Carl Savich Column on Serbianna.com

By Carl K. Savich

Introduction: Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuehrer

In Germany from 1933 to 1945, the Nazi regime sought to create: One People, One State, One Leader. The Nazi pursuit of the Final Solution was based in the nationalist imperative to create a single people, a single nation, and a single ruler exemplified in Hitler’s slogan, Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuehrer (One People, One State, One leader) based on race. The Final Solution was a product of 19th century German nationalist ideology, 19th century European racial doctrines, and industrialization, which required homogeneity - ethnic, cultural, religious, linguistic. German racialism during the 1935-1945 period fits into the contemporary historical model of nationalism called integral nationalism. Race or ethnicity as a basis of a nation is a fundamental tenet of modern nationalism. The Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935 codified this principle of modern nationalism. The Nazi pursuit of the Final Solution was based on modern nationalism, the imperative of one people, one race, one state, one nation.

In Croatia from 1941 to 1945, the Ustasha regime established in the independent state of Croatia (Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska, NDH) by Germany, similarly sought to create a single people, an ethnically pure Greater Croatia which included Bosnia-Hercegovina. To create a single people, Croatia, like Germany, embarked on a massive program of genocide to eliminate the non-Croatian population, which consisted of Orthodox Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies or Roma. Like with the case of Germany, Croatian policy was based in modern nationalism, which defined the nation based on ethnic or racial criteria as consisting of a single people. Like with Germany, from 1941 to 1945 Croatia sought to create a single people in the NDH by the mass murder, deportation, or forceful religious conversion of the non-Croatian populations. Croatia enacted the Nuremberg Race Laws in 1941 and played a major role in the Holocaust or Final Solution. What made the Croatian case unique was that Croats themselves engaged in the organization, planning, and execution of the genocide in the NDH. In other occupied or satellite states during World War II, it was the German military and civilian authorities who conducted the genocide. But in Croatia, it was the Croats themselves who conducted the genocide. The genocide in Croatia, like in Germany, was based in the doctrines and requirements of modern nationalism.

Adolf Hitler meeting Croat leader Ante Pavelic.

I. The Case of Germany

Race or Ethnicity as the Basis of the Nation

The Nazi ideology of nationalism was based on race or ethnicity as the defining factor of a nation. The Nazi pursuit of the Final Solution was based in the overriding objective to achieve one people in Germany defined by race. The Nazi emphasis on race, on “blood”, or genetics, as defining nationhood or a nation, was based on 19th nationalism and German nationalism in particular that defined the nation in racial/ethnic terms, the volk concept. The way in which the Nazi regime sought to create a single people in Germany was to exclude and ultimately eliminate any non-German races, known as the Final Solution.

The Nuremberg Race and Citizenship Laws were the first step in the Nazi attempt to create a single German people, a racially pure Aryan race. By so doing, they would ensure the growth and viability of the German nation. The Final Solution was thus based in nationalism. The Nuremberg Laws of September 15, 1935 were enacted to exclude German Jews, German Gypsies (Sinti, Roma), and other non-Aryans from German citizenship and from German national life altogether. The goal was to create a homogenous German volk or people, a single people defined in racial terms. The objective was to create a strong nation, national strength being defined in 19th century nationalism as pure blood.

Evidence of genocide: April 27, 1941, Serbian population of Gudovac massacred, bodies lined up in rows on a field.

Interbreeding between the races, racial mixing, was seen as destroying the ethnic, racial, national, and genetic make-up of a nation. Under 19th century nationalism, ethnicity or race defined a nation, it was the essential core of what constituted a nation. Did the Nazis just come up with this out of thin air? No. This racial basis for the nation is at the core of 19th century nationalism. Racial mixing was under this nationalist conception seen as the primary threat to the health and well-being of a nation. Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf (1925) that Jews posed a threat and danger to Germany principally because the mixing of the races “defiles” the pure blood of the German Aryan which gradually would destroy the German nation and lead to its death: “With the aid of all means he tries to ruin the racial foundations of the people to be enslaved…a racially pure people, conscious of its blood, can never be enslaved by the Jew.” One people, one nation, one leader. Under strict nationalist theory, a nation is made up of a single people, a single race. Minorities are a different people and thus part of a different nation. These minorities were not an integral part of the nation, but another people who belonged to another, different and alien nation. Under the nationalist doctrine of one people, one state, they represented a threat or danger because they were not integrated in the nation but were potential divisive forces. Hitler emphasized the racial difference between Aryan Germans and Semitic Jews as the reason for the exclusion and elimination of Jews and Gypsies: “Because they are different they have to be removed. “ (1)

Railroad tracks leading into Jasenovac concentration camp.

Jews were seen as a nation within a nation in eastern Europe, a separate, distinct people and nation, a separate national community. This was different in western Europe where Jews were seen as assimilated and integrated. But Hitler was born in Austria and his view of European Jews was developed in Vienna, which was the border and frontier of eastern Europe. In other words, Hitler’s conception of Jews was based on the east European model of a Jewish nation within a nation. (2) Of course, minorities can be an advantage or a disadvantage depending upon which paradigm of nationalism one adheres to. Where the nation is defined upon diversity and nationality is based solely on citizenship, such as in the US and USSR, minorities are integrated into the nation. But where the nation is based on race or ethnicity, then minorities are perceived as a danger because they a priori cannot be integrated in the nation.

German nationalism was based in the volkish concept of a German nation based on race or ethnicity. (3) Only Aryan Germans could be part of the German nation. Hitler stated that “politics is merely applied biology.” A nation was based on “blood” or genetics, that is, biology. One was either an Aryan German or one was not. If not, one could not be a true German citizen of Germany. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws were the legal embodiment and codification of these nationalist doctrines. The goal of the Nazi regime from 1935 to 1945 under Adolf Hitler was to create a German state that consisted of a single race, a single people. This objective entailed the necessary eradication of minorities in Germany, primarily Jews and Gypsies (Sinti, Roma). The natural and necessary result was the Final Solution, the elimination of the Jews from Germany and Europe.

The Nuremberg Laws of September 15, 1935 consisted of two laws, The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, or the Blutschutzgesetz (the Blood Protection Act), and the Reich Citizenship Act. Hitler enunciated the central position of race in Nazi nationalist ideology: “All events in world history are merely the manifestation of the self-preservation drive of the races.”

Yellow Croatian/NDH armband for Jews

The Nuremberg Race Law was introduced in the German legislature as follows: “Entirely convinced that the purity of German blood is essential to the further existence of the German people, and inspired by the uncompromising determination to safeguard the future of the German nation” the law was enacted by the Reichstag unanimously. Under section 1, marriages between Jews and citizens of German or kindred blood are forbidden. Under section 2, sexual relations outside of marriage between Jews and nationals of German or kindred blood are forbidden. Under section 3, Jews were not permitted to employ female citizens of German or kindred blood as domestic servants under forty-five years old. Section 4 prohibited Jews from displaying the German national flag or colors. Jews could, however, display the Jewish colors. The second law on citizenship stripped German Jews of citizenship and established a distinction between “Reich citizens” who were Aryan and “nationals” or “state subjects” who were Jews or Gypsies. Section 2 held that “a citizen of the Reich may be only one who is of German or kindred blood.” There were thirteen subsequent implementation ordinances added to the laws from November, 1935 to July, 1943 which excluded Jews entirely from German national life. In the First Supplementary Decree of November 14, 1935, the German Jews lost German citizenship. Under section 4, “a Jew cannot be a citizen of the Reich. He cannot exercise the right to vote; he cannot hold public office. Jewish officials will be retired as of December 31, 1935.” The law also defined racially what a Jew is: “A Jew is an individual who is descended from at least three grandparents who were, racially, full Jews.”

The Nazi regime perceived German Jews and Gypsies (Sinti, Roma) as a danger or threat to the German nation. This reasoning was based in German nationalist ideology and in general European principles of nationalism as developed in the 19th century. Under German nationalist ideology, the German volk were the basis of the German nation. The volk spoke German, were racially Aryan or Nordic, were part of a distinct German culture, were Christian, and were indigenous to Germany. This concept excluded most German Jews on racial grounds, which were always the essential criteria for who constituted the volk. (4) As Michael Marrus noted, there were two types of anti-Semitism in German nationalist ideology, traditional and radical. (5) Traditional was based on religion and culture. So long as a Jew or Gypsy converted to Christianity and assimilated culturally, they would be accepted. But radical anti-Semitism, which motivated the Nazi Movement and the Nazi regime, which tended to be anti-Christian, secular, “scientific”, was based on race. Jews were a different race from Aryans and thus were not part of the German nation as defined by 19th century German nationalism and the volkish concept of the German volk. Hitler emphasized in Mein Kampf that Jews were disseminating “the big lie”. (6) What was “the big lie”? Hitler argued that Jews were a distinct and separate race, a racial group (and thus a separate nation), not a religious group. Based in 19th century nationalism, Hitler was correct. Sebastian Haffner disagreed with this judgment by Hitler. But what Haffner failed to see is that Hitler was very knowledgeable of 19th century nationalism. Hitler grasped it very well. Thus, under nationalist doctrine, under the concept of one people, one nation, one state, the Jews were a separate nation, a nation within a nation. In short, they could not be assimilated in Germany. A religious group could be assimilated, but not a different race, not a different nation. By definition, by how a nation was defined in 19th century nationalism, the Jews could not be a part of the German nation. This is how the Nazis saw Jews. So based on race, the Jews and Gypsies (Sinti, Roma) in Germany were excluded from being citizens of Germany and were prohibited from taking part in German national life.

