Visions of Annihilation: The Ustasha Regime and the Cultural Politics of Fascism, 1941–1945

Preface

vii 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 regeneration 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 Independent State of Croatia between 1941 and 1945, considered this campaign a vital precondition for the survival of the Croatian nation and how and why it evolved over time. The Ustasha regime was notorious in postwar Yugoslavia 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 intellectuals , artists, and writers—the public face of the regime—presented and 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 comprehensive 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 attitude toward Muslims. Nor have I been able—except tangentially—to explore the public reception of the regime or the attitude of the Catholic Church, either among the ecclesiastical hierarchy or at the local, village level. The importance 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 intellectual 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 title “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, friendship of a number of individuals. In the course of writing a book, most historians 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 SianiDavies , formerly of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, who made an immeasurable contribution to the early development of this book. Not only was he extremely supportive of me in every step...