Recent research by Alexander Korb shows that the relationship between the Ustasha and the Germans and between the Ustasha and violence is more complicated than a question of either export or de novo. Korb in essence posits that Ustasha violence was to a certain degree up to the dynamics of the Ustasha movement, to a certain degree up to a plan the Ustasha had developed before they took power, and to a certain degree fired on by German encouragement. And this topic is still very much under investigation. In August , historian Ivo Goldstein and his father Slavko Goldstein, a former Tito Partisan, will publish one of the first major books on the Holocaust in Croatia in English. So we will see what new insights they will bring to the table.

So, when looking at the Independant State of Croatia (NDH) and the violence that was exacted there, it is imperative to look first at the Ustasha itself. The Ustasha according to Korb was "a product of the violent nationalism prevalent to the disentigration of the Habsburg Empire". In its set-up it was not a mass movement but rather a violent conspiratorial organization that blamed Yugoslavia, the Serbs, and the Jews for the alleged subjugation of the Croat people. It was an organization that we today would probably classify as a terrorist organization. Its members trained in Italian para-military camps, the main focus of the Ustasha movement was to use violence to disintegrate and destabilize the Yugoslav state before they came to power. Actions such as the assassination of the Yugoslav King Alexander in 1934 are the perfect example for this.

Furthermore, the ascension to power of the Ustasha was not something the Germans had planned all along. The Ustasha was a compromise candidate when it came to setting up a collaborationist regime in Croatia. Initially, the Germans would have preferred the nationalistic Croatian Peasants' Party but their leader, one of the strongest advocates for greater Croatian autonomy and even independence within the pre-war Yugoslav system, refused to collaborate. Similarly, the Germans, who were under pressure to organize the occupation of Yugoslavia with as little resources as possible because of the impeding attack on the USSR, were pressured by the Italians to install the Ustasha because Mussolini thought the Ustasha would be useful in granting Italy greater influence when it came to their presence at the Dalmation Coast Line.

When the Ustasha took over power in April 1941, they had about 3000 members, which is less than the considerably toned down German presence in the country of 7.500 soldiers (who still killed about 30.000 Serbs btw.). This is an important difference to say, the Nazi party in Germany of the Fascist Party in Italy. The Nazis in Germany had by the late 1920s embraced the move into legality, i.e. they switched their focus from trying to violently overthrow the system to trying to overthrow the system by participating in it and building a power base -- a tactic that worked. Similarly, the Italian Fascist who had considerable time in power to build something resembling a power base. The Ustasha didn't have that and because of their focus on violent action, they chose violence against Serbs, Jews, and so-called gypsies to mobilize and homogenize their power base.

As Korb writes:

The regime partly mobilized the Croatian population through the use of force against non-Croats, increasingly applying more violence during the spring and summer of 1941. Individual murders turned into mass arrests, which gradually paved the way for occasional massacres.

(Alexander Korb: ‘Understanding Ustaša Violence’, in Journal of Genocide Research, 12 (2010), 1–18, here p. 5)

Violence was employed at first by local cadres of the Ustasha and the regime noticed that violent action against the non-Croats was a way to mobilize people for their cause -- because of the violent atmosphere during the war, because they were afraid they could become victims of this violence, because of the whipped up frenzy that combined settling old scores combined with a nationalistic fervor directed against the Serbs who were seen as responsible for the German invasion. Much of this violence was not necessarily pre-planned. Korb again:

While overlooking the dynamics of violence, the dominant narrative suggests that the Ustaša were acting upon a preconceived plan—spelled out in their racist programm—to destroy Serbs, Jews and Gypsies. This narrative is largely based on post-war interrogations of Ustaša leaders by the Yugoslavian secret service UDBa, presumed statements by Ustaša leaders in speeches they gave in May and June 1941 and the post-war memoirs by German officials such as plenipotentiary Hermann Neubacher. According to these sources, the Ustaša planned to eliminate the Jews and the Gypsies, ‘While the solution off the Serb “problem” was seen in the slogan ‘kill one third, deport one third, convert one third to Catholicism.” The genocide-narrative tends to neglect what happened on the ground. Thus, the occasional massacres that occurred during the Ustaša takeover were described as a ‘test for genocide,’ and the four-week hiatus that followed as ‘preparation’ for genocide that had been unleashed in June 1941. However, once again, there is no documentary evidence for such a plan. Indeed, the extant violent practices are not enough to conclude that the perpetrators were following a plan of total destruction. As regards the intentions behind mass murder, a distinction should be made between what was ‘deliberate’ and what was ‘planned.’ Undoubtedly, mass murder in the NDH was committed with the intention to kill. Yet genocide does not normally begin with a single decision whereby perpetrators explicitly commit to killing all members of a designated group. Rather, the decision is taken in the course of violence, motivated and modified by it.

(Alexander Korb: ‘Understanding Ustaša Violence’, in Journal of Genocide Research, 12 (2010), 1–18, here p. 5)

As Korb concludes here, the Ustasha did not come to power with the plan to commit a genocide. Rather, due to its ideology and its set-up as a conspiratorial violent organization, they employed violence at first because it was rooted within their structural ideology and radicalized form there, partly because they realized that violence could substitute as a mobilizing force in order to strengthen a narrative of us vs. them and thereby building popular support for the regime.

Of course, this all didn't go unnoticed by the Germans. The German started to heavily encourage the Ustasha regime to employ violence, especially against the Jews. On July 21, 1941 Hitler met with the leader of the Ustasha, Ante Pavelic and encouraged him to employ violence against the Jews:

"The Jews are the bane of mankind. If the Jews will be allowed to do as they will, like they are permitted in their Soviet heaven, then they will fulfill their most insane plans. (...) if for any reason, one nation would endure the existence of a single Jewish family, that family would eventually become the center of a new plot. If there are no more Jews in Europe, nothing will hold the unification of the European nations ... this sort of people cannot be integrated in the social order or into an organized nation. They are parasites on the body of a healthy society, that live off of expulsion of decent people. One cannot expect them to fit into a state that requires order and discipline. There is only one thing to be done with them: To exterminate them."

(Cited from Andreas Hilgruber: Diplomaten und Staatschefs bei Hitler, p. 61)

It is important to keep in mind here that by this time , July 21, the Germans had not started the complete physical annihilation of the European Jews yet. In the Soviet Union, the Einsatzgruppen were busy shooting the male Jews they came across (the escalation to women and children took place at some point in August) and no death camp existed yet. But they certainly saw the value of an ally who was ready, willing, and able to employ violence against its Jewish population and so they continued to encourage the Ustasha regime to take more and more drastic measures. Also, note that in the summer of 1941, the main victims of Ustasha murderous violence were Serbs rather than Jews. The large-scale murder of Jews in the NDH only started later.

The situation with Serbs however also met with encouragement from the Germans but with a different kind. The Ustasha program as declared on May 17, 1941 by the Ustasha ministers ministers Mile Budak, Mirko Puk, and Milovan Žanić was that a third of the Serbs was to be killed, a third was to be expelled and a third was to be converted to Catholicism in order to create a racially pure Croatia. The Nazis can be seen as indirect radicalizing force in this program. When the NDH started expelling Serbs in massive numbers in the Summer of 1941 (German sources speak of at least 50.000 in July 41 but the number is likely to have been higher), these refugees started to flood into Serbia proper and became a very important part of the Partisan / Cetnik uprising against the German occupiers there. Because the German administration in Serbia had neither the resources to deal with these refugees nor the resources to properly suppress the national uprising, they encouraged and even pressured the Ustasha leadership to deal with the Serbs in Coratia rather than expelling them. This is where the impulse for large scale Ustasha concentration camps comes from.