“The Last Bullet for the Last Serb”:1

This constitutes the last phrase of a frequently cited speech by which Hermann Tongl, Ustaša operative in Eastern Bosnia, sought to enlist Croat and Muslim villagers in actions against their Serb neighbors. See n. 5.

The Ustaša Genocide against Serbs: 1941–19452

The research for this paper was supported by a grant from the Department of Research and Development, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, and a fellowship from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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Notes

This constitutes the last phrase of a frequently cited speech by which Hermann Tongl, Ustaša operative in Eastern Bosnia, sought to enlist Croat and Muslim villagers in actions against their Serb neighbors. See n. 5.

The research for this paper was supported by a grant from the Department of Research and Development, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, and a fellowship from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The noun Ustaša refers to the government itself, while its plural, Ustaše, designates members of the various branches of that government.

Italian soldiers in Mostar helped Jews reach Italian camps on the Adriatic, where, despite Mussolini's orders, they generally treated Serbs and Jews comparatively well, enabling many of the latter to reach Italy. But Italy had sheltered and supported the Ustaše in their exile, invaded Ethiopia in 1936, invaded Albania in 1939, with Albania entered Greece in 1940, and in 1941 allied with Germany in Operation Maritsa, annexing much of the Dalmatian Coast (thereby angering Croats and precipitating mutual hostility), as well as parts of Montenegro, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Moreover, Italians failed to intervene in the Ustaša massacres of Serbs and Jews, stood by as the Ustaša on Pag carried out genocidal operations there, and helped round up the Jews near Rjeka. Between 1941 and 1943, moreover, Italy struggled fiercely with Germany over territory and authority in the NDH, often using Serb Četnici to help defeat the Partisans, an alliance that included supplying food and arms to Serbs, which angered Croats.

The Četnici had existed since the nineteenth century, when bands of 10, četi, hid in the forests of Ottoman-occupied Serbian lands to raid Ottoman targets and thus achieve Serbia's independence. On 5 June 1941, after the Korita incident, Serbs began forming units to resist the Ustaši. Initially royalists, most later became Serb nationalists, collaborating with the Germans or Italians when it served their cause.

Job, Yugoslavia's Ruin, 8. Žerjavić and Bogoljub Kočović, a Montenegrin Serb scholar, have produced the most credible work on the numbers of dead in Yugoslavia during World War II.

Bax, “Mass Graves, Stagnating Identification, and Violence,” 11.

Nyström, “The Holocaust and Croatian National Identity,” 272.

Indeed, the West actively intervened in Bosnia despite having only a fragmentary knowledge of its peoples' history.

Hoare, “The Ustaša Genocide,” 29.

See Hewitt, “Ethnic Cleansing,” 296–318.

Ramet explicitly suggests of her edited volume: “The collection of articles in this volume is an attempt to remedy this deficit.” See “The NDH,” 403.

Redžić, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 84.

Dulić cites a number between 2,000 and 4,000 in Utopias of Nation, 81. Biondich suggests a core group “not exceeding 10,000 members” in “Religion and Nation,” 79.

Paris, Genocide in Satellite Croatia, 22.

Anzulović, Heavenly Serbia, 142–43.

Dulić, Utopias of Nation, 82.

During and after the eighteenth century, the West essentialized and racialized Balkan ethnicities, advancing the notion of two Europes, the civilized West and the barbaric, atavistic East. Enlightenment travel narratives commonly figured Eastern Europe as oriental, irrational, and barbaric, its people dark and degenerate. Indeed, while historically and geographically peripheral to the West, Eastern Europe proved vital to its psyche. For this trope of the West's internal opposite, like the topos of Europe's external other, Africa, enhanced Western claims to civilization and reason. To escape the sting of Western stereotypes, the west of Eastern Europe named itself Mitteleuropa, Central Europe, thereby gaining distance from the Balkans, the “true threshold to the Orient,” replete with barbarism, tribalism and “ancient hatreds.” Maria Todorova calls this discourse “Balkanism,” akin to Said's Orientalism. See such works as Jezernik, Wild Europe; Todorova, Imagining the Balkans; Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe.

This position emerged partially from the mythic view articulated by nineteenth-century Croat nationalists that Bosnian Muslims were descendants of medieval Croat settlers in Bosnia who had embraced the Bogomil sect before converting to Islam. Here, Dulić quotes Pavelić (Dulić, Utopias of Nation, 85).