1941, Zagreb - Jews forced to wear Ustasha/NDH yellow Star of David armbands: Clockwise from left, Irma Deutsch, Salamon Basch, Silva Basch, Edita Basch.

Jews and Gypsies (Sinti and Roma) were seen as threats under German nationalist ideology because they were a different race. (7) Being a different race, they were part of the Jewish nation or Gypsy nation, but not part of the German nation. They were alien people who owed their allegiance to another nation. They were a Fifth Column, an alien people who were a threat to the nation. For the Nazi Movement, the danger or threat was of a racial or genetic nature. By “mixing” with the Aryan Germans, they weakened the genetic viability of Germany as nation. This can only be understood as a product of modern nationalism, with the advent of Social Darwinism of the Victorian Era, of modern eugenics and genetics, and of industrialization, which relied on what can be called an Anglo-Saxon or Protestant work ethos, which was unique to the Protestant, northern Europeans, who were deemed an Aryan race.

Under modern nationalist principles, minorities are a potential source of instability and a security threat to the nation because they are part of another nation, owing an allegiance to that other nation and thereby threatening the nation where they live. (8) Minorities violate a fundamental tenet of modern nationalism: One people should have one state or country. Ernest Gellner expressed this nationalist requirement of one state for every culture of people as follows in Nations and Nationalism: “Just as every girl should have a husband, preferably her own, so every culture must have its state, preferably its own.” (9) Minorities are archetypical Aliens, or Others. Modern nationalist thought justified the threat and danger they posed to the nation as a potential Fifth Column. In times of war and crises, the perceived danger from the Other is heightened for the nation. The Nazi movement accepted this concept of the nation and of nationalism. Minorities were a danger and threat to the nation because they could not be completely integrated in the German nation, race excluding them. Because “blood was thicker than water”, German Jews would seek their national interests outside Germany, in the “Jewish nation” based on “blood”, or race. This was what the Nazi leaders meant when they invoked the term “international Jewry” and a global Jewish conspiracy. In other words, Jews related or identified with other Jews based on race; race was the overriding factor. So German Jews would always identify their interests not with Germany, but with the Jewish “nation” outside of Germany, which consisted of Jewish populations in Europe and the US. Jews would always place their interests above those of Germany because they owed a higher allegiance to global Jewry, or the Jewish “nation”.

Jewish children in the "independent" Croatia forced to wear the yellow armband.

So Jews had dual allegiances and dual loyalties that meant they posed a threat to Germany. But ultimately the issue revolved around race, because it was race that made them non-Aryans, non-Germans. These minorities were thus seen as a threat or danger to the German nation because they were an Alien nation, an alien race, they were the Other. Jews could change their religion and language and culture, but they couldn’t change their race. And it was ultimately as a different race that they posed the greatest danger to Germany. Hitler said in a 1936 speech: “The Jew is a parasite. Wherever he flourishes, the people will die…Elimination of the Jew from our community is to be regarded as an emergency defense measure.”

The Nuremberg Laws explicitly excluded Jews and Gypsies (Sinti, Roma) from German citizenship. Moreover, they forbade marriages between Aryan Germans and Jews and also all sexual relations. The Nazi regime enacted Race Laws which were to ensure a pure, Aryan race, a German race. The Nazis wanted to maintain a pure race because under German nationalism and nationalism in general, a nation is defined by race. Is this a new or original concept with the Nazis and Adolf Hitler? In fact, the Nazis were largely unoriginal on the issue of race. The United States based its society totally upon race (Jim Crow laws, “separate but equal”, blacks, Native Americans, Asians, eastern Europeans were “inferior” and not even human, etc.). If a person living in America originated from sub-Saharan Africa, he was excluded from American society and was not even legally a human being. Native Americans or “Indians” were likewise not fully human beings and were not even citizens of the US for much of US history. This was so even though they were the indigenous population. Race or “blood” was also crucial in Judaism. Benjamin Disraeli, who was Jewish, made the statement that “race is everything.” So the Nazis were not very original with their racial theories, although this tends to be forgotten today. In fact, they were derived from European racial theories that originated with non-Germans. British Social Darwinism, Joseph-Arthur Gobineau, Francis Galton, Houston Chamberlain, Herbert Spencer, US racial policies, these all contributed to the German nationalist ideology of race along with German influences that began with Johann Herder’s first use of the term “nationalism” in 1774. Racial theories of the 19th century emphasized the primary importance of a single, superior Aryan race that was diluted and endangered by minorities. These non-German theories reinforced the Nazi and German nationalist drive to create a single volk, a single people.
Was the Final Solution not related to Nationalism at all?

Jewish girl in Croatia wearing yellow badge.

The counter-argument has been made by Hannah Arendt and Sebastian Haffner that the Final Solution was not based on principles of modern nationalism but on the personal obsession of Adolf Hitler, on his personal psychological obsession and racial paranoia. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt characterized Nazism as a “supranational” movement, a movement that disdained the narrow concept of the nation-state. Adolf Hitler did not see the Jewish threat or danger to Germany as strictly an internal or domestic issue but a global or international threat. There were about 500,000 German Jews. The vast majority of European Jews killed in the Holocaust were Jews outside of Germany.

Haffner argued in The Meaning of Hitler that Hitler never developed a stable or static conception of the German nation or state. Improvisation and constant expansion were the norms of the Nazi state. Hitler had no constitution for Germany and no political mechanisms to ensure the continuity of the Nazi regime following his death so that the Nazi regime was based on his personal rule and not on nationalist principles as such.

With regard to the Holocaust, Hitler saw the destruction of Jews not in national or nationalist terms, but in global terms, as a world-wide, international crusade that was supranational. Hitler used the following slogan, quoted in Leni Yahil ‘s The Holocaust, invoking a Marxist-internationalist outlook: “Workers of the all classes and of all nations, recognize your common enemy!” Hitler was appealing not to nationalism, not to a narrow German conception of the nation, but to an international movement.

The Final Solution went against the national interests of Germany so how could it be based on nationalism, which seeks to develop the nation? Haffner noted that railway cars and other German military transport was being diverted from vital military needs to transport Jews to the concentration or death camps. Hitler did not make use of Jewish labor and Jewish scientists who could have helped the German war effort. Albert Einstein was a German professor of physics living in Berlin who was forced to emigrate from Germany when the Nazis came to power. It was Einstein who convinced FDR to develop an atomic bomb. Many other prominent Jewish intellectuals and scientists were excluded from making a contribution to the German nation. The Final Solution can thus be seen as irrational and even “outside history, based on the personal intervention of a single individual. This is one view. (9)

New internal regions reconstituted so that the western territories are majority Albanian reducing the

In The Holocaust in History, Marrus noted that “Holocaust specialists have presented a strong case for the ‘centrality’ of anti-Semitism in Nazi ideology, or the ‘uniqueness’ of the Holocaust.” But how important was anti-Semitism in popular opinion during the period of the Third Reich? In The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw showed that anti-Semitism was of “secondary importance” in shaping public opinion in the Third Reich. Hitler engaged in an elaborate scheme to keep his anti-Jewish policies secret. Haffner showed that Hitler made a systematic and concerted effort to control his anti-Jewish measures and statements because he did not want to antagonize or alienate the German people or foreign opinion. Following Kristallnacht, Hitler gauged that there was little German popular support for such anti-Jewish actions. The St. Loius affair demonstrated that Hitler and the Nazi regime were concerned with the public perception of anti-Jewish measures in Germany such as the Nuremberg racial laws of 1935 and the German boycotts of Jewish businesses. The Nazi regime agreed to allow German Jews to freely emigrate from Germany aboard the ocean liner St. Louis. This was a public relations action and a goodwill gesture by the Nazi regime. Hitler was able to demonstrate that no nation, including the United States, wanted to take the Jews. The St. Louis affair showed that the Nazi regime was perceptive to public opinion and wanted to sell the anti-Jewish policy to the German public through PR.

