The Independent State of Croatia proclaimed

On 10 April 1941, Maundy Thursday and the fourth day of the German invasion of Yugoslavia, Slavko Kvaternik, a retired colonel, former officer of the Austro-Hungarian army and deputy leader of the Ustaše, went on the air on Radio Zagreb. “Croatian people! Divine providence and the will of our ally, together with the centuries-long, arduous struggle of the Croatian nation and the great sacrifice of our Poglavnik, Dr Ante Pavelić, and of the Ustaša movement at home and abroad, have ensured that today, on the eve of the resurrection of the Son of God, our Independent State of Croatia is resurrected as well,” he announced. It was the very hours in which German armoured columns were rolling into Zagreb, some of the inhabitants greeting them in the streets with flowers. The new state, known by its initials as the NDH (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska), was an Axis creation from its first day: it came into being by the will of Berlin and Rome, and it was to be ruled by the organisation that seven years earlier had arranged the assassination of King Alexander I in Marseille.

War chronologies record that on 10 April the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, still under invasion, was partitioned by Germany and Italy, and that the NDH was created under Ante Pavelić and his Ustaše. That compresses several weeks into a single day. On 10 April Pavelić was not even in the country: he was still in Italy and reached Zagreb only on 15 April. Kvaternik acted in his name and with the knowledge of the Germans. Nor had Yugoslavia yet been formally partitioned. The Yugoslav army fought on until 17 April, the boundaries of the occupation zones were agreed by the German and Italian foreign ministers in Vienna on 21–22 April, and Croatia’s western border with Italy was settled only by the Treaties of Rome of 18 May 1941. The proclamation of 10 April was nevertheless the first act of that partition: it declared that Yugoslavia had ceased to exist before it had even been defeated.

The Ustaše and their patrons

From the outset the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes – Yugoslavia from 1929 – was divided by a quarrel over how the state should be governed. The Serbs, its most numerous people, wanted centralism; the Croats wanted autonomy. In June 1928 a shooting in the Belgrade parliament mortally wounded Stjepan Radić, leader of the Croatian Peasant Party, and in January 1929 King Alexander I introduced a dictatorship. It was then that Ante Pavelić, a Zagreb lawyer and member of parliament, went abroad and founded the Ustaša organisation (from the Croatian ustati, “to rise up”), which was to win an independent Croatia by any means, terror included.

The Ustaše’s chief patron was Benito Mussolini. Italy allowed them to set up training camps and funded their activities, because the break-up of Yugoslavia would open the way to Dalmatia, which Italian nationalists had regarded as land owed to Italy since 1915. As early as 1927 Pavelić had promised Rome territorial concessions on the coast in exchange for its support. After the Marseille assassination the Italians arrested him and later interned his men, and when Rome came to terms with Belgrade in 1937 the Ustaše lost their importance. For years afterwards Pavelić lived under police supervision in Siena and then near Florence. At home the movement remained on the fringe: the Germans estimated that at the time of the invasion Pavelić had some 900 sworn Ustaše in Yugoslavia, while the Ustaše themselves put their sympathisers at around 40,000.

The Croats were represented by someone else – the Croatian Peasant Party of Vladko Maček, which had for years won elections in the Croatian constituencies. In August 1939 the Cvetković–Maček Agreement created the autonomous Banovina of Croatia, and Maček became deputy prime minister of Yugoslavia. He kept that post after the coup of 27 March 1941, in the government of General Dušan Simović.

Germany looks for a partner

When, after the coup in Belgrade, Adolf Hitler resolved to destroy Yugoslavia, the Croats at once became part of the plan. In Directive No. 25 of 27 March he ordered that the internal tensions in the country be sharpened by giving the Croats political assurances. Yet at the time Hitler had no clear idea of what to do with Croatia. He also considered handing it to Hungary as an autonomous territory, and he regarded the Ustaše as Mussolini’s men. Mussolini moved faster. On 29 March he received Pavelić at his Roman residence, the Villa Torlonia – their first meeting since the Ustaša leader had settled in Italy – and heard from him that his old commitments to Italy over Dalmatia still stood. The Italians released the interned Ustaše, gathered them at Pistoia near Florence, gave them Italian uniforms and weapons, and put a radio station in Florence at Pavelić’s disposal, from which he called on the Croats to rise.

The Germans, however, preferred to deal with someone who had real support in Croatia. To Zagreb came Edmund Veesenmayer, an envoy of the foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and a specialist in such operations, who in 1938 and 1939 had prepared the ground for the Anschluss and the break-up of Czechoslovakia. He first proposed that Maček himself should proclaim an independent Croatia and form a government. Maček refused. He was a cautious man, bound by oath to the Yugoslav government, and did not want to build a state by the grace of Germany in the middle of a war whose outcome nobody knew. When the war broke out he returned from Belgrade to Zagreb and waited on events. After Maček’s refusal the Germans were left with the Ustaše – specifically with Kvaternik, who was regarded in Berlin as more pro-German than Pavelić.

