Hitler's Foreign Executioners (13 page)

In other words, Veesenmayer and his boss Ribbentrop would be the real
metteurs en scène
of Croatian statehood.
¹⁸

Ribbentrop’s machinations pleased Hitler who had previously assumed that Croatia would fall into the hands of the Italians. Now he could add another puppet state to his collection. For his part Mussolini, still smarting from his Greek disgrace, had good reason to hope that Pavelić, who had enjoyed his largesse for so long, could still be of use. He sent him to Trieste, on the border with Croatia, where a few days later he rendezvoused with Ustasha men who had been held on the Lipari Islands. The Italians provided buses and a few rickety cars and the motley Ustasha crew drove south and crossed the border into independent Croatia. As Pavelić and his cronies approached Zagreb, a delegation led by Kvaternik and Veesenmayer waited to greet the new Croatian head of state. In the early hours of 15 April, under cover of darkness, the Ustasha government slipped quietly into Zagreb, at the head of a few hundred paramilitaries kitted out in Italian uniforms.

That same day, the elderly German Plenipotentiary General in Croatia, Edmund Glaise von Horstenau, and the German envoy Siegfried Kasche presented their diplomatic bona fides to the Croatian leader, known as the Poglavnik – a title with the same connotations as Führer. Although the NDH, as Jonathan Steinberg writes, ‘lacked everything’ including enough cars to drive its Cabinet members to meetings, Pavelić shrewdly inaugurated his rule by appointing a head of propaganda, Vilko Rieger, a journalist who had studied for his doctorate in Berlin. Pavelić told him to ‘Consider as friends those I consider friends, and as enemies those I consider enemies’. Dr Rieger lavished his modest departmental budget on conjuring up a conspicuously Catholic leadership cult. The Poglavnik, Rieger proclaimed, was ‘the most ideal man of contemporary Croatia, since in the eyes of the people He is their saviour and redeemer’.
¹⁹
This was rhetoric all too reminiscent of Josef Goebbels. Although Mussolini had hoped to use Pavelić to dominate ‘independent Croatia’, Italy would end up Hitler’s frustrated junior partner in the Balkans – and the Poglavnik and his henchmen the willing tools of German-inspired terror. Rieger wrote later (on the eleventh anniversary of Hitler’s seizure of power), ‘The Ustasha movement is the only movement in this part of Europe that according to its programme and activities is so close to German National Socialism’.
²⁰
The national policy of the Ustasha puppet regime would be to build a mono-ethnic state dominated by the Roman Catholic Church but respecting the historic faith of the Bosnian Muslims to secure their allegiance. The message for Serbs, Jews and gypsies was plain. The Ustasha regime spewed out a steady stream of political decrees that embodied a brutally plain maxim: ‘only Croats rule always and everywhere.’

In Croatia, radical nationalist ideology had been nourished both by what Michael Burleigh calls a ‘crude nativism’ that claimed that anyone not descended from a peasant family was ‘not Croat at all, but a foreign immigrant’, and by academic pseudoscience.
²¹
In the aftermath of the First World War, the Croatian intelligentsia violently rejected ‘Yugoslavism’. ‘Yugoslavists’ advocated a kind of Balkan melting pot in which the super-heated force of modernity would dissolve the old ethnic and religious barriers. Academics and government officials joined forces to develop a radical social policy that they believed would bring forth the new ‘Yugoslav man’. They embraced the full armoury of modernist social engineering from rapid urbanisation to eugenics.

