Cults of Death and Fantasies of Annihilation: The Croatian Ustasha Movement in Power, 1941–45

Rory Yeomans

The paper based on archival, published and press sources, and relevant literature presents the ideological basis and enforcement of the Croatian policy of the extermination of the Serbs and Jews in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) which had its place within the New Order of Europe. Soon after the establishment of the NDH in April 1941, the destruction process was partially centralised in a network of camps centred at Gospić. After the outbreak of a mass Serb uprising and the dissolution of the Gospić camp, a new and much larger system of camps centred at Jasenovac operated as an extermination and concentration camp from the end of August 1941 until the end of the war. In November 1941, the mass internment of undesirable population groups was provided for by law, whereby the destruction process was given a “legal” form.

This article looks at how ordinary Serb and Jewish victims in the wartime Independent State of Croatia attempted to negotiate the terror of the mass deportations to Serbia, ghettoization, economic destruction and wearing of the Jewish insignia through petition writing and attempting to identify themselves with the Croatian nation in whose name they were being persecuted by the Ustasha regime. Using a comparative and subjective framework it analyses their letters in the wider context of similar petition writing and subjective processes of other totalitarian states - for example, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia - during times of terror.

Central Europe 10:2, September-October 2005, 234-56 Cults of Death and Fantasies of Annihilation: the Croatian Ustasha Movement in Power, 1941-1945 Rory Yeomans University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies Croat youth! You know them well, not from today and not from tomorrow. You have known them for a long time. Does it not seem as if we already somewhere have worked and spoken with them? Do you not feel their presence? Marko Hranilović and Matija Soldin are with us although it has been ten years since their brave deaths because their spirits live in us. ― V.E., ‘Hranilović i Soldin,’ Naš rad, 4 October 1941 ‘The Ustasha Movement is a movement of life, a movement of youth. Not just because it sought the lives of so many of our best. It is a movement of life, a movement of youth precisely because death is the start of life.’ So ended the declaration of loyalty of one youth journal to the Independent State of Croatia in April 1944. 1 This morbid rejoinder, perhaps shocking to a contemporary audience, would have seemed familiar to anyone who had lived in the Independent State of Croatia between 1941 and 1945, not least because the ideology of the extreme nationalist regime which ruled the State – the Revolutionary Croatian Ustasha Organisation – was permeated by notions of death. When historians write of an ideology of death in the Ustasha Movement, it is usually discussed in the context of their campaign of terror and genocide against Serbs, Jews and gypsies. The horror of this campaign has been exhaustively documented. 2 However, while the violence of the Ustashas rightly remains the defining feature of their rule in the Independent State of Croatia, in the years between 1941 and 1945, the Movement was simultaneously creating a symbiotic cult of death inextricably linked to the cult of violence. This fixation with dying, which was permeated by chiliastic imagery and Biblical notions of suffering, blood, death and resurrection, has remained almost unexplored in the post-war historiography of the Movement. Yet between 1941 and 1945, led by the Ustasha Movement, the Independent State of Croatia, through its journals and newspapers, poems and short stories, its public ceremonies and days of national mourning produced a ritualistic cult of death in which both the annihilation of the enemy and the creation of Croatian martyrs were elevated to a moral and national imperative. Furthermore, this cult of death mimicked both the rites and beliefs of Catholicism and, in its chiliastic intensity, presented a rationale for the Ustashas’ revolutionary and iconoclastic ideology. 1 ‘Ž.A.P.!’ Naš list, 22 April 1944, 1. See, for example, Fikreta Jelić-Butić, Ustaše i Nezavisna Država Hrvatska (Zagreb: Liber, 1977); Vladimir Dedijer and Antun Miletić (eds.), Proterivanje Stradanje Srba sa ognjišta, 1941-1945: svedočanstva (Belgrade: Rad, 1989); Ladislaus Hory and Martin Broszat, Der kroatische Ustascha-Staat, 1941-1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsches Verlags Anstalt, 1965); and Bogdan Krizman, Ante Pavelić i Ustaše (Zagreb: Globus, 1978). English-language studies include Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945: Occupation and Collaboration (California: Stanford University Press, 2002). 2 1 Central Europe 10:2, September-October 2005, 234-56 The Myths of the Movement: Ustashas as Warriors, Martyrs and Avenging Angels From the inception of their movement, the Ustashas portrayed themselves as an elite legion of avenging angels who would use violence to liberate their nation from godlessness, Sodom and spiritual degradation. Croatia had to be liberated from the rule of Serbian ‘occupation’ and ‘oppression’ not simply because its rule was tyrannical and cruel, but also because of the immorality and atheism it propagated. In an article of April 1934 in the official journal of the Movement, the Ustasha Poglavnik (leader), Ante Pavelić, railed against the ‘barbaric culture and gypsy civilisation’ of the ruling Belgrade elite, accusing them of spreading atheist and ‘bestial’ values in ‘Godly’ Croatia. 3 The Ustasha army, he promised, would launch a war to cleanse Croatia of such impurity. The purification of Croatia would necessarily be violent. The Poglavnik explained that the Serbs, through their occupation of Croatia, had betrayed the Croatians as Judas had Jesus and could expect only the same cruel fate. The Ustashas would launch a ‘bloody and brutal struggle’ in which the blood of its enemies would ‘flow into rivers and streams’ and Ustasha bombs ‘scatter its bones like dust’. This was the ‘great and sacred’ aim of all Ustashas. 4 At the same time, the Ustashas painted a grim and harrowing picture of life under the Serbian ‘tyranny’. The crimes and misdeeds committed against the Croatian nation amounted to a campaign of terror: the Croats were living in a prison and were facing extermination through the destruction of their religion, culture and language and the annihilation of the best sons of the fatherland at the hands of the batons and bayonets of King Aleksandar’s gendarmes. In such a situation, the Ustashas were compelled to use ‘revolution, blood and arms to destroy the foreign tyranny and create an independent state of Croatia’. 5 The violence of the Yugoslav state was manifested not merely in the suffering of the Croatian masses, but also in the martyrs created by the Ustasha Movement in its struggle for an independent state. One of the first such martyrs, Franjo Zrinski, arrested after the assassination of the newspaper proprietor, Mirko Neudorfer, accused of assisting in the murder of Neudorfer and planting bombs on railway tracks. According to the Ustashas’ journal, before being hanged in the early dawn in Belgrade, he was ‘horribly tortured’. His execution was irrefutable evidence not of his guilt, the article continued, but of Belgrade’s desire ‘to exterminate the most nationally conscious and militant sons of Croatia’. Like an early Christian saint, he had borne the hours before his execution with courage imbued with the Ustasha faith and ‘blessing the Croat liberation struggle with his young martyred blood’. The ‘blood of such martyrs’ was the seed of national freedom and state independence, the article concluded. 6 The violent activities of the Ustashas between 1929 and 1941 created a number of other martyrs for the Movement, including Marko Hranilović, Matija Soldin and Ivan Rošić, all executed following show trials in the 1930s for terrorist activity. Perhaps the most famous pre-war martyr of all was Stipe Devčić who took part in the failed Ustasha raid on a police station in Brušani and who blew himself up with his hand grenade rather than face the ‘ignominy’ of surrender. For this gruesome act, he not only found himself hailed in the Ustasha press as their most celebrated of martyrs but set a standard for self- 3 Poglavnik, ‘Možemo i tamo!’ Ustaša, April 1934, 1. Poglavnik, ‘I mi konja za trku imamo!’ Ustaša, January 1934, 1; Mijo Babić, ‘Neka znadu oni, kojih se tiče!’ Ustaša, September 1932, 2. 5 ‘Krvlju treba prati ljagu!’ Ustaša, February 1932, 2; ‘Možemo i to!’ Ustaša, April 1934, 1. 6 ‘Slava ustaši Franji Zrinskome!’ Ustaša, April 1934, 2. 4 2 Central Europe 10:2, September‐October 2005, 234‐56 sacrifice by which other Ustashas would be judged. 7 However, all Ustashas were supposed to pass through a period of suffering and hardship in the same way that Jesus had endured forty days and forty nights in the wilderness in order to be considered real Ustashas. All forms of pleasure including gambling, swearing, chattering and women were condemned as vices and considered to be forbidden fruit for Ustashas. 8 They were to live lives of moral rectitude and absolute asceticism. The biographies of leading Ustashas such as Jure Francetić, stressed their self-sacrifice and ascetic lifestyles, taking vows of poverty and chastity during the period of struggle for an independent Croatian state. In Francetić’s case, he had voluntarily abandoned the supposedly comfortable life of a law student to take on the rigours of the national struggle. 9 From these years of struggle, testing and sacrifice would emerge a spiritually-cleansed new man, ready and capable of liberating the nation. The initiation ceremony for new members of the Movement consciously evoked Catholic symbolism, with the Ustasha taking an oath to ‘Almighty God’ before an altar bearing the crucifix, a candle, hand grenade and a dagger. Once a member he was joined to the Movement for life. As an article of Christmas 1941 explained, the presence of the crucifix reminded ‘the Ustasha before whom (God) he took his oath. Before the cross, he serves the nation as a holy and grave act…The crucifix emboldens the Ustasha to carry out the honourable deed which he was assigned by the Poglavnik and the Ustasha Movement. On the cross, he saw the Christ figure who sacrificed himself for others. And it is the duty of the Ustasha to work for the salvation of others’. 10 The fact that many émigré Ustashas had endured years of harsh existence in exile on the Sicilian island of Lipari as guests of fascist Italy encouraged some writers to make explicit parallels between Jesus and the Movement. Commenting on the first ‘test’ of the Ustashas, when the Yugoslav government had offered an amnesty to Ustashas who returned home, one theological student Antun Vrbić wrote in 1942 that the Ustashas were not merely a political organisation but a movement of the greatest moral worth, ‘founded on the self-mutilation and contemplation of the individual for the good of the community’. It was no wonder that many Ustashas had preferred to be ‘incarcerated’ on the Isle of Lipari where they starved to death, he wrote, rather than return to Croatia, their Homeland, and ‘renounce their travails’. 