Ustaše: The Fascists That Shocked Even Hitler

It is the summer of 1941. We are just outside a small village named Meda in modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina, and a 10-year-old girl named Dorilla Cukul is forced to abandon her chores and run for the hills. Danger is coming to her family in the form of a fledgling political organization that has only recently taken power in the region: the Ustaše, led by a man named Ante Pavelić.

The crimes of the Ustaše would go on to become so extreme that even their allies in Nazi Germany were shocked by the sheer scale and brutality of the violence. Young Dorilla is about to witness this savagery firsthand. Although she was able to successfully hide from the monsters approaching her farmstead, not everyone was so fortunate.

Oftentimes, the Ustaše were unpaid, and so these men in black uniforms tore through the house looking for anything of value to pillage. Frustrated at the lack of trinkets to loot, they turned their aggression onto the inhabitants of the farmstead. Three of Dorilla’s family members fell victim to this violence and were dispatched in a slow, ritualistic manner, as if the attackers were savoring the cruelty as they picked apart middle-aged women and elderly men with knives, clubs, and bayonets.

Dorilla would describe it as a form of butchery. The worst fate came to her neighbor, a man named Sreto, who was captured while trying to flee; because he was a young male, he was subjected to torture beyond description. Dorilla and the other survivors were forced to wait in hiding as they heard Sreto’s blood-curdling screams ring through the village.

Hours passed, and the Ustaše finally left. Sreto’s mother, Anna, rushed to the house to check on her son and immediately let out a shriek that was somehow even more disturbing than Sreto’s had been. She found him in what Dorilla describes as such a state of slaughter that she then passed from farm to farm, wailing and begging the other survivors to come to her house and put her son out of his misery.

Petrified and traumatized, the other villagers did not dare to oblige her request for a mercy killing. He passed away from his wounds that night at just 20 years of age. I will leave it for you to imagine the condition that this young man must have been left in for his own mother to decide that death would be a mercy for him, so much so that she would go out and beg her neighbors to perform the grim deed.

For the 10-year-old Dorilla, this already horrifying experience was just the beginning, and soon she would find herself center stage in the cruelty of the 12 relatives left standing in her household. Only she would survive the violence, going on to give firsthand testimony to posterity of the cruelty that unfolded not just in this small village in Bosnia, but across all of Yugoslavia. This is the story of the Ustaše.

In the 1920s and 30s, in the area known then as Yugoslavia—which is today Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia—chaos reigned supreme, and political turmoil and division characterized daily life. Through these decades, governments and monarchs would collapse almost as quickly as they took power due to the region’s extremely diverse ethnic groups of Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks, as well as religious divides between Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Jews, and Muslims.

It was almost impossible for a government to establish a consensus between each of these groups, and the pendulum swung between each faction as power changed hands. In the midst of the chaos, a middle-aged Croatian lawyer named Ante Pavelić believed he had the answer to Yugoslavia’s woes: a Croatian nation-state within Yugoslavia, free from the influence of Serbs.

And so, in 1929, he founded the Ustaše, influenced by Italian fascism and later German Nazism. The Ustaše were ultranationalist, anti-Serb, anti-communist, fundamentalist Catholics who saw other races and religions as a threat to Croatian identity and the realization of the Croatian state. The means by which to achieve this goal were, predictably, violence.

Pavelić would write that “knives, revolvers, automatic pistols, and time bombs are the bells that ring in the dawn and rebirth of the Croatian state.” Despite his fiery words, Pavelić would play a relatively minor role in Yugoslavian politics, and during the 1920s and 30s, he even found himself in exile, eyeing the seats of power from the sidelines.

Pavelić and the Ustaše would have to wait for their time, but when the Second World War broke out in 1939, they finally got their moment. Chaos on the world stage had shaken up politics within the Balkans, and Yugoslavia was forced to pick a side in the conflict. In March of 1941, Yugoslavia signed the Tripartite Pact with the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan.

