći reich,
vol. 2 (Zagreb: Globus, 1983), 78–140; Kišić-Kolanović, Mladen Lorković.
2. Matija Kovačić, “Posljedni čin drame dra Mladen Lorkovića,” Hrvatska revija 18, no.
4 (Apr. 1968): 443–57; “Poglavnik je odlučio!” Nova Hrvatska, 2 Sept. 1944.
3. “Put hrvatskoga naroda je odredjen,” Gospodarstvo, 10 Sept. 1944.
4. Božo Šarkanj, “Na braniku države,” Nova Hrvatska, 11 Jan. 1944.
5. Ivo Šarinić, “Nikada više!” Hrvatski narod, 10 Apr. 1945.
6. M. Žibrat, “Vampir Jugoslavija,” Ustaša, 3 Dec. 1944, 5.
7. See, e.g., Matija Kovačić, “Crveni Beograd ne predstavlja hrvatski narod,” Hrvatski
narod, 22 Mar. 1945; Franjo Bubanić, “Jučer amputacija, danas federacija, sutra likvida-
cija,” Hrvatski narod, 11 Feb. 1945; Marko Čović, “Ratni zločini,” Hrvatski narod, 7 Feb.
1945. See also the caricature showing Starčević, Gubec, and Eugen Kvaternik in prison
muster and chains in the new Yugoslavia: A. Hyl, “Ratni zločini,” Naša borba, 15 Jan. 1945.
8. See the caricatures in Naša borba, 15 Jan. 1945; Ivan Šumić, “Zašto su vas ubili,”
Ustaša (Easter 1945): 3.
9. Za obranu hrvatske drzave: poglavnikov govor od 10. III. 1945 i izjava hrvatske države
vlade od 8. III. 1945 (Zagreb: n.p. 1945), 3–4, 22; “Velebna radnička manifestacija,” Vojnik,
30 Apr. 1945.
10. “Snage hrvatskoga odpora,” Nova Hrvatska, 25 Feb. 1945; “Milicija se ne predaje,”
Hrvatski narod, 18 Jan. 1945.
11. Marko Čović, “Branimo država,” Hrvatski narod, 10 Apr. 1945.
12. “Uskrnuce i mir,” Ustaša (Easter 1945): 1.
13. “Danas smo najbliže pobjedi,” Naša borba, 14 Apr. 1945.
14. C., “Narodni ustanak,” Vojnik, 1 Mar. 1945; “Pomažimo svoje,” Naš list, 12 June
1944.
15. “Junačka smrt ustaškog poručnika Krune Penjavića,” Hrvatski narod, 25 Jan. 1944;
“Životi na oltar domovine,” Hrvatski narod, 23 Jan. 1944; “Jedan od mnogih,” Hrvatski
narod, 31 Dec. 1944; ”Što više hrvatske krvi!” Nova Hrvatska, 21 Feb. 1945.
16. “Poglavnika odlikovanja,” Hrvatski narod, 11 Apr. 1945.
17. “Zemlja i narod,” Ustaša, 25 Mar. 1945, 8–9.
18. Ivan Potrač, “Ustaše pre svog bekstva iz Jasenovca poubijali sve zatvorenike,”
Borba, 8 May 1945; “Kako je oslobodjenjo Sarajevo,” Slobodna Dalmacija, 10 Apr. 1945;
 Notes to Pages 351–353  413

“Ustaški koljači poubijali su u Sisku noć prije svoga povlačenja oko 400 gradjana i
seljačka,” Vjesnik, 19 May 1945.
19. Ze’ev Sternhell, “Fascist Ideology,” in Walter Lacquer, ed., Fascism—A Reader’s
Guide: Analyses, Interpretations, Bibliography (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1976), 315–76.
20. Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Avec Doriot (Paris: Gallimard, 1937), 8; Corrado de Vita,
“Cultura Fascista,” Critica Fascista 8, no. 6 (15 Mar. 1930): 104–5.
21. Dino Alfieri and Luigi Freddi, Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (Rome: Partito
Nazionale Fascista, 1933), 17–18; Marla Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in
Fascist Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 140–43.
22. Emily Braun, “Expressionism as Fascist Aesthetic,” Journal of Contemporary
History 31, no. 2 (1996): 273–88; Braun, “Mario Sironi’s Urban Landscapes,” in Matthew
Afron and Mark Antliff, eds., Fascist Visions: Art and Ideology in France and Italy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 101–33.
23. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Italian Fascism and the Aesthetics of the ‘Third Way,’” Journal of
Contemporary History 31, no. 2 (1996): 293–311.
24. Drieu La Rochelle, Avec Doriot, 164–68.
25. Pierre-Henri Lavent, “Belgium Rexism and Leon Degrelle,” in George Mosse, ed.,
International Fascism: New Thoughts and New Approaches (London: Sage, 1979), 295–316.
26. Joseph Darnand, “Mille-Francs gardes de la Milice défilé hier dans le Paris,”
L’Oeuvre, 5 July 1944; Marcel Déat, “Le FST dénonce l’invasion des trusts,” L’Oeuvre, 13
June 1944; Sternhell, “Fascist Ideology,” 340.
27. Giovanni Gentile, Origini e dottrina del fascismo (Rome: Libreria del littorio, 1929),
41–50.
28. Marcel Déat, “Les tendences anticapitalistes” and “Le rassemblement socialiste,”
both in Perspectives socialiste (Paris: Librarié Valois, 1930), 37–64, 43–85; Déat, with
Barthéley Montagnon and Adrién Marcquet, Neosocialisme: Order, autorité, nation
(Paris: B. Grasset, 1933), 90; Sternhell, “Fascist Ideology,” 351.
29. See, e.g., Mark Antliff, “La Cité Française: Georges Valois, Le Corbusier and
Fascist Themes of Urbanism,” in Afron and Antliff, Fascist Visions, 134–70; Le Corbusier,
Urbanisme (Paris: Les Éditions G. Crés et Co., 1925), 93–94, 263–65; Diane Yvonne
Ghirardo, “Città Fascista: Surveillance and Spectacle,” Journal of Contemporary History
31, no. 2 (1996): 347–72; Iain Boyd Whyte, “National Socialism and Modernism,” in Dawn
Ades, Tim Benton, David Elliot and Iain Boyd-Whyte, eds., Art and Power: Europe under
the Dictators, 1930–1945 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 260–73.
30. Baldur von Schirach, Der Hitler Jugend: Idee und Gestalt (Leipzig: Koehler und
Anehung, 1934), 18–19.
31. Richard Grunberger, The Twelve Year Reich: A Social History of Nazi Germany,
1933–1945 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1971), 113, 267–84.
32. Von Schirach, Der Hitler Jugend, 18–19.
33. Michael A. Ledeen, Universal Fascism: The Theory and Practice of the Fascist
International, 1928–1936 (New York: Howard Fertig, 1982), 39–40, 84–85. See also C. O.
Cochetti, “Il Fascismo contro l’Europa,” Critica fascista 6, no. 12 (15 June 1928): 228.