Many scholars cite this quote, variously attributing it to Budak or Kvaternik, often crediting as its source Dedijer's The Yugoslavian Auschwitz and the Vatican. But Dulić, Utopias, suggests that he has found no primary source that can confirm its reality (101).

Prpa-Jovanović, “The Making of Yugoslavia,” 58.

Later in the war, the Ustaše would target Muslims, as also happened during the Bosnian War—as, for example, when Croats and Muslims ethnically cleansed Mostar of Serbs, then took separate sides of the city (divided by the Neretva River) and attacked one another. This suggests that while paying lip service to the ideal of Muslims as “blood brothers,” Croats in fact saw them as potential rivals.

Dulić, Utopias, 22.

The fascist governments and armies of Germany and Italy played a considerable role in the NDH as they variously fought and allied with Četnici, battled Partisans, and vied with one another for power in the region.

The Serbian Milan Bulajić cites a figure of 1,850,000 dead Serbs, a quote even higher than the inflated total Tito's representative presented to the International Reparations Commission in 1946, which purported to include all the war dead. Croatian revisionists cite figures as low as 35,000 for the total number of Serb war dead. But most contemporary scholars find the figures of the Montenegrin Serb Bogoljub Kočović and the Croat Vladimir Žerjavić more digestible. David Bruce MacDonald cites the figures of 487,000 and 530,000, respectively. See Balkan Holocausts?, 162. However, Žerjavić himself sets 322,000 as a likely figure for Serb dead, with 85,000 of those in camps and the remainder in villages. See “The Most Likely Numbers of Victims Killed in Jasenovac,” 21.

Dulić, Utopias, 100.

See Biondich, “Religion and Nation in Wartime Croatia,” 72.

Tomasevich, The Chetniks, 106.

Indeed, the Balkans themselves internalized negative Western stereotypes from Balkanist discourse. Thus, Todorova declares that Imagining the Balkans, her pioneering work on the subject, “emphasizes the extent to which the outside perception of the Balkans has been internalized in the region itself” (39). Within Yugoslavia, Eastern Orthodox Serbs came to believe themselves the last proud Christian warriors in the land of the infidel Turk, while Westernized Catholic Croats projected onto Serbs the worst aspects of Eastern civilization. That the Ustaša labeled Serbs “Greek Easterners” aptly demonstrates this point.

“Principles of the Ustaša Movement.”

For while Croat nationalism, like its Serb counterpart, depended upon the “volk” for support, it was historically framed and promulgated by the intellectual elite.

The government, however, viewed the Volksdeutsche as kinsmen. See discussion on page 813.

Dulić, Utopias, 88.

Tomasevich, The Chetniks, 58.

Ibid., 78.

Tomasevich, Occupation and Collaboration, 282.

As domobrani increasingly deserted to join the Partisans after 1943, it appears that the government may have conscripted Serbs, some of whom were ultimately liquidated in Jasenovac. See the testimony of Miloš Despot, “Death and Survival in Jasenovac,” 138. Hoare, moreover, notes that the Ustaša conscripted Serbs in Bosanska Gradiška region; see “The Ustaša Genocide,” 34.

Tomasevich, Occupation and Collaboration, 381–87.

Ibid., 393.

Three were in prison, five died of natural causes, 217 were killed by the Ustaše, 334 were deported to Serbia, and 18 fled to Serbia on their own. Ramet, Balkan Babel, 104.

Tomasevich suggests that at least 300,000 Serbian refugees or deportees had come to Serbia by the end of the war. See Occupation and Collaboration, 219.

While most scholars see this practice as emerging from the Catholic foundation of Ustaša ideology, Mark Biondich suggests that the Ustaša acted from a secular desire to achieve the “neutralization of Orthodoxy in the western Balkans.” Thus, he argues that these conversions were essentially a political tactic. He nonetheless maintains that “the ‘marriage’ between the Church and Ustaša state was consummated during the Second World War.” See “Religion and Nation,” 114, 81.

Dulić, Utopias, 85.

Phayer, The Catholic Church, 32.

Actes et documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la seconde guerre mondiale, Book 4, 500.

Ibid., 545.

Ibid., Book 5, 736.

Mgr. Tardini, aide to Pius XII in the Secretariat, in a note dated 13 June 1941, suggests that Pavelić was “furioso” about this, since the Pope had granted Slovakia a nuncio. See Actes et documents du Saint Siège, Book 4, 547.