It looked like Yugoslavia had finally picked a side, and as a fascist himself, Pavelić could not have been more pleased about the direction his country was heading. But then, a group of anti-Axis Serbian officers led a coup against the pro-Axis government. Hitler and Mussolini were furious at the loss of a key ally after what they saw as insubordinate meddling.

On April 6, 1941, Germany and Italy invaded Yugoslavia, and after just 11 days of fighting, most resistance was firmly squashed. But this put the Axis powers in a bit of a pickle. With the Yugoslavian government now completely collapsing, someone would now need to take the reins of power and ensure that Yugoslavia remained a compliant ally for the war effort.

Who better to head this puppet government than the violently nationalistic Ante Pavelić and his fascist party, the Ustaše? By April 10, Pavelić was firmly in the seat of government as the head of the newly founded Independent State of Croatia, and the Ustaše were let loose on the people of Yugoslavia. They wasted no time getting to work fulfilling their vision of an ethnically pure and religiously united Croatian state.

Jews and Roma people were immediately targeted, but those who were the primary object of the Ustaše’s hatred were the Serbs now living within the Independent State of Croatia. The Ustaše’s intentions towards the Serbs became known as the “three-thirds” policy: one-third to be converted to Catholicism, one-third to be expelled from the land, and one-third to be killed.

This was a wildly ambitious task. Of the 6.5 million people living in this new Croatian state, up to 30% were ethnic Serbs, meaning that the Ustaše had around 2 million people to deal with. By their own logic, this meant 700,000 to forcibly convert, 700,000 to deport, and 700,000 to murder. Pavelić and his thugs would have their work cut out for them.

To meet this objective, they set up a number of concentration camps in the opening months of their reign, including Jadovno, Danica, and Slana, as well as Sisak, a concentration camp specifically designed for Serbian children, which we will cover later. By 1941, due to the relatively chaotic political circumstances and the fact that Pavelić and the Ustaše were new to governance, things were very unstable.

As such, the Ustaše used terrifying fear as a tool of governance, making an already brutal ambition that much more bloodthirsty and savage. Although concentration camps had been established, most of the violence during the opening weeks and months would be random, arbitrary, and quite frankly sickening.

The first of many mass killings occurred on April 30, 1941, less than two weeks after the Ustaše took power, where nearly 200 Serb villagers were rounded up in Gudovac and then dispatched in cold blood. A Catholic bishop named Alojzije Mišić, who was himself Croatian, was horrified at the violence.

He described, “People were captured like beasts, slaughtered, killed, thrown live into the abyss. Women, mothers with children, young women, girls, and boys were thrown into pits. Six full train carriages of women, mothers and girls, and children under age 10 were taken from Mostar and Čapljina to the Šurmanci station where they were unloaded and taken into the hills with live mothers and their children tossed down the cliffs. Poor souls, they were calm. I will not enumerate further. I would go too far.”

Violence was meted out both in large-scale mass atrocities but also in smaller, more random moments of savage opportunity in which vulnerable Serbs were targeted on little more than the whim of passing members. The historian Jonathan Steinberg tells us about the nature of these crimes: “Serbian and Jewish men, women, and children were hacked to death. There are photographs of Serbian women with breasts hacked off by pocketknives, men with eyes gouged out, emasculated and mutilated.”

On top of all this organized violence, there were also groups of unpaid volunteers, sometimes called the “Wild Ustaše,” who would roam the ethnically Serbian countryside looking to chase out Serbs, kill those that remained, and then reimburse themselves for the work by pillaging the houses of their victims and taking away any valuables they could find.

It was these so-called Wild Ustaše who came for Dorilla Cukul’s family, the 10-year-old girl with whom we opened this story. We will now follow her ordeal through the descent into horror. A few days after the first raid, which had taken three members of Dorilla’s family and left her 20-year-old neighbor Sreto begging to be put out of his misery, the Ustaše came again for the Cukul family.

On this occasion, they were more successful. All of Dorilla’s family was captured and would be slowly shipped towards a concentration camp. Men and women were immediately separated and then made to wait in a neighboring village: the women in a yard outside of a church and the men in a meadow on the opposite side.

