Ante Pavelic and Independent State of Croacia

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Death Be Not Proud
T his is the third time I have attempted to
write an introductory text for Degenerate 5.
For some reason, it has never been more
difficult to find a few simple words to
encapsulate all that has occured, both in my
life and in the world, since the last issue appeared.
This issue, the reader may recall, was intended to be a study of
degeneracy on the island of Hispaniola, from the arrival of
Columbus to the departure of Baby Doc Duvalier. We’d have a good
laugh at self-proclaimed emperors, voodoo priests and Catholic
priests, discoverers and conquerors and, most of all, destroyers.
Then I made a trip to Haiti, which was quite possibly the best
thing that could have happened for me—and the worst that could
have happened to Degenerate 5. I fell in love—a deep passionate
love for a people, a marvelous landscape, and a way of life which seems
dictated less by the former than the latter. My notes for a grand study of
Haitian degeneracy shriveled away to insignificance. It’s hard to laugh at the
coyote falling off a cliff after you’ve shared a dirty jar of clarin with him.
So I narrowed my focus—always a challenge, as readers of the two volumes
of Degenerate 4 know—to a man named Sonthonax, the world’s first race trai-
tor, who abolished slavery in Haiti while on assignment there during the
French Revolution. This article may still appear, so I don’t want to bitch it too
much, but given its length and scope (covering more than 200 years of social histo-
ry in the Carribean), I decided to put it on hold until I could figure out just what it
was I wanted to do with it. For now, it’s on the Degenerate website at
http://www.diacritica.com/degenerate/.
So it comes to this. I’m not sure what brought me to
consider Ante Pavelic as a subject for Degenerate—nor
what took me so long to write about him. He was the
leader of the ephemeral Independent State of Croatia,
created in the wake of Nazi aggression in World War II.
His rule was so violent and so exceptionally brutal that
Pavelic became a personification for evil to everyone touched by his presence, including sev-
eral high-ranking Nazis. Pavelic’s Italian allies—patrons during his fugitive exile before the
war—were forced to aid and protect his enemies, not out of the goodness of Mussolini’s
heart but from a reflexive instinct of outraged humanity.
Unlike most high-ranking Nazis and their chief quislings (including the man who gave
the gaggle of lackeys their name, Scandanavian collaborator Vidkun Quisling), Ante Pavelic
eluded justice after the war, becoming the world’s most wanted—yet least pursued—war
criminal. There is an obvious echo with current events, with the horrible carnage of
September 11th, 2001 in New York City and the alleged mastermind behind it.
Nevertheless, I felt the need to divorce the narrative from present realities. If you’ve
missed an issue of Diacritica Press’ Balkan tabloid Sobaka, here’s the scoop: Balkanoids are
pretty sensitive about this history thing. Most Croats will freely admit that Pavelic was
insane. But with political realities being what they are, they are often inclined to compare
him with more recent Balkan despots like Milosevic—who was known, of course, for killing
lots of Croats. The whole routine is a game of psychic ping-pong that I tried to avoid in my
story as well as my life. I hope I succeeded.
Cali Ruchala
November, 2001
The Scene of the
Crime ever underestimate the power of
kitsch. It compels some men to open
their souls and separates fools from
the burden of their wallets. And
though I felt a strong desire to stay in
Split and kick up a tsunami on
Croatia’s famed beaches, the sea
chantey of kitsch has some power over
me as well. When the opportunity
arose I simply could not pass up a chance to wallow in Bosnia’s
most famous tourist trap, the Holy City of Medjugorje.
Medjugorje exists at the intersection of gullibility, theatri-
cality and blunt, brutal nationalism. In 1981, six local children
had a sighting of the Virgin Mary. They told their elders, and the
most common manifestation of kitsch—religious merchandis-
ing—flooded this backwater, causing Croatia’s edgy Communists
a good deal of consternation.
Care for the cult of Our Lady of Medjugorje was taken up
by the local Croatian clergy. They are mostly Franciscans, but
Franciscans of a peculiar, Balkan variety. Balkan Franciscans have
jettisoned most of Francis of Assisi’s maxims about love for all liv-
ing creatures, replacing his hymns to spiders and squirrels with
romantic rhapsodies about the beauty of all things Croatian. To
ancient slaughters they helped themselves with both hands. In the
more recent war, their activity was limited to blessing troops and
tanks and Croatianizing the wide swathes of torched, empty
houses left in their wake.
Enter gullible (and rich) Americans. Spread through the
tentacles of the Croatian émigré community, word of the
Madonna sightings and the ten secret messages entrusted to her
six pre-pubescent witnesses brought an avalanche of salvation

seekers rolling in from Mexican villages where they begged for
redemption from a likeness of Christ burned into a taco. The
Vatican adopted its usual ambiguous attitude as to the legitimacy
of the apparitions, but it hardly mattered. Even the Archbishop of
Split claimed the Virgin of Medjugorje had healed his poor eye-
sight. The architects of Greater Croatia squealed with glee as
Hercegovina, that sparse suffix, was separated from Bosnia and
attached by sacred ties to the Vaterland.
But I must confess: it wasn’t just the intangible lure of
kitsch that pulled me into a motor coach across the barren
Dalmatian hinterland to Medjugorje. Being an equal-opportuni-
ty cynic, I wanted a chance to make
fun of Catholics. Croatians had an
easy time in the PR battles of the
Bosnian Civil War. Serbs were per-
sonified as toothless descendants of
the Hun, worshipping a medieval
Orthodox god of fire and pain.
Bosnjaks were colloquially known
as “Bosnian Muslims,” an ethnicity
defined by their confession, though
they are the least dogmatic
Muslims in the world. Foreign
reporters on their obligatory junket
of Balkan mayhem composed omi-
nous dispatches to warn of the
arrival of Iranian and Afghani vol-
unteers. Only the Croatians, as
medieval as the next but practicing
a more agreeable faith, escaped car-
icaturization.
I would do my part to reme-
dy that.
It was a two-hour drive from
Split to Medjugorje—two hours
longer than eternity. Except for the
driver and a pair of guides, there
wasn’t a single Slav hitching a ride

on this Caravan of Love. And a journey of passion it was, as my
fellow passengers prayed to the potholes, sang tuneless melodies
in praise of a tone-deaf Jesus and ended every conversation with
tight, soulful hugs. Some of them had paid a fortune for this “pil-
grimage”—three or four times the cost of airfare by my calcula-
tions, and much more than they would have doled out to visit the
real Holy Land. There are probably many reasons why they pre-
ferred a chicken-shit Balkan village to the place where their
Saviour walked, talked and died on Friday. In plain fact, there are
far more kaffirs in Pagan Jerusalem than in Holy, Ethnically-
Cleansed Medjugorje.
My fellow pilgrims grew excited as the bus wound through
the limestone cliffs of Hercegovina, inching closer to the
shrine. A few minutes before we arrived, our driver was
flagged down by three Franciscans in loose, brown robes tied
at the waist. They came on board, clutching rosaries and
praying. Everyone lowered their heads and joined in,
echoing this trio’s English mutilation of the Lord’s
Prayer. I watched the monks stop at the back of the
bus, turn around and begin a second procession
through the pew-like seats of the motor coach, this
time soliciting donations. Flush with cash, the pil-
grims eagerly fed their dirty porcelain bowls with
folding money. The monks stopped at the head of the
bus, nodded to the driver, made the sign of the cross and
left.
The crush of pilgrims in Medjugorje reminded me
of a small college campus on Freshman Orientation Day.
Groups of tourists who had raided their children’s trust funds for
a shot at salvation trampled the desert-like vegetation of one of
the world’s ugliest places, determined to get their money’s worth.
They would meet with other pilgrims, pray together, share a
group hug and move on to the next site. Their tour guides would
spur them on, taking them to “shrines” with the durability of
instant coffee. They would climb “Apparition Hill,” gush excited-
ly about feeling the presence of the Virgin and kneel again in
prayer. Some were crying, their sobs fogging up the shiny, plastic
amber beads of the rosaries twisted between their fingers. It

occurred to me Apparition Hill might be nothing more than a
landfill of animal waste. It probably occurred to the guides as well,
but at five dollars a group and twenty groups per day, they would
make a shrine where they damn well pleased.
Mass was held every morning at “St. James Church”. The
native appellations for local landmarks have long since fallen into
disuse. The mass was held in English; local believers would have
to wait until late in the evening for a chance to talk to God in a
language they understood.
They say you can only see the Madonna if you really believe in
her. Though a heathen, I saw Mary everywhere. Men squawked
in the universal language of commerce over her six-inch porcelain
and plastic likenesses. The pilgrims couldn’t buy enough. The
souvenirs were mostly neutral in character, though the local ideo-
logues couldn’t help but to put a little touch of propaganda to the
overpriced trinkets, like the painting of the Virgin standing over
a map of Croatia which seemed to have swollen its size in a few
places, or poorly-printed books about Croatia authored by apolo-
gists for Hitler’s local quislings, the Ustasha. But they were the
exception, as most of the merchandise violated few standards but
those of good taste.
Beside me in the hollow beneath Apparition Hill, an eld-
erly lady from Florida turned and exclaimed, “They say one of the
children will be coming to meet us tomorrow!” We talked about
Medjugorje, about Catholicism and the Church. She told me she
had been to a shrine dedicated to Our Lady of Guadeloupe, and
launched into a casual but well-informed dissertation on the dif-
ferences between that Central American tourist-trap and the one
we were standing on. She was some kind of salvation junkie,
embarking on geriatric crusades to hellholes like Bosnia with
simple-hearted faith, hoping her devotion would reserve a place
at the front of the line come Judgment Day.

On matters more earthy, my
friend was a bit less erudite. The
war had been terrible, she lament-
ed, but seemed unsure of who was
actually fighting. “I think it’s a
shame to make those people go
back to Turkey,” she sighed myste-
riously. The poverty of Hercegovina
and Central America disturbed her,
“but these people like to live this
way.” The salvation of the world is
too heavy a burden for most believ-
ers. That is why the church makes
such a clear distinction between
pilgrims and missionaries.
Ignorant about events which had
taken place here just two years
before, I was doubtful she knew
anything about the Ustasha or the
true history of this town. That
wouldn’t be so bad, but I couldn’t
help but to wonder if she and other
pilgrims praying for forgiveness,
healing—oh, and world peace
would be nice, too—would be in the least bit perturbed if told
they were standing on one of the largest mass graves in Bosnia-
Hercegovina, a country with the world’s most prosperous tomb-
stone industry. Would she care that this Catholic shrine was built
on the bones of Christian believers? And did she have an inkling
that this entire charade—the children, the messages, the existence
of the shrine itself—was one of the most successful propaganda
campaigns of a movement which had blown up airplanes, assassi-
nated diplomats, planted bombs in movie theaters and airports
and had presided over the extermination of thousands of fellow
Christians, right on this very spot? It was an empty question, I
knew, self-righteous perhaps but sincere. I didn’t press the point.
But I did manage to pick up some great religious merchandise.

One could measure how quickly Yugoslavia was unraveling by
counting his pictures displayed in the streets of Zagreb. His reha-
bilitation began as a nondescript ornament in the corners of polit-
ical tracts and brochures shilling for marginal ideologies. But
within a matter of months, his cult—as well as the physical size
of his portraits—had grown to truly Khomeini-like proportions.
It was still more common in the countryside, especially in the
badlands of Hercegovina where shrines to the beloved Poglavnik
have never really gone out of style.
But it was in the charming city of Zagreb, on placards held
aloft at rallies of masturbatory nationalism and in the pews of
cathedrals where the clergy sang his praises, that Croatia and the
rest of the world were forced to refamiliar-
ize themselves with the menacing gaze
and the murderous legacy of Dr. Ante
Pavelic.
The portrait gave a false impression
of the Poglavnik (a designation roughly
akin to Führer or duce). In the high style of
Fascist aesthetics, it was a face crafted of
steel, full of determination and persever-
ance, the eyes projecting a menacing and
disapproving gaze typical of dictator para-
phernalia. Real photographs of Ante
Pavelic—even official photographs of the
Poglavnik meeting with pious clergymen,
reviewing his black legions before
unleashing them on the countryside, or
taking advice on race relations from Adolf
Hitler—reveal the seasoned terrorist to be
a prematurely aging bureaucrat, a flabby
man with a Goering-like paunch, a crea-
ture more likely to be found shuffling
papers than laughing maniacally as he Ante Pavelic, from a propaganda leaflet
quaffs blood from a human skull. His
writings are fairly boring, lacking the passion of Mein Kampf or
any similar manifesto. His speeches likewise failed to reach the
ecstatic pinnacle of Mussolini’s sermons from the balconies.

While the duce wrestled with lions and the Führer organized
totemistic parades that would later inspire a thousand gay porn
movies, Pavelic shut himself away in his spare time to pursue his
mania for stamp collecting.
But while Eichmann and other desk murderers from World
War II had their day in the dock or were buried in anonymous
pits, quite nearly the entire braintrust of the Ustasha—from Maks
Luburic, the creator of Croatian archipelago of concentration
camps and a dead ringer for Ralph Malph, to the Poglavnik him-
self—escaped. Some went to Argentina to kick sand at Jozef
Mengele and blow kisses at Evita. Some went to Spain to sip
margaritas with Generalissimo Franco. Still others settled in
dreary Ohio industrial parks and sleepy California suburbs, pub-
lishing manifestos, detonating bombs, curing dynamite and carry-
ing on the struggle that officially ended in the waning days of
World War II but never in the hearts beneath their black tunics.
Even so, the injustice of Croatia’s mass murderers living off
Nazi gold in a tropical paradise pales before the striking contra-
diction of their leader. Ante Pavelic—the bloodiest Balkan tyrant
since Vlad the Impaler, one who decreed the death sentence for
half of his five million subjects on the day he came to power—
probably never pulled the trigger on a man himself.