Most importantly, Hitler concealed the Final Solution from the German public. Moreover, the Final Solution was decided upon only after the start of World War II. So how could it be a product of German nationalism when it was only decided upon during war-time and kept secret from the German people? The Nazi regime used euphemisms in an administrative and bureaucratic language that concealed the fact that Jewish civilians were being killed. Such terms as “evacuations”, “removals”, “resettlement”, “labor camps”, were used. The Final Solution was a secret operation. Even at the concentration/death camps, Jewish inmates were killed in ways that obscured the systematic policy. Jewish inmates were taken to showers where they were instead gassed to death.

Finally, Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy and Francisco Franco’s Spain were integral nationalist states but no Final Solution of minorities occurred in these states. So genocide or a Final Solution is not a necessary requirement of integral nationalism based on the experiences in Italy and Spain.

Where does Nazi racialism fit in contemporary historical models of nationalism? The Nazi pursuit of the Final Solution fits the integral nationalism model. (10) Contemporary historical models of nationalism divide modern nationalism into two major types: Risorgimento nationalism and integral nationalism. Risorgimento nationalism describes the Italian, German, Greek, and Polish nationalist movements in the 19th century that established national states after centuries of disunity and having no nation-state. This type of nationalism is present when nations achieve independence and unification as occurred with Italy and Germany in the 19th century.

The opposite of risorgimento nationalism is integral nationalism, also known as “radical”, “extreme”, “right-wing”, “reactionary”, “aggressive-expansionist”, “derivative”, and “militant” nationalism. Integral nationalism results after a nation has achieved independence and unity. Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945 and fascist Italy under Benito Mussolini are examples of nations in the integral nationalism stage. In integral nationalism, the nation and state is one and indivisible. It is this homogeneity that is a distinguishing feature. One people, one race, one nation, one state, one leader.

Jewish boy in Croatia wearing yellow band.

Carleton Hayes categorized nationalism as either “traditional”, “liberal”, or “integral”. Carleton Hayes categorized Nazi Germany as an example of integral nationalism. Integral nationalism is derived from “nationalisme integrale” of the nationalist French author Charles Maurras. Maurras stated that “a true nationalist places his country above everything else.” Nazi German racialism fits this integral nationalism model. Like Hitler with Germany, Maurras sought to revive the French nation after the devastating defeat suffered during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 when France lost territory to Germany and was humiliated as a nation. Like with Hitler later, Maurras appealed to race or ethnicity, to maintain the French nation through a difficult time. Like the Nazis later, the integral nationalists of Maurras’ time saw French Jews as potential threats or dangers to the French nation. This was manifested in the Dreyfus Affair when a French military officer, Alfred Dreyfus, was wrongly accused of giving secrets to German agents. National weakness induced a backlash against minorities who were perceived as alien and a danger to the nation. This is true with regard to France following the Franco-Prussian War and Germany following World War I. The Nazi experience was thus not unique but represented a natural phenomenon in modern nationalism.

There are identifiable factors that can change a “liberal nationalism” into an “integral nationalism”. Carleton Hayes described three factors that could transform a liberal nation into an integral nation. (11) First, a “militarist spirit engendered” in the struggle or war to unify and obtain independence remains and grows in the new nation. Moreover, only a strong military can maintain the security and viability of the new nation once unity and independence are achieved. Otto von Bismarck achieved German unity and independence through “blood and iron”, through aggressive war and by means of a powerful military. This Prussian militarism remained a part of German national life through the Kaiser Wilhelm I and II periods and after World War I was exhibited in the paramilitary formations of the Freikorps or Free Corps Movement, from where the Nazi movement emerged. (12) Carleton Hayes argued that nationalists in these countries “unwittingly fashioned a martial monster”. Second, Carleton Hayes argued that “the feeling of superiority engendered by success” during the wars of independence and unification lead to extreme forms of nationalism. Third, integral nationalism like that in Nazi Germany results because of the “operation of certain propagandist instruments” which are the end products of Jacobin and liberal nationalism. Like Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm, Hayes saw the establishment of a national public school system and a mass newspaper and mass communication system as allowing for the development of integral nationalism. Now the entire population could be mobilized and indoctrinated and subordinated in a hierarchical and bureaucratic system that was all centralized by the state or government. These developments of science, technology, and education lead to a breaking down of barriers and strata of society. This meant that a country now became one big national village, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan. The country was now connected to all of its people and could act as one. Homogeneity and uniformity were engendered. But what defined this homogeneity, this uniformity, this oneness? Ever since the 1789 French Revolution, in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, the nation became the ultimate authority: “The principle of sovereignty resides essentially in the nation.” The nation replaces god and becomes the highest authority, nationalism becomes a religion. This means that meaning in a country is found only with respect to nationality.

By contrast, in the medieval and feudal period, there were other bases of meaning in a country, based on religion, such as the church, based on class, whether one was a noble, for instance, based on one’s unique professional or economic status in the society. But modern nationalism did away with all that and placed all meaning and authority in the state or government or nation. What results is a uniform and standardized national school system where everyone is taught the same thing, a new national flag is created that destroys old allegiances and creates new national ones: France created the tri-color, abolishing the old royal monarchist fleur-de-lys flag; the US abolished the British Union Jack and adopted the “star spangled banner”; the USSR abolished the monarchist flag and adopted a red Communist flag associated with the Communist party; Nazi Germany adopted the Swastika as the new national symbol for the German flag creating an absolute allegiance to the Nazi Party), a new national anthem is introduced (in France it was the nationalist Marseillaise, in the US, the Star Spangled Banner), and religion is taken out of schools and public life and is replaced by civic allegiance, allegiance to the nation. The nation replaces god as the ultimate authority.

Systematic Genocide: An entire Serbian family murdered in their own house in Croatia. Click here to enlarge the picture.

The Nazi pursuit of the Final Solution is related to nationalism because one of the most crucial or defining traits of a nation is cultural homogeneity, the “capacity for context-free communication, the standardization of expression and comprehension.” For Ernest Gellner, this homogeneity, this oneness, explained nationalism: “It is this which explains nationalism---the principle…that homogeneity of culture is the political bond, that mastery of and acceptability in a given high culture is the precondition of political, economic, and social citizenship.” This goal of achieving homogeneity drove the Nazi pursuit of the Final Solution. This meant that those persons who were not one with the nation, were a threat or danger to the nation. The only issue then is whether one is one with the nation. How do you define oneness? Does it have to be by ethnicity or race? It does not always have to be defined by race or ethnicity, but because a nation is defined by race and ethnicity in modern nationalism, by genetics in other words, it is the natural definition of oneness. The US and USSR were exceptions because they were never national states to begin with but based on a supranational basis. They were melting pots where one adopts a new national identity of “American” or “Soviet”, but nevertheless, beneath the surface, they too are based in race and ethnicity. The USSR imploded and broke up along ethnic and racial lines in 1991 precisely because of this fact. And the US had a racial basis for much of its history, it being unstated but understood that Americans were “Anglo-Saxon whites”, and blacks, Native American Indians, Asians, and even eastern Europeans were excluded from what constituted an American. The US population continues to be defined by race and ethnicity, whether one is “Hispanic”, “African-American”, “Asian”, “white”, although this has changed recently with the emergence of a new bi-racial category. Nevertheless, ethnicity and race remain the core identifying factors in any nation, even in the US and USSR. So it is natural and consistent under modern nationalist principles that the German nation would be defined as one where non-Germans such as Jews and Gypsies would be excluded.

But is this necessary in all cases of integral nationalism? No. As Benedict Anderson noted in Imagined Communities, a nation is in many respects an imagined political community or creation, a group fantasy. The nation exists as an image of a community in the mind of the citizen. In other words, racial or ethnic criteria for defining a nation are based on myth. To be sure, genetics and DNA are what are considered the basis for ethnicity and race and thus of a nation. Race and ethnicity are supposed to be “scientific” and objective criteria. But as Ernest Renan showed in “What is a Nation?” (1882), a nation is based ultimately on “a soul, a spiritual principle” on “a daily plebiscite”, a decision to believe that one is part of a nation.

Croatian guards make an elderly Jew remove his ring before he is executed in the concentration camps.