11 Indeed, the period of testing for some young Ustashas proved to be too much and they perished in exile, dying as restless, unfulfilled martyrs in a barren faraway land. 12 Spiritually-cleansed new men they might have been, yet in addition to being cleansed of all moral vices, becoming an Ustasha also meant divesting oneself of all moral compunctions, including the exhortation not to kill. Ruthlessness, manliness and cruelty became guiding qualities required of those wishing to join the Movement. Becoming an Ustasha was a rite of passage in which boys became men in whom all traces of sentimentality were to disappear. The Ustashas would not be able to cleanse Croatia armed with a prayer book or a rosary: instead they would use those ‘cold implements which have warmed the Ustashas in battle’ – the crucifix, the dagger and the hand grenade, their ‘holy trinity’. 13 7 ‘Brušani,’ Ustaša, August 1932, 2; Franjo Bubarić, Seljaštvo i ustaški pokret (Zagreb: Glavni ustaški stan, 1942), 35-40. 8 ‘Ustaške vrline,’ Ustaša, October 1932, 2-3. 9 ‘Život i djelo ustaše Jure Francetića,’ Nova Hrvatska, 3 April 1943; ‘Jure Francetić: junak naših dana,’ Nova Hrvatska, 2 April 1943; ‘Jure Francetić kao revolucionarac i vojnik,’ Hrvatski narod, 2 April 1943. 10 ‘U znaku kriza, noža i samokresa,’ Ustaša, 19 December 1941, 2. 11 Antun Vrbić, ‘Poglavniko djelo,’ Vrhbosna, 56: 3-4, March-April 1942, 147-50. 12 ‘Smrt medju nosiocima oslobodjenja,’ Ustaša, 2 November 1941, 4. 13 ‘U znaku kriza, noža i samokresa,’ Ustaša, 19 December 1942, 2. 3 Central Europe 10:2, September‐October 2005, 234‐56 The idea of fascism as a secular religion is as old as the ideology itself. As early as 1929, the American writers Herbert Walter Schneider and Stuart Clough observed that fascism possessed the fundamental characteristics of a new religion. They wrote of it as a new cult which had taken hold of the minds of many young Italians. 14 Fascism explicitly appropriated the language of organised religion; Benito Mussolini wrote that the ‘fascist conception of life is a religious one’. The life of the fascist, he explained, must be ‘serious, austere and religious’, and based on the rejection of an ‘easy’ life. Fascism was not just a political doctrine but ‘a living faith’ and its followers ‘apostles’. 15 With its emphasis on suffering and martyrdom, its processions and symbolic ceremonies, its crusading zeal and mystic rituals of loyalty and faith, fascism was also steeped in the imagery of religion. Its mysticism of blood and sacrifice above material values answered the demands of youth in Italy to transcend the wretched banality of everyday bourgeois life and sacrifice themselves for a great cause. 16 Given this, it is hardly surprising that many of the fascist movements to emerge in Eastern Europe in the inter-war years, most famously the Legion of the Archangel Michael in Romania and the Hlinka Guard in Slovakia, not only possessed a deeply mystical outlook, but seemed to attract a significant number of seminary and theology students to their ranks. This was also true for the Ustasha Movement, many of whose leading figures had been educated in Catholic seminaries. Many of the young men who joined the elite death squads of the Movement in 1941 were also devoutly religious and imbued with crusading Catholic zeal. As with the Hlinka Guard and the Legion, priests also played an active role in the Movement and in the most notorious cases led Ustasha militia with guns in one hand and rosaries in the other; other priests served ruthlessly as guards and commandants at the various concentration camps that the Movement established in 1941 after coming to power. Like many rightist and extreme nationalist movements in inter-war and Second World War eastern Europe, the Ustashas viewed their ideology as a religion in itself. For Niko Zekanović, writing in the leading journal of the Ustasha youth movement, the ideology of the Ustashas (ustaštvo) was a faith which drew its inspiration from both the past and the present, a faith so invincible that it could overcome any force or evil. ‘It emboldens us, steels our desires and strengthens our decisiveness,’ he wrote. The young poet Vinko Nikolić declared the Independent State of Croatia to be not just an ideology itself, but an article of faith. ‘Our religion is the Independent State of Croatia!’ he wrote in September 1941. ‘We are all believers of this divine faith of ours!’ 17 The fervent pronouncements of youth leaders were important since they emphasised two integral elements of the Ustasha Movement: its mystical belief that the creation of an independent Croatia was ordained by God and would herald a spiritual rebirth of the nation and the conviction that the victory of the Ustashas’ ‘national revolution’ in 1941 represented the triumph of youthful militancy over compromised liberal democracy. In the new revivified Croatia, the values of extreme nationalism, Catholic piety, patriarchy and traditional morality would supersede those of atheism, secularism and the ideology of South Slav brotherhood and unity. Although the Ustasha Movement was profoundly influenced by the ideals of fascism and Catholicism, the Ustashas’ chiliastic and religious mindset and aesthetics also owed something to older and - from their point of view – in some cases moribund and decayed ideologies. As a movement that was supposed to reflect the aspirations of the Croatian 14 H.W. Schneider and S.B. Clough, Making Fascists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), 73. Benito Mussolini, ‘Fascismo,’ Enciclopedia Italiana, 14: 1932, 847. 16 Emilio Gentile, ‘Fascism as Political Religion,’ Journal of Contemporary History, 25, 1990, 233-4. See also his Il culto del littorio: la saccralizrazione della politica nell’Italia fascista (Rome: Editore Laterza, 1993), esp 1-18. 17 Niko Zekanović, ‘Naša vjera,’ Ustaška mladež, 16 November 1941, 1-2; Vinko Nikolić, ‘Mi smo vjernici,’ Ustaška mladež, 28 September 1941, 1-2. 15 4 Central Europe 10:2, September‐October 2005, 234‐56 nation, it was to be expected that many of their notions reflected ideas deeply ingrained in Croatian nationalist culture. What is more of a surprise, given their hatred of Yugoslavia, is that at least some of their ideas were also inspired by the aesthetics of romantic Yugoslavism. Among the sixteenth-century Croatian pirates, the feared Uskoks of Senj, who acquired the dubious honour of proto-Ustashas in the Independent State of Croatia, violence was seen as a form of heroism and honour and it was written that a warrior should not die a ‘good death in his bed’, but rather fall fighting the Turks and their allies or perish ‘hanged, cut to pieces and foully slaughtered in other ways in their pursuits’. In the same way that the Uskoks celebrated their deaths at the hands of their enemies, their code of honour required them to take gruesome violence on those who had dishonoured or betrayed them. Stories abounded of their decapitation and mutilation of their victims and the drinking of their blood. In a letter to the Venetian Ban of Zadar who had criticised the Uskoks for sparing the town of Glamoč from their raids, the Uskoks warned the Ban to keep counsel, pointing out that while it was easy for him to drink cool wine, it was hard to guard the border ‘wiping off hands wet with blood’ since there were ‘self-willed children here/ who have no father and no mother./ Gun and sword are their father and mother’. 18 The heroic ideal of violence and death also emerged as a central theme in the writing of many nineteenth-century Croatian poets such as August Harambašić and August Šenoa. Harambašić, for example, called for patriots to sacrifice their lives for the freedom of the nation and the fatherland. Invoking the past sacrifices of Croatian historical figures such as the peasant leader, Matija Gubec and Counts Krsto Frankopan and Nikola Zrinski who had defied Austria-Hungary and paid with their heads, he wrote that the ‘spirit of our fathers calls out to us: “Freedom or death!” In another famous poem he proclaimed that ‘death is sweeter than life’ and sent greetings to death. ‘Do not cry, my darling,’ he wrote, ‘if your husband falls in a grave:/ the summit of the grave leads us to/ all roads to freedom.’ 19 Likewise, the poetry of August Šenoa expressed similarly militant sentiments, exploring the possibility that the dead Croatian martyr-hero could command the living from beyond the grave. In one of his most celebrated poems, he wrote of a ‘spiritual legion’ of ‘dead heroes’ rising from their graves to save Croatia. 20 In the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, not only were poets such as Šenoa and Harambašić appropriated, but also the Croatian heroes about whom they often wrote. As with many utopian ideologies through history, romantic Yugoslavism was often framed in highly religious and chiliastic terms by its leading artistic and cultural ideologues. Like fascists and, indeed, nineteenth-century Croatian nationalists, they employed the same rhetoric of messianism, resurrection after a national Golgotha of suffering and spiritual cleansing in which the immoral, degenerate and alien would be thrown out of the new Promised Land. In one propaganda leaflet designed to induce Croat and Slovene soldiers to desert the Austro-Hungarian army and join the Yugoslav Legion, Yugoslavia was described as a nation ‘bathed in blood and restored in blood and 18 Cited in Catherine Wendy Bracewell, The Uskoks of Senj: Piracy, Banditry and Holy War in the Sixteenth-Century Adriatic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 162-70, 187. The notion of the Ustashas as the ideological heirs of the Uskoks is considered, for example, in Vjekoslav Šišul, ‘Senj – uskočko i ustaško gnijezdo,’ Ustaški godišnjak, 1: 1942, 175-80. 19 Cited in Julije Benešić (ed.), August Harambašić, Lirika II, 1882-1885 (Zagreb: HIBZ, 1943), ‘Il slobodu ili smrt,’ pp. 210-11 and ‘Prije boja,’ 217. 20 Franjo Marković (ed.), August Šenoa, ‘Grobovi Hrvate’, Izabrane Pjesme (Zagreb: Lav Hartman, 1908), 245-46. Not surprisingly, given the two poets’ nationalistic sentiments, the Ustasha Movement was keen to appropriate both the poetry of Harambašić and Šenoa. See, for example, Vinko Nikolić (ed.), Hrvatska domovina: hrvatsko rodolubno pjesništvo, 1831-1941. (Zagreb: Zapovijedništvo ustaške mladeži – odjel za promičbu, 1942). 5 Central Europe 10:2, September‐October 2005, 234‐56 baptised in fire and lightning’. 21 Meanwhile, Aleksa Šantić’s paean to national unity talked of ‘blots and blood and sin and shame’ transformed into ‘beautiful Gods’ and wormgnawed souls ‘twined into a single crown’. 22 The legend of the Battle of Kosovo also featured prominently as one of the founding myths of the new state. In the mythology of inter-war Yugoslavia, the Battle was a traumatic event in which the defeat of the Serbian army at the hands of the Ottomans had ushered in centuries of enslavement, suffering and death for the Yugoslav nation. The Croat sculptor Ivan Mestrović declared that Kosovo was ‘the crown of thorns in the suffering of the Yugoslav nation and in it is symbolised all its torture on its martyred journey through the centuries. Around this symbol is concentrated maybe the most beautiful and best fantasies of our Slavic soul, thus is Kosovo at once the most catastrophic and the most sacred of events’. 