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

Introduction

1 O n 8 September 1942, the third Zagreb economic and trade exhibition in the Independent State of Croatia was officially opened. The press portrayed it as an unparalleled triumph for the young state: newly constructed trams took visitors to the entrance of the Zagreb fairground; the city’s travel office was open late for visitors from abroad needing accommodation 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 conditions , the warm and pleasant autumn weather and the influx of foreign visitors meant that this year’s fair would be visited in “record numbers.” Opening the exhibition, Dragutin Toth, minister for commerce, crafts, and agriculture , 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 section responsible for their operational running: Bureau 3, the Ustasha Defense INTRODUCTION 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 inmates in its “peaceful work camps.” In an exhibition organized by the Ustasha 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, commissioned 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 individuals into valuable members of the national community through the dignity of labor, not a factory of death dedicated to the extermination of predominantly 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 malnutrition 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 contradictory . 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 movement . However, there was another aspect that has been little discussed: the importance its ideology placed on cultural concerns. In fact, Ustasha ideology 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 culture that sought to liberate the Croatian people from the barbarism and backwardness of their Serbian oppressors.4 Conventional wisdom suggests that fascism and culture do not belong together . The novelist Thomas Mann wrote of the Nazis as “heralds of a worldrejuvenating 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...