What is an Aryan or Aryan race? The term “Aryan” emerged in the 18th century in Europe as a linguistic term. In studies and research of languages, it was found that the European languages were related to the languages of India and the northern Indus valley. The languages spoken in the Hindu Kush, the Paropamisan Mountains, Hindu, Persian or Iranian, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Germanic or Teutonic, and Slavic were all related. They became known as the Proto-Indo-European family of languages grouping. Opposed to this group was the Semitic languages of Jews or Hebrew, and Arabic of the Arab tribes of the middle East. A language dichotomy thus was established between the Indo-European group and the Semitic group. From this, it was argued that based on these language differences, there was also a racial difference. The Indo-Europeans were of the Aryan race while the Semites were of the Semitic race. The term “Aryan” is derived from the Sanscrit, Vedic, and Avestan root “arya-“, which means noble, honorable, or excellent. The German philosopher Friedrich Schlegel linked “arya” to the German word “ehre”, honor, in the 1830s, and maintained that the terms had a common origin. Arya was linked to the word “ario-“, which is the root of the term aristocracy. The Aryan people were seen as honorable or “honorary people”, the upper echelon or master race. The concept of the Aryan race was taken up by British colonialists and imperialists to justify British imperialism, especially in the largest British colony, India. The British exploited the caste system to argue that they were Aryans, who had a rightful and legitimate right to rule the lower groups, or Dravidians, because they were the natural aristocracy. Social Darwinism further buttressed this view by arguing that nature sanctioned such a hierarchy. Gobineau and Chamberlain further elaborated on Aryan racial supremacy.

Race and ethnicity can be misleading and inaccurate bases for a nation. As Renan noted, the notion of a pure race is a myth. Germany itself is made up of Germans, Celts, and Slavs. And ironically, defining who was a Jew was very complex even under the Nuremberg Race Laws. Hannah Arendt wrote in Eichmann in Jerusalem that Hans Frank and Reinhard Heydrich were either Jewish or part Jewish. Heydrich was actually the German leader who organized the Final Solution in 1942 at the Wannsee Conference outside Berlin. Frank was the Governor General of Poland where the largest number of Jews were actually killed during the Final Solution. Moreover, Erhard Milch, one of the most powerful Nazi leaders, the deputy Luftwaffe chief under Hermann Goering, was half Jewish, his father being Jewish. There was also the Nazi concept of an “honorary Aryan” for Jews that Hitler decided could be assimilated, not based on race, but on their usefulness to the regime. And what about Gypsies (Sinti, Roma)? Under 19th century racial theories, they settled in Europe from India and are actually part of the Indo-European family tree, the same as the German Aryans. In other words, Germans and Gypsies are the same race. So is race or genetics/DNA an accurate criteria upon which to establish a nation?

Ante Starcevic, the founder of modern Croatian nationalism. His mother was Serbian Orthodox, his father was Croatian Roman Catholic.

Both Anderson and Renan would see the creation of a pure German race as something based in group fantasy. Renan wrote that such myths and fantasies actually help to, nevertheless, define and unify a nation: “Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation.” Nevertheless, this perceived homogeneity or national consciousness of oneness is necessary in integral nationalism to preserve unity and a national purpose.

Nationalism guided the Final Solution until the end of the war. The Nazi pursuit of the Final Solution was not static, but evolved and changed during the 1935 to 1945 period. But the goal was always to create one German people or race and to eliminate completely non-German minorities, Jews and Gypsies. The Final Solution was always implemented in the context of 19th century modern nationalism. Race or ethnicity defined a nation under modern nationalism. The Nazi conception of the nation was based on this 19th century model of nationalism.

The Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935 were meant to provide a uniform and consistent national policy towards German Jews. But foremost they were meant to prevent racial “mixing”, they were meant to preserve and maintain a single, pure Aryan race. But it should be noted that the Nuremberg Laws did not enunciate the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem and were constantly and repeatedly modified up until 1943. German Jews became second-class citizens in Germany but they were not facing genocide in 1935 with the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws. Hitler wanted to establish clear and uniform guidelines for the status of Jews in Germany. He also wanted to establish a certain level of stability due to Germany’s hosting of the 1936 Summer Olympics. He also wanted to explore emigration as an option or outlet for Germany’s Jewish population, which was less than 1% of the total German population at the time. So the Nuremberg Laws were meant to create a level of normalcy that did not satisfy extremist Nazi leaders. From 1935 to 1938 there was a period of relative normalcy.

The body of a girl at the Gradina execution site near Jasenovac. The Croats outdid the Nazis by setting up concentration camps for children like the one at Sisak.

It was Kristallnacht in 1938 that shattered this relative calm and led to an intensification of Nazi efforts to completely eliminate Jews from German life. Kristallnacht occurred following the Munich Agreement. The Munich Agreement allowed Germany to take over the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. One way that the Nazi regime sought to pursue the Final Solution to the Jewish Question was by emigration, forcing German Jews to emigrate out of Germany voluntarily. There were also forced deportations. In 1938, 17,000 Jews of Polish citizenship lived in Germany. The Nazi regime deported them to Poland on October 28. Included in this group was Zindel Grynszpan. His son Herschel Grynszpan, who lived in France, read about the deportations and decided to assassinate the German Ambassador to France. Instead, finding the Ambassador absent, he shot Ernst vom Rath, the Third Secretary in the German Embassy in Paris on November 7, 1938. Vom Rath died two days later. On February 4, 1936, Yugoslav Jew David Frankfurter had assassinated Wilhelm Gustloff in Davos, Switzerland. Gustloff was the leader of the Nazi Party’s Foreign Organization. There was no reaction to that assassination by the Nazi regime. But the Grynszpan assassination was different. This resulted in rioting on November 9 and 10 in Germany against German Jews, Jewish businesses, and synagogues. At least 96 Jews were killed, hundreds were wounded, while over a thousand synagogues were damaged or destroyed, and Jewish cemeteries desecrated. Over 7,500 Jewish businesses were damaged. The Nazi regime arrested and imprisoned 30,000 Jews in concentration camps following the riots. Hermann Goering convened a meeting following Kristallnacht to address the issue of elimination Jews from German life: “Gentlemen! Today’s meeting is of a decisive nature. I have received a letter written on the Fuehrer’s orders requesting that the Jewish question be now, once and for all, coordinated and solved one way or another.” (13) What followed were additional laws and regulations that sought to eliminate the German Jews from the German economy. Here Nazi racialism was applied to the economy. Goering said: “I implore competent agencies to take all measures for the elimination of the Jew from the German economy…” Goering sought to “Aryanize” the German economy. Laws were enacted following the Kristallnacht violence that prohibited Jews from carrying or owning guns and knives, Jews were segregated in German towns, driver’s licenses of Jews were suspended and Jewish-owned radios were confiscated, there were curfews imposed, and Jewish owned stocks and bonds could only be alienated to the German government. (14) Kristallnacht was an important turning point in the pursuit of the Final Solution, when the Nazi regime became committed to a program of elimination and intensified it thereafter.

The Nazi leaders saw this assassination in nationalist terms, not as the individual act of a deranged person, but an act of violence and aggression by the Jewish “nation” against the German nation, “International Jewry” acting against Germany. The German leaders argued that Jewish political leaders in New York and London had sent the assassin as part of a wider plot in the Jewish “nation’s” war against Germany. So Hitler and the other Nazi leaders were guided by German nationalism even in the Kristallnacht riots because they saw the events surrounding it in nationalist terms of nations warring against each other. What occurred fits this nationalist paradigm. German citizens attacked their own citizens or nationals because they were in fact part of a Jewish “nation within a nation”. The Nazi leadership thus perceived the crisis in the context of nationalism. In addition, since 1936, Germany had switched over to a war economy in preparation for a future war(s). It is significant that Kristallnacht occurred after the Munich Agreement because war was possible at any time. In other words, Jews were targeted at this time because they were perceived as an even greater danger to national security because war was very possible.

Sarajevo, 1941 - Before and after: The Sarajevo Sephardic synagogue destroyed by Bosnian Muslim, Croat, and German forces.

Hitler gave a speech before the start of World War II in which he stated that if there is a war, the Jews of Europe would be killed. This can be understood in nationalist terms. Hitler saw the Jewish population of Europe as a single, unified Jewish “nation”. Thus, by killing Jews outside of Germany, Hitler was destroying the Jewish “nation” that threatened the security and survival of the German nation. This is how the Nazi leaders understood the Final Solution, as a war against a “nation”, in nationalist terms.

In July, 1941, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Hermann Goering requested that Reinhard Heydrich, the head of State Police, devise a strategy for the Endlosung der Judenfrage, the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem. The Action Groups or Einsatzgruppen had begun executing Jewish civilians in the USSR. As more territory in the USSR was occupied by German troops, more Jewish prisoners were taken. A coordinated, systematic, plan for the killing of eastern European Jews was needed that would coordinate the Nazi party officials with German state officials or the state bureaucracy.

The Wannsee Conference followed six months later, held on January 20, 1942 in a suburb of Berlin, where the Final Solution was officially adopted, organized, and coordinated between the branches of the German government and Nazi officials. Reinhard Heydrich set up the mechanism and structure for the “evacuation”, transportation, and the systematic killing of the Jewish population in German-occupied countries in Europe. Heinrich Muller, the chief of the Gestapo, and Adolf Eichmann, who coordinated the transport, were also present at the meeting.