Croatian scholars took an altogether different line. Unlike Serbia, which had thrown off the shackles of empire in the nineteenth century, the Croatian lands
remained locked inside the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of the First World War. Croatian nationalism emerged against a backdrop of tremendous ethnic diversity and Croatian nationalists looked for any distinctiveness that gave them an edge over their neighbours. The father of Croatian separatism was Ante Starčević, a philosopher and theologian who founded the Croatian Party of Rights. A prolific writer of popular pseudoscientific books, journalist and political agitator, Starčević insisted that Serbs at best disguised Croats or, at worst, an inferior and degenerate race descended from nomadic ‘Vlach’ shepherds. He promoted what would become a persistent theme in Croat racism: the idea that Bosnian Muslims, the Bosniaks, possessed the purest Croatian bloodlines. This was, even on its own terms, nonsense: the Bosnian Muslims were Slavs just like the Croats and Serbians and had no special claim to ethnic purity. In any case, Starčević’s claim was not intended to flatter Muslims, who resented the ‘pure Croatian’ appellation anyway because it implied that the Bosnian heartlands, to which they claimed a vague kind of right, were, by default, an integral part of Croatia. But for Catholic Croatians, these fantasies of ethnic singularity had insidious popular appeal, at least in part because Starčević and his followers were unaffiliated ‘gentlemen scholars’ rather than elite university academics. This populist ethnic advocacy soon found its political champions in Josip Frank’s Pure Party of Rights and the Croatian Peasant Party, led by future Croatian martyr Stjepan Radić. On the streets of Zagreb, party activists began attacking Serbs, chanting slogans picked up from Starčević’s pamphlets and books.

Another advocate of Croatian ethnic singularity was Ćiro Truhelka. He was an archaeologist and anthropologist who welded together anti-Serb rhetoric with the tropes of anti-Semitism. He claimed, for example that the despised Vlachs, descended from the pre-Roman inhabitants of the Balkans, would always be ‘recognizable at a hundred paces’. Any intelligent child on meeting a Serb would exclaim ‘That’s a Vlach!’ This peculiar formula was borrowed, of course, from the anti-Semitic maxim that even assimilated Jews could never hide certain telltale physiological traits. Like Hans F.K. Günther, the German
Rassenpapst
, Truhelka relied on a set of allegedly fixed physiological tropes: Serbs were dark skinned, brown eyed and ‘pigeon-chested’; Bosniaks and Croats were blonde and blue eyed. Serbs were swarthy, degenerate types, who, unless they were ‘removed’, threatened to spread their dark blood among true Croatians. The solution naturally was to build national barriers to protect Croatian lands and blood: Croatia for Croatians.

This strand of Croatian nationalism faded somewhat after the creation of Yugoslavia, but as the kingdom began to fracture after 1925, the Croatian cause found a brilliant new advocate. This was Milan Šufflay, a genuinely brilliant scholar in the Anthropology Department of Zagreb University. Although he was
respected outside Croatia, Šufflay developed a fixation with the pre-eminence of the white race and the threat of ‘Asiatic’ that echoed the hysterical theories of the German anthropologists. Like them, Šufflay believed that his own ‘Gothic’ blood line must become a cordon sanitaire between the west and the ‘Asiatic’ east. ‘The blood of Croatdom means civilization,’ he wrote, ‘it does not mean simply a nation. Croatdom is a synonym for all that is beatific and good that the European West has created.’ In the Balkans, Serbs had distinct and threatening ‘Asiatic’ characteristics; they did not belong with Croats within the same pseudo-national borders: ‘Yugoslavism’ was a dangerous delusion.

To proclaim these ideas in royal Yugoslavia was dangerous. In 1931, Serb fanatics ambushed Šufflay in the street outside his home and beat him to death with iron rods. Prominent intellectuals like Heinrich Mann and Albert Einstein, who surely cannot have read Šufflay’s nationalist tracts, denounced the Yugoslavs for failing to protect an academic luminary. Šufflay joined a Valhalla of martyred heroes. The murder galvanised nationalists, including the embryonic Ustasha militia. A new convert to the cause was a young law student called Mladen Lorković who, in 1939, published a pamphlet, ‘The Nation and Lands of the Croats’. Following Šufflay’s lead, Lorković explicitly introduced the language of German racism into Croatian nationalist rhetoric. He stated that Vlach nomads (a pejorative way of referring to the ancestors of Serbs) and Turkish mercenaries had ‘stolen Croatian living space’. He resuscitated the old idea that Bosniaks were the purest Croatians – and that Bosnia thus belonged to Croatia, just as German nationalists had claimed that the Sudetenland and other ethnic German strongholds were an integral territory of the German Reich. But Lorković went a lot further even than Šufflay when he proclaimed that Croatians were originally of Persian descent, and were thus Aryans – not South Slavs at all.
²²
After 1941, in Ante Pavelić’s puppet state, pseudo-history like this had deadly consequences as the Ustasha regime rushed with unseemly haste to bolster the legitimacy of the NDH. The fantastical notion that Bosniaks had distant Aryan ancestors would later be taken up by Muslim leaders when, in 1943, they sought German backing for their own autonomist aspirations.