 414  Notes to Pages 354–356

34. Giuseppe Bottai, “Fuzione della gioventù,” Critica fascista 11, no. 5 (1 Mar. 1933):
81–82; Romano Bilenchi, “Indifferenza dei giovani,” Critica fascista 11, no. 8 (15 Apr.
1933): 144–45; Luisa Passerini, “Youth as a Metaphor for Social Change: Fascist Italy
and America in the 1950s,” in Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude Schmitt, eds., A History
of Young People in the West: Stormy Evolution to Modern Times, trans. Carole Volk
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 2: 302.
35. Martin Broszat, German National Socialism, 1919–1945, trans. Kurt Rosenbaum
(California: Clio Press, 1966), 74–75.
36. F. T. Marinetti, “Contro il matromonio,” in Democrazia Futurista: Dinamismo
politico (Milan: Facchi, 1920), “Orgoglio italiano revolucionario e libero amore,” in
Democrazia Futurista, and “Contro il lusso femminile,” in Futurismo e Fascismo
(Foligno: Campitelli, 1924), all reprinted in Luciano de Maria, ed., Teoria e invenzione
futurista (Milan: Editore Arnoldo Mondadori, 1968), 368–74, 546–49.
37. Valentine de St. Point, “Manifesta della donna futurista,” in F. T. Marianetti, ed., I
manifesti del futurismo (Milan: Instituto editorale Italiano, 1919), 38–51.
38. Alexander De Grand, “Women under Italian Fascism,” Historical Journal 19, no. 4
(1976): 947–68.
39. Ferdinando Loffredo, Politica della famiglia (Milan: Valentino Bompiano, 1938),
361, 365, 369.
40. See, e.g., Ellevi, “Instituto familiare e femminismo,” Gerarchia 14, no. 5 (May 1939):
17.
41. Manlio Pompei, “Donne i culle,” Critica fascista 8, no. 6 (15 Mar. 1930): 106–7.
42. Stelio Bonavita, “Dall’uomo Borghese all’uomo Fascista,” Gerarchia 19, no. 4 (Apr.
1939): 282.
43. Mario Carli, “Manifesto dell’Ardito Futurista,” in Mario Carli and G. A. Fanelli,
eds., Antologia degli scrittori Fascisti (Florence: Bemporad, 1931), 39–43; Victoria di
Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–45 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993), 43.
44. Gaetano Salvemini, “Do Italian Women Obey Mussolini?” Birth Control Review 17
(1933): 65. See also G. B. Pelizzi, “Alcune realtà nel problema demografico,” Critica fascista
8, no. 5 (1 Mar. 1930): 96–99.
45. See, e.g., “Dienst des Herzens,” Schwarze Korps, 14 May 1942; “An unsere Frauen,”
Schwarze Korps, 19 Nov. 1942, 2; “Erst der Dienst—heiter die Freizeit,” Schwarze Korps,
8 July 1943, 3; Hans Peter Bleuel, Strength through Joy: Sex and Society in Nazi Germany,
trans. J. Maxwell Brownjohn (London: Secker and Warburg, 1973), 80–98.
46. “Sind Mannequins Freiwild?” Der Schwarze Korps, 28 Aug. 1935, 8; “Frauen sind
keine Männer!” Der Schwarze Korps, 12 Mar. 1936, 1; Mario Zeck, Das Schwarze Korps:
Geschichte und Gestalt des Organs des Reichsführungs (Tubingen: Max Niemayer Verlag,
2002), 323–26.
47. Josef Goebbels, “Gegen die Reaktion,” in Die Angriff: Aufschätze aus der Kampfzeit
(Munich: Zentralverlag des NSDAP, 1935), 282, 385; Bleuel, Strength through Joy, 106–7.
48. Irmgard Reichenau, “Die begrabte Frau,” in Irmgard Reichenau, ed., Deutschen
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49. Alfred Bäumler, “Das akademisches Männerhaus,” in Männerbund und Wissen-

schaft (Berlin: Verlag Junker und Dunnhaupt, 1934), 30–44.
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51. Benito Mussolini, La dottrina del Fascismo con una storia del movimento fascista di
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54. See, e.g., Alfred Brancaccio, Fascismo eroico (Naples: Gaspari Casulli, 1934);
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56. See, e.g., Hans-Peter Hermel, ed., Jagdgeschwander Horst Wessel (Munich:
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Hrvatski narod, 1939–41
Hrvatski akademičar, 1937
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Orač, 1936
Rakovica, 1936–37
Socijalni rad, 1937
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Uskok, 1940
Ustaša, 1934–35
The Independent State of Croatia,
1941–45
Regime Newspapers, Gazettes, and
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Hrvatska krajina, 1941
Hrvatska rieć, 1945
Hrvatski branik, 1941
Hrvatski glas, 1941–45
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Military and Paramilitary Newspapers
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Hrvatski domobran, 1942
Hrvatski vojnik, 1944–45
Naš list, 1944–45
Naša borba, 1944–45
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Youth and Student Journals and
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Alma Mater Croatica, 1941–44
Hrvatski junak, 1942–43 (Mitrovica)
Hrvatski junak, 1943 (Zagreb)
Naraštaj slobode, 1942–44
Naš rad, 1941
Plug, 1944–45
Rakovica, 1941–42
U život, 1941–45
Ustaška uzdanica, 1942–44
Ustaški mladež, 1941–45
ŽAP, 1941–45
Leisure and Cultural Journals
Gluma, 1942–44
Hrvatska sarajevska pozornica,
1942–43
Hrvatski krugoval, 1941–45
Hrvatski radio list, 1941
Hrvatski radnik, 1941–45
Hrvatski slikopis, 1942–45
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Gospodarstvo, 1941–45 Foreign-Language Publications

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Hrvatska ognjište, 1943
Hrvatski ženski list, 1942–45
Savjest Karlovca, 1941
Spremnost, 1942–45
Ustaškinja, 1942–45
Catholic Journals
Katolički list, 1941–45
Katolički tjednik, 1940–45
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Deutsche Zeitung in Kroatien,
1942–43
Neue Ordnung, 1942–45
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abortion: hospital committees and, 145–46;
law against, 145–46; Ministry of Health
and claimed success against and, 145–47;
propaganda campaign against, 147–50;
Serb and Jewish doctors involved in, 148.
See also Ivan Topljak; Mara Švel-Gamiršek;
Đuro Šnajder
anti-Serb stereotypes. See anti-Semitism;
cities; swearing
anti-Semitism: anti-Semitic exhibition,
309–10; cities, cosmopolitanism, and,
205–6; cosmetics and, 305; exploitation
of Croatian workers as justification for,
193–96; importance in ideology of Ustasha
movement, 6; in literature and poetry,
103, 288; workers’ journals and, 189–90 on
workers’ radio programs, 219–20. See also
Jews; radical-right students; Oak Tree, The;
Ustasha Youth
Aryanism: Aryan workers, 312; “Honorary
Aryans,” 14–15, 25; Jewish exploitation of
Aryan employees, 195; “race membership”
and racial laws, 14; racial-political com-
missariat, 14. See also anti-Semitism
Babić, Franjo, The New Generation, 112–13.