23 So central did the suffering and bloodshed of the Kosovo Battle come to be for the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, that at least one author declared that Vidovdan, the day on which the defeat of the Battle was celebrated, had become ‘a religion, our national religion, our Yugoslav faith’. The sacrifice of the First World War, he implied, and the ‘fraternal slaughter and the spilling of blood’ which it had entailed was the final act in the Kosovo cycle and had been responsible for leading the Yugoslav race to freedom and ‘the realms of immortality’. 24 In its efforts to create a synthetic Yugoslav nation, the new kingdom also invented ceremonies and rituals in which the bodies of deceased national martyrs were reconsecrated. These rituals were supposed to suggest to the masses that the Yugoslav nation was an ancient one and that it had been constructed on the blood and the bones of all the national groups throughout history who could best honour the memory of their ancestors by helping to build the Yugoslav state. In 1925, for instance, the bodies of Zrinski and Frankopan were transferred from Vienna to Zagreb and paraded through the streets on funeral biers, observed by rapt and mournful crowds. It was through the ‘bloody sacrifices’ of martyrs such as Frankopan and Zrinski, opined one Croatian newspaper, that the union of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes had been given life. 25 Similarly, monuments were built and poems dedicated to the memory of the deceased members of Young Bosnia, the violent and revolutionary Yugoslav nationalist youth group from whose ranks Gavrilo Princip, the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, had emerged. Alongside the Battle of Kosovo, the actions of Young Bosnia became one of the founding myths of the new state. Not everyone was impressed. The myth of Kosovo, Young Bosnia and the imagery of blood, sacrifice and death provoked sharp criticism from some Yugoslav writers. In his collection of poems, Vid’s Day (1920), Miloš Crnjanski wrote acerbically: ‘We have nothing. Neither God nor master./ Blood is our God.’ He also sarcastically commented on the fixation with death that many ceremonies and rituals of official Yugoslav life implied. ‘Long live the cemetery!/ It alone is beautiful, clean and faithful […] We are for death!’ 26 Despite these influences, the Ustashas saw themselves as the vanguard of a young, radical and uncorrupted ideology. The Ustashas’ contention that their values represented the values of a new ‘young’ Croatia was not simply a rhetorical device which sought to 21 ‘Iz proglasa “Jadranske legije” meseca januara 1915,’ Viktor Novak (ed.), Antologija jugoslovenske misli i narodna jedinstva, 1390-1930 (Belgrade: Država stamparija, 1930), 710-712. 22 Aleksa Šantić, “Prolog [Pesniku narodnog jedinstva],” Književni jug, 1: 6, 16 March 1918, 209. 23 ‘Ideja “Kosovskoga hram”,’ Jugoslovenska biblioteka, 1: 1, 1919, 27. 24 M. Bartulica, ‘Vidovdan,’ Književni jug, 4: 1, 1 July 1919, 1, 4. 25 ‘Doček mučenika u Zagrebu,’ Hrvat, 19 April 1925. 26 Miloš Crnjanski, ‘Himna’ and ‘Zdravica’, Svetlana Velmar-Janković (ed.) Sabrane Pesme (Belgrade: Srpska književna zadruga, 1978), pp. 11, 13. See also Crnjanski, ‘Spomen Principu,’ Književni jug, 4: 11, 1 July-16 December 1919, 8. 6 Central Europe 10:2, September‐October 2005, 234‐56 contrast the purity of their aims and ideals with those of the ançien regime; it was also rooted in demographic fact. From the inception of the founding of the Ustasha Movement in 1929 amongst nationalist students at the University of Zagreb, the militant and apocalyptic rhetoric and ideology of the Ustashas had a strong appeal for Croatian youth. By the late 1930s, of those students who were politically active, the largest and most popular faction was the Frankists, the nationalist supporters of the Ustashas. According to one, Vatroslav Murvar, the first student body young provincial nationalist students joined on arriving at the University of Zagreb were secret and illegal proUstasha organisations. When the German military invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, nationalist youth enthusiastically rose up against Serbian ‘rule’. Radical university students in Zagreb, for example, in the chaos of 10 April 1941, occupied many government buildings and took over control of the university; high school students disarmed Yugoslav soldiers; both groups led the expulsion of Serb and Jewish lecturers and teachers and the confiscation and burning of banned literature in the new state. 27 They demanded to be placed at the pinnacle of power and influence in the new revolutionary nation-State. 28 If, as the Poglavnik told a rally of Ustasha youths in May 1942, to be an Ustasha ‘means to be eternally young and forever a warrior’, 29 then equally youth members of the Ustasha Movement felt that they deserved a special status in the State owing to their sacrifice and struggle. They, after all, in pursuit of an independent Croatia, had endured a ‘tortured journey, watered with fresh blood, blood spilled in struggle, in the epic battle against enemies and foreigners’. 30 The Ustashas maintained that their dynamic young religion of ustaštvo had liberated the Croatian nation from the bondage and oppression of Yugoslavia. The fact that the liberation of Croatia had occurred during the Easter period, with its cycles of torture, death and liberation simply added grist to the nationalist mill of those who saw something divine in the assumption of power by the Ustasha Movement. This notion was bolstered by the strong support the Ustasha Movement found within the ranks of the lower Croatian Catholic clergy. In April 1942, for example, at a reception held in honour of the Poglavnik by divinity students, their president, Stjepan Krivosoc, told him that with his Ustashas, he had saved the Croats from certain decay. ‘Over our dear Croatia, dark clouds appeared and the enemies saw how they could destroy [Croatia] but the good Lord would not allow a Croatia to collapse which had sacrificed so much for the protection of His Holy Son, but he rewarded the Croat nation for its thirteen centuries of faith to Christ - the Almighty Lord - by sending the Croatian nation You, Poglavnik, to save it.’ 31 Secular writers expressed similar sentiments. Halid Čausević compared the new heavenly Croatia to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, a morallycontaminated Babylon: On the ruins of an artificial and worm-ridden state creation whose miserable end is unique in the annals of world history, on the orders of divine Providence, a new and young Independent State of Croatia has arisen…In this apocalyptic and difficult struggle, many individuals lost hope, their spirits collapsed and they despaired, but the Croatian nation did not collapse because it believed, it fanatically believed in eternal justice and the arrival of a great male-liberator[…] Carrying a torch at the head of an iron phalange of sunkissed Ustasha heroes, the Poglavnik arrived. On the Poglavnik’s deeply creased and tanned face the signs 27 Vatroslav Murvar, ‘Banja Luka - grad budućnosti,’ Zbornik hrvatskih sveučilištaraca, 1: 1942 21; ‘Preporod i uloga hrvatskog sveučilišta kao vrhovne naučne ustanove u novoj Hrvatskoj,’ Nova Hrvatska, 10 April 1942, 20-21. 28 Jure Pavičić, ‘Ustaški pokret – pokret mladosti,’ Ustaška mladež, 23 December 1941, 9. 29 ‘Biti vječno mlad znači biti ustaša,’ Ustaška mladež, 7 June 1942, 4. 30 Zdravko Radić, ‘Pravo novog naraštaja,’ Ustaška mladež, 5 July 1942, 3. 31 ‘Rad hrvatskog svećenstva ima osobito znančenje u izgradivanju i ucvrsčivanu hrvatske domovine kad bude trebalo u narod raditi,’ Hrvatski narod, 21 April 1942. 7 Central Europe 10:2, September‐October 2005, 234‐56 of great spiritual and physical torture which this humble son of a poor Bosnian village had endured for justice and the liberation of his people were visible. 32 For many nationalist writers and intellectuals, Croatia had endured suffering of Biblical proportions under the Yugoslav regime. Božidar Kavran wrote that the ‘rivers of blood’ in Croatia and the ‘hecatombs of martyrs’ were proof of the ‘Golgotha’ it had endured so it could subsequently experience its ‘resurrection’. 33 For Vladimir Jurčić, Croatia through one thousand years had been enslaved and the nation had become a grave, ‘with a similar fate to Christ’. Yet the tenth of April 1941 represented for him a mythic Calvary. ‘On the holy day of Good Friday,’ he wrote, ‘tyranny imploded, Croatian resurrected.’ 34 Other writers also used the theme of a biblical journey from slavery to freedom to greet the new state. However, they added the imagery of blood and death to their writing. For the poet Jerko Skračić, with the creation of the Independent State of Croatia, slavery had been crushed and the Ustasha army of many ‘martyrs’ has achieved its dream. ‘We waited in agony, we struggled a long time/the whole Homeland was one grave,’ Skračić declared. ‘But from blood is growing a fortified life/who emerges from blood will never be a slave.’ 35 Meanwhile, a poem written by an anonymous contributor for the Poglavnik made allusions to blood and death in the liberation of Croatia even more graphic, talking of ‘banners written with proud sacrifices’ glistening in blood. 36 Politics as Ritual: National Mourning and Days of the Dead in the Ustasha State The founding myth of the Independent State of Croatia was the suffering and martyrdom of its people through the centuries and especially under Yugoslavia for western and cultured values. Yet this martyrdom for the nation was also to be seen as a source of pride and a reflection of the mystical power of the nation. Without the creation of martyrs and the sacrifice of the Croatian nation, its ideologues reasoned, the state would not have been achieved. Nikola Šabić wrote on the occasion of the passing of Francetić, the commander of the elite death squad, the Black Legion, that Croatia was like ‘a splendid temple whose foundations are built on the bones of martyred heroes and whose rocks are lubricated with a volcanic mixture of the blood and sweat of the great multitudes’. Francetić was one of countless martyrs who ‘fell dead for a free homeland. Lifting their eyes to Rakovica, they thought of the Uskoks, the pirates, the Ustashas, they summoned Petar Svačić, Gubec and Javor, the young heroes Soldin, Mijo Babić and (Milan) Luetić and many more. There are whole litanies of martyrs who offered up their lives so that their homeland could live.’ 37 Jure Prpić was even more explicit. Demanding blood and victims, he called blood the ‘eternal guarantee of our happy future’. Dead Ustasha warriors, he argued, did not die, but lived as an ‘eternal legion of the dead’ who would accompany the living nation on its journey through history. 38 For the Ustashas, blood was the living expression of the warrior values of the nation. Simply put, blood was life. 39 They believed that the sacrifices of dead martyrs, and Halid Čausević, ‘Za dom!’ Novi behar, 14: 1-2, 15 May 1941, 6-7. Božidar Kavran, ‘U Golgoti leži veličanstvo smrti i misterij uzkrsnuća,’ Hrvatski narod, Easter 1944. 34 Vladimir Jurčić, ‘Uskrsnuće Hrvatske,’ Spomen-knjiga prve obljetnice Nezavisne Države Hrvatske, 10.iv.4110.iv.42 (Zagreb: Državni i izvjestajni ured, 1942), n.p. 35 Jerko Skračić, ‘Pjesma hrvatske pobjede,’ Hrvatski narod, 13 April 1941. 36 M., ‘Da rode sunce radosti sine,’ Hrvatski narod, 14 April 1941. 37 Nikola Šabić, ‘Smisao i veličina žrtve,’ Hrvatski krugoval, 4 April 1943, 4. 