Cornwell, Hitler's Pope, 259.

Early sources include Dedijer, The Yugoslavian Auschwitz; Paris, Genocide in Satellite Croatia. Innumerable eyewitness accounts can be found today, including several cited within this paper.

A note from Montini dated 5 July 1943 suggests that while Pavelić seeks a papal audience, even if private, the Pope will attempt to avoid an encounter “si verifichi a Roma.” See Actes et documents du Saint Siège, Book 7, 404. As to the alleged meetings, I have not yet been able to verify them, though they may be noted in papal memoranda from Tardini or Montini.

When, for example, Sarajevo's Chief Rabbi Freiberger wrote regarding the plight of Sarajevo's Jews under Bishop Šarić's anti-Semitic and anti-Serb reign, the Vatican instructed Marcone to respond “prudently, tactfully, in accordance with the circumstances.” See Shelah, “The Catholic Church in Croatia,” 332.

Dulić, Utopias, 80.

This would seem to validate Biondich's position.

Dedijer, The Yugoslavian Auschwitz, 103.

Dulić, Utopias, 95.

Mark Biondich offers compelling evidence that while many scholars date the mass conversions from the spring, the main thrust did not take place until late autumn. See “Religion and Nation in Wartime Croatia,” 88–90.

Ibid., 111.

Ibid., 94.

Breitman notes that Stepinac served as the Ustaša military chaplain; see Breitman et al., US Intelligence, 205. See also Shelah, “The Catholic Church in Croatia,” 330.

One German report by Herr Dörnberg, dated 20 April 1942, states: “Er [Pavelic] a-üsserte sich dabei in ablehnender Form über den Agramer Erzbischof. Auf den Papst war er sichtlich sehr schlecht zu sprechen und bemerkte, die Kroaten seien zwar zum grossen Teil Katholiken, aber gar keine Anhänger des Papstes und der päpstlichen Kirche.” [Büro des Staatssekretärs, Bind 3:32]

Jansen, Pius XII, 151.

Tomasevich, Occupation and Collaboration, 563.

So, for example, Esther Gitman, a Croatian- born Israeli, wrote a dissertation on Stepinac and is currently publishing articles that document his work on behalf of Jews.

According to Miloš Despot, that spring Brkljačić briefly eased camp conditions, before resuming oppressive policies that summer. See “Death and Survival in Jasenovac,” 136.

Gumz, “Wehrmacht Perceptions of Mass Violence,” 1025.

Novi List (Croatia), 24 July 1941.

See Allen Milcic, “Croatian Axis Forces in WWII,” <http://www.feldgrau.com/a-croatia.html> (accessed 16 September 2009).

According to Tomasevich, Siegfried Kasche, the German envoy to the NDH, learned this from Croatian Minister of Foreign Affairs Lorković. See Tomasevich, Occupation and Collaboration, 397–98.

Popovich, “Primary Sources,” 93.

Dulić, Utopias, 125.

Again, the Ustaša used Chetnik attacks as a pretext for the executions. Ibid., 126.

Ibid., 129.

The Muslims rightly worried that such massacres would mobilize Serb resistance and that they themselves would likely serve as the targets.

Dulić, Utopias, 127.

Ibid., 144.

Ibid., 145.

Ibid., 179.

Šurmanci is the location highlighted in the article by Bax, cited at the beginning of the present paper.

Again, Dedijer and Paris address this. As both a high-ranking communist under Tito and a Serb, Dedijer had strong political reasons to disparage the Church. But Edmund von Glaise-Horstenau, the German commanding officer in the NDH in 1941, likewise condemned both Ustaša atrocities in Bosnia and the highest official of the Church in Bosnia, Ivan Šarić, whom he identified as a Croat extremist who supported genocide as a solution to the Serbian problem. See Adeli, “From Jasenovac to Yugoslavism,” 121.

In “Wehrmacht Perceptions of Mass Violence,” Gumz explores the Wehrmacht's perceptions of Ustaša violence compared to its sense of its own strategies against Serbs. He pays particular attention to the Germans' language, suggesting that “words like ‘cleansed’ or ‘elimination’ bestowed on German efforts a clinical and restrained appearance; an appearance undermined in fact by the wholesale brutality associated with these operations.” See 1029.

Adeli, “From Jasenovac to Yugoslavism,” 137.