Hitler always saw the Final Solution in relation to nationalism. Nationalism can explain why Hitler and the Nazi regime sought the killing of Jews who were outside the borders of Germany. Why did the Nazis kill Jews who did not even live in Germany? How is this to be explained? Hitler saw Jews, whether they lived in Poland, the USSR, Hungary, France, Italy, or Greece, as being part of a single “nation” that was unified, organized, financed, and that was a threat to Germany. Haffner does not see this in his argument. Haffner argued that Hitler was acting against the national interests of Germany by pursuing the Final Solution even after the war was militarily lost. He saw this as irrational and illogical, inexplicable in nationalist terms. But he fails to see that for Hitler and the Nazi leaders, they saw the Jewish “nation” as posing the greatest threat and danger to the security or viability of the German nation, precisely because it was a nation without borders! So for Hitler and the other Nazi leaders, pursuing the Final Solution was not meaningless and irreconcilable with German nationalism, but was the fulfillment of modern nationalism. The Nazis were pursuing the Final Solution until the final days of the war because they were still fighting the Jewish “nation” which threatened to destroy the German race or ethnicity. Nationalism pervaded the Nazi pursuit of the Final Solution even up to the end of the war in 1945.

Conclusion

The Nazi leaders of Germany pursued the Final Solution because they wanted to create one people, one Aryan race, one nation, in Germany. Modern nationalism as developed in the 19th century defined the nation as one consisting of a single people, a single ethnicity. The German volkish concept in German nationalism also emphasized this racial or ethnic component. The Nazi nation or state was defined by race. It was made up of one people, one race, one state, one government, one leader. Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuehrer. This encapsulates succinctly the 19th century conception of a nation. The Nazi pursuit of the Final Solution was thus based in fundamental tenets of modern nationalism. Non-Aryans such as Jews and Gypsies were targeted for elimination because they posed primarily a racial threat or danger to the future viability of the German nation. At all times from 1935 to 1945, the Nazi regime was motivated by the objective to create one people, one ethnicity, in Germany, because under modern nationalism, this is what defined a nation.

A malnourished Serb child inmate at the Sisak concentration camp for children in Croatia.

II. The Case of Croatia

The Holocaust in Croatia

Croatia adopted the Nuremberg Race Laws and sought to eliminate the “foreign elements”, Orthodox Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, through genocide. In June, 1941, mass arrests of Jews began. By the end of 1941, about two-thirds of Croatia’s Jews were imprisoned. Most of the Jews of Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina were killed at the Jasenovac concentration camp. In August, 1942, 5.000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz from the NDH. In May, 1943, 2,000 Jews were deported. By 1945, 31,000 of the 40,000 Jews in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina were killed, 80% of the total Jewish population of the NDH.

The Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska, NDH) was proclaimed on April 10, 1941, when German Wehrmacht troops entered Zagreb, following the German, Italian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Albanian invasion of Yugoslavia.

Croatian Roman Catholic Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac publicly gave his support to the establishment of the Ustasha regime on April 12. The Roman Catholic Church in Croatia sanctioned the racial laws in a statement published in the Hrvatska Straza of May 11, 1941, because they would ensure “the survival and development of the Croatian nation….the protection of our honor and blood….” Roman Catholic priests had taken an active role in the mass murders of Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies. This is a suppressed and covered-up fact of the Holocaust and World War II. It is misleading. The Roman Catholic Church not only played an active role in the genocide committed against Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies, but in actual fact, the Roman Catholic Church was the seed bed of the Ustasha Movement itself. The whole Ustasha Movement sprang from the Roman Catholic Church. This is the big picture that mainstream historians of World War II do not want presented. The main sponsor of Greater Croatia nationalism and separatism in the interwar years, 1918-1941, was the Roman Catholic Church. Ante Pavelic was sponsored and funded by the Vatican and the Croatian Roman Catholic Church in the 1930s. The Vatican was always the base of operations for the Ustasha and for Pavelic. The Vatican not only put Pavelic in power, they sustained him in that power, and they also helped him elude arrest by planning and organizing his escape to Argentina after the war. Pavelic was an instrument or tool of the Vatican and Roman Catholic Church at all times. So the Croatian Roman Catholic Church and the Vatican did not merely actively participate in the genocide against Orthodox Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies, in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina, but in fact, they were the source and basis for the Ustasha Movement itself. The Ustasha Movement cannot be understood without grasping this usually censored fact. So the Final Solution in Croatia was different from that in Germany in that in Croatia there was a crucial religious component. German Nazi leaders were for the most part anti-Christian and secular. In Croatia, by contrast, the leaders of the NDH were devout and committed Roman Catholics. In Croatia, the goal was not only one people, one state, one leader, but also, one religion.

The Roman Catholic Church in Croatia played a more central and dominant role in Croatian nationalism than it had done in Germany. The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Sarajevo, Ivan Saric, supported the Ustasha regime and its policy of genocide. Father Franjo Kralik, a Roman Catholic priest who was an associate of Saric, wrote an article, “Why are the Jews being Persecuted?”, published in the Catholic Weekly (Katolicki Tjednik) in which he supported the elimination or extermination of the Jews, Serbs, and Gypsies from the NDH based in religion:

The descendants of those who hated Jesus, who condemned him to death, who crucified him and immediately persecuted his disciples, are guilty of greater excesses than those of their forefathers. Greed is growing. The Jews who led Europe and the entire world to disaster---morally, culturally, and economically---developed an appetite, which nothing less than the world as a whole could satisfy….Love has its limits. The movement for freeing the world from the Jews is a movement for the renaissance of human dignity. The all-wise and Almighty God is behind this movement.

Yugoslavia was dismembered by the Axis nations into “independent” states, creating a Greater Croatia which included Bosnia-Hercegovina, a Greater Albania which included Kosovo-Metohija, western Macedonia, and southern Montenegro, and a Greater Bulgaria, which included eastern Macedonia and Thrace.

Pavelic met Hitler on June 6, 1941 at Hitler’s retreat at Berchtesgaden. Hitler and Pavelic discussed how the Serbian, Jewish, and Gypsy populations were to be eliminated from the NDH. In particular, Pavelic sought Hitler’s recommendation for how to eliminate the Serbian population of Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina, which was a population of over 2 million. Hitler suggested that Pavelic immediately begin eliminating the Serbian population: “After all, if the Croat state wishes to be strong, a nationally intolerant policy must be pursued for fifty years because too much tolerance on such issues can only do harm.” In other words, Hitler recommended that Pavelic follow the policy of genocide which Hitler had initiated in Germany and the occupied territories against Jews and Gypsies. Pavelic had the green light from Hitler to begin the genocide of the Serbian, Jewish, and Gypsy populations of the NDH, Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina.

The Greater Croatian state sought to create a single people, a single leader, and a single state. The focus of the “independent” Croatian state was the total and complete extermination of the Orthodox Serbian population, the Jewish population, and the Gypsy or Roma population. Ante Pavelic became the undisputed leader, the Hrvatski Fuehrer, the poglavnik, following the Fuehrerprinzip or Fuehrer principle, this was the requirement of modern nationalism that a nation have one leader, ein fuehrer. Pavelic was the Croatian Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini combined.

What about Bosnia-Hercegovina and Islam? There were 700,000 Bosnian Muslims in the NDH which the Croatian regime classified as Croatians. Thus, the Bosnian Muslims, who had a distinct and separate identity, over-night became Croats. To satisfy the requirement of modern nationalism that a state or nation consist of one people, the NDH could only grant citizenship to Croats and no one else. According to the NDH policies, the Bosnian Muslims were originally Roman Catholic Croats who had been forcefully converted to Islam by the Ottoman Turks but who retained an ethnic Croatian identity. Moreover, the NDH goal was to encourage the Bosnian Muslims to return to their “original” identity as Roman Catholic Croats. In other words, the Bosnian Muslims were not only “originally” Croats, but they were originally Roman Catholics. Doglavnik or deputy poglavnik Mile Budak referred to the Bosnian Muslims as “the purest Croats”. The Bosnian Muslims were the “cream of the Croatian nation”. So the Ustasha/NDH racial doctrine perceived the Bosnian Muslims as Croat Roman Catholics underneath. They just needed to be re-assimilated and reawakened to return to their original religion, “enlightened Latin Christendom”. It was just a matter of time before the Bosnian Muslims saw the light. Pavelic and Artukovic, both being “Bosnians”, born in western Hercegovina, understood that the Bosnian Muslim population needed to be co-opted as a bulwark against the Bosnian Serb population because the Bosnian Orthodox Serbs were the largest population in Bosnia.

