Honorary Aryans

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126
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DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126
 Honorary Aryans:
National–Racial
Identity and Protected
Jews in the Independent
State of Croatia

Nevenko Bartulin

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126
honorary aryans
Copyright © Nevenko Bartulin, 2013.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-33911-9
All rights reserved.
First published in 2013 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 978-1-137-33912-6 PDF
ISBN: 978-1-349-46429-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from
the Library of Congress.
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
First edition: 2013
www.palgrave.com/pivot
doi: 10.1057/9781137339126
 Contents
Introduction 1
1 Racial Nationalism and Anti-Semitism,
1782–1918 16
Jews in the Kingdom of
Dalmatia–Croatia–Slavonia 17
Croatian national ideologies
and the question of race 20
National identity, religion, racial
anthropology and the ‘Jewish question’ 25
2 Yugoslavism, Jews and Ustasha Ideology,
1918–1941 41
The South Slavic nation state 42
The Jews in Yugoslavia 43
Racial Yugoslavism and racial
anti-Yugoslavism 44
Ustasha ideas on Croatian ethnic–racial
identity 49
3 Jews and Honorary Aryans in the Croat
Racial State 61
The Croatian national community 62
Anti-Semitic ideology 66
The racial law decrees 68
Conclusion 84
Bibliography 88
Index 97

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126 v
 Introduction

Abstract: The introduction outlines the main aim of the book,

which is to examine Ustasha race theory and its importance
to the political and legal functioning of the Independent
State of Croatia by focusing on the case of Croatian Jews
who were granted the rights of Aryan citizens of the Ustasha
state; this question is examined within the broader context
of anti-Semitism, nationalism and race theory in Croatia
from the mid-nineteenth century. The introduction provides
an overview of the relevant historiography on the Ustasha
regime and the Independent State of Croatia, pointing out that
historians have tended to downplay or ignore the importance
of racial ideas to the Ustasha movement, including racial
anti-Semitism.

Bartulin, Nevenko. Honorary Aryans: National–Racial

Identity and Protected Jews in the Independent State of
Croatia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126 
 Honorary Aryans

In 1910 a Jewish member of the liberal–nationalist Croatian Pure Party

of Right, Vladimir Sachs, declared that Croatia’s Jews were not part of a
separate nation but ‘Croats of the Mosaic faith’.1 Thirty years later, in late
May 1941, Sachs sent an application to the Jewish section of the Ustasha
Directorate of Police requesting that it grant him, ‘a person of non-Aryan
descent’, the full rights of an Aryan citizen of the Independent State of
Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH), because he had proved him-
self ‘meritorious for the Croatian people’, and had always fought against
‘international Jewry’.2 Sachs based his application (to which he received
a positive answer) upon the fact that the sixth article of the first Ustasha
racial law decree, issued on 30 April 1941, had indeed given the Head
of State the right to grant all political rights that belong to individuals
of Aryan descent to non-Aryan individuals who had proven themselves
‘meritorious for the Croatian people, especially for its liberation’ before
10 April 1941.3 This date was the day the NDH was proclaimed by the
unofficial head of the Ustasha movement in Croatia, the former Austro–
Hungarian Colonel Slavko Kvaternik (1878–1947), who was married to
the daughter of Josip Frank (1844–1911), the baptised Jew who had led
the Pure Party of Right from 1895 to his death in 1911. The members of
this party later became known as ‘Frankists’ (frankovci).
Frank would have presumably had no inkling that his one-time
political followers – including the future Poglavnik (Leader) of the
NDH, Ante Pavelić (1889–1959) – would establish a movement and
state that completely rejected his, and Sachs’, idea of a civic and liberal
Croatian nation state. Sachs himself belonged to a small group of
assimilated Jews who, given the ‘privilege’ of living in the NDH, would
no longer be able to be Croats of the Mosaic faith, but merely ‘honorary
Aryans’ or protected Jews, a coterie of Jews living on the margins of a
racial state that was prepared to accept ‘exceptions to the rule’ (in this
case Jews who were defined as possessing Aryan ‘spiritual’ or mental
qualities) but not accept Jews as Jews. This book examines the case of
the so-called honorary Aryans, as well as Jews in mixed marriages and
so-called Mischlinge (half- and quarter Jews), by focusing on how these
exemptions from the NDH’s race laws were justified by race theory.
This question is explored within the broader context of anti-Semitism,
nationalism and racial theory in Croatia in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century. This work analyses, in detail, the position of Jews
in Croatian and Yugoslav nationalist discourses on race, ethnicity and
nationhood. Ustasha anti-Semitism needs to be comprehended within

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126
 Introduction 

the context of a wider racial ideology, which did not concern itself
solely, or even primarily, with Jews.
The historiography on the NDH has reduced the question of Ustasha
anti-Semitism to: a) a matter of political pragmatism and opportunism
on the part of the Ustashe, i.e. introducing anti-Semitic laws and policies
in order to receive further favour and sympathy of the Third Reich; b) the
need to protect members of the Ustasha movement who were of Jewish
descent; and c) economic greed, in other words, pursing anti-Semitic
policy merely in order to acquire Jewish property. Although these factors
should not be ignored or overlooked in a study of Ustasha anti-Semitism,
historians of the NDH have tended to dismiss Ustasha ideas on race in
general as little more than a carbon copy of National Socialist ideologi-
cal views. In line with that historiographical position, the existence of
Jewish honorary Aryans could easily be seen as a contradiction of race
theory, which thereby highlights the supposed ideological shallowness
of the Ustashe, as well as their willingness to exempt certain Jews purely
in return for economic gain. In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963),
Hannah Arendt thus referred to the ‘highly assimilated and extraordi-
narily rich’ group of Jews who were able to acquire honorary Aryan sta-
tus by parting ‘voluntarily with their property’.4 Gerald Reitlinger wrote
that ‘the whole of the Ustashe autocracy was mixed with Jewish blood’,
but Pavelić nonetheless ‘decreed the confiscation of all Jewish property’
because ‘the trigger-happy Ustashe needed plunder and the wealth of the
orthodox Serb minority was not enough to satisfy them’.5 Since the pub-
lication of these two books (Reitlinger’s work was first published in 1953)
little more has been offered in the way of a historiographical explana-
tion for Ustasha anti-Semitic policy and the justification for exempting
certain Jews.
Only two historiographical studies have really dealt with the question
of honorary Aryans in any detail, namely, Holokaust u Zagrebu (‘The
Holocaust in Zagreb’, 2001) by Ivo (and Slavko) Goldstein, and When
Courage Prevailed: The Rescue and Survival of Jews in the Independent State
of Croatia 1941–1945 (2011), by Esther Gitman.6 While Goldstein exam-
ines the Ustasha persecution of Jews in the NDH (focusing on Zagreb),
Gitman’s book explores the efforts of various political and social actors to
save Jews from that persecution. While both books provide a good deal of
detail on the individual cases and fates of Jewish honorary Aryans,7 they
neglect to examine how the Ustasha government attempted to justify, in
an ideological and legal sense, the exemption of these Jews from the race

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126
 Honorary Aryans

laws. Goldstein merely cites the sixth article of the first racial law decree,
and provides biographical notes on the several high-ranking Ustashe of
Jewish descent or married to Jewish/half-Jewish women,8 but makes no
attempt to situate this question within the context of Ustasha ideology.
In any case, Goldstein defines Ustasha ideology as nothing more than ‘a
specific synthesis of Fascist and Nazi elements, adapted to the Croatian
and Bosnian reality’. Accordingly, the Ustasha regime implemented the
‘ideology of Croatian exclusivism’, which had ‘developed into a typical Nazi
ideology transplanted onto Croatian soil’.9 Goldstein is mainly concerned
with highlighting the genocidal nature of the NDH, including its anti-
Semitism, without actually examining the roots of Ustasha racial ideology.
Gitman, for her part, notes that the Ustashe ‘officially embraced the
Nazi goal of a genocidal Final Solution’, but also ‘worked to protect those
individuals whose education, skills, or family ties they deemed vital to
Croatia’s national interest’.10 She further argues that:

[ ... ] Pavelić made one significant change to the Nazi definition of ‘Jew.’
Rather than relying on the criteria of three Jewish grandparents, he empow-
ered himself as head of state to recognize new categories specific to Croatia:
‘Honorary Aryan’ and ‘Aryan Rights.’ The Nazis, naturally, objected to the
change, primarily because it introduced arbitrary and subjective criteria
that invited corrupt practices.11

While the last sentence is a valid point, Gitman is incorrect when she
claims that Pavelić made a ‘significant change’ to the ‘Nazi definition of
Jew’ by not relying on the criteria of three Jewish grandparents. According
to the first Ustasha racial law decree, which Gitman does not actually
examine, individuals with at least three Jewish grandparents were in fact
legally defined as Jewish. Similarly to the position of German Jews under
the 1935 Nuremberg laws, quarter Jews (individuals with one Jewish
grandparent) and certain half-Jews (with two Jewish grandparents) in
the NDH were able to acquire full Croatian citizenship and recognition
as Aryans. As regards the categories ‘Honorary Aryan‘ (which was never
officially used) and ‘Aryan rights’, it must be stressed that Jews who were
granted such status were not in fact recognised or defined as racially
Aryan. These Jews were awarded the full rights that belonged to Aryan
citizens of the NDH because they had proven themselves ‘meritorious’
for the Croatian people and/or possessed vital economic skills, but they
were only honorary Aryans. Although representatives of the German
Foreign Ministry and SS (Schutzstaffel) in the NDH were critical of these

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126
 Introduction 

exemptions from the race laws, the Third Reich itself granted certain
groups of German Jews ‘clemency’ from the Nuremberg laws.12 Gitman
also makes the common historiographical error of claiming that Ante
Pavelić and Slavko Kvaternik had ‘Jewish wives’, implying that they were
either full Jews or Jewish by religion.13
A great deal of research has been conducted on the ethnic and racial
policies of the Ustasha state towards Serbs, Jews and Gypsies in wartime
Croatia and Bosnia–Herzegovina, policies that aimed to transform the
NDH into an ethno-racially homogeneous nation state.14 Historians have
not, however, subjected Ustasha racial ideology – including anti-Semitic
ideas – to a serious historiographical analysis, preferring instead to down-
play or ignore race theory as an important legal, political and ideological
factor in the NDH.15 One of the main reasons for this neglect is the fact that
the history of the NDH was, for many decades, examined according to three
strictly delineated historiographical models. The Croatian historian Nada
Kisić Kolanović has pointed out that Croatian and Yugoslav historiography
on the NDH from the post-war period to 1990 basically consisted of two
schools or ‘models’, the ‘Marxist–Yugoslav’ and ‘Nostalgic–Apologetic’.16
According to the Marxist Yugoslav model, represented above all by the
historians Bogdan Krizman and Fikreta Jelić-Butić, the NDH was nothing
more than a ‘Nazi–Fascist’ puppet state and, furthermore, ‘any attempt to
create an independent Croatian state was solely an act of Croatian chau-
vinism and the legitimising of terror on other peoples’.17 In contrast to this
school, the ‘Nostalgic–Apologetic’ model, found primarily among anti-
Yugoslav right-wing intellectuals in the émigré journal Hrvatska revija (The
Croatian Review) downplayed or ignored the historical reality of Ustasha
racism and crimes against humanity. They aimed to rehabilitate the NDH
by reducing it to a question of the Croatian people’s right to independent
statehood, so that the NDH was simply the ‘historical realisation of an
independent Croatian state’.18
Western historians in turn have generally interpreted the Ustashe and
NDH as a movement and state that adhered to political Catholicism or
clerical fascism. In his book (which he wrote in cooperation with the
Hungarian journalist Ladislaus Hory) Der kroatische Ustascha-Staat 1941–
1945, published in 1964, the German historian Martin Broszat defined
the Ustashe as ‘the Catholic-Croatian type of fascism’.19 More recent
studies by Western historians continue to maintain that the Ustashe
were strongly influenced by an ardent Catholic ideology. Rory Yeomans
states that the Ustashe were motivated by a Catholic-derived religious

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126
 Honorary Aryans

‘mysticism’, and the ‘overtly apocalyptic, violent and chiliastic imagery

the Ustashas employed reflected their extreme Manichean view of the
world’.20 According to Jonathan Steinberg, the Croats themselves are ‘a
community defined by religion and by almost nothing else’ and this leads
him to conclude that the Ustashe therefore ‘hated the [Orthodox] Serbs
and so killed them’.21 Jonathan Gumz argues that ‘the Ustaša attempted
to tie itself to Catholicism through using a dagger superimposed upon
a Catholic crucifix as the movement’s symbol’ (though this claim is
incorrect).22 The Ustashe were in fact a thoroughly secular radical nation-
alist movement and certainly did not represent a group of anti-Orthodox
Catholic fundamentalists. For example, the Ustashe pursued a serious
policy of integrating the Bosnian Muslims (or ‘Croats of the Islamic
faith’) into the Croatian nation, to the extent that they recognised Islam
as an official religion of the NDH and promoted a vigorous Islamophile
propaganda campaign.23 The historians mentioned above have ignored
or simply overlooked a single important fact: the Ustasha regime’s party
program, the seventeen ‘Principles of the Ustasha Movement’ (Načela
ustaškog pokreta, 1933), made no mention of Catholicism, and only one
principle made a reference to religion at all (i.e. ‘the moral strengths of
the Croatian people lie in an orderly and religious family life’).24
Contemporary historians more or less agree in their assessments of
the Ustashe as integral nationalists and/or fascists. Although there is no
doubt that the Ustashe were indeed fervent anti-Communist integral
nationalists with strong political and ideological sympathies for fascist
regimes in Europe (though Martin Broszat referred to the Ustashe as
being only ‘proto-fascist’ or ‘half-fascist’),25 the specific question of race
theory in the NDH remains a neglected subject amongst historians. Mark
Biondich, for example, has more recently highlighted that Catholicism
had little influence on Ustasha attitudes and policies toward Serbs in
the NDH. The Ustashe are defined by Biondich as ‘integral nationalists’,
worshippers of the ‘cult of state’ and further characterised by anti-
Serbianism and anti-Communism.26 On the other hand, he downplays
the significance of racial ideas in Ustasha ideology and policy, arguing
that the Ustashe ‘never formulated’ a coherent racial theory, because the
regime’s ideological ‘racial or racist undertone’ was supposedly ‘implied
rather than explicit’.27 Other historians similarly present Ustasha racial
ideas as a peripheral feature of the regime’s ideology or as too vague and
unclear to warrant serious analysis. Kisić Kolanović thus argues that it
is ‘difficult to identify some sort of racial type of Ustasha nationalism’,

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126
 Introduction 

because the Ustashe also emphasised language, culture and history as key
factors of Croatian nationhood.28 Emily Greble notes that ‘the Ustasha
Party’s ideological program described the Croat nation as an “identifi-
able ethnic unit” ’, but it ‘was identifiable only insofar as it was not “other”
nations’. Accordingly, Greble argues, ‘a foreigner was somebody who was
not a Croat, and a Croat was somebody who was not a foreigner – at best
a political tautology and at worst a stage for national crisis’.29
Such lack of ideological clarity is apparently reflected, in particular, in
the theory of the Gothic (Germanic) origin of the Croats to which the
Ustashe were supposed to have subscribed. Sabrina Ramet thus writes
that ‘the claim that Croats were “Goths“ (whatever that might mean)
rather than Slavs was one element in that ideology and provided an ideo-
logical groundwork for asserting that Croats (Goths) and Serbs (Slavs)
were not related’.30 According to James Sadkovich, the Ustashe ‘began to
develop a rather ambiguous racial theory that claimed a “gothic” ances-
try for the Croats’.31 Although Ante Pavelić claimed a Gothic origin in
conversation with Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) in June 1941, Mario Jareb
has recently shown that the Ustashe did not in fact promote a specifically
Gothic/Germanic racial identity for the Croats in the NDH; in any case,
the NDH’s academics and ideologists readily admitted that the Croats
were of at least partially Slavic origin.32 Jareb, however, argues that such
an identification (even if only partial) of a Slavic descent highlights that
the Ustashe could not therefore claim an Aryan racial identity. According
to Jareb, the National Socialists regarded the Slavs as ‘racially less valu-
able’ non-Aryans, including in this category the Slavic speaking Croats.33
Yeshayahu Jelinek, for his part, argued that the Ustasha idea of an Aryan
Gothic, and/or Iranian, racial identity was ‘for external consumption’
only, that is, a straightforward political ploy to gain the sympathy of
Berlin.34 Stanley Payne similarly states that the Ustashe used the Gothic
theory to place Croats above other Slavs in the Nazi racial hierarchy.35
The preceding arguments neglect or significantly downplay several key
points about the NDH and the question of race. Firstly, they fail to note
that the Ustashe emphasised race alongside language, history and culture
as vital aspects of Croatian national identity in the NDH. Secondly, the
argument that the Ustashe simply imitated or copied National Socialist
racial ideology does not take into account the strong intellectual and
ideological influence that racial anthropology and race theory exerted
on sections of the political and academic milieu of Croatia long before
1941. Thirdly, the claim that the Ustashe did not possess their own Aryan

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126
 Honorary Aryans

race theory because the Croats are linguistically Slavic and therefore
regarded by the Third Reich as ‘racial inferiors’ is a deeply entrenched,
but highly misleading, thesis. ‘Slav’ and ‘South Slav‘ are in the first
instance linguistic terms and this fact was accepted by German racial
anthropologists and National Socialist ideologists in the Third Reich,
at least in theory.36 Furthermore, it was entirely conceivable for Croat
nationalists to claim an Aryan (i.e. Indo–European/Indo–Germanic)
racial identity. As far as the Gothic theory of Croat origins is concerned,
the Ustashe never claimed that the Croats were actually Goths, but rather
that this Germanic people had significantly contributed to the Croatian
ethnic and racial composition.37
Accordingly, historians cannot dismiss Ustasha race theory with the
assertion that such ideas are too obviously fictitious or a political ploy
without an intellectual/ideological basis, and therefore not worthy of seri-
ous scholarly analysis. As the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920)
pointed out, ‘with race theories you can prove or disprove anything you
want’.38 The Ustashe were committed to the formulation of a national
‘ethno-history’, that is, ‘the subjective view of later generations of a given
cultural unit of population of the experience of their real or presumed
forebears’.39 Ethno-histories are based on a combination of ‘varying degrees
of documented fact’ and ‘political myth’.40 Furthermore, an ethno-linguistic
or race theory could be more easily seen to be substantiated when that
theory was built upon an earlier ethnic myth and/or national tradition.
As the late American historian George L. Mosse noted, one needs ‘tradi-
tion to activate thought or else it can not be activated’.41 For example, the
Fascist Duce Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) found it difficult to ‘activate’
an imported Aryan–Nordic racial theory, which traditionally had little
or no influence on Italian nationalism. Accordingly, ‘when Italian racism
was introduced, it had to be invented and you get a crude transposition
from the German Aryan man to the Mediterranean Aryan man [ ... ]’42 In
contrast to Italian Fascism, the Ustashe did have particular intellectual,
ideological and cultural traditions to draw upon in the articulation of their
own Aryan/Indo–European/Indo–Germanic race theory. According to the
Ustashe, the Croats were not only a distinct political nation (one defined
as possessing historic statehood and a modern national consciousness),43
but also a distinct ethnicity (one defined as a group possessing or claim-
ing a common ancestry, culture, history and territory).44 Furthermore, the
Croats were defined as a distinct white Indo–European people – of Slavic–
Iranian–Gothic–Illyrian–Celtic descent – that exhibited the physical and

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126
 Introduction 

spiritual traits of the main European racial types (Nordic, Alpine, Dinaric,
Mediterranean and East Baltic), while the best Croats were said to specifi-
cally bear the traits of the more gifted Dinaric and Nordic races.
The principal Ustasha political aim was to establish an independ-
ent Croatian nation state. Such an aim necessitated the destruction of
the state of Yugoslavia, in which Croatia had been wiped off the map
as a distinct political entity and reduced, more or less, to a satrapy of
the Serbian dominated royalist government in Belgrade.45 This aim was
closely connected to the other equally important goal of the Ustashe: to
redefine the concept of Croatian nationhood, which, until the end of the
First World War, had been defined by the dominant Croatian political
ideologies as being purely Slavic in an ethnic and/or racial sense. The
redefinition of Croatian nationhood also necessitated defining the
ethnic and racial groups who represented the ‘Other’46: these groups
were the majority of Serbs and almost all Gypsies and Jews living on the
territory considered the ethnic and historic land of the Croatian people
(comprising today’s Republics of Croatia and Bosnia–Herzegovina).
These groups were further defined as forming part of a broader Asiatic
racial counter-type. Accordingly, though Ustasha attitudes towards Jews
were directly influenced by National Socialist anti-Semitic ideas, they
also need to be understood as forming part of a home-grown ideology
that placed Croatia’s Jews in a group together with other peoples defined
as racially Near Eastern and Oriental; in this case, the Gypsies and the
Serbs, the latter identified as being predominantly of Balkan Vlach (i.e. a
non-Aryan racial) origin. Interestingly, that racial ideology had emerged
in a curious fashion.
Ante Pavelić, along with many other leading Ustasha members, had
been a former member of one of the factions of the Croatian Party of
Right, which had been founded in 1861 by the Croatian writer Ante
Starčević (1823–1896). Starčević promoted the idea that Croatia had
a right to independent statehood, outside of the Habsburg Monarchy,
upon the basis of Croatian historic state right. He was also opposed to
the ideology of Yugoslavism, which propagated the idea of the ‘national
unity’ of all the South Slavs. Starčević was, however, a strong supporter
of civic nationalism and generally opposed to ethnic and racial notions
of Croat nationhood. He chose as his successor to lead the Party of Right
(now renamed the Pure Party of Right), Josip Frank. Due to Frank’s
Jewish background and the fact that a large number of Croatian Jews
supported his party, the Pure Party of Right gained the reputation of

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126
 Honorary Aryans

being a Jewish run liberal party. The party argued that Croat Jews were,
in a national sense, ‘Croats of the Mosaic faith’, equal in all respects
to Croats of Catholic, Orthodox and Islamic faith. In contrast, Croat
Yugoslavist nationalists, in other words, those who viewed the Croats as
a purely Slavic people, were highly critical of the ‘Jew’ Frank and tended
to view the predominantly urban, and mainly German and Hungarian
speaking, Croatian Jews as racial aliens.
During the early twentieth century many intellectuals and supporters
of the Pure Party of Right had begun to develop an ethnic–racial theory
of Croat nationhood, but one that was opposed to Yugoslavism. This was
mainly due to the ideological need to ‘prove’ the existence of a separate
ethno-linguistic Croatian people, since general academic opinion in and
outside of Croatia viewed the Croats as an integral part of the South Slav
or ‘Yugoslav’ nation, which gave the ideology of Yugoslavism a stronger
intellectual foundation. Croatian Jews increasingly came to be seen as
racial foreigners by anti-Yugoslavist Croat nationalists, including the
Ustasha movement. During the 1930s the Ustashe increasingly developed
an openly anti-Semitic stance, whilst still making a distinction between
individual ‘good’ Croatian Jews and ‘international’ or foreign Jewry as a
whole. This distinction was maintained in the NDH, to a certain degree,
by the legal practice of granting individual Jews honorary Aryan status.
Parallel to the development of anti-Yugoslavist Croat nationalism
from an ideology of civic national identity to one of national identity
understood as ethnic–racial kinship, Croatian Jews were also develop-
ing their own identity, marked by the opposing forces of assimilation
and Zionism, within the political structures of two multi-ethnic states,
namely, the Habsburg Monarchy and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Jewish
identity in Croatia was inextricably linked, on the one hand, to the
Habsburg Monarchy, and, on the other, to modernity. Large-scale Jewish
settlement in the autonomous Kingdom of Croatia–Slavonia, part of the
Habsburg Monarchy since 1527, only began with the Edict of Toleration
issued by Emperor Joseph II in 1782, which permitted Jews to settle in
Croatia. The Jews lived exclusively in the towns and cities of Croatia
where they worked as lawyers, doctors and/or were engaged in industry
and trade, in stark contrast to the great majority of ethnic Croats who
were peasants. In terms of its ideology, the Ustasha NDH represented
a radical break, not only with Yugoslav racial supranationalism, but
also with Habsburg dynastic ‘multiculturalism’ and nineteenth-century
liberalism. The Ustashe further rejected many aspects of modernity,

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126
 Introduction 

such as urban life, cosmopolitanism and the internationalist ideologies

of communism and laissez-faire capitalism. In Ustasha eyes, the Jews
were the representative type of the modern, rootless and materialist
cosmopolitan. A Jewish identity could survive, and even thrive, in the
Habsburg and Yugoslav political contexts, but it could not be preserved
within a modern racialist state that extolled an ideal Aryan racial type.
This book shows that the presence of Jewish honorary Aryans in the
NDH does not bring into question the importance of racial thought in
the NDH, but rather, it actually highlights the significance of race for
the Ustasha state. This book focuses its attention on theory, that is, on
ideology and law, in order to examine how race theory and the race laws
in the NDH accommodated and justified the inclusion of Jewish hon-
orary Aryans in the body of NDH citizens. A study of this race theory
cannot be undertaken without first examining the roots of that theory.
Accordingly, the Chapters 1 and 2 chart the development of racial theory,
nationalism and anti-Semitism in Croatia from the late eighteenth cen-
tury to the Second World War. Chapter 3 examines the phenomena of
racism, anti-Semitism and honorary Aryans in the NDH. The leaders
and ideologists of the Ustasha movement had genuinely rejected the
Frankist heritage of civic Croat nationalism, but they could still make
exceptions to the rule, granting assimilated Jews the privilege of NDH
citizenship, whilst still recognising, in theory, their racial otherness.