Gumz discusses this at length in “Wehrmacht Perceptions of Mass Violence” and “German Counterinsurgency Policy.” See also Tomasevich, The Chetniks, 122–25.

Its first and fifth divisions, the Crna legija, or Black Legion, were led by Jure Francetić and composed of some 1,000–1,500 Muslim and Croat refugees from villages in Bosnia-Herzegovina that Četnici or Partisans had raided.

Tomasevich, Occupation and Collaboration, 422.

Rosenbaum, “Jasenovac as Encountered in OSI's Investigations,” 72.

Pavelić had both Kvaterniks removed. Tomasevich suggests that he perceived Slavko as his rival, Dido as a cause of tension with the Germans, and realized that he might blame army failures on both of them. See Tomasevich, Occupation and Collaboration, 439–42.

Rosenbaum, “Jasenovac as Encountered in OSI's Investigations,” 83.

Gumz, “Wehrmacht Perceptions,” 1023.

Herzstein, Waldheim, 71–78, 233–47.

See Dulić, Utopias, 237–40; Jelinek, “Bosnia-Herzegovina at War,” 279.

See Jelinek, “Bosnia-Herzegovina at War,” for a general discussion of the Muslim response to the genocide and Biondich, who examines the negative Muslim response to forced conversions, in “Religion and Nation,” 107–09.

For specific names, see Dulić's section on “Muslim Resolutions,” in Utopias, 228–36. Jelinek mentions that Dr. Lemr, local representative of the Company for South-Eastern Europe Ltd (a front agency for the German secret service), petitioned his superiors, Deputy Prime Minister Kulenović wrote the local governments in the Sana and Luka districts, and prominent Muslims in Sarajevo wrote Kulenović (284).

Dulić, Utopias, 231.

Jelinek, “Bosnia-Herzegovina at War,” 279.

Tomasevich, Occupation and Collaboration, 495–96.

Ibid., 496.

Ibid., 500.

This incident is referred to as the Mutiny at Villefranche.

Rosenbaum, “Jasenovac as Encountered in OSI's Investigations,” 68.

Goldstein, Anti-Semitism; Holocaust; Anti-Fascism, 97.

Vejnović-Smiljanić, “The Suffering of Children,” 226.

Švarc, “The Testimony of a Survivor,” 140.

Dulić, Utopias, 249–50.

Lukić, Rat i djeca Kozare. Lukić has written a number of volumes detailing the fates of children across the NDH whose lives were caught in the Ustaša net.

The figure is cited by Goldstein and Goldstein, Jews in Jasenovac, 9. Ramet states that “there were some 26.” See “The NDH—An Introduction,” 402. Among the camps were: Loborgrad, in northern Croatia, administered by Volksdeutsche, Krušcica, near Travnik (mainly for women and children, sent to Loborgrad and finally to Auschwitz when the camp was closed in 1942), Đakovo, near Sarajevo (also for women and children), and Jadovno, near Gospić (which may have held as many as 35,000 prisoners).

To counter Serbian propagandists' egregious inflation of the dead at Jasenovac, Croat strategists exaggerated the numbers of dead Croats in the Bleiberg incident in fall 1945.

Rosenbaum quotes from a “heavily footnoted” OSI report housed in the US National Archives and originally classified as “Secret”: T-120/5793/H306076-87. See “Jasenovac as Encountered in OSI's Investigations,” 72.

Miletić, “Establishing the Number of Persons Killed,” 6. See also the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Jasenovac website, <http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/jasenovac/frameset.html> (accessed 16 September 2009).

Žerjavić, “The Most Likely Numbers,” 18.

Sabolevski, “Jews in the Jasenovac Group,” 102.

Erlih, “Kula,” 158.

Indeed, since 6 of 22 foremen were Jews, Franjo Tuđjman blamed them, not Ustaše, for Jasenovac brutalities. Since the publication of his “history,” Bespuća, many Serb and Croat eyewitness testimonies have directly refuted this.

Dulić, Utopias, 280.

Goldstein and Goldstein, Jews in Jasenovac, 15. But Lituchy cites Dachau as the influence; see Lituchy, Jasenovac, xxxix.

Šajer, “The Stench of the Crematorium,” 80.

Danon, “Recollections of Jasenovac,” 181.

Kennedy et al., The Library of Congress World War II Companion, 683.

Goldstein and Goldstein, Jews in Jasenovac, 20. See also Novaković, Crimes in the Jasenovac Camp, 63.