38 Jure Prpić, ‘Naše žrtve,’ Ustaški godišnjak, 2: 1943, 91-97. 39 Milivoj Karamarko, ‘Vojnička krv,’ Ustaška mladež, 23 November 1941. 32 33 8 Central Europe 10:2, September‐October 2005, 234‐56 especially their spilt blood, were passed to the nation in perpetuity. In this sense, death was seen as vital for the survival of the nation. As such, Ustashas were portrayed as not just being prepared but eager to go to their deaths for the survival of Croatia. The Ustasha Movement was accompanied by an aura of death. A leading ideologue of the Movement, Aleksandar Žibrat, wrote that ‘death hung over the head of every Ustasha, death connected them to their oaths and they embraced it’. As good Ustashas, should the Poglavnik desire it, ‘legion after legion would go to their deaths, without a sigh, without words’. 40 Likewise, after the death of Mijo Babić, commander of the Ustasha Defence Force, in Hercegovina, his obituary painted the image of the Ustasha as a self-sacrificing martyr setting off to his death as if to going to a wedding. Just as he had heroically suffered under the rifle butts and gallows of King Aleksandar, now he would ignore the tears of his mother and the wail of his children: ‘The Ustasha is not a rabbit, nor an old woman nor a member of the politer classes,’ it declared. ‘The Ustasha is a warrior who, in his battles, fights until the end…One after the other he fights heroically and in an Ustasha way, one after the other he dies and gives his life in the foundation and building of the Independent State of Croatia.’ 41 According to yet another such article, the Ustashas were ‘eternal victims’ heroically perishing for the Homeland. 42 The commemoration of those martyrs who had willingly died to liberate the Homeland began as soon as the State was declared. For example, as early as 19 April 1941, a regional newspaper was announcing with pride that ‘everywhere the Ustashas are in a hurry. They’re giving their lives, their blood, they gamble on playing Russian roulette with their lives all the better and more quickly to secure our power so the blood of the Croat national organism begins to flow through every part of national and historical Croatia’. 43 In addition to the portrayal of the Ustashas as a self-sacrificing elite of men liberating the nation, descriptions of their death at the hands of enemies – Serb Communists and Chetniks - luridly recounted the sufferings, torture and humiliation they had endured before the moment of death. Ustasha warriors were depicted as Christian martyrs, enduring horrible indignities simply because of their faith in homeland and Poglavnik. Like Saint Sebastian or Saint Bartholomew, they exulted in their suffering and torture. Oaths of loyalty to the Poglavnik and the nation were their valedictory testimonies of grace and fortitude. In a typical tale, a young Ustasha warrior would be captured by a savage Serbian horde and tortured in a sadistic manner. However, he would never abandon his faith in the nationalist cause. In one of the most lurid examples of this kind of propaganda, the young Ustasha warrior, Ivan Kukoranović was captured by a group of maddened Orthodox women at Petrovo Selo, stripped naked and roasted alive on a fire. As he was mocked for his faith in the Ustasha ideology, his last words were said to have been: ‘I am burning for Croatia and the Poglavnik!’ 44 Similarly, the young Black Legionary, Josip Križanac, who wrote poems of adoration to Francetić, according to his biographer met a grisly end. Captured by ‘bandits’ in Bugojno in July 1943, he was roasted on an open fire. Remaining defiant and brave until the end, however, his last words were: ‘Long Live the Independent State of Croatia! Long live the Poglavnik! Long live Jure!’ 45 Some young Ustashas were reported to have gone even further in their zeal. When Nikola Jurišić, an adjutant at the Ustasha Main Headquarters, fell in battle, in his 40 Aleksandar Žibrat, ‘Ustaška vojnica,’ Ustaški godišnjak, 1: 1942, 370-375. ‘On ne žali krvce vrele,’ Ustaša, 19 July 1941, 1. 42 ‘Nove borbe – novi grobovi,’ Ustaša, 17 August 1941, 9. 43 ‘Uskrsnuće hrvatske Drine,’ Hrvatski branik, 19 April 1941. 44 Franjo Rubina, Tri mjesecom pod crvenom zviezdom: s ‘Vražijom divizijom’ za partizana po Grmeću ( Zagreb: Nova Hrvatska, 1943), 94-99. 45 Vilim Peroš (ed.), ‘Život i djela pjesnika Josipa Križanca’ in Josip Križanac, Junačka djela Jure viteza Francetića u stihovima (Zagreb: Nova Hrvatska, 1943), 51-55. 41 9 Central Europe 10:2, September‐October 2005, 234‐56 last breaths before he expired, he declared that ‘this was my only wish – that I die for the Poglavnik and Croatia’. 46 This stereotype unsurprisingly became a central trope of Ustasha youth literature. In Vera Franz’s ‘Bezimeni heroj’ (The Anonymous Hero, 1944), a young Ustasha warrior can only destroy a cabin of enemy weapons at the risk of killing himself too. In the event, he too, is mortally wounded, but he dies with a smile on his face, in ecstasy on the banks of the Drina. Uttering his last breaths, he ask his mother not to weep for him as he died happy and ‘with ecstasy’, sacrificing his life, ‘desires and hopes’ for the Poglavnik whom he confesses guiltily he loves more than his mother. ‘My joy in my soul is so limitless and enormous that it lifts my body up and carries it on waves of happiness.’ 47 It became an integral part of the oeuvre of more established nationalist writers. One of the best know of these was Salih Alić’s short story, ‘Smrt ustaše Salke’ (The Death of the Ustasha Salko). His story, published in the Ustasha Almanac of 1942, told of the last day in the life of a twenty-two year old Bosnian Muslim Ustasha called Salko hiding from the Chetniks in the woods. Waiting for his arrest ‘which would involve torture’, he looks back on his reasons for joining the Ustasha Movement. He has joined the Movement, the author writes, out of an idealistic urge to right the wrongs of the injustice of the Yugoslav state. With a pure heart, he loved the good nation from which he had emerged. He loved it with all his soul. He did not fear death, but he held onto his life and passionately defended it. His life meant for him in these moments more for him than ever because he felt the imminent destruction of barbarism whose blows he had felt on his own back. As a child, he had learnt to hold a gun, sword and dagger and above the mountains one day, when his soul was most outraged, he would declare: ‘I swear to the Almighty and these mountains that I will help to destroy the injustice in my land, my weak and poverty-stricken brothers and sisters!’ 48 After spending the night in an abandoned church, he is captured in the forest and knocked unconscious. His tormentors, grinning and drunken Chetniks, beat him with rifle butts and bloody his face as he drops in and out of consciousness. Forced to walk towards his firing squad, he can hear not only the sound of bombs and bullets as Croatian villages are attacked, but also the wail of a child looking for his mother. With his hands tied behind his back, ‘stepping ever nearer death, he thought of his oppressed brothers and sisters, of his destroyed hearth and the suffering of his nation’ from more than two decades of ‘Serb terror’. Turning his face towards heaven, to his brothers, his home and his ‘proud Bosnia’, he dies in a hail of bullets. After he has fallen dead, the reader learns that he is horribly mutilated by the ‘bestial’ and barely human Chetniks, his heart ripped out of his chest. In the next moment, four ‘brave young Bosnian Ustashas’ appear to disarm and kill the Chetniks, but it is too late: Salko is dead. Croatia has another martyr. 49 In the light of the suffering of the young martyrs of the Ustasha Movement both in the former Yugoslavia and at the hands of brigands in the new Independent State of Croatia, their funerals were often extravagant ceremonies of collective mourning and ritual symbolism. When Josip Gesler, a member of the Poglavnik bodyguard, fell in battle against Serbian rebels in Bosnia in July 1941, his body was paraded on flower-strewn trains through the villages of Bosnia before reaching its final resting place in his native village. According to news reports of the time, Gesler’s death occasioned weeping and 46 ‘Sprovod ustaše Nikole Jurišića,’ Hrvatski narod, 21 April 1942. Vera Franz, ‘Bezimeni Heroj,’ Naraštaj slobode, 10 May 1944, 8. 48 Salih Alić, ‘Smrt ustaše Salke,’ Ustaški godišnjak, 2: 1943, 302-306. 49 Alić, ‘Smrt ustaše Salke,’ Ustaški godišnjak, 2: 1943, 304-06. 47 10 Central Europe 10:2, September‐October 2005, 234‐56 lamentation throughout Bosanska Krajina, especially amongst his young comrades. 50 A similar demonstration of mass mourning pertained in the death and funeral of Antun Pogorelec, who fell in battle alongside Mijo Babić. In this case, the open cask coffin of the dead Ustasha was used by the provincial governor of western Bosnia, Viktor Gutić, to admonish those Croats who had supposedly shown too much tolerance towards the Serb population. Looking at the ‘horribly mutilated’ body of Pogorelec, in his funeral eulogy, Gutić stated that his death was the answer to those who had intervened on behalf of Serbs. They did not deserve any mercy as they were a ‘bloodthirsty brood’ who wanted to wipe away the Croat nation. ‘Ask these young Ustashas - who for two nights have paid their respects to their fallen role model - if they think of mercy or if their young souls cry out for revenge. Have you noticed the flame in their eyes when they took part in prayers for the salvation of their Ustasha hero?’ he thundered. Like Pogorelec who had left his home to save his ‘persecuted brothers’, ‘their noble spirit could not stay deaf to the scream of the Hercegovinan Croats who groaned under the violence of rabid Chetnik mobs.’ 51 Although with the events of 10 April 1941, an Independent State of Croatia had been achieved, it had not been liberated since in Ustasha mythology there still existed the ‘dregs’ of the former regime in the shape of Serb Chetniks and Communists intent on continuing to oppress the Croatian nation. Until they were exterminated and ‘cleansed’ from Croatian lands, Croatia would not be a true nation again. Even as an independent nation, the Croatians were a victimised nation. State propaganda thus portrayed dead Ustasha warriors as not only self-sacrificing martyrs, but as a liberating army of avenging angels. Aleksandar Žibrat, for example, portrayed the Ustashas as an army of liberation, freeing the Croatian peasants from Serbian brigands, carrying out ‘destruction, plunder and murder’ against defenceless citizens. In his vision, the citizens wailed to the Ustashas for assistance as Serb Chetniks danced a ‘bloody kolo’ around the corpses of their victims. The Ustashas, arriving as liberators, ‘prowl the woods like lions, exterminating the bandits’. 