In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

29 O n 23 April 1941 eleven hundred student and high school members of the Ustasha movement gathered in the courtyard of the main university 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 discipline and in military formation” to hear a speech from the Poglavnik. In silence 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 radical 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 nation 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 students roared their approval, declaring themselves prepared for all sacrifices.1 In a speech afterward, Blažeković told the Poglavnik that Ustasha students 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 ChaPTeR 1 THE GENERATION OF STRUGGLE Ustasha Students and the Construction of a New elite 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 eliminate 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 uncompromising supporters, enlisting enthusiastically in the movement’s militias 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 enthusiasm evaporated as even committed Ustasha students confronted the reality 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 contemporaries 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...

Share