Several survivors note the particular brutality of the Ustaše women. See, for example, the testimonies of Erlih and Štefica Serdar Sabolić in Jasenovac and the Holocaust in Yugoslavia, 155, 173, and Šajer in “The Stench of the Crematorium,” 85.

Among other sites, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum library houses both oral and written eyewitness testimony and photographs that document the particularly ghastly nature of the killings at Jasenovac.

See Despot, “Death and Survival in Jasenovac,” 132. Indeed, innumerable accounts now exist. Thus, for instance, Gaon's two-volume collection, We Survived, compiles survivor testimony from Jasenovac and other camps, including Dachau and Auschwitz, while Lituchy's Jasenovac also includes a number of eyewitness testimonies by Serbs, Jews, and Croats detailing the horrors of the camp. See also the online sites of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: <http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/jasenovac/frameset.html> (accessed 16 September 2009) and <http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?ModuleId=10005449> (accessed 16 September 2009).

Delibašić, “Varieties of Psychopathological Behavior among the Ustashe at Jasenovac,” 233.

Despot, “Death and Survival in Jasenovac,” 139; Erlih, “Kula,” 160.

“The Jasenovac Extermination Camps,” Holocaust Education and Archive Research Team, <http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/othercamps/jasenovac.html> (accessed 16 September 2009).

See such works as: Neitzke, Ustaša Gold; Milan and Brogan, Soldiers, Spies and The Ratline; Aarons and Loftus, Unholy Trinity; Eizenstat, U.S. and Allied Wartime and Postwar Relations and Negotiations.

In Spain he operated a printing press, “Drina,” a symbolic name for diaspora Croats since Budak famously stated in 1941: “The Drina is the border between East and West” (Dedijer, The Yugoslavian Auschwitz, 130). Interestingly, his publications also included the diaries of Marcone's Zagreb secretary. See Dulić, “Tito's Slaughterhouse,” 92.

In his weblog a month after the funeral of Sakić, Marko Atilla Hoare noted that he was buried in full Ustaša uniform and that the presiding clergyman, Vjekoslav Lasić, had said that “the court that convicted Dinko Sakić convicted Croatia and the Croatian nation,” that “the NDH is the foundation of the modern Croatian homeland,” and that “every honorable Croat should be proud of Sakić's name.” See Hoare, <http://greatersurbiton.wordpress.com/2008/08/05/croatias-ustashas-from-treason-and-genocide-to-simple-national-embarrassment> (accessed 16 September 2009).

Cornwell, Hitler's Pope, 266.

Breitman et al., US Intelligence, 211.

Records of the Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) show that government funds helped provide maintenance and travel for these exiles, seen as potentially useful weapons in the Cold War against the growing communist threat. See Neitzke, Ustaša Gold, 3, 8; US Department of Justice, Criminal Division, Klaus Barbie and the U.S. Government: A Report to the Attorney General of the United States.

Thus, for example, Yossi Melman suggests in “Tied up in the Rat Lines” that Juan Peron granted entry visas to 34,000 Croats.

Breitman et al., US Intelligence, 217. The circumstances under which Draganović came to Yugoslavia remain a mystery.

Neitzke, Ustaša Gold, 149–50.

That event split an increasingly divided Croatia, with nationalist Catholics supporting Franco and those who leaned communist favoring his rivals.

This, at least, according to the Argentine newspaper Hrvatska, February 1960. See Paris, Genocide, 279.

Dedijer, The Yugoslav Auschwitz, 313.

For Žerjavić, see Gubici stanovništva Jugoslavije u drugom svjetskom ratu, 61–66 and “The Most Likely Numbers of Victims Killed in Jasenovac,” 21. For Kočović, see “Žrtve Drugog svetskog rata u Jugoslaviji.” Interestingly, each gave a lower number for his own ethnicity. For a good overview on the numbers issue, see Srđan Bogosavljević, “The Unresolved Genocide,” 146–59.

Dinko Šakić made this assertion at his trial. See Croatian News Agency (HINA), “The Trial of Dinko Šakić.”

Price, “Memory, the Media, and Nato,” 143.

Nyström, “The Holocaust and Croatian National Identity,” 269.

Bet-El, “Unimagined Communities,” 206.

The šahovnica pre-dates and differs slightly from the flag of the NDH, but its red and white checkerboard clearly evokes the latter.

Brkljačić, “What Past is Present?,” 50.