See also Ustasha Youth
Babić, Ivo: Sparta and militarization of
youth, 114; Sparta and the warrior society,
130
Babić, Ljubo, 20 June 1928, 273
Babić, Mijo: archive of the Ustasha
Movement and, 339; as battalion leader
of Ustasha Defence, 313–14; as Ustasha
martyr, 322; death and funeral of, 313–14,
INDEX
319–20; poems written in honor of, 103, 105;
threats against Serbs in Ustaša, 297
Balaković, Đuro, 96, 255
Balentović, Ivo, 101,132, 135, 138, 183, 185, 276,
324
Bäumler, Alfred, 357
begging, 303, 306
Bilenchi, Romano, 353–54
Black Legion, 10, 27, 94–95, 100–1, 134, 166,
319; cult of death and, 339; ethnic cleansing
of Serbs and, 311; as a family unit, 138;
The Guard on the Drina and, 210; Josip
Križanac and, 341; masculinity and, 140;
mass murder of Serbs and, 324–26; poetry
and, 105, 341; Slavin Cindrić, August
Pogačnik, and, 230; youth and; 131–32. See
also Francetić, Jure; new Ustasha man
Blaškov, Vjekoslav, 195, 202; anti-Semitism
and, 312
Blažanov, Jozo, Under a Foreign Roof, 288–89
Blažek, Josip, 48; as adjutant for student
socioeconomic welfare in the USS, 53–54
Blažeković, Zdenko, 54, 74, 105; boasts of
committing atrocities, 51; commander of
the USS, 29–30, 43–5, 61–63; commander of
the Ustasha Youth, 90, 100–1; 105; as com-
missioner of DVTOŠ, 232–33; as radical
student activist, 35
Bogdan, Ivo, 130, 180; as cultural hardliner,
181; editor of Spremnost, 251; head of the
Main Directorate for propaganda, 251;
member of the censorship committee of
the State Secretariat for Propaganda, 251
Bonifačić, Ante, 155, 236, 238, 241, 246, 248
book burning 96, 255. See also censorship
437
 438 Index
Boroje, Jure, 97
Bottai, Giuseppe, 353, 358
Božin, Marijan, 208–9
Brajković, Zdravko, 285; arrested as part of
Plug group, 346; as contributor, editor of
Plug, 60, 74; literary experimentalism, 244;
views on Ivo Kozarčanin, 244; views on
Tin Ujević, 75–76
Bresler, Kamilo, 145
Brušane, 156, 298
Budak, Mile, 151, 184, 239, 256, 337; discusses
plans for genocide of Serbs, 16; Lika region
and, 129–30; as Minister of Education,
42–45, 87, 358, 260, 264; Ognjište and, 237;
peasant novels of, 129–60; public threats
against Serbs, 15–16
Bulić, Ivo, 198
Bureau for Nationalised Property (Ured za
podržavljeni imetak), 193–94. See also State
Directorate for Regeneration
Bzik, Mijo, 20, 304, 306, 311, 328; Croatian
Information Service and, 250; death cults
and, 332; Main Directorate for Propaganda
and, 251–52; new Ustasha man and, 130,
132, 138; workers and, 191–92; working-class
Ustasha faction and, 191; Ustasha greeting
and, 258
campaign against bachelors among Ustasha
ideologues, 137; propaganda exercises, 137;
under Italian fascism, 355. See also Topljak,
Ivan; football
Carlo, Mario, 355
Catholic Church, 14, 295, 360; and conversion
of Serbs to Catholicism, 21–22. See also
Catholicism
Catholicism: Catholic rituals and the
sacralization of politics, 297–308; Catholic
writers and, 151, 153, 161, 167, 242, 295,
385; Croatian identity and, 4; Crusader
organization and, 86, 106, 327, 342–43; cult
of martyrdom and, 312–22; new morality
and, 301–8; Ustasha ideology as a political
religion and, 299–301; “village Catholi-
cism,” 296. See also cult of death; Day of
the Croatian Martyr; Day of the Dead;
nudity; swearing
censorship, 11, 96, 249–52, 254–55. See also
Main Directorate for Propaganda; State
Investigative and Propaganda Office
Cerovac, Drago, 201
Čerovski, Božidar, 10, 338
Cesarić, Dobriša, 236, 238
Cindrić, Slavin, 134, 230–31
Cipra, Franjo, 262, 265
cities: curfews in, 11–12; immoral behavior
in, 150–51, 305–6; modernization of, 204,
207–9; modernity in Yugoslavia and, 182;
regeneration by Ustasha youth, 95–96;
relationship with village, 184–86, 206–7;
social welfare policies in, 200–201. See also
anti-Semitism
Committee of Enquiry of December 5
Uprising, 329
Čović, Marko, 40, 185, 226, 348; censor-
ship of article by Main Directorate for
Propaganda, 256; Day of Croatian Victims
and, 338; duties of the writer in the Ustasha
state, 239–40; Ustasha movement and cult
of youth, 82; views of Ustasha cultural
values, 255–56
Croatian Hero, 45, 99; Ivo Protulipac and,
86–87; as youthful rebellion, 89
Croatian Information Service (Hrvatska
izvještajna služba, HIS), 250
Croatian Peasant Party, 12, 36, 292, 331, 333;
student clubs of, 34, 41
Croatian Radio, 219; confiscation of radios
from Jews and Serbs, 14, 220–21; Croatian
State Bureau for Language and, 267;
cultured values and, 233–34; Jewish control
of radio and, 219–20; popular participation
and programs of 221–22; programs for sol-
diers, 218–19; radio programs for workers
and peasants, 219–21; social and educative
function of, 219–21; Ustasha Radio Velebit
in The Oak Tree, 290–93
Croatian right-radical youth organizations,
83–87; anti-Yugoslav violence and, 85–86;
Croatian Right Revolutinary Youth, 84–85;
literary production of, 86; paramilitary
organizations of, 84. See also Croatian
Hero; Protulipac, Ivo
Croatian Scout, 45, 87–88
“Croatian socialism,” 196–98; differences
with Marxism, 197; nationalism and, 197;
workers’ colonies and, 197–98
Croatian National Socialist Workers’ Party,
59, 188
Croatian State Bureau for Language
(Hrvatski državni ured za jezik), 261–71;
linguistic experts in, 262–63; Ministry of
National Education and, 261–62; popular
participation in linguistic purification
and, 266–67; regular linguistic advice of,
267–68; “Serbisms” and, 265–66. See also
language purification
Croatian Workers’ Union (Hrvatski radnički

savez, HRS), 12, 136, 186–87, 196, 201–2;
“Art for the People” and, 222–23
cult of death, 296, 327–39; desire to die and,
313–15; future plans for, 335–36; integral
part of state ideology, 337–38; letters to
dead Ustashas and, 338–39; martyrdom
and, 300–1, 312–19; poetry of, 281–83;
285–86; 340–44; regenerative violence and,
322–27; in Romania, 330; suicide bombing
and, 316–17. See also Black Legion; Catholi-
cism; Kojaković, Pero; Ustasha Youth
cultural history: approach, 3; problems of
with the Ustasha regime, 24, 350–51
Čurl, Ivan, 139–40
Cvitan, Gabrijel, 236; “Poem of a Slave” and,
279
Day of the Dead (Dan mrtvih), 221, 296,
330–33, 336–38
Day of the Croatian Martyr (Dan hrvatskih
mučenika), 221, 296, 330, 333–39
Day of the Ustasha Student, 46, 173; Ustasha
student rally of 25 April 1942 and, 61–64
Déat, Marcel, 352
December 5 uprising: commemoration in
the Ustasha state, 328–30; as early Ustasha
martyrs, 328, 300; in Yugoslav media,
327–28
demographic struggle. See White Plague
Devčić, Krunoslav: as PTS commander, 135;
relationship with mother, 156
Devčić, Manda, 156
Devčić, Stipe: as participant in Velebit Upris-
ing, 8, 156; as Ustasha martyr, 298
Directorate for Security and Public Order
(Ravnateljstvo za sigurnost I javni red), 10,
211, 345–46
Domjanić, Stjepan, 117, 120, 122
Doriot, Jacques, 351
Došen, Dragutin, 135, 325, 400n41
drunkenness: among Ustasha paramilitaries,
112; “Duties of the Ustasha Member” and,
304; introduction of laws against, 303–6;
in literature, 227, 245, 247; model workers
and, 199; new Ustasha woman and, 152;
Ustasha attitude toward, 138, 152; Ustasha
regulations and, 305
economic theory: anticapitalism and, 109,
192–94; corporativism, 194; Croatian
socialism, 196–97; in European fascism,
351–52; Jews and Serbs and, 15, 97, 193–96,
199–200; nationalist workers’ organiza-
tions and, 186–87; radical-right students
Index  439
and, 38–39; Ustasha students and, 68. See
also anti-Semitism
Ereš, Grga, 37, 43
fascism: cult of youth and, 351–54; culturalist
approach toward, 2–3; ideas of, 351–60;
gender and, 354–57; ideas about spiritual
rebirth in, 359–60; modernity and, 352;
relationship of the Ustasha movement
toward, 4–5, 350; socioeconomic visions of,
351–52; sacralization of politics in, 357–59.
