Thursday, January 23, 2020

Lovro Kralj. "Paving the Road to Death: Antisemitism in the Ustasha Movement (1929-1945)" (project summary)

Right-Wing Politics and the Rise of Antisemitism in Europe 1935-1941, 2019
Summary of a dissertation project titled "Paving the Road to Death: Antisemitism in the Ustasha Movement 1929-1945." published in Frank Bajohr, Dieter Pohl, eds. Right-Wing Politics and the Rise of Antisemitism in Europe 1935-1941 (Wallstein Verlag, 2019): 233-239.

Publication Date: 2019
Publication Name: Right-Wing Politics and the Rise of Antisemitism in Europe 1935-1941




Historiography of the Ustasha Movement: Review Max Bergholz and Ivo,Slavko Goldstein.pdf     


This essay reviews recent developments in the historiography of the Ustasha movement through the prism of two recently published studies: Bergholz, Max: Violence as a Generative Force. Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community. Ithaka: Cornell University Press 2016. ISBN: 978-1-5017-0492-5; 464 p. and Goldstein, Ivo; Goldstein, Slavko: The Holocaust in Croatia. Pittsburgh: University of Pitts- burgh Press 2016. ISBN: 9780822944515; VII, 728 p.
Page Numbers: 6
Publication Date: 2017


Understanding Ustasha violence

ALEXANDER KORB

The Independent State of Croatia (1941–1945) was a multi-ethnic entity in which a range of political and military powers cooperated with and fought against one another. No lesscomplicated were the ruling Ustasˇa movement and its relationship with Nazi Germany andFascist Italy. The persecution of the Serbs, the Jews, and the Roma in the IndependentState of Croatia was marked by differences and similarities, which were reflected thedecision-making process within the Ustasˇa leadership. Over time, this mass violence (andUstasˇa decisions) moderated due to a variety of factors: the interethnic civil war, victimreactions, local factors, and the harvest. The Italians and Germans, however, also played arole in the persecution of the Serbs, Jews, and Roma in Croatia. Simplifying narratives of the Ustasˇa as marginal collaborationist and state-centered concepts of genocide areinadequate when it comes to explaining Ustasˇa violence.


In this article I analyze the variations in violence directed against Jews, Serbs,and Roma committed by the Croatia’s fascist Ustasˇa movement in the IndependentState of Croatia (Nezavisna Drzˇava Hrvatska—NDH). The NDH was one of themost heterogeneous, multi-ethnic, and complicated in Hitler’s Europe. Indeed,it was home to a transnational matrix of a range of political and militarypowers including Croatian Ustasˇe, the Croatian Army, Serb Cˇetnici, Muslim militias, Communist partisans, and German and Italian occupying forces Adding tothis mix was a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional society comprised of Catholic andUniate Greek-Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs, Catholic and Protestant Germans,Hungarians, Slovaks and Czechs, Rusyns, Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews as wellas Roma of Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim faiths. Violence occurred in manydirections. Religious, ethnic, social, and political motives for persecution over-lapped, both nationally and locally. Boundaries between victims and perpetratorswere often blurred; collective violence was interactive, procedural, and perma-nently changing




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