Ustašism as Ideology and Practice: Mass Violence and Genocide in Vukovar District, Croatia, 1939-1945

This dissertation analyzes the ideology of the Ustaša movement and its practice in the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH) under the Ustaša regimeduring World War II. Using a case study of the town of Vukovar, this study connects ideas with on-the-ground violence, identifying vectors of ideological dissemination into local communities. In terms of sources, this history makes special use of printed primary sources—books, pamphlets, and newspapers—which were dissected for ideological content, contemporary documents, and postwar testimonies, which provided information on practices and experiences of violence. Rooted in Croat right-wing nationalist tradition, Ustašism claimed as its foundation the thought of nineteenth-century intellectual Ante Starčević, whose ideas served as the prism through which Croat right-wing nationalism, including Ustašism, conceptualized key parameters of the Croat national project. Once in power, the regime implemented Ustašism’s mandates into Croatia’s socio-political arrangements and priorities, employing the media and a broad front of state-controlled organizations. To enforce the nation as the paramount value, the regime resorted to limitless violence, which it used as a concrete, on-the-ground method to hammer Ustašism into local communities. Ustašist principles governed Ustaša population policy. The regime used mass killings and deportations to remove the population it judged incompatible with “new Croatia”: primarily Jews, Roma, and Serb elites as carriers of the Serb national project in the NDH. The majority of the Serb population, mostly peasant non-elites, the regime erased as “Serbs” from NDH’s population categories and subjected to “double conversion”: religious conversion to Catholicism or Croatian Orthodoxy and bureaucratic conversion to Croat ethnonationality. Ustašism’s historical narrative considered these people “Croats-of-old,” whom “foreign elements” had manipulated into Serb identity. The regime also launched a campaign of violent repression of those it identified as Croat national “renegades.” Like in Jews, Roma, and Serb elites, in Croat “renegades” Ustašism recognized “internal enemies,” who carried the stigma of racial-ethnonational “foreignness” and inferiority. Furthermore, even as the regime and its local activists controlled the ideological agenda, ordinary people like “citizen Croat,” the anonymous author of a threatening note, appropriated its logic, threatening to open ideological horizons beyond the regime’s grip.

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