Sons of One
Mother
I f there is a place in the world where devils are born,
it is Hercegovina. The limestone cliffs and the bar-
ren, skeletal hills rise up to meet the aching sun,
punishing the interloper trapped between earth and
sky. History has it that Hercegovina was once a
broad, leafy forest used by the Romans as a primary source for
the ships that ruled the Mediterranean. By the 17th century,
the woods had been totally denuded. Without a film of green-
ery to filter out the sun’s reflection from the face of stone,
Hercegovina becomes the hottest spot in Europe during the
summer months. Cretinous Greenpeace activists might desig-
The Ustasha won't refrain from
nate Hercegovina as Europe’s first ecological catastrophe. killing, because when the order to
It should surprise no one that the God of Hercegovina is
a mean, angry son of a bitch, blood brother to the Aztec sun god spill blood is issued, rivers of blood
and the fire-breathing Jehovahs of other wastelands. The
Brotherhood of the Franciscans holds sway in ugly, hut-like will flow... Every Ustasha is wait-
monasteries and cowshed churches, but follow a creed so warped
ing for an order to attack the
by the sweat of the land that the sweet, wholesome Francis of
Assisi would not recognize his descendants. The first Franciscans enemy, to butcher and destroy.
were brought here to convert the heathens of Hercegovina by
fire: the propensity of the brothers to dress local uprisings and Ante Pavelic
fratricides in the clothing of a Crusade suggests they haven’t
grown much beyond their origins.
Hercegovina was on the periphery of the most recent
Bosnian War, the place where the three warring nationalities
converged in their struggle to reach the Adriatic Sea. Only the
most demented warlords entertained the fantasy that
Hercegovina could be conquered by force. The Croats held
sway in the 1990s and even formed their own breakaway state,
the Republic of Herceg-Bosna, with its capital at the smashed
city of Mostar. Today, Croats are the dominant tribe of
Hercegovina. Local boy Ante Pavelic made sure it got that way.
The future Poglavnik was born in Bradina in 1889, a hang-
nail into the 19th century. Hercegovina, with the rest of Bosnia,
was claimed by the Ottoman Turks, longed for by Serbia and
Montenegro but occupied by the Austrians.
The Austrian occupation was supposed to be temporary;
many German and Hungarian political leaders were willing to
fight their own Emperor to get rid of this accursed ruin of rocks
and snakes. Driving the Empire’s borders further into the
Balkans, these Cassandras warned, would cause nothing but trou-
ble, with little tangible gain. In the early years of the 20th centu-
ry, when Ante was graduating from a Jesuit school, the occupation
was made permanent when the Emperor annexed Bosnia-
Hercegovina and attached it to his family’s domains.
The Hapsburgs took relatively good care of Bosnia. In the
end, they loved it too much. Their empire was being ripped apart
by internal divisions—Slavs against Magyars, Magyars against
Germans. One proposal to patch up the eclectic social demo-
graphic was “Trialism”: to turn the dual monarchy—where the
Austrians and Hungarians were theoretically two states joined in
the body of the Emperor—into a triple monarchy, with the Slavs
given their own parliament.
The idea of a Triple Monarchy had little support among
the Empire’s peoples but one influential supporter in the heir to
the throne, Franz Ferdinand. Then he went for a drive through
Sarajevo, on a day so beautiful he just had to take the top down.
The Archduke and his pregnant wife Sophie were shot by a Serb,
a tool of one of the most destructive secret societies of the day, the
Black Hand. The Emperor delivered an ultimatum to Serbia, and
the First World War was on.
While Russia’s war effort was paralyzed by Bolshevism in
the ranks, the Austrians had a more moderate yet still more dan-
gerous demon with which to contend: Yugoslavism. The move-
ment which gave its name to the ill-starred state had its roots in
that great European equalizer, Napoleon, and his leveling of age-
old traditions and political structures. In his drive east, he had
grouped together his Balkan possessions under the name Illyria,

in pretentious imitation of Roman antiquity. After the midget
was exiled to St. Helena, many Croats looked back with fondness
to their short-lived existence in a South Slavic state. The crude
yearning and romanticism of Illyrianism evolved into
Yugoslavism, which had resonance beyond the unhappy Austrian
lands into the adjacent Slavic states of Serbia and Montenegro.
Yugoslavism and other Slavic ideologies undermined
morale in the Austrian lands, especially in the army. Sometimes
whole units composed of Slavs surrendered to the Russians. But
most Croats—and indeed, most Serbs in the Empire as well—
fought heroically. One was a young Croat/Slovene from the
region of peasant villages and rolling hills known as Zagorje, “the
land beyond the mountains”. His name was Josip Broz, but he is
far better known by the nom de guerre he never
abandoned, even when he bore a closer resem-
blance to a chubby golfer tossing nickels to the
lads on the Senior Tour than a war leader: Tito.
Born in Kumrovec in May of 1892, Josip
Broz was one of seven surviving children (out of
fifteen) born to a rather horny Croatian father
and his magnificently fertile Slovene wife. His
official birthday, May 25th, later celebrated as a
“Day of Youth”, was an invention by Party com-
rades; Tito was actually born on May 7th
according to parish records.
Broz left Kumrovec at the age of 15 to work
in the Krajina, formerly a militarized frontier
against the Turks that lost its strategic impor-
tance after the annexation of Bosnia. In 1910,
his father wanted to move to the United States
and bring his son with him as part of the great
exodus from the Croatian lands. For Josip Broz,
the idea of making it in America was a kind of
fantasy, a daydream that would linger for the
next ten years. For now, he wandered around the Austrian
domains, from Ljubljana to Trieste to Prague and Vienna, part of
a huge internal migration of Slavic peasants looking for work in
the new industries. Then, in 1912, having reached compulsory

draft age, he returned to Croatia and entered the Austrian army.
The young Broz flourished there, was recommended to an
officer’s training school and became the youngest sergeant-major
in the Empire.
Immediately after the beginning of the First World War,
Broz and his unit, the 25th Croatian Territorial Infantry, took
part in an invasion of Serbia. Owing to the desperate defense of
Belgrade by the Serbs (“the most thrilling feat of arms that this
war had witnessed,” wrote British historian G.M. Trevelyan, who
was on the scene as a kind of celebrity war correspondent), Broz’s
unit was repelled. Perhaps because of Yugoslavism in the ranks,
his unit did not take part in future assaults on Serbia, and was
transferred to the Eastern Front in Ukraine instead.
Though the bulk of his later memories were coloured by
ideology, Broz would make light of his accomplishments in the
field in World War I. This was not because he was modest, but
because the future terror of the bourgeoisie had fought in service
of an “imperialist” power. It was not discovered until after his
death that Sergeant-Major Josip Broz had in fact received a major
commendation for bravery and initiative on the Eastern Front.
The Croat officer’s conversion to Communism—and thus
Josip Broz’s transformation into Tito—came about by chance. On
March 21, 1915, the Russian Army launched a surprise attack. It
was Catholic Easter, and the Austrians were caught with their
pants down. Broz was wounded and taken prisoner. Two years
later he was in a POW camp in the Urals when local workers
threw open the gates and invited the prisoners to join them in the
streets. The Czar had been overthrown; the Bolshevik Revolution
had begun.

Rats in the
Pantry
T he Kingdom of Serbia wound up on the winning
side of the war, though at a terrible price in terms
of human life. Yet one of the national uprisings
which brought the Austrians to their knees
occurred in Croatia. On the first of December,
1918, a heavily Yugoslavist national council or Sabor in Zagreb
voted to join Serbia, and departed for Belgrade to lay the laurels
across the temples of the Serbian king. The Kingdom of Serbs,
Croats and Slovenes—later renamed Yugoslavia—was formed.
Was the Croat population behind the decision of the Sabor?
In the absence of pollsters and Time magazine “Power Ratings”
back in 1918, it’s hard to tell. We can assume that the Croats were
at least as bitterly divided as the Montenegrins. The Montenegrins
voted to join the new state, though in conditions so filled with law-
lessness and strife that it could hardly be considered a pristine ges-
ture. The last King of Montenegro, Nikola, was prevented from
returning to the country before the referendum, and a violent
revolt by his adherents in 1919 known as the Christmas Uprising
refutes the idea that it was a bloodless union. Nikola died a bitter
exile in Italy, a stone from Montenegro’s towering Mount Lovcen
gripped in his palm.
Some Croats in the army of the collapsed Empire (in fact,
from the 25th Croatian—Josip Broz’s old unit) revolted when
they heard of the new state’s formation. One could be against
Yugoslavia while still wishing the Serbs well, but there was a base
of support in Croatia for politicians who held violently anti-
Serbian views. The most notorious was Ante Starcevic, a former
Yugoslavist who later proselytized that Serbs were originally
brought to the Balkans as slaves, and far from being closely relat-

ed, Croats were actually a “lost tribe of Goths” who had somehow
lost their names, language—basically, every semblance of a
Germanic identity but the mysterious purity
of their blood.
More than your average hate group,
Starcevic’s political tool, the Croat Party of
Rights, based their entire political platform
on a total demonization of the Other. In the
immortal words of Walter Sobchak: “Say
what you will about the tenets of National
Socialism, but at least it’s an ethos.”
A less bigoted opposition to
Yugoslavism was led by a man who would
become the ubiquitous wet blanket to the
Serbian kings. Leader of the populist
Croatian Peasant Party, Stjepan Radic was
one of the most charismatic politicians in
Balkan history. Nothing illustrates his wily
charisma more than the fact that Croatian Fascists (including
Ante Pavelic), Communists (including Tito) as well as most of
today’s leaders consider Stjepan Radic their political ancestor.
Radic believed that the vote of the Sabor was illegal and in
any case not representative of the nation. He led a parliamentary
boycott, refusing to recognize the new state until Croatian state-
hood was acknowledged.
Ante Pavelic had practically nothing to do with the events
described above. While Europe was in turmoil, he was studying at
a Jesuit seminary in Travnik. While Radic was cracking jokes and
snapping towels in the lockerroom, Ante was making his way
through the University of Zagreb as a mediocre student of law.
Hack biographers have created an entire mythology around their
Poglavnik, transforming the dull teenager into a tireless campaign-
er for Croat rights from the time he moved from the nipple to the
cup. But while he was not yet known and was incapable of shap-
ing the events taking place around him, the founding of Yugoslavia
and the fate of Stjepan Radic were two events which had a pro-
found impact on his life.

In the early 1920s, nationalist Croats weren’t the gravest threat to
Yugoslavia. In the closing days of World War I, the Hungarian
Communist Party under their leader Bela Kun seized power in
Budapest. It was a heady time, almost forgotten today, when the
whole world shuddered in reflection of Lenin’s prophesy that the
senseless carnage of the war would bring about the collapse of
capitalism. Russia supported the Hungarian reds and made a stab
at stirring up revolt in Poland before the Allied armies in the east
smashed Bela Kun’s regime. Lenin stroked his goatee and decid-
ed that perhaps he should be a little more realistic, and focused on
defeating the White Armies at home instead.
The Yugoslav Communist Party at the
conclusion of the war was one of the largest
in Europe. Their leader was a gentle, eccen-
tric academic who replaced the atheism of
Marx with the metaphysics of Hinduism.
Through vegetarianism and a “conscious
recognition of the other,” he believed that the
need for a bloody and distasteful class war
could be done away with and the chaos
Russia was suffering through averted. The
militant members of the party thought he
was a joke. In December 1920, after a series
of strikes and uprisings, the Crown Prince
and Regent of Yugoslavia, Alexander
Karadjordjevic, outlawed the Communist
Party. The Serbian Hindu was later lured to
Moscow and swept away in a purge.
A secret organization of Communist youth, calling itself
“Red Terror”, set out to avenge the arrest and persecution of their
comrades by murdering the Crown Prince. The attempt failed,
and Red Terror was broken up by police. A Bosnian Marxist, Alija
Aliagic, murdered the police minister in retaliation. These tit-for-
tat disputes fueled a spiral of violence, in a confrontation the gov-
ernment was destined to win. The Yugoslav Communist Party lit-
erally conspired itself out of existence. Party membership just five
years after the war had dwindled from 120,000 to 700.
Hoping to escape the famine which accompanied the col-

lapse of the Czarist regime, Josip Broz joined the Red
International Guard. Probably the most dangerous action he saw
in service was among babushkas jostling on a tram. The Guards,
mostly former prisoners of war, were unreliable for frontline duty,
and too often got in the way when the CheKa or secret police
were clearing villages of their bourgeoisie. Tito later went AWOL
and wandered about, from Finland (a springboard he hoped
would launch him to the United States) to Siberia, not quite free
but not quite a prisoner, adrift in the turmoil of Red Armies,
White Armies and raging mobs. Eventually, he found his way to
St. Petersburg, and with a new Russian wife, Pelagija, set off for
Kumrovec. Finding a job at a mill in Croatia, part of the new
Yugoslavia, he thrilled fellow workers with his eyewitness account
of the worker’s revolution and shortly thereafter joined the illegal
Communist Party.
Bolshevik aims will be far more As an anti-Communist, Ante Pavelic welcomed the King’s
suppression of the reds. But with diseased reasoning, he suspect-
easily achieved in a Yugoslavia ed something more was going on. Was it possible that the Serbian
monarchy controlled the Communist Party? He wasn’t willing to
disrupted by the Serb-Croat go that far—yet. Most of the Communists he had met while at
struggle, than in a strong and the University of Zagreb were Serbs. Had he gotten to know
them, he would have realized they were from a belt of mountain-
homogenous Croat national state. ous land and small villages along the present-day border of
Croatia and Bosnia, called the Krajina. They had settled there at
Ante Pavelic the invitation of the Austrian Emperor to act as a bulwark against
the Turks. With the country’s small proletariat, Yugoslav commu-
nism in the 1920s was primarily represented by these intellectual
sons of peasants. Not knowing the Communists, the Serbs, or his
country for that matter, Ante Pavelic saw the sinister hand of
Serbdom in the Communist students, as he did in all evils which
flourished like tumours in the supple body of Mother Croatia. In
his subtle treatise, The Enemies of the Croatian Liberation
Movement, Pavelic wrote that “Communism has not been able to
penetrate wider layers of Croat society. Nevertheless, the Belgrade
government has sent a large number of Marx-infected Serbian
students to attend the Croat University of Zagreb, at the cost of
the state. Together with the Jews, these students spread
Communist propaganda in Croatia, demonstrate at every oppor-

tunity and falsify before the outside world the true position of the
Croat nationalist student body.”
How exactly does someone, apparently intelligent enough
to graduate from law school, fall prey to this kind of tripe? Asking
how Ante Pavelic developed such a ferocious antipathy to Serbs
and Jews is no different than inquiring into the origins of any man
emblazoned in history for the searing force of his hatred. Perhaps
we could find its origins was a bruised ego, a mother caught in a
flagrante delicto with a Serbian neighbour, or a sweetheart who
submitted to the temptations of an Orthodox beau. This still
wouldn’t explain much, because it assumes that hatred and preju-
dice have some sort of rational bearing. Those who carried out
Ustasha crimes could claim a temporary insanity. The respected
politicians and clergymen who paved the road to Jasenovac said
their only crime was a blindness caused by their insatiable love of
freedom and their homeland. But what alibi can there be for a
man who rehearsed the genocidal frenzy of the Independent State
of Croatia for twenty years, who carried within him the kernel of
evil almost from birth?
In banal reality, we take our Pavelices to the madhouse,
because it’s easier to slap them with a label as mental defectives
than to admit that normal, even happy circumstances can nourish
such evil men.