Now in the early summer of 1941, the new German-backed Ustasha government would incite a crusade against the hated ‘Asiatic’ Serbs. But to satisfy their sponsors in Berlin, their rage fell first on the Jews. In September 1942 Monsignor Augustin Juretic fled Croatia and submitted a series of reports to the American OSS and the Yugoslav government-in-exile in London. He denounced the genocide as a ‘dark blot on the conscience of many Croats’. Croatia, he said, had become ‘a real slaughterhouse’. Some 80 per cent of Croatian Jews would perish at the hands of Ustasha murder squads and in Croatian camps like Jasenovac.
²³

In Berlin, as soon as Balkan matters had been settled, the demands of Operation Barbarossa again took precedence. The bulk of German forces were withdrawn from the Balkans and were replaced by garrison units. In Croatia a single division, the 718th headquartered in Banja Luka, was left behind. The German diplomatic corps headquartered in Zagreb proved to be either fanatical Nazis or feeble ‘yes men’. The Plenipotentiary General, the Austrian Edmund Glaise von Horstenau, was not in Hitler’s view, reliable. Glaise von Horstenau was a dedicated Nazi and had served under the fanatical Arthur Seyß-Inquart. But he was hostile to Himmler’s SS and his reports to Berlin show that he was repelled by Ustasha violence, while barely lifting a finger to stop it. The German envoy Siegfried Kasche, on the other hand, a fanatical Nazi who had joined the party in 1926, had no such doubts. He remained a staunch supporter of the NDH to the very end. What troubled Kasche and the German Foreign Office was not Pavelić, but Mussolini. State Secretary Ernst Weizsäcker confusingly warned Kasche that ‘the Croats and Italians would not get along well’ and that he should in all matters ‘spare Italian sensibilities’ and let ‘Italian hegemony in Croatia prevail’.
²⁴
But ‘sensibilities’ could not get in the way of German strategic plans. Hitler’s solution was to bind Pavelić to the Reich by exploiting what historian Marko Attila Hoare calls ‘the Ustasha’s genocidal proclivities’.
²⁵

In other words, Pavelić and Ustasha militias would serve German interests by fully embracing the core Nazi doctrines of state terror and ethnic cleansing. Croatian propaganda soon enshrined both. In the 1930s, a Croatian ‘legion’ had been trained by German officers in Vienna. In 1941, this became the core of a new Ustasha militia that was loyal to Pavelić and dedicated to ‘Croatia for Croatians’. According to an Ustasha propaganda leaflet: ‘knife, revolver, bomb, and the infernal machine, these are the means that are going to return to the peasant the fruits of his land.’
²⁶
But who, in Ustasha minds, was guilty of purloining these fruits? The answer was obvious: Orthodox Serbs, Freemasons, Gypsies and Jews. The hard-faced Croatian nationalists and the Catholic ‘Clericalists’ who had been allotted senior positions in the Pavelić government, including propaganda and mass media, believed ardently that Jews were a toxic ‘foreign element’ that spread poison through the Croatian body politic. But a parochial hatred of Serbs far outweighed the regime’s anti-Semitism.
²⁷
One of the terrible ironies of the Croatian genocide is that Ante Pavelić, the head of state and Slavko Kvaternik, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, had half-Jewish wives, and a few high-ranking Ustasha Cabinet members had married ‘full Jews’, whom they secretly protected from the attentions of NDH murder squads.
Hoare makes a crucial point: the Croatian genocide was both ‘a Nazi-led genocide of Jews and Gypsies and an independent … genocide of the Serbs’. What drove Ustasha anti-Jewish measures was a desire to fit in with Hitler’s New Order.