See also Mosse, George; Sternhell, Ze’ev
Fazlagića kula, 166
Fištrović, Branko, 82, 93, 96
football (soccer), 23; as anti-bachelor
propaganda, 137; DVTOŠ and indiscipline
on the football pitch, 232–3; as form of
military training, 133–34; football players
as Ustasha warriors, 134; football players
as role models, 230–31; as “workers’ game,”
231
Frajtić, Josip, 310
Francetić, Jure, 10, 26, 27, 100, 258, 311; Black
Legion and, 101, 131–32, 138, 140, 316; cult
of death and, 313, 320, 323, 338, 340; Lika
region and, 130; mass murder against Serbs
and Jews, 324–26; new Ustasha man and,
135; poems about, 105, 228, 340; role model
for Ustasha youth, 94–95; as Ustasha
martyr,138–39, 272, 349
Frankopan, Krsto 333, 334
freemasons, 87, 207, 289
Freudenreich, Aleksandar: educational
centers and, 209–10
Gal, Miroslav, 110, 134; Ustasha workers and,
195, 219
gambling: banned in Ustasha camps, 138, 157,
298; campaigns by Ustasha women against,
152–53; “Duties of the Ustasha Member,”
304
Gasparović, Stanko, 242, 285
Gavella, Branko, 223
Gentile, Giovanni, 352
Govedić, Slavko, 59, 188
Grgec, Petar, 183, 275
Glavas, Radoslav, 230, 289; regulations for
conversions of Serbs and, 21
Goebbels, Josef, 356, 360
Gradjanski, 137, 230–31
Gubec, Matija (peasant leader), 95, 313; as
Croatian martyr, 333–34. See also Matija
Gubec (student society)
Guberina, Ivo, 180, 311
 440 Index
Guberina, Petar, 260, 262, 266. See also
Croatian State Bureau for Language
Gutić, Viktor, 204, 286–87, 303, 321; plans for
genocide against Serbs, 17; public threats
against Serbs, 15
Hadžijahić, Muhamed, 37, 52
Harnoš, Oskar, 110, 134
Heimatstil, 119, 209. See also Freudenreich,
Aleksandar
Himmler, Heinrich, 357
Hitler Youth: relations with Ustasha Youth,
163; 353–54
homosexuality: allegations of in the Ustasha
movement, 134; the Männerstaat and, 156
Horvat, Jakob, 50, 89
Horvat, Josip, 268
Hranilović, Marija: as subject of “An Ustasha
Mother at the Grave of her Martyred Son,”
115
Hranilović, Marko, 84, 156, 298; 349; as
Ustasha martyr, 334
Hrvatska Mitrovica Ustasha Youth camp,
116–17, 121–22, 124
Hrvatski slikopis (Croatia Film, State Film
Institute), 210–17; anti-Semitic and anti-
Serb policies of, 210–11; cinema as a social
force and 210–11; competition for new
screenplays and, 216–17; public opinion
and propaganda films of, 210, 212–13; social
function of cinema in villages and, 212–13.
See also Lisinski; Mikac, Marijan; Miletić,
Oktavijan
Ilić, Andrija, 56, 67, 113, 244, 280
Ilik, Antun, 230–31
illiteracy, 213; in interwar Croatia, 32;
Ministry of Education and law to promote
literacy, 23, 217–18; radical students and, 39;
war against illiteracy, 203
Institute for Colonization (Zavod za
kolonizacija), 17, 200
Ivaštinović, Jakov, as Plug contributor, 74–5;
student poetry of, 66–67
Jakšić, Stevan, 31–32
Jasenovac (concentration camp), 16, 57, 79;
construction of, 18; deportation of Gypsies,
25; “elite” student and youth guards, 100;
exhibition about, 2; liquidation of, 349–50;
Zagreb Economic and Trade Exhibition
and, 2
Javor, Stipe, 313, 349; funeral of 34; as “Usta-
sha Christ,” 317–19; street named after, 335
Jerkov, Antun, 151, 295, 305
Jews: Andrija Artuković and, 25–26; capitalist
exploitation and, 14, 53, 68, 70, 194–96,
203; curfews and ghettoization of, 13–14;
deportation to Jasenovac and liquidation
of, 14, 26, 98; discriminatory laws against,
13–14, 42–44; joint conspiracy with
Serbs against Croatia, 195–96; morality,
family life, and, 311–12; nationalization of
Jewish businesses and, 193–94; threats of
extermination against, 15. See also Ustasha
University Center; Ustasha Youth
Jožčenko (satirist), 118, 235, 281
Jugo, Derviša, 166. See also warrior women
Jurišić, Blaž, 239
Jurišić, Nikola, 315
Karamarko, Milivoj: arrest and execution,
78–79, 346; involvement in Plug, 74–75,
77–78; Rakovica as Ustasha revolution,
333; Ustasha ideology as political religion,
301; Ustasha students and, 46–47; Ustasha
Youth and, 95; as USS center leader, 69–70,
77; Vienna Resolution and, 71; war against
renegade Ustashas and, 20
Katalenić, Zvonimir, 66, 74, 85, 183, 244; Plug
movement and, 346; poetry of, 280, 282;
“poetry of the national soul,” 246–47
Katić, Milan, 213, 216. See also Hrvatski
slikopis; Lisinski
Kavran, Božidar, 218, 302; Day of the Dead
and, 332
Klaić, Antun, 262, 267
Klarić, Branko: poetry of, 276, 278, 183–84,
340; “The Chasm and the Sun,” 134; tribute
to Jure Francetić, 139
Kojaković, Pero: death and last hours
visualised, 343; death poetry of, 141–2,