Death of a
Saviour
W ith the communists defanged, some in
Belgrade urged the newly-crowned King
Alexander to do the same to the arrogant
Croatian nationalist leaders, most notably
Stjepan Radic. In 1924, Radic’s Croat
Peasant Party had scored an immense electoral victory. In a
shrewd move, Radic decided to head to Belgrade to take his seat
in parliament. His Croats forged an alliance with opposition
Serbian parties, and together they toppled the government, which
had a reputation of protecting racketeers and was, in any case,
deeply unpopular irrespective of nationality. Many radical Croats,
including members of the Party of Rights, condemned Radic as a
traitor for acknowledging the government as legitimate.
Those who counseled Alexander to cut the uppity Croat
leader down to size had their day. Because kings by nature are
rather stupid, Alexander had no idea how unpopular the previous
government had been; he viewed the opposition’s exercise of their
rights as tantamount to a personal affront. The King outlawed the
Peasant Party and returned the toppled government to power.
Radic himself was imprisoned on an outrageous charge of treason,
ostensibly for being overheard quipping, “We are republicans, but
if the Serbs want a monarchy, good luck to them.”
After seven years of political trenchwork, Ante Pavelic
finally saw some return on his sweat equity when he was elected
to the Zagreb city council in 1927, and later to the national par-
liament as a member of Starcevic’s proto-fascist Party of Rights.
He had a small law practice in Zagreb. His clients were typically
debtors and aggrieved parties to contracts and wills, though he
would often lend his expertise to those who had fallen under the
scrutiny of the increasingly repressive royal government.
Radic was released from prison in 1925, and again returned

to parliament. He did himself no
favours with his sharp tongue. On
the floor of parliament, he pro-
claimed that “Our Serbian friends
are always reminding us of the
price they paid in the war. I would
like to invite them to tabulate the
costs, so we may square accounts
and be on our way.”
Unjust as it is, that last
statement has become his epitaph.
On June 20, 1928—with Pavelic
looking on—a thuggish
Montenegrin deputy, Punisa
Racic, drew a pistol from his belt
and blew away Radic and two
other deputies from the Peasant
Party on the floor of parliament.
Not even the stupidest
observer could fail to note at the
awful irony of the triple homi-
cide—the first shot of the Croat-Serb civil war, one might call
it—and on the floor of parliament, an institution devoted to the
suffocation of friction beneath layers of bureaucratic largesse.
Stupid observers were enlightened, but the blind were not. Punisa
Racic, renowned in his Montenegrin district as a foul-mouthed
jerk and troublemaker (which is sort of why they liked him)
became a hero to those who believed Radic and the Croats were
going too far. Rumours that the assassination had royal sanction
have never been proven, nor have they ever gone away.
Alexander made a brief visit to Radic in the hospital where
he languished for two long months. Contrary to latter-day spec-
ulation, Radic wasn’t just an enemy to avowed Serb nationalists,
but to an entire class of politicians and businessmen getting fat at
a time of unrelenting poverty for peasants of all nationalities.
This, not a hatred of Croats, is why Alexander sacked him and
restored the old administration of racketeers and jaundiced
defenders of the status quo. Yugoslavia was not so polarized that

Serb and Croat peasants (who, it must be remembered, lived side
by side in the vast majority of the country) saw each other as
monsters rather than a people with much in common, including,
in many cases, sympathy for Radic.
All the same, and no matter who supported him, Radic
wasn’t murdered because he threatened the status quo. He was
murdered because he was a Croat.
On August 28, 1928, the leader of the Croatian Peasant
Party died. His widow appeared in the White Palace, residence of
the king, and lay the blame upon Alexander and his household
minister. She was joined on her voyage back to Zagreb by every
Croatian deputy. They formed a separatist “shadow parliament”
and refused to acknowledge the authority of the King or legiti-
macy of the state. The minuscule Communist Party called on the
masses to avenge the murder of Radic by taking out their frustra-
tion on policemen.
Neither threats nor flattery persuaded the Croats to return
to Belgrade. Politicians benighted by 19th century scruples didn’t
necessarily believe that was a bad thing. Alexander, who had dis-
pensed with democratic norms a long time ago, was determined
to hold together the state. As in the past, his actions would only
serve to drive his peoples further apart. On January 6, 1929, he
suspended the constitution and declared his personal dictatorship.
All political parties were dissolved, including the Croat
Party of Rights, which had recently elected Ante Pavelic their vice
president. Several members were arrested. The shots leveled at
Stjepan Radic had a devastating impact on the young lawyer.
Three weeks after the king became the law, Ante Pavelic gathered
together as many belongings as he could carry on his back and
crossed the Italian frontier, on his way to exile in Vienna.

The Exiles
V ienna, former capital of the Austrian Empire,
was now the center of operations for every sort of
parasitic fiend burned out of the fur of their
bipedal carriers. There were leftists, rightists,
Nazis, Trotskyists, Stalinists and other fringe
operators nestled away in the cafes, flophouses, attics and cellars
along her baroque and pristine streets. Though the police made it
a point to keep them under surveillance, subversive activities
largely went on without too much interference.
Ante Pavelic arrived in Vienna in early February, 1929. His The entire press in Croatia is in
arrival was acknowledged in the papers as a curiosity—after all, by
title if not by influence, the former parliamentarian was a very Jewish-masonic hands. After the
prominent exile. One of these write-ups got the attention of a
student named Branimir “Branko” Jelic, leader of the Croat Youth
establishment of the dictatorship
Movement, a nationalist group resisting the Royal Dictatorship in 1929, the Croat press was infil-
back home. According to his memoir, Fight for the Croatian State,
Jelic invited Pavelic to take the leadership of the Youth trated and destroyed, with these
Movement, largely by virtue of his status in the Croat Party of
Rights and his parliamentary seat. Pavelic accepted. immigrant foreigners brought in.
Branko Jelic and the other students hoped Pavelic’s prestige
as a member of parliament would help recruitment. It did not. Ante Pavelic
Even those exiles ideologically predisposed toward Pavelic—
including fellow members of the Party of Rights—didn’t take the
youth group very seriously.
But Pavelic did make other important contacts in Vienna,
as the city was boiling over with the rhetorical froth of
Yugoslavia’s discontent nationalities. First among the disgruntled
in Vienna—and indeed, their notoriety was renowned throughout
the world—was the Macedonian Internal Revolutionary
Organization, known by their Bulgarian acronym, VRMO.
By the time Pavelic came on the scene, VRMO was beset

by internal squabbles and rivalries, giving rise to the occasional
shoot-out between balconies at the opera and anonymous, head-
less corpses dredged up from the silt of the Danube. Macedonia
had been ceded to Yugoslavia during the Balkan conflicts preced-
ing the First World War. Very few people then recognized the
Macedonians as a distinct ethnicity. To the new Yugoslav state,
Macedonians were “Bulgarized Serbs”. To the Bulgarians, they
were “Serbianized Bulgarians”. The Greeks didn’t know quite
what they were, but kept the doors locked and the porchlight on
just to be sure.
VRMO’s aim was to make Macedonia ungovernable to
Yugoslavia, and thus effect its transfer to Bulgaria. This was to be
accomplished by labour strikes, assassinations, punitive raids and
outright invasions along the Bulgarian-Yugoslav border. VRMO
fought under a banner emblazoned by a skull and crossbones, and
lived up to it.
By the time Pavelic hit Austria, Ivan
“Vance” Mihailov was emerging as the top
dog in VRMO’s bloody civil war. His
fiancee lived in Vienna, and it was probably
through her intervention that Pavelic wran-
gled an invitation to Banka, Mihailov’s
headquarters in the suburbs of Sofia. At this
meeting, Mihailov gave Pavelic the phone
number and zip code for Europe’s foremost
Law and Order guy, Italian duce Benito
Mussolini. Yugoslavia and Italy had quar-
reled at the conclusion of World War I over
possession of Croatia’s Adriatic coastline,
which Italy had long lusted after. As such, Mussolini, Mihailov
suspected, would be a friend to anyone who lived and breathed
the death of Yugoslavia.
The duce was then receiving dozens of adventurers every
day, scoundrels and bandits seeking the protection and blessing of
the High Pope of Fascism. After Pavelic’s first meeting with gov-
ernment officials, Mussolini adopted a wait-and-see posture, as
he had with a certain Viennese housepainter before.
Pavelic was undeterred by Mussolini’s cold reception. After

all, the deputy was now meeting with some of the most notorious
men in Europe. He made the unflattering comparison between
VRMO, the fascistas, and his own Croat Youth Movement, and
decided that a sexier image was necessary if he was to mine the
bullion of his dreams out of the ether. Invigorated by the gospel
of Fascism, he plunged into recruitment as he never had before,
aided by depredations in Croatia that led to a great influx of
refugees to Budapest and Vienna. Many of them made up the
foot soldiers of Pavelic’s still-undefined new movement. In addi-
tion, some of the more seasoned Croatian nationalists in exile
began to take Pavelic seriously after his meetings with Mihailov
and Mussolini. Ivo Percic was one of his earliest protégés, a for-
mer officer in the Hapsburg army who later took charge of one of
Pavelic’s training camps provided by right-wing elements in the
Hungarian government. Andrija Artukovic, future Minister of
the Interior and often referred to as the “Yugoslav Himmler” in
yellowed newspaper clippings from the 1950s, also joined the
movement at this time. But the crowning achievement of his
recruitment drive was Ante’s seduction of the storied Kvaternik
family. The earliest Kvaternik of note was Eugen, friend and con-
temporary of Ante Starcevic and his right-hand man in the Croat
Party of Rights. His son Slavko had married the daughter of
another Starcevic disciple, Ivo Frank. The Kvaterniks apparently
enjoyed playing waterboys to stud quarterbacks, because Slavko
and his own son Eugen (or, as he was known, “Dido”) immedi-
ately swore loyalty to Pavelic, despite his inexperience as a hell-
raiser.
While Pavelic was building up his organization abroad, Josip

Broz had become a nomad, hounded by police, spies and employ-
ers who tipped off the government once they discovered a
Communist in their shops. The police caught him with forbidden
socialist literature and several crude explosives (which he insisted
had been planted on him), beat him unmercifully and put him on

trial. So neutered was the Communist threat, right-wing newspa-
per columnists treated it as a kind of curiosity, even going so far
as to show some sympathy with the firebrand:
The Communist trial which has become known as the ’Bomb-Thrower’s Trial’ was con-
cluded yesterday, its dominant tone struck once more by Josip Broz. After the sentence was
read he rose and turning to the large audience which was already rising to leave the court-
room, shouting three times, ‘Long live the Communist Party! Long live the Third
International!’...
Thus it was that this unyielding Communist disappeared behind prison walls, for all the
world like a sea-captain who bellows when his ship is sinking.
Broz spent the next five and a half years at Lepoglava, a former
monastery and university. The guards largely left him alone, free
to commiserate with other prisoners. It was at Lepoglava that he
met Mosa Pijade, a Serbian Jew who had been a Communist only
slightly longer than he’d been a prisoner. He tutored Josip Broz in
Marxist dialectics. The quarrelsome, pedantic Pijade wasn’t the
best teacher, but neither was Broz a very good student. He never
indulged in the monotonous dialogues about theory that
Communists revel in, leaving his subordinates to sort through his
proclamations and put a Marxist spin on them.
Broz emerged from prison in March of 1934. For his crim-
inal record he was rewarded with a job as a full-time party work-
er. Traveling with false documents, one step ahead of the police,
Broz rarely slept in the same place two nights in a row. Eventually
he was sent to Vienna where he worked for the Communist
International (aka the “Comintern”). Getting across the frontier
was no easy trick, but Broz made it, thanks to a novelistic device
that owes more to Groucho Marx than to Karl. At the last
Yugoslav border post, an Austrian mother asked him to hold her
baby while she rifled through her papers. The baby pissed on his
lap, and the border guards had such a good laugh at Broz’s
expense that he passed through unmolested.
Broz was once more roaming through the great cities of
Europe. In Paris he helped organize volunteers for the Spanish
Civil War. He was later transferred to Moscow where he saw the
tail end of the purges lash out against the head of the Yugoslav

Communist Party, Milan Gorkic. Broz was first named as inter-
im General Secretary of the Party, which thanks to King
Alexander’s police, then had its headquarters exiled in Paris. He
took over for good in 1939, and moved the Party back into the
maw of the beast, Zagreb.
Broz had risen through the party ranks for no other reason
than his complete obedience to the leaders of the Party in the
USSR. In a country where every man with an argument believes
the weight of God is on his side, Broz was the only Croat who
had none. At a party congress, he had made a name for himself
and attracted the attention of the Soviets by denouncing the “fac-
tionalism” of his fellow Yugoslav Communists. No one knows for
certain just what role he played in the downfall of Milan Gorkic.
He was typical of the rank-and-file Communist of the 1930s, pre-
pared to back anything, so long as it came from the lips of Stalin.
Broz had been traveling for so long on false papers that his
identity was still a closely guarded secret, especially to the new
generation of Communists emerging from the universities. When
employed by the Comintern, Broz had gone by the codename
“Walter” (not Sobchak). Back home, he was known to Yugoslav
Communists only as “Tito”, which was a common enough name
in his home region of Zagorje.
Promising reports from Vienna convinced Mussolini that his

Croatian friend was someone to be taken seriously after all.
Pavelic’s newest disciple, Andrija Artukovic, made headlines across
Europe by leading an uprising inside Croatia itself. The insurrec-
tion was crushed by the army without much trouble, and was
notable only for it’s symbolism, taking place in the Velebit
Mountains in the shadow of a shrine to the Virgin Mary (or, as
local mythology has it, “Mother of Croatia”).
Pavelic had a new dream, new friends, and a new organiza-
tion in his bag in 1932 when he accepted the offer of Mussolini’s

foreign minister and son-in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano, and
relocated to a villa supplied by the Italian government. His dream
was “Croatia from the Alps to the Sava”. His new friends have
already been described. And his new movement, which emerged
from the shell of the Croat Youth Movement like a pupilla, he
christened the Ustasha (“insurrection”; I use here the more com-
mon Western spelling and pronunciation instead of the original
ustase).
Though Ustasha ideology, for what it was, never grew
beyond the stunted nationalism and primitive xenophobia which
lay at the center of Pavelic’s own beliefs, he did adapt to the fash-
ions of his protector. He dressed his toy soldiers in black tunics
and his speech became a stilted mimicry of Mussolini’s florid
poetry of the barricades. And with the rhetoric of violence, real
acts began to follow.
The first terrorist attack the Ustasha took credit for
occurred in a suburb of Belgrade. An Ustasha agent planted a
bomb on a railroad track; the explosion and derailment caused the
death of a large family. Later, another bomb was planted at the
same location, but a joint operation by the Austrian and Serbian
police defused the plot and the explosive before either could be
executed. And the hits continued to come.