Notes
 Ivo and Slavko Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu (Zagreb: Novi liber, 2001), 619.
 Bogdan Krizman, Pavelić između Hitlera i Mussolinija (Zagreb: Globus, 1980),
137, 191fn. See a copy of Sach’s application in Krizman, Pavelić između Hitlera i
Mussolinija, 224–225.
 ‘Krv i čast hrvatskog naroda zaštićeni posebnim odredbama’, Hrvatski narod,
1 May 1941, 1.
 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New
York: The Viking Press, 1963), 184.
 Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of
Europe 1939–1945 (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc., 1987), 365.
 See Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu and Esther Gitman, When Courage
Prevailed: The Rescue and Survival of Jews in the Independent State of Croatia
1941–1945 (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2011).

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 Honorary Aryans

 See Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu, 132–144, 378–384; and Gitman, When

Courage Prevailed, 67–91.
 Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu, 119, 619–625.
 ibid, 93, 95.
 Gitman, When Courage Prevailed, 67.
 ibid, XVII.
 Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws
and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military (Kansas: University of Press
of Kansas), 203.
 Gitman, When Courage Prevailed, 67. Claims that the wives of Pavelić and
Kvaternik were Jewish or required honorary Aryan status are also made
by Emily Greble, Sarajevo, 1941–1945: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Hitler’s
Europe (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011), 90; Jure Krišto,
‘The Catholic Church and the Jews in the Independent State of Croatia’,
Review of Croatian History, 3, No. 1 (2007): 35; and Jozo Tomasevich, War and
Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration (California:
Stanford University Press, 2001), 593.
 Ustasha policies of deportation, extermination and forced religious
conversion in relation to the NDH’s Serb, Jewish and Gypsy minorities have
been extensively documented. See Mark Biondich, ‘Religion and Nation
in Wartime Croatia: Reflections on the Ustaša Policy of Forced Religious
Conversions, 1941–1942’, Slavonic and East European Review, 83, No. 1 (2005):
71–115; Fikreta Jelić-Butić, Ustaše i Nezavisna Država Hrvatska 1941–1945.
(Zagreb: Sveučilišna naklada Liber, 1977); Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu;
Greble, Sarajevo, 1941–1945; Jonathan Gumz, ‘Wehrmacht Perceptions
of Mass Violence in Croatia, 1941–1942’, The Historical Journal, 44, No.
4 (2001): 1015–1038; Ladislaus Hory and Martin Broszat, Der kroatische
Ustascha-Staat 1941–1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1964); Narcisa
Lengel-Krizman, Genocid nad Romima: Jasenovac 1942 (Zagreb: Biblioteka
Kameni cvijet, 2003); Holm Sundhaussen, ‘Der Ustascha-Staat: Anatomie
eines Herrschaftssystems’, Österreichische Osthefte, 37 (1995): 516–532; and
Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 380–415.
 The only works specifically dealing with race theory in the NDH have been
the following three articles by the author of this book: Nevenko Bartulin,
‘The Anti-Yugoslavist Narrative on Croatian Ethnolinguistic and Racial
Identity, 1900–1941’, East Central Europe, 39, Nos. 2–3 (2012): 331–356; ‘The
Ideal Nordic-Dinaric Racial Type: Racial Anthropology in the Independent
State of Croatia’, Review of Croatian History, 5, No. 1 (2009): 189–219; and ‘The
Ideology of Nation and Race: The Croatian Ustasha Regime and Its Policies
toward Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia 1941–1945’, Croatian Studies
Review, 5 (2008): 75–102.

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 Introduction 

 Nada Kisić Kolanović, ‘Povijest NDH kao predmet istraživanja’, Časopis za

suvremenu povijest, 34, No. 3 (2002): 684.
 Kisić Kolanović, ‘Povijest NDH’, 684–685. For examples of the Marxist
school, see the works of Bogdan Krizman, Ante Pavelić i ustaše (Zagreb:
Globus, 1978), Pavelić između Hitlera i Mussolinija and the two volume Ustaše
i Treći Reich (Zagreb: Globus, 1983); and Jelić-Butić, Ustaše i Nezavisna Država
Hrvatska.
 Kisić Kolanović, ‘Povijest NDH’, 687.
 Hory and Broszat, Der kroatische Ustascha-Staat, 72. For a highly biased
account of the supposedly close link between the Ustasha regime, the
Catholic Church in Croatia and the Vatican, see Carlo Falconi, The Silence of
Pius XII, trans. Bernard Wall (London: Faber & Faber, 1970).
 Rory Yeomans, ‘Militant Women, Warrior Men and Revolutionary Personae:
The New Ustasha Man and Woman in the Independent State of Croatia,
1941–1945’, Slavonic and East European Review, 83, No. 4 (2005): 705–706.
 Jonathan Steinberg, ‘Types of Genocide? Croatians, Serbs, Jews, 1941–45’, in
The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation, ed. David Cesarani (New York:
Routledge, 1994), 189–190.
 Gumz, ‘Wehrmacht Perceptions of Mass Violence in Croatia’, 1025–1026.
 See Nada Kisić Kolanović, Muslimani i hrvatski nacionalizam 1941–1945.
(Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 2009).
 This statement is found in article 16 of the ‘Ustasha principles’ (which
included 15 articles from 1933 to 1941, and then 17 from 1941 to 1945). See
Mario Jareb, Ustaško-domobranski pokret od nastanka do travnja 1941. godine
(Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 2006), 124–128.
 Hory and Broszat, Der kroatische Ustascha-Staat, 177. According to Stanley
Payne, ‘the murderousness of the Ustashi did not by itself qualify them to
be considered generic fascists, since the great majority of the movements
and regimes of this century to have engaged in large-scale killings were
either Marxist-Leninists or nonfascist nationalists’. Stanley Payne, A History
of Fascism, 1914–1945 (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995),
411. For more on the argument that the Ustashe were a fascist movement, see
Rory Yeomans, Visions of Annihilation: The Ustasha Regime and the Cultural
Politics of Fascism 1941–1945 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013).
 Biondich, ‘Religion and Nation in Wartime Croatia’, 77, 113.
 ibid, 78.
 Kisić Kolanović, Muslimani i hrvatski nacionalizam, 30–31.
 Greble, Sarajevo, 1941–1945, 97.
 Sabrina P. Ramet, ‘The NDH – An Introduction’, Totalitarian Movements and
Political Religions, 7, No. 4 (2006): 404.

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 Honorary Aryans

 James J. Sadkovich, Italian Support for Croatian Separatism, 1927–1937 (New

York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1987), 150. For similar views, see Tomasevich,
War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 348.
 Mario Jareb, ‘Jesu li Hrvati postali Goti? Odnos ustaša i vlasti Nezavisne
Države Hrvatske prema neslavenskim teorijama o podrijetlu Hrvata’, Časopis
za suvremenu povijest, 40, No. 3 (2008): 869–882.
 ibid, 874–875, 881.
 Yeshayahu Jelinek, ‘Nationalities and Minorities in the Independent State of
Croatia’, Nationalities Papers, VIII, No. 2 (1984): 195–196.
 Payne, A History of Fascism, 405.
 John Connelly, ‘Nazis and Slavs: From Racial Theory to Racist Practice’,
Central European History, 32, No. 1 (1999): 1–33. For more on the distinction
between racial and linguistic identity see Christopher M. Hutton, Race and
the Third Reich: Linguistics, Racial Anthropology and Genetics in the Dialectic of
Volk (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005).
 See Bartulin, ‘The Ideal Nordic-Dinaric Racial Type’, 197–199, 207–213.
 Cited in Aaron Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy (London and New York:
Routledge, 2002), 1.
 Anthony D. Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1995), 63.
 Political myths are ‘stories told, and widely believed, about the heroic past
that serves some collective need in the present and future’. See Smith, Nations
and Nationalism in a Global Era.
 George L. Mosse, Nazism: A Historical and Comparative Analysis of National
Socialism (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1978), 101.
 ibid. For more on the Fascist racial elaboration of the terms ‘Aryan‘,
‘Mediterranean‘ and ‘Italian’, see Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy.
 A nation, as Holm Sundhaussen notes, claims political sovereignty, and
possesses a national consciousness. Holm Sundhaussen, ‘Nationsbildung
und Nationalismus im Donau-Balkan-Raum’, Forschungen zur osteuropäischen
Geschichte, 48 (1993): 236.
 Anthony Smith defines the ethnie as ‘named units of population with
common ancestry myths and historical memories, elements of shared
culture, some link with a historic territory and some measure of solidarity,
at least among their elites’. Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era,
57. Smith argues that a number of modern nations can trace their origins to
pre-modern ethnies. See Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources
of National Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). For modernist
views on the origin of national identity, see Ernest Gellner, Nationalism
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997) and Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and
Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

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 Introduction 

 There is an extensive literature on the politics of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

For works dealing with Croatia’s position in Yugoslavia and nationalist
responses to policies of Serbian centralism see Ivo Banac, The National
Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, 1984), Jareb, Ustaško-domobranski pokret and Sadkovich,
Italian Support for Croatian Separatism. For a different appraisal of interwar
Yugoslav politics, see John R. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a
Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
 Every nation is defined through its relation to other peoples. Nationalism
cannot exist without Abgrenzung (delineation or demarcation). Sundhaussen,
‘Nationsbildung und Nationalismus’, 244.

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 1
Racial Nationalism and
Anti-Semitism, 1782–1918

Abstract: This chapter outlines the modern history of Jews in

Croatia from the Edict of Toleration issued by the Habsburg
Emperor Joseph II, which permitted Jews to settle in the
Kingdom of Croatia (or Dalmatia–Croatia–Slavonia), to
the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy in 1918. This period
saw the numerical growth of the Jewish minority and its
increasing influence in Croatian political and social life, as
well as the parallel growth of anti-Semitic attitudes and ideas
among certain political groups, who identified the Jews with
the worst aspects of modern urban life and the ideologies of
liberalism and socialism. The chapter goes into some detail
on the reasons for the general emergence of anti-Semitism
in nineteenth-century Europe, as well as the simultaneous
evolution of race theory in both Europe and Croatia.

Bartulin, Nevenko. Honorary Aryans: National–Racial

Identity and Protected Jews in the Independent State of
Croatia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126
 Racial Nationalism and Anti-Semitism, 1782–1918 

Jews in the Kingdom of Dalmatia–Croatia–Slavonia

In contrast to the large Orthodox Serb minority, which had been settled
in the Kingdom of Dalmatia–Croatia–Slavonia (i.e. the historic Croatian
provinces) for centuries, the history of Jewish settlement in Croatia is of
relatively recent origin. With the exception of the old Sephardic Jewish
communities in the Dalmatian port towns of Split and Dubrovnik, exist-
ing from the late Middle Ages,1 the numbers of Jews in other parts of
Croatia were insignificant. Under Habsburg rulers in the early modern
period, Jews and Protestants were not permitted to settle in the Kingdom
of Croatia. In 1697 the common Hungaro–Croatian parliament forbade
by law any non-Catholics from owning property in Croatia.2 Jews were
allowed to trade in certain goods on the territory of the Habsburg Empire
until the end of the eighteenth century, and they also arrived in northern
Croatia as travelling merchants from Austria, Hungary, Bohemia and
Moravia. However, the law against Jewish settlement in Croatia was
upheld by the Croatian parliament in 1729. In 1741 the Hungarian parlia-
ment confirmed (at the request of the Croatian parliament) the law that
only Catholics could live on the territory of Croatia.3
Croatia’s position within the Habsburg Monarchy itself was deter-
mined by the Croats’ status as a ‘historic nation’.4 The term ‘historic
nation’ referred to all those peoples (including the German–Austrians,
Hungarians, Poles and Czechs), or more accurately, to the nobilities of
these peoples, which possessed a tradition of statehood dating from
the Middle Ages.5 Croatian historic state right was founded on the legal
continuity of the medieval Kingdom of Croatia, institutionalised in
the office of the Ban (viceroy) and the Sabor (parliament), which func-
tioned long after Croatia’s incorporation in the Habsburg Monarchy in
1527. The nobility of Civil Croatia (north-west Croatia) saw itself as the
rightful heir to the medieval kingdom and its former territories, lost in
past centuries to the Ottoman and Venetian empires, which included
Dalmatia, the Military Frontier, eastern Istria and parts of Ottoman
Bosnia and Herzegovina (the parts known as ‘Turkish Croatia’ and
‘Turkish Dalmatia’).6 Formerly Venetian Dalmatia and Istria became
Austrian provinces in 1815, and were administered by Vienna, in contrast
to northern Croatia–Slavonia (Civil Croatia and Civil Slavonia), which
had been in union with the Kingdom of Hungary since 1102, until both
had passed to the Habsburg crown. Despite their administrative divi-
sions, the historical political unity of the Croatian provinces was still

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 Honorary Aryans

legally maintained in the collective royal title of the Triune Kingdom of

Dalmatia, Croatia and Slavonia (Regna Dalmatiae, Croatiae et Slavoniae).7
The Croatian nobility comprised the Croatian ‘political nation’ or
natio croatica; its ‘Croat’ identity was more territorial and political in
nature than it was ethnic.8 Accordingly, through its constitutional tie
to the Kingdom of Hungary, the natio croatica also considered itself a
constituent part of the Hungarian nobility.9 However, at the end of the
eighteenth century, the Croatian nobility began to resist the efforts of the
Hungarian nobility to make Magyar the official language of the whole
Hungarian Kingdom (including Croatia and Slavonia). This action on
part of the Croatian nobles heralded the beginning of a modern Croatian
national movement under the name of Illyrian in the 1830s.
Before that time, the ‘enlightened despot’, Emperor Joseph II, issued the
‘Edict of Tolerance’ and its annex, ‘Systematica Gentis Judaicae Regulatio’
in 1782 (applicable to Croatia and Hungary in 1783), which guaranteed the
Jews of the Habsburg Monarchy freedom of movement and settlement,
freedom of religion and education, though there still remained certain
limitations on Jewish trading activities and Jews were not permitted the
ownership of houses or land.10 Despite the Edict, Jews (and Protestants)
in Hungary, Croatia and Slavonia were still not legally recognised as a
religious community. Furthermore, after the death of Joseph II in 1790,
many free royal cities in Hungary and Croatia–Slavonia resisted the
Edict of Tolerance and sought to expel Jews from their towns.11 Despite
continual attempts and acts aimed against further Jewish migration and
settlement, Jews managed to obtain permission to settle permanently in
several major north Croatian towns, for example, in Osijek in 1776 and in
Zagreb in 1806.12 In 1840 the Sabor decided that it would ‘gradually’ grant
Jews full equal rights in Croatia–Slavonia; this decision led to increased
Jewish migration to Croatia and the establishment of a Jewish school
in Zagreb.13 The Jews of Zagreb petitioned the Croatian parliament to
grant them full civic equality during the revolutionary year of 1848 but
the Sabor followed the Hungarian parliament in deciding to defer the
question of Jewish emancipation.14
It was not until 19 September 1873 that the Sabor passed a law on
the equality of the ‘Israelites’, which received the sanction of the King/
Emperor on 21 October of the same year. The law granted the ‘followers
of the Israelite faith’ religious freedom and all civic and political rights
which belonged to followers of other recognised religions in Croatia
and Slavonia.15 The law on emancipation bears witness to the fact that

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 Racial Nationalism and Anti-Semitism, 1782–1918 

it was ‘inspired by the liberal teaching that all religions are equally valid
before the law’, while permitting individuals to change their confession
was based on the ‘classic liberal principle of freedom of conscience’.16
However, though the law allowed for the possibility of conversions to
Judaism, strong opposition from the hierarchy of the Catholic Church
in Croatia meant that such conversions did not actually occur in prac-
tice. While Austria and Hungary introduced civil marriages (including
those between Jews and Christians) in 1868 and 1895 respectively, mar-
riages between Christians and Jews were eventually forbidden by law in
Croatia in 1906.17 The Catholic Church in Croatia could not accept the
legalisation of civil marriages, which would allow possible conversions to
Judaism. The only way that marriages between Catholics and Jews could
be legally conducted in the Kingdom of Croatia–Slavonia was for the
Jewish partner to convert to Catholicism (though mixed couples man-
aged to circumvent this law by first marrying in Austria and Hungary
and then returning to Croatia).18 The Jewish or ‘Israelite’ religion was
officially recognised by the Sabor in 1906, which granted Jewish commu-
nities autonomy in religious matters (subject to the ultimate authority of
the Croatian government).19
By the beginning of the twentieth century, there were approximately
20,000 Jews in Croatia.20 Most of the Jews in Croatia–Slavonia were
Ashkenazim, originating predominantly from Hungary and Austria,
and resided in towns and cities. In 1910 the Jews made up a little less
than 1% of the Croatian population, but they comprised 17% of the
country’s lawyers and 25–26% of doctors; more than half of the Croatian
Jews were involved in trade, while many were also architects, artisans
and artists.21 In terms of their culture and language, in 1900 only 35% of
the total number of Jews in Croatia regarded Croatian as their mother
tongue, with 41% claiming German and 21% Hungarian as their primary
languages (in Zagreb in the same year 54.1% of Jews considered Croatian
their mother tongue).22 Croatian Jews (of Ashkenazi origin) were gener-
ally regarded as foreigners by Croats due to their widespread use of the
German and Hungarian languages.23 Zionism, the movement of Jewish
nationalism, also began to make headway among Croatian Jews at the
beginning of the twentieth century. Zionist groups, promoting their own
brand of Jewish ethno–cultural nationalism combined with Croatian
patriotism, organised several Zionist congresses in Croatian towns
(beginning in 1904) and founded a Zionist newspaper in 1906.24 These
Jews proudly called themselves Jewish and not ‘Israelite‘.25

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 Honorary Aryans

Croatian national ideologies and the question of race

Before we turn to the specific question of anti-Semitism in Croatia, we

need to briefly examine the main Croatian national movements of the
nineteenth and early twentieth century and their ideas on national and
racial identity. The Illyrian movement had sought to defend Croatia’s tra-
ditional political autonomy within the Habsburg Empire and to create a
standard literary language and unified cultural identity for all South Slavs
or ‘Illyrians’ (after the classical name of the region).26 The Illyrian move-
ment introduced the ideological concept of ‘political Croatism’ combined
with ‘cultural Illyrianism’ (later Yugoslavism): the first term denoted the
political identity of the Croats i.e. historic state right, while the second
referred to their South Slavic ethnolinguistic and cultural identity.27 The
leader of the Illyrian movement, Ljudevit Gaj (1809–1872), believed that
the Croats possessed a particular Slavic ‘spirit’ (Volksgeist), which was
closely tied to their language. Under the influence of the cultural and lin-
guistic ideas of German romantic scholars and thinkers, above all Johann
Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), the Illyrians articulated a pan-Slavic
ideology, according to which the Croats ‘belonged to three nationalities:
the Croats, the Illyrians and the Slavs’.28 In general, national movements
in East-Central Europe were based on a cultural and linguistic notion of
nationhood, while in Western Europe the idea of the nation tended to
be based on political identity or citizenship. Although one should adopt
Hans Kohn‘s theory of the difference between ‘Western’ (political) and
‘Eastern’ (ethnic) nationalisms with some caution (for ethnonationalism
was certainly present in Western Europe),29 ethnic nationalism was more
common in East-Central Europe, because the British, French and other
Atlantic states were able to provide a territorial and political framework
for the formation of nations.30 In East-Central Europe, on the other hand,
there was no social class, as in Western Europe, which ‘could affirm the
nation as a political community of equal citizens and proclaim them the
bearers of sovereignty’.31 Accordingly, the social and intellectual elites in
East-Central Europe did not focus their efforts to construct a modern
national identity on ‘political modernisation’, but rather on ‘cultural
standardisation’.32
The Illyrian movement considered the Croats and other South Slavs
to be the direct descendants of the ancient Illyrians, who had also
apparently been Slavs. During the revolutionary years of 1848 and
1849, the idea of Slavic autochthony in the western Balkans was used

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 Racial Nationalism and Anti-Semitism, 1782–1918 

in the Illyrianist struggle against the liberal nationalist government of

Hungary, which aimed to introduce a system of modern centralisation
to the Hungarian Kingdom, which would have curtailed the autonomy
of the associated Kingdom of Croatia–Slavonia. As a reaction to the
Hungarian nationalist disparagement of Croatia’s political and cultural
traditions, the idea of Slav antiquity in the Balkans stressed not only
‘the historical continuity’ of Croatian settlement, but also the ‘value of
Illyrian-Croatian culture and tradition and affiliation to the European
civilisational circle’.33
Croatian writers and intellectuals looked to the ‘new discoveries
of European scientists from various fields, particularly to discoveries
in biology, anthropology, linguistics and Oriental studies’, in order to
highlight that the non-Indo-European speaking Hungarians actually
belonged to the Asiatic branch of nations.34 These intellectuals and think-
ers were influenced by the work of the Slovak national leader L’udovít
Štúr (1815–1856), who, on the basis of the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), distinguished between ‘historic’ and
‘non-historic’ peoples: while the former peoples belonged to the Indo-
European and Semitic ethnolinguistic families, the latter belonged to
the Asiatic branch, including the Hungarians.35 Articles in the Illyrianist
newspaper Slavenski jug (‘The Slavic South’) from 1848 referred to the
Magyars as ‘kinfolk of the Mongols’ and the ‘sons of Attila’, who ‘do not
conceal their Hunnish descent’, from which ‘they inherited the right to
suppress other peoples’.36
The Illyrian movement disintegrated after 1849, in large part because
they failed to create an ‘Illyrian‘ nation; the Serb and Slovene cultural
elites rejected the Illyrianist idea as being, in essence, a Croatian national
ideology.37 Otherwise, the semi-independent Principality of Serbia was
pursuing its own national political goal, ‘the liberation and unification
of all Serbs into a single Great Serbian state’.38 The most influential
Serbian scholar of the time, Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (1787–1864), also
propagated the view that the South Slav dialect of štokavian, used by
almost all ethnic Serbs and most ethnic Croats, was a purely Serbian
one, which meant that štokavian speaking Croats were merely ‘Catholic
Serbs’. Alongside the traditional religious Orthodox designation of Serb
nationhood, Karadžić had therefore also introduced an ethnolinguistic
definition.39 In Croatia itself, the Serbian Orthodox Church (to which
most Orthodox Christians in Croatia belonged) rejected Yugoslavism
and sought to preserve Serbian ‘nationality, religion and alphabet’.40

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 Honorary Aryans

Despite the failure of its wider cultural and political aims, the pan-
Slavic ideology of the Illyrian movement was further articulated in
Croatia by the Yugoslavist National Party, led by the Catholic Bishop
Josip Juraj Strossmayer (1815–1905) in Croatia–Slavonia. The National
Party similarly propagated the idea of ‘political Croatism’ and ‘cultural
Yugoslavism’. According to this idea, the Croats belonged to the Illyrian/
Yugoslav (i.e. South Slavic) ‘nation’ and Slavic ‘race’ in an ethnolinguis-
tic and racial sense, but constituted a separate political nation on the
grounds of Croat historic state right.41 This concept continued to exert
a significant ideological influence on Croatian politics in the early
twentieth century and was wholeheartedly adopted and promoted by
the Croatian Peasant Party under the leadership of the brothers Antun
(1868–1919) and Stjepan Radić (1871–1928).42 Yugoslavist ideology also
emphasised Croatia’s Indo–European or ‘Aryan‘ ethnic–racial heritage.
In the program of the Dalmatian Yugoslavist Nationalists from 1862, the
distinguished Dalmatian Croat historian and politician Natko Nodilo
(1834–1912) argued that ‘the Dalmatian Slavs, noble according to their
pure Indo-European origin, from which all the great civilised nations
have emerged [ ... ] take in hand the unwritten right of the free develop-
ment of their nationality’.43
In its origins, the intellectual concept of the Aryan ‘race’, or a common
Aryan family of peoples, did not emerge directly in relation to the Jews.
Over time, however, the Aryan hypothesis would eventually lead to the
construction of a binary opposition between Aryans and Semites.44 The
Aryan hypothesis was derived from linguistics. In the late eighteenth
century, scholars such as the English Orientalist Sir William Jones
(1746–1794), brought to light evidence that the sacred language of Hindu
texts, Sanskrit, was cognate to Latin and Greek, as well as to the Romanic
and Germanic languages.45 This major scholarly discovery eventually
led to the theory that India, or some other Central Asian cradle, was
quite possibly the original birthplace of the white European peoples.
Consequently, European intellectuals no longer had to look exclusively to
the Holy Land in the ‘Semitic’ Middle East for the cultural and spiritual
cradle of their civilisation.46 During the course of the nineteenth century,
the Sanskrit name ‘Aryan‘ (from Sanskrit ārya, meaning ‘noble’) was
generally employed as a linguistic designation for the Indo–European,
or Indo–Germanic, family of languages (also including the Slavic, Celtic,
Baltic, Greek, Albanian, Armenian, and Indo–Iranian languages) and,
by association, as a racial term for the speakers of these languages. Well

