Abstract
The introduction outlines the main aim of the book, which is to examine Ustasha race theory and its importance to the political and legal functioning of the Independent State of Croatia by focusing on the case of Croatian Jews who were granted the rights of Aryan citizens of the Ustasha state; this question is examined within the broader context of anti-Semitism, nationalism and race theory in Croatia from the mid-nineteenth century. The introduction provides an overview of the relevant historiography on the Ustasha regime and the Independent State of Croatia, pointing out that historians have tended to downplay or ignore the importance of racial ideas to the Ustasha movement, including racial anti-Semitism.
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Notes
Ivo and Slavko Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu (Zagreb: Novi liber, 2001), 619.
Bogdan Krizman, Pavelić između Hitlera i Mussolinija (Zagreb: Globus, 1980), 137, 191fn. See a copy of Sach’s application in Krizman, Pavelić između Hitlera i Mussolinija, 224–225.
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: The Viking Press, 1963), 184.
Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe 1939–1945 (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc., 1987), 365.
See Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu and Esther Gitman, When Courage Prevailed: The Rescue and Survival of Jews in the Independent State of Croatia 1941–1945 (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2011).
Gitman, When Courage Prevailed, 67. Claims that the wives of Pavelić and Kvaternik were Jewish or required honorary Aryan status are also made by Emily Greble, Sarajevo, 1941–1945: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Hitlers Europe (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011), 90;
Jure Krišto, ‘The Catholic Church and the Jews in the Independent State of Croatia’, Review of Croatian History, 3, No. 1 (2007): 35;
Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration (California: Stanford University Press, 2001), 593.
Ustasha policies of deportation, extermination and forced religious conversion in relation to the NDH’s Serb, Jewish and Gypsy minorities have been extensively documented. See Mark Biondich, ‘Religion and Nation in Wartime Croatia: Reflections on the Ustaša Policy of Forced Religious Conversions, 1941–1942’, Slavonic and East European Review, 83, No. 1 (2005): 71–115;
Fikreta Jelić-Butić, Ustaše i Nezavisna Država Hrvatska 1941–1945. (Zagreb: Sveučilišna naklada Liber, 1977); Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu; Greble, Sarajevo, 1941–1945;
Jonathan Gumz, ‘Wehrmacht Perceptions of Mass Violence in Croatia, 1941–1942’, The Historical Journal, 44, No. 4 (2001): 1015–1038;
Ladislaus Hory and Martin Broszat, Der kroatische Ustascha-Staat 1941–1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1964);
Narcisa Lengel-Krizman, Genocíd nad Romima: Jasenovac 1942 (Zagreb: Biblioteka Kameni cvijet, 2003);
Holm Sundhaussen, ‘Der Ustascha-Staat: Anatomie eines Herrschaftssystems’, Österreichische Osthefte, 37 (1995): 516–532; and Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 380–415.
The only works specifically dealing with race theory in the NDH have been the following three articles by the author of this book: Nevenko Bartulin, ‘The Anti-Yugoslavist Narrative on Croatian Ethnolinguistic and Racial Identity, 1900–1941’, East Central Europe, 39, Nos. 2–3 (2012): 331–356; ‘The Ideal Nordic-Dinaric Racial Type: Racial Anthropology in the Independent State of Croatia’, Review of Croatian History, 5, No. 1 (2009): 189–219; and ‘The Ideology of Nation and Race: The Croatian Ustasha Regime and Its Policies toward Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia 1941–1945’, Croatian Studies Review, 5 (2008): 75–102.
Nada Kisić Kolanović, ‘Povijest NDH kao predmet istraživanja’, Časopis za suvremenu povijest, 34, No. 3 (2002): 684.
Kisić Kolanović, ‘Povijest NDH’, 684–685. For examples of the Marxist school, see the works of Bogdan Krizman, Ante Pavelić i ustaše (Zagreb: Globus, 1978), Pavelić između Hitlera i Mussolinija and the two volume Ustaše i Treći Reich (Zagreb: Globus, 1983); and Jelić-Butić, Ustaše i Nezavisna Država Hrvatska.