Crime of the
Century
K ing Alexander of Yugoslavia was a popular target
for discontent from the day he exchanged his
family jewels for those of the crown. Attempting
to kill him was something of a participatory
sport. The first attempt on his life, if that’s what
it was, came during the First World War, when the Regent and
Crown Prince became irritated that some of his senior military
officials seemed to hold their oath to the society whose conspira-
cy had launched the war, the Black Hand, higher than the one
sworn to their monarch. The Grand Master of the Black Hand,
Colonel Dimitrijevic, was executed for trumped-up charges of
plotting Alexander’s assassination—“a fine example of judicial
murder,” as historian Barbara Jelavic describes it. The Black Hand
fell into disgrace and then obsolescence, except in the minds of
paranoiacs who read too many books about the Knights Templar.
Europe in the 1920s and ’30s was afflicted by an outbreak
of assassinations, putsches and revolutions. So dark was the hori-
zon, it wasn’t until the Ustasha made their first attempt on
Alexander’s life that the government realized there was something
new under the sun. The King had gone to Zagreb to celebrate his
slava or the feast of his name-day saint. Because kings are inbred
idiots who never learn from their predecessors, Alexander insist-
ed on driving in parade fashion, and in an open car. Pavelic sent
two commando squads from two different locations to converge
on the King. Neither party of assassins knew of the existence of
the other. One Ustasha had a clear shot at Alexander, but hesitat-
ed. He couldn’t stomach the thought that the bomb he was hold-
ing might harm innocent bystanders. At this point, the other
group attacked a police detachment for no apparent reason.
Someone shouted that a guy had a bomb, and the revolutionary
with a heart of gold was arrested with the explosive device still in

his hands.
Obviously, the Croatian exile movement still hadn’t shed
it’s farcical side. Later in 1933, they were scandalized in Hungary
where they had wrested control of a refugee camp on the border
and transformed it into a command post for Ustasha incursions
across Yugoslavia’s northern border. Ivo Percic, the camp’s com-
mander, had a bit of a domestic situation on his hands when his
common-law wife, Jelka, indulged in some freelancing of the
heart. Her beau was Josip Zarko, one of his prized recruits and a
man wanted for the attempted murder of the Yugoslav ambassa-
dor to Belgium. Josip died in mysterious circumstances, suppos-
edly from a self-inflicted wound. Jelka suspected that he had actu-
ally been murdered, particularly from dark hints that Percic
dropped during one of their many stormy
arguments. She became deranged and her
sister took her to be examined by one of
Sigmund Freud’s pupils in Vienna. After
recovering, Jelka made contact with agents
of the king and agreed to act as a spy.
Pavelic was outraged, not by the inter-
nal feuding that characterized his movement
(which few revolutionaries would tolerate),
but that Percic had allowed a mere woman
to set him up. Jelka fled to Yugoslavia when
she was discovered, and her testimony led to
the Hungarian bases being closed down.
Pavelic dealt with Percic, who had been one
of his first recruits in Vienna, first. Using his
knowledge of motivational techniques,
Pavelic had him shot in the head. It took
longer to get to Jelka, but Pavelic finally set-
tled the score with her after the Ustasha
took power in Zagreb, sending a special
police squad to slit her throat.
After the failed assassination in Zagreb, the Ustasha really
could claim to be persecuted. A wave of arrests rounded up sus-
pects inside Yugoslavia. Nor were Ustasha abroad safe from sum-
mary justice. The leader of the Ustasha exiles in Czechoslovakia

was found hanged in his room in Karlsbad; public opinion had
that it was not a suicide but an assassination. Attempts were also
made on the lives of Ustasha leaders in Budapest and Vienna, and
on Pavelic himself when he was visiting members of the Munich
branch of the Mussolini Fan Club, the Nazi Party.
Having never lived in the time of kings, with no emotion-
al connection to a vista in the past when Your Royal Majesties and
Your Excellencies were spoken, it is difficult to feel love, respect,
or even pity for King Alexander. For sure, he was a loving father
and probably a hale fellow. In matters of introspection and
instinct, however, Alexander was definitely wanting. For one
thing, though political leaders, from President McKinley to
Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss were dropping like flies,
he could not be persuaded to abandon his pretension for march-
ing in parades. To you or I, the murder of Franz Ferdinand in
Sarajevo might have been an encouragement to sidestep the open
car procession, or at least put the top up. The failed attempt in
Zagreb would have us waving behind the glass of a customized
PopeMobile. But Alexander reveled in these kinds of events,
which provided one of the few occasions for a king to wallow in
the love of the herd in the manner of his ancestors.
While in Marseilles, France for meetings with his western
allies, Alexander decided to indulge in his passion for displaying
the Royal Wave. In the same car was the Louis Barthou, the
French Foreign Minister, and several high ranking generals. They
were surrounded on all sides by French gendarmes marching on
horseback.
Halfway through the parade, Alexander was feeling the
people’s love. He was looking spiffy in his Admiral’s uniform,
with the French Legion of Honour pinned to his chest. France
and Serbia were allies in the First World War, as Serbian propa-
gandists never tire of reminding us. Having overthrown three
kings and two emperors in the previous hundred and fifty years,
the spectacle of a monarch from the peasant kingdoms of the east
was truly a sight for the French Marseillais.
One of those deliriously happy citizens jumped on the
hood of the sedan Alexander and Barthou were riding in, shout-
ing “Long Live the King!” A moment later, he drew a pistol from

his frock coat.
And Alexander just then remembered why he hated
Sarajevo.
Gasps and cries of pain rippled through the dense crowd as
more shots were fired from their midst. A French colonel pounced
on the overexcited Alexanderphile, though the assassin continued
firing until his weapon was empty. The crowd grabbed the perp
from the colonel’s grasp and tore him to pieces, ripping off his
clothes, tearing out his hair and mutilating his body. Only one
identifying mark remained: on the right wrist, a tattoo of a skull
and crossbones.
Alexander had been pierced by two bullets and died short-
ly thereafter. Barthou bled to death. Three innocent bystanders
watching the procession were killed, nine wounded by the ran-
dom gunfire coming from the crowd.
Though some controversy
about the disemboweled
assassin’s origins would sim-
mer (as the skull-and-bones
tattoo indicated, he was a
member of VRMO,
Mihailov’s former chauffeur
and a seasoned killer
“loaned” in Mihailov’s words
for the job at Marseilles after
Pavelic’s boys had goofed in
Zagreb), there was no doubt
about the identity of the men
who had fired from the
crowd. The men arrested with pistols in their hands were Croats,
recruited from among the bitter Croatian émigrés in Hungary by
Dido Kvaternik to carry out a death sentence on the King ordered
by Ante Pavelic.
The entire continent of Europe gasped, as they do when-
ever another Balkan fanatic succeeds in rubbing out another
tyrant. They had no reason to. Though there were several raucous
confrontations in the League of Nations, the Yugoslav govern-
ment was determined to act with the somber reflection and tact-

fulness which Alexander so acutely lacked. There was no
Krystallnacht in Zagreb. As the King’s son and heir was but a
schoolboy, a regency was set up under Prince Paul, who immedi-
ately began the dismantling of his cousin’s repressive regime.
For Mussolini, this whole affair was a bridge too far. Before
European powers could react, he arrested Pavelic, Kvaternik and
several other Ustasha leaders in Italy. He would later refuse to
extradite them to serve the death sentence passed in absentia in
France, on grounds that France itself was harbouring several men
who had tried to kill him. Many historians have taken for grant-
ed that Mussolini, as Pavelic’s protector and Yugoslavia’s enemy,
was apprised of the plot in advance. He was not. In the archives
of the Fascist government is a cable confirming an earlier report
that the King and the Foreign Minister were dead. In the margin,
Mussolini has scrawled the instruction, “Ask our Croat friends
who the murderer could be and who could have inspired him.”
Though this could be read in a few different ways, it at least shows
that he had no intimate knowledge of the plot. Some months later,
Pavelic and Kvaternik were quietly released. The aspiring revolu-
tionaries could now pick up chicks with the claim that they had
been sentenced to death in absentia in two different countries.
While Prince Paul was a backer of many of his cousin’s policies,

he considered his time as Regent more of a duty than a right—to
hold the state together until the Crown Prince, Alexander’s son
Peter, came of age. As such, relaxation of his cousin’s repression
was an absolute necessity.
Alexander had imprisoned Stjepan Radic’s successor as
head of the Croat Peasant Party, Vladko Macek, and had permit-
ted the release of the leader of the Serbs in Croatia, Svetozar
Pribicevic, only when he developed a terminal illness while in
prison. It’s true that Alexander’s policies had favoured Serbs in
general, but he was as hostile to the Serbian opposition as he was

to the Croats.
Prince Paul commuted Macek’s sentence and released other
political prisoners, including many Communists. In 1935, a coali-
tion comprised of the Croat Peasant Party and the Serbian oppo-
sition took more than a third of the votes in grossly unfair elec-
tions. In 1938, their vote percentage had grown to 45%. Though
the racketeers Alexander favoured had been supplanted by an
assortment of increasingly bizarre governing coalitions (one con-
tained parties representing Serbian military veterans, Bosnian
Muslim merchants and Slovene farmers), the Croats could no
longer be cut out of the deal.
The King is, as a rule, the grand With Paul’s prompting, a new government, headed by
Dragisa Cvetkovic, came to a historic agreement with Vladko
master of the Yugoslav Free- Macek, the Sporazum (Understanding) of 1939. Croatia was
made an autonomous, federated republic, subordinate to Belgrade
mason lodges... Freemasonry does in matters of foreign policy and military affairs but self-governing
not attack any of the Croat party in most other respects. Macek himself, after years as a pariah,
became Vice Premier of the Yugoslav government.
politicians who demand Croat The Sporazum was absolutely the worst thing that could
happen to the Ustasha. Croats becoming satisfied with the polit-
autonomy, because these are them- ical situation inside Yugoslavia would end Pavelic’s dream of
killing lots and lots of people. To Pavelic, the Sporazum was a
selves connected with Jewry and betrayal of the highest sort—Macek had sold out not only to
Freemasonry. Serbia, but to the nefarious forces of Croat-hating Judaism and
International Freemasonry as well. From 1939 to 1941 the
Ustasha accelerated attacks both in and outside of Yugoslavia. It
Ante Pavelic
was to no avail. Political leaders condemned them, but didn’t real-
ly seem that interested.
Facing political oblivion, Ante Pavelic was saved, as so
many scoundrels are, by the fortunes of war.

The Denouement
Y ugoslavia remained neutral in the early days of
World War II, despite pressure from both the
Germans and those vaunted French allies. It
was Italy’s duce, Mussolini, who would be
responsible for the physical destruction of
Yugoslavia, though not in the manner he would have preferred.
The Italians had fashioned a pathetic “Mediterranean
Empire” by the annexation of Ethiopia and Albania. Hitler by
this point had already taken Poland and blasted France out of
existence. Jealous of his former pupil’s success, and with his
syphilitic mind filled with delusions of grandeur about the ancient
union of Athens and Rome, Mussolini launched a war of con-
quest on Greece. He was shocked when Greek soldiers, seasoned
by years of mountain warfare, turned on the Italian invaders in a
blistering counter-offensive, driving deep into Italian-occupied
Albania.
Mussolini, his tail between his legs, scurried back to cower
behind his German master. Hitler was obliged to help, not least
of all because of British intervention in Southeast Europe could
destablize the entire southern flank of his European empire.
Someone playing Risk would say, “Just throw two XX and one V
army down into the Balkans,” but it’s not that easy, not even for
der Führer. The only railway link to the port of Thessaloniki orig-
inated in Southern Serbia. Furthermore, he needed to act quick-
ly—the countdown was on to Operation Barbarossa, his momen-
tous invasion of the Soviet Union, and the launch had already
been delayed to allow for this pathetic Balkan adventure.
Alternating threats and flattery, the Germans spent weeks
attempting to get Prince Paul and his Prime Minister Dragisa
Cvetkovic to declare themselves for the Axis. The Yugoslavs
wanted to remain neutral. Hitler insisted on outright declaration

for the Germans. In a hopeless situation, the Yugoslav leaders
caved. On March 24, 1941, Yugoslavia officially became a party to
the Tripartite Pact.
The Patriarch of the Serbian
Orthodox Church had a stormy
meeting with Prince Paul and
denounced the agreement on the
radio. The reaction from the coun-
try’s institutions was even more
belligerent. On the night of
March 26th, junior officers from
the Yugoslav Air Force carried out
a coup d’etat, sacking Cvetkovic
and ousting Prince Paul. At their
prompting, King Peter II, 17 years
old and destined for one of the
shortest reigns of any Serbian
monarch, took the throne.
People in the streets of Belgrade
came out en masse to support the
new government, in demonstra-
tions with a distinctly anti-
German pallour. An immense
crowd gathered in Belgrade and
chanted anti-Nazi slogans. They
advanced on the building housing
the German Tourist Board,
which, it was said, was a front run
by the Gestapo. Demonstrators
smashed all the windows, set a fire
inside, and ritualistically defiled a
swastika flag.
Adolf Hitler at first could not believe what he was being
told about the happenings in Belgrade. It had to be some kind of
sick joke. He then called in the heads of the German military and
informed them he had decided to “destroy Yugoslavia as a military
power and sovereign state”—to “cauterize the Serbian ulcer”.
In a tender telegram, Hitler advised the Italians not to start

any new ventures in the Balkans for the moment. Given that the
duce was getting his lights punched out in Greece, that was easy
enough. But Mussolini, who had precipitated this whole affair,
was able to help rather than hurt his German allies for once, and
not just because the demoralized Italian Army wouldn’t be spear-
heading the invasion. Mussolini put Hitler in touch with the
Ustasha.
The Nazis launched Operation Enterprise 25, the conquest
of Yugoslavia, on the morning of April 6, 1941. Belgrade was
emerging from Orthodox Easter services when Luftwaffe
bombers appeared in the sky. Their bombs pinpointed anti-air-
craft batteries and airfields, including the camouflaged hangers
which housed most of the Yugoslav Air Force. Without the
slightest resistance, Stuka divebombers then skipped across the
rooftops, blowing the city into cinders and killing close to 17,000
civilians in a firestorm. The Nazis had been given precise instruc-
tions on the location of targets by a Croatian officer in the Air
Force who had gone AWOL the week before. This was the pri-
mary contribution of the Ustasha to the war effort: wiping out the
entirety of the Yugoslav Air Force before they had a chance to
leave the ground.
Citizens of Zagreb turned on their radios to find out what
was happening over the river. They had seen the swarms of air-
craft from the north, but the Luftwaffe passed over Croatia and
Slovenia without dropping their payloads. The radio relays in
Belgrade had been destroyed; a deep, cloistered voice greeted
them instead. It was Ante Pavelic broadcasting from Rome, call-
ing for a mutiny. “Croat soldiers, use your weapons against the
Serbian soldiers and officers. We are already fighting shoulder to
shoulder with our German and Italian allies.”
Many Yugoslavs had been lulled into the belief that the cri-
sis precipitated by the signing of the Tripartite Pact had ended
with the coup. Tito, after arriving in Belgrade following the coup,
assumed the danger was over and returned to his hideout in
Zagreb a few days later. Many units of the army were not even
mobilized. One bemused German soldier wrote about a “con-
frontation” with a barracked unit in Croatia which had ignored

the mobilization order. Instead of preparing for mortal combat,
they were having a party. The Croat officers interrupted festivities
long enough to negotiate their surrender, before continuing on as
if nothing had happened.
The collapse of Yugoslavia was swift and anti-climactic.
Twenty-four hours after the on-slaught began, on April 7, the
government was already making preparations to flee. On April
10, with the Royal Army still in the field, Slavko Kvaternik dis-
embarked fresh from Italy and declared the Independent State of
Croatia in the name of his Poglavnik, Ante Pavelic.
The head of the post-coup government, Air Force General
Simovic, had spent a good deal of time in meetings leading up to
the invasion going on about Serbia’s storied history of resistance to
aggressors. Vladko Macek, who with the other Croatian deputies
retained his position after the coup, rebuked him, saying that one
couldn’t establish a sound national policy by stirring up strong
emotions. Macek later confirmed that he was contacted before the
invasion by German agents and asked to head an independent
Croatia himself—an offer which he declined. Regardless, on April
9, he deserted the embattled government. Two days later he met
with Kvaternik in Croatia and announced on the radio, “I invite all
members of the Peasant Party to recognize the change, to help the
new Croatia, and above all, to obey all its laws.” To lead by exam-
ple, Vladko Macek dutifully obeyed one of new Croatia’s first laws
which sentenced him to a concentration camp.
Ante Pavelic, accompanied by scarcely a hundred hardened
Ustasha—the core of his organization after twelve years of fitful
exile—arrived in Zagreb on April 16, where he was met by a con-
gregation of notable citizens, including leaders of political parties,
civic organizations and the hierarchy of the Croatian Catholic
Church. Though it was a fait accompli, their acclaim would have
made him Poglavnik even if German tanks not done so. “A wave
of enthusiasm pervaded Zagreb at the time,” Macek later wrote,
“not unlike that which had swept through the city in 1918 when
ties with Hungary were severed.”