They were told to wait there since there wasn’t currently any capacity for more prisoners in the camp itself. What the Ustaše failed to tell Dorilla was that they were currently making room for her and her family by dispatching those currently inside the overcrowded camp. After 10 days of waiting, the men were loaded up onto trucks and driven off into the distance.

Dorilla tells us that “that was the last time I saw my father, brother, and uncles.” A few days later, the women and children would follow suit and were forced to march towards the camp. As she walked through the village on the way to her doom, she remembers a group of Croatians who had come out of their houses rattling tin cans and shouting, “Serbs, Serbs, go to the camps. Those are the places you belong to. Go and end your lives there.”

Shortly after, Dorilla and the other girls in the family came to the banks of the river Sava where they would be ferried across. Whilst on the ferry, her mother, two sisters, and Aunt Maria—with four of her own children—started to realize the fate in store for them. Dorilla remembers a conversation between her mother, Savka, and her aunt, Maria.

She was telling my mother, “Savka, let us throw our children and ourselves into the river Sava. Come on, you see that they are taking us straight to death.” My mother replied, “We won’t, Maria. It may happen that some of us stay alive.” And here I am, still living and existing.

On the entrance to the concentration camp, Dorilla and her family were welcomed with bayonets. Some died right there, only a few feet past the wire that separates the free from the damned. Once they passed through, however, the horror would only continue, and on one occasion, a cousin of hers, just 11 years old during the ordeal, would find himself the target of violence after he was accused of stealing a piece of black bread.

For this transgression, his right hand was cut off at the elbow in front of her eyes by the Ustaše. He did not survive the amputation. Dorilla’s most harrowing moment was still yet to follow; in a moving interview, she would describe the camp experience and her time there.

“Entering the concentration camp was the same thing as entering a death club ruled by lawlessness and madness where you could only hear screams, crying, and moaning all the way to the sky. One sight that still freezes the blood in my veins is running from the Ustaše who were capturing little girls and then brutalizing them. That’s when I accidentally stepped on a newborn lying on the ground. The cry it let out still rings in my ears.”

All of this unimaginable horror was endured by a girl who was only 10 years old, now separated from her family and completely alone. To an extent, you could argue she was one of the lucky ones in that she was able to actually survive the madness and live on to tell her story. But she writes, “The consequences of that horror and evil left a deep trace of sorrow, misery, and grief on my soul because I lost the dearest people in my life. I had a joyful and happy childhood before the evil occurred.”

It wasn’t just at Jasenovac that these atrocities were taking place. Around the same time that Dorilla was in captivity, other horrors were taking place in another camp named Jadovno, where it was reported that cases of flaying were popping up. Flaying, if you didn’t know, is the removal of the entirety of your skin whilst you are still alive. It is an unthinkably cruel process which requires precision and intent to perform. One Serbian priest named Damjan Štrbac was reportedly subjected to this fate before his skinless body was tossed into a ditch to expire.

All of this is, of course, horrific, and it wasn’t just the immediate victims that this horror left an impression on. Many Nazi soldiers and officers found themselves working in and around the region at the time, and despite the atrocities that the Nazis were performing back in Germany and Poland, what they were seeing in Croatia seemed a step too far even for them.

The German Captain Konapacki called the slaughter of Serbs in eastern Bosnia “a new wave of butchery of innocence.” Lieutenant Colonel von Heer would describe the entire affair as “bestial,” and in the end, General von Horstenau would send a letter back to Germany about the humanitarian concerns in the region.

“About 500 15- to 20-year-old thugs descended under the leadership of an Ustaše lieutenant colonel. People were killed everywhere. Women were assaulted and then tortured to death. Children were killed. I saw in the Sava River the corpse of a young woman with her eyes dug out and a stake driven into her parts. This woman was at most 20 years old when she fell into the hands of these monsters. All around, pigs devoured unburied human beings.”

By 1942, Germany was concerned that this might be creating an image problem for the Axis powers and that the scale of violence might lead to further uprisings. As a result, they took the extraordinary step of putting an Ustaše chaplain named Miroslav Filipović on trial for the massacre of 2,300 civilians across three villages.

It’s worth remembering that this was probably out of a practical necessity to keep things stable and orderly rather than any ethical reservations about what the Ustaše were up to. Either way, it created a bit of a rift between Germany and Croatia. And when a German general remarked that the Ustaše had killed 500,000 Serbs in this horrific way, an Ustaše official replied, “Half a million is a slanderous accusation. The number is not higher than 200,000.”

It seems that from an ethical lens, both sides seem to have completely missed the point. Disagreements aside, not much would change, and for the next four years or so, Pavelić and the Ustaše would have full reign to persecute anyone they deemed as unworthy or undesirable. Numbers are disputed, but as many as half a million perished in the fires of ethnic division and fascist extremism.

All of this would finally come to a close in 1945 when the Second World War was finally being wrestled to its grand conclusion. Without Germany and Italy’s financial and military support, the Ustaše began to fall apart. Although it was during these final months and weeks that the violence peaked as fanatics took on an almost apocalyptic attitude towards the changing winds.

Nonetheless, with Pavelić weak in the absence of his allies, a communist partisan named Josip Broz Tito was able to sweep into the capital of Zagreb. In May 1945, the state collapsed, and Pavelić fled to Austria, then Italy, then France, and finally Argentina. Although he never actually faced a trial for his participation in the genocide, he was eventually shot in Argentina by a Yugoslavian agent.

He survived the shooting at first, but two years later, he died from his wounds. Although Pavelić never faced formal justice for his crimes, many of the Ustaše would in what became known as the Bleiburg repatriations. Back in May 1945, when many Ustaše members were fleeing Zagreb, they were intercepted by the British armed forces, who in turn handed them back over to Josip Tito and his partisan forces.

What followed was a series of war crime trials, but also mass executions. Some were against guilty members of the Ustaše, but many were also against civilian women and children who were swept up in the exodus and feared an indiscriminate series of reprisals against the Croats for what the Ustaše had done to the Serbs.

After successfully stamping out the Ustaše, Tito would go on to wipe out the project for a Croatian state and establish a communist dictatorship in Yugoslavia. His promise was one of “brotherhood and unity,” meaning there was a strict ban on nationalism of any kind. Under Tito, speaking of any ethnic grievances in the region was a dangerous offense, causing many to hold their tongues.

This forced silence would build into long-term pressure which would eventually explode onto the world stage in the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. Many of the tensions and causes of which can be traced right back to 1941, with Ante Pavelić and the birth of a regime built upon the foundations of hatred, division, and the systematic erasure of the “other.”

The tragedy of Dorilla Cukul is not an isolated incident but a microcosm of a much larger, more systemic failure of humanity. As she grew older, the weight of those memories never truly lifted. Survivors often carry a unique kind of pain, a survivor’s guilt mixed with the vivid, unwanted trauma of witnessing the absolute worst of which human beings are capable.

Her testimony remains a vital historical document, not just because of the names or the dates, but because of the emotional reality it conveys. When we discuss the Ustaše today, it is easy to get lost in the dry statistics of the war—the numbers, the political maneuvering, the military defeats—but behind every statistic, there was a house like Dorilla’s, a neighbor like Sreto, and a life like the thousands who were extinguished in the pits and camps of the Independent State of Croatia.

The ideology of the Ustaše was predicated on the idea that national purity could only be achieved through the violent excision of those they deemed “unworthy.” This is a recurring theme in the darkest chapters of the 20th century. By labeling their neighbors as an existential threat, the Ustaše leadership gave themselves and their followers a perverse permission to discard their moral compass entirely.

The “three-thirds” policy was not just a strategy for governance; it was a psychological mechanism used to justify the unjustifiable. It turned the complex, interconnected social fabric of a Balkan village into a binary of “us versus them.” It forced ordinary people into impossible situations, where the survival of a family member might depend on the betrayal of a neighbor.

Consider the atmosphere in the villages during those years. The constant fear of the “Wild Ustaše,” the sound of boots on dirt roads, the sudden silences that fell over communities when the black uniforms appeared. For a child like Dorilla, this was the only reality she knew. The innocence of childhood was replaced by the constant, grinding necessity of hiding, of being quiet, of watching for the signs of impending death.

The role of religion in this conflict is also a subject that has been debated for decades. The Ustaše claimed to be protecting the Catholic faith, yet their actions were a direct contradiction to the core tenets of that faith. By weaponizing religion, they were able to mobilize a segment of the population that might otherwise have hesitated to participate in such brutality.

It is a sobering reminder of how easily faith can be corrupted to serve political ends, how the language of righteousness can be used to mask the most unrighteous acts. The division between the Catholic Croats and the Orthodox Serbs, while historically present, was exacerbated to a point of no return by the Ustaše propaganda machine.

Furthermore, the response of the international community—or lack thereof—is a chilling aspect of this history. While German officers expressed horror, their primary concern was often the stability of the region for the war effort, rather than the intrinsic value of the lives being lost. This bureaucratic detachment allowed the atrocities to continue under the thin veil of “war necessity.”

It is a failure that haunts history, demonstrating that when a state decides to commit genocide, external observers often calculate the cost of intervention against the cost of indifference, frequently choosing the latter. The story of the Ustaše does not end in 1945. The resentment and the trauma were buried under the surface of the communist regime, held back by a strong central authority that refused to acknowledge the wounds of the past.

When Tito died and the Soviet bloc began to crack in the late 80s, the lid on that pressure cooker finally blew off. Many of the nationalist narratives that fueled the conflicts of the 90s were the same echoes of the 1940s. The ghosts of 1941 were never properly laid to rest. They were simply silenced, waiting for a moment to re-emerge.

The importance of preserving testimonies like those of Dorilla cannot be overstated. They serve as a firewall against the revisionist history that often follows such conflicts. When we look at the ruins of those times, we are not just looking at the past; we are looking at the potential consequences of unchecked hatred.

As Dorilla stood there on the bank of the Sava, watching the ferry, she was witnessing the death of her old life. She saw the desperation in her mother’s eyes, the realization that the world they had known was gone forever. That river represents the divide between a life of normalcy and a life of survival.

The memory of the newborn being crushed in the mud is perhaps one of the most haunting details of her account. It signifies the absolute devaluation of life in that space, where even the most vulnerable, the most innocent, were treated as obstacles to be trampled underfoot. It is a moment that shatters the concept of mercy.

We should also reflect on the role of the bystanders. When the villagers in the neighboring areas rattled their cans and cheered as the families were being sent away, they were making a choice. Silence and complicity are often the silent partners of atrocity. It is easy to look back and judge, but it is a question for every generation: what would we do in a society where such cruelty is normalized?

The subsequent lives of these survivors were defined by their experience. To return to a home that is no longer a home, to live in a village that has been emptied of its heart, to remember faces that are now only shadows—this is a burden that few can fully comprehend.

The legacy of the Ustaše is a stark reminder of the fragile nature of civilization. It takes only a few years, a few charismatic leaders, and a few broken social norms for a society to descend into a darkness that seems impossible to climb out of. The scale of the death and the nature of the methods used—the flaying, the hacking, the deliberate cruelty—were not just acts of war; they were acts intended to break the spirit of an entire people.

But despite the intent of the perpetrators, the human spirit, as seen in those who survived, often displayed an incredible capacity to endure. Dorilla’s survival is not just a statistical anomaly; it is a testament to the fact that, even in the most absolute darkness, some part of humanity survives.

Yet, this survival comes at a cost. The “deep trace of sorrow” she describes is the true toll of the Ustaše. It is not just the lives lost; it is the lives that were irreversibly altered, the childhoods stolen, and the permanent grief that carries on long after the last soldier has left the field.

The study of such events should not be a morbid fascination, but a commitment to remembrance. We study these stories to understand the mechanics of hate and the warning signs that often precede such an explosion of violence. The path to 1941 was paved with years of social, religious, and political instability.

Today, in a world that is still deeply fragmented, the lessons of this period remain incredibly relevant. The danger of dehumanization, the power of propaganda to divide communities, and the vital importance of speaking out against bigotry are the frontline defenses against the return of such ideologies.

The story of the Ustaše should be a warning beacon for the future. It reminds us that peace is not merely the absence of war, but the result of sustained effort, empathy, and a collective commitment to human rights. When those foundations are allowed to erode, the consequences are always catastrophic.

When we consider the life of Dorilla, we see the ripple effects of choices made by those in power. Every law, every decree, and every piece of rhetoric that dehumanizes a group of people has real-world consequences on the ground, in the villages, and in the lives of the most vulnerable.

History is a teacher that we often refuse to listen to. We like to think that we have evolved, that such levels of barbarism are confined to the dusty pages of history books, yet the potential for such events exists in every society. It is the responsibility of each generation to guard the gates of their society against the entry of such hatred.

The Ustaše did not act in a vacuum. They were emboldened by the global climate, by their alliances, and by the lack of resistance within their own borders. They were a symptom of a systemic collapse that started long before they took power, but they were the ones who turned that collapse into a systematic machine of death.

As we look back at the photos and the testimonies, we are confronted with the undeniable truth that these crimes were committed by people—not monsters, but people who made choices, people who followed orders, and people who watched while others were led to their deaths.

The ability to look at another human being and see only their ethnicity or their religion, rather than their personhood, is the first step on the road to the camp. It is the step that allows for the justifications, the bureaucratic dismissals, and the final acts of violence.

Ultimately, the story of Dorilla and the Ustaše is a story about the fragility of human dignity. It is a story that requires us to be vigilant, to be compassionate, and to recognize that the safety and rights of all people are inextricably linked. We cannot thrive if we allow our neighbors to be marginalized or persecuted.

The trauma of the 1940s in Yugoslavia still informs the political landscape of the Balkans today. It is a region with a deep memory of the past, a memory that is often invoked to justify current political positions. Breaking that cycle requires an honest confrontation with the history of the Ustaše and the consequences of their reign.

While the perpetrators are long gone and the geopolitical landscape has shifted, the fundamental human questions remain. How do we build a society that is resilient to the siren call of hate? How do we ensure that the voices of those like Dorilla are not just heard, but are used to prevent the repetition of such horror?

Her story is a call to action. It is a demand that we remember the names, the suffering, and the lessons. It is a reminder that each of us plays a role in the society we live in, and our choices, however small, contribute to the collective direction of our communities.

The cruelty was vast, but so was the courage of those who helped one another in secret. The stories of resistance, of those who hid others, who shared bread, or who refused to cooperate, are the counter-narrative to the despair. They remind us that even in the darkest times, humanity does not disappear.

We must also acknowledge the complexity of the period. It was not just a case of “good versus evil” in a simple sense, but a complex web of motivations, fears, and manipulations. Understanding this complexity is vital if we are to prevent similar dynamics from emerging in the future.

The journey from a peaceful summer day in Meda to the horrors of the concentration camp was rapid. It happened in the span of months. That speed is a warning. It shows how quickly the democratic order can be dismantled and how easily violence can become the primary language of political discourse.

Let us carry the memory of Dorilla Cukul as a symbol of both the capacity for destruction and the resilience of the human soul. May her testimony continue to serve as a beacon, shining a light into the darkest corners of the 20th century so that we may learn, grow, and ultimately be better to one another.

In the final assessment, the story of the Ustaše is a testament to the absolute necessity of justice. Without a reckoning, without an acknowledgment of the truth, the wounds of the past continue to fester, poisoning the present and threatening the future. Justice is not just about punishment; it is about restoring the moral balance of a society.

May we never forget the lessons learned at such a heavy cost. May we honor the survivors by dedicating ourselves to the preservation of human rights, the dignity of every individual, and the pursuit of a world where such a story as Dorilla’s never happens again. We owe it to the victims, and we owe it to the future.

The shadows of the past are long, but they are not insurmountable. Through education, empathy, and an unwavering commitment to truth, we can ensure that the lessons of the Ustaše are not forgotten, and that the principles of tolerance and human brotherhood prevail over the dark forces of hatred and division.