342–3; as model Ustasha warrior, 137, 141;
soldiers’ literature and, 228
Kolar, Slavko, 75, 129, 183
Košutić, Šida, 154
Kos, Vinko, 236, 261, 280–82
Košak, Vladimir, 22, 27
Kovačić, Ivan Goran, 184, 238; reaction of
Ustasha commentators to the death of, 241
Kovačić, Vladimir, 215
Kozarčanin, Ivo, 129, 239; appropriated as
Ustasha cultural icon, 242–44; depiction
of city, 183; influence on young nationalist
writers, 183–85
Križanac, Josip: death of, 316; poetry of, 138,
228
Krklec, Gustav, 238, 249, 252

Krleža, Miroslav, 111, 238, 249; article by
Marko Čović and, 256; attitudes of Plug
toward, 75–76; new Ustasha literature
and, 245; novels of, 129, 183; work banned
by Ministry of the Interior, 250; younger
writers’ views of, 244
Krstić, Krunoslav, 260, 262–63, 265–66. See
also Croatian State Bureau for Language
Kuhar, Zvonko, 185
Kvaternik, Eugen, 263, 335; “apostle of
Ustasha ideas,” 333; appropriated by the
Ustasha movement, 7, 272; Croatian Right
Revolutionary Youth and, 84; intellectual
property of, 249; Ustasha Youth and, 95
Kvaternik, Eugen Dido, 10, 311; threat to kill
all Serbs, 26; purging of, 26; demonstration
by Dalmatian students, and 39
Kvaternik, Slavko, 10, 26, 45; declaration
of Croatian independence and, 9, 294;
speeches to Ustasha army recruits, 138, 322
Lamešić, Marko, 178, 212
La Rochelle, Pierre Drieu, 351, 359
language purification: anti-Semitism and,
264–65; anti-Serb policies and, 263–65;
Commissariat for Language and, 262;
complexity of rules and, 267, 268–69;
etymological script and, 260–62; militant
language and, 257–58; new words and,
260–61; relaunch of, 269–71
Lašić, Emil, 39; Jure Francetić and, 101, 131–32
Latković, Radovan, 75, 86, 88, 219
Lepoglava prison, 41, 48, 345–46
Le Corbusier, 207, 208, 210, 352
Libera, Aldaberto, 351, 352
Lika region, 8, 48, 158, 184, 326, 331; the new
Ustasha man and, 130; Ognjište and, 237
Likan, Gustav: 10 April 1941 and, 273–74
Lisinski, 213–6
literary prizes, 248–49
Lorca, Federico Garcia, 111, 183
Lorković, Mladen, 7; alleged coup with Ante
Vokić and, 345–46; anti-Serb propaganda,
16, 311; arrest, 28, 345–46; execution of, 350;
leader of moderate faction, 22; new Ustasha
man, 130–31; speeches against Serbs and
Jews, 15; view of Ustasha students, 46
Luburić, Vjekoslav, 2, 10, 78–79, 253, 346,
349–50
Luburić, Maks. See Luburić, Vjekoslav
Maček, Vladko, 8, 35, 37
Magdić, Milivoj, 56, 202
Index  441
Main Alliance of Syndicates, 10, 196. See also
Croatian socialism; Seitz, Aleksandar
Main Directorate for Propaganda, 249–50,
255; censorship policies of, 253–54; cinema
and, 210–15; establishment and personnel
in, 250–51; linguistic purification and,
270–71; poetry of Pero Kojaković and,
141–42
Main Directorate for Mass National Enlight-
enment, 10–11, 92, 179, 225, 238, 248, 269
Majer, Vjekoslav, 129
Majtin, Zlatko, 60
Makanec, Julije, 316; European values of the
Ustasha state, 4; national revolution in
Bjelovar, 92; role of the Ustasha movement,
181; Ustasha Youth training schools and,
106, 115
makeup: journalistic articles against, 303,
305–6; prohibition on female teachers and
students wearing, 151–52; regional Ustasha
center prohibitions on makeup in offices,
305
Miličević, Vlado, 86; arrest of, 78, 344; con-
flict with older generation of writers, 183,
244; Plug and, 74, 75; review of Tamnica,
50; views of Miroslav Krleža, 76
Männerstaat, 356–57
Maraković, Ljubomir, 183; The Oak Tree
and, 249, 289–90, 293; “political-patriotic
literature” and, 249; review of Tamnica
and, 50; The Struggle for Justice and, 235;
Vladimir Jurčić and, 184
Marčinko, Matija, 134, 284
Marija Bistrica, 214, 216
Matica Hrvatska, 33, 184, 226, 248
Matija Gubec (student society) 34, 45. See also
Gubec, Matija (peasant leader)
Medvedović, Emil, 69, 96
Mestrović, Ivan, 247, 273
Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 207, 210, 352
Mikac, Marijan: competition for new
screenplays and, 216; concerns about
Jewish subject matter in film, 211; Hrvatski
slikopis (Croatia Film) and, 210–11; Lisinski
and, 213–14
Miletić, Oktavijan: the making of Lisinski
and, 213–14
Milković, Zlatko, 66, 275; the Day of the
Dead, 332; literary prizes and, 249; new
generation of writers, 236, 244; new na-
tionalist literature and, 247–48; Tamnica,
49–50; “The Last Furrow,” 257–58
Miloslavić, Eduard, consequences of abortion
and, 147–48
 442 Index
Ministry of Health, 145; anti-abortion laws
and, 146–47; construction of workers’
homes and, 198–201; establishment of
“social stations” by, 200–201; travelling
anti-abortion exhibition and, 147.