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 Racial Nationalism and Anti-Semitism, 1782–1918 

into the twentieth century, European scholars and popular writers would
regularly use the term Aryan to refer to the Caucasian (white) race, first
classified by the German physiologist and anatomist Johann Friedrich
Blumenbach (1752–1840).47
The use of ‘Aryan‘ as a synonym for the white race was mainly propa-
gated by the French historian, diplomat and race theorist Joseph-Arthur
Comte de Gobineau (1816–1882) who also searched for the origins of
the white Indo–Europeans (including Celts, Thracians, Latins, Hellenes,
Slavs, Hindus and Persians) ‘in the heights of Asia’, particularly in Iran.48
The name ‘Irany itself ’, noted Gobineau, ‘is nothing other than “Ayrian”
or “Aryan“, which was the name common to all the white races at their
origin’.49 By the end of the nineteenth century it became clear that as a
linguistic term, ‘Aryan‘ was, as the German philologist Friedrich Max
Müller (1823–1900) stated, ‘utterly inapplicable to race’.50 Nevertheless,
‘Aryan‘ continued to be employed in intellectual and political discourses
as a wider racial–cultural term to define the European peoples, and in
order to distinguish Europeans from non-European (especially Semitic)
races and peoples.51 In 1871 Müller himself wrote that ‘we are by nature
Aryan, Indo-European, not Semitic: our spiritual kith and kin are to
be found in India, Persia, Greece, Italy, Germany; not in Mesopotamia,
Egypt, or Palestine’.52
In contrast to Yugoslavist ideology, Ante Starčević dismissed the idea
that the Croats belonged exclusively to the Slavic (and Aryan) ethnolin-
guistic family of peoples, for ‘every nation was a mix of diverse nations,
of diverse blood’, and the Croats also undoubtedly had ‘Roman, or
Greek, or some Barbarian blood’.53 Starčević dismissed notions of Slavic
unity or reciprocity as ‘empty words, because for those dreams without
any content, there is no basis in history, no reason in the present, and
no perspective in the future’.54 He viewed Croatian nationhood resting
on essentially spiritual rather than biological grounds.55 Starčević argued
that, as a conquering people, the early medieval Croats had succeeded
in imposing their will and spirit upon all the inhabitants of the western
Balkans through the creation of their state, i.e. the Kingdom of Croatia.56
Accordingly, there were no longer any ‘pure-blooded Croats from the
seventh century’ living in the Croatia of his time.57
In 1861 Starčević founded the Croatian Party of Right (Hrvatska stranka
prava), which became the first political party to call for the establish-
ment of an independent Croatian nation-state, outside of the Habsburg
Monarchy. Starčević consistently argued that historic state right was the

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 Honorary Aryans

most important foundation of the Croatian people’s right to independent

statehood.58 A fervent admirer of the French Revolution, Starčević argued
that the Croatian ‘political nation’ or natio croatica now comprised the
lower classes (regardless of religion).59 In fact, after 1848, the Croatian
nobility was no longer the sole bearer of the Triune Kingdom’s sover-
eignty, but rather the entire citizenry ‘without regard to estate’ (though
the citizenry remained limited, until the end of the Habsburg Monarchy,
to the elite social classes).60
Although he adhered to a civic nationalist ideology, Starčević occa-
sionally employed racial arguments. He thus considered the Muslims of
Bosnia and Herzegovina to be of ‘the purest Croatian blood’,61 since they
were the descendants of the Bosnian Croat nobility that had converted
to Islam during Ottoman rule in order to preserve its titles and privi-
leges.62 He also introduced the term Slavoserb to Croatian political life.
Starčević generally used this term, derived from the Latin words sclavus
and servus (both meaning ‘slave’), to refer to Croats who ‘served’ foreign
states and ideologies, including Austria, Hungary and pan-Slavism.63 At
times, he also applied this term to the ancient nomadic inhabitants of
the Balkans, the Vlachs, whom he periodically defined as being identi-
cal with the Serbs.64 According to Starčević, the origins of these Balkan
nomads could be traced to a people of ‘impure breed’ in Thrace first
identified by Aristotle.65 In his essay, Pasmina Slavoserbska po Hervatskoj
(‘The Slavoserb Breed in Croatia’, 1876), Starčević described the arrival
of the nomadic Orthodox Vlachs into Croatian regions during the
Ottoman invasions and their predilection for pillaging and murder as
Ottoman auxiliaries.66
Starčević’s racial ideas were somewhat muddled and contradictory
because they stood in theoretical opposition to his ideology of civic
Croatian nationhood. The Croatian modernist poet and writer Antun
Gustav Matoš (1873–1914) was the first observer to remark on this
incongruity between Starčević’s civic nationalism, on the one hand,
and ethnolinguistic–racial nationalism, on the other. As Matoš noted,
in some of his important works Starčević emphasises the importance of
race in a similar manner to Gobineau, Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)
and Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927). In other words, he
considers ‘the racial, ethnic factor [to be] dominant in politics, branding
the Serbs as a foreign element by their race and blood’, but in his ‘main,
programmatic, foundational ideas’, Starčević regards the ‘state, legal and
historical idea as the national idea’.67 In short, Starčević was a sincere

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 Racial Nationalism and Anti-Semitism, 1782–1918 

advocate of civic nationalism, but he could not avoid using the dominant
racial terminology of the period:
nineteenth-century political language must be acknowledged as being
infected by racial idioms. By mid-nineteenth century, the category of race
ceased to be just an insignificant entry in the appendix of erudite naturalist
encyclopaedias. It became [ ... ] accepted as one of the distinctive tropes of
intellectual discourse.68

Starčević’s racial ideas marked an important shift in racial thought in

Croatia, because he had introduced the theory of the Vlach racial origin
of the Serbs. Before Starčević, pan-Slavist/Yugoslavist Croat nationalists
had employed the science of comparative linguistics in order to prove
the theory of racial kinship with other (South) Slavs. According to the
pan-Slavists/Yugoslavists, linguistics provided the means of defining
the racial identity of a people. However, by the second half of the nine-
teenth century it became increasingly evident that language was actually
an unreliable indicator of racial origins and identity. For example, the
nineteenth-century British colonial rulers of India found it ever more
difficult to believe that they shared a common racial descent with their
dark-skinned Hindu and Muslim subjects despite their shared Aryan
or Indo–European linguistic roots, a philological fact that had initially
produced the idea of ‘Aryan brotherhood’.69 By the end of the nineteenth
century, racial anthropologists, and philologists, were drawing atten-
tion to the fallacy, committed by both pan-Aryanists and pan-Slavists,
of equating language with ‘racial’ origins.70 The Croat Illyrianists and
Yugoslavists had defined the Croats as a Slavic–Aryan people in an
ethnolinguistic and racial sense, distinguishing them from their non-
Aryan neighbours to the north, the Hungarians (and their non-Slavic
German–Austrian and Italian neighbours to the northwest and west).
However, what remained uncertain was the question of the racial rela-
tionship between Croats and their linguistic kinfolk amongst the other
South Slavs.

National identity, religion, racial anthropology

and the ‘Jewish Question’

Until the last two decades of the nineteenth century the subject of Jews
and anti-Semitism played little part in Croatian national ideologies and

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 Honorary Aryans

politics. With the growing participation of Jews in Croatian economic,

political and cultural life, however, anti-Semitic ideas started to be propa-
gated by certain political circles from the 1880s. Although anti-Semitism
never acquired the prominence in Croatian politics that it did in other
parts of the Habsburg Monarchy, the intense anti-Semitic political and
ideological agitation that spread throughout Europe in the 1880s – from
the anti-Semitic pogroms in Tsarist Russia to the first international anti-
Semitic congress held in Dresden in 1882 – made significant inroads into
Croatian political life too.71
The emancipation of the Jews in Europe, combined with the increasing
influence of liberal political ideas and the growth of capitalism, formed
the historical context of the ideological and intellectual debates on the
‘Jewish question’ during the second half of the nineteenth century. As
Bernard Lewis remarks, ‘the advent of capitalism found the Jews well
placed to take advantage of the new opportunities which it offered them,
and in consequence exposed them to both revised and new accusa-
tions’.72 The successful adaptation of Jews to the demands and pressures
of modernity, as well as their increasing assimilation into European
societies – helped in large measure by their centuries old nurturance of
education, trade and finance73 – caused a great deal of concern and fear
amongst many Christian Europeans. The question of Jewish assimila-
tion and Jewish participation in political life was a question of upmost
importance for European political and cultural elites (particularly in
East-Central Europe) seeking to define the identities and boundaries of
the nation in the age of nationality. The position of Jews in these dis-
courses on nationhood depended on the type of nationalism in question;
in other words, whether it had a civic, ethnic/racial or clerical/religious
foundation.
It should be noted that although anti-Semitism came to be closely
linked with racial theory by the end of the nineteenth century, promi-
nent nationalist romantic thinkers in East-Central Europe, including
Germany, were not initially opposed to the assimilation of the Jews.74
In nineteenth-century Germany, Volkisch ideology sought to create a
strong nation upon the basis of a basically medieval vision ‘of social
cohesion, organic unity, cooperation, and hierarchical harmony
among all social classes’ and a ‘Germanic form of Christianity‘.75 The
distinguished German historian Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–1896)
was opposed to what he viewed as foreign Jewish cultural influence
on a fundamentally Christian German nation.76 While he refrained

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 Racial Nationalism and Anti-Semitism, 1782–1918 

from using racial arguments, Treitschke felt that German Jews could
become part of the nation or Volk only if they completely assimilated
into German culture.77 As George Mosse notes, Treitschke would later
become more sceptical of the possibility of Jewish assimilation, since
‘that assimilation could go only as far as religion, tradition, and tribal
nature would allow’.78
One should not overlook the fact that European Jews, particularly
in East-Central Europe, were also affected by the age of romantic
nationalism. The movement of Jewish nationalism, Zionism, adopted
the principle that ‘if the nation – an entity defined by descent, culture,
and aspiration – was the only natural and rightful basis of statehood,
then the Jews were also a nation, and must have their own state’.79 Jewish
cultural identity in East-Central Europe was especially well defined and
clearly distinct from the surrounding Christian societies. Apart from
Gypsies, the Jews ‘were the only sizeable minority living in Europe who,
before emancipation [ ... ] dressed differently, spoke a different language
from the rest of the population, and whose religious practices seemed
chaotic and mysterious’.80 Jewish nationalism in Eastern Europe was thus
constructed upon the basis of a distinct Jewish culture, which Zionists
wanted to preserve, and was significantly strengthened by the rise of
anti-Semitism in late nineteenth-century Europe.81 Furthermore, promi-
nent individual Jews, most notably the baptised Jew and British prime
minister, Benjamin Disraeli, adopted race theory and promoted the idea
of the Jews as a distinct racial group characterised by exceptional quali-
ties due to Jewish maintenance of racial purity.82
The emancipation and subsequent assimilation of European Jewry in
the nineteenth century was essentially the product of politically liberal
values, which sought to extend the rights of citizenship to all regardless
of religion, and could be traced to the Age of Enlightenment and the
American and French Revolutions.83 The emancipation of Jews was also
the product of ‘philo-Semitism‘, a tradition dating to the late seventeenth
century ‘which defended the Jews against their detractors, attributed
their faults to persecution, and pleaded for their admission to equal
rights and full citizenship’, and which, furthermore, was also ‘without
precedent in the history of Christendom’.84 While the Christian churches
theoretically accepted Jewish converts to Christianity, the Christian anti-
Semites of the nineteenth century were concerned about the possible
ramifications of Jewish assimilation in an increasingly liberal society.
In any case, they viewed Jews in general with a great deal of suspicion.

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 Honorary Aryans

This was, not surprisingly, the result of centuries of Christian religious

teaching which accused the Jews of the crime of deicide – the murder of
Christ, that is, God.85 The traditional theological Christian position on
Jews held that they ‘should be tolerated in a subservient, powerless role
because of their usefulness as testimony to the truth of Christianity’.86
In late nineteenth-century Croatia a part of the clergy of the Catholic
Church began to organise politically in response to what it viewed as the
increasing encroachment of liberalism on political life in the Habsburg
Monarchy. In common with other conservative Catholic circles in
Europe, these Croatian clergymen saw Jews, alongside Protestants, as the
chief bearers of political and cultural liberalism.87 Inspired by the politi-
cal rise of the Christian Social Party in Austria, led by the anti-Semitic
mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger (1844–1910), in the mid-1890s the Croat
‘Catholic Paper’ (Katolički list), a newspaper edited by the priest Stjepan
Korenić, regularly attacked the economic and political influence of
Jewish-owned capital (though it rejected racial anti-Semitism).88 A few
years later, in the early 1900s, Croatian lay Catholic activists began to
organise around the newspaper Hrvatstvo (‘Croatdom’), which promoted
the cause of political Catholicism combined with anti-Yugoslavist Croat
nationalism. This group based its Croat nationalism exclusively upon
the Catholic Church.89 The Croatian Christian-Social Party of Right was
subsequently founded in 1906. Interestingly, these political Catholics
found their main political ally in the man who was, for a decade or so,
the main target of anti-Semitic animus in Croatia – Josip Frank.
In 1895 the Party of Right had split into two factions, one led by
Frank, a lawyer and one-time editor of German language newspapers in
Croatia, the other by Fran Folnegović (1848–1903). With the support of
Starčević, Frank founded the Pure Party of Right (Čista stranka prava),
which sought to unite the Croatian provinces into ‘one independent state
body within the framework of the Habsburg Monarchy‘.90 Frank’s policy
of seeking to realise ‘Croatian state interests’ within the Monarchy’s
‘framework’ represented a significant departure from Starčević’s tradi-
tion of anti-Habsburg politics, though the elderly Starčević also gave his
consent to Frank’s pursuit of Realpolitik, in other words, accepting the
reality that Croatia was not in a position to achieve complete independ-
ence.91 Alongside its commitment to liberal political principles, such as
freedom of speech, freedom of the press and association and the holding
of free general elections,92 Frank’s party was also the main political advo-
cate of civic nationalism and philo-Semitism in Croatia.

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 Racial Nationalism and Anti-Semitism, 1782–1918 

The son of German-speaking Jews from Hungary, Josip Frank was

born in 1844 in the northeast Croatian–Slavonian town of Osijek, which
was home to a large German and Hungarian speaking population. In
1874 Frank was baptised into the Roman Catholic faith.93 Frank no doubt
realised that to advance his career prospects in Croatia, one needed, to
quote the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), ‘the entry
certificate of baptism’.94 An admirer of Frank, Antun Gustav Matoš once
described him as ‘one of those unbreakable Hebrews who gave prophets
to Judea and the best liberals and democratic revolutionaries to Europe.
I thought him our Gambetta and Disraeli, our first realistic politician
[ ... ]’.95 In a letter to a friend in 1901, Matoš once again expressed his
approval of Frank by referring to his Jewishness, since ‘the Jews today,
amice, are no longer slaves; today they are the European aristocracy, the
European tax-collectors, more sympathetic than sacerdotal nit-pickers’.96
Although they were prepared to politically cooperate with the Croat
Clericalists against the Croat Yugoslavist parties, the Frankists were
very critical of political Catholicism, which equated Croatian national
identity with Catholic religious affiliation. For that reason they attacked
the First Croatian Catholic Congress, held in Zagreb in 1900. On that
occasion, Frank’s associate, the nephew of Ante Starčević, Mile Starčević
(1862–1917), declared the following in the Sabor:
The Pure Party of Right is a liberal party which holds that all layers of the
population, which live in the Croatian regions [ ... ] whether they profess
Islam, the Eastern Orthodox, Catholic or Mosaic religion, are, consequently,
all Croats, and that all layers of the population have to be free and equal.97

The Frankists thus insisted on the need for the Orthodox Serbs of Croatia
to accept that they were citizens of Croatia (i.e. ‘political Croats’).98
The Pure Party of Right’s commitment to civic nationalism and philo-
Semitism drew substantial support from Croatia’s Jewish minority, many
of whom became members of Frank’s party, such as Egidije Kornitzer,
Nikola Winterhalter, Ljudevit Hagenauer, Salomon Mosković and
Aleksander Alexander.99
The Pure Party of Right‘s philo-Semitism was sharply criticised by the
Party of Right faction that followed Folnegović. One of the leading mem-
bers of this faction, Grga Tuškan (1845–1923), interrupted one of Frank’s
speeches in the Sabor in early December 1901 by declaring: ‘A Jew tells
me that I am a slanderer. He tells me that here; let him go to Palestine
to speak, and not here in the Croatian Sabor. This is the parliament of

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 Honorary Aryans

my homeland, which my grandfathers defended, not his’.100 Tuškan and

his party were proponents of ethnolinguistic nationalism and eventually
adopted the ideology of Yugoslavism. As someone who believed that
‘Serbdom’ was an ‘obstacle to the development of Croatian statehood
and nation within the Habsburg Monarchy‘,101 Frank and his party were
also attacked by Serbian politicians in Croatia, who regarded him as a
foreign Jew who had no business meddling in internal Croatian–Serbian
relations.102 In an article from 1902 the Serbian nationalist ideologist
Nikola Stojanović accused the Croats of being led by priests (‘Jesuits’)
and Jews, which was a sign of the ‘degeneration’ of Croatian politics.103
Frank also became the favourite anti-Semitic target of the Croatian
Peasant Party. The leader of the Peasant Party, Stjepan Radić, along with
its chief ideologist, his brother Antun, adhered to an ideology of racial
pan-Slavism. They regarded the Croat peasantry as the true narod (peo-
ple/nation) rather than the Germanised and Latinised Croat aristocracy
and urban middle class, known as the gospoda (gentlemen/nobility).104
In an article from 1902 entitled ‘The Croats’, Antun Radić argued that
the Croats belonged to the Slavic and South Slavic ‘tribes’ and ‘we Slavs
are all of one blood and somewhere our ancestors had herded sheep
under one sky’.105 Furthermore, the South Slavs were the ‘guardians’ of
Europe, having defended it from ‘Asiatic barbarians and conquerors’.106
The Radić brothers regarded the small minority of Croatian Jews as an
urban element foreign to Slavic–Croatian peasant culture. They associ-
ated Jews with the most negative social, political and cultural aspects of
urban modernity, above all with the foreign ideologies of capitalism and
socialism. According to Stjepan Radić, both capitalism and socialism
appealed to the Jews because they could not understand the ‘funda-
mentals of every civilization: property and state’.107 The Jews could not
comprehend these ‘fundamentals’ because they had no homeland to call
their own. Consequently, the Jews embraced either socialism or capital-
ism – the former because it propagated the ideas of collective property
ownership and internationalism, the latter because the Jews would
rather possess money than property.108 Although the aversion of the
Radić brothers toward Jews was mainly economic, social and religious,
rather than racial, in its nature, they were ill at ease with the thought
of Jewish assimilation, because as an urban, and not rural, people the
Jews were considered corrupt and decadent.109 This opposition toward
the assimilation of Jews was most evident in their hostility toward Josip
Frank. It mattered little to the Radić brothers that Frank had converted

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 Racial Nationalism and Anti-Semitism, 1782–1918 

to Catholicism, for ‘the Jew remains a Jew’.110 Antun Radić also expressed
his disapproval of the increasing Jewish adoption of ‘nice, old and hon-
ourable’ Croatian surnames.111
In 1906 Stjepan Radić wrote an article under the title ‘Jewry as a
Negative Element of Culture’.112 This article examined the book enti-
tled, Geschlecht und Charakter (‘Sex and Character’, 1903), written by
the baptised Austrian Jew Otto Weininger (1880–1903). Radić argued
that in terms of its ‘richness and depth of thought and logic of facts’,
Weininger’s book could only be compared with Die Grundlagen des
neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (‘Foundations of the Nineteenth Century’,
1899) by the Germanophile English racial philosopher Houston Stewart
Chamberlain.113 Radić’s article included translated passages of Weininger’s
book, beginning with an anthropological description of the Jews, who
‘appear to be related, to some degree, to Blacks and Mongols’.114 Weininger
was, however, more interested in the ‘psychological side of Jewry’, which
was characterised by an immoral, soulless and earth bound materialism
devoid of any transcendental values.115
Although he considered Jews a racially foreign element, Radić also felt
uncomfortable with racial anti-Semitism. In the conclusion to his article
on Weininger’s book, Radić stated the following:

As true Christians, we cannot in any way be anti-Semites according to the

German model; but as a people, to whom even Western Europe recognises
the greatest strength and depth of morality, we cannot and must not allow
any member of Jewry, whether Semitic or Aryan, to be our national repre-
sentative and leader. Instead of anti-Semitism, we should therefore strictly
carry out a-Semitism: instead of an unworthy struggle against the Jews, [we
must carry out] unremitting work without the Jews.116

Mark Biondich states that Stjepan and Antun Radić were opposed to
the assimilation of the predominantly urban Jews because it ‘would
have meant bolstering capitalism and liberal ideology, both of which
undermined the vital interests of the Croat peasantry’.117 Furthermore,
the Peasant Party’s ‘a-Semitism’ was also closely tied to anti-Hungarian
sentiments. During their long struggle against assimilationist and
expansionist Magyar nationalism, the Croats tended to see the Jews in
Croatia as natural partners of the Hungarians. To be sure, the Hungarian
Jews were very well assimilated into Hungarian bourgeois society (as
‘Magyars of the Mosaic faith’) and had played a highly significant role
in the economic modernisation of Hungary in the second half of the

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nineteenth century.118 A great number of Hungarian Jews became ardent

Magyar nationalists and were therefore viewed by the non-Hungarian
nationalities, particularly Croats, Slovaks and Romanians, as agents of
the nationalistic policies of the Hungarian government.119 The Radić
brothers associated the Jews with the nationalism of the Hungarian rul-
ing class, which they considered to be ‘Magyaro–Jewish rule’, which was
‘in many ways Asiatic, that is, barbaric, despotic’.120
Antun and Stjepan Radić had sought to highlight the ethnolinguis-
tic/racial differences between Slavs and non-Slavs (including Jews).
For anti-Yugoslavist nationalists, however, the main dividing line
was between Croats and Serbs. A year after the publication of Stjepan
Radić‘s essay on Jewry, a booklet entitled ‘Croatian Bosnia: We and
“They over There” ’ was published in Sarajevo. This booklet was penned
(anonymously) by an anti-Yugoslavist intellectual, the eminent Croatian
archaeologist Ćiro Truhelka (1865–1942), one of the first curators of the
Land Museum in Sarajevo (founded in 1885). In this booklet Truhelka
argued, in Starčevićist fashion, that Bosnia and Herzegovina belonged
to Croatia according to historic state right. In contrast to Starčević,
however, Truhelka employed modern anthropological arguments in
order to buttress Croatia’s ‘historic’ right to Bosnia and Herzegovina.
He did so by anthropologically distinguishing between the Bosnian
Catholics and Muslims, on the one hand, and the Orthodox Bosnian
Serbs, on the other; the former belonged predominantly to the same fair
Slavic–Croatian ‘ethnic element’ in an ‘anthropological sense’, while the
latter were largely the dark-skinned descendants of the Balkan Romanic
Vlachs.121 According to Truhelka the authentic racial features of the
Catholic and Muslim Croats were fair hair, blue eyes, brachycephalic
heads and broad chests.122
Although he did not specifically name this racial type, it is clear that
Truhelka was referring to the Dinaric race, which was characterised by tall
stature, dark hair and a brachycephalic skull, and first classified as such
by the French anthropologist Joseph Deniker (1852–1918). Furthermore,
by documenting individuals with broad (Dinaric) skulls, but with fair
hair and light eyes, Truhelka was specifically referring to a racial type
Deniker had identified as the ‘Sub-Adriatic’ (a ‘secondary race’ related to
the Dinaric race).123 German racial anthropologists would later tend to
define the Sub-Adriatic race as mixture of the Dinaric and Nordic races.
According to Deniker there were six ‘primary’ European races: Northern
(tall, fair, dolichocephalic); Eastern (short, fair, sub-brachycephalic);

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Ibero-insular (short, dark, dolichocephalic); Cevenole or Western

(short, dark, brachycephalic); Littoral (tall, dark, sub-dolichocephalic);
and Adriatic or Dinaric (tall, dark, brachycephalic).124 The Northern race
would come to be known as the ‘Nordic’. Deniker rejected the notion of
an ‘Aryan race’, preferring to speak of a ‘family of Aryan languages’ and
Aryan ethnolinguistic groups in Europe (Latin, Teutonic and Slav).125
Truhelka defined the Vlachs as the descendants of the Romanised
Dacians from the north-east Balkans, who were physically ‘dark-skinned,
with dark hair and black eyes’, descended from ‘a mixture of the primeval
aborigines and Cymric-Celtic settlers’.126 In the early Middle Ages, the
ancestors of the Vlachs had started to migrate in large numbers from
Dacia to other Balkan lands, but were strongly concentrated in Serbia.127
As cunning merchants and speculators, the Vlachs had succeeded in
securing economic and political power over the pure Slavic peasant
Serbs in both Serbia and Bosnia.128 Truhelka was cautious to differentiate
between the dark-skinned Serbs of Vlach descent and the fair-haired
Serbs who were apparently of authentic Slav origin. Accordingly, all the
bad traits of the contemporary Serbs and their culture (including their
‘Byzantine’ corruption and expansionist megalomania) were actually
not the product of the Slavic Serbs, but the expression of the dark Vlach
blood.129 At the same time, the Serbs had been so polluted by Vlach blood
that Truhelka dismissed the idea of South Slavic racial homogeneity.130
Truhelka further likened the Vlachs to Jews. As he argued, all
human beings had some sort of inherited ‘anthropological instinct’, so
that a lay person would be able to tell apart a Jew – whether ‘Russian
or Pole, German or French, English or Spanish by birth’ – in a ‘crowd
of one hundred people’. It would similarly be possible to recognise a
Vlach, regardless of whether he was from Romania, Serbia or Bosnia
and Herzegovina, or for that matter ‘dressed in the clothes of a Persian
shah’.131 Truhelka defined the Vlachs as belonging to a Dauerrasse, that
is, a ‘permanent race’, similar to the Jews and Armenians; such a racial
type was formed through an evolutionary process which had led to
stagnation and the acquirement of permanent features.132 A Dauerrasse
was therefore ‘sterile, stereotypical, persistent, anthropologically rigid’, in
other words, a race that ‘no longer changes its external physical charac-
teristics’. Accordingly, the Vlachs, Jews and Armenians represented ‘old
races’ that always remain the same and anthropologically distinct from
the peoples amongst whom they settle. These old races were marked by
a tendency toward ‘tuberculosis and sterility, and then feebleness of the