The Poglavnik
T rue to their master’s word, Hitler’s armies put an
end to the short-lived (and, it should be noted, all-
around disastrous) Yugoslav experiment. The gov-
ernment (including, notably, the Croat Peasant
Party’s governor of autonomous Croatia, Ivan
Subasic) together with the 17 year old monarch fled to the
Middle East and onward to Britain. With no one left behind to
sign the articles of surrender, the Germans sprung a former
Minister of Foreign Affairs from a Belgrade prison to do so.
Eventually the Nazis found a more prominent figure, former
Minister of War Milan Nedic, to act as the Marshal Pétain of a
puppet Serbia. A group of junior officers led by Col. Dragoljub
“Draza” Mihailovic were miffed by the quick surrender of the
army and took to the hills in resistance.
The Germans had annexed small bits of Yugoslavia direct-
ly, and dished out vittles from the dead state to Bulgaria,
Romania, and Hungary. The Italians took the lion’s share of ter-
ritory. As the locals had feared, Dalmatia was annexed outright,
according to an agreement between Ante Pavelic and Count
Ciano which was deeply unpopular even within the ranks of the
Ustasha. Much of Kosovo and Macedonia was attached to
Mussolini’s puppet Albanian state. Montenegro was established
as a “kingdom” without a king. None of the descendants of King
Nikola wanted anything to do with it, and so it was ruled for the
remainder of the war by the Italian army command.
Hitler was reluctant to grant the Ustasha, a party with min-
imal popular backing, control of such a large swath of territory.
Had the support they gave to the invasion been critical (or even
necessary), he may have overlooked the fact that none of the lead-
ers of the group which purported to represent the soul of Croatia
had stepped foot in their own country for a decade. Perhaps

remembering its position in the Hapsburg Empire, Hitler was
inclined to grant Croatia “an autonomy in close liaison with
Hungary”. Mussolini pressed for a puppet state he could better
control. It was only by the duce’s persuasion, and after Macek
turned down German overtures to lead the state, that Pavelic was
granted his fief. The Independent State of Croatia (or NDH by
its Serbo-Croatian acronym) was a swollen monster, including
modern Croatia and Bosnia and swaths of territory in Serbia up
to Zemun, at the gates of Belgrade itself.
Most important is the dedication, Pavelic and his henchmen were still ordering new nameplates and
stationary when newspapers throughout the NDH printed a
guns, bombs and sharp knives of memo from the desk of Ante Pavelic that must have made his
subjects’ blood run cold. Pavelic explained that the primary aim of
Croatian Ustasha, who will clear his government the “purification” of Croatia and the elimination
and cut all that is rotten from the of “alien elements”. Though the world was not yet familiar with
the language of Dachau, such words couldn’t portend a bright and
healthy Croat body. And then, let merry future. Reading excerpts from his deranged political tracts
reprinted with devotion in every newspaper, Jews, Serbs, and
the world observe the murdered Gypsies (and Freemasons) shuddered for what was to come.
According to his own figures, just less than half of the
and burned corpses of traitors.
Independent State of Croatia’s inhabitants were actually
Croatian. Even this figure was deduced using the Poglavnik’s
Ante Pavelic arithmetic, which diverges greatly from the science we use to send
rockets into space and tabulate our grocery bills. The Croats, then
as now, were but the third-largest ethnic group in Bosnia, and
their position in Hercegovina was by no means as dominant as it
is today.
The Poglavnik, for all of his blind intolerance, had a rather
liberal definition of Croat in this sense. Bosnjaks were hereafter
considered apostate Croats who had adopted Islam (and Croats
were, you recall, apostate Germans who somehow adopted names

like Ivo and Miroslav). The Ustasha Minister of Education,
Religion and Cults and their chief cultural figure, Mile Budak,
assured the Bosnian Muslims that “The state religion of Croatia
is Islam, where the Croats are Muslims.” Great efforts were made
to insinuate the common folk of both Bosnia and Croatia into
collaboration with the Ustasha, through special recruitment, com-
pulsory service of teenagers in either construction projects or
Junior Ustasha paramilitary training, and handing over ownership
of property belonging to dead or exiled Serbs to Muslim or
Catholic peasants largely indifferent to the new rulers.
On April 27, 1941, just two weeks into the life of the
Independent State of Croatia, there was no longer any doubt that
Pavelic walked the walk. On that day, a newly-organized detach-
ment of the Ustasha Army pounced upon the primarily Serbian
village of Gudovac. They broke down doors, threw old women
from windows, stabbed villagers in their beds. One group of
Ustasha ordered ten men to stand in a line as if they were prepar-
ing to march. He then fired a single shot to see how many he
could kill—a small contribution to the study of forensics, as well
as an exposition of traditional Balkan thriftiness.
One hundred and ninety six Serbs perished in this small
village. Over the next two weeks, the pogrom intensified. On May
8, the chief of one of the dozen secret police organizations set up
in the NDH, Vjekoslav “Maks” Luburic, set aside his blueprints
for the first of 26 concentration camps to lead the assult on anoth-
er village, Blagaj. Four days later, he was back at it, rounding up
and killing 260 Serbs in the mixed village of Prekopa. The meth-
ods of execution belied an absolute genius for cruelty. The Italians
had been slow in securing ammunition for Ustasha units, but the
Ustasha preferred these more savage forms of execution even after
they were flush with guns‘n’ammo. The vast majority of their vic-
tims were killed by truncheons, knives, axes, and clubs, suffering
snapped necks, slit throats, and even live burial. In areas where the
terrain was favourable—for instance, the future site of the nerv-
ous Virgin, Medjugorje—they were thrown from cliffs into one of
the spontaneous cemeteries forming at the bottom of Bosnia’s
snaking stone ravines. To make sure no one survived, Ustasha

pranksters would toss grenades or sticks
of dynamite into the pits to blow the
dead apart.
Something gruesome was happening in
the Croatian countryside. Yet not
even those familiar with the river of
frayed press releases Ante Pavelic
plowed through in his exile would
guess that this was only the beginning.
Mile Budak, in an speech on July 22,
1941, crystallized the horror of the NDH
and the Ustasha ideology with a few banal
sentences: “We shall kill one part of the
Serbs. We shall transport another third, and
the rest of them will embrace the Roman Catholic religion...
Our Croatia will become Catholic within ten years.”
Pouncing on rural Serbian villages in the old Hapsburg Military
Frontier of the Krajina was Pavelic’s way to bring about
“purification”. The first people the Ustasha took away were the
educated—teachers, doctors, and local leaders. Of the peasants,
the men would be killed, though Ustasha certainly wouldn’t
discriminate between the sexes in the passion of the slaugh-
ter. A mass migration towards Serbia began as rumours of
atrocities spread. Of those left—widows especially—the con-
version to Catholicism and marriage to eligable Croatian
bachelors would complete Pavelic’s diabolical plan.
Jews, Gypsies, and political dissidents had no recourse to emi-
gration or salvation. For them, there was only death. This was in
spite the fact that Pavelic’s wife was part-Jewish (a detail which
his apologists leap upon, hoping to erase a few thousand mass
graves by a genealogical trick). Maks Luburic’s death camps
began taking inmates in the Summer of 1941. After three
months, approximately 20,000 Jews had been deported to the
camps, chief among them Jasenovac.
Historian Jonathan Steinberg, in his overview of the
Catholic reaction to the Holocaust, has written, “Even those
who criticize the silence of [then Pope] Pius XII never suggest

that the Vatican caused the massacres; the issue is whether the
pope and the clergy did enough to stop them. The Croatian case
will not fit such comfortable secular categories.” Many of the
attacks on Orthodox villages, as impossible as it is to believe, were
spearheaded by dressed members of the Catholic clergy. Nowhere
else in Europe was faith to become so ruthlessly prostituted for
such evil.
The Archbishop of Sarajevo, Ivan Saric, was a fervent
devotee to the Ustasha, his oath to the Poglavnik taking prece-
dence over his oath to the Lord. “How many times have I heard
the Ustasha ask where they would be without their priests!” he
wrote on May 11, 1941. “I sang with the Ustasha with all my
heart and voice, ‘Our Beautiful Homeland’, all with big tears in
our eyes. And with eager hope in its beautiful, sweet and golden
freedom, uplifting ourselves to God, we prayed to the Almighty
to guide and protect Ante Pavelic for the freeing of Croatia.”
The stark reality that the Ustasha stood for the murder in
principle of more than 2 million people never dissuaded the
Archbishop of Sarajevo and other high-ranking members of the
Croatian Catholic Church from their belief in the righteousness
of their hero. Those priests and monks not bathing in human
blood were invited to assist in mass conversions. Te Deums were
sung in churches on the Poglavnik’s birthday (one parish priest
who refused to do so was sent to Jasenovac). Archbishop Saric,
who was also a bad poet, loved his big brute more than ever on
Christmas Day, 1941, when he wrote a 22 verse epic called “Ode
to the Poglavnik”:
Embracing thee was precious to the poet

as embracing our beloved Homeland.
For God Himself was at thy side, thou good and strong one
so that thou might perform thy deeds for the Homeland...
And against the Jews, who had all the money,
who wanted to sell our souls,
who built a prison around our name—
those traitors!—
Dr. Ante Pavelic! the dear name!
Croatia has therein a treasure from Heaven!
May the King of Heaven accompany thee, our Golden Leader!

My Favourite
Fascist
B ut there is, after all, more to life than driving a
pickaxe into the skull of your enemies. With the
founding of the NDH and the introduction of Rule
by Massacre, Pavelic launched a diplomatic blitz to
thank and further ingratiate himself with his allies,
knowing their support was necessary to solve the minority prob-
lem troubling his masticated state.
In Italy, Pavelic and Count Ciano discussed some details
about the Italian zone of influence in the NDH and their annex-
ation of the Dalmatian coast. The Poglavnik also made a visit to
the Vatican, where he made a favourable impression on the
Catholic hierarchs. Though they would not recognize the new
state, seeing as how it had declared war on the free world, they
made it clear to the chieftain that this was but a formality. The
Ustasha representative was recognized as an ambassador.
Throughout the fitful life of the NDH, only one high-ranking
cleric in Rome—Cardinal Eugene Tisserant—had the courage to
criticize the Croatian aspect of what Pope John Paul II has scan-
dalously characterized as “the wise and skilful diplomacy” of Pope
Pius XII.
While in Rome, Pavelic also had the rather difficult task of
finding a king for his new Kingdom. Mussolini insisted that Ante
Pavelic and the Ustasha replicate in Croatia his own bizarre
arrangement with the Italian King, Victor Emmanuel III. Victor
himself proposed his second cousin, the dissolute Duke of
Spoleto, as a candidate. The Duke accepted but, as he later said,
“I was drunk at the time.” With surprising resolve, Spoleto
learned something about the bloody pandemonium of his new
realm from returning Italian officers. Using a diverse repertoire of
stunts, bluffs and lies, the newly-ordained King Tomislav man-
aged to delay his expected departure date for more than two years,

by which time Italy had dropped out of the war and Spoleto was
free to return to his delicious Milanese mistress. Croatia remained
a kingdom, even though their monarch never stepped foot in the
country.
On June 6, 1941, Pavelic had
his first meeting with Adolf Hitler.
In the two months since he had
advocated that Croatia be liquidated
as an appendage of Hungary, Hitler
had warmed to his lost Gothic kins-
man. Pavelic appealed to his good
side when he offered to send
Croatian volunteers to fight the
Soviets on the Eastern Front. Hitler
in turn encouraged the expulsion of
Serbs and offered to settle their
lands with leftover Slovenes and
Croats from the Reich. The growing
pains of the NDH would be tortur-
ous, Hitler warned his fellow barbar-
ian, but this would in the end be bet-
ter than a “permanent suffering”.
Also sprach der Führer: “If the Croat
state wishes to be strong, a fifty year policy of intolerance must be
pursued, because too much tolerance on such issues can only do
harm.”
Pavelic hardly needed the encouragement. On June 28th,
1941 the center of terror moved south from the Krajina.
Hercegovina, Ante’s old stomping ground, was stamped with
blood and gore, with the ferocity of the massacres even more
intense than the atrocities of May. Villages were literally depopu-
lated overnight by Ustasha, drunk on blood, playing with the sev-
ered body parts of their victims.
On that same, dreaded day ( June 28th is St. Vitus’ Day,
Vidovdan to the Serbs, on which horribly bad things occur with
uncanny frequency), an Italian squadron investigating reports of
gunshots came under fire in the Krajina. The Italians thought it
was the Ustasha. “Don’t shoot!” one shouted. “We’re Italians!”

A moment later, several Serbs climbed out of the brush and
apologized. These were the first Chetniks in Croatia, under the
command of a former Orthodox priest, socialist, trade unionist
and a bear of a man, Momcilo “Duke” Djujic.
As soon as he got word of the German invasion, Tito
emerged from his Zagreb hideout and set out for Belgrade, trav-
eling in disguise as a wealthy man of leisure. On July 4th, in the
swank Belgrade villa of the publisher of the newspaper Politika, he
dispatched members of the Communist Party’s Central
Committee to different parts of the dismembered country to
organize resistance to the invader. Tito would never live down the
fact that, though he claimed the decision to fight was motivated
by patriotism, the Party didn’t move an inch until the Soviet
Union was attacked by Hitler. Up until then, Germany and the
USSR had a “Non-Aggression Pact,” and in states which had fall-
en to the Nazis the Communist Party remained dormant even
when, as happened in Belgrade, high-ranking members were
rounded up by the Gestapo.
On July 13, 1941, the Montenegrins rose in arms—the first
mass rebellion in Occupied Europe. Reports leaked out to
England and the Soviet Union, cheering the Allies that the
rugged mountain folk, whose defiance had been celebrated in the
poems of Milton and Shelley, had not lost their love of freedom.
During the uprising, before the Italians resorted to brutal reprisals
to quell the population, Royalist Chetniks fought side-by-side
with Communist-led insurgents (who imported the word parti-
zan to designate their soldiers). Tito met with Draza Mihailovic
on three occasions to smooth relations, but their minions were
already at each others’ throats.
The Italian campaign of pacification in Montenegro, in
which whole villages were burned in retaliation, was nothing
compared to what the Germans did in the Serbian city of
Kragujevac, where in October 1941, 7,000 Serbian men and boys
and one German soldier who refused to stand in the firing squad
were executed in retaliation for a squadron of Germans killed in
an ambush. This unfathomable barbarity was repeated at Kraljevo
with 1,700 civilians butchered. For the Serbian Chetniks, the sur-
vival of their nation took precedence over every foolish skirmish

with an overpowering enemy. They were far more powerful than
the Partizans, and more popular as well. Their forces could better
withstand punishing assaults from the Germans, but were also
more at risk. Nonetheless, in the Bosnian city of Foca, self-
defense against the Ustasha had spiraled out of control, resulting
in a massive bloodletting against the city’s Muslim inhabitants
and adding another ethnic dimension to the Balkan Golgotha.
Though they later cried foul, the Communists were
brazenly attempting to undercut the Chetniks from the very
beginning, throwing away resources to build cadres in Serbia
where the Chetniks had popular support. It was a dismal failure,
and the Serbian divisions of the Partizans were completely deci-
mated.
The Partizans were driven out of Serbia by the Chetniks,
and then out of the Sandzak, a narrow belt of predominantly
Slavic Muslim communities on the border between Serbia and
Montenegro. Tito and the Supreme Staff relocated to Bosnia, to
lick their wounds and regroup for yet another suicidal penetration
into Serbia or Montenegro. Instead, they received an influx of
new recruits. These were Serbs from the NDH, hardened by the
murderous rampage of the Ustasha. During 1942 and most of
1943 the units of the Supreme Staff ranged throughout Bosnia,
building mobile units capable of fighting anywhere in the country
without ties to the land, forming ephemeral local “soviets” wher-
ever they parked, and attempting to link up their belt of “liberat-
ed territories”.
It was to be Ante Pavelic’s fate that the two ideas he
despised most—Communism and Yugoslavism—would prosper
because of him.

