Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in Southeastern Europe to 1945

Fighting the White Plague: Demography and Abortion in the Independent State of Croatia

386 Rory Yeomans the fascist state that Blažek served so fanatically had appropriated many of his ideas and theories.1 The relationship between Blažek and Štampar serves as a microcosm of the wider story of an ultra-nationalist regime in Europe and the way in which it used eugenic theories, racial hygiene and pro-natalist principles as well as a religious conception of life to regenerate the state, racially cleanse the nation and morally purify society, the latter by encouraging women to return to the home and fulfill their “natural” function as wives and mothers. In 1941 Yugoslavia was invaded, occupied and divided by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. After less than a month of fighting, the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska – NDH) was established in April, comprising Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as most of present-day Croatia . The new state was divided into two zones of occupation, one controlled by the German army and the other by Italian army units and local Italian Fascists. However, official power in the state resided nominally with an extreme nationalist and terrorist organization, the Croatian Ustasha Movement . Founded in the early 1930s out of militant youth groups and radical student societies, the founding members of the movement lived in exile in training camps in Hungary, Italy and Germany, from where they periodically infiltrated Yugoslavia to carry out terrorist attacks. However, the Ustasha also had significant support within Croatia and Bosnia, especially among the lower clergy, seminary and university students and high school youth as well as Catholic and rightist intellectuals. Following the establishment of the Independent State of Croatia in 1941, Ante Pavelić (1889– 1959), the leader of the Movement, was declared the supreme leader or Poglavnik of the state. The Ustashas’ long-stated aim was the establishment of a Greater Croatia purified, by force if necessary, of all “alien” populations, especially Serbs, Jews and Gypsies. They rejected many—although by no means all— aspects of modern urban life, including cosmopolitanism, bourgeois liberalism and female emancipation and idealized the traditional and patriarchal life of the peasant zadruga, which the Ustashas and their mainly young Catholic intellectual acolytes claimed was the true expression of Croatian 1 “Ustaša-sveučilištarac Josip Blažek položio je svjoj život kao ustaški zastavnik u borbi protiv odmetnika,” Nova Hrvatska (25 March 1943): 7. All translations from the original are my own unless otherwise cited. 387 Fighting the White Plague nationalism. Although the Ustasha Movement was not doctrinally religious (like the Romanian Iron Guard) or led by priests (like the Slovakian Hlinka Guard), this Fascist movement was intensely mystical, ritualistic and powerfully influenced by the rites and beliefs of Catholicism. This resulted in a world-view which was chiliastic and apocalyptic, encapsulated in its mystical cult of death.2 Once in power, the Ustasha regime embarked on a campaign of extermination against its “racial” enemies, a campaign carried out with such brutality and ruthlessness that it shocked even hardened Third Reich officials. This was preceded by a public campaign of vilification in which Serbs and Jews were portrayed by regime officials and the press as the most dangerous enemies of the Croatian nation, needing to be eliminated if the Croatian nation was to survive. By the time the Independent State of Croatia collapsed in 1945, the Ustasha regime was responsible for the deaths of over half a million people, with both the state and the movement becoming synonymous with sadism, fanaticism and genocide.3 But the ideology of the Ustasha Movement was inherently contradictory . Despite the regime’s violence and emphasis on racial and moral purification , the Ustashas’ relationship to eugenics and racial hygiene was complicated . On the one hand, when it concerned the persecution, expulsion and mass murder of dangerous “aliens,” the regime showed no compunction in utilizing the most extreme interpretations of racial hygiene and negative eugenics in order to purify the nation. On the other, the predominantly Catholic roots of many regime functionaries and the strong support the regime received from young Catholic intellectuals meant it officially opposed the “scientific” principles of negative eugenics in the case of euthanasia and abortion. Although the Ustashas aimed to improve the Croatian nation through racial purification, the exterminatory excesses of negative eugenics were to be applied only to biological enemies of the Croatian 2 Regarding the Ustasha Movement’s cult of death see Rory Yeomans, Visions of...