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 Honorary Aryans

physical and psychic constitution’, as well as having a tendency toward a

nomadic way of life. Truhelka remarked that the ‘descendants of these
once cultured races become cultural parasites’.133 He concluded that the
‘Vlacho-Serbs‘ of Bosnia and Herzegovina did not represent a political,
but on the contrary, a ‘social problem’.134
Truhelka’s anthropological theory on Croat–Serb differences was
echoed in a work from 1918 entitled ‘The South Slav Question’, written
by the Croatian sociologist and historian Ivo Pilar (1874–1933). In his
book, which was to have a great influence on young Croatian national-
ists in the interwar period,135 Pilar argued that the Croats had retained
the Nordic–Aryan racial blood of their Slavic ancestors to a far higher
degree than the Serbs, who were marked by a strong Vlach racial admix-
ture. According to Pilar, the medieval ‘old Croats’ had been a ‘Slavic-
Aryan people of pure Aryan type: fair-haired, blue-eyed, tall height and
[with] dolichocephalic heads’.136 In support of this theory, Pilar cited
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who had argued that the old Slavs were,
alongside the Germanic and Celtic peoples, part of the ‘Germanic race’, a
more suitable term than ‘Indo-European‘, which was ‘a mere theoretical
and hypothetical term’.137 Pilar thus noted that ‘in Chamberlain’s sense,
I understand Germanics to include all Aryans, Teutons, the old Slavs
and Celts’.138 Although originally Slavic, the typical Serb had, through
admixture with the ‘pre-Aryan‘ Vlachs, inherited the predominant phys-
ical features of black hair, dark eyes and dark skin.139 Pilar recognised
Starčević as the first person who had broached the ‘Vlach question or
the question of the Balkan Romans’.140 However, during Starčević’s time,
the Vlach question was not yet the ‘subject of scientific inquiry’, so that it
was belittled as ‘politically tendentious’. Pilar added that Truhelka’s text
from 1907 was the first work to actually deal with the Vlach question
from a scientific perspective.141
It is important to note that, for Truhelka, the Serb–Vlachs, and not the
Jews, represented the main ethnic–racial ‘problem’ of Bosnia. Identifying
Vlachs with Jews (and Armenians) was meant to establish the racial ‘oth-
erness’ and essentially non-European origin of the Serbs; after all, by the
end of the nineteenth century, the Jew came to represent the non-Aryan
par excellence of the European continent. Accordingly, Truhelka was
able to intellectually construct the idea of a profound racial distinction
between Croats and Serbs by arguing that the latter, as descendants of
the Vlachs, were part of the same degenerate non-European race as the
Jews. By providing the Croats with an impeccable Aryan racial identity,

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 Racial Nationalism and Anti-Semitism, 1782–1918 

Truhelka and Pilar (who only mentioned the Jews in passing)142 had
helped to transform anti-Yugoslavist Croat nationalism from an ideol-
ogy based on a civic understanding of the nation to one constructed on
an ethnolinguistic and racial foundation. Racial theory provided Croat
anti-Yugoslavism with an important ideological and intellectual tool
with which to disprove the idea of South Slav ethnic–racial homogene-
ity. Racial ideology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century
had given ‘new dimensions to the idea of rootedness inherent in all of
nationalism, while at the same time sharpening the differences between
nations, providing clear and unambiguous distinctions between them’.143

Notes
 Ljiljana Dobrovšak, ‘Emancipacija Židova u Kraljevini Hrvatskoj, Slavoniji i
Dalmaciji u 19. stoljeću’, Radovi – Zavod za hrvatsku povijest, 37, No. 1 (2005):
126–127. Jews in Split were subject to Venetian laws, while Jews in Dubrovnik
were under the authority of the Ragusan Republic.
 Dobrovšak, ‘Emancipacija Židova’, 128–129.
 ibid, 129.
 Branka Magaš, Croatia Through History: The Making of a European State
(London: Saqi, 2007), 194.
 Peter F. Sugar, ‘External and Domestic Roots of Eastern European
Nationalism’ in Nationalism in Eastern Europe, eds Peter F. Sugar and Ivo
Lederer (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969), 24.
 ‘Turkish Croatia’ (north-west Bosnia) and ‘Turkish Dalmatia’ (western
Herzegovina) extended to the rivers Vrbas and the Neretva. Nikša Stančić,
Hrvatska nacija i nacionalizam u 19. i 20. stoljeću (Zagreb: Barbat, 2002), 95–96.
 Elinor Murray Despalatovic, Ljudevit Gaj and the Illyrian Movement (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 6.
 ibid, 19.
 Nikša Stančić, ‘Između političkog nacionalizma i etnonacionalizma: od
hrvatske staleške “nacije” (natio croatica) do hrvatskoga “političkog naroda,”‘
in Nacija i nacionalizam u hrvatskoj povijesnoj tradiciji, eds. Tihomir Cipek and
Josip Vrandečić (Zagreb: Alinea, 2007), 42.
 Dobrovšak, ‘Emancipacija Židova’, 131.
 ibid, 132–133.
 ibid, 134.
 ibid, 134–135.
 Ljiljana Dobrovšak, ‘Židovi u hrvatskim zemljama 1848/1849’, Radovi – Zavod
za hrvatsku povijest, 30, No. 1 (1997): 86.

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 Honorary Aryans

 Dobrovšak, ‘Emancipacija Židova’, 138.

 ibid, 139.
 ibid, 140–142.
 ibid, 140–141.
 ibid, 141–142.
 Ivo and Slavko Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu (Zagreb: Novi liber, 2001), 25.
 ibid, 25; and Emil Kerenji, ‘Jewish Citizens of Socialist Yugoslavia: Politics of
Jewish Identity in a Socialist State, 1944–1974’, PhD Dissertation, University
of Michigan, 2008, 44.
 Emil Kerenji, ‘Jewish Citizens of Socialist Yugoslavia: Politics of Jewish
Identity in a Socialist State, 1944–1974’, PhD Dissertation, University of
Michigan, 2008, 44.
 See Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu, 29 and Ivo Goldstein, ‘The Jews in
Yugoslavia 1918–1941: Antisemitism and the Struggle for Equality’, Jewish
Studies at the CEU: II. Yearbook (1999–2001): 1.
 Kerenji, ‘Jewish Citizens of Socialist Yugoslavia’, 57–65.
 Goldstein, ‘Jews in Yugoslavia’, 3.
 Despalatovic, Ljudevit Gaj, 2.
 ibid, 142.
 ibid, 90–91, 110.
 Stančić, ‘Između političkog nacionalizma i etnonacionalizma’, 34–35.
 Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany
(Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992), 3–10.
 Stančić, ‘Između političkog nacionalizma i etnonacionalizma’, 38.
 ibid, 39.
 Arijana Kolak, ‘Između Europe i Azije: Hrvati i Mađari u propagandnom
ratu 1848/49’, Povijesni prilozi, 34, No. 34 (2008): 184.
 ibid, 185.
 ibid, 179.
 ibid, 185–186.
 Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca
and London: Cornell University Press, 1984), 78.
 ibid, 83–84.
 ibid, 80.
 Charles Jelavich, South Slav Nationalisms: Textbooks and Yugoslav Union Before
1914 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990), 46.
 Banac, National Question in Yugoslavia, 89–91.
 Mark Biondich, Stjepan Radić, the Croat Peasant Party, and the Politics of Mass
Mobilization, 1904–1928 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 99–102,
115.
 Cited in Tihomir Cipek and Stjepan Matković, eds Programatski dokumenti
hrvatskih političkih stranaka i skupina 1842–1914 (Zagreb: Disput, 2006), 143.

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 Racial Nationalism and Anti-Semitism, 1782–1918 

 Christopher M. Hutton, Race and the Third Reich: Linguistics, Racial

Anthropology and Genetics in the Dialectic of Volk (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2005), 87–89.
 See Hutton, Race and the Third Reich, 83–84 and Helmuth von Glasenapp,
Brahma und Buddha: Die Religionen Indiens in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwickelung
(Berlin: Deutsche Buch-Gemeinschaft, 1926), 35.
 Glasenapp, Brahma und Buddha, 5–14.
 Hutton, Race and the Third Reich, 5.
 Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, The World of the Persians, ed. John Gifford (1869;
reprint Genève: Editions Minerva S. A., 1971), 6.
 ibid.
 Hutton, Race and the Third Reich, 89.
 ibid, 84–89.
 ibid, 88.
 Ante Starčević, ‘Bi-li k Slavstvu ili ka Hrvatstvu?: dva razgovora’, in Djela
dra. Ante Starčevića, ed. Josip Bratulić (1867: reprint Varaždin: Inačica, 1995),
39–40.
 ibid, 6.
 Mirjana Gross, Izvorno pravaštvo: ideologija, agitacija, pokret (Zagreb: Golden
Marketing, 2000), 347–348.
 ibid, 348.
 Starčević, ‘Bi-li k Slavstvu ili ka Hrvatstvu’, 40.
 Jasna Turkalj, ‘Prilog istraživanju pravaškog pokreta 1880-ih’, in Pravaška
misao i politika: zbornik radova, eds Jasna Turkalj, Zlatko Matijević and
Stjepan Matković (Zagreb: Hrvatski institut za povijest, 2007), 30–31.
 Banac, National Question in Yugoslavia, 86–88.
 Stančić, ‘Između političkog nacionalizma i etnonacionalizma’, 48.
 Starčević, ‘Bi-li k Slavstvu ili ka Hrvatstvu’, 40.
 Mario Spalatin, ‘The Croatian Nationalism of Ante Starčević, 1845–1871’,
Croatian Studies Journal 16 (1975): 55.
 Gross, Izvorno pravaštvo, 249–250.
 ibid, 341.
 ibid, 249, 341.
 Ante Starčević, ‘Pasmina Slavoserbska po Hervatskoj’, in Djela dra. Ante
Starčevića, ed. Josip Bratulić (1876: reprint, Varaždin: Inačica, 1995), 157–158.
 Antun Gustav Matoš, Feljtoni i eseji (Zagreb: Naklada ‘Juga’, 1917), 72.
 Marius Turda, ‘ “The Magyars: A Ruling Race”: The Idea of National
Superiority in Fin-de-Siècle Hungary’, European Review of History, 10, no. 1
(2003): 8.
 Hutton, Race and the Third Reich, 84–86.
 ibid, 84–85.

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 Honorary Aryans

 Mato Artuković, ‘Ante Starčević i Židovi (prema pisanju lista Sloboda)’,

Časopis za suvremenu povijest, 42, No. 2 (2010): 484–486.
 Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice
(London: Phoenix Giant, 1997), 109.
 ibid, 109–110.
 Kevin B. Macdonald, Separation and its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary
Theory of Anti-Semitism (Bloomington, IN: 1stbooks Library, 2004), 169. Also
see Hutton, Race and the Third Reich, 87–88, and Lewis, Semites and Anti-
Semites, 90–91.
 Macdonald, Separation and its Discontents, 168–169.
 ibid, 168.
 George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third
Reich (New York: The Universal Library, Grosset & Dunlap, 1971), 200–201.
 ibid, 201.
 Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites, 68.
 George L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism
(New York: Howard Fertig, 1999), 63.
 Macdonald, Separation and its Discontents, 181–182.
 ibid, 180–181.
 Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites, 85–86.
 ibid, 86.
 See ibid, 100, and Macdonald, Separation and Its Discontents, 128.
 Macdonald, Separation and Its Discontents, 133.
 Mario Strecha, ‘ “Sve za vjeru i domovinu”: Idejna strujanja u katolicizmu u
banskoj Hrvatskoj potkraj XIX stoljeća’, Croatica Christiana Periodica, 20, No.
38 (1996): 104.
 ibid, 3–4.
 Mario Strecha, ‘Od katoličkog hrvatstva do katoličkog pravaštva’, Radovi –
zavod za hrvatsku povijest, 34–36, No. 1 (2004): 101–133.
 Gross, Izvorno pravaštvo, 781.
 For more on this topic see Nevenko Bartulin, ‘From Independence to
Trialism: The Croatian Party of Right and the Project for a Liberal “Greater
Croatia” within the Habsburg Empire, 1861–1914’, in Liberal Imperialism in
Europe, ed. Matthew P. Fitzpatrick (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012),
115–140.
 Gross, Izvorno pravaštvo, 781.
 Stjepan Matković, Čista stranka prava 1895–1903 (Zagreb: Hrvatski institut za
povijest, 2001), 23.
 Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites, 95.
 Cited in Banac, National Question in Yugoslavia, 261.

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 Racial Nationalism and Anti-Semitism, 1782–1918 

 Cited in Tomislav Jonjić, ‘Pogledi Antuna Gustava Matoša na hrvatsko-

srpske odnose’, Pilar – Časopis za društvene i humanističke studije, VII, No. 13
(2012): 31, 104fn.
 Cited in Matković, Čista stranka prava, 120.
 ibid, 148–149.
 ibid, 213, 318.
 Cited in ibid, 75, 13fn.
 ibid, 149.
 Mato Artuković, ‘Pitanje šteta i odštete u antisrpskim demonstracijama
1902. godine’, Časopis za suvremenu povijest, 42, No. 1 (2010): 183.
 ibid, 185.
 Elinor Murray Despalatovic, ‘The Peasant Nationalism of Ante Radić’,
Canadian Review of Studies of Nationalism, 5, No. 1 (1978): 90.
 Antun Radić, Sabrana djela VIII (Zagreb: Dom, 1937), 7–8.
 ibid, 7.
 Biondich, Stjepan Radić, 53.
 ibid, 53, 76.
 ibid, 77.
 ibid.
 ibid.
 ‘Židovstvo kao negativni elemenat kulture’ (1906), in Stjepan Radić, O
Židovima (Kamnik: Slatnar, 1938).
 ibid, 6.
 ibid.
 ibid, 6–15.
 ibid, 16.
 Biondich, Stjepan Radić, 77.
 Paul Lendvai, The Hungarians: 1000 Years of Victory in Defeat (London: Hurst
& Company, 2003), 329–347.
 Robert S. Wistrich, ‘The Jews and Nationality Conflicts in the Habsburg
Lands’, Nationalities Papers, 22, No. 1 (1994): 130–132.
 Biondich, Stjepan Radić, 110.
 [Ćiro Truhelka], Hrvatska Bosna (Mi i ‘oni tamo’.) (Sarajevo: Tiskara Vogler i
drugovi, 1907), 13–15.
 ibid.
 Joseph Deniker, The Races of Man: An Outline of Anthropology and
Ethnography, Havelock Ellis ed. (London: Walter Scott, Limited, 1900),
333–334.
 ibid, 325–326.
 ibid, 318–319, 329, 334.
 [Truhelka], Hrvatska Bosna, 18.
 ibid, 18–20.

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 Honorary Aryans

 ibid, 20–22.

 ibid, 25.
 ibid, 30.
 ibid, 12.
 ibid, 27–28.
 ibid, 28.
 ibid, 50.
 Nevenko Bartulin, ‘The Ideal Nordic-Dinaric Racial Type: Racial
Anthropology in the Independent State of Croatia’, Review of Croatian
History, 5, No. 1 (2009): 195–196.
 See L. von Südland (Ivo Pilar), Južnoslavensko pitanje: prikaz cjelokupnog
pitanja, trans. Fedor Pucek (1943, reprint: Varaždin: Hrvatska demokratska
stranka, 1990), 19–20. Pilar’s book was first published in German as L. von
Südland, Die südslawische Frage und der Weltkrieg. Übersichtliche Darstellung
des Gesamt-Problems, Manz Verlag, Vienna, 1918.
 Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, trans.
John Lees, Vol. 1 (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1910), 498.
 Pilar, Južnoslavensko pitanje, 419, 18fn.
 ibid, 108, 121–122, 170, 316.
 ibid, 183.
 ibid.
 ibid, 297.
 Mosse, The Fascist Revolution, 55.

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 2
Yugoslavism, Jews and
Ustasha Ideology, 1918–1941

Abstract: This chapter examines the three dominant

national ideologies in the interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia:
Yugoslavism, anti-Yugoslavist Croat nationalism and Greater
Serbian nationalism. The chapter explores the development of
racial theories in Croatia/Yugoslavia and its importance to all
three ideologies, and how the Jews fitted into these theories.
A larger section is devoted to the Ustasha movement, which
derived its political origins from the philo-Semitic Croatian
Party of Right, but adopted racial anti-Semitism in the 1930s.
An overview of Jewish life in Yugoslavia is also provided in this
chapter.

Bartulin, Nevenko. Honorary Aryans: National–Racial

Identity and Protected Jews in the Independent State of
Croatia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126.

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 Honorary Aryans

The South Slavic nation state

In 1918 a British advocate of Yugoslav nationalism, Fanny Copeland

(1872–1970), stated that ‘from the ordeal of war, pestilence, famine and
persecution, the Yugo-Slavs have emerged as one people, as homogene-
ous as they were when they first descended from the Carpathians’.1 The
Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was founded in November 1918
(renamed Yugoslavia in 1929) upon the basis of the theory of South Slavic
ethnolinguistic–racial homogeneity. The Croat political elite, largely
made up of Yugoslavist nationalists, had agreed to the unification of the
Austro–Hungarian South Slav provinces with the Kingdoms of Serbia
and Montenegro because the ‘modern principle of nationality’, according
to which the Croats were an integral part of the South Slav ethnolinguis-
tic family, logically demanded the establishment of a nation-state for the
‘Yugo-Slavs’.2
Life in the new Yugoslav state, however, only highlighted more clearly
the stark differences between Serbian and Croatian political customs and
cultural traditions.3 Serbia, which had existed as an independent state
for more than a century and which was motivated by an expansionist
ideology that aimed to unite all Serbs into one state, undertook a policy
of centralisation.4 In contrast, the Croats were historically accustomed
to a political system that preserved Croatia’s traditional autonomy, and
wanted equality with Serbia in the new state.5 Belgrade had no real
intention of meeting Croatian national aspirations, so that no separate
Croat administrative unit existed until 1939. Between 1918 and 1939,
Croatia was wiped off the political map of Europe, administratively
divided (from 1929) between the Banovine (‘banates’ or districts) of
Savska (northern Croatia), Primorska (most of the coastline) and Zetska
(southern Dalmatia with Montenegro).6 The South Slav state bore an
undeniably Serbian political, military and cultural stamp, headed as it
was by the Serbian royal dynasty of Karadjordjević, while the new army
was based entirely on the former Serbian army (in everything from
uniforms to medals and to its predominantly Serbian officer corps).7 The
official ideology of the ‘trinomial Yugoslav nation’, according to which
Serbs, Croats and Slovenes were considered three equal ‘tribes’ of one
‘people’, in reality meant the domination of Serbian political customs
and culture in the administration and cultural life of Yugoslavia.8
Serbian nationalists, who led the two dominant Yugoslav political
parties, the Democrats and Radicals, believed that they could eventually

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 Yugoslavism, Jews and Ustasha Ideology, 1918–1941 

assimilate the Croats to Serbian nationhood through the propagation

of Yugoslavist ideology, because the Serbs were numerically and politi-
cally much stronger than the Croats; accordingly, Yugoslavism would
eventually lead to the eradication of a separate Croatian, but not Serbian,
national identity.9 There was some tension between the ideologies of
Greater Serbianism and Yugoslavism (or ‘unitarism’). Contemporary
British supporters of Yugoslav unification, such as Henry Wickham-
Steed (1871–1956) and R. W. Seton-Watson (1879–1951), considered a
single state for the South Slavs the result of a completely natural process,
but opposed Serbian hegemony in the new state because they, like the
Croat Yugoslavists, viewed it as an hindrance to the ‘internal harmony
of a homogeneous race’.10 At the same time, these differences were
minimised by that fact that both Yugoslav unitarists and Greater Serbian
nationalists favoured a strongly centralised state, which in effect ensured
Serbian political dominance.11

The Jews in Yugoslavia

The first Yugoslav census from 1921 recorded 64,159 Jews in Yugoslavia,
comprising both the Ashkenazi and Sephardic groups.12 Jews, along
with ethnic Germans and Hungarians found living within the borders
of the new Yugoslav state, were denied the right to vote in the first elec-
tions for the Constituent Assembly; though citizens, members of these
minorities were denied the vote on the basis of the fact that they pos-
sessed the right to opt for the citizenship of foreign countries.13 Attempts
were also made by the authorities in Belgrade to deport Ashkenazi Jews
as Austro–Hungarian foreigners in the years 1919–1920.14 However, the
position of Jews in Yugoslavia gradually improved soon after this initial
period. Furthermore, during the 1920s Zionists first gained control over
the Zagreb and other Ashkenazi Jewish communities, and then the
Sephardic communities in other parts of Yugoslavia.15 A law regulating the
religious community of Yugoslav Jews was passed in December 1929. This
law, which granted the Jews autonomy in their own affairs and complete
legal equality, was viewed favourably by the Jews, while King Aleksandar
Karadjordjević sought to show himself ‘a friend of the Jews’.16
The Jews of Yugoslavia collectively sought to preserve their good
relations with the royal authorities in Belgrade. As a symbol of
Jewish–Yugoslav friendship, trees in honour of the late King Petar I

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 Honorary Aryans

Karadjordjević were planted in Palestine in 1928 by Zionists. The same

was done for King Aleksandar after he was assassinated by the Ustashe
in Marseille in 1934.17 Croatian Jewish businessmen and financiers,
such as the Alexander family, who controlled much of the commerce
and trade of northern Croatia, also enjoyed a good relationship with
King Aleksandar.18 This situation began to change, however, during the
course of the 1930s, when Yugoslavia established close economic ties
with National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy.19 Although there
was ‘no party either in Croatia or in Yugoslavia that had an explicitly
antisemitic programme’, anti-Semitic themes started to appear more
regularly in some newspapers (both in Croatia and Serbia), leading to
complaints from the Union of Jewish Religious Communities.20 Finally,
as Yugoslavia drew ever closer to Germany, in September and October
1940 the Yugoslav government decided to pass two law decrees that
restricted the rights of Jews. The first decree banned the operation of all
Jewish-owned businesses dealing with food provisions, while the second
decree introduced restrictions (numerus clausus) on the number of stu-
dents ‘of Jewish descent’ in secondary schools, teacher training colleges
and universities.21 This decree did not actually define ‘Jewish descent’ and
also allowed for exceptions in the case of ‘persons of Jewish descent’, who
‘had parents who were meritorious for the homeland’.22

Racial Yugoslavism and racial anti-Yugoslavism

The Yugoslavist project was based on a reductionist definition of nation-
hood that used the criterion of language as the main marker of ethnic–
racial identity, in other words, language equals ethnicity/nation/race and
this equals one nation state.23 During the interwar period Yugoslavist
intellectuals also sought to reinforce the idea of Yugoslav national homo-
geneity by promoting the notion of a common Dinaric racial identity that
included all Yugoslavs (or at least their vital ‘Serbo–Croat’ core element).24
The main intellectual proponent of this theory was the geographer Jovan
Cvijić (1865–1927), one of Serbia’s leading scholars since the early twenti-
eth century. Although one could describe him as a Yugoslav nationalist,
Cvijić also regarded the ‘Serbian type’ of the Dinaric race to be the core
or leading component of the South Slavs. According to Cvijić, the area
of the Dinaric Alps was ‘populated by the same race’.25 Due to large-scale
historical migrations, the ‘Dinaric type of man’ was found far outside the

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 Yugoslavism, Jews and Ustasha Ideology, 1918–1941 