Blues for
Adolph
I t is truly astounding to see, in the handwriting of loyal
Germans, reports of atrocities inscribed not with words
of pride and smug superiority, but descriptions such as
“nauseating” and “disgusting”. In an the illustrated cat-
alog of headless bodies and mutilated corpses called
What the Ustasha Did At Bjelovar, German investigators describe
how Pavelic’s troops had broken into an Orthodox Church
(which Pavelic deemed a “political organization” rather than a
faith), forced the worshippers to lay face down and speared them
with bayonets like fish on a trident. “If a stop isn’t put to this,” one
German intelligence officer wrote with astonishing vehemence,
“there won’t be a Serb left in this country.”
Croatia’s other ally went further than expressions of con-
demnation and disgust. Italian commanders initially provided
food and protection, and later even guns and ammunition to
bands of Chetniks for defense against the Ustasha. At Trebinje,
the Italian military governor actually disarmed an Ustasha
detachment emerging from a massive bloodletting and placed
them under arrest. The Chetniks took over the town the next day.
And then reports critical of the Ustasha began appearing in
the Italian press. Mussolini, a former newspaper editor, controlled
the tabloids with an iron hand, and there’s little doubt they
appeared with his approval. Turin’s Gazetto del Popol opined: “It
would be ludicrous to deny that the powers-that-be in Croatia are
former terrorists. These criminals have become generals, minis-
ters, ambassadors, newspaper editors and police chiefs. In spite of
their promotion to higher ranks, they have not changed funda-
mentally. In fact they are exactly what they used to be, including
Pavelic and all members of his government.” Just six months after
the invasion, after Pavelic’s meeting with Hitler, Mussolini had
lost all influence over his former protégé.

But no fascista, SS trooper or Gestapo goon could compete
in a game of The Dozens with the crusty Nazi plenipotentiary for
the region, General Edmund Glaise von Horstenau. His first con-
tact with the Ustasha came at Petar Kvaternik’s funeral (the
brother of Slavko and uncle of Dido Kvaternik had been mur-
dered by members of the Royal Army in revenge for his family’s
sabotage). The General told Slavko Kvaternik he looked forward
to working with him, but warned against adopting the “comic
opera” title of Field Marshal. That Field Marshal Slavko
Kvaternik, a man who had no experience as a commander, ignored
his advice told the General that this was going to be a tough job.
In June of 1941, with the NDH hemorrhaging from
Ustasha attacks and Chetnik retaliation, von Horstenau began his
report to Berlin:
According to reliable reports from countless German military and civilian observers, during
the last few weeks, in town and country, the Ustasha have gone raging mad.
Horstenau set up his own intelligence network in the

NDH, knowing he could never rely on Dido Kvaternik (“the
pathological son of the pathological Field Marshal”) for accurate
information. In the Autumn of 1942, the Austrian General con-
cluded a report with his assessment of the “unspeakable swineish-
ness of this gang of murderers and criminals.”
The General had heard about the “internment camps” for
undesirables, and demanded to be taken to one. His host—“a
rogue”—had cleaned up the place but it still stank of death and
excrement. “And then worst of all: a room along whose walls,
lying on straw just lain down for my inspection, something like
fifty naked children, half of them dead, the other half dying...
Such places have reached the peak of abomination here in
Croatia, under a Poglavnik installed by us.”
On this occasion, von Horstenau turned to his roguish
guide and summed up his opinion of the NDH, the Ustasha, and
Ante Pavelic in general: “This is enough to make you puke.”
“The Croat Revolution was by far the bloodiest and most
awful among all I have seen firsthand or from afar in Europe since
1917,” von Horstenau goaded Pavelic. According to von
Horstenau, the Ustasha had done “more evil in a day than the
Serbian regime had done in twenty years.”
When historians (or propagandists, as it is) mention that
the Ustasha regime was so barbaric that “even Nazis” were sick-
ened by it, they are referring primarily to Edmund Glaise von
Horstenau. He was typical in some respects of the old Austrian
military aristocracy, but a few things do have to be kept in mind
before repeating clichés. First, few people knew what was really
being done to the Jews, other than that they were being trans-
ported to camps. Horstenau was regular army, not SS, and like
many Wehrmacht officers, probably didn’t know Jews in Poland
and Germany were being kept in places at least as bad as
Jasenovac. The massacres in the NDH also predate adoption of
the Final Solution, when German camps where undesirables were
worked to death were replaced by extermination camps where the
only escape was through the chimney.
Second, not even Nazi true believers wished for the exter-
mination of the Serbs—it was off the radar of their indoctrina-
tion. Some believed Serbs were barbaric savages; others admired
their fighting prowess from anecdotes from the First World War.
Officers such as von Horstenau saw that Pavelic’s demented poli-
The Poglavnik with Slavko cies were driving docile and largely indifferent peasants into the
Kvaternik, Zagreb 1943 ranks of the insurgents. The Germans had no desire to police
Croatia more than they had to, which would mean diverting
troops from where they were needed on the Eastern Front.
And, finally, as often happens in war, occupying troops
weighed down by bureaucratic burdens and concerned with the
administration of political objectives sympathized with the wild
crazies they were fighting, who had no similar restrictions.
That said, Glaise von Horstenau wasn’t the only
Wehrmacht officer to complain about the Ustasha’s barbarity and
sadism to Berlin. Field Marshal Wilhelm List, famous for having
been sacked from the siege of Stalingrad by Hitler before the lat-
ter threw his troops into catastrophe, also protested against the
wickedness of his Ustasha “allies”, as did many others.

One of the first inmates in the concentration camp of Jasenovac
was none other than Vladko Macek. Pavelic considered the pop-
ular successor to Stjepan Radic more of a threat than any Serb,
but, possibly realizing the value of public relations for the first
time in his life, released him to serve under house arrest before his
three-month term expired (inmates sent to Jasenovac were
imprisoned for three months, after which death was certain).
Macek was repeatedly contacted by von Horstenau and others
and asked to take a public role in the NDH to balance out
Pavelic’s Ustasha lunacy. On every occasion, he listened, but he
refused.
In his memoirs, Macek writes that
there was a Catholic chapel in the
death camp where priests heard
confession from the guards. On
seeing one Ustasha torturer
emerge from confessing his sins,
Macek asked him if he did not
fear the judgment of God.
“Don’t talk to me about that,”
the guard retorted. “I am per-
fectly aware of what is in store
for me. For my past, present
and future sins I will burn in
hell. But at least I will burn for
Croatia.”
This fanatical devotion to a primitive national ideal perme-
ated the hardcore of the Ustasha. Pavelic transformed the former
terrorist organization into a ruling elite, a Nazi Party for the
Balkans, with their own Gestapo and SS fighting units. There
were probably about 15,000 members of the Ustasha Army dur-
ing the war years. They would fight to the last bullet, then pull the
pins on their grenades before surrendering, knowing that death,
possibly horrific but in any case certain, awaited their capture by
Chetniks or Partizans.
Beneath the Ustasha were the Domobranci—the Home
Guards and Croatia’s regular army. Pavelic showed absolute dis-

dain for the Domobrans, believing that anyone who would pass
up the chance to become an heroic Ustasha was hardly worthy of
the name Croat. Subsequently the Domobrans were a complete-
ly unreliable force, heavily infiltrated by Communists, Socialists
and other political undesirables who thought it wise to get some
military training and find a few things to steal before defecting to
the Partizans. The less cunning often surrendered before the first
shot was fired. Cynical Ustasha dubbed the Domobrans “the
Partizan Supply Unit” for their tendency to throw down their
weapons as soon as the enemy came near. One Domobran even
landed an aircraft at Partizan headquarters. Others, upon surren-
dering, bragged that it was the third or fourth time they had been
disarmed.
With the Domobrans largely on the sideline, and the
Ustasha Army busy protecting Croatianism from little old ladies,
the Partizans were soon able to lay claim to large swathes of
Bosnia, Slavonia and even pockets on the outskirts of Zagreb as
liberated territory. To explain the situation, in a meeting with
Hitler in November 1942 at the Führer’s command post on the
Eastern Front, Pavelic fell back on a typical scapegoat. The prob-
lem, as always, was the Serbs. The Italians were protecting up to
30,000 Chetniks in Bosnia and the Krajina. Because of them, the
Poglavnik was unable to exercise authority over most of his own
territory.
Some German commanders in Berlin, privy to the reports
of von Horstenau, had begun to doubt the wisdom of placing
Pavelic in power on the ashes of Yugoslavia. Hitler was not one of
them. He came down hard on his aides, who in turn pressured
Mussolini to order his commanders to stop protecting Serbs and
Jews in the NDH. On Ciano’s memo detailing the German
demands, Mussolini scrawled “No objection.” But if they ever
received the order, his commanders in the Balkans ignored it.
They refused to hand over Jews and Serbs to the Ustasha because,
as Italian General Mario Roatta explained in his memoirs, “they
would be interned at Jasenovac, with well-known consequences.”
While the Italians were being transformed from allies to
enemies, Pavelic spent most of this period—most of the entire
war, actually—behind his desk in Zagreb. The Poglavnik was a

puritan, a homebody. While he reveled in lavish military parades
and bizarre fascizoid holidays, Pavelic was an imperfect fit for his
role as a jerkwater Hitler. For one thing, he
lacked the personality. Pavelic was so awful
at public speaking (and the mass rally was
an essential component of Fascism) that
he began to consciously mimic his idols,
watching hours of newsreels to study
Hitler’s unparalleled control of an audi-
ence and Mussolini’s fits and faints of
impossible drama.
Pavelic and his handlers threw out
every trick in Goebbels’ Bible to make the
Poglavnik into a Demigod, but his person-
ality cult never took root. For one thing,
Pavelic, like many Slavic leaders ashamed
of his peasant origins, had a terrible inferi-
ority complex. He had obtained a doctor-
ate in law from the University of Zagreb.
Subsequently it was illegal to print his
name without the honourific title of
“Doctor” included. Propaganda posters
with his face generously rendered swore
eternal loyalty to “Poglavnik Dr. Ante
Pavelic”.
The Ustasha had officially supplant- Ante Pavelic, Zagreb, 1944
ed Macek’s party as the champions of the
peasantry (“In Croatia, whoever is not of peasant origin is, nine
times out of ten, not a Croat at all but an immigrant foreigner,”
Pavelic wrote), but nevertheless agents of his sprawling security
apparatus noted that the Balkan art form of composing obscene
odes to their leaders was enjoying a popular renaissance at the
Poglavnik’s expense.
Besides micromanaging Dante’s Inferno, Pavelic really only
applied himself to one other administrative task during the war.
Having long been an avid stamp collector, he threw himself into
the task of making Croatia the international capital of philately.
Among the loot from murdered Serbs and Jews, the Poglavnik

would help himself to all collections of old or rare postage stamps.
He was outraged at his Ustasha administrators at the beginning
of the war, who merely seized Royal Yugoslavia’s postage and
stamped the NDH’s insignia, the red and white checkerboard, on
top of it. He consulted with his culture mogul Mile Budak about
selecting the best Croatian artists to illustrate the postage of their
new country. Pavelic suggested Ivan Mestrovic as a good candi-
date. The self-proclaimed Father of his Country had no idea that
the internationally acclaimed Mestrovic was not a painter at all
but a sculptor.

Collapse
T he NDH never regained control over its territory,
and the boundaries of the state were theoretical
from 1942 until the end of the war. The Partizans
in Bosnia would not be dislodged despite two
punishing operations by Axis forces. Duke
Djujic’s Chetniks struck deep into the NDH heartland with
impunity. In 1943 alone, 58 Ustasha mayors of Bosnian towns
were assassinated, and nearly two hundred town halls burnt to the
ground.
A few months after Pavelic’s meeting with Hitler, the
German army suffered their major defeat at Stalingrad. Ustasha
troops under German command were annihilated. Axis forces
were also beaten in North Africa, leaving Southern Europe wide
open to an Allied landing. With the situation on the ground
unraveling, the only reliable Domobrans—the so-called “Legion”
units of Croatian soldiers commanded by German officers—
began deserting as well.
The Allied invasion of Europe began on July 10, 1943 with
the capture of Sicily. Bombers were rushed to captured airfields
for raids on Italian cities. After an air attack on Rome, the long-
silent Italian king decided that something had to be done.
Mussolini was deposed. A month later, the Italians surrendered.
The Germans had anticipated Italy’s collapse, but there was
too much ground for them to cover. More than 380,000 Italian
troops were stationed in the Balkans, many of them policing the
Italian sphere of influence in the NDH. Few elected to continue
fighting on the German side. Many, in fact, elected to join their
erstwhile enemies. In Dalmatia and Slovenia alone more than
4,000 Italian troops joined the Partizans or the Chetniks.
But the vast majority of Italians simply shrugged and tried
to figure out a way to get home. They were almost knocked down

in the race to grab the weapons they left
behind. It was Tito’s ability to seize the
city of Split, supply center for the Italian
Army in the NDH and Dalmatia, that
really won the war for the Partizans. Far
from becoming fascistas during the occu-
pation, the shipworkers of Split threw
open the city gates for the Communists.
In Dalmatia, Croats were not asked to
murder their brothers or neighbours, but
to give up their language and become
Italians. They too were fighting for
national survival, and gravitated to the
Partizans as the only force which would
have them. With the Germans advancing,
the Partizans were forced to evacuate
Split soon thereafter. But they did so hap-
pily, as units mauled by offensives healed
up and retooled with their new toys.
Until 1943, the Partizans were a minor
irritant to the Ustasha. Certainly the
Germans didn’t care much about them, as
their only point of interest in the Balkans
was security for the railways and the pro-
curement of certain metals necessary to
feed the war machine. Now, with German forces in retreat from
Russia, the prospect of an Allied landing in the Balkans turned
Yugoslavia into a major theater of the war. Growth in the size of
the Partizan army, the equipment seized from the Italians and the
emergence of several talented commanders made the Partizans
the largest, most militant resistance force in Occupied Europe.
Oddly enough, Tito, Hitler and Pavelic all feared the same
thing: an Anglo-American landing in the Balkans. Tito calculat-
ed that if this were to occur, Western forces would back the
Chetniks—and his real objective wasn’t just to win the war but to
add Yugoslavia to the short list of red republics. In secret negoti-
ations carried out with the Germans (Communist historians later
referred to them euphemistically as the “March Consultations”),