Meanwhile the Yugoslav army in Croatia had begun to fall apart. As early as 7 and 8 April the Croatian 108th Infantry Regiment mutinied, arrested its Serbian officers and, together with a group of Ustaše and members of the Croatian Peasant Defence, the paramilitary organisation of Maček’s party, seized Bjelovar. The mayor declared that the town belonged to the independent Croatian state. At the request of the high command Maček sent an emissary to the mutineers calling on them to obey orders, but to no effect. Mutinies and desertions spread to other units of the 4th and 7th Armies. Historians disagree about their scale. Some of them, such as Aleksa Djilas, point out that many Croatian units did fight, and that most Croatian officers remained loyal until 10 April, when the proclamation of the NDH released them, as they saw it, from their oath.

Zagreb, 10 April

From the morning of 10 April German columns were closing on Zagreb from the north, from Austria and the Drava valley. The authorities of the banovina under the ban, Ivan Šubašić, no longer had any influence on events. In the afternoon Kvaternik, acting in concert with Veesenmayer, read out the proclamation of the new state at the broadcasting station in Vlaška Street. He also announced that until Pavelić arrived he was assuming power as his deputy. Soon afterwards the radio broadcast a statement by Maček, which Kvaternik had asked him for: “Croatian people! Colonel Slavko Kvaternik, leader of the nationalist movement at home, has today proclaimed a free and independent Croatian state over the whole historical and ethnic territory of the Croatian nation and has taken power. I call on the whole Croatian nation to obey the new authorities. I call on all supporters of the Croatian Peasant Party who hold posts in the administration […] to cooperate sincerely with the new national government.”

The statement mattered enormously. The leader whom most Croats followed had not joined the Ustaše, but he had given them his blessing. Members of the Croatian Peasant Defence, part of which was already in the hands of Pavelić’s men, disarmed Yugoslav soldiers and took over the towns. In the evening German armoured units entered Zagreb. In the city, especially in the centre, many people welcomed them as liberators. It was much the same in Lika and western Herzegovina, while in Mostar Ustaša supporters clashed with the army and took control of the town. Maček wrote years later that the people of Zagreb had been “blinded and intoxicated” by having the occupation presented to them as an independent state, whereas the peasants in the countryside received the change with unease. The Archbishop of Zagreb, Alojzije Stepinac, called on Kvaternik as early as 12 April, and in a letter to the clergy of 28 April urged cooperation with the new state – which after the war became one of the main charges against him.

The proclamation in Zagreb also had immediate military consequences. The Regent of Hungary, Miklós Horthy, and his government had made Hungary’s entry into the war conditional on Yugoslavia ceasing to exist, since in December 1940 Hungary had concluded a treaty of eternal friendship with it. The proclamation of an independent Croatia gave them their pretext. On 11 April Hungarian troops crossed the border and occupied the Bačka and Baranja. On the same day the Italians went over to the attack from Istria and Albania.

The Poglavnik returns

Pavelić heard of the proclamation in Florence, and on 10 April went to his men at Pistoia and told them that the struggle for an independent Croatia was drawing to a close. The next day Mussolini received him in Rome and assured him that his government would be recognised as soon as he reached Zagreb. Pavelić set off by train through Trieste and Rijeka with an escort of, according to various sources, 250 to 400 Ustaše. On 13 April Veesenmayer was waiting for him in Karlovac, wanting to make sure that the Ustaša leader had not tied himself too closely to Italy. But an envoy of Mussolini’s had come too, and Pavelić had to word his telegrams to the two dictators so that Rome received guarantees over Dalmatia. It was the first sign of the rivalry between Germany and Italy for influence in the new state.

On 15 April Pavelić entered Zagreb, and Germany and Italy recognised the NDH. Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia and other states aligned with the Axis soon followed. On 16 April the Poglavnik (“leader”, a title modelled on “Führer” and “Duce”) appointed a government and placed himself at its head. Kvaternik became his deputy (Doglavnik), minister of the armed forces and a marshal, and the deputy prime minister was a Muslim, Osman Kulenović, an appointment meant to win the Bosnian Muslims over to the state. The Ustaše regarded them as Croats of the Islamic faith. Pavelić presented the NDH as the fulfilment of the aspirations of a nation which, in his telling, had had no state of its own since 1102.

The partition of Yugoslavia

The Yugoslav army capitulated on 17 April. On 21 and 22 April Ribbentrop and the Italian foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, agreed the partition of the country in Vienna. Germany incorporated northern Slovenia into the Reich; Italy annexed its southern part with Ljubljana, occupied Montenegro and gave most of Kosovo to Albania. Hungary received the Bačka, Baranja, Međimurje and Prekmurje, and Bulgaria most of Yugoslav Macedonia. A truncated Serbia came under German military administration, and the Banat under the rule of its local Germans. A demarcation line was drawn across the territory of the NDH between a German zone in the north-east and an Italian one in the south-west.