Dinaric mountain zone, throughout the rest of Yugoslavia. The Dinaric

man belonged, Cvijić argued, to a ‘patriarchal stage of culture’ and was
‘original and exceedingly patriotic and is untouched by contact with
foreign peoples or civilisations’.26 Cvijić claimed that two-thirds of the
population of the Dinaric area were Serbs, and ‘the best example of the
really pure patriarchal Dinaric type is certainly the Serbian variety’.27 The
main psychological characteristics of the Dinaric Serb were sensitivity,
lively temperament, idealism, honour, heroism, a strong link with nature
and one’s ancestors and the desire to fight for justice and freedom.28
Yugoslavist intellectuals also stressed the importance of the Nordic
race in the racial composition of the Yugoslavs. The Slovenian born
Croatian biologist Boris Zarnik (1883–1945), a professor of biology at
the Faculty of Medicine in Zagreb, argued that a Nordic–Dinaric racial
admixture represented the core of the South Slavs. In an article entitled
‘The Racial Composition of the European Population’, published in
the Croatian cultural journal Hrvatsko kolo (‘Croatian Circle’) in 1927,
Zarnik argued that ‘apart from Sweden, no other state in Europe has
a population with such a relatively equal racial composition as our
land, which [ ... ] shows everywhere the same Dinaric-Nordic core’.29
Like the Germanic peoples, the old Slavs, as well as the ancient Greeks
and Persians, had belonged to the Nordic race, and there was no doubt,
Zarnik stated, that the Aryan languages were ‘a creation of the Nordic
race’.30 This particular argument had been popularised in the interwar
period by the German race theorist and anthropologist Hans F. K.
Günther (1891–1968), according to whom the Nordic race was the origi-
nal bearer of all the Indo–European languages and cultures, including
the Greek, Roman, Indian and Iranian.31
Although Günther was a staunch racial Nordicist, he also had a very
favourable view of the Dinaric race, which was predominantly represented
in the regions of the South Slavs, but also found amongst the southern
Germans of Bavaria and Austria.32 Similarly to the Nordic psychological
traits he described, Dinaric mental characteristics, according to Günther,
included bravery in war, a warm feeling for nature, a strong love of home
and a gift for music.33 The German anthropologist and anatomist Eugen
Fischer (1874–1967), for his part, regarded the Dinaric and Alpine races
as representing, to an extent, the equals of the Nordic race, which was
the leading race in German and European history.34 Like Fischer, who
served as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology in
Berlin, Zarnik argued that there were four basic European races: Nordic,

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 Honorary Aryans

Dinaric, Alpine (equivalent to Deniker’s Cevenole or Western race) and

Mediterranean (Deniker’s Ibero-insular race).35
The discipline of racial anthropology provided Yugoslavist intellectu-
als with an ostensibly effective intellectual instrument with which to
confirm the distinction and relative purity of South Slav racial origins
and identity. Zarnik’s remark that only Sweden could offer a comparable
example of relative racial homogeneity reflected a common idea among
racial anthropologists, namely, that Scandinavia was one of the few areas
in Europe in which there was a strong congruence between race, geog-
raphy and language (i.e. the Nordic type, Scandinavia and the Germanic
languages).36 In the case of the Dinaric race, its purest representatives
were said to be found in the South Slav (or ‘Serbo–Croat’) linguistic area
of the Dinaric Alps.
Similarly to other racial anthropologists, Zarnik had also taken into
account the question of racial mixing. Racial anthropology had long
established that all the European peoples were actually composed of
mixtures of several main races.37 Racial anthropologists argued that,
generally speaking, there was little equivalence between racial type and
language, while nationalism could not mask the fact that all peoples
were racially mixed. Accordingly, a sharp distinction had to be drawn
between the nation and/or people, defined as an ethnic and cultural
group, on the one hand, and the anthropological–biological group-
ing of race, on the other.38 During the interwar period, the theoretical
distinction between people (Volk) and race (Rasse) was accepted as
‘academic orthodoxy’ by leading race theorists and anthropologists in
Europe, above all in Germany.39 According to Günther, six races made
up – in varying proportions – the composition of the European peoples,
including the Germans: Nordic (tall, slender, blond and long-headed),
Mediterranean (short, slender, dark and long-headed), Dinaric (tall,
thin, dark and round-headed with a long face), Alpine or Eastern (short,
heavy-set, dark and round-headed), East Baltic (short, heavy-set, light
pigmentation and round-headed) and the Phalian (tall, solid, fair, long-
headed with a broad face).40 Günther emphasised the importance of
being on ‘guard against confusing Race and People (generally marked
by a common language), or Race and Nationality, or (as in the case of
the Jewish people) Blood kinship and Faith’. There was no such thing
as a ‘Germanic’ or ‘Slavic race’, or a ‘German’ or ‘Spanish race’, nor, for
that matter, was there any such ‘white’ or ‘Caucasian race’.41 As Günther
explained, ‘a race shows itself in a human group which is marked off

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 Yugoslavism, Jews and Ustasha Ideology, 1918–1941 

from every other human group through its own proper combination of
bodily and mental characteristics, and in turn produces only its like’.42
Günther defined the Jews as a nation ‘of non-European origin’, com-
posed primarily of the Hither Asiatic (or Near Eastern) and Oriental
races, along with smaller elements of the Hamitic, Inner Asiatic, Negro
and Nordic races.43 Interestingly, Günther argued that the Dinaric race
probably shared a common origin with the Hither Asiatic race in the
Caucasus; the Dinaric race would have thus been formed from a part of
the original race which left its home in the Caucasus and then under-
went a ‘change in the process of selection under different conditions’.44
Despite their probable common origin, Günther maintained that the
Dinaric and Hither Asiatic races differed considerably in terms of their
physical and mental characteristics (e.g. while ‘the expression of the
Dinaric race may be called bold, that of the Hither Asiatic is cunning’).45
According to Zarnik’s 1927 article, out of a total of 48 chromosomes, the
average Ashkenazi Jew had 16 chromosomes from the Hither Asiatic/
Near Eastern race, 8 from the Nordic, 8 Alpine, 6 Oriental, 5 Mongol, 2
Mediterranean, 2 Dinaric and 1 Negro chromosome; the Sephardic Jew
had 18 Oriental chromosomes, and a further 18 Mediterranean, 7 Near
Eastern, 3 Nordic and 2 Negro chromosomes. In stark contrast to the
typical Jew, the average South Slav had 23 Dinaric, 15 Nordic, 7 Alpine,
2 Mediterranean chromosomes and 1 Mongol chromosome.46 Such a
racial composition placed the average South Slav very close to the racial
structure of the typical south German and north Italian, as hypothesised
by Zarnik.47 Although a leading intellectual proponent of Yugoslavism
in the interwar period, Zarnik had no trouble offering his scientific cre-
dentials and services to the Ustasha regime, becoming the main expert
who drafted the NDH’s race laws in 1941. The racial ideology of the new
regime was based on the idea of the Aryan and Nordic–Dinaric racial
identity of the Croatian people, an idea that was obviously similar to
Zarnik’s own race theory on the identity of the South Slavs as a whole.
The distinction between language and race was highly significant
for Croat anti-Yugoslavist intellectuals who aimed to prove Croatian
national individuality. The leading anti-Yugoslavist intellectual of the
interwar period was the Croat geographer and geopolitical theorist Filip
Lukas (1871–1958), who served as president of Croatia’s oldest cultural
institution, Matica Hrvatska (‘The Croatian Matrix’) from 1928 to 1945. In
a series of essays and articles written during the interwar period, Lukas
presented a coherent theory of Croatian ethnic distinctiveness, based

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 Honorary Aryans

on the idea of a unique Croat racial ‘spirit’ that had shaped a particular
national culture. As he argued in one of his most important essays, ‘The
Problem of Croatian Culture’ (1938), before their migration from the
proto-Slavic homeland in north-east Europe to the western Balkans,
the original Croats had already interbred with various Caucasian,
Tatar–Mongol and Germanic tribes, such as the Antes, Avars and the
Goths.48 The Croats acquired their greatest ‘blood admixture’ in their new
homeland along the Adriatic, where they intermarried with ‘the large
number of Romanised Illyro-Celts, Romans, remnants of the Avars and
Germanic tribes, and some other ethnic splinters’.49 Lukas argued that
the predominant Dinaric racial type found among the Croats developed
from a ‘crystallization’ of this ethnic–racial admixture.50 As a result of
all this mixture, ‘the Croats, regardless of how much they belong to the
Slavic group by their language, have come to be racially closer to some
neighbouring tribes than to the Slavic Russians’.51 Contrary to Cvijić’s
claim that it was the Serbs who formed the bulk of the Dinaric popula-
tion, Lukas argued that the Dinaric race was today found predominantly
in the mountainous regions of Croatia, which were historically inhabited
by the strongest Croatian clans and families.52 Lukas also noted that
Croatia had been settled by persons of the Nordic race, ‘who, merging
with the old [Dinaric] inhabitants, gave our culture many beautiful
contributions’.53
Lukas also remarked that ‘language is not a blood and racial charac-
teristic’, an anthropological tenet that was highlighted by the example
of the Jews of central Europe, who spoke German but remained racially
distinct from the Germans and other peoples in the region.54 Lukas had
touched upon the ‘Jewish question’ in an earlier article from 1932 entitled
‘The Lines of Direction and Elements in the Development of the Croatian
People’. Lukas did not explicitly refer to the Jews but wrote of a ‘group’ of
people living in Croatia who were ‘racially and spiritually foreign’ to the
Croatian nation.55 As he remarked, this group had nothing in common
with the history of the Croats, and therefore could not have inherited
the ‘psychic dispositions of our collectivity’. Indeed, the majority of this
group had preserved their ‘original nomadic characteristics’, while only a
smaller part had adapted to Croatian culture.56 Lacking the ‘instinct for
physical work’, the Jews had a ‘concentrated sense for material interests’
and this sense actually represented their sole aim in life.57 Similarly to
Truhelka’s idea on the sterility and permanency of the Jews, Lukas argued
that while the ‘principle of differentiation’, which was ‘characteristic of all

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 Yugoslavism, Jews and Ustasha Ideology, 1918–1941 

Aryan peoples’, created the movement of life and progress, the Jews were
marked by a uniformity and uniqueness that remained ‘permanent and
unaltered’.58

Ustasha ideas on Croatian ethnic–racial identity

The lawyer and former secretary of the Croatian Party of Right (the
successor to Josip Frank‘s Pure Party of Right), Ante Pavelić, founded
the Ustasha Organisation (from 1933, ‘Movement’) in 1930 in Italy, where
he enjoyed the sanctuary of the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini,
which pursued a foreign policy in the Balkans generally hostile to the
Yugoslav state. The Ustasha movement aimed to liberate Croatia from
Serbian rule ‘with all means’, in order to establish an independent state
on the whole of its ‘ethnic and historic territory’. The central Ustasha
ideas on nation and state were laid out in the central ideological docu-
ment issued by Pavelić in 1933, known as ‘The Principles of the Ustasha
Movement’.59
The Ustasha Principles were based on two central concepts: the ethnic
individuality of the Croatian nation and Croatian historic state right.
The first principle stated unambiguously: ‘the Croatian nation [narod]
is a self-contained ethnic unit, it is a nation in its own right and from an
ethnic perspective is not identical with any other nation nor is it a part
of, or a tribe of, any other nation’.60 Principles five and six stated that the
Croats arrived in their current homeland, which they ‘conquered’, as a
‘completely free’ and ‘completely organised’ people, in both a ‘military’
and ‘familial’ sense. Principle seven stated that the Croats maintained
their state ‘throughout the centuries up until the end of the [first] world
war’, and they therefore have the right to restore ‘their own completely
free and independent Croatian state’ (no. 8).61 Furthermore, ‘no one who
is not by descent and blood a member of the Croatian nation can decide
on Croatian state and national matters in an independent Croatian state’
(no. 11); and ‘in Croatia he who does not originate from a peasant fam-
ily is, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, not of Croatian descent or
blood but a foreign settler’ (no. 13).62
As Holm Sundhaussen concisely notes, the document expressed the
idea that the Croats were ‘a god-given, immortal blood community,
which conquered its settled areas 1400 years ago’ and therefore ‘had
acquired inalienable territorial rights’.63 He fails, however, to point out

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 Honorary Aryans

that the Ustashe wished to prove that the Croats were a separate eth-
nolinguistic nation, and that is why there are several references in the
Ustasha Principles to ‘ethnicity’, ‘blood’, ‘descent’, ‘family’ and ‘foreign
settlers’. In 1935 a leading Ustasha by the name of Ante Valenta published
a booklet in which he explained the Ustasha Principles in more detail.
With regard to principle number eleven Valenta argued that foreign-
ers in a Croatian state would enjoy ‘all rights to life’, but they would be
excluded from having any influence on ‘the fate of Croatia’, even if their
ancestors had settled in Croatia many generations ago.64 Therefore, only
the descendants of those foreigners who had thoroughly assimilated into
the Croatian nation through intermarriage (thus acquiring Croatian
‘spirit’ and ‘blood’) were to be considered equal to native Croats in the
future independent Croatian state.65
To be sure, the Ustashe did not always abide by principle eleven. Among
the 500 or so recruits of the pre-war Ustasha movement there were a
small number of individuals who were of non-Croatian ethnic descent,
including Narcis Jeszensky (Slovak), Josip Metzger (German) and Vlado
Singer (Jewish), while others also bore non-Croatian surnames, such
as Vjekoslav Servatzy and Emil Lahowski.66 Yet it would be misleading
to conclude, as Mario Jareb does, that the Ustasha Principles reflected
an ideology of non-racial ‘national exclusivity’ rather than a ‘racist
viewpoint’.67 It is necessary to distinguish between racial theory and rac-
ist practice, because the histories of all modern political movements and
states based on racial ideology have highlighted the difficulties in turn-
ing race theory into actual party or government policy. Thus, one could
hardly argue, for example, that the Third Reich was not really a racialist
state because the German State Secretary of Aviation, Field Marshal
Erhard Milch (1892–1972), was half-Jewish (his father was a Jew). The
case of Milch and tens of thousands of other Germans of Jewish or partly
Jewish descent (Mischlinge), who were exempted from the Nuremberg
race laws and/or declared deutschblütig (‘of German blood’), points to
the complexity of Nazi Germany’s racial politics. The National Socialists
could not reject a highly capable professional and German nationalist
such as Milch simply because he was of partly Jewish descent.68 At the
same time, a line had to be drawn somewhere; Milch and others like him
were considered exceptional and so deserved, according to the Nazis, to
be recognised as full Germans.
Similarly, the small number of Ustasha members of non-Croat (or
even ‘non-Aryan‘) descent were considered quintessential ‘exceptions

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 Yugoslavism, Jews and Ustasha Ideology, 1918–1941 

to the rule’. In a book published in 1934 entitled, ‘The Croatian Nation

in the Struggle for an Independent Croatian State’, the leading Ustasha
writer Mile Budak (1889–1945) admitted that in Croatia one could
find the assimilated descendants of foreigners from other lands of
the Habsburg Monarchy who had loyally displayed Croatian national
sentiments, but these individuals were ‘only honourable exceptions
that confirmed the completely natural rule’.69 A former follower of
Frank, Budak was critical of Josip Frank‘s pro-Habsburg politics, in
contrast to his praise of Starčević, who had struggled against Austrian
hegemony and Yugoslavism with ‘the intensity of his pure Croatian
racial strength’.70 Although Budak noted that Frank had personally
been an honest man and loyal to Croatia, he had nevertheless been
unable, as a ‘baptised Jew from Osijek’, to faithfully continue Starčević’s
political legacy.71 Frank’s political realism lay in his Jewish blood, for
through his veins ‘ran the purest blood of a thoroughly practical race’.72
Frank could not give the Croatian national struggle a ‘proper internal,
Croatian, racial content’, and that is why he had sought Habsburg
support in direct opposition to Starčević’s tradition of anti-Austrian
politics.73 Budak had definitely rejected Frank and his concept of civic
Croatian nationhood, whilst also remodelling Starčević as a racialist
thinker; Budak had noted that anyone wishing to study the ‘racial
question’ in the Balkans would have to consult Starčević’s essay from
1876, ‘The Slavoserb Breed in Croatia’.74
According to Budak, two main types of racially foreign groups existed
in Croatia. One group was comprised of the descendants of ‘Austrian’
(Habsburg) officers and officials ‘of various nationalities’ who had
eventually assimilated into the Croatian nation in a cultural sense, even
though they did not possess any ‘Croatian racial characteristics’; the sec-
ond group consisted of the Orthodox Serbs who were the descendants
of ‘various Balkan ethnic refuse’, including Vlachs, Greeks, Armenians,
Albanians, Romanians and Gypsies.75 Budak defined the Croatian Serbs
as a ‘Balkan-Asian potpourri’.76 Although the descendants of the ‘Austrian’
settlers had been culturally assimilated, their ‘Croatdom’ (hrvatstvo) was
completely different to the national consciousness of the ‘true-born
Croats of old stock [koljenovići]’, which included the Muslims of Bosnia
and Herzegovina.77 As Budak argued, the Croatdom of the Croat of old
stock was found in ‘his blood, in his bones, in his flesh, in his soul and
was tied to the land [and to the] graves of over twenty generations of
grandparents and great-grandparents’.78

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 Honorary Aryans

While Budak stressed the role of race in Croatian history, he had

provided no detail on the precise ethnolinguistic and racial origins of
the Croats. This task was taken up by another Ustasha ideologist, the
lawyer and political scientist Mladen Lorković (1909–1945). In 1939
Matica Hrvatska published Lorković’s book, ‘The People and Land of
the Croats’, the most ambitious intellectual undertaking by a pre-war
member of the Ustasha movement.79 According to Lorković, the origi-
nal Croats had been ‘a tribe of Iranian-Caucasian race’, which became
the ‘warrior nation’ that organised the Slavs in White Croatia (located
in present day southern Poland), as well as later along the Adriatic
coast.80 This Iranian military and political ruling class intermarried
with its more numerous Slav subjects, and this led to the linguistic (and
partial ethnic) Slavicisation of the Iranian Croats. On the other hand,
Iranian–Croat blood had turned the subject Slavs into a state-building
people.81 Lorković’s Iranian theory was based upon the work of a number
of Croat and non-Croat historians, philologists and archaeologists,
stretching back to the late eighteenth century, which traced the origins
of the Croats to the Indo–Iranian peoples of the Caucasus region.82
After the Slavicised Iranian Croats reached the western Balkans they
subsequently intermarried with the remnants of the Slavs, Romanised
Illyrians and Celts, Goths and some (Turkic) Avars left in the former
Roman provinces of Dalmatia and Pannonia after the fall of the Western
Roman Empire and the subsequent defeat of the Avars at the hands of
the Croats. Consequently, the Croats received a ‘strong Illyrian-Celtic
blood admixture’.83 The Illyrians and Celts had represented the second
and third waves of migration of racially ‘Aryan‘ peoples to present day
Croatian territory (the Thracians had constituted the first Aryan migra-
tory ‘wave’).84
Lorković praised the history of the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina,
emphasising their important place in the ethnic history and identity of
the Croats. Just as the Catholic Croats had represented the ‘bulwark of
Christianity‘, the Islamic Croats were the historical vanguard of Islam
in Europe.85 Lorković concluded that the bloody religious–imperial wars
that pitted Christian and Muslim Croats against each other from the
fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries had proven that the Croats were ‘a
strong enough race’, since ‘a people of weak blood, of a hybrid breed, of a
small land and tiny numbers could not have given evidence of that vital
force and real greatness which the Croats of both faiths gave, fighting
on two sides of the world barricade’.86 With regard to the question of the

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 Yugoslavism, Jews and Ustasha Ideology, 1918–1941 

Orthodox Serbs of Croatia, Lorković argued that they were actually the
descendants of, a) nomadic, Orthodox Christian Ottoman auxiliaries of
Vlach origin; b) ethnic Serbs who had settled in northeast Croatia after
1690; and c) Catholic Croats who had been pressured to convert to the
Orthodox faith during the seventeenth century under the Ottomans,
who favoured the Orthodox over the Catholic Church.87 The only com-
ponent that held these disparate groups together was their adherence
to the Serbian Orthodox Church, which was to provide the subsequent
basis for a Serbian national identity.
The call for Catholic–Islamic Croat ethnic unity against the Balkan–
Asiatic Serbs represented the most important Ustasha ideological tenet.
During the course of the 1930s the Ustashe also began to take an increas-
ing interest in the ‘Jewish question’. This was not simply due to the grow-
ing political influence of National Socialist Germany in Southeastern
Europe. As part of their aim to return Croatia to the rightful rule of
the racially authentic Croats (koljenovići) the Ustashe identified the
racially foreign minorities in Croatia. Alongside the Balkan Serb–Vlach
of nomadic origin, the equally ‘nomadic’, rootless, cosmopolitan and
mercantile Jew provided another obvious ‘counter-type’ to the ideal type
of the noble, Aryan, warrior and peasant Croat. The very small number
of Gypsies in Croatia would also be added to the counter-type, while
during the period of the NDH, these stereotypes would be firmly welded
into the general counter-type of the ‘Bolshevik–Asiatic’. Counter-types
were important for racialist political movements because it was ‘through
the counter-image’, as the National Socialists argued, that ‘we obtain the
greatest clarity of what our own ideals should be’.88 The Croatian Jews
had already been defined as a racially foreign element by Grga Tuškan,
Antun and Stjepan Radić, Ćiro Truhelka and Filip Lukas.
Ustasha ideologists had started to define the Jews as a racially differ-
ent group from an early date. For Mile Budak, the Jews were first and
foremost a racial, and not simply a religious, group. In an essay on the
organisation of a future independent Croat state from 1934, Budak
linked both capitalism and communism – two political systems that he
rejected as alien to the peasant Croatian way of life – with ‘Jewish blood’.
According to Budak, the leaders of both communism and capitalism
were of the same racial origin:
They are not, to be sure, the same people, but the blood is the same, the
same descent, the same race, which has its aspirations and aims [ ... ]

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 Honorary Aryans

according to the decrees of their blood, which has led and directed them
through the centuries [ ... ] The only difference is that some Rockefeller or
Stern is replaced by some Trotsky, who was called Bronstein before, and
now continues to work the same as before, only under a new firm.89

At the same time, during the interwar period, Budak occasionally made
a distinction between the ‘honourable’ Jews who identified as Croats and
with the Croatian national cause on the one hand, and the Jews who were
Serbian allies, as well as ‘usurers, profiteers and exploiters’, on the other.90
The Ustasha movement included a handful of sworn members who were
of Jewish origin, one of whom, Vlado Singer (1908–1943), was counted
among Pavelić’s most trusted subordinates. Singer had converted to
Catholicism at an early age and considered himself a Croat.91 The Ustashe
were thus capable of making a distinction between individual assimilated
Jews and foreign Jews, and in comparison to its importance for National
Socialism, anti-Semitism constituted a far less significant component
of pre-war Ustasha ideology. It is important to note, however, that the
Ustashe regarded Croatian Jewry as a whole to be a racially foreign
element in the Croatian national body. In his essay from 1934, Budak
remarked, for example, that the present commercial laws in Yugoslavia
were ‘a collection of shams and swindles of international capital, created
for baptised and non-baptised Jews’.92
The Ustasha movement’s anti-Jewish sentiments were closely con-
nected to its anti-Communism. The Ustashe linked Communism
with Yugoslavism, and since Communism was generally associated
with Jewry, the ‘Bolshevik’ Jews came to be viewed as supporters of
Yugoslavia. Although the pre-war Communist Party of Yugoslavia
(Komunistička partija Jugoslavije, KPJ) opposed the royalist regime in
Belgrade, the Yugoslav Communists generally argued in favour of a
united Yugoslav state. The Yugoslav Communists adhered to both the
racial–supranational ideology of Yugoslavism and the opposing ideology
of Marxist internationalism.93 The significance of this particular ideo-
logical inconsistency was minimised by the fact that the Comintern had
supported the establishment of a strongly centralised Yugoslav state.94
The KPJ’s support for Yugoslav statehood offered the Ustashe a specific
Croatian reason to oppose ‘Jewish’ Communism.
In his first political memorandum to the German government entitled
Die kroatische Frage (sent to the German Foreign Ministry in late 1936),
Ante Pavelić stated that, in their struggle to free themselves from the
Yugoslav state, the Croats faced four main enemies: ‘the Serbian State

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 Yugoslavism, Jews and Ustasha Ideology, 1918–1941 

Government, International Freemasonry, Jewry and Communism‘.95

In 1938 Pavelić explained (in his fluent Italian) the Ustasha position
on Communism and the Soviet Union in a short book entitled, Orrori
e Errori (‘Horrors and Errors’).96 According to Pavelić, Bolshevism had
created a criminal system in the Soviet Union, which repudiated the
natural order of life, since it was opposed to family, religion, nationhood
and private property. The Bolsheviks viewed the family, ‘the oldest and
most natural human society’, as an obstacle in the way of their policy
to ‘negate the worth and importance of blood ties, for the blood tie is
a negation of internationalism and non-nationhood’.97 Communist
materialism and internationalism was easy to comprehend if one studied
the racial origin of the ‘great majority of the intellectuals and followers
of Marx’. These intellectuals were of Jewish racial origin, including Karl
Marx himself, defined by Pavelić as a ‘Semite Easterner’.98 For Pavelić,
the great lie of Bolshevism was the Jewish appropriation of leadership of
the working class and peasantry, since the Jews were ‘a race that for two
millennia were never workers, soldiers or peasants’, but merchants and
speculators, who now saw themselves as ‘the representatives of workers,
soldiers and peasants’.99
Pavelić had a specific national reason to attack Marxism. Marx had
written several passages vilifying the Croats because the Ban Josip Jelačić
(1801–1859) had sided with the ‘reactionary’ Habsburgs against Lajos
Kossuth’s liberal nationalist Hungarian government in 1848. Marx’s anti-
Croat remarks were, according to the Ustashe, evidence of Communist,
and therefore Jewish, hostility to the Croatian national cause. To be
sure, Marx had felt nothing but contempt for the national demands of
the small peoples of East-Central Europe; for him these peoples repre-
sented obstacles standing in the path of general progress, which would
eventuate through the policies of the large nations (such as the Germans
and Hungarians).100 In a booklet from 1937 entitled ‘Communism and
Croatdom’, the nationalist Catholic priest Ivo Guberina (1897–1945), who
joined the Ustasha movement in 1940, argued that Marx’s hatred of the
Croats originated from his Jewish materialism and violent Communist
ideology, which was irreconcilable with a nation that was dedicated to
ethics, freedom and the defence of Western Christian civilisation.101
By the end of the 1930s the Ustasha movement had constructed a
coherent ethnolinguistic–racial ideology, which was based on the fol-
lowing main arguments: a) the Croats were a distinct nation defined by
the racial criteria of ‘blood and descent’; b) the proto-Croats had been a

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 Honorary Aryans

Slavicised Iranian warrior caste which, after its migration to Dalmatia,

had moulded a people from the blending of several Indo–European or
Aryan peoples, including Slavs, Illyrians, Celts and Goths; c) the Croats
of old stock (koljenovići) – whether of Catholic or Islamic faith – were
descended from the original people of Iranian, Slavic, Illyrian–Celtic
and Gothic blood; and d) the Ottoman invasions had introduced a new
ethnic–racial element into the Croatian lands, namely, the Orthodox
Christian Vlach population of Balkan–Asiatic origin, while, under
Habsburg rule, the urban centres of Croatia had also been subject to the
settlement of racially foreign individuals, particularly Jews.