For the approximately 2 million Orthodox Serbs in the NDH versus 3.3 million Roman Catholic Croats in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina, the Ustasha/NDH regime contemplated total eradication and elimination, extermination or genocide. The Doglavnik, Mile Budak, enunciated the policy as follows: A third of the Serbs were to be killed, another third was to be expelled or deported to Serbia, and the remaining third were to be converted to Roman Catholicism. The Serbs were of a different ethnic identification, were a different people or volk, and thus could not satisfy the requirement in modern nationalism of “one people”, ein volk.

Josip Frank, founder of the Frankists or Frankovci.

Ustasha doctrine held, however, that, like the Bosnian Muslims, the Orthodox Serbs too were “originally” Roman Catholic Croats who had converted to a backward, schismatic, Byzantine religion of Orthodoxy. In other words, the Serbs too were actually merely Croats as well. This explained why the Doglavnik Budak favored the forceful conversion of a third of the Serbian Orthodox population. The Orthodox Serbs were just Croats originally who were returning to their original religion or faith. An estimated 250,000 Orthodox Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina were forcefully converted this way by Ustasha Roman Catholic priests. The dirty little secret about the NDH/Ustasha state is that it was a state based in Roman Catholicism, sponsored by the Vatican and the Pope, and whose nationalism was inculcated and engendered by Roman Catholic priests. But if the Orthodox Serbs of Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina were actually originally Roman Catholic Croats who had apostatized, they why did a third need to be murdered. Ante Pavelic argued in a 1932 editorial in the Ustasha newspaper for the “use of all means, even the most terrible” against the Serbian population.

Why not merely re-classify the Orthodox Serbs as Croats like with the Bosnian Muslims? This shows the illogical and absurd aspects of modern nationalism. In fact, the Serbs and Croats are both Slavic groups that speak the identical language with minor cultural variations. Likewise, the Bosnian Muslims are actually Slavs who speak the identical language to the Serbs and Croats. But this illustrates that modern nationalism is in many respects based on group fantasy and that a modern nation state is in many regards an imagined community. The Ustasha/NDH regime concocted this imaginary ethnic identity to satisfy the one people requirement of modern nationalism. But the only way to create a single people in Croatia and Bosnia was to exterminate the “foreign elements” through genocide, to murder over 2 million people.

There were 40,000 Jews in the NDH. In Zagreb, the Jewish population was 11,000, in Sarajevo, it was 10,000, in Bjelovar and Osijek it was 3,000 in both cities. The Jews of Croatia were 60% Ashkenazic, Jews who had settled from Austria-Hungary. The Jews of Sarajevo were Sephardic Jews who had settled in Bosnia following their mass expulsions from Spain and Portugal in 1492 by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Ashkenazi Jews made up 40% of the Jewish population of the NDH.

Under modern nationalist requirements, the Jews were a different race or ethnicity and thus were “foreign elements” that had to be eliminated from Croatian life and society. Unlike Germany, however, in the Ustasha/NDH, the Orthodox Serbian population was subjected to genocide based on an ideological racism and nationalism. In other words, the Serbs were the major targets of genocide in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina. The Jews, remarkably, were only secondary targets. There was very little real ideological anti-Semitism in Croatian history. In fact, one of the key founders of the Ustasha Movement, Josip Frank, the successor to Starcevic in The Party of Rights, was an Austro-Hungarian Jew. This is another fact that is suppressed in historical accounts of Croatia and the Ustasha Movement. Josip Frank was a convert to Roman Catholicism but was by birth Jewish. The Ustasha were also known as Frankists or Frankovci because they followed Frank’s virulently racist and anti-Serbian and anti-Orthodox and anti-Semitic ideology that began with Ante Starcevic. Starcevic, the founder of the Ustasha Movement and of modern Croatian nationalism, was actually half-Serbian Orthodox on his mother’s side. This modern Croatian nationalism can be seen as the fanaticism and unbounded zealotry of the new convert, whether to Roman Catholicism or to “Croatianism”, Croatian nationalism. For what is modern nationalism but an ideological construct, in fact, a new religion, another modern-day -ism. Starcevic originally favored a pan-Slavism or Yugoslavian approach but later rejected this approach vehemently, arguing that Slavs were actually “slaves”, that was the derivation of the term according to him. Guilt is another motivation. Starcevic and Frank were subconsciously racked by guilt because they had turned on their own people. So there is self-hate and self-loathing that results in an outward manifestation that is directed at the source or object of the guilt feelings.

The psychogenesis of ethnic, religious, and racial enmity or conflict is based on fear and guilt. The person denies or suppresses their own identification with the enemy by projecting this onto an external target or object and by disassociating it from themselves. This projection is what the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung called “the shadow”. The person projects “the shadow”, which is part of the person’s own identity, outwards and as Other. But, in fact, “the shadow” is suppressed and denied. Ethnic, religious, and racial enmity or hatred is psychologically like a divorce or violent breakup or separation where persons who were united seek to disassociate from themselves. This entails the denial and suppression of all traits in common and a transference of them to a target or enemy or Other. Violent separation engenders fear, which in turn leads to paranoia and suspicion, and an exacerbation and intensification of isolation that seeks to identify with the Tribe or Clan for security and defense. A bipolar Us versus Them psychological dichotomy emerges in which case one is either with Us or with the Enemy. A simplified black and white picture emerges where only differences, real or imagined, are emphasized. Similarities are repressed and denied.

The self-doubt, fear, anxiety, and guilt of the person who denies and suppresses “the shadow”, emerges as fanaticism and zealotry, which acts to relieve this psychological imbalance. The anxiety and fear induces paranoia which results in ethnic, religious, and racial hatred and intense animosity leading to mass murder. Only the physical elimination, or homicide of the enemy object, brings psychological equanimity and stability. This also explains why the victims have to be mutilated and disfigured, to accentuate the differences between the person and the object of his or her enmity. The enemy must not only be killed, but mutilated and disfigured to dehumanize the victim and to eradicate any similarities between the person committing the murder and his or her victim. The more the two groups have in common, ethnically, racially, or culturally, and the closer the proximity of the two groups to each other, the greater the perceived danger they pose. Then there is an exaggeration of differences to produce disassociation and enmity. (15)

As Benedict Anderson and Ernest Renan have noted, however, modern nations are based on imaginary communities. Ethnic identity is in many instances based on group fantasy and a primordial need to associate with a Clan or Tribe, even if that Tribe is in many ways imaginary. The source of the identification is arbitrary and subjective. We can identify with the Group or Clan based on gender, skin color, race, ethnicity, religion, physical attributes, language, culture, citizenship, or as in Lilliput, based on whether we break our eggs on the round or pointed side of the egg. A nation is an “imagined community”. A nation is an ideological construct.

The Ustasha Movement had its origins in Starcevic’s Croatian Party of Rights (Hrvatska Stranka Prava, HSP). The HSP broke up in 1908. Pavelic joined a splinter group lead by Josip Frank. The Frankist group was regarded as the “pure” Party of Rights, the most extremist and right-wing faction. Pavelic wanted “a free and independent Croat state comprising the entire historical and ethnic territory of the Croat people.” It was a plan for a Greater Croatia. In 1927, Pavelic was elected to the Zagreb City Council. Pavelic won a seat in the Yugoslav Parliament in Belgrade. Pavelic sought complete independence of Croatia from Yugoslvia while Stjepan Radic sought a de-centralized federation where Croatia would be autonomous. They opposed the Yugoslav centralized unitary state. On June 28, 1928, Stjepan Radic, the founder of the Croatian Peasant Party, was shot on the floor of the Parliament or Skupshtina in Belgrade by a Serbian deputy from Montenegro, Punisa Racic of the National Radical Party, later dying of his injuries. Other Croatian MPs, Pavle Radic, and Djuro Basaricek, were shot and mortally wounded. A political crisis resulted in Yugoslavia. On January 26, 1929, a “Royal Dictatorship” was declared. Pavelic was sentenced to death in absentia for anti-Serbian demonstrations. Pavelic fled to Croatia, then to Austria, to form the Croat Youth Movement, the forerunner of the Ustasha. In 1932, he moved to Italy and began terrorist attacks in Yugoslavia. In 1939, Croatia was granted autonomy within Yugoslavia under the Sporazum plan but by that time it was too little too late.