52 The extreme youth of many of the slain Ustashas was used purposefully to distinguish the purity and idealism of Ustasha ideology from the corruption of those who still clung to the ‘old’ and discredited ways of thinking and who were responsible for the deaths of so many of the best sons of the Croatian homeland. In a situation in which heroic youths were being slaughtered by a perfidious enemy in the most sadistic manner possible, who could not be moved and heed the words of men like Gutić and desire revenge? In this way were notions of martyrdom and sacrifice inextricably linked to a cult of violence and aggression. One of the most vivid examples of this occurred following an armed attack of a Croatian Communist cell on Ustasha student guards at the University of Zagreb in August 1941 in which a number of students were wounded. As a consequence, regime newspapers carried their most apocalyptic message yet. Using the attack on nationalist students to highlight the brutality of the enemy within, the Ustashas announced a war of annihilation against Serbs, Communists and Jews. Imbued with the imagery of blood, they promised they would protect their new State from all its adversaries: We will protect it from all those who have remained in our home as Balkan shit, as the most terrible reminder of our 20 years of enslavement. We will protect it from all those who want to return it to the old days of Great Serb tyranny, we will protect it from all those who seek the resolution of our bloody events in Communism. From all these elements we will protect our holy freedom, from all these elements we will cleanse Croatia. We have begun a life and death struggle against them, those who persecuted and cursed us, those who killed us, but we prevailed and we will suffocate their rebellion in blood...In blood we will 50 ‘Nove borbe – novi grobovi,’ Ustaša, 17 August 1941, 9. ‘Prema ubojicama ne smije biti obzira,’ Hrvatska krajina, 9 July 1941. 52 Žibrat, ‘Ustaška vojnica,’ Ustaški godišnjak, 371. 51 11 Central Europe 10:2, September‐October 2005, 234‐56 drown their destruction. We never feared blood when it was necessary to give it, so we won’t be afraid when we have to take it from them. Blood for blood! 53 For their part, the Ustasha students who were injured in the attack wore their wounds like a badge of honour. A reporter from the leading Ustasha youth journal wrote that the wounded students wore a ‘smile of contentment and happiness, proud that drops of their blood sprinkled the foundations of the new state. Proud of every drop of blood which dripped from their wounds’. 54 In Ustasha Croatia, the ideals of sacrifice and death culminated in many public days of mourning and commemoration. These included a day for the Remembrance of Deceased Croatian Students and a Day for the Remembrance of the Martyrs of Senj, to remember the ten nationalist Crusader youth shot dead by Yugoslav gendarmes in 1937. However, the two most important days of mourning in the new national state were the Day of Remembrance of the Deceased and the Day of the Croatian Martyr. On 1 November each year, the Ustashas commemorated the Day of Remembrance of the Dead. The Day of Remembrance of the Dead was marked by a special radio programme on which actors recited sombre and morbid poetry, such as Stjepko Trontl’s paen to death, ‘An Ustasha Grave’. The Ustashas also made a pilgrimage to the grave of Ante Starčević, the nineteenth-century father of Croatian nationalism, at Šestine as well as the graves of fallen Ustashas and soldiers. In this way, they sought to create a spiritual connection between themselves and Starčević. Yet for the Ustashas, graves in themselves had a mystical power. They believed that they connected the past and the present and that the graves of dead heroes contained the essence of the national spirit. Such graves contained the unseen power to protect the nation. Therefore, ‘whoever honours the dead also cares for the living’. The young nationalist writer, Zlatko Milković, on one such day of commemoration, called graves the ‘beacons on the journey of national liberation’. Indeed, at the graves of dead soldiers, the Ustashas claimed to have felt the call of Croatdom. As one anonymous writer expressed it: ‘We stand on these graves which represent the dead. For us, they represent life. A life which speaks to us about sacrifice, renunciation, the enthusiasm of Croat youth which fell in battle, but which lives on’. 55 It was hardly surprising then that on this day, in 1943, Božidar Kavran declared over the radio that ‘the cult of the dead is the cult of the living’. 56 Yet, if the graves of dead Ustasha martyrs at Šestine were a mystical connection between the living and the dead, then in a certain sense the dead were also stronger than the living since they were ‘bearers of militancy’ who had sacrificed themselves for the sake of later generations. The Day of Remembrance of the Deceased was a day on which to commemorate not just those Ustashas who had died for the State since April 1941, but also those Ustasha warriors who had died before the liberation of Croatia had been achieved. This included not merely those who had been executed under Yugoslavia’s gallows, tortured to death in its prisons or who had blown themselves up with hand grenades to avoid capture by hated Serb gendarmes. Those who had died in exile in ‘sanatoriums in sunny Sicily or on the Isle of Lipari’ were also honoured. In expiring while their nation in the north experienced its own Golgotha, where ‘great drops of rain dripped on to black crosses like the tears of a people and like the tears of a land over the tragedy of Croatia,’ they were denied the yearning to return to the native soil. They were the most tragic of victims since they had died without achieving their aim. 57 Nevertheless, the Ustashas believed that from these dead and restless souls that not only a supernatural force was passed to 53 ‘Ustaška rijeć,’ Hrvatski branik, 9 August 1941. M. Velnić, ‘Uz dogadaj i razgovor s našem ranjenim sveučilištaraca,’ Ustaški mladež, 24 August 1941, 2-3. 55 ‘Hrvatski narod nad grobovima svojih junaka,’ Hrvatski narod, 3 November 1943. 56 ‘Kult mrtvih je kult živih,’ Hrvatski narod, 3 November 1943. 57 P.O., ‘Pred sjenom mučenika na dan mrtvih,’ Ustaša, 2 November 1941, 1. 54 12 Central Europe 10:2, September‐October 2005, 234‐56 the nation like a ‘holy testament’, 58 but that deceased Ustasha martyrs watched over them and their nation. Talking of the sacrifices of Soldin and Hranilović, two nationalist Croatian youths executed in the 1930s for terrorist activities, an article in the Movement’s official journal commented that on the Day of the Dead, at the graves of heroes, they would experience the ‘mystery of martyrdom’ – the feeling that all the dead warriors of the Movement were with them. ‘They are with us in freedom! They are with us in Ustasha Croatia! Our martyrs are with us! They are with us!’ 59 This last slogan became the crie de coeur of all Ustasha funerals, signifying the idea that there was a spiritual legion of Ustashas joined to living ones. If the Day of Remembrance for the Dead commemorated the dynamic sacrifices of the elite warriors of national liberation – the Ustashas – then the Day of Croatian Martyrs brought together the pantheon of Croatian victims who, throughout the centuries, had perished for the right of their homeland to be free and independent. Unlike the Day of Remembrance of the Dead, the date of the Day of the Croatian Martyr had national resonance, falling on 20 June each year – the day Croatian Peasant Party leader, Stjepan Radić, was assassinated in the Yugoslav skupština. The occasion solemnly remembered all those who had struggled for or advocated Croatian independence. All those Croats who had throughout history fought in some way for the idea of an independent Croatia were considered to be national martyrs: King Tomislav who had presided over a ‘golden’ age of the medieval Croatian kingdom, the nobles Nikola Zrinski and Krsto Frankopan who had risen up against Austro-Hungarian rule; the fifteenth-century peasant rebel, Matija Gubec; the assassinated leader of the Croatian Peasant Party, Stjepan Radić and, inevitably, the long list of fallen Ustashas. The nationalist man of letters, Milan Šufflay, murdered by Yugoslav government agents in 1934 was eulogised as their ‘priest and prophet’, a gentleman scholar prepared to sacrifice his own life for the truth, ‘bathe it in his own blood and bloodily give it to the nation, the world and science’. 60 The build-up to the Day of Croatian Martyrs lasted some weeks and the national press purposefully intensified the sense of excitement. On the morning of the first commemoration in 1941, barely three months after the founding of the new state, the leading newspaper in Zagreb produced a commemorative edition. Its front page, framed in black, was dominated by a the portrait of the slain Radić. Stressing the importance of suffering to the redemptive act of an independent resurrected Croatia, its editorial wrote: There is no force which can defeat ideals behind which stand shed tears, spilt blood, behind which stand the graves of martyrs. The graves scream, they roar! The rich gallery of all our martyrs from Petar Svačić to Stjepan Radić and Petar Kvaternik, the bones of all our martyrs have been consecrated and offered up to the Croat earth, the Croat nation, to our seas, our forests, our fields, rivers, lakes, vines, our olive trees and groves. The nation celebrates them and carries their own memories of them in their hearts. Matija Gubec, Zrinski and Frankopan and Šufflay searching for sun and exhaling air in the seconds before the criminals’ batons fell on his cranium. The Ustasha Begović, like a lover, writing verses to Croatia on the last night before his death!! Soldin, Rošić, Hranilović and Oreb under the gallows chanting for Croatia. In their stupidity, Croatia’s enemies executed her sons, creating new martyrs, strengthening her [….] Croatia, with such divine victims, had to succeed. Now we ask: how could anyone doubt the fanaticism of the Poglavnik, as he believed in Croatia, seeing such beauty, so many sacrifices and young lives laid on the altar of the Homeland?? 61 On the day itself, all shops and businesses were closed and draped with black flags to signify mourning, as was the national cemetery of Mirigoj; flowers were placed on the 58 B.U., ‘Vriednost ustaških žrtava,’ Ustaša, 2 November 1941, 2. P.O., ‘Dva mučenika, dva junaka,’ Ustaša, 2 November 1941, 5. 60 Grga Pejnović, ‘Dr Milan Šufflay,’ Ustaški godišnjak, 2: 1943, 65-70; P.O., ‘Šufflay – naš žrec i vidovnjak,’ Ustaša, 2 November 1941, 7. 61 ‘Sveti dan hrvatskoga naroda,’ Hrvatski narod, 20 June 1941. 59 13 Central Europe 10:2, September‐October 2005, 234‐56 catafalque at Zrenjevac. At nine o’clock a memorial service was held for all Croatia’s martyrs at Saint Stephen’s Cathedral. Prominent positions in the Cathedral were given to relatives of recently deceased martyrs, such as the widow and children of Stjepan Radić, as well as the families of Ustasha martyrs such as Matija Soldin and Marko Hranilović. After the service at the Kapitol, relatives then walked in a procession, accompanied by high State officials, youth groups and leading novelists, poets and artists to Mirigoj to visit the graves of the fallen. These were draped in black cloth and adorned with wreaths. 62 The day was potent with sombre imagery: the procession to the cemetery was lined along the route by rapt and weeping Croatian citizens dressed in black funereal clothes, signifying that the nation was in mourning for the oppression and suffering of the past; the walk up the steep hill to the cemetery at Mirigoj by state officials demonstrated, despite their power, not only their humility and admiration in the face of such historical fortitude, but also that they came from the masses and were one with them; the presence of youth, meanwhile, affected to show that the bloody Calvary of Croatian martyrs had not been in vain and had guaranteed a renewed independent and youthful Croatia. It was also designed to reinforce the fact that youth were the new martyrs and saviours of the nation, dying for Croatia and, in so doing, honouring the tribulations of their illustrious ancestors. On the first commemoration of the Day of the Croatian Martyr, the Minister of Religion and Education, the novelist, Mile Budak, made a pilgrimage at Mirigoj to the graves of all the students and young men who had ‘died in the flower of their youth’ for a free Croatia in inter-war Yugoslavia. 