the Partizans declared unambiguously that they would attack the
British and Americans if they attempted a landing. The “consul-
tations” never amounted to more than a prisoner exchange and a
lull in the fighting, which the Partizans used to attack the
Chetniks. The Germans on the other hand used the ceasefire to
give their forces time to prepare for an offensive intended to
encircle and destroy the Partizans in Bosnia and Montenegro.
Tito’s paranoia (and Hitler’s too) was fed by British disin-
formation. As is well known, the English had cracked the
German’s “Enigma” code and knew the Nazis feared an invasion
force landing in the Balkans, driving north and cutting off their
troops still fighting in the Soviet Union. The Germans, in turn,
had cracked Tito’s code, and knew from his messages to Moscow
that the Wehrmacht would have an unusual ally in the event of an
Allied penetration into the Balkans.
The year 1943 was an awful prophesy of things to come for the
Ustasha. Domobrans continued to desert, until the Ustasha Army
had to be dissolved and their troops placed in line with their
Domobran comrades to fortify their resolve. The Partizans, who
had previously shot themselves in the foot repeatedly by acting as
brutal as the invader to local peasants they considered Chetniks
(which came to be defined as “Serbs who are not Communists”),
finally began to understand how things worked and would accept
many former Domobran and Chetnik grunts without asking too
many questions. As season turned into season, Pavelic’s enemies
grew stronger, fortified now by airdrops and reinforcement from
the British and to a lesser degree, the Soviets.
According to the erstwhile NDH “president”, a non-entity
named Nikola Mandic (whoops... Doctor Nikola Mandic), Ante
Pavelic never gave up hope that the Germans would win the war.
He confided in Mandic that Hitler was developing “super-
weapons” that would throw the Russian hordes back from the

threshold of Germany. It was an article of faith, unbending before
logic. Mussolini, before being deposed at a meeting of the Grand
Fascist Council, also babbled on about these superweapons van-
quishing his enemies in Sicily. To men who tied their fortunes so
closely to the Nazis, it was their only hope.
At least two Ustasha chieftains didn’t see such a rosy pic-
ture. Mladen Lorkovic, who had held several minister-level posi-
tions in the government, had established contact with the British
military mission to the Partizans. British documents on the war
are, maddeningly, still classified, so we have little indication how
much consideration was given to a minor member of the govern-
ment considering a coup. Some nationalist historians have delud-
ed themselves that Lorkovic would be recognized as the head of
a neutral Croatia and the country would suddenly join the Allied
camp—a game the King of Italy had previously tried to play with
the Allies, to no avail. It’s unthinkable that the Independent State
of Croatia, born in the Nazi onslaught and on the periphery of a
shrinking Reich, would fetch a better price—or a less draconian
punishment—than Germany’s chief ally.
Regardless, Lorkovic met frequently with the Ustasha
Minister of War Ante Vokic about his plans, and the two began
to sound out other officers in the Domobrans for a coup d’etat
against the mad Poglavnik. Pavelic got wind of the conspiracy
before it got that far. Lorkovic and Vokic were arrested and
imprisoned in that hotbed of sedition, Lepoglava, where Tito had
once been taught the difference between a factionalist, a devia-
tionist and a neo-capitalistic dupe. In an act of spite, the conspir-
ators were executed by the retreating Ustasha in May of 1945.
On May Day, 1943, Tito promised his ragged soldiers that they
would be celebrating their next Communist Christmas in
Belgrade. His optimism seemed ludicrous at the time. But after a
rapid advance following Stalingrad, the Soviets were on the cusp

of eastern Serbia a year later. By late September, 1944, the Red
Army was fighting north of Belgrade in an attempt to encircle the
capital, and on October 20 they took the city.
The Wehrmacht took overall command of the forces still
fighting in the Balkans and established a front-
line at Srem. After savage fighting, their
defenses were breached and Croatia was virtu-
ally defenseless. To the last, however, Pavelic
stuck to his insane principles. Hunted by the
Partizans, the Chetnik commander of
Montenegro, Pavle Djurisic, attempted a
breakout to reach British and American troops
north of Yugoslavia by crossing the meager ter-
ritory Pavelic still controlled. The temptation of
killing one last handful of Serbs was too great.
The Poglavnik gleefully diverted troops from
the front to intercept Djurisic’s desperate band
and annihilate them to a man.
Djurisic’s fate notwithstanding, Chetniks
had more to fear from Tito than from Pavelic.
Tito was looking to settle the score with every-
one, but most of all with Draza Mihailovic. Duke Djujic had led
a huge detachment of Serbian soldiers and refugees to exile in
Italy. Instead of following suit, which would have meant crossing
the whole of Yugoslavia with clashes the entire way, Draza decid-
ed to take his chances in Serbia. There have been claims that the
Partizans, after recruiting one of Draza’s radio operator, led the
Chetnik leader into a trap. Whatever the case, he was captured,
put on trial a year later, and executed.
For the Poglavnik, too, the end was near. In March of 1945,
Pavelic asked Archbishop Stepinac, head of the Croatian
Catholic Church, to take over as leader of the NDH. It wasn’t to
forestall the Partizans and Russians, or to give an independent
Croatia untainted by his brutal legacy a chance in post-war bar-
gaining sessions. Pavelic wouldn’t dream of a Croatia without
himself at its head. Instead, his “abdication” was a transparent
attempt to preempt his old rival, Vladko Macek, who was weigh-
ing the possibility of declaring an independent Croatia under the

protection of the British. Stepinac seriously considered Pavelic’s
proposal while the skies exploded above him. Macek, for his part,
hardly had a movement to lead anymore. Some Peasant Party
leaders became exasperated by his unwillingness to openly oppose
the Ustasha, or to lead his own movement which would siphon
off the support of anti-Fascist Croats from the Partizans. The
indecisiveness of their leaders led several Peasant Party members
to contact the Partizans on their own, though they were prevent-
ed by party elders from attending the planned meetings.
Thus, despite having fought through and survived an
unmerciful enemy, in one of the most violent theaters of the most
horrendous war the world has ever known, Tito and the
Communists were handed Croatia by default.
The Nazis signed their surrender on May 9th, but the
Ustasha kept on fighting. Croatia, not Germany, was the last Axis
state in Europe to succumb.
In mid-May, 1945, Tito informed his commanders that the
ringleaders of the NDH were at the head of a large column of
refugees fleeing at top speed for the Austrian border. All Partizan
units in Croatia, Vojvodina and Slovenia were put on alert and
ordered to apprehend them.
Dr. Ante Pavelic, Dr. Andrija Artukovic, Dr. Mile Budak,
Archbishop (and Dr.) Ivan Saric and a horde of less degreed
henchmen were among the 50,000 or so desperate Croats run-
ning this marathon of the damned. Partizans were on their every
side, as were former Domobrans and others pissed about what
had happened to their country. This long column of refugees was
pursued by the Communists, strafed by the Soviets from the air,
riddled with bullets from the forests and ravines, as if the dead
were rising from their pits to seek revenge.
They finally reached the Austrian frontier at the city of
Bleiburg. The British met them there. Pavelic and the other
Ustasha ringleaders wore disguises—the British already knew
who they were and were looking for them. After some time, the
British decided to send the entire column—refugees, Ustasha and
all—back into Yugoslavia for the new régime to sort out. The
Partizans, now Yugoslavia’s government, met them. Some were
shot immediately. Others were marched until they collapsed on

their feet. The survivors were put into camps where typhus and
disease further cut them down. This is what nationalist historians
refer to as Krizni Put, “the Way of the Cross”, comparing the
march of these Croats to the path of Jesus on the way to
Crucifixion.
No one can be sure how many Croats died on the march
from Bleiburg—a mass grave reputed to be from this time was just
recently discovered beneath a highway in Slovenia. For that mat-
ter, no one can reasonably estimate how many human beings were
driven through Ante Pavelic’s slaughterhouse. The Yugoslav
Communist government put the war dead at 1.8 million, but this
included all those killed on the territory of Yugoslavia. The Italian
War Ministry put the Ustasha’s victims at 300,000 in 1941, when
the death camps, which operated until the collapse of the NDH,
were just getting started. The truth is that nationalist historians
have too often played tit-for-tat with war dead, Croats assuming
the highest number possible at Bleiburg and the Serbs doing the
same for the victims of the NDH, and the Bosnian Muslims
pointing to the massacre of thousands by Chetniks at Foca as
proof that they were actually the ones who suffered the most.
As for the victims of the Ustasha—the NDH, while many
of its records have been preserved, wasn’t inspired by the anal
retentiveness of the Germans in noting its victims’ height, weight
and eye colour before they were turned into kindling. The Simon
Weisenthal Center, which has sought not to get involved in the
Balkan bloodshed of the later 20th century, has put the number at
30,000 Jews killed (about 75% of the pre-war population), and
29,000 Gypsies (97%). For Serbs, they estimate 600,000 were
murdered in cold blood by the Ustasha, which, Mile Budak would
be pleased to know, was just under a third of the pre-war Serbian
population of the lands gathered together in the hideous night-
mare of the Independent State of Croatia.

The Ratline
T he story of Tito in the years after the war is well
known. Filled with delusions that they were a
great power, the Yugoslav Communists tossed
around nuclear-tipped sticks of dynamite in the
stand-off between East and West, first by funding
the Communists in the Greek Civil War after the Soviets cut
them off, then by attempting to lay claim to parts of Austria and
Italy, nearly setting off World War III by their intransigence over
the Italian port city of Trieste, which had a Slovene minority. The
Russians weren’t pleased by the freelancing done by their frater-
nal subordinates, and with Stalin’s megalomania feeding an
insipid feud, in 1948 Yugoslavia was expelled from the merry
Bolshevik family of nations. The state apparatus was gradually
liberalized, though outbreaks of repression followed any overt
national revivals in the lands aching with the fresh wounds of
mass graves.
As well-known as the story of Yugoslavia is, the story of
Croatia during these years—or the tale of those fanatics who
claimed to represent her—is barely known, glimpsed only
through the propaganda of her self-mythologizing historians. If
this were the story of Nazi Germany, it would end right here, at
the end of the war, while a chorus of lawyers and journalists
grandstand on the concepts of international law at Nuremberg.
The story of Ante Pavelic and the Independent State of Croatia,
however, is far more complicated.
For years, all that was known was that Ante Pavelic escaped
justice through a net of darkness, surfacing several years after the
war in Argentina. No one knew how he got there, or the compli-
cated interests of the Americans, Argentines, and Papal envoys
watching over this orphan of fortune. While we have nothing
approaching a complete narrative, both time and the emergence

of an independent Croatian state in the 1990s have cast some
light on just how it was that the worst mass-murderer to survive
the war escaped from justice and lived quite openly in the years
following the immolation of the Independent State of Croatia.
Pavelic and many other Ustasha chieftains slipped away
from the British camp in Bleiburg, thus evading the fate of the
others who were turned over to the Partizans. It was alleged that
there was a significant pay-off to buy their escape, but no evidence
has ever been produced.
Pavelic spent several months laying low in Austria. Despite
speculation, the only eyewitness account of his time there comes
to us from his daughter, Marija, who gave a number of interviews
when she returned to Croatia in the 1990s to lead an extremist
movement and reclaim her family’s political dowery:
We were lucky. We landed on an Austrian who saved Father. For money. He put him up on
a peasant estate in the Alps, with false Austrian papers. The only person who lived with
Father in that house was a maid, an Italian woman. We (the family) lived elsewhere in San
Egilgen. We reported to the Americans, as this zone was under American control...
We met up with Father one to three times a week, in the woods. He spent his time in the
woods, picking mushrooms and catching fish. He even sent us some of these and we in turn
sent him some of the bread rations we had received. One day at the end of summer 1945, it
was raining and mother wasn’t feeling well and she asked me to go out and meet Father. I
found him alone in the woods, with a backpack, preparing to escape. When he had gone
home the maid had waved a signal that the police were there.
In the same interview, Marija’s husband Srecko Psinicik, a former

Ustasha officer who would later resurface as Pavelic’s right hand
man and editor of one of the reborn Ustasha movement’s chief
propagandists, added, “Had he been arrested he would certainly
have been handed over to Yugoslavia. He had already once been
in the hands of the Americans and English but they hadn’t rec-
ognized him.” The facelessness which had impeded the growth of
his personality cult while Pavelic was in power benefited him
greatly as a fugitive.

Far from the idyll of the
mass-murderer in flannel
with his trout and mush-
rooms—and even further
away from the killing fields
around Bleiburg—clergy and
laymen at the College of San
Girolamo degli Illrici in
Rome were abuzz with activ-
ity. San Girolamo was a place
of rest and refuge for
Croatian priests come to
study at the See of St. Peter.
Unofficially, it was a waysta-
tion for hunted Ustasha
chieftains desperate to catch
a steamer out of Europe.
Naif painting of Ante Pavelic from a post-war émigré journal Monsignor Juraj Madjerec
was the head of San
Girolamo. He was reputedly a favourite of Pope Pius XII, and
ably assisted by his secretary, Father Krunoslav Draganovic.
Father Draganovic was a Franciscan. As posterboy for the satan-
ic marriage of the Crucifix and the Dagger, he was also an officer
in the Ustasha. He achieved the rank of Colonel in Pavelic’s corps
of wonderboys, and as an official of the Ministry of Internal
Colonization was responsible for the confiscation of Serbian and
Jewish land and its reappropriation to Croats.
In 1943, Col./Father Draganovic was convinced to lay
aside his Ustasha Oath and join, of all clubs that would have him,
the Red Cross. As Croatia’s representative, he went to Rome,
probably to assist in diplomacy with the Vatican. His timing was
fortuitous. Because of his connections in the Red Cross,
Draganovic was able to expedite the vetting process Croats in
Allied hands went through to check if they were wanted for war
crimes. Draganovic, this scandalous Scarlet Pimpernel in the col-
lar of a cleric, made sure to keep one foot in the gutter of his
underworld connections. When God and the Holy Father weren’t
enough, he kept several master forgers from the Calabrian mafia

on speed-dial, to procure false identity papers for his charges.
Draganovic was the commander the Croatian arm of the
many-legged Der Spider, a secret organization dedicated to link-
ing up with Nazi fugitives and shepherding them out of Europe
to Latin America. Der Spider is better known, and perhaps better
described, as the infamous “Ratline”. As a Ratline operative,
Father Draganovic was sometimes required to extend a helping
hand to refugees from places other than Croatia. The most
famous of his foreign beneficiaries was Klaus Barbie.
The new faultline in Europe had formed in the volcanic
ashes of Hitler’s cratered Germany, and the tainted refugees of the
Nazi Vesuvius were eagerly recruited by the Americans and
Soviets. The American Counterintelligence Corps’ (CIC) Roman
headquarters was the power behind the Ratline, whose main
obstacle was the democratic governments of Western Europe,
including their own. Undoubtedly, the CIC helped many intel-
lectuals and prominent non-Communists escape before Stalin’s
henchmen could organize an army of shovels and wheelbarrows
to cart off their corpses to Siberia. But the CIC didn’t ask too
many questions, and directives issued by the CIC to protect and
aid notorious Nazi criminals such as Barbie have been well-pub-
licized.
For nearly two years, Ante Pavelic lived in Rome, beneath
the nose of the CIC, among the brothers of San Giorlamo and in
safehouses provided by mysterious sources. The CIC knew who
he was, and they knew where he was. When an agent first pinned
down Pavelic’s exact location, the Supreme Allied Commander in
Italy contacted Washington to ask for instructions. The return
cable from the State Department, revealed in a Freedom of
Information Act request, states that “the United States should
cooperate with the Italian authorities to the extent necessary in
this particular case.” It was an ambiguous statement that could
mean anything. In context, we are led to believe that it meant to
do nothing.
In early 1948, Ante Pavelic left Rome for an even stranger
“safe” location—near Castel Gandolfo, the Pope’s summer resi-
dence. Disguised as a priest again, he lived among the monks at a
nearby monastery. There is no evidence he met personally with

Pius XII—no evidence at all, in fact, about who exactly was pro-
tecting him in a country occupied, administered and policed by
the Armed Forces of the United States. A good deal of the CIC
correspondence regarding Pavelic’s Italian holiday is still censored
or otherwise unavailable.
Six months later, with the man the CIC described as
“Pavelic’s alter-ego”, Father Draganovic, at his side, Ante Pavelic
boarded a ship, the Sestiere, bound for Argentina. He had with
him a falsified ID card identifying him as a Spanish national
named “Dal Aranyos”.
How did Ante Pavelic, the highest ranking war criminal to
elude justice after the war, manage to escape? So long as Western
governments continue to drag their feet—even at the precise
moment that munitions smash through countries accused of har-
bouring other, more swarthy terrorists—we may never know. The
reasoning of the State Department, as much as we can surmise, is
perhaps epitomized in a September 12, 1947 memorandum from
the Roman headquarters of the CIC. An agent opines that
“Pavelic’s contacts are so high, and his present position is so com-
promising to the Vatican, that any extradition of Subject would
deal a staggering blow to the Roman Catholic Church.”