The Independent State of Croatia was the largest of these creations. Besides most of present-day Croatia it took in the whole of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Syrmia up to the outskirts of Belgrade. By various estimates it had 6.2 to 6.5 million inhabitants, of whom Croats made up only about half. There were some 1.9 million Orthodox Serbs, nearly a third of the population, and some 700,000–800,000 Muslims. It was also home to around 40,000 Jews, several tens of thousands of Roma, and German and Hungarian minorities.

Pavelić paid for these borders with the coast. On 18 May 1941 in Rome he signed agreements under which Italy annexed most of central Dalmatia with Split, Šibenik and Trogir, the islands of Krk and Rab, part of Gorski Kotar and the Bay of Kotor – some 5,400 square kilometres with 380,000 inhabitants, most of them Croats. The NDH was not allowed a navy, and the Italians kept military control of the coast. On the same day Prince Aimone of the House of Savoy was proclaimed King of Croatia, taking the name Tomislav II, but he never set foot in his kingdom. The loss of Dalmatia was a blow to Croatian nationalists and quickly undermined confidence in Pavelić. The state that was meant to fulfil the dream of independence was in reality a German–Italian condominium. After the war the military tribunal at Nuremberg ruled in the Hostages Trial that Croatia had been an occupied country throughout.

The first laws and the first killings

From its first days the Ustaša regime set about building a state in which there was to be no place for Serbs, Jews or Roma. On 17 April Pavelić signed a decree having the force of law on the defence of the nation and the state, which applied retroactively and prescribed the death penalty for any act harming the “honour and vital interests” of the Croatian nation. Cases were to be tried by summary courts. Further decrees made it possible to remove all undesirable employees from the administration and state enterprises, which in practice meant Jews, Serbs and pro-Yugoslav Croats. On 25 April the use of the Cyrillic script, the alphabet of the Serbs and of the Serbian Orthodox Church, was banned. On 30 April three racial laws modelled on the Nuremberg Laws were promulgated: on racial origin, on the protection of Aryan blood and the honour of the Croatian nation, and on citizenship, which stripped Jews of their civil rights. In May Jews were forced to wear yellow badges, and in June their mass arrests began.

At the end of April came the first mass killing. The pretext was the death of two local Ustaše. The Ustaše arrested Serbs from Gudovac and neighbouring villages near Bjelovar on the charge of being rebels loyal to the old regime, led them out into a field and shot them. Most studies date the Gudovac massacre to 28 April, others to 29 or 30 April, and the number of victims is estimated at about 190 (between 184 and 196 in different sources). A few men survived the volley. The Germans, alerted by the victims’ families, had some of the bodies exhumed and arrested several dozen suspects, but the senior Ustaša official Mladen Lorković secured their release and promised an investigation that was never carried out. Around the same time Pavelić is said to have told the Italian journalist Alfio Russo that Serbs who rebelled would be killed. Asked what would happen if they all rebelled, he replied, according to Russo: “We will kill them all.” In May came the massacres of Serbs at Veljun and Glina.

Its place in the war

The proclamation of 10 April 1941 gave the Axis a cheap solution to a problem: in the middle of the Balkans a state had arisen that was to keep order and supply soldiers, labour and raw materials while the Wehrmacht prepared for war with the Soviet Union. On 15 June 1941 the NDH acceded to the Tripartite Pact, and its volunteers later fought on the Eastern Front, Stalingrad included. But Berlin and Rome had miscalculated. The Ustaše’s terror against the Serbs – killings, deportations to Serbia and forced conversions to Catholicism – provoked an uprising as early as the summer of 1941. Serbs took to the forests, some of them joining the Chetniks and others the communist partisans of Josip Broz Tito. German generals reported that the Ustaše had “run amok”, and a Gestapo report to Himmler of February 1942 named their crimes as the main reason for the growth of partisan activity. In August 1941 the Ustaše set up the Jasenovac camp, where, according to estimates by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, between 77,000 and 99,000 people died: Serbs, Jews, Roma and opponents of the regime.

The record of Ustaša rule is among the most terrible in occupied Europe. Historians estimate that between about 170,000 and more than 300,000 Serbs died in the NDH at the hands of the Ustaše and their allies – the differences between scholars are wide – together with some 30,000 of the nearly 40,000 Jews and some 25,000 Roma, almost the entire community. Croats and Muslims who opposed the regime were killed as well. Maček, who on 10 April had called on his compatriots to obey, was himself sent to Jasenovac in October 1941 and later placed under house arrest. The civil war unleashed by Ustaša rule became entangled with the struggle against the occupiers and with the war between the Chetniks and the partisans. Tito won it, and the NDH collapsed in May 1945 when his forces entered Zagreb. Pavelić escaped and died in exile in Spain in 1959, never having answered before a court for the crimes of his state. In Tito’s Yugoslavia the memory of the Ustaša crimes was one of the foundations of the new state, and in the 1990s, during the wars that accompanied the break-up of the federation, it returned as a weapon in the quarrels between Serbs and Croats.