Hory and Broszat, Der kroatische Ustascha-Staat, 72. For a highly biased account of the supposedly close link between the Ustasha regime, the Catholic Church in Croatia and the Vatican, see Carlo Falconi, The Silence of Pius XII, trans. Bernard Wall (London: Faber & Faber, 1970).
Rory Yeomans, ‘Militant Women, Warrior Men and Revolutionary Personae: The New Ustasha Man and Woman in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941–1945’, Slavonic and East European Review, 83, No. 4 (2005): 705–706.
Jonathan Steinberg, ‘Types of Genocide? Croatians, Serbs, Jews, 1941–45’, in The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation, ed. David Cesarani (New York: Routledge, 1994), 189–190.
See Nada Kisić Kolanović, Muslimani i hrvatski nacionalizam 1941–1945. (Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 2009).
This statement is found in article 16 of the ‘Ustasha principles’ (which included 15 articles from 1933 to 1941, and then 17 from 1941 to 1945). See Mario Jareb, Ustaško-domobranski pokret od nastanka do travnja 1941. godine (Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 2006), 124–128.
Hory and Broszat, Der kroatische Ustascha-Staat, 177 According to Stanley Payne, ‘the murderousness of the Ustashi did not by itself qualify them to be considered generic fascists, since the great majority of the movements and regimes of this century to have engaged in large-scale killings were either Marxist-Leninists or nonfascist nationalists’. Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 411.
For more on the argument that the Ustashe were a fascist movement, see Rory Yeomans, Visions of Annihilation: The Ustasha Regime and the Cultural Politics of Fascism 1941–1945 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013).
Sabrina P. Ramet, ‘The NDH — An Introduction’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 7, No. 4 (2006): 404.
James J. Sadkovich, Italian Support for Croatian Separatism, 1927–1937 (New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1987), 150. For similar views, see Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 348.
Mario Jareb, ‘Jesu li Hrvati postali Goti? Odnos ustaša i vlasti Nezavisne Države Hrvatske prema neslavenskim teorijama o podrijetlu Hrvata’, Časopis za suvremenu povijest, 40, No. 3 (2008): 869–882.
Yeshayahu Jelinek, ‘Nationalities and Minorities in the Independent State of Croatia’, Nationalities Papers, VIII, No. 2 (1984): 195–196.
John Connelly, ‘Nazis and Slavs: From Racial Theory to Racist Practice’, Central European History, 32, No. 1 (1999): 1–33.
For more on the distinction between racial and linguistic identity see Christopher M. Hutton, Race and the Third Reich: Linguistics, Racial Anthropology and Genetics in the Dialectic of Volk (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005).
Cited in Aaron Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 1.
Anthony D. Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 63.
George L. Mosse, Nazism: A Historical and Comparative Analysis of National Socialism (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1978), 101.
A nation, as Holm Sundhaussen notes, claims political sovereignty, and possesses a national consciousness. Holm Sundhaussen, ‘Nationsbildung und Nationalismus im Donau-Balkan-Raum’, Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte, 48 (1993): 236.
Anthony Smith defines the ethnie as ‘named units of population with common ancestry myths and historical memories, elements of shared culture, some link with a historic territory and some measure of solidarity, at least among their elites’. Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era, 57 Smith argues that a number of modern nations can trace their origins to pre-modern ethnies. See Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
For modernist views on the origin of national identity, see Ernest Gellner, Nationalism (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997)
Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
There is an extensive literature on the politics of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. For works dealing with Croatia’s position in Yugoslavia and nationalist responses to policies of Serbian centralism see Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984), Jareb, Ustaško-domobranski pokret and Sadkovich, Italian Support for Croatian Separatism.
For a different appraisal of interwar Yugoslav politics, see John R. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
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© 2013 Nevenko Bartulin
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Bartulin, N. (2013). Introduction. In: Honorary Aryans: National-Racial Identity and Protected Jews in the Independent State of Croatia. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137339126_1
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