The Stranger
N ot long after arriving in Buenos Aires, intrep-
id traveler Dal Araynos shed the mask. Ante
Pavelic lived openly in Argentina for more
than eight years. Argentine strongman Juan
Peron took advantage of his guest’s know-how
and used several members of the Ustasha leader’s inner-circle to
train his security staff.
Buenos Aires had a large Croatian community even before
the war. Blinded by anti-Communism, they welcomed their
prodigal son with open arms. Ante, exiled on Main Street again,
organized a new émigré movement, the Hrvatska Drzavotvorna
Stranka. While it attracted many Croats who had no connection
with the sinister legacy of the NDH, it is impossible to charac-
terize a movement founded by a Nazi, controlled by a Nazi, ded-
icated to whitewashing a Nazi past and reestablishing a Nazi
regime as anything but a Nazi organization. Vladko Macek went
into exile in America in 1948, but, again, refused to lend his cred-
ibility to a movement contesting the reanimated Ustasha. With
no other contenders among the Croatian exiles, Ante was still the
man.
Six large meetings were held to inaugurate the new incar-
nation of the Croatian extremist movement. Most were held in
Church property, such as the Catholic Croat Parish Hall on
Avenida Belgrano (though not “Belgrado”, one has to wonder if
this was an ominous oracle). Ante was in top form. While still an
awful public speaker, his study of the posture and delivery of
Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini had served him well.
Émigré papers—most of which had as their initials the let-
ters N, D, and H—churned out Ante’s writings, both his old pulp
and a few new rubies sprinkled in the mud. Pavelic’s prosaic “The
Call of Blood” became the intro to this kinder, gentler Ustasha

Party platform.
But it was the title of another work—“The Ideological
War”—that defined Ante Pavelic’s post-war movement. Many
scholars have commented on the pagan aspects of Adolf Hitler’s
rule. Among them was the belief in an apocalyptic conflict that
can only end in the destruction of one side or the other, a universe
without compromise. Ante shared these Strangelovian views to
the marrow. “War will soon break out,” Ante warned his follow-
ers in a speech on May 13, 1949 which further elucidated the con-
cepts of “The Ideological War”. The Soviets and Americans
would duke it out, “and then the liberation of Croatia will come.”
It’s hardly necessary to note the rather loony, cultish quality of
this sort of rhetoric. Like a doomsday movement, the new
Ustasha waited with bated breath for the apocalypse of World
War III. There’s no indication Pavelic also believed that
Communists were responsible for adding fluoride to the water
supply.
The fallen Poglavnik began to receive distinguished visitors
from abroad, curious about the sinister reputation (and increasing
mainstream acceptance) of Hitler’s most devoted quisling. One
was a young French ideologue of the right-wing named Jean
Marie Le Pen, who walked away mightily impressed by the “pow-
erful virility” of the Poglavnik. Soon after Le Pen published a
book about his new hero called La Croatie Martyre.
But most of Ante’s guests were old friends, late arrivals on
Father Draganovic’s exile train. One by one, worn-out Ustasha
henchmen arrived in the paradise of the sun, rested up and shared
war stories about decapitating babies and snapping the necks of
babushkas. Franjo Cvijic, head of the National Bank of the NDH,
arrived in 1949. He had been making a deposit at a Swiss bank
when Croatia fell. His arrival in Buenos Aires was interpreted by
still-watchful American intelligence agents to mean that Pavelic
had access to his wartime booty, though the majority of the
Ustasha treasury has never been accounted for. The recent fiasco
of Nazi Gold in the Swiss banking industry essentially cleared
that country of harbouring the treasure of Yugoslavia’s massacred
Jews and Serbs. Considering the Vatican’s role in assisting the
escape of Pavelic and dozens of other Ustasha, the Church has

been understandably reticent about opening up their wartime
records relating to the Ustasha. A special commission—made up
entirely of Vatican agents—“cleared” the Church in the 1960s,
claiming that no reference to the missing Ustasha gold had been
found in their archives. They refused to allow outside investiga-
tors to examine their findings, and the evidence they based their
report on has never been presented to anyone, in spite of repeat-
ed demands.
The new Ustasha found it difficult to break with old habits. As

Mussolini’s press had suggested, their time as ambassadors and
ministers was but an interlude, for once again in exile, they
returned to the path of conspiracy and terror they knew best.
From 1955 to 1980, Croat extremists connected with the Ustasha
were implicated in no less than 50 violent attacks, from assassina-
tion attempts on diplomats to terrorist bombings, most notably in
the “October 20” theater in Belgrade, which wounded 85 people,
and the bombing of a Yugoslav Air Transport ( JAT) jet flying
from Copenhagen to Zagreb.
There was also the issue of the Ustasha left behind. Small
groups of die-hards formed units in the woods of Zagorje and
elsewhere in Croatia, assisted for a time by the Catholic Church.
They called themselves the “Crusaders”, which pretty much says
all that needs to be. They were gradually snuffed out.
The Americans were not the only ones to monitor Pavelic’s
visitors in Buenos Aires. Being a Communist, foreign policy for
Tito always went finger-to-trigger, and soon specially-trained
UDBA (Yugoslav secret police) agents were scrounging abroad,
looking for the opportunity to take out their Boss’ garbage. One
of them finally got to Pavelic in April of 1957. It is believed that
the Peronistas had withdrawn their support; indeed, there is con-
vincing evidence that at least one native Argentine participated in
the attempt on the Poglavnik’s life. Pavelic survived, but was shak-

en enough that he moved his entire organization to higher
ground. For an unrepentant Fascist, that meant Franco’s Spain.
Some say Pavelic began to mellow in the acculturated cli-
mate of Madrid. He was contacted by several right-wing Serbian
exile groups (one of whose members bragged that he had been the
one who slit the throat of Ivan Goran Kovacic, a Croatian poet
who in the white heat of the
Ustasha mayhem wrote one of
the most enduring works of
Balkan literature, “The Pit”,
about the massacre of the Serbs
in the NDH). Together, Pavelic
and these Serbs, these two
mortal enemies, agreed over a
handshake and tiny cups of cof-
fee on how they would split up
Yugoslavia once Tito was
deposed. Those who see some
reflection of the byzantine
world of Yugoslav politics in
the 1990s, when Serbian
President Slobodan Milosevic
and his Croatian counterpart,
Franjo Tudjman, made a few
backroom deals on the partition
of Bosnia, shouldn’t question
their instincts. However, while
many of these mutually-repel-
lant scumbags returned to the
Balkans after the collapse of
Yugoslavia, it’s rather silly to
imagine that Pavelic’s doodles
Ante Pavelic in Spain on cocktail napkins had any-
thing to do with post-Yugoslav realignments.
But the UDBA did get Pavelic back in Buenos Aires after
all. He began to suffer from complications relating to his injury,
and was rushed to the German hospital in Madrid in December

of 1959. There his family watched over him as he breathed his last
breath. He said nothing extraordinary. Indeed, his passing on
December 28, three days before the New Year, was hardly noted
at all, by the world press or in Yugoslavia. It was anonymous, and
it was in exile, and if one is embittered by the Poglavnik’s evasion
of justice, one can at least take solace in the fact that Ante
Pavelic’s body is far removed from the soil of the homeland he
drenched in blood.

Appendix I
The fate of Slavko and Eugen “Dido” Kvaternik turned against Pavelic and—
some say with his cooperation—were captured by the UDBA and
taken back to Yugoslavia for trial. Father and son were executed
several by the Communists.
personages Andrija Artukovic, the “Yugoslav Himmler”, slipped through the

Allies’ porous dragnet and spent a year hiding in a Catholic
monastery in Ireland before continuing on to California. He
after the remained there for nearly forty years, raising a family and living
quite openly. Pressure from the Jewish Defense League and the
war... Simon Weisenthal Center finally led to his extradition to

Yugoslavia in the mid-1980s. For his crimes he was sentenced to
death by firing squad, but his execution was delayed owing to ill
health. Artukovic died in 1988 in a Yugoslav prison hospital.
Archbishop Stepinac, who apologists and Church fathers claim

lived in fear of Pavelic, suddenly recovered his courage when the
latter fled and issued a pastoral letter denouncing the
Communists. Tito demanded the Vatican recall him from the
country; instead, Pope Pius XII made him a Cardinal. He was
arrested and tried on charges including treason relating to his
recognition of the NDH before Royal Yugoslavia had surren-
dered. He was sentenced to an jail term (later commuted to house
arrest). Stepinac was beatified by Pope John Paul II.
Vjekoslav “Maks” Luburic carried out the execution of conspirators

Vokic and Lorkovic in May of 1945, and by final order of the
Poglavnik was named Commander-in-Chief of the Independent
State of Croatia. He coordinated resistance to the Partizans and
the formation of “Crusader” units until November, 1945. Luburic
escaped from Yugoslavia via Hungary, eventually joining Pavelic

in Spain. He broke with the Poglavnik after the latter’s concordat
with right-wing Serbian groups and formed a splinter group, the
Croatian People’s Resistance. On April 20, 1969, Luburic’s corpse
was discovered in his villa in Valencia, his skull smashed by
repeated blows from an iron bar and his chest lacerated by slash-
es from a dagger.
Father Krunoslav Draganovic was disowned by the Vatican after

the death of Pope Pius XII. He was dropped from the CIC’s pay-
roll in 1962 “with prejudice, for security reasons and a lack of con-
trol.” In 1967, Draganovic walked across the Yugoslav-Italian
border. He had been granted amnesty in exchange for telling the
UDBA everything he knew. A few days later Draganovic’s voice
was heard on a Yugoslav radio station, denouncing Pavelic and the
Ustasha and praising Tito and the progress of Yugoslavia. He
never made another public statement, living a quiet life in a
monastery near Sarajevo until his death in July of 1983.

Appendix II
Suggestions Degenerate is not a work intended for a scholarly audience (pres-
ent company excluded). However, I do like to provide a few notes
at the end as an encouragement for future reading on each issue’s
for future themes.
Richard West’s Tito and the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia is a
reading... rather light work, though it does encapsulate the history of the
South Slavs nicely up until 1993 or so. The author would echo a
chronicler of Renaissance Florence, who stated, “If Lorenzo il
Magnifico is a dictator, one could hardly ask for a better one.”
The last half of his book is sadly an anecdotal recital of Tito’s bon-
homie.
Edmund Paris’ Genocide in Satellite Croatia is a lurid narra-
tive on the bloody history of the Independent State of Croatia. It
has a few virtues, but the reader should know that it was original-
ly published in the United States as an anti-Catholic political
tract by an Evangelical printing company under the even-handed
title Convert or Die!
Possibly the best book on World War II in Croatia is
Viktor Novak’s Magnum Crimen, which had the notable distinc-
tion of being the only work of scholarship I know of banned by
the Communist Yugoslav government, which was eager to sweep
a few hundred thousand bodies under the rug and expunge the
past (hence their hunt for Pavelic abroad), as well as by the
Vatican, which placed it on the notorious Papal Index of
Forbidden Works. Unlike most chroniclers of the Ustasha horror,
Novak was neither Serbian nor a Communist, nor an anti-cleri-
cal. He was a Roman Catholic Croat, who did time in Pavelic’s
concentration camps before writing his unchallenged critical his-
tory of the Catholic Church in Croatia.
Hubert Butler, a Protestant Irishman, wrote extensively on

Andrija Artukovic, who was once held up by a world in the throes
of anti-Communist hysteria as a kind of suffering saint. After the
war, Butler was granted access to the NDH archives stored in
Zagreb, which he characterized as “the rosetta stone of Christian
corruption.” His collection of essays The Sub-Prefect Should Have
Held His Tongue contains his articles about Croatia’s Poglavnik
and the “Yugoslav Himmler”.
Possibly the the most unusual work on Pavelic is Fight for
the Croatian State by Branimir “Branko” Jelic. Mr. Jelic, referenced
earlier in the text, was a Croat nationalist from before World War
II, and shared imprisonment in Italy with Pavelic and Dido
Kvaternik after the assassination of King Alexander. After the war
Jelic became a dentist in Germany and led the independent
Hrvatski Narodni Odbor (Croatian National Council) with his
brother Ivan. The HNO’s platform is notable for its suggestion
that an independent Croatian state could achieve recognition by
offering the Soviet Union a series of ports on the Adriatic Sea—
a political idea which owes more to the legacy of Stjepan Radic
than Ante Pavelic. Though at times flirting with the ideological
obnoxiousness, Jelic’s book offers a valuable insight on the gene-
sis of the Ustasha organization.
End
Published by Diacritica Press
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Chicago, IL 60611
http://www.diacritica.com
For more information, please contact the author

at [email protected] or at the address above.
Copyright © 2002 Diacritica Press

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The Making of the Monster A New Generation of Madness

Superman or Supermidget? Red Man Walking

The Decay of the Angels Black Magic Woman

The Bastard in the Bathtub American Sodom

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While Pavelic was building up his organization abroad, Josip

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Promising reports from Vienna convinced Mussolini that his

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While Prince Paul was a backer of many of his cousin’s policies,

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Embracing thee was precious to the poet

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