63 However, the prominence of youth in this day of national mourning was also meant to signify that the youth would not just emulate the deeds of their forefathers, but that the spirit of their forefathers would also enter them. If the conduct of the younger generation was the greatest tribute to the living souls of the dead, the obeisance and honour paid them by the masses also meant that they could now be at rest: The graves of all the martyred dead Croats throughout the Independent State of Croatia are pacified, the graves of all those heroes who with their sacrifices, their bones, which rotted in the many prisons, cells, fields and woods where they lost their lives, have built the firm foundations of a free Croatia and the Croat nation are convinced that not one sacrifice is too great and even one’s life if it is needed to create the foundations of the future happiness of one’s own people. The souls of Matija Gubec, Petar Zrinski, Eugen Kvaternik as well as all other legendary figures and warriors for freedom through the centuries have been pacified. Their graves are sacred altars of precious Croat blood […] The history of the Croat people in this struggle has been written with the most precious gift of a people and a nation, in blood from which has emerged the new souls of Croat heroes, warriors and steely temperaments. 64 Some historians have argued that fascism was not merely a secular religion transfixed by the accoutrements of death and martyrdom, but that it possesses necrophiliac tendencies. Maria Antonietta Macchiocci, for example, argued that fascism eulogised death in order to channel the sexual instincts in both men and women into the state and the nation. The author believed that in the fascist state both men and women represented aspects of death: the man as violent avenger, fated to kill and die on the battlefield and the woman as grieving widow or mother of the dead fascist warrior. 65 However, throughout history, as Norman Cohn pointed out in his seminal studies from the 1960s and 1970s, utopian and radical movements have used the imagery of apocalypse and religious fervour to 62 ‘Dan hrvatskih mučenika,’ Hrvatski narod, 21 June 1941. ‘Dan hrvatskih mučenika,’ Hrvatski narod, 21 June 1941. 64 ‘Dan hrvatskoga mučenika,’ Hrvatski narod, 21 June 1941. 65 Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi, ‘Female Sexuality in Fascist Ideology,’ Feminist Review, 1: 1979, 67-81. 63 14 Central Europe 10:2, September‐October 2005, 234‐56 promote loyalty amongst their followers. 66 The Ustashas’ obsession with death and corpses, to the extent that it was not drawn from the violent conditions of the period between 1941 and 1945, was deeply influenced by Balkan ritualistic attitudes towards death. It could be argued that the Ustashas’ rituals of burial and commemoration represented a form of ‘village Catholicism’, in which local pagan customs combined with Roman Catholic traditions. 67 Although most Ustashas, with some notable exceptions, were not devoutly religious or pious in the manner of the Hlinka Guard and the Legion of the Archangel Michael, their nationalism was similarly mystical and exhibited strongly religious characteristics. The rural Catholic upbringing of the majority of their members informed their outlook and there is little doubt that many of the Ustashas' death rites and cults mirrored traditional Catholicism. The belief that the soul did not die but lived on echoed the Roman Catholic idea of purgatory; meanwhile, the suffering of Ustasha soldiers alluded to the notion that before entering the Kingdom of God, believers had first to suffer for their sins. The fixation with corpses replicated the viewing of the dead body during the days of the wake. In 1942, the young Croatian legionary Pero Kojaković died at Stalingrad. A posthumously celebrated writer of poetry that eulogised death and the paraphernalia of dying, his last letter to his wife, later published in the Movement’s leading theoretical journal, had been written, he claimed, on ‘the day of my death’. Prior to becoming a legionary, the deeply pious Kojaković had been a militant member of the radical rightist Catholic youth group, the Crusaders, in the 1930s and had once attempted to assassinate the pro-Yugoslav Ban of Croatia, Ivan Šubašić. The Crusaders, who combined extreme nationalism with a belief in intense moral piety, believed that an independent Croatia would be useless without a return to the values of Godliness. When Kojaković perished in 1942, not merely his death, but also his corpse was imagined and visualised by members of his Catholic youth organisation. One young Crusader, referring to the fatalistic letter Kojaković had left for his wife, commented: I thought about this letter for a long time. And in my soul the dead crusader Pero Kojaković appeared. I saw him. He is lying in a bunker. Dead, pallid, stiff. His lips can no longer speak, his heart has stopped beating. He has died. 68 He had died as a ‘crusader, a Catholic and an apostle’ for Croatia. Other young Catholics also made a fetish of the corpses of dead comrades. Another Crusader, looking back at a graduation ceremony for pre-1941 students of Archbishop Ivan Šarić's notoriously nationalist Sarajevo Gymnasium, celebrated all the ‘young clear and smiling’ youths who had fallen for the Movement, ‘dead, their bones buried in dark Bosnian forests, their graves forgotten and unknown, covered in moss’. 69 One of the most startling aspects of the Ustashas’ death cult was their practice of selfmutilation and suicide. Most, if not all, fascist movements appropriated the language of sacrifice, daring and recklessness and the imagery of suffering, death and martyrdom; however, with the exception of the Romanian Iron Guard, in few fascist movements was the mutilation of the body or suicide celebrated as a heroic act of resistance. Benito Mussolini, for example, wrote in 1932 that although the fascist soldier possessed a ‘fighting spirit that accepts all risks’, scrawling the Squadristi motto ‘Me ne frego!’ [I don’t 66 See, for example, Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Elect: Revolutionary Millenarianism and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (London: Temple Smith, 1970). 67 On village Catholicism, see, for example, Marju Torp-Kõivupuu, ‘The Transformation of the Death Cult over Time: The Example of the Burial Customs in the Historic Võruuma County,’ Folklore, 22: 1, 2003, 1023-1064. 68 ‘Kad križar umire,’ Nedjelja, 13 December 1942. 69 Dragica Peško, ‘Naš nacionalizam,’ Katolički tjednik, 30 July 1944. 15 Central Europe 10:2, September‐October 2005, 234‐56 give a damn!] on the bandages of his festering wounds, he still ‘accepts and loves life and despises suicide as cowardly’. 70 Yet, as Stipe Devčić’s decision in 1932 to burn himself alive rather than risk capture demonstrated, this became, officially at least, a sacred duty of the Ustasha warrior. This was reflected in both popular literature of the era and journalistic propaganda. In both, the moment of death was described with contemplative pleasure. In October 1942, for example, a leading Bosnian Muslim newspaper reported that a second lieutenant, Mustafa Kavazanović, had perished by blowing himself up rather than allow himself to fall into the hands of the Chetnik enemy. All his enemies found, the newspaper reported, were bits of his dead body scattered across the battlefield. He had perished like a real Croat. 71 In the same edition, a poem by his sister commemorated his death in graphic detail: ‘And while bombs your dear body/ blew to bits, with your book of commands/ the enemies curse at the burned documents/ and your comrades follow the fountainhead of your blood.’ 72 In another report, published after the death of Colonel Jure Francetić, it was reported that one of his young legionaries blew himself up with a hand grenade to save the life of his beloved commander, his body blown to bits and his limbs and entrails strewn in all directions. That these stories were not simply apocryphal but reflected a degree of reality is suggested by the numerous short stories written by anonymous and named soldiers about comrades who had made precisely such a sacrifice. The motivation for recourse to such a drastic action was not always clear: in some stories it was explained that the decision to end one’s life rather than fall into the hands of the enemy was a command of the Movement; at the same time, these accounts usually emphasised the personal element of choice in the decision of many intrepid Ustashas to embark on dangerous missions, knowing perfectly well their lives were doomed. For example, one anonymous Ustasha soldier wrote of his comrade, Captain B: Using every last inch of his might, he shot the last bullet from his gun and collapsed behind the tree. Already, the first bandits were approaching. He took the hand grenade out of his rucksack, beat it on the tree and pushed it under his shirt…When the first bandits, approached him, he pulled out the trigger. None of the documentation that could help them would fall into the hands of the bandits. Ustasha captain B. had performed his last duty…The moon again hid behind the clouds. Everywhere there was peace and tranquillity, only the tall silvery black spruces billowing high in the air. 73 Meanwhile, in Corporal Krešimir Golik's short story, the author recounts the story of a group of embattled Ustashas holding out in a wooden cabin against superior Partisan arms. Surrounded on all sides, their situation is surely hopeless and the sensible thing to do would be to surrender and hope for compassionate treatment at their hands of their victorious foe. This is not an option for Ustashas, who, as the title of the story tells us, never surrender. Faced with such an impossible decision, one Ustasha in particular knows what is expected of him. Arming himself with hand grenades, he decides to blow himself and the enemy to smithereens in order to save his men. ‘You know that total destruction awaits you. I can't allow it!’ his commander protests. ‘Commander,’ he replies, ‘you must allow it! This is the only way of life for all of us!’ The reader learns that, as the Ustasha sets off to meet his death, ‘in the black night, his eyes shone with pride at having made the ultimate sacrifice’. 74 70 Benito Mussolini, ‘Fascismo,’ Encliclopedia Italiana, 849. ‘Kako gine Hrvate,’ Osvit, 19 October 1942. 72 Asija Cemerlić-Kavazanović, ‘Spomen junačkom bratu, Mustafi Kavazanović,’ Osvit, 19 October 1942. 73 Anon., ‘Zadnja usluga,’ Ustaške se vojske diže… (Zagreb: Odgojni odjel ministarstva oružanih snaga, 1944), 21. 74 Krešimir Golik, ‘Jer ustaša živ ne predaje,’ Ustaša, 17 January 1942, 5. 