Notes
 Cited in Cathie Carmichael, Ethnic Cleansing in the Balkans: Nationalism and
the Destruction of Tradition (London: Routledge, 2002), 11.
 Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca
and London: Cornell University Press, 1984), 128.
 ibid, 141–153.
 For more on pro-Serbian cultural politics in the early years of the interwar
Yugoslav state, see ibid, 202–214.
 Srdjan Trifković, ‘The First Yugoslavia and Origins of Croatian Separatism,
East European Quarterly, XXVI, No. 3 (1992): 355.
 Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History (London: Papermac, 1996), 169.
 Banac, National Question in Yugoslavia, 150.
 ibid, 212.
 ibid, 163–164.
 ibid, 132–133. Also see Adrian Hastings, Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity,
Religion and Nationalism, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 125.
 Banac, National Question in Yugoslavia, 163.
 ibid, 55, 58.
 ibid, 387–390.
 Ivo Goldstein, ‘The Jews in Yugoslavia 1918–1941: Antisemitism and the
Struggle for Equality’, Jewish Studies at the CEU: II. Yearbook (1999–2001), 2.
 ibid, 3.
 ibid, 5–6.
 ibid, 6.
 Banac, National Question in Yugoslavia, 409.
 Goldstein, ‘Jews in Yugoslavia’, 8 and Branka Magaš, Croatia Through History:
The Making of a European State (London: Saqi, 2007), 533–536.
 Goldstein, ‘Jews in Yugoslavia’, 6–8.

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 Yugoslavism, Jews and Ustasha Ideology, 1918–1941 

 ibid, 10.
 ibid, 10–11.
 George Schöpflin, Nations, Identity, Power: The New Politics of Europe (London:
Hurst & Company, 2000), 330.
 Christian Promitzer, ‘The Body of the Other: “Racial Science” and Ethnic
Minorities in the Balkans’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte und Kultur Südosteuropas,
5 (München: Slavica Verlag Kovač, 2003), 29–30.
 Jovan Cvijić, ‘Studies in Jugoslav Psychology’ (trans. Fanny Foster), The
Slavonic and East European Review, 9 (1930–31): 375.
 ibid, 377.
 ibid, 377–378.
 ibid, 378–383.
 Boris Zarnik, ‘O rasnom sastavu evropskog pučanstva’, Hrvatsko kolo, VIII
(1927): 79–80.
 ibid, p. 77. For similar views see Boris Zarnik, ‘Rasa i duševna produktivnost’,
Priroda: popularni ilustrovani časopis Hrv. Prirodoslovnog Društva u Zagrebu,
XXL, Nos. 5–6 (1931): 134.
 Hans F. K. Günther, The Racial Elements of European History, trans. G. C.
Wheeler (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1927), 123–126.
 ibid, 89, 92.
 ibid, 51–55, 58–59.
 Christopher M. Hutton, Race and the Third Reich: Linguistics, Racial
Anthropology and Genetics in the Dialectic of Volk (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2005), 148.
 Zarnik, ‘O rasnom sastavu’, 56–66 and Hutton, Race and the Third Reich, 118.
 Hutton, Race and the Third Reich, 25, 32.
 By the 1920s developments in the science of genetics had drawn attention
to the ‘increasing uncertainty about the status of anthropological features
such as hair colour and skull shape’. Under the influence of Mendel’s law
of inheritance, scientists began to view race as a ‘set of hereditary features’,
which were inherited independently of one another so that there was no
necessary direct correlation between the phenotype and genotype. See
Hutton, Race and the Third Reich, 25, 31–32.
 Hutton, Race and the Third Reich, 17–25.
 ibid, 23–24.
 In the translated work from 1927 cited above, The Racial Elements of European
History, Günther spoke of five European races (Nordic, Mediterranean,
Dinaric, Alpine and East Baltic). See Günther, Racial Elements of European
History, 3–4. By 1933 he had added the Phalian race (as well as adding the
Sudetan race at times). See Hutton, Race and the Third Reich, 35–48.
 Günther, Racial Elements of European History, 1–2.
 ibid, 3.

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 Honorary Aryans

 ibid, 74.
 ibid, 67–70, 111.
 ibid, 70
 Zarnik, ‘O rasnom sastavu’, 71.
 The racial structure of the south German: 20 Nordic, 17 Dinaric, 10 Alpine
chromosomes and 1 Mediterranean chromosome. The north Italian: 18
Nordic, 18 Dinaric, 6 Alpine and 6 Mediterranean chromosomes. See Zarnik,
‘O rasnom sastavu’.
 ‘Problem hrvatske kulture’ in Filip Lukas, Hrvatska narodna samobitnost, ed.
Mirko Mađor (Zagreb: Dom i svijet, 1997), 250–251.
 ibid, 251.
 ibid.
 ibid, 252. According to Lukas the Russians had received a good deal of
non-Aryan blood through admixture with Finno-Ugric and Mongol tribes.
See ibid, 251–252.
 ibid, 251.
 ibid.
 ibid, 252.
 ‘Smjernice i elementi u razvoju hrvatskoga naroda’ in Filip Lukas, Hrvatska
narodna samobitnost, Mirko Mađor ed. (Zagreb: Dom i svijet, 1997), 174.
 ibid.
 ibid, 174–175.
 ibid, 175.
 Mario Jareb, Ustaško-domobranski pokret od nastanka do travnja 1941. godine
(Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 2006), 124.
 Cited in ibid, 124.
 ibid, 125.
 ibid, 128.
 Holm Sundhaussen, ‘Der Ustascha-Staat: Anatomie eines
Herrschaftssystems’, Österreichische Osthefte, 37 (1995), 513.
 Cited in Jareb, Ustaško-domobranski pokret, 129, 396fn.
 ibid.
 See the short biographies on Jeszensky, Metzger and Singer in Tko je Tko u
NDH: Hrvatska 1941.–1945. ed. Darko Stuparić (Zagreb: Minerva, 1997), 172,
268, 359.
 Jareb, Ustaško-domobranski pokret, 129, 396fn.
 See Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial
Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military (Kansas: University of
Press of Kansas), 29–30. German Mischlinge serving in the Wehrmacht were
exempted from the Nuremberg race laws by receiving an official exemption
(Genehmigung) from the Führer. Many of them subsequently received a

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 Yugoslavism, Jews and Ustasha Ideology, 1918–1941 

Deutschblütigkeitserklärung (‘German blood certificate’), which declared these

Mischlinge to be of German blood. See Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, 199–246.
 Mile Budak, Hrvatski narod u borbi za samostalnu i nezavisnu hrvatsku državu
(Youngstown, Ohio: Hrvatsko kolo, 1934), 13.
 ibid, 5.
 ibid, 66.
 ibid.
 ibid, 67.
 ibid, 56.
 ibid, 12, 17–18, 56.
 ibid, 175.
 ibid, 13, 35.
 ibid, 13.
 See the latest edition, Mladen Lorković, Narod i zemlja Hrvata (Split: Marjan
tisak, 2005).
 ibid, 17, 35.
 ibid, 16–17, 35–36.
 The Iranian theory of Croat origins was first presented at the Royal Academy
in Zagreb in 1797 by the Croat historian Josip Mikoczy (1734–1800). Mikoczy
argued that ‘the Croats, [who are] Slavs by their nationality, originated from
the Sarmatians, the descendants of the Medes, and arrived in Dalmatia from
Poland around the year 630’. Cited in Mato Marčinko, Mučenička Hrvatska
(Zagreb: HKD Sv. Jeronima, 2008), 331, 343. Amongst the numerous works
promoting the Iranian theory, see Stjepan Krizin Sakač, ‘O kavkasko-
iranskom podrijetlu Hrvata’, Život, 18, No. 1 (1937): 1–25.
 Lorković, Narod i zemlja Hrvata, 36–38.
 ibid, 17.
 ibid, 44–48.
 ibid, 48.
 ibid, 68–72.
 George L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism
(New York: Howard Fertig, 1999), 49.
 Mile Budak, ‘Nekoliko misli o uređenju slobodne i nezavisne hrvatske
države’ (1934), in Bogdan Krizman, Ante Pavelić i ustaše (Zagreb: Globus,
1978) 368.
 Ante Moškov, Pavelićevo doba, Petar Požar ed. (Split: Laus, 1999), 206–207.
 Ivo and Slavko Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu (Zagreb: Novi liber, 2001),
619–621.
 Budak, ‘Nekoliko misli o uređenju slobodne i nezavisne hrvatske države’, 373.
 Banac, National Question in Yugoslavia, 333, 337–338.
 ibid, 338.
 Krizman, Ante Pavelić, 240.

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 Honorary Aryans

 The book was published in Croatian in the NDH in 1941.

 Ante Pavelić, Strahote zabluda: komunizam i boljševizam u Rusiji i u svietu
(1941; Madrid: Domovina, 1974), 81–82.
 ibid, 16–17.
 ibid, 115.
 Both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels considered the South Slavs of the
Habsburg Monarchy to be ‘nothing more than the “ethnic rubbish” of a
complicated “thousand-year evolution”‘. See Paul Lendvai, The Hungarians:
1000 Years of Victory in Defeat (London: Hurst & Company, 2003), 235.
 Ivo Guberina, Komunizam i Hrvatstvo (Zagreb: Hrvatska omladinska
biblioteka, 1937), 4–8, 12–20.

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 3
Jews and Honorary Aryans
in the Croat Racial State

Abstract: This chapter explores the question of the Jewish

‘honorary Aryans’ by focusing on Ustasha law and ideology
in relation to Jews. The Ustasha racial law decrees, including
the honorary Aryan paragraph, are examined in detail. The
chapter highlights that the exemption of a minority of Jews
in the Ustasha state actually highlights the importance of
racial thought for the regime – something hitherto ignored or
overlooked by historians of the Ustashe – because these Jews
were simply ‘exceptions to the rule’ targeted for biological
assimilation into the majority Aryan population. The chapter
also examines the question of mixed Jewish–Aryan marriages
and so-called Mischlinge (half- and quarter Jews) in the
Ustasha state.

Bartulin, Nevenko. Honorary Aryans: National–Racial

Identity and Protected Jews in the Independent State of
Croatia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126 
 Honorary Aryans

The Croatian national community

On 10 April 1941 the Independent State of Croatia was proclaimed in

Zagreb in the name of Ante Pavelić and by ‘the will of our ally’ (i.e.
Germany) by Colonel Slavko Kvaternik.1 After 12 years in exile in Italy
Pavelić returned to Croatia on 13 April. He arrived in Zagreb two days
later and set about forming a new government that he officially headed
as the Poglavnik. Although the NDH was never truly independent,
one cannot overlook the fact that ‘a political entity calling itself the
Independent State of Croatia did exist from April 10, 1941 to May 8,
1945’.2 By late 1942 the NDH had been practically reduced to a satellite
state of the German Reich.3 Nevertheless, the NDH retained all the
formal trappings of a state until its fall in May 1945, including its own
currency, foreign office, police and armed forces (albeit under German
operational command), educational system and significant control over
policies toward ethnic and racial minorities. The territories officially
encompassing the NDH in 1941 included Croatia–Slavonia, the Croatian
Littoral, southern Dalmatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Italy annexed
the littoral and hinterland of northern and central Dalmatia after the
signing of the Rome Agreements between Italy and the NDH on 18 May
1941; after Italy’s capitulation in September 1943, Germany recognised
Croatian sovereignty over the formerly Italian annexed areas. The NDH
had a population of approximately 6.5 million inhabitants: 30% were
comprised of Orthodox Serbs (around 1,845,000 people); there were
also around 150,000 ethnic Germans, between 36,000 and 39,000 Jews
and just over 750,000 Bosnian Muslims.4 Ethnic Croats thus made up a
little over half of the population of the NDH, but as all Bosnian Muslims
were declared ethnically Croatian, the number of Croats was officially
estimated at around 4.5 million people.
In order to transform what the German Plenipotentiary General in
Zagreb, Edmund Glaise von Horstenau (1882–1946), called a Völkerstaat
(multinational state) into an ethnically homogeneous nation-state,5 the
Ustasha regime set up a one-party state in which extra-legal forces were
free to deal, in whatever manner seemed fit, with the political and racial
enemies of the Croatian people. On 17 April 1941 Pavelić issued the Legal
Decree on the Defence of the Nation and State: this decree authorised
the death sentence for ‘whoever in whatever way acts or has acted
against the honour and vital interests of the Croatian people or in any
way endangers the existence of the Independent State of Croatia or state

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 Jews and Honorary Aryans in the Croat Racial State 

authority, even if the act is only attempted [ ... ]’6 Similarly to the German
Reich, the NDH did not possess a constitution; its legal system was
constructed upon the Ustasha Principles from 1933, upon a succession
of decrees issued by the Poglavnik and other decrees of a constitutional–
legal nature.7 The leading legal theorist in the NDH, Eugen Sladović
(1882–1960), stated that the NDH ‘includes within itself ’ the fundamen-
tal ideas of nationalism and patriotism, solidarity, the social obligation
of work, socially tied private property and estate corporatism.8
The NDH was constructed as the state of the Croatian ‘national com-
munity’ (narodna zajednica), which directly corresponded to the National
Socialist concept of the Volksgemeinschaft. In November 1941 Pavelić
explained the central importance of the national community:

Today, when we, the Croatian people, have come to new ideas, and rejected
individualistic and democratic ideas, the whole people become one family,
what the Germans today call: the Volksgemeinschaft. Individuals [ ... ] cease
to be of worth, except as members of the national community.9

The Croatian national community was best protected, as the Ustasha

ideologist Aleksandar Seitz (1912–1981) argued in 1943, within the ideo-
logical and organisational framework of ‘Croatian socialism’, or ‘social
nationalism’, which was completely different to the socialism propagated
by ‘international Bolshevism’.10 Croatian socialism aimed to harmonise
and bring together all classes and estates to work for the greater good of
the national community.11 The term ‘national community’ was an alien
concept to both Marxists and capitalists, because the former knew only
of classes, while the latter recognised only free markets.12 Seitz noted
that the concept of the ‘national community’ was a new one devised by
Adolf Hitler.13 The national community was not the same as a nation,
for the latter, constituting a ‘group of people tied together through con-
sciousness of a common affiliation on the basis of a common origin’, had
historically been split up into mutually hostile estates and classes.14 The
task of true nationalism (based on the national community) was to bring
these opposing classes together into a harmonious whole.15 Croatian
social nationalism was considered a component part of the European
revolution that was opposed to both ‘Americanism’ and Bolshevism, two
ideologies that sought the ‘levelling’ of all human cultures. In contrast,
the European identity was founded on ‘unity in diversity’.16
The new European identity was also founded on the principle of
natural inequality. As the first Minister of Justice in the NDH, Mirko

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 Honorary Aryans

Puk (1884–1945), told the Croatian Sabor in late February 1942: ‘The
authoritarian state rejects the past legal theories, by which all people
are already equal according to their own nature, but [instead] accepts
the other principle of differentiation and selection of mankind [ ... ]’17
According to Puk, the Ustasha elite was not an ‘aristocracy of blood, nor
an aristocracy of property, but an aristocracy of a superior spirit’.18 The
authoritarian state this Ustasha aristocracy sought to create rested on
the ‘principle of one leader, one nation and one state’.19 According to the
Ustashe, the democratic principle of natural equality had been invented
by the Jews; as Vladimir Cicak argued in the ‘Ustasha Annual’ for 1943,
the Jews had
[ ... ] abused the Christian tenet of the equality of all people before God,
[hence] in the transcendental order, and had begun to seek the equality of
all people in individual states and among individual nations, [hence] in the
natural order, even if all living nature was the best proof that such equality
does not and cannot exist in the natural order.20

The Ustasha state had rejected the liberal principles of the ‘European
and American traditions, by which the foundation of a state was
accompanied by legislation that conferred certain rights and liberties
on citizens’.21 Ustasha racial ideology was ultimately founded on the
Romanticist (Herderian) notion that the world was divided into differ-
ent peoples possessing their own inherited spiritual characteristics (even
though racial anthropology itself originated in the Enlightenment).22
The Ustasha rejection of the universalism of the Enlightenment reflected
the basic National Socialist idea expressed in 1936 by Walter Gross
(1904–1945), head of the Race Policy Office of the National Socialist
Party: ‘Man as such does not exist [as] there are only men belonging to
this or that race’.23 A century and a half earlier, one of the great critics of
the Enlightenment and French Revolution, the Savoyard Catholic writer
and diplomat Josèph de Maistre (1753–1821), had famously written that
he had met Frenchmen, Italians, Germans and Russians, ‘But as for Man,
I’ve never met one in my life’.24
The Ustasha state was founded on a racial world view, which was made
very clear after the Archbishop of Zagreb, Alojzije Stepinac (1898–1960),
attacked racial ideology in unequivocal terms in several sermons in
Zagreb cathedral during 1942 and 1943. During two sermons in late
October 1943, for example, Stepinac declared that ‘the Catholic Church
has always condemned and condemns today as well every injustice and

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 Jews and Honorary Aryans in the Croat Racial State 

every violence committed in the name of the theories of class, race or

nationality’, while ‘the Catholic Church knows nothing of races born to
rule and races doomed to slavery [ ... ] for it the negro of central Africa is
as much a man as a European’.25 The NDH’s Minister of Education Julije
Makanec (1904–1945) made the following reply to Stepinac in the press:
If man is the image of God, then European man is so to a special degree; he
is without doubt more so than a negro of central Africa. A Gothic cathedral
surely reflects eternity in a more intense and more sublime manner than
a negro’s filthy hut or a gypsy’s tent; and the Ninth Symphony is certainly
nearer to God than the howling of a cannibal tribe in Australia.26

A section on the world’s ‘Main Races and Nations’ in a geography text-

book for Croatian high school students from 1943 noted that the Croats
belonged to the ‘white or Indo-European race’.27 All the peoples on earth
formed one human species, but the Indo–European race exhibited the
greatest abilities and strengths in comparison to the other remaining
races (although the ‘Mongolian’ or ‘yellow race’ was also capable of great
progress).28 The Indo–European race had settled more than two-thirds
of the planet and had subjected more than three-quarters of the earth’s
surface to its rule; the white Indo–European peoples were ahead of all
other races in education and culture.29
The National Socialists and the Ustashe regarded the division of
humanity into distinct racial, cultural and linguistic units as part of the
natural order. In the words of one German racial theorist from 1936,
‘every race, every people is an idea of God’s made flesh, which we must
nurture. It is our task to protect their distinctive nature’.30 It should be
noted that almost all scholars in Nazi Germany in the fields of racial
anthropology, biology and human genetics were monogenists, ‘and rec-
ognized the biological and genetic unity of the human species’.31 The fact
that human races belonged to one species and could therefore interbreed
is exactly what had led to widespread European concern about the ques-
tion of ‘racial purity’, which in turn led to the introduction of laws against
miscegenation in the German Reich (as well as in the United States).32
The NDH’s racial theorists had a more positive attitude toward the
question of racial hybridity than German National Socialist race theo-
rists, who generally held a strongly Nordicist position, which limited all
the great cultural and political achievements of the German and Aryan
peoples exclusively to the role of the Nordic race. There was a degree
of mild opposition to this Nordicist ideology from other German racial

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 Honorary Aryans

anthropologists, such as Eugen Fischer, who adopted a more cautious

intellectual approach which, though recognising the significant role of
the Nordic race, also stressed the contributions of other races, particu-
larly the Dinaric.33 In a section on ‘Man’ in the biological sciences in the
1942 edition of the ‘Croatian Encyclopaedia’, Boris Zarnik rejected the
idea that only the Nordic race was capable of cultural creativity, although
he did note that it was ‘very probable’ that the Nordic race had created
the most noticeable aspects of the cultures of the Indo–European peo-
ples.34 Citing Fischer (among others) as a source, Zarnik argued there
was strong evidence to suggest that mixing between ‘some races’, notably
the Nordic, Alpine and Dinaric races, created the spiritual conditions
that led to cultural creativity (Goethe, for example, had many Dinaric
physical characteristics). Although he rejected the idea of racial superi-
ority (i.e. racism), Zarnik argued in favour of the idea that different races
possessed different spiritual characteristics (i.e. racial anthropology).35
As Christopher Hutton points out, National Socialism was not prima-
rily an ideological attack on the idea of ‘difference’ but an attack on the
idea of ‘assimilation’.36 Although Nazi ideologists ‘shared conventional
European racism directed at “inferior” peoples’, they also ‘dreamed of an
unlimited horizon for the unfolding of difference’.37 In the specific case of
the Jews, the National Socialists had viewed them not as ‘conventionally
inferior, but as radically unnatural’, because as a predominantly urban ele-
ment of modernity, the ‘nomadic’ Jews were able to culturally assimilate
into different nations, thereby threatening the natural ecological order
of human diversity.38 The Jews were regarded as Gemeinschaftsunfähig
(‘incapable of creating or sustaining a community’).39

Anti-Semitic ideology
The Ustasha government continually accused the Jews of having con-
trolled the interwar Croatian economy, of having exploited Croatian
peasants and for corrupting interwar art, music and public morality.
In a newspaper article in the ‘Croatian Worker’ in late April 1941 the
Poglavnik’s Adjutant, Vjekoslav Blaškov (1911–1948), argued that ‘money
is God for the Jew’ and all his ‘concepts of beauty, of the elevated are
merely economic concepts’.40 Even in the Middle Ages the Jews were ‘the
bearers of ideas that destroyed the spirit of European peoples’, and always
introduced those elements that sought to destroy the economic and

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 Jews and Honorary Aryans in the Croat Racial State 

spiritual life of ‘Aryan society’. The Jews were the intellectual instigators
of both economic liberalism and Bolshevism: ‘The founder of Marxism
Karl Marx was himself a typical racial Jew. In his doctrine there is not a
single Aryan thought from which would spring forth the dynamism of
life, enthusiasm and readiness for self-sacrifice’.41
In a lecture he gave in early August 1941, the first Ustasha State
Secretary for Propaganda, Josip Milković (1909–1966), remarked that
national consciousness was a great obstacle for Jewish-led Marxism,
which ‘destroys the blood [based] national family and creates so-called
classes’.42 The Jews aimed to lead these classes, which were without ideas
and had no blood-ties, into a never-ending struggle against ‘elevated
ideas’, to turn the ‘conscientious and unselfish man against God and
his nation, against the noble idea and his own blood’.43 As an article in
Hrvatski narod (‘The Croatian People’) from February 1942 stated, ‘every
Jew is simply a member of the large Jewish International’. All the lead-
ing anti-national ideologies and movements in the world were created
by international Jewry: ‘atheism, rationalist materialism, Freemasonry,
Communism, etc’.44
In a speech to the Sabor in late February 1942, the NDH’s first Minister
for Internal Affairs, Andrija Artuković (1899–1988), accused the ‘Jews,
Communists and Freemasons’ of having tried to erode the Croatian nation’s
‘family life, its faith, its morality, its civilisation and its youth’.45 In order to
defend Croatia from the ‘insatiable and poisonous parasites’ of interna-
tional Jewry the NDH had decided to solve ‘the so-called Jewish question’.46
According to the Ustasha ideologist Danijel Crljen (1914–1995) in 1942, the
Jews had, in the cultural field, ‘promoted decadence in all directions’ during
the interwar period. They had thus ‘made music into barbarism, painting
into a disgrace to true art [and] the theatre into an exhibition of absurdity
and filth’.47 According to an article in the Ustasha party newspaper Spremnost
(‘Readiness’) in the same year, penned by the writer and vice-president of
the Society of Croatian Writers, Antun Bonifačić (1901–1986), the Jew did
not possess the concept of honour, which represented ‘the fundamental
Aryan principle’.48 The Aryan man would ‘rather die than trample on his
honour’, something ‘we Croats had beautifully shown in the course of our
national struggle’. Standing in opposition to the honourable Aryans were
‘the parasitic people of Jewish liars’.49
The Jewish spirit was completely alien to the European/Aryan spirit,
because it was, as Julije Makanec argued in 1944, ‘materialist in its
essence’.50 Jewish Marxism was focused on destroying the three ‘spiritual

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 Honorary Aryans

foundations’ of European culture. The first of these spiritual foundations

was Antiquity, ‘with its cult of heroic and creative personalities’, while
the second was Christianity, whereby man was ‘a bearer of the spirit’
and ‘a citizen of not only the visible, but also the invisible world’.51 The
third foundation of European culture was nationalism; the nation was a
‘God-given dynamic creative entity [ ... ] which, as a moral and spiritual
medium, encompasses all its members and gives their individual lives a
higher and durable meaning [ ... ]’52 Makanec argued that the NDH was
engaged in a struggle for the survival of European culture:
Fighting today for Croatia and Europe, we fight for the values that are repre-
sented by names such as Sophocles, Plato, Dante, Bošković, Pascal, Goethe
and so many other great men, and against the world whose representatives
are Rotschild, Morgenthau, La Guardi, Apfelbaum or Bela Kun.53

The racial law decrees

The idea of human ‘selection’ was reflected in the NDH’s Legal Decree
on Citizenship promulgated on 30 April 1941. This decree made a dis-
tinction between a ‘citizen’ (državljanin) and a ‘state national’ (državni
pripadnik): a state national was ‘a person who stands under the protec-
tion of the Independent State of Croatia’, while a citizen was a ‘state
national of Aryan origin who by his actions has demonstrated that he
did not work against the liberation aspirations of the Croatian people
and who is willing to readily and faithfully serve the Croatian people and
the Independent State of Croatia’.54 Only the citizen was ‘the bearer of
political rights according to the decrees of the law’.55As Jozo Tomasevich
noted, ‘with this formulation not only Jews, Serbs, and Gypsies, but also
Croats who did not agree with the Ustashas could, by administrative fiat,
be denied Croatian citizenship’.56
The notion of Aryan racial identity found further legal expression in
two racial decrees also issued on 30 April: The Law Decree on Racial
Affiliation and The Law Decree on the Protection of the Aryan Blood
and Honour of the Croatian People.57 The first decree stated that an
individual of Aryan descent (arijsko porijetlo) was one ‘who descends
from ancestors, who are members of the European racial community or
who descends from ancestors of that community outside of Europe’.58 An
individual could prove his/her Aryan descent through the birth, baptis-
mal and marriage certificates of his/her ancestors in the first and second

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 Jews and Honorary Aryans in the Croat Racial State 

generations (parents and grandparents), while members of the Islamic

religious community who were unable to offer the necessary documents
had to present written testimony of two credible witnesses who knew
their ancestors (parents and grandparents) and could verify that there
were no ‘individuals of non-Aryan descent’ among them.59
The first decree also specified who was legally counted as a Jew.
Individuals were Jews by race if they had at least three Jewish grand-
parents; a grandparent was defined as Jewish if he/she belonged to the
‘Mosaic faith’.60 Individuals with one Jewish grandparent (a quarter-Jew)
were able to legally acquire NDH citizenship, while certain half-Jews
(i.e. with two Jewish grandparents) could also attain Aryan legal status.
A half-Jew was considered non-Aryan if he/she: a) was a member of
the ‘Mosaic faith’ on or after 10 April 1941; b) was married to a full or
three-quarter Jew; c) had married an individual with two or more Jewish
grandparents after the promulgation of the race laws, or was a descend-
ant of such a marriage; d) was the illegitimate child of a full or three-
quarter Jew and was born after 31 January 1942; or e) was classified as a
Jew or Jewess by the Ministry of Internal Affairs on the recommendation
of the Racial–Political Committee (Rasno-političko povjerenstvo).61 Jews
and half-Jews born outside of Croatia to parents who did not originate
from the territory of the NDH were also defined as non-Aryans, as were
the illegitimate children born of a full or three-quarter Jewish woman,
and individuals marrying Jews after 30 April 1941 in contravention of the
racial law decree.62
The first decree further defined the Gypsy as an individual who had
two or more grandparents who were Gypsies by race.63 The sixth arti-
cle of the first decree also gave the Head of State the right to grant all
political rights that belong to individuals of Aryan descent to non-Aryan
individuals (together with their spouses and children) who had proven
themselves ‘meritorious for the Croatian people, especially for its libera-
tion’ before 10 April 1941.64 The second racial law decree (on the protec-
tion of Aryan blood and honour) banned marriages between Aryans
and racial Jews, as well as with other individuals of non-Aryan descent;
this law decree also explained in what circumstances a special licence
was required from the Ministry of Internal Affairs (on recommendation
of the Racial–Political Committee) for certain marriages (e.g. a marriage
between a half-Jewish individual and an Aryan).65
Although the NDH’s racial law decrees were modelled on the National
Socialist Nuremberg laws of September 1935, the Ustasha race laws were

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 Honorary Aryans

nevertheless in line with the arguments of pre-war Ustasha and Croat anti-
Yugoslavist ideology in regard to racial anthropology and racial identity. On
3 May 1941 an anonymous article in the main Ustasha daily, Hrvatski narod,
entitled ‘Interpretation of the Racial Law Decrees’ – which in all probabil-
ity was written by Boris Zarnik – stated that the NDH ‘is a national state
and only Aryans have the right to occupy responsible positions in it and
direct its fate’.66 A nation, the article claimed, was ‘a group of people with
a common tradition, common spiritual goods and the will for the com-
mon advancement of those goods’, while a race was ‘a group of people who
correspond in essential hereditary characteristics’.67 The nation possessed a
unique spirit, and ‘spirituality has its source in the psyche of the individual,
which is to a large degree the expression of his hereditary spiritual charac-
teristics’ and consequently, the ‘spiritual essence of the nation is therefore
mainly a function of its racial structure’. Accordingly, ‘only members of the
racial community who form part of the nation can successfully participate
in the building up of the original cultural goods of the nation’, and ‘only
they can faithfully serve the nation and decide its fate’.68
Any nation, the article continued, that ‘wishes to preserve its national
individuality cannot give to individuals foreign by race the same rights
that it gives to individuals who are of the same origin and racial struc-
ture’; therefore, an Aryan nation could only assimilate foreigners who
belonged to another Aryan people.69 The article identified two racial
minorities as being essentially different to the Croatian people in terms
of their ‘racial components’: the Jews, who occupied a high social posi-
tion, and the Gypsies, who occupied the lowest position in the social
hierarchy. The Jews were defined not by their ‘Mosaic faith’ but by their
‘racial structure and biological heritage’; the author explained that cer-
tificates of baptism were the ‘surest criteria’ for confirming the Aryan
descent of one’s grandparents because ‘in the time of our grandparents,
the Jews, as a general rule, almost never mixed with Aryans’.70 The article
claimed that the Ustasha race laws were not based on the biologically
untenable idea of racism, according to which one race was superior
to another, and, therefore, the race laws were not in conflict with the
teachings of Catholicism, which was ‘one of the foundations of Croatian
spiritual culture’.71 Every race was equally worthy in the sense that each
race had biologically adapted to its own particular environment, but it
was not right that a foreign racial minority, such as the Jewish race in
Germany, should ‘arrogate for itself leadership in the [German] culture
and economy’.72 The article justified the Ustasha race laws as ‘only an

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 Jews and Honorary Aryans in the Croat Racial State 

expression of the aspiration that the Croatian state, its fate and spiritual
and economic culture be administered in the national spirit and for the
exclusive welfare of the Croatian people’.73
The article noted that the race laws were ‘prepared according to the
German law decrees’ (i.e. the Nuremberg laws), but remarked that
whereas the German government employed the term deutsches oder
artverwandtes Blut (‘German or kindred blood’), the Croatian government
used the term arijsko porijetlo (‘Aryan descent’) since ‘blood in a biological
sense actually has no connection with heredity’.74 Furthermore, there was
no such thing as a separate Croatian race, for ‘the Croats, as all European
nations in general, are a mixture of the Nordic, Dinaric, Alpine, Baltic
and Mediterranean races with small admixtures of other races’.75 The
European racial community was thus defined as ‘a group of those races
that have for centuries been mixing with one another in Europe: Nordic,
Dinaric, Alpine, Baltic and Mediterranean‘.76 While the Croats were
said to exhibit traits of all the main European races, the NDH’s schol-
ars and ideologists who wrote on the subject of race stressed the ideal
physical and spiritual qualities of the Dinaric and Nordic races, which
were regarded as the leading and decisive types in the Croatian people’s
racial composition. According to the general academic and ideological
view in the NDH, the Dinaric and Nordic races, or more specifically, a
Nordic–Dinaric racial admixture, had been chiefly responsible for the
establishment of the Croatian state and its major cultural achievements;
according to the Ustasha ideologist Milivoj Karamarko (1920–1945), 65%
of the Croats belonged to the Dinaric race and 10% were of Nordic racial
type (a further 20% were of Alpine race).77
According to the article on the racial decrees, the Jews and Gypsies
had, throughout history, remained outside the European community
because of Jewish ‘religious and racial exclusivity’ and the low Gypsy
‘social position’.78 The predominant racial types among the Jews con-
sisted of the ‘Oriental and Near Eastern races with admixtures of the
Mongol and Black races’, while the Gypsies were ‘a mixture of the Indic
and Iranian races with paleo-negroid elements [and] with Oriental and
Mongoloid admixtures’; both the Jews and Gypsies carried, however, a
20% admixture of the European racial community.79 The Ustasha racial
decrees had not mentioned the NDH’s Serbian Orthodox minority at all,
for the question of the racial origin and identity of the Serbs was a much
more complex issue. According to the Ustashe, the Croatian Serbs were
a people of diverse ethnic–racial origin that only possessed a common

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 Honorary Aryans

national consciousness through their adherence to the Serbian Orthodox

Church. The autochthonous Serbs of the NDH were officially classified
as ‘Greek-Easterners‘ (grčkoistočnjaci).80 Ustasha racial propaganda
would often group the Greek-Eastern ‘Serb–Vlachs’ together with Jews
and Gypsies, since a large portion of the former were defined as having
a good deal of Gypsy or Near Eastern blood,81 but many Serbs were also
considered to be of Croatian and Serbian–Slavic (i.e. Aryan) blood, so
that the Orthodox or ‘Greek-Eastern’ question was considered a more
complex problem requiring a different approach from the one employed
in regard to Jews and Gypsies. The Serbian peasantry in the NDH was
thus subject to policies of forced assimilation through conversion to
Roman Catholicism.82 On the other hand, the Ustashe stipulated that any
Jews, Gypsies and Tzintzars (Vlachs) wishing to convert to Catholicism
would be prohibited from doing so.83
As regards the sixth article of the first racial decree, the author of
the article on the racial law decrees noted that the possibility that an
‘individual with stronger admixtures of Jewish blood or even a pure
Jew’ could, ‘in the most exceptional cases’, be recognised as an Aryan,
was ‘biologically justified’ by the fact that Jews possessed a 20 to 22%
European racial admixture.84 Accordingly, it was possible that an indi-
vidual Jew might actually possess, through a chance combination of
genes, a more dominant European racial strain:
If a certain Jew or half-Jew sacrificed himself for years, suffered poverty in
the homeland or in exile and risked his life for a lofty idea instead of liv-
ing comfortably and acquiring material goods, then he has passed the best
experiment, which proves that he possesses the moral characteristics that
distinguishes the Aryan community, that he is therefore such an individual
in whom a greater quantity of Aryan inherited factors have been combined,
mixed with the Jewish racial community [ ... ] He is in a biological sense at
least as much an Aryan as that individual, who, besides three Aryan grand-
parents, has one Jewish grandparent [ ... ]85

Such an individual had thus proven that he possessed ‘predominantly

Aryan characteristics’ and that, ‘according to the majority of his chromo-
somes he resembles a man of Aryan descent’.86 The article made clear that
the fate of the Jewish ‘honorary Aryans’ in the NDH would be their even-
tual disappearance through total biological assimilation. Accordingly, the
elimination or ‘cleansing’ of those ‘non-Aryan elements’ that were already
‘biologically mixed with the Croatian nation’ could be only achieved
through the method of Verdrängungszucht, that is, the process whereby a

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 Jews and Honorary Aryans in the Croat Racial State 

person of mixed blood, and his descendants, continually ‘interbreed’ with

individuals of ‘pure race’ until the ‘foreign racial factors’ are diminished
to such a small extent as to be hardly apparent. The author concluded
that ‘Jewish inherited factors in the Croatian people therefore need to be
dissipated through successive interbreeding so that practically nothing
more remains of them’.87 The government was also cautioned to ensure
that marriages between Aryans and individuals who had ‘½ Jewish
blood’ or had Gypsies, Blacks, Malays or Chinese amongst their ances-
tors, were made more difficult and/or strictly controlled.88 The article did,
however, point out that the government could not invalidate interracial
marriages (for example between a Jewish Catholic man and a Catholic
Aryan woman) that had been contracted in a church.89 According to a
1943 article in Spremnost by Ivan Krajač, the Croats had not received any
significant admixture of ‘Semitic blood’ throughout their ‘pre-history and
history’, with the exception of an ‘insignificant number of mixed-bloods
in the towns in the most recent period’.90
On 4 June 1941 the Ministry of Internal Affairs issued the Decree on
the Establishment [Verification] of the Racial Affiliation of State and
Government Officials and Executives of Free Academic Professions. As
part of the decree, the Ministry provided guidelines for determining
racial affiliation.91 For example, an individual who had a paternal Jewish
grandfather, a paternal Aryan grandmother and an Aryan mother would
be classified on the official form for declaring racial affiliation as ‘3/4
Aryan, 1/4 Jew’; an individual who had one Gypsy great-grandfather,
one Jewish great-grandmother, with the remaining ancestors Aryans,
would be classified as ‘3/4 Aryan, 1/8 Jew, 1/8 Indid [Indic race]’.92 The
Ministry’s guidelines pointed out that, according to the first racial law
decree, ‘an Aryan is only that person, who has ancestors who were
members of the Aryan racial community’. If a person had one Jewish
grandparent (i.e. a quarter-Jew), then he/she would have the ‘same rights
to acquire citizenship as an Aryan‘, but would not automatically be recog-
nised as an Aryan; such a person would be considered an ‘Aryan-Jewish
hybrid’.93 The guidelines made clear that for some offices the racial decree
could prescribe a search for ‘proof of Aryan descent’ extending beyond
one’s grandparents.94 In cases where the documentary evidence of an
individual’s Aryan descent might be called into question, officials were
directed to look for a ‘Jewish appearance’ or ‘Jewish character’, which
included ‘great egotism, great accommodation to other people, lack of
any reservation and a great familiarity toward strangers’.95

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 Honorary Aryans

The Ministry’s guidelines also listed the following peoples as ‘non-Ar-

yan racial communities’: Tatars, Kalmucks, Armenians, Persians, Arabs,
Malays and Blacks. The Hungarians, Finns and Estonians belonged to
the ‘Aryan community’, even though they spoke Finno–Ugric languages;
the Albanians were also members of the Aryan community as was the
‘greater part’ of the Turkish people.96 The official classification of the
Indo–European speaking Persians and Armenians among the non-Aryan
racial communities shows the influence of the anthropological theory of
the main expert who drafted the NDH’s racial decrees, Boris Zarnik.97
In an article on ‘Race and Spiritual Productivity’ from 1931, Zarnik had
noted that the ‘present-day’ Persians, Armenians and Indians belonged to
‘different races’ in comparison to the original Nordic race that had been
the bearer of all the Indo–Germanic tongues, including the Indian and
Iranian languages.98 Zarnik was also a member of the Racial–Political
Committee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, along with the biologist
Zdravko Lorković (1900–1998) and the physician Đuro Vranešić (1897–
1946); the Ustasha president of the NDH’s Legislative Council, Milovan
Žanić (1882–1946), who was married to a Jewish woman, also attended
meetings of the Committee.99 The Racial–Political Committee was a gov-
ernment agency set up in early June 1941 in order to ‘prepare proposals
and drafts of laws, law decrees and regulations that concern the areas of
racial biology, racial politics and racial hygiene or eugenics’.100
Out of a total Jewish population of between 36,000 to 39,000 people,
only 100 Jews actually attained the legal status of Aryan citizens of the
NDH. Together with their immediate family members the total number
of ‘honorary Aryans’ was 500 people.101 It is important to note that only
a small minority of Jews were in a position to acquire honorary Aryan
status: these included Jews who had personal ties to Ustasha members
and officials, Jews who were able to bribe NDH officials, baptised Jews
and Jews in mixed marriages.102 For example, on 12 January 1942, the
printer and publisher Dragutin Stjepan Schulhof (1884–1983) agreed to
donate 50,221 of his shares (out of a total of 60,000 shares) in the largest
printing house in Croatia, ‘Tipografija’, to Matica Hrvatska, in exchange
for receiving Aryan citizenship for himself and his son Milan.103 Both of
Dragutin’s parents had been Jews, although he himself had converted to
Roman Catholicism before 1941 and considered himself a Croat; accord-
ing to the testimony of Milan Schulhof in August 1945, only his father,
and his sister Nevenka, who was married to the Jew Manko Berman,
were considered Jews according to the NDH’s racial law decrees, while he

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 Jews and Honorary Aryans in the Croat Racial State 

himself, along with his brother Velimir and non-Jewish mother Ljubica,
were Aryans (there was clearly some uncertainty as to Milan’s racial
status).104 Dragutin Schulhof was further pressured to buy the remaining
11% of shares of other shareholders in ‘Tipografija’ and, in turn, donate
those remaining shares to Matica Hrvatska; consequently, on 31 January
1942 Matica Hrvatska acquired 96% of all shares in ‘Tipograpfija’, becom-
ing the largest shareholder of the firm.105 Dragutin and Milan Schulhof
remained in Zagreb until the end of the war.106
Jews married to Aryan Croats in the NDH (comprising around one
thousand people) also received official protection from anti-Jewish
measures.107 Most of these Jews, and the Jewish honorary Aryans, sur-
vived the war. At the same time, Ustasha party officials complained about
the high number of officers of the regular Croatian army, the Home
Guard, who were married to Jewish, and Serbian, women. The Home
Guard (Domobranstvo) was led by former Austro–Hungarian Croat
officers, who generally did not belong to the Ustasha movement and
were markedly more moderate in their treatment of Serbs and Jews.108 A
meeting of Ustasha deputy party leaders (including Mile Budak) on 22
November 1943 called for the need to dismiss all Home Guard officers
who had Jewish and Serbian wives.109 Until 1943 a few thousand Jews in
the NDH, including businessmen, doctors, lawyers and engineers, were
also granted ‘Aryan rights’ (but not formal Aryan citizenship) because
their services were required by a government that was desperately
in need of specialists and professionals for the economic running of
the country. However, following a meeting between Reichsführer-SS
Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945) and Ante Pavelić in Zagreb in early May
1943, these Jews were deported to Auschwitz (at Himmler’s request).110
Otherwise, thousands of Croatian Jews were deported to Auschwitz in
two rounds of deportations in August 1942 and April/May 1943 by the SS,
with Ustasha agreement and assistance, while the Ustasha government
itself was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews, killed mostly in
the Jasenovac concentration camp; the Nazis and Ustashe exterminated
between 70% and 75% of the Jewish population of the NDH.111
The Ustasha of Jewish origin, Vlado Singer, also perished in an Ustasha
concentration camp. Singer was not granted honorary Aryan status
because he was considered a Croat by the Ustashe. The small number
of other Ustasha and/or NDH officials of Jewish parentage, such as Ivo
Korsky, Ljubomir Kremzir, David Sinčić and Oktavijan Svježić were also
not considered racial Jews; on the other hand, the Jew Vilko Lehner,

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 Honorary Aryans

an employee of the Ministry of National Economy, was granted Aryan

citizenship.112 In the early months of the NDH Singer was head of the
Ustasha intelligence service (department 2 of the Ustasha Supervisory
Service – Ustaška nadzorna služba – UNS), but in September of the same
year he was arrested on the charge of maintaining secret ties with the
Communist Partisans. He was murdered in the Stara Gradiška camp in
1943.113 Although the circumstances surrounding Singer’s arrest and death
are still not entirely clear, it does appear that his Jewish origin played
some part in his removal. There is reason to believe that Pavelić was wor-
ried about German objections to a racial Jew holding high office in the
NDH.114 The pre-war Ustasha Ljubomir Kremzir (1911–1955) was also of
Jewish origin and became the chief controller of the NDH’s main custom
house in Zagreb.115 Despite his high office, Kremzir was unable to save
his sister Zlata Glück and her family from deportation to Auschwitz.116
In April 1944 the German ambassador to the NDH, Siegfried Kasche
(1903–1947), together with the German police attaché in Zagreb,
SS-Obersturmbannführer Hans Helm (1909–1946), sent a report to Berlin
in which Kasche stated that the Jewish question in the NDH had been
solved apart from the cases of Jewish honorary Aryans, Jews in mixed
marriages and Mischlinge. Helm added that the problem of Mischlinge and
mixed marriages had not been solved in Germany either.117 Although the
National Socialists rejected, in principle, the notion of Jewish honorary
Aryans, and while German agencies in the NDH criticised the Ustashe
for their protection of certain Jews,118 the Reich itself provided leniency
from the Nuremberg laws to a certain number of protected German Jews
(Schutzjuden) whose economic or scientific services were required by the
Nazi state.119 In any case, the exemption of a small minority of Jews in the
NDH does not bring Ustasha racial anti-Semitism into question: the sixth
article of the first racial law decree clearly specified that meritorious non-
Aryans could attain the political rights of ‘individuals of Aryan descent’.
The article did not state that these Jews would actually be classified as
Aryan, and was therefore not in contradiction with race theory (although
there were cases where individuals of completely Jewish descent, such as
Ivo Korsky (1918–2004), were simply counted as Croats).
In the specific case of the NDH’s ‘first lady’, it should be pointed
out that, under the Ustasha race laws, Ante Pavelić‘s wife, Mara née
Lovrenčević (1897–1984), the daughter of a Catholic Croat father and a
Jewish mother, Ivana Herzfeld,120 was Aryan and not Jewish, as has been
argued or implied by some historians. Mara Pavelić was already married

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 Jews and Honorary Aryans in the Croat Racial State 

to an Aryan before 10 April 1941 and did not adhere to the Jewish reli-
gion; these two facts made her Aryan according to the NDH’s racial
law decrees.121 In his first report to Berlin on 3 May 1941 Kasche noted
that the wives of Pavelić and the Minister for the Home Guard, Field
Marshal Slavko Kvaternik, ‘have admixtures of Jewish blood’ and that
the wife of Milovan Žanić was a Jewess.122 Žanić’s wife, Alma née Stöger,
was exempted from the racial law decrees because she was married to
a Croat and Ustasha, but the wives of Pavelić and Kvaternik (the wife
of the latter, Olga, was the daughter of Josip Frank and his non-Jewish
wife Dora Martini)123 did not need to acquire honorary Aryan status
or be exempted from the racial law decrees. Accordingly, Slavko’s son,
the chief of all Ustasha police and security forces until September 1942,
Eugen Dido Kvaternik (1910–1962), was also an Aryan (i.e. he was ¾
Aryan and ¼ Jewish). In his capacity as head of UNS Kvaternik directed
the policies of deportation and extermination of the NDH’s Serbs, Jews
and Gypsies. According to the post-war testimony of the Ustasha com-
mander Ante Moškov (1911–?), Kvaternik’s hostility toward Jews could
have derived from his desire to show others that he had no ‘racial con-
nection’ to Jewry.124
In order to gain a better perspective on the question of ‘racial purity’
in the NDH, one might add that Eugen Kvaternik’s German counterpart,
the head of the Reich Security Main Office, SS-Obergruppenführer
Reinhard Heydrich (1904–1942), was continually suspected by many peo-
ple in the Reich of having a Jewish parent or grandparent.125 If Heydrich
truly had Jewish descent (which was most probably not the case), then
he should have never been permitted to join the SS, since that National
Socialist political and military organisation required its officers to prove
pure Aryan ancestry back to the year 1750 (enlisted men had to show
untainted Aryan ancestry to the year 1800).126 Yet even if Heydrich was
of partly Jewish descent, his exemption from the SS’s strict entry require-
ments would simply be another example (albeit an important one) of the
exception proving the rule. Otherwise, a German Mischling would have
been able – depending on a number of factors – to become an officer
of any branch of the German armed forces (Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe or
Kriegsmarine).127
The racial anti-Semitism of the Ustasha regime was clearly expressed
in the absence of any notable mention of Josip Frank in the Ustasha
media.128 Frank did not receive any sort of posthumous honorary Aryan
status in the NDH. In late August 1941 his daughter, Olga Kvaternik,

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 Honorary Aryans

committed suicide, apparently due to the fact that she was half-Jewish.129
While Ante Starčević and Stjepan Radić were frequently eulogised by
the Ustasha press in the NDH, Josip Frank was intentionally forgotten,
and this was due to Frank’s Jewish origin. Pavelić alluded to this during
a meeting with high-ranking Ustasha officials on 4 February 1944. The
Poglavnik noted that one of the reasons why the Party of Right led by
Frank had failed to capitalise on Starčević’s greatness and popularity
was that ‘Frank, who did not emerge from the Croatian national core,
was never able to draw the wider national rank and file with him’.130 The
Ustashe had also adopted the ‘a-Semitism’ of the Croatian Peasant Party
in order to justify its own radical anti-Semitic policy. During the same
meeting, the Ustasha Doglavnik or deputy party leader Miško Račan
(1882–1945) remarked that when individual citizens took the opportu-
nity to criticise Ustasha measures against Jews and Serbs at local party
meetings, he had always justified these actions by citing Radić’s opinions
against the Jews and Starčević’s statements against the Serbs.131

Notes
 Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation and
Collaboration (California: Stanford University Press, 2001), 52–53.
 ibid, 272.
 See ibid, 274–279.
 The figures for the population of the NDH and the make-up of nationalities
were deduced on the basis of population statistics from 1931; different
authors give somewhat different figures. See Jere Jareb, Pola stoljeća hrvatske
politike 1895–1945 (Zagreb: Institut za suvremenu povijest, 1995), 87–88,
Jelić-Butić, Ustaše i NDH, 106, Hrvoje Matković, Povijest Nezavisne Države
Hrvatske (Zagreb: Naklada Pavičić, 1994), 113, 161 and Tomasevich, War and
Revolution in Yugoslavia, 592.
 On Glaise, see Jonathan Gumz, ‘Wehrmacht Perceptions of Mass Violence in
Croatia, 1941–1942’, The Historical Journal, 44, No. 4 (2001): 1028.
 Cited in Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 383, and Matković,
Povijest NDH, 154.
 Eugen Sladović, ‘Ustavni temelji hrvatske države’, Spremnost, 26 April 1942, 2.
Also see Matković, Povijest NDH, 67 and Ladislaus Hory and Martin Broszat,
Der kroatische Ustascha-Staat 1941–1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt,
1964), 77.
 Eugen Sladović, ‘Družtvovno-politički sustav Hrvatske’, Spremnost, 3 May
1942, 2.

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 Jews and Honorary Aryans in the Croat Racial State 

 Pavelić cited in Aleksandar Seitz, Put do hrvatskog socializma (Zagreb:

Hrvatska državna tiskara, 1943), 45.
 ibid, 38–39.
 ibid, 32.
 ibid.
 ibid, 180.
 ibid.
 ibid, 180–182.
 ibid, 29.
 ‘Probitak zajednice kao vrhovni zakon’, Hrvatski narod, 26 February 1942, 1.
 ibid.
 ibid.
 Vladimir Cicak, ‘Europa u borbi proti boljševizma’, Ustaški godišnjak 1943
(Zagreb: Nakladna knjižara ‘Velebit’, 1942), 213.
 Aleksa Djilas, The Contested Country: Yugoslav Unity and Communist Revolution
1919–1953 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 116.
 Christopher M. Hutton, Race and the Third Reich: Linguistics, Racial
Anthropology and Genetics in the Dialectic of Volk (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2005), 5–16.
 Cited in Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe
(London: Allen Lane, 2008), 11–12.
 Cited in Norman Davies, Europe: A History (London: Pimlico, 1997), 704.
 Cited in Stella Alexander, The Triple Myth: A Life of Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 99.
 ibid.
 ‘Glavne rase i narodi’ in Osnove zemljopisa: za 1. razred srednjih i sličnih škola,
ed. Ivo Juras (Zagreb: Nakladni odjel Hrvatske Državne Tiskare, 1943), 77.
 ibid, 78.
 ibid.
 Cited in Hutton, Race and the Third Reich, 16.
 ibid, 77.
 ibid.
 See Hutton, Race and the Third Reich, 24, 42, 113–139.
 Boris Zarnik, ‘Čovjek’, Hrvatska enciklopedija, Vol. 4 (Zagreb: Naklada
hrvatskog izdavalačkog bibliografskog zavoda, 1942), 355.
 ibid. Also see Boris Zarnik, ‘Rasa i duševna produktivnost’, Priroda: popularni
ilustrovani časopis Hrv. Prirodoslovnog Društva u Zagrebu, XXL, Nos. 5–6 (1931):
129–140.
 Hutton, Race and the Third Reich, p. 16.
 ibid.
 ibid.
 George L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism
(New York: Howard Fertig, 1999), 64.

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 Honorary Aryans

 See Vjekoslav Blaškov, ‘Židovi su kroz cijelu povijest čovječanstva smatrani

neprijateljima svakog naroda’, Hrvatski radnik, 30 April 1941 in Ivo and Slavko
Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu (Zagreb: Novi liber, 2001), 110.
 ibid.
 ‘Zašto smo nacionalisti, a ne komunisti’, Hrvatski narod, 1 August 1941, 6.
 ibid.
 S. R. Žrnovački, ‘Židovi podgrizaju narodni život’, Hrvatski narod, 7 February
1942, 2.
 ‘Izvršivanje zakona u slovu i duhu dužnost je svih službenika unutarnje
uprave’, Hrvatski narod, 26 February 1942, 3.
 ibid.
 Danijel Crljen, ‘Načela hrvatskog ustaškog pokreta’ (1942), in Ustaša:
dokumenti o ustaškom pokretu, ed. Petar Požar (Zagreb: Zagrebačka stvarnost,
1995), 77.
 Antun Bonifačić, ‘Europski duh je našao sebe’, Spremnost, 28 March 1942, 9.
 ibid.
 Julije Makanec, Hrvatski vidici: nacionalno-politički eseji (Zagreb: Hrvatska
državna tiskara, 1944), 27.
 ibid, 26.
 ibid, 27.
 ibid, 22.
 ‘Zakonska odredba o državljanstvu’, Hrvatski narod, 1 May 1941, 2.
 ibid.
 Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 384. Also see Holm
Sundhaussen, ‘Der Ustascha-Staat: Anatomie eines Herrschaftssystems’,
Österreichische Osthefte, 37 (1995): 522–523.
 ‘Krv i čast hrvatskog naroda zaštićeni posebnim odredbama’, Hrvatski narod,
1 May 1941, 1.
 ibid.
 ibid.
 ibid.
 ibid.
 ibid.
 ibid.
 ibid.
 ibid. For a partial English translation of the Ustasha race laws, see Raul
Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quandrangle Books,
1961), 454.
 ‘Tumačenje rasnih zakonskih odredbi’, Hrvatski narod, 3 May 1941, 7.
 ibid.
 ibid.
 ibid.

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 Jews and Honorary Aryans in the Croat Racial State 

 ibid.
 ibid.
 ibid.
 ibid.
 ibid. As Hutton notes, ‘laws passed in the early years of the Nazi regime used
the notion of “Aryan descent”, but exclusively in its negative form, so that
those “of non-Aryan descent” were excluded from different aspects of public
life’. Hutton, Race and Third Reich, 90.
 ‘Tumačenje rasnih zakonskih odredbi’.
 ibid.
 Milivoj Karamarko, ‘Dinarska rasa i Hrvati: osebujne naše značajke i
pozitivni prinos nordijske rase, Spremnost, 22 November 1942, p. 7. Also
see Nevenko Bartulin, ‘The Ideal Nordic-Dinaric Racial Type: Racial
Anthropology in the Independent State of Croatia’, Review of Croatian History,
5, No. 1 (2009): 203–213.
 ‘Tumačenje rasnih zakonskih odredbi’.
 ibid.
 Matković, Povijest NDH, 113–114, 159.
 See, for example, the 1941 article by Ćiro Truhelka in which he argued
that the nomadic Vlach ancestors of the Orthodox Serbs of Bosnia
and Herzegovina were ‘the descendants of pre-Aryan, pre-historic
Mediterraneans’. See ‘O podrijetlu žiteljstva grčkoistočne vjeroispovijesti
u Bosni i Hercegovini’ in Ćiro Truhelka, Studije o podrijetlu: etnološka
razmatranja iz Bosne i Hercegovine (Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska, 1941), 30.
The Croatian anthropologist Franjo Ivaniček stated that, while the Croat
population of the NDH was predominantly of Dinaric racial type, including
a sizeable minority of blond Dinarics, the Orthodox Serb minority mainly
belonged to the dark-skinned Near Eastern race. See Franjo Ivaniček,
‘Beiträge zur Anthropologie und Rassengeschichte der Kroaten (Eine
Untersuchung an Schülern aus Gau Hum.)’, Zeitschrift für Morphologie und
Anthropologie, 41, No. 1 (1944): 177–192.
 Mark Biondich, ‘Religion and Nation in Wartime Croatia: Reflections on the
Ustaša Policy of Forced Religious Conversions, 1941–1942’, Slavonic and East
European Review, 83, No. 1 (2005): 71–115.
 See Falconi, Silence of Pius XII, 285, and HDA, MUP NDH, kutija 34: broj
26081/1941 (‘Upute za vjerozakonski prelaz grčkoistočnjaka’) 24 October
1941.
 ‘Tumačenje rasnih zakonskih odredbi’.
 ibid.
 ibid.
 ibid.
 ibid.

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 Honorary Aryans

 ibid.
 Ivan Krajač, ‘Kulturna sposobnost Hrvata’, Spremnost, 6 June 1943, 9.
 ‘Naredba o utvrđivanju rasne pripadnosti državnih i samoupravnih
službenika i vršitelja slobodnih akademskih zvanja’, Hrvatski narod, 6 June
1941, 15.
 ‘Utvrdjivanje rasne pripadnosti državnih i samoupravnih službenika i
vršitelja slobodnih akademskih zvanja’, Hrvatski narod, 7 June 1941, 12. The
guidelines explained that since the word ‘Gypsy’ had an ‘insulting character’
this racial community was to be defined as ‘Indid’ since the Indic race
formed the main component of the ‘Gypsy racial community’. See ibid.
 ibid.
 ibid.
 ibid.
 ibid.
 On Zarnik as the author of the race laws, see Goldstein, Holokaust u
Zagrebu, 581. Raul Hilberg noted that ‘we need only recall the problems to
which the original German definition [of a Jew] gave rise to realize that the
Croat definition, with all its improvements, was drafted by expert hands’.
See Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, 454.
 Zarnik, ‘Rasa i duševna produktivnost’, 134. Also see Boris Zarnik, ‘O
rasnom sastavu evropskog pučanstva’, Hrvatsko kolo, VIII (1927): 79.
 Darko Polšek, Sudbina odabranih: eugeničko nasljeđe u vrijeme genske
tehnologije, 133. http://mudrac.ffzg.unizg.hr/~dpolsek/eugenika%20
sudbina%20odabranih_cijelo.pdf (accessed 1 March 2013). On Žanić, see
Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu, 621.
 ‘Rasno-političko povjerenstvo Nezavisne Države Hrvatske’, Hrvatski narod, 5
June 1941, 6.
 See Esther Gitman, When Courage Prevailed: The Rescue and Survival of Jews
in the Independent State of Croatia 1941–1945 (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House,
2011), 67 and Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu, 137.
 Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu, 136–137.
 Višeslav Aralica, ‘Matica hrvatska u političkom životu Hrvatske 1935.–1945’,
Časopis za suvremenu povijest, 41, No. 2 (2009): 468–469.
 See ibid, 469, 87 fn.
 ibid, 469.
 After the fall of the NDH, Dragutin Schulhof was arrested by the new
Communist authorities, deprived of his civil rights and had his property
confiscated. He was released from prison at the end of 1945. See the entry
‘Dragutin Stjepan Schulhof ‘ in Tko je tko u NDH, 355.
 Gitman, When Courage Prevailed, p. 67 and Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu,
378.
 See Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 434–439.

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 Jews and Honorary Aryans in the Croat Racial State 

 Jere Jareb, ‘Bilješke sa sjednica doglavničkog vijeća 1943–1945 iz ostavštine

dra. Lovre Sušića’, Hrvatska revija: jubilarni zbornik 1951–1975 (München-
Barcelona: Knjižnica Hrvatske revije, 1976), 174.
 See Gitman, When Courage Prevailed, 68, 76, and Tomasevich, War and
Revolution in Yugoslavia, 594.
 See Gitman, When Courage Prevailed, 65, Hilberg, Destruction of the European
Jews, 457 and Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 595–596, 607.
 Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu, 621–622.
 See the entry ‘Vlado Singer‘ in Tko je tko u NDH, 359.
 Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu, 621.
 ‘Ljubomir Kremzir‘, in Tko je tko u NDH, 206–207.
 Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu, 622–623.
 Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, 457–458.
 Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu, 536.
 There were around 200 Schutzjuden in Berlin alone. Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish
Soldiers, 203.
 Esther Gitman, ‘A Question of Judgment: Dr. Alojzije Stepinac and the
Jews’, Review of Croatian History, II, No. 1 (2006), 68, 73fn.
 Jewish law (Halakah) states that ‘a Jew is a person born of a Jewish mother
or one who properly converts to Judaism‘. Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, 7.
According to this definition, Mara Pavelić would have been considered
Jewish by religious Jews.
 Bogdan Krizman, Pavelić između Hitlera i Mussolinija (Zagreb: Globus,
1980), 27.
 Eugen Dido Kvaternik, Sjećanja i zapažanja 1925–1945: prilozi za hrvatsku
povijest (Zagreb: Naklada Starčević, 1995), 269.
 Ante Moškov, Pavelićevo doba, Petar Požar ed. (Split: Laus, 1999), 237.
 Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, 176–177.
 ibid, 20.
 For figures on the number of Jews and Mischlinge who served in the
Wehrmacht and SS in the Third Reich, see Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers,
64–65.
 I have found only one reference to Josip Frank in an Ustasha publication
between 1941 and 1945: a section on important dates in Croatian history
from a 1944 handbook for NDH soldiers merely notes that the ‘politician dr.
Josip Frank‘ was born in Osijek on 10 April 1844. See Hrvatu u borbi: vojnički
godišnjak za godinu 1944 (Zagreb: Odgojni odjel Ministarstva oružanih
snaga, 1944), 173.
 See the entry ‘Slavko Kvaternik‘ in Tko je tko u NDH, 227.
 Cited in Jareb, ‘Bilješke sa sjednica doglavničkog vijeća’, 184.
 ibid, 185.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126
 Conclusion

Abstract: This section offers some concluding remarks on

the nature of race theory in the Ustasha state, including its
inconsistencies and contradictions, and how it provided an
ideological framework for the formation of a new Croatian
national identity and culture. The conclusion explains that
the Ustashe aimed to eradicate all traces of Jewish life from
Croatia, with the biological assimilation of the honorary
Aryans forming part of this plan.

Bartulin, Nevenko. Honorary Aryans: National–Racial

Identity and Protected Jews in the Independent State of
Croatia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126
 Conclusion 

Racial identity in the NDH was defined legally in the racial law decrees
and culturally in the intellectual and ideological narrative presented in
numerous articles and books. The definition of Aryan Croat identity
was based on the recognition of the racial hybridity of the Croats, that
is, they consisted of an admixture of the main European racial types,
while, in contrast, the definition of the Asiatic racial counter-type rested
on the idea of (maintaining) racial purity, that is, the Jews and Gypsies
belonged to non-European races unlike the Nordic, Dinaric, Alpine and
other races of Europe. In this way the contradiction between the fact of
racial hybridity and the idea of racial purity could be theoretically over-
come, and as Max Weber had pointed out (see introduction), ‘with race
theories you can prove or disprove anything you want’. Consequently,
Ustasha race theorists could argue that the Croats were racially distinct
from other Slavs because they were the product of a peculiar race mix-
ture (and were thus racially hybrid). On the other hand, race theory
could exclude Jews, Gypsies and Serb–Vlachs from the Aryan Croatian
people on the basis of the theory of the racially non-European origins of
the former three groups.
Race theory was also able to explain why some Jews in the NDH were
entitled to attain the political rights of Aryan citizens: these Jews possessed
Aryan ‘spiritual’ characteristics, which included selfless heroism and
idealism. As in other racialist states, race theory in the NDH provided an
endless possibility for convoluted definitions and explanations in regard to
the question of national and racial identity. Despite its reliance on racial
anthropological theory, the NDH’s racial law decrees were also based on
spiritual racism, which was grounded ‘on an appeal to intuition, myth,
historical analysis, and a variety of irrational philosophies’ and ‘generally
emphasized the primacy of the racial “spirit” over the physical aspects of
race’.1 Although the official article interpreting the Ustasha racial law decrees
from early May 1941 tried to provide a biological justification for granting
Aryan status to certain Jews – for they supposedly had a 20% admixture of
European racial blood –equal, if not more, emphasis was placed on the sup-
posedly Aryan ‘spiritual’ attributes of these Jews; no genetic test could pos-
sibly determine the respective number of ‘Aryan‘ and ‘Jewish’ chromosomes
that these individuals contained. In that sense, the Ustashe used completely
subjective criteria for granting honorary Aryan status. Furthermore, they
were also motivated by more materialistic concerns; Dragutin Schulhof, for
example, became an honorary Aryan only after making a large monetary
‘donation’ to the oldest cultural institution in Croatia.

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 Honorary Aryans

Ultimately, there was a great deal of arbitrariness in how the Ustashe

defined and treated individual Jews. Although Schulhof was Catholic and
felt Croatian, he had to acquire honorary Aryan status, while Ivo Korsky,
the son of baptised Jews, was simply regarded as an Aryan Croat. The
inconsistencies and contradictions apparent in Ustasha racial politics
does not mean, however, that the Ustashe did not take their racial ideol-
ogy seriously. The ambiguities of racial policy applied only to a small
minority of Jews – exceptions to the rule – who were required to discard
their Jewish identity in exchange for honorary Aryan status. These Jews
were, along with their descendants, to be racially ‘Aryanised’ through
interbreeding with the majority Aryan population (Verdrängungszucht).
According to race theory, this process would eventually remove all
Jewish genetic factors from the Croatian national body, which in any case
were considered insignificant in comparison to the core Nordic–Dinaric
(plus Alpine) racial structure of the Croats. Biological assimilation was
thus conceived as another method of eradicating Jewry from Croatian
society.
Ustasha racial ideology aimed to remould the national identity and
culture of the Croatian people and state. According to that ideology,
the Croats were a cultured warrior nation of Aryans. Ustasha ethnolin-
guistic nationalism had constructed a Croat national genealogical tree
that included Slavs, Iranians, Illyrians and Goths. As in the case of most
European nationalist ideologies, the construction of a modern Croat
national identity was ultimately rooted in the biblical model or paradigm
of human identity, which ‘was founded on the notion of a lineage traced
forwards through time from an original male ancestor’, and ‘lineages
were distinguished by language and territory’.2
At the same time, the increasing influence of the discipline of racial
anthropology in the nineteenth century remoulded the definition of
national identity by distinguishing between racial and linguistic identity.
Many German Jews, for example, were thoroughly German according to
their language and culture, but German race theorists and racial anthro-
pologists argued that Jews did not truly belong to the Volk because their
racial composition was made up of foreign non-European races.3 Race
theory in the NDH similarly argued that there was no place in the Croat
national family tree for Croatian Jews or ‘Croats of the Mosaic faith’. To
accept the idea that Croats could also adhere to Judaism would mean
accepting the liberal concept of a civic nation. The Ustashe intended to
eradicate all traces of Jewish religion and cultural identity in Croatia

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126
 Conclusion 

along with the ideologies of liberalism and communism. In the minds of

racial anti-Semites throughout Europe, Jewish culture was inextricably
linked with modern liberal values, particularly cosmopolitanism, and
urban life, which were viewed as incompatible with true national (i.e.
racial) values.

Notes
 Aaron Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy (London and New York:
Routledge, 2002), 188.
 Christopher M. Hutton, Race and the Third Reich: Linguistics, Racial
Anthropology and Genetics in the Dialectic of Volk (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2005), 80.
 ibid, 23–24, 34, 48–55.

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DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126
 Index
Alpine race, 9, 45–47, 57–58,
66, 71, 85
Artuković, Andrija, 67
Aryans, 2, 65, 67–77, 81,
85–86
Ban (viceroy), 17
Blaškov, Vjekoslav, 66, 80
Blumenbach, Johann
Friedrich, 23
Bonifačić, Antun, 67, 80
Bosnia and Herzegovina, 5, 9
Budak, Mile, 51, 75
Catholic Church, 12–13, 19, 28,
53, 64
Catholicism, 5–6, 19, 28–29, 31,
54, 70, 72, 74
Celts, 8, 22, 33–34, 52, 56
Chamberlain, Houston
Stewart, 24, 31, 34, 40
Christianity, 26–27, 52, 68
Cicak, Vladimir, 64, 79
Communism, 6, 54–55, 67
Communist Party of
Yugoslavia, 54
Copeland, Fanny, 42
Crljen, Danijel, 67, 80
Croatian Party of Right, 9,
23, 78
Cvijić, Jovan, 44
Dauerrasse, 33
Deniker, Joseph, 32, 39
DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126
Dinaric race, 9, 32–33, 40,
44–48, 57–58, 66, 71, 81,
85–86
Disraeli, Benjamin, 24, 27
East Baltic race, 9, 46, 57
fascism, 5
Fischer, Eugen, 45, 66
Folnegović, Fran, 28
Frank, Josip, 2, 49, 51, 77–78, 83
Gaj, Ljudevit, 20, 35–36
Germans, 43, 45–46, 48, 50, 55,
62–64
Gobineau, Joseph-Arthur
Comte de, 23
Goths, 7–8, 48, 52, 56, 86
Greek-Easterners, 72
Gross, Walter, 64
Guberina, Ivo, 55
Günther, Hans F. K., 45
Gypsies, 5, 68–71, 73, 77, 85
Habsburg Monarchy, 9–10,
17–18, 23, 26, 28, 30, 51, 60
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich, 21
Helm, Hans, 76
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 20
Heydrich, Reinhard, 77
Himmler, Heinrich, 75
historic state right, 9
Hitler, Adolf, 7, 63

 Index
Home Guard (Domobranstvo), 75
Horstenau, Edmund Glaise von, 62
Hungarians, 17, 74
Illyrians, 8, 18, 20–22, 35, 52, 56
Indo–European (Indo–Germanic), 8,
21–23, 25, 34, 45, 56, 65–66, 74
Iranians, 7–8, 22, 45, 52, 56, 59, 71, 74
Israelite, 18–19
Jelačić, Ban Josip, 55
Jones, Sir William, 22
Joseph II, Emperor, 10
Judaism, 19, 83, 86
Karadjordjević, King Aleksandar, 43
Karadžić, Vuk Stefanović, 21
Karamarko, Milivoj, 71, 81
Kasche, Siegfried, 76
Kohn, Hans, 20
koljenović, 51
Korsky, Ivo, 75–76, 86
Krajač, Ivan, 73, 82
Kremzir, Ljubomir, 75–76, 83
Kvaternik, Eugen Dido, 77, 83
Kvaternik, Slavko, 2, 62, 77, 83
liberalism, 2, 10, 19, 21, 26–29, 31, 55,
64, 86–87
Lorković, Mladen, 52, 59
Lorković, Zdravko, 74
Lueger, Karl, 28
Lukas, Filip, 47
Maistre, Josèph de, 64
Makanec, Julije, 65, 67, 80
Marxism, 55, 67
Marx, Karl, 55, 60, 67
Matica Hrvatska, 47, 52, 74, 81
Matoš, Antun Gustav, 24, 29, 37
Mediterranean race, 8–9, 14, 46, 71
Milch, Erhard, 50
Milković, Josip, 67
Mischlinge, 2, 76, 83
Moškov, Ante, 59, 77, 83
Müller, Friedrich Max, 23
Muslims, 6, 62
Mussolini, Benito, 8
narodna zajednica, 63
natio croatica, 18, 24, 35
National Socialism, 3, 7–9, 63–65,
69, 77
Near Eastern race, 9, 47, 71–72, 81
Nodilo, Natko, 22
non-Aryans, 2, 34, 50, 58, 69, 72, 74, 81
Nordic race, 8, 34, 40, 45, 65–66, 71, 74,
81, 85–86
numerus clausus, 44
Nuremberg laws, 69, 71, 76
Oriental race, 9, 21, 47, 71
Pavelić, Ante, 2, 5, 7, 9, 13, 49, 54,
59–60, 62, 75–76
Pavelić, Mara, 76, 83
Philo–Semitism, 27–29
Pilar, Ivo, 34, 40
placeSouth Slavs, 35, 46
Protestants, 17, 18
Puk, Mirko, 64
Pure Party of Right, 2
racial anthropology, 7, 25, 46, 64–65,
70, 86
Racial–Political Committee, 69, 74
Radić, Antun, 30–31, 39
Radić, Stjepan, 22, 30, 78
Račan, Miško, 78
Rasse, 46
Sabor (parliament), 17
Sachs, Vladimir, 2
Schulhof, Dragutin Stjepan, 74, 82
Schulhof, Milan, 74–75
Seitz, Aleksandar, 63, 79
Sephardic Jews, 17, 43, 47
Serbs, 5–7, 9, 62, 68, 71, 75, 77–78, 81
Seton-Watson, R. W., 43
Singer, Vlado, 50, 54, 75, 83
Sladović, Eugen, 63, 78
Slavoserb, 24, 51
DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126

Slavs, 7, 9, 85–86
South Slavs, 8, 35, 46
SS (Schutzstaffel), 4
Starčević, Ante, 9, 78
Starčević, Mile, 29
Stepinac, Alojzije, 64, 79, 83
Strossmayer, Josip Juraj, 22
Štúr, Ludovít, 21
Treitschke, Heinrich von, 26
Truhelka, Ćiro, 32, 39, 53, 81
Tuškan, Grga, 29, 53
DOI: 10.1057/9781137339126
Index 
Valenta, Ante, 50
Verdrängungszucht, 72, 86
Vlachs, 9, 25, 33, 81
Volk, 14, 79, 86, 87
Vranešić, Ðuro, 74
Weber, Max, 8, 85
Weininger, Otto, 31
Wickham-Steed, Henry, 43
Žanić, Milovan, 74, 77
Zarnik, Boris, 45, 57, 66, 70, 74, 79, 82
Zionism, 10, 19