Ministry of National Education: authors’
commercial rights, 64–65; campaigns for
morality and, 50; Commissariat for Film
and, 210; construction of new buildings at
the University of Zagreb, 44; DIPU and,
250; female Ustasha students and state
labor service, 54; ideological and racial
purification at University of Zagreb and,
41–42; language purification and, 262, 268;
male Ustasha students and examinations,
64–65; Racial-Political Committee and, 14;
Ustasha student social welfare and, 50; war
against illiteracy and, 217–18
Ministry for Social Care: confiscation of
Serb homes, 199; foundation of Institute
for Colonization, 200; involvement in
construction of workers’ homes, 198–201;
social welfare system and, 201
Minić, Maca, 126, 152–53
Mirogoj, 54, 31, 332; burial of 5 December
martyrs and, 329; the Day of the Dead and,
334–45, 337; funeral of Antun Pogorelec
and, 322; funeral of Mijo Babić and, 319,
320; poetry and, 340
Mlada Hrvatska (newspaper), 189
modernity: cinema as an expression of,
210–13; cities and, 207–10; mass murder of
Serbs as an integral part of, 204; fascism
and, 4, 351–52; radical-right student visions
and, 40; urban values and, 204–5; Ustasha
Youth and, 80; villages and, 204; Yugoslav-
ism and, 182
moral regeneration, 309–10. See also anti-
Semitism
Mortigjija, Tias, 75; as editor of Spremnost,
254; representative of moderate faction, 24;
views of role of Ustasha movement, 181
Mosse, George, 3, 363
motherhood, 143–57; Catholic writers and,
151; Croatia as a mother, 143, 155; as a form
of combat for the homeland, 159–60; moral
purity and, 150; poetry about, 154; used
as weapon against Croatian nation in
interwar Yugoslavia, 144–45, 150; Ustasha
female ideologues’ views about, 151–3;
younger Ustasha women’s resistance to,
158–59. See also abortion; White Plague;
Ustasha mother; Week of the Croatian
Mother and Child
Mrmić, Josip, 138, 229, 252, 346. See also
sexual morality
Muradbegović, Ahmed, 234; and people’s
drama, 222–23
Murvar, Vatroslav, 52–53, 86
Muslims, 51, 70; blood brotherhood of
Muslim and Catholic Ustasha youth, 102,
115; claims to Bosnia and, 38; Muslim
women and the new Ustasha woman,
164, 166; plan for Muslim university in
Sarajevo, 69; radical nationalist students
and, 38; screenplays about, 217; Ustasha
movement sees as racially pure Croats, 13;
Ustasha students and, 52
Mussolini, Benito, 355, 357–58
National Socialism: cult of youth, 352–54;
gender and, 356–57; political religion and
morality in, 358–60; Ustasha ideology
and, 6
Nazor, Vladimir, 239, 244, 278
Neugebauer, Walter, The Liberation of
Croatia, 273
Nezavisnost (newspaper), 32, 188–89
Nevistić, Franjo, 32, 188–89. 43, 72–73, 78,
80, 254
new Ustasha man, 130–43; masculinity of,
130–32; physical attributes of, 134–35;
popular culture and, 134–35; relationship
to marriage and women, 135–38; Spartan
warrior values and, 130–32; sport and
athletics and, 132–35; warrior family unit
and, 138–40
new Ustasha woman 143–67. See also
abortion; motherhood; Ustasha mother;
warrior women
Niedzielski, Feliks, 124, 275
Nikolić, Vinko, 75, 236, 273, 275; “An Ustasha
Mother at the Grave of her Martyred Son,”
156–57; Lisinski and, 216; new Ustasha
literature, 244–45; new Ustasha man and,
130; poetry of, 284, 286; “The Crucifixion of
Croatia,” 279; Ustasha ideology as political
religion, 301, 303; Wreaths, 245–46, 340–41
Nikolić, Zrinko, 73
Nitsche, Karl, 359
nudity, 305–7
Oak Tree, The (Hrast), anti-Semitism in,
291–92; anti-Serb propaganda in, 292–94;
anti-urban themes of, 290–91; critical
reception of, 289–90
Oršanić, Haris Seitz, 153
Oršanić, Ivan, 54, 98, 251

Panjkota, Dražen, 74, 86, 111, 280, 285–86
Pavelić, Ante (Poglavnik): alleged coup
against, 345–46; article about Serbs in
Ustaša, 297; The Beautiful Blonde, 157–58,
299; censorship and propaganda about,
253–54; Congress of Ustasha Students and,
68–70; cult of personality and, 271–72;
factions in the Ustasha movement and,
12–13; as “father” of the Ustasha move-
ment, 138–39; 5 December martyrs and,
329; founding of the Ustasha movement
and, 6–7; hardline faction and, 19–20, 26,
345–57; language purification and, 262,
264–65, 270–71; literature and art glorified
in, 103–4, 276–78; moderate faction and, 22,
27–28, 345–47; as object of female Ustasha
fantasies, 153–54, 165; plans for the extermi-
nation of the Serbs, 16–17, 26, 29–30; poems
sent to by members of the public, 278–79;
portraits of, 274–75; powers as Poglavnik,
9–10; relations with Ustasha students,
57–59; “A Rifle Fires,” 271, 275; speech to
Ustasha governor about anti-Serb terror,
19; speech at Workers’ Chamber and, 346;
speeches to Ustasha students, 29–30, 45–47,
61–64; as successor of Ante Starčević,
212–13; urban bourgeoisie and, 205;
Ustasha oath of loyalty to, 299; Ustasha
workers and, 191–93, 198; Ustasha Youth
and, 100, 114; “Worker No. 1,” 192
Pavičić, Jure, 46, 275–76, 281, 287
Pavlović, Matija, 225–26, 277
Pejnović, Grga, 95, 96, 119, 251; GUS
Propaganda Office and Day of the Croatian
Martyr, 332; idea of Ustasha warrior as
Christian martyr and, 300; Ustasha state as
the “Promised Land,” 302
people’s artists, 225–28. See also individual
artists’ entries
Perčec, Gustav, 6–7, 157
Perković, Luka, 182, 238
Peroš, Vilim, 229, 316, 336
Perše, Bosiljka, 158–59; 167
Petrić, Ivo, 147, 198, 200
Plug (journal), 27, 69, 73, 74–79; anti-
cosmopolitan views of, 75–76; arrest of
Plug leaders on conspiracy charges, 78, 346;
links with the moderate faction, 254, 362;
literary debates in, 75–76; purge of Plug,
350; return to apocalyptic nationalism in,
75–78
Poglavnik Bodyguard Brigade (Poglavnikov
tjelesni sdrug), 10, 100, 114, 164, 349; Banja
Luka rampage by, 112; biography of, 135,
Index  443
325; Ivo Babić and, 114, 130; Josip Blažek
and, 48, 54; Krune Devčić and, 135; Milivoj
Karamarko and, 69, 78
Pogorelec, Ante, 338; as Ustasha martyr, 338;
funeral of, 320–22
Pogorelec, Jelka, 7, 157
Polonijo, Ante, 48, 319
Polonijo, Stanislav, 318–19, 333
Prison, The (Tamnica), 49–50, 66, 249; racial
themes in, 49–50; reviews of, 50
prostitution, 32, 305, 307; abortion and, 168;
anti-Semitic stereotypes and, 309–10;
morality laws and, 303; symptom of
Yugoslav society, 145, 185
Puljiz, Luka, 108, 123
Pustajec, Velimir, 58–59, 63
Puzstay, Josip, 98
radical-right students, 31–41; anti-Semitism
of, 36–37; anti-Yugoslav activism of, 35–36;
Bosnia and, 37–38; clashes with political
opponents, 33–35; connections with
Ustasha movement, 40–41; cultural visions
of, 39–40; ideas about the relationship
between the city and the village, 38–41;
