All who opposed and/or threatened the Ustaše were outlawed. In early 1941, Jews and Serbs were ordered to leave certain areas of Zagreb.
Pavelić first met with Adolf Hitler on 6 June 1941. Mile Budak, then a minister in Pavelić's government, publicly proclaimed the violent racial policy of the state on 22 July 1941. Maks Luburić, one of the chiefs of the secret police, started building concentration camps in the summer of the same year. Ustaše activities in villages across the Dinaric Alps led to the Italians and the Germans expressing disquiet. As early as July 10, 1941, Wehrmacht General Edmund Glaise von Horstenau reported the following to the German High Command, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW):
A Gestapo report to Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, dated February 17, 1942, stated that:
Italian troops in the field had competing territorial claims with their Ustaše allies and had cooperated from the start with Chetnik units operating in the southern areas that they controlled. Hitler tried to insist that Mussolini should have his forces work with the Ustaše, but senior Italian commanders, such as General Mario Roatta, ignored such orders.
The Ustaše enacted race laws patterned after those of Nazi Germany. These laws were aimed against Jews, Roma, and Serbs, who were collectively declared enemies of the Croatian people. Serbs, Jews, Roma and anti-fascist Croats and Bosniaks, including communists, were interned in concentration camps, the largest of which was the Jasenovac complex, where many were killed by Ustaše militia. The exact number of victims is not known. The number of murdered Jews is fairly reliable: around 32,000 Jews were killed during World War II on NDH territory. Gypsies (Yugoslav Roma) numbered around 40,000 fewer after the war. Of the number of Serbs who died, estimates tend to vary between 300,000 and 700,000.
The history textbooks in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia cited 700,000 as the total number of victims at Jasenovac. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center (citing the "Encyclopedia of the Holocaust"), "Ustasa terrorists killed 500,000 