The policy of the NDH was “the purge of Croatia from foreign elements.” In the summer of 1941, Ante Pavelic told a German newspaper that: “The Jews will be liquidated within a very short time.” The Ustasha goal was to create an ethnically pure Greater Croatia, a Croatia of one people. The Ustasha also sought to eliminate the Jews because it wanted to take over their property and also because German support was predicated on the NDH pursuit of the Final Solution to the Jewish problem. The Holocaust in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina was under the supervision of Andrija Artukovic, as the head of the Ministry of the Interior. The Interior Ministry oversaw the enactment of anti-Jewish legislation in the NDH. Vladimir Kosak headed the Ministry of Finance, which oversaw the confiscation of Jewish property in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina. The security police of the NDH, the Ustashka Nadzorna Sluzba (UNS), was headed by Eugen Dido Kvaternik, known as the “Ustasha Himmler”. The UNS had authority over the 22 concentration camps in the NDH and apprehended, arrested, incarcerated, and executed Jewish prisoners.

On April 17. 1941, the day after the establishment of the Croatian state, the NDH proclaimed the Zakonska odredba za obranu naroda i drzave (The Legal Provision for the Defense of the People and State) which created the legal framework for the arrest and execution of “foreign elements” who were perceived as a threat or danger to the survival and existence of the newly created Croatian state. Even listening to the banned BBC radio newscasts was deemed treasonous to the NDH and punishable by death.

The NDH passed anti-Jewish legislation immediately following its creation in 1941. The Croat anti-Jewish racial laws, passed on April 30, 1941, were based on the German Nuremberg Race laws of 1935. Like Germany, Croatia sought to create a single people. The Ustasha race laws defined who was a Jew and excluded them from Croatian society and life. Jewish businesses, factories, enterprises, and real estate were taken over by “Aryans” and were “nationalized”, which resulted in “the Aryanization of Jewish property”. Jews were deprived of citizenship rights. Jews could not sign business contracts. Jews in the professions could only work with non-Aryans. Jewish civil servants were dismissed from their posts and positions. Jewish personal and real property was seized and collective fines were imposed on Jews. In 1944, the Ustasha Ministry of Finance released an estimate of the total value of Jewish property that was taken at $50 million.

In 1941, legislation was passed that restricted the movement of Jews and sought to concentrate them in ghettoes, where they would be isolated from the main population. Jews were arrested along with the leaders of Serbian political organizations and parties, Communists, left-wing groups, Jewish lawyers, and democratic party members, and about 100 Jewish youth members of Zionist youth organizations in Zagreb. These groups were seen as a potential threat to the new NDH regime and a source for anti-government activity. They were sent to the newly created NDH concentration camps where most of them were executed. This group included Serbs, Jews, and anti-Ustasha Croats.

The Croatian nationalist ideology of the Ustasha Movement was based on the principles and requirements of modern nationalism that a nation consist of a single people, one people, ein volk. It is reflected in the public policy statements of Pavelic and Artukovic and Milovan Zanic. Pavelic stated in a speech given at Vukovar in Srem on August 14, 1941: “This is now the …Independent State of Croatia. It must be cleansed of Serbs and Jews.” Milovan Zanic, the President of the NDH Legislative Council, stated this much more succinctly in a speech given on June 3, 1941: “This must be a country of Croats and of no one else, and there is no method that we Ustashe will not use in order to make this country truly Croatian and to cleanse it of Serbs.” The population must be “cleansed” to create a pure ethnicity or pure race because this is a fundamental requirement of modern nationalism, one people, ein volk. So the Ustasha Movement was based in modern nationalism. How much different are the Ustasha policies from US policies, also based on modern nationalism, against the Native American Indians? US General Philip Sheridan enunciated the US policy succinctly: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” The US genocide against Native American Indians was romanticized as a game-like battle between cowboys and Indians in Westerns and US histories. So the racial policies of the Ustasha were derived from modern nationalism.

In May, 1941, a decree was enacted by the Ustasha government that required that Jews wear a yellow badge or banner. It came in two forms, a banner and a large strip of cloth worn on the back. The badge was yellow and had the letter Z for Zidov, the Croatian word for “Jew” and a Star of David, or Mogen David. Even Jewish children and infants in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina were forced to wear either the band or the banner. There are photographs of Jewish children wearing the Ustasha Star of David badge. The Serbian Orthodox population was forced to wear a blue armband with the letter “P” for Pravoslavac, Orthodox. Jews were consigned to forced labor and later legislation allowed for their deportation to concentration camps. On April 14. 1941, the synagogue in Osijek was burned down by the Ustasha. In Sarajevo, the Sephardic synagogue was destroyed by German, Croat, and Bosnian Muslim forces after the German Army entered the city. The mass arrest of Jews began on June 26, 1941, when Pavelic issued a decree that stated that the Jews were disseminating lies and falsehoods meant to incite the population to rebellion and that the Jews were obstructing the orderly supply of essential goods in Croatia. Pavelic decreed: ‘well-known black-marketeers that they are… I declare that the Jews are collectively guilty and order them to be imprisoned….in concentration camps.” Of the 40,000 Jews in the NDH, about 31,000 were killed during the Holocaust.

In a February 26, 1942 speech to the Croatian Sabor or Parliament, Artukovic articulated the Croatian goal for the Final Solution of the Jewish Question, to create an independent Croatian state that was ethnically pure:

Immediately following the birth of the former Yugoslavia, all the enemies of the Croat people---the Jews, Communists, and Freemasons---united to destroy the Croatian people and all their national characteristics…The Jews, as one of the most dangerous international organizations, tried to achieve world Jewry…in order that the Jews might gain full mastery over all goods of the world and all the power in the world…Communism is the child of Jewry and one of the principle levers for the world mastery of the Jews…The Judeo-Communists have tried to bring about the disintegration of the Croatian national body…The Croatian people, having re-established their independent state of Croatia, could not do otherwise but to clean off the poisonous damagers and insatiable parasites---Jews, Communists, Freemasons. The independent state of Croatia…settled the so-called Jewish question with a decisive and healthy grasp.

The first mass murders against Serbs occurred on April 27-28 in Gudovac near Bjelovar when 196 Serbian men were killed. Their bodies were lined up in rows in a field where they were photographed. On May 9, 400 Serbs from Veljun in the Kordun region were murdered. On May 13, 260 Serbs from Glina in Banija were murdered. The NDH forces continued to murder Serbian men, women, and children from Lika, Kordun, and Banija. Bosnian Muslim members of the Ustasha forces also committed mass murders of Orthodox Serbs in eastern Hercegovina in 1941. In August, 1941, the German occupation officials in Serbia recorded that 190,000 Serbian refuges had fled to Serbia, mostly from Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegocina. On April 29, 1941, the first concentration camp was set up in Danica near Koprivnica. The NDH established approximately 30 concentration, labor, and exterminations camps. The largest was Jasenovac, established in September, 1941. Even under the most conservative estimates, 100,000 Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, and anti-Ustasha Croats were murdered there, most of the victims being Orthodox Serbs.

In August, 1941, the NDH began to systematically eliminate the Jewish population of Bosnia-Hercegovina. This was done in stages. At first, Jews living in the small towns of Bosnia-Hercegovina were arrested. By the end of August, the Jews of Sarajevo were rounded up. By November, 1941, the Jews of Sarajevo were all arrested and deported to the Ustasha camps. SS Sturmbannfuehrer Alfred Heinrich was put in charge of Jewish affairs in Sarajevo. Most Jews from Bosnia were sent to the Croatian concentration camp at Jasenovac. Some Jewish women from Sarajevo were incarcerated in a special women’s prison camp in the town of Djakovo. Jews were incarcerated in the following Croatian concentration camps: the Jasenovac camp on the Sava river, the Pag Island camp in the Adriatic Sea, the Jadovno camp, the Djakovo camp in southern Croatia, the Kruscica camp in Bosnia, the Loborgrad camp in northern Croatia, and the Danica camp near Zagreb.

Following the Wannsee Conference, where the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem was worked out, held on January 20, 1942, it was proposed that Croatia transfer the Jews held in Croatian concentration camps to eastern Europe. In discussions between SS Sturmbannfuehrer Hans Helm, who was the embassy police attaché and was part of the RSHA, the Reich Security main Office, and Eugen Dido Kvaternik, chief of the NDH security service, it was decided that the NDH government would arrest the Jews, take them to a railway terminal, and pay Germany 30 reichsmarks per person to have then sent to the extermination camps in the east. The German government would give the property of the Jews seized to Croatia. Between August 13 and 20, 1942, 5,500 Jews were transported to Auschwitz from the Tenje and Loborgrad concentration camps and from Zagreb and Sarajevo. SS Hauptsturmfuehrer Franz Abromeit was sent to Zagreb to oversee the deportations. In May, 1943, Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler made an official visit to Zagreb to obtain the agreement of the NDH regime for the formation of the 13th Waffen Division der SS “Handschar” or “Handzar”, which Himmler initially planned as an SS Division made up entirely of Bosnian Muslims. Due to NDH pressure, however, Himmler was forced to include a token number of Roman Catholic Croat troops in the division. While Himmler met with NDH political leaders in Zagreb, 1,150 Jews from Zagreb and Osijek were deported in two trains on May 5 and 10 to Auschwitz.