71 16 Central Europe 10:2, September‐October 2005, 234‐56 Death, Annihilation, Youth: The Black Legion in the Popular Imagination Golik’s tale combined the Ustasha values of male comradeship and death on the battlefield. Few, if any, Ustasha militias combined these values in such an extreme manner as the young men of Francetić's Black Legion, both in their own actions and words and those that wrote about. The biographer of the Legion was a well-known nationalist poet, Ivo Balentović. He spent months living with the Legionaries in eastern Bosnia, witnessing their brutal ‘cleansing’ operations against Serbs in the Romanija and Kozara regions. Balentović's biography, hugely popular at the time, eulogised the fanaticism and violence of the Black Legionaries. In one passage, he talked of them as legions of invincible youth whose ‘bravery glitters in their eyes’. He recalled one young Legionary kissing his gun and telling him that his gun had now become his mother. Another poet, Gabrijel Cvitan, who travelled with Francetić’s Legionaries, talked of the ‘clear faces and proud gait’ of the men he met. 75 Francetić himself was portrayed not just as a legendary hero and commander: he was also the father of his Legionaries. For his part, he regularly referred to them as his children and they referred to him as their father. For one group of young Bosnian Muslim legionaries interviewed by a journalist after his death, he was ‘our mother and father […] No one can express what he meant to us’. 76 According to Balentović, he wanted only young men in his Legion and would only rarely accept men past the age of eighteen. As a father, he brought them up with tender love and never raised his voice or hand to them. In the famous story of the Legionary who blew himself up to save his commander, in the heat of battle, after Francetić refused to countenance it, Marko, the Legionary, is alleged to have said: ‘As my father, I order you to allow me to do this!’ Having blown himself up with a hand grenade, and scattered his remains over the battlefield, Francetić cried out in anguish: ‘I have lost a son!’ 77 Yet, in contrast to this familial image, Balentović’s reportage was imbued with constant visions of nightmare and fantasies of annihilation. Writing of the Legion’s battles in the Romanija Mountains, he remembered ‘bloody Romanija. Foća in flames, in blood.’ 78 Like other writers, he also presented disturbing images of dead bodies. ‘Edhem is dead,’ he wrote of one Legionary. ‘The snow has blossomed red cloves of his blood. Edhem was killed. In my dreams, I see his clear blue eyes […] Dead eyes, a dead man. A dead comrade.’ 79 As a death squad, the main image presented of the Black Legion was inevitably of a merciless legion of elite youths bringing annihilation to those trying to destroy Croatia. Francetić liked to say that his Legionary sons had made the ‘fanatical decision’ to scorn everything they valued, 'including their own lives’ for the attainment of Croatian liberation and the extermination of the enemy. 80 Appropriately, some nationalist writers revelled in the violence of this death squad. Ismet Zunić, a young Muslim writer who was a fervent supporter of the regime, presciently predicted the extermination of the Serbs of Romanija in the same month the Legion mounted their infamous campaign of mass murder in that region. Writing in the youth journal, Ustaška mladež (The Ustasha Youth), in April 1942, he vowed that every trace of their ‘alien’ nature would be 75 Gabrijel Cvitan, ‘Bilježke s puta po Podravinu,’ Nova Hrvatska, 30 July 1944. ‘Al’ Bog šalje po izbor junaka iz Otoćca, grada kamenoga…,’ Nova Hrvatska, 3 April 1943. 77 As reported in ‘“Izgubio sam sina!”’ Hrvatski narod, 1 April 1943. 78 Ivo Balentović, ‘Godišnjica borbe i uspjeha,’ Crna legija: odredi nepobjedive mladosti (Zagreb: Ustaška mladež, 1942), 65-66. 79 Balentović, ‘Borbe u snijegu i leda,’ Crna legija, 11. 80 ‘Uništavanje četničkih banda u Bosni - izjava ustaškog bojnika Jure Francetića,’ Nova Hrvatska, 23 December 1941. 76 17 Central Europe 10:2, September‐October 2005, 234‐56 ‘suffocated and annihilated’. The ‘Legion of dragons of the purest Croatian blood’, led by Francetić, were preparing a burial for the ‘Great Serbian bloodsuckers’ in which the ‘whizzing sound of Ustasha guns’ would be their ‘funeral requiem’. 81 Other writers painted an equally fearsome image. ‘Like a black ghost on winter snow,’ one article began, ‘the Black Legion went upright, decisively, heroically, disdaining death and all its enemies who began to throw away their rifles and retreat into the forest in the hope that this would save them from the annihilation of the Ustashas.’ 82 Describing the notorious Legionary massacre in the Romanija Mountains, in which thousands of Serbs had been massacred, another report wrote of the ‘legion of youth’ ‘cleansing their souls’ in the midst of battle by annihilating the enemy as grenades ‘sang songs of death’. 83 The Black Legion was a deeply mythologised death squad in a State obsessed by the concept of death and dying and even its most ordinary characteristics were saddled with layers of morbid meaning. Its black uniforms, from which it derived its name, were said to have been chosen in commemoration of the fact that the first to join the Legion had been Muslim youths whose parents had been massacred by Serb Chetniks and Communists. In fact, the black uniforms were not a manifestation of mourning, but a reflection of the shortage of any other available fabric at that time. Nonetheless, like many mythic symbols in the State, the Black Legion was the subject of many poems and plays which perpetuated its violent and heroic image. In one epic poem about the Legion written by Mijo and Jure Matić, the perfidious enemies of the Legion, a ‘black legion of angels’, are decimated by the Legionaries and their dead pulled away on carts. Simultaneously, the Matić brothers also highlighted the self-sacrificing nature of the legionaries. They described how the youths went to their deaths, singing, as they marched through the streets of Sarajevo. 84 Unsurprisingly, Križanac, the young Legionary bard, gloried in the destructive but ‘righteous’ power of the Legionaries. He wrote with pride of the actions of the Legionaries in Serb villages such as Bratunac where ‘all the criminals that were there/ lost their lives’. As the Ustashas stride towards the mystical River Drina, ‘the criminals fall like funeral wreaths’. 85 However, the poet also discusses the inevitable martyred deaths of young Legionaries, a subject given added resonance by the fact that the writer himself would soon be dead, and, in fact, like Kojaković, only find fame after his death. ‘And now grass grows on the graves/ of our young Ustasha heroes/ God, let them always in death give/ us strength and happy progress!’ 86 As Križanac’s verse suggests, the Black Legion also provoked morbid verse commemorating their sacrifices in battle. One of the most fêted poems of 1944 was Vladimir Jurčić’s, ‘Vjećna Straža’ (The Eternal Sentry), a mystical melancholy poem about the afterlife of dead Legionaries. The duty of the Black Legion was officially to protect the eastern borders at the shores of the River Drina from savage Serb hordes. In his poem, Jurčić imagines the Drina as the watery grave of Black Legionaries, a place where ‘dead brothers swim and dream’ and ‘dead units secretly meet’ and embrace. As a mausoleum, the Drina is not quiet, however. As they hear the weeping and wailing of oppressed Croats from the shore, the Legionaries, the eternal border guards, awake from their slumbers. ‘O, roar Drina, yell!’ the poet implores, for the ‘blood of martyrs’ and the ‘gift of dead murdered brothers’. In Jurčić’s imagination, the murmurs, rushes and 81 Ismet Zunić,’ Južni Hrvati u oslobodjenoj domovine,’ Ustaška mladež, 26 April 1942, 4-5. 'Podignut će si opet novi dom u kojem znam da ću živjeti sretnije i zadovljnije nego što sam živio prije..,' Hrvatski narod, 2 July 1942. 83 ‘Borbom i pjesnom ustaška vojnica izpisuje najljepše stranice hrvatske oslobodilacke borbe,’ Hrvatski narod, 12 March 1943. 84 Mijo and Jure Matić, ‘Borba ustaškog pukovnika Jure Francetića,’ Borba ustaškog pukovnika Jure Francetića i njegove Crne legije s odmetnicama u Bosni i Hercegovini (Zagreb: Merkantile, 1942), 5, 8. 85 Križanac, Junačka djela Jure vitez Francetića u stihovima, 25-26, 45. 86 Križanac, Junačka djela Jure vitez Francetića u stihovima, 50. 82 18 Central Europe 10:2, September‐October 2005, 234‐56 gurgles of the River are the sounds of the dead Legionaries arising from their graves – ‘ardent, powerful, booming’ - to defend the homeland. ‘In savage strength and in eternal yearning’, the Legionaries arise to fight again and the ‘murmur of the eternal Drina; blood and a voice from the depths/ leads others there to the sentries of the Homeland’. 87 Jurčić’s vision of a brotherhood of Legionaries reflected the ideal of a community of Spartan warriors in the Movement as a whole. However, within the Legion, the bonds of friendship were portrayed as being particularly intense, not least because few commanders possessed such an aura of charisma and fanaticism as Francetić. As the leader of the Legion, he was the subject of a number of poems, plays and novels, many of which reflected the violent and extreme existence of the Legion. One of the most powerful and intimate pictures of the Legionary commander emerged from the pen of Branko Klarić, the mystical Catholic writer. On the occasion of Francetić’s passing in April 1943, Klarić wrote an emotional and intense ode to him which experimented with unsettling necrophiliac imagery. For the poet, the grave of Francetić – ‘my Ustasha, my brother, my hero, dear son, darling one, the only one’ - is not just a ‘black fist of earth’, but the grave of a hero. The native earth, he writes, ‘glistened/ with your fertile blood (like with young wine).’ He envisages all the nation gathered under the birch tree in a pilgrimage to his grave, imploring him to return, ‘our best, our first, our greatest’. The poet promises to do the same. Yet his will be an intimate journey. In the ‘late and lonely hours’, he will visit Francetić’s grave, ‘so close, near to you/ and I will tell you all the thoughts of my heart,/ and never will wilt the blooming flowers/ which are fed by warm, young, strong blood’. 88 ‘Comrade, we will fearlessly follow you!’ Obituaries, Letters and Other Communication with the Dead Like Klarić, the warriors of the Ustasha Movement were destined to not only annihilate the ‘disgusting and nauseating enemy’ but, as the obituaries and eulogies of Croatian soldiers stated, also to embrace death. 89 This need to confront death transcended all layers of society in Croatia, however. The Ustasha youth, who must have been aware that they too might be called up for action and confronted daily by the consequences of war and conflict, wrote about death regularly. Luka Puljiz, for example, dedicated a poem to a group of Ustasha youth comrades who had fallen in battle against the Partisans - listing the names of ten young men. 90 In many youth poems, death was treated as a living phenomenon as it was in other institutions in the State. In Alojzije Lutz’s poem, death must be welcomed by youth dressed in ‘festive clothes,/ when it knocks on our door at midnight,/ we offer it joyful hands/ as if greeting a beloved brother/ who has returned from a long journey’. He advises his comrades: ‘Lift up your beaming face,/ look it straight in the eye,/ because death is only the inverse of life.’ 91 In common with their belief that dead martyrs were immortal, the Ustashas aimed to talk to the dead. In fact, a common theme of rousing Ustasha poetry was the motif of the brave young Ustasha speaking from beyond the grave to his family or comrades. In Vinko Nikolić's celebrated poem about Maria Hranilović visiting the grave of her son, Marko, he tells her not to weep at his death but to use his martyrdom as a means to 87 Vladimir Jurčić, ‘Vječna straža,’ Hrvatski narod, 26 June 1944. Branko Klarić, ‘Ustaši koji je pao,’ Hrvatski narod, 4 April 1943. 