The Ustaše (also called Ustashas or Ustashi) was a Croatian racist, terrorist, and Nazi-like movement. It was engaged in terrorist activities before World War II.[Under the protection of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, the Ustaše ruled a part of Yugoslavia, after Yugoslavia was occupied by Italy and Germany. At the end of World War II, the Ustaše were defeated and expelled by the Yugoslav Partisans.
Croatian politician Stjepan Radić was shot on October 1928 and died a month later. Alexander I, King of Yugoslavia, imposed a royal dictatorship in January 1929 and made all political parties illegal. Ante Pavelić left the country for Vienna. He and Gustav Perčec, a former Austro-Hungarian Lieutenant colonel, established contact with organization of Macedonian political emigres. These two groups agreed to coordinate their political activities for achieving full independence for Macedonia and Croatia. There and then, Pavelić secretly met with the leader of outlawed Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO), Ivan Mikhailov, a declared enemy of Yugoslavia, and made agreement with him to cooperate against the Yugoslav state.
Due to these circumstances, the Court for the Preservation of the State in Belgrade sentenced Pavelić and Perčec to death on 17 July 1929.The exiles started organizing support for their cause among the Croatian emigration in Europe, North America, and South America. The Ustaše organization was small in numbers and was organized in military patterns. They fought Yugoslav statehood by means of terror.
The roots of the Ustaše ideology were in the Croatian nationalism of the nineteenth century. The Ustaše ideological system was chiefly based on the traditional pure Croatian nationalism of Ante Starčević.
The ideology of the movement was a blend of fascism, Roman Catholicism and Croatian nationalism.The Ustaše supported the creation of a Greater Croatia that would span the River Drina and extend to the border of Belgrade.The movement emphasized the need for a racially “pure” Croatia and promoted genocide against Serbs, Jews and Romani people, and persecution of anti-fascist or dissident Croatians.
The Ustaše were fiercely Catholic, identifying it with Croatian nationalism. They declared that the Catholic and Muslim faiths were the religions of the Croatian people. They claimed the Islam of the Bosniaks was a religion which “keeps true the blood of Croats”.
When it was founded in 1930, as Ustaša – Croatian Revolutionary Organization it was a nationalist organization that sought to create an independent Croatian state. When the Ustaše came to power in the NDH, a quasi-protectorate established by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany during World War II, its military wings became the Army of the Independent State of Croatia and the Ustaše militia.
Starčević’s racism was further fully elaborated by Ustaša Ivo Pilar [under the pseudonym L. von Südland].His book was translated into Croatian in 1943, by Pavelić’s regime, as one of the tenets of his Ustaše and his Independent State of Croatia. At the same time, the Ustaše borrowed from traditional Croatian nationalism, the National-Socialism of Hitler, the fascism of Mussolini, and even from the program of the Croatian Peasant Party. The Ustaše aimed at an ethnically “pure” Croatia, and saw the Serbs that lived in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina as their biggest obstacle.
The Ustaše persecuted the Serbs, who were Orthodox Christians. They were tolerant toward the Bosnian Muslims, claiming that the Muslims were actually ethnic Croats that converted to Islam during the Ottoman Turk occupation of Bosnia. The state even converted a former museum in Zagreb for use as a mosque. The basic principles of the movement were laid out by Pavelić in his 1929 pamphlet “Principles of the Ustaše Movement.”
The Ustaše’s problem with the Nazi ideology was that the Croats are Slavs and were considered inferior by Nazi standards. Ustaše ideology thus created a theory about a pseudo-Gothic origin of the Croats in order to raise their standing on the Aryan ladder.
At the top of the command was the Poglavnik (meaning “head”) Ante Pavelić. Pavelić was appointed the office as Head of State of Croatia after Adolf Hitler had accepted Benito Mussolini’s proposal of Pavelić, on 10 April 1941. The Croatian Home Guard was the armed forces of Croatia, it subsequently merged into the Croatian Armed Forces.
Germany and Italy invaded Yugoslavia on 6 April 1941. On April 10, the most senior home-based Ustaša, Slavko Kvaternik, took control of the police in Zagreb and in a radio broadcast that day proclaimed the formation of the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH). Maček issued a statement that day, calling on all Croatians to cooperate with the new authorities.
Meanwhile, Pavelić and several hundred Ustaše left their camps in Italy for Zagreb, where Pavelić set up his government on 17 April. He accorded himself the title of “Poglavnik”, – which was equivalent to “Führer,” or “Headman” in English. Pavelić’s “Independent State of Croatia” comprised territory of Croatia, Srem, and Bosnia-Herzegovina – except parts of the Dalmatian coast and islands, which were ceded to the Italians. De facto control over this territory varied for the majority of the war, as the Partisans grew more successful, while the Germans and Italians increasingly exercised direct control over areas of their interest.
All who opposed and/or threatened the Ustaše were outlawed. In early 1941, Jews and Serbs were ordered to leave certain areas of Zagreb.
Pavelić first met with Adolf Hitler on 6 June 1941.
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