What was unique about the Holocaust in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina? Unlike Serbia and the other occupied regions of Europe, the Jews of Croatia and Bosnia were, for the most part, murdered by their fellow citizens, Roman Catholic Croats and Bosnian Muslims. This is another fact suppressed and covered up by the mainstream historians and the elitist cadre of Holocaust pundits-for-hire. This is one of those salient facts of World War II and the Holocaust that is never noted, let alone discussed. The Croats and the Bosnian Muslims murdered the Jews of Croatia and Bosnia themselves. This is a unique fact of World War II and certainly merits analysis and examination. But it is meticulously suppressed by the mainstream historians and the lick-spittle pundits and experts. Instead, the mainstream historians try to concoct preposterous scenarios of Serbian “collaborators” and how everyone was equally guilty during the Holocaust and how Serbs were Nazis. But the most Jews killed during the Holocaust in Yugoslavia were in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina, 31,000, 80 % of the Jewish population of the NDH. And they were killed not by the Germans, but primarily by Croats and Bosnian Muslims. Croats and Bosnian Muslims were unique in this regard.

Conclusion

Both Germany and Croatia sought to create nations consisting of one people, one state, and one leader. They were nations that sought to create ethnically pure states based in principles of modern nationalism, which defined a nation as consisting fundamentally as a single people, in a single state, under a single leader. To achieve racial or ethnic homogeneity or purity, Germany and Croatia embarked on a systematic and planned program of genocide against minorities which were perceived as posing a danger or threat to the nation. In Germany, Jews and Gypsies (Sinti-Roma) were the primary populations targeted for extermination. In Croatia, the Orthodox Serbian, Jewish, and Gypsy or Roma populations were targeted for elimination. Both Germany and Croatia passed race laws that sought to legally exclude minorities from citizenship. Croatia was unique from other occupied or satellite states during the Holocaust in that the genocide committed there was conducted by Croats and Bosnian Muslims themselves. The role of Croatia in the Holocaust is largely suppressed and covered-up and marginalized by mainstream historiography in the so-called West. One reason for this falsification of history is to cover-up the fact that the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church were one of the primary sponsors of the genocide committed there. The Holocaust in Germany and Croatia was a by-product of modern nationalism, of the imperative to have one people, one state, one leader.

Footnotes

(1) Sebastian Haffner, The Meaning of Hitler (NY: Macmillan, 1979), 9.

(2) Haffner, 8-10.

(3) George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: The Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (NY: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964), 31-40.

(4) Mosse, 43-49. The volkish concept developed as a romanticized idea of what constituted a nation, developed originally by Johann Herder as a cultural nationalism. It was a romantic notion of the German people or volk that emphasized “blood and soil” (Blut und Boden). Throughout the 19th century, as Mosse noted, German literature explored this volkish idea in novels that glorified the peasant, urban German volk. Blood (Blut), Rasse (Race), and the People or Nation (Volk) became dominant terms and themes. Hermann Godsche (Biarritz, 1868, which recounts a fictional Jewish conspiracy to control the world), Ernst Arnt, Friedrich Jahn, German composer Richard Wagner (who published Judaism in Music, (Das Judentum in der Musik, 1850), attacking Jewish composers for lacking a truly national musical idiom, but relied on a polyglot or bastardized form of music, which was not true art; Wagner relied on German mythology and a Nordic past in creating a truly German national music), and Paul de Lagarde emphasized this volkish idea, Guido von List, Lanz von Liebenfels (who was allegedly part Jewish), and the mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger. These 19th century themes of German nationalism were adopted and adapted by the Nazis. The Nazis created the concept of Blutschutz (the protection of German blood), Volksgemeinschaft (a community of people based on blood), and the Volksfiend (enemy of the German people), who were Jews and Gypsies, and Rassenschande (the sexual violation of the German race). Ironically, the concept of an “Aryan” was originally based in 19th century linguistic groupings that classed people from India and Europe as Aryans. Gypsies (Sinti, Roma) originally are from India, so they are Aryan under this definition. But Nazis categorized Gypsies as non-Aryans. These Nazi concepts go back to the 19th century blood and soil volkish concept. In many ways, the volkish movement was a reaction to modernity, industrialization, urbanization, i.e., what produced modern nationalism and made it possible and what nationalism in turn made possible. Ironically, as Mosse noted, in 1890, France and Czarist Russia (where there were pogroms or massacres of Jews) were the centers of anti-Semitism while Germany tended to have integrated Jews into the political and social life of the nation. The German defeat in World War I changed all that. But the Nazi racial ideology for the Final Solution is based in the 19th century volkish concepts of blood and soil, the Volk, the Rasse.
(5) Michael Marrus, The Holocaust in History (Hanover, NH: University Press, 1987), 84-88.

(6) Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (NY: Houghton-Mifflin, 1943), 342.

(7) The T-4 Euthanasia Program under Philip Bouhler and Karl Brandt was an attempt by the Nazi regime at eugenics, which resulted in the mercy killing of approximately 100,000 German citizens. The mentally handicapped, homosexuals, and the “asocial” were also targets of elimination in German society. But these policies were based on race and nationalism. These groups were targeted for elimination because they posed a threat to the Aryan race, which if not preserved and maintained, would lead to the death of the German nation itself. Indeed, the mentally handicapped and ill were the first who were gassed. They were seen as a liability for the German nation and were eliminated. Nationalism guided these policies because these policies were devised in the context of nationalism: What makes Germany as a nation strong and viable? Who is an asset and who is a liability for the German nation? The criteria were based in nationalist ideology developed in the 19th century. Modern nationalism emerged in the late 18th century with a reliance on German writer Johann Gottfried Herder’s concept of a nation based on a shared culture and language, a volkish concept of a nation, as opposed to a political or religious state. Herder founded ethnic nationalism. As Benedict Anderson noted, the first use of the term “nationalism” appears in a 1774 work by Herder. This led to the concept of ethnicity as the basis of a nation. The Burschenschaft movement emerged following the Congress of Vienna in 1815 with the goal of unifying the German settled areas of Europe. It was a nationalist movement that was spurred on by the failure of the Vienna Congress to unify Germany. The 1818 Burschenschaft Congress excluded Jews and other non-Germans from membership but allowed them to join if they develop “in Christian-German spirit” and completely assimilated. This evolved into a more genetics-based concept of the nation, which led to the emergence of “scientific” racism, or the concept of race, which in its narrow sense was about “ethnicity”. In 1853, Joseph-Arthur Gobineau, a French author, published An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races in which he argued that the Aryan or Germanic race was a superior race and largely responsible for European civilization. Scientific or biological racism emerged in Britain with the work of Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, who developed eugenics. The British mathematician Karl Pearson argued that “there is a struggle of race against race and of nation against nation” in National Life from the Standpoint of Science (1900), a Social Darwinist attempt to justify British imperialism based in “scientific” principles. Pearson argued that “inferior races” needed the “Aryan’s success” to achieve progress and civilization. German journalist Wilhelm Marr founded the Anti-Semitic League in 1879. Marr coined the term “anti-Semitism” to define “Judenhass” or “Jew-hate”. In 1879, he published the book Der Sieg des Judentums uber das Germanentum (The Victory of Judaism over Germanism) in which he posited the theme of a racial struggle between Germans and Jews. The Anti-Semitic league was formed to specifically combat the supposed Jewish threat to the German nation. The organization advocated the removal of Jews from Germany. Marr was influenced by Ernst Haeckel, who popularized Social Darwinism in Germany, by the Burschenschaft Movement of the early 19th century, by Johann Herder’s volkish concept. The German historian and professor Heinrich von Treitschke developed these concepts in the late 19th century of a constant struggle between races in Germany and saw Jews as a hindrance to the full development of Germany as a nation (he said that “the Jews are our misfortune”). In 1891, the Pan-German League, a nationalist organization, allowed Jewish members so long as they were assimilated. But by 1912, membership was based on race. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, he settled in Germany, married Eva Wagner, Richard Wagner’s daughter, published The Foundations of the 19th Century in 1899 in German arguing that the Aryan or Teutonic, the Anglo-Saxon, was responsible for European progress and civilization. Chamberlain had an important influence on the Nazi Movement, meeting Adolf Hitler and personally endorsing his movement. Alfred Rosenberg, the philosopher of the Nazi Movement, wrote a follow-up book in 1930 entitled The Myth of the 20th Century (Mythos des XX. Jahrhunderts). It has been cl