The ideology of nation and race: the Croatian Ustasha regime and its policies toward minorities in the independent state of Croatia, 1941-1945

In the short period from 1941 to 1945, the Croatian Ustasha* regime attempted to remove,
through deportation, physical extermination and forced assimilation, the Serbian, Jewish and
Roma minorities of the ‘Independent State of Croatia’ (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH).
The Nazi-backed regime also attempted the first serious effort by any regime in the region to
nationally integrate the large Muslim population of Bosnia-Herzegovina. This endeavour of
‘demographic engineering’ in the Balkans in the 1940s was, as Stanley Payne rightly asserts,
of ‘truly Hitlerian proportions,’ considering the fact that non-Croatian ethnic, racial and
religious minorities constituted approximately one-half of the NDH’s population.1 Jonathan
Gumz correctly attributes Ustasha policies to an agenda of a ‘nationalizing war’, that is, ‘the
extensive use of military and political violence to reduce a multi-national state to a nationstate.