89 Vlado Geocfić, ‘Borimo i ginemo za Hrvatsku,’ Hrvatski vojnik, 25 January 1945, 2. 90 Luka Puljiz, ‘Stari me putovi zovu,’ Naraštaj slobode, 10 April 1944, 5. 91 Alojzije Lutz, ‘Dolazak smrti,’ Ustaška mladež, 16 August 1942, 3. 88 19 Central Europe 10:2, September‐October 2005, 234‐56 inspire new generation of young Croat men to fight for independence. Similar was Gabrijel Cvitan's poem about Kozara, which had been transformed from the site of a true grisly Ustasha massacre of Serbs into a mythic tale of the heroism and suffering of the Ustasha martyr. In Cvitan’s poem, a mother searches amongst the Ustasha graves of Kozara for her son and when she finds it, he tells her and his sister not to weep but to be proud that he died a hero for the Homeland. 92 Vladimir Jurčić, meanwhile, wrote a poem to a fallen Ustasha friend, Dane. ‘Dane, my Dalmatian son,’ he wrote to the dead youth as if he were alive, could return to Croatia because ‘everything that was bloody and alien/ now has gone and will not return!’ 93 Such literary manifestations of the belief that the living could communicate with the dead was mirrored by members of the Ustasha Movement in the letters and ‘living’ obituaries published in journals and newspapers. When Francetić perished in 1943, his legionaries wrote letters to him which were published in the Sarajevean press. They expressed the belief that he was still with them and remained their commander. Speeches were publicly recited by his comrades, asking him to watch over them and Croatia. Soldiers who were not members of the Black Legion also called on his help. Corporal Antun Bojčić inveighed his comrades to embrace death, asking them: ‘Let hateful foreigners take this land!?/ No! You will annihilate them! The spirit of Jure leads us…’ 94 However, the Black Legion was hardly exceptional in this regard since throughout the Movement, members were communicating with the deceased. When the Ustasha youth, Omer Jahić, fell in action in 1944 for the Ustasha army, his comrade, Miljenko Barbarić, wrote to him through the pages of a youth journal the following posthumous letter: Could you ever imagine when we sat on the rails of the promenade in Mostar and quietly hummed the latest songs, that I would one day write this posthumous letter, our Omer! Could we ever imagine that we would be able to see your ever clear face one day only in pictures and remember it only in memories! But the laws of fate and the dictates of Providence are merciless and we cannot negate them…You are the newest, bloody and glistening rose, a rose of a great martyred wreath which our suffering city is placing at the base of the sacrificial altar of love for the Homeland. In the cradle, you were swung by sharp craggy mountains, they told you about the glory of our ancestors and the heroism of Your forebears. And you listened to the scream of victorious tempests and the voice of your own agitated blood and when the moment of vengeance came, the moment of battle and the settling of accounts, you hurried joyfully with a victorious cry to the streams, the rivers of young soldiers in the Ustasha Army to show with your labour, blood and sword how to love, fight and perish for the Homeland. And you didn’t return from your last heroic undertaking. In the fog-covered mountains of high Slavonia, they jealously guard your bones, they jealously talk about the last bloody storm of the Ustashas, of warriors and heroes, they tell old and wretched tales about your last steps, the last thing you saw, our unforgettable Omer! 95 In much the same manner, a member of the student militia, the Poglavnik Body Guard, remembering his young commanding officer, Božidar Baća, wrote this letter to a national newspaper: Božidar, we stand full of determination to continue the journey which we set out on together with You! You showed us the ending because Fate had chosen You and You didn't cry and whine but you accepted it for yourself […] Božidar, we are proud of you and are not crying because tears would take away the strength to ascend the rugged and magnificent path of your heroic journey. Your death echoes with the voice of victorious fanfare and fills us with an indescribable fervour to never become tired! We will 92 Vinko Nikolić, ‘Ustaška majka,’ Ustaša, 30 May 1943, 1; Petar Grgec, 'Plebescit za hrvatsku državu u narodnim pjesama,’ Nova Hrvatska, 25 June 1944. 93 Vladimir Jurčić, ‘Naraštaj slobode,’ Naraštaj slobode, 1 April 1942, 13. 94 Antun Bojčić, ‘Borčima,’ Hrvatski vojnik, 22 February 1945, 1. 95 Miljenko Barbarić, ‘Ustaši Omeru Jahiću,’ Ustaška mladež, 10 April 1944, 3. 20 Central Europe 10:2, September‐October 2005, 234‐56 fearlessly follow you! Today this will of ours is stronger than ever! Thank you Božidar! From now on, you lead and we will never betray you! Your Ustasha comrades! 96 These are only two examples of the kinds of way in which members of the Movement were communicating with the dead between 1941 and 1945; however, the practice was quite extensive. It appears that by talking and writing to the dead through obituaries, letters, odes and eulogies, living members of the Ustasha Movement hoped to affirm that the sacrifices they had made for their independent state had not been in vain and thus, by implication, neither would future sacrifices. As the above letters suggest, the desire and the compulsion for the living to communicate with the dead seems to have become more acute the more perilous the position of the State became and the more members of the Movement that perished. It perhaps reflected the fact that if they could not save themselves, a mystical legion of the dead could. This in turn was evidence of the Ustashas’ image of themselves as persecuted and self-sacrificing martyrs whose actions were divine, heavenly, and certainly morally irreproachable. By 10 April 1945, the situation of the State was critical and within a month it would collapse. It was on 10 April that the highest state honour – the Medal of the Crown of King Zvonimir – was traditionally awarded. The medal was named after the medieval Croatian king whose betrayal at the hands of his nobles had led to an eternal curse being placed on Croatia. On the solemn fourth anniversary of the State, the most prominent and fêted recipients that year were not living heroes, but dead national martyrs, all ‘victims’ of the Yugoslav regime – Ivan Rošić, Milan Šufflay, Marko Hranilović and Stipe Javor. With them, the deceased Black Legion commander, Francetić, was named head of the Ustasha military. From that moment on, Croatia – and not merely a legion - was effectively to be led by a dead man. Conclusion The ideology of the Croatian Ustasha Movement was intimately connected with death: it informed its identity, its view of the nation, the behaviour of its members, its aesthetic tastes and its rhetoric. Few, if any, historians of the Ustasha Movement in post-war Communist Yugoslavia (or, for that matter, in the West) disputed the fact that the Ustashas were inextricably linked to death. Yet, for them, the Ustashas’ embrace of death was expressed in its campaign of genocide against Serbs, Jews and gypsies; as far as they were concerned, the only martyrs were those murdered by the Movement and the only sacrifices were made by those who fell in the anti-fascist struggle against the Ustashas and their supporters. However, the Ustashas’ fixation with death did not stop at their campaign of genocide. On the contrary, their propaganda and literature as well as their private and public modes of communication such as obituaries and letters demonstrate their attachment to a chiliastic cult of death in which the ideal Ustasha would be both cold-blooded killer and a fearless sacrificial martyr. Indeed, the cult of death was necessary to legitimise the cult of violence and mobilise support for it. If the best sons of Croatia were laying their lives on the altar of the Homeland, victims of bestial enemies, who could oppose their life and death struggle against the enemy within, even if it meant mass extermination? Although the Ustashas believed that the suffering and death of their young warriors made effective propaganda, the cult of death was surely more than utilitarian expediency. The writings and correspondence of soldiers as well as the Movement’s novelists and 96 Drug iz borbe, ‘Ustaški poručnik PTS-a Božidar Baća pao na polju časti i slave,’ Nova Hrvatska, 18 January 1944. 21 Central Europe 10:2, September‐October 2005, 234‐56 poets suggest that it was a deeply and fervently-held ideology. Moreover, the cult of death was not one simply propagated by and for the activists of the Movement or its cultural commissars. The mass ceremonies and rituals of the State such as the Day of the Croatian Martyr, drawing on Croatia’s rich and traumatic history, allowed the masses to participate in mystical commemorations of death, mourning and burial. With such displays of national solidarity and pietism did the Ustashas aim to bring the masses closer to their regime. That these days of mourning and memory were so well attended and so strictly observed suggests that their endeavours were not entirely futile. Of course, the Ustashas were far from being the only nationalist movement in inter-war Europe fixated by death. However, with the exception of the Iron Guard, perhaps no other fascist movement elevated death to such commanding heights as the Ustashas; certainly, no other fascist movement was as violent. Its litany of martyrs, saints and spiritual legions were a testament to their fantasies of annihilation. While the terroristic violence and murderous rage of the Ustashas is undeniable, their attachment to dying and sacrificing themselves was equally as pervasive. Without sacrifice and suffering, the Ustashas could not legitimise their apocalyptic visions of destruction; without their cult of both the dead and death itself, they could not inaugurate the spiritual and cultural rebirth of the nation they so desired. And without such a rebirth, their nation, they believed, was doomed to extinction. For the Ustashas, their deaths, as well as the slaughter of their enemies, were necessary for the salvation and cleansing of the nation. By dying and by killing, they were giving birth to a new nation and a new race of warrior men. It is only by trying to comprehend the Ustashas’ desire to die that their urge to kill can be understood. 22

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Cults of Death and Fantasies of Annihilation: The Croatian Ustasha Movement in Power, 1941–45

Cults of Death and Fantasies of Annihilation: The Croatian Ustasha Movement in Power, 1941–45

Cults of Death and Fantasies of Annihilation: The Croatian Ustasha Movement in Power, 1941–45

Cults of Death and Fantasies of Annihilation: The Croatian Ustasha Movement in Power, 1941–45

Cults of Death and Fantasies of Annihilation: The Croatian Ustasha Movement in Power, 1941–45

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