internment of, 41; new nationalist man
and, 129; poetry of, 39–40; racial views
of, 36–38; social ideas of, 36–40; student
elections and, 34, 41; student law club and,
40–41; violence against professors and
scholars, 33–34
Radić, Stjepan, 85; assassination of, 6, 273,
292; Day of the Croatian Martyr and,
333–34; political vision of, 68, 127
Rakovica, 71, 276; as first Ustasha revolution,
333; Croatian Home Guard youth organiza-
tion and, 84; cult of death and, 313
Raos, Ivan, 86, 282
Rasjin, Valodja, 17, 121
Renzi, Mario di, 351–52
“revolution of blood” 5, 20–21, 180–81; con-
cerns of Ustasha women about, 152; debates
about role of the Ustasha movement,
180–81; language purification and, 270–71;
poetry and, 275–76; return to 28, 270, 346;
“second revolution” and, 86–89, 361–62;
themes explored in The Oak Tree, 290–94;
Ustasha literature and, 317–18
Rieger, Vilko, 212; director of DIPU, 100, 251;
ideas about national economy, 38; national
regeneration and, 178–79
Rošić, Ivan, 298, 334, 349
Rubina, Franjo, 140, 315
 444 Index
Šabić, Nikola, 111, 313, 340
Šantić, Jelena, 102, 165
Sarajevo-SAŠK (Sarajevski amaterski
športski klub), 137, 230–31
Šarić, Anđjelka, 102, 165
second revolution: Croatian socialism and,
203; cultural politics and, 80, 255; Ustasha
factions and, 20–26; Ustasha students and,
30, 70, 74, 77
Seitz, Aleksandar, Main Alliance of Corpora-
tions, 10, 196; new social system and, 190;
speech against Jews and Serbs, 15; theory of
Croatian socialism and, 196–97
Serbs: accusations of economic exploitation
and, 193–96; accusations of overbreeding
and, 15; Balkan habits and, 96, 131, 186, 264,
308–11, 327; calls for vengeance against,
297–98, 319–23; campaign of mass murder
against, 17–18, 26, 324–26; children’s
concentration camps, 18; concerns within
Ustasha movement about policy towards,
18–19, 26; confiscation of businesses,
193–94; Croatian Orthodox Church and,
22; crimes of Ustasha student militia
against, 51–52; crimes of Ustasha Youth
against, 97–98; deportation to Jasenovac,
18; discriminatory laws against, 13–14;
emergence of new line towards, 19–21;
filth and gypsy attributes of, 77, 131, 297,
310–11, 322–23, 326; forced assimilation and
conversion to Catholicism, 20–22; ghet-
toization of, 13–14; legitimation of mass
murder against in popular culture, 103,
277–78, 287–89, 291–94; moderate factions
in Ustasha movement and, 26–27; plans for
extermination of in Ustasha movement,
16–17; as racially alien immigrants, 7, 15–16,
37–38, 52–3, 97–98; racist stereotypes of in
literature, 49–50, 288–89, 291–94; radical-
right students and, 35–38; Serb children
in Ustasha Youth, 116–17; as source of
immorality, 308–12; threats of extermina-
tion against, 15–17, 96–97, 297–98; uprisings
against state led by, 18–19; views of Ustasha
students about, 52–53, 76–78; views of
Ustasha Youth about, 96–99. See also
Black Legion; Pavelić, Ante; “revolution of
blood”; Ustasha Youth; Ustasha students
Šeunik, Zdenka-Jušić, 128, 154, 184, 249
sexual morality: abortion and, 148; “Duties
of the Ustasha Member,” 304; in anti-
abortion literature, 149; in interwar
Yugoslavia, 145; in anti-Semitic literature,
290–92; in poetry, 343; Jews and, 97, 195,
309–10; morality laws, 303–4; Serbs and,
52, 309–10; soldiers’ handbook on sexual
morality, 135–37; in Ustasha camps, 138,
298; in the Ustasha movement, 19, 23, 136;
Ustasha regulations and, 304–5
Širola, Mladen, 110, 143
Sironi, Mario, 351
Skračić, Jerko, 86, 277; poetry of, 277, 280–82;
“The Song of Croatian Victory,” 271; Under
Another’s Lock and Key, 48–49, 66
Škrbin, Janko, 86, 92
Smolčić, Josip, 20
Šnajder, Đuro, “A Woman, A Dove, and
Abortion,” 148–49
social realism: criticism of 227, 289–90; in
Ustasha literature, 49, 225, 227, 249, 273,
289–90
Softa, Ivan, 185; the “new realism” and,
226–28
soldiers: campaign for literacy and, 23–24;
cult of death and, 315, 326–27; culture and,
217–19, 223, 228–30; discipinary court and,
19; journals of and etymological script,
261; poems about, 103–5; poetry of, 140–41,
143, 155–56, 341–42; role model for youth,
106; student soldiers, 65–66, 73; uncultured
behavior of, 152–53; viewed as good
Catholic sons, 295–96
Soldin, Matija, 84, 156, 298, 313, 334
Sparta: the militarization of Ustasha Youth
and, 114–15, 130–31; Lika and the “Croatian
Sparta,” 130; Ustasha man as Spartan
warrior, 135, 300, 322, 343; Ustasha mother
as Spartan mother, 156–57. See also new
Ustasha man; new Ustasha woman;
Ustasha mother; Ustasha Youth
Špoljar, Branko, 110, 215
Spremnost: arrest of intellectuals connected
with, 346; cultural values and, 235, 255;
debates about the nature of the Ustasha
movement and, 180–81; moderate faction
and, 24; national intelligentsia and, 240;
target of censorship, 254–57; vehicle for
language purification, 267
Squadristi, 358
Stahuljak, Tihomir, 208
Stanković, Marica, 151, 305
Starčević, Ante, 7, 130; Day of the Dead and,
330; etymological script and, 263; Father
of the Homeland and, 212; sculptures and
monuments to, 272, 286; Ustasha move-
ment’s commercial rights to work of, 249
Starčević, Mile, 10, 39; as cultural softliner, 24
State Directorate for Regeneration (Državni

ravnateljstvo za ponovo): appropriation of
Serb property, 17, 199; Croatian Workers’
Union and, 223; deportation of Serbs,
199–200; economic transformation and,
193–94; religious section of, 21–22
State Investigative and Propaganda Office
(Državni izvještajni i promičbeni ured,
DIPU): censorship and, 249–54, 256–57;
language purification and, 262; mobile
cinematic department and, 212–13;
structure of, 249–50; Ustasha greeting and,
259; Ustasha Youth and, 100, 225, 255
State Labor Service, 54–55, 120, 161, 163,
203–4. See also Ustasha University Center;
Ustasha Youth
State Leadership for Physical Education and
Sport (Državni vodstvo za tjelesni odgoja i
šport, DVTOŠ), 232–33
Sternhell, Ze’ev, 3, 351.
Švel-Gamiršek, Mara: The Oak Tree and,
289–94; “Ranka’s Mistake,” 149; reception
of work, 249, 289
swearing, 24; “Duties of the Ustasha Mem-
ber” and, 304; Josip Frajtić and, 310–11;
law against swearing, 303, 310; movement
against swearing, 307–8; swearing as Serb
and Balkan habit, 308–11; Ustasha regula-
tions and, 304–5
Thirteenth student militia 45–48, 50, 65, 339
Tolj, Mijo, 251, 254
Topolčić, Ivan, Ustasha Youth—The Hope of
Croatia, 273
Topljak, Ivan, 137, 146, 304–5, 312
Trbuha, Franjo: as Plug contributor and
Ustasha student, 75; the Ustasha ideology
as a political religion and, 301, 329; as
Ustasha Youth leader, 91, 93, 118
Trepše, Marijan, Maja, 157.
Triplat, Ivan, Circle, 225–26
Trontl, Stjepko: “In Great Days,” 318; The
Unseen Toni, 129; “An Ustasha Grave,” 318,
330
Truhelka, Ćiro, 7, 52, 350
Ujević, Tin, 238; literary critics and, 242;
Plug students and, 75–76; “a poetry of the
national soul” and, 247; radical young
writers and, 244
Uskoks: as proto-Ustashas, 322–23; in
pantheon of Ustasha martyrs, 313; Ustasha
Youth and, 48, 95
Ustaša (party journal): attitude toward
second revolution, 181; Croatian socialism
Index  445
and, 196; promotion of soldier and militia
literature in, 228–30; purges in the Ustasha
movement and, 201; Ustasha student guard
interviewed in, 50; Ustasha worker articles
in, 202–3; warnings about surveillance
and, 11
Ustasha mother, 143, 155–57; in “An Ustasha
Mother at the Grave of her Martyred
Son,” 156–57. See also Devčić, Manda;
Hranilović, Marija; motherhood; Sparta
Ustasha Defence Brigade (Ustaški obranbeni
zdrug), 10, 253; arrest of Milivoj Kara-
marko and, 78–79; Jasenovac exhibition of,
2; liquidation of Jasenovac concentration
camp by, 349–50
Ustasha greeting, 258–59
Ustasha movement: allegations of homo-
sexuality in, 136–37; concerns about
entryism in, 22–23, 116–117; debates about
role of, 180–81; “Duties of the Ustasha
Member” and, 304; factionalism in, 4–5,
12–13, 19–20, 27–28; internal dissent in,
18–19; new members of, 12; oath for new
members of, 299–300; structure of, 10;
Ustasha disciplinary court and, 19; Ustasha
principles and, 6, 23, 44; Ustasha regula-
tions and, 304–5; war against “renegade”
Ustashas and, 20–21. See also morality;
new Ustasha man; new Ustasha woman;
Ustasha students; Ustasha Youth
Ustasha students: attitudes to military mobi-
lization, 59–61, 64–66; Congress of Ustasha
Students, 67–70; crimes against Serbs and
Jews, 51–52; evolving national ideas of,
70–74; female Ustasha students and state
labour service, 63–64; feminization of
university life, 161; ideological conflict with
veteran student radicals, 72–74; literary
visions of, 67–68; new female Ustasha
student, 162; October student plenum
and, 65–66; Office for Academic Support
to Student-Soldiers and, 66; problems of
university study and, 54, 64–66; racialised
attitudes toward Serbs and East, 52–53,
76–78; reception to Tamnica, 50, 66; social
ideas of, 68–69; Vienna Resolution and,
70–72. See also Murvar, Vatroslav; Plug
Ustasha University Center (Ustaški
sveučilištni stožer), 43–44; as elite
student organization, 58–59; extent of
support for, 58; involvement in racial and
ideological cleansing of University of
Zagreb, 43–44; organization of student life
under leadership of, 43–44; mass university
 446 Index
construction program and, 43–44; mass
rally for the Poglavnik organised by, 61–64;
special privileges of members of, 64–65;
social mobility and, 55–56; social welfare
of students and, 43–44; state labor service
duties and, 54–56. See also Blažeković,
Zdenko
Ustasha Supervisory Service (Ustaška
nadzorna služba): details of, 10; student
agents and, 55, 57–58; Zagreb economic and
trade exhibition, 1–2
Ustasha worker: as constituent class in
national community, 196–97; new female
Ustasha worker, 161–62; social mobility
of in the Ustasha state, 195–96, 202–3. See
also Croatian Radio; Croatian socialism;
Croatian Workers’ Union; worker artists;
workers’ colonies
Ustasha Youth, 81–125; anti-bourgeois
beliefs of, 93–95; anti-Semitism of, 97–98;
anti-Serb sentiment in, 96–97; atrocities
committed by, 51, 97–98; conflicts with
older generation, 81–83, 99–100; cult of
youth in, 81–83, 91–93; as elite avantgarde
of terror, 100–101; female members of, 160,
162–63, martyrdom of, 101–2; as merciless
new youth, 100–101; Muslim-Croat blood
brotherhood and, 102, 115; New Generation
and, 112–13; poetry of death by 103–5; rebel-
lious ethos of, 90–95; relationship with
families and schools, 88–89; recruitment
drive in, 90–91; social harmony and, 105–8;
social mobility in, 90–91, 99; social solidar-
ity and, 108–10; as Spartan child warriors,
113–15; structure of, 87–89; training schools
and, 106–7; Ustasha Youth Art School and,
110–11; war against immorality in, 95–96
Ustasha Youth camps, 115–16; resistance to
central control in, 116–20; indiscipline in,
117–18; 120–25; physical activity and sport
in, 110, 120, 133; lack of resources in, 119–20;
Serb applications to join, 116–18; work-
service camps and, 107–8
Velebit uprising, 8, 340
Velebit Mountains, 135; poetry and, 343;
Ustasha movement and, 156
Veljačić, Zvonimir, The Struggle for Justice,
225. See also worker artists
Veža, Mladen, The Victims of Sibinj, 74–75
Vienna, 52, 70
Vine of Ustasha Women, 143–44, 152–55
Vitković, Stanko: calls for second revolution,
180; criticized by Vlado Miličević, 75
Vokić, Ante, 254; arrest of, 28; execution of,
350; involvement in alleged putsch, 354–56;
representative of moderate faction, 22;
speech to students, 65
Vrančić, Vjekoslav, 22, 27
warrior women, 127, 166–67; training schools
and, 159; Ustasha Women’s Vine and,
159–62; young revolutionary women and,
158–59
Week of the Croatian Mother and Child,
144–45, 150, 163
White Plague, 145–50
worker artists, 225–28
workers’ colonies, 197–201; Institute for
Colonization and, 200; social mobility,
“the good life” and, 198, 200–1; State
Directorate for Regeneration and, 200–201;
as a tool of social control, 199
Zadruga: new Ustasha man and, 127; role in
economic policy, 197; role in the workers’
and peasants’ state, 191; Ustasha Principles
and, 6; views of the Croatian Social
Institute about, 186
Zagreb-HAŠK (Hrvatski amaterski športski
klub), 137, 230–31
Zagreb Economic and Trade Exhibition
(September 1942), 1–2
Žanetić, Janko, 67, 82, 237
Žanić, Milovan, 15–16
Žanko, Dušan: “new art” and, 222–23; 234;
role of theater and, 236–37; “spiritual
revolution” and, 179–80
Žanko, Zdenka, 130, 144, 156
Žebić, Miško, 133, 231
“Zemlja” group, 182
Žibrat, Marijan, 229, 347
Žimbrek, Ladislav, 31
Živić, Viktor, 141–42, 343. See also death
poetry; Kojaković, Pero
Zrinski, Nikola, 333, 334
Žrnovački, Stanko Radanović, 273
Žubrinić, Dragica, 120
Žunić, Ismet, 283, 326