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345 b y the end of 1944, an apocalyptic spirit reigned in the capital. The Independent State of Croatia was close to collapse, and in fact, the control of the Ustasha regime throughout the state was so limited that the Poglavnik earned himself the dubious sobriquet the “Mayor of Zagreb.” As the state deteriorated, divisions among the Ustasha hierarchy became increasingly public and their rhetoric ever more extreme; they began to see enemies 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 Poglavnik Bodyguard Battalion, they were stripped of their rank in the militia 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 execution of all those considered disloyal to the regime, in particular those associated 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 CONCLUSION 346 conclusion second hardliner Viktor Tomić, the ruthless former Ustasha police commissar in Srijem, arrested at the height of the new course for attempting to assassinate 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—including 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 representatives of the intellectual circle associated with Spremnost, including for a short while Tias Mortigjija himself. For the second time, the Ustasha project 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 September 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 professional 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 Josip Mrmić, initiated a campaign to imbue Croatian army units with an Ustasha 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 parallel , hermetically sealed world, the regime’s journalists tried to rally the nation [3.140.186.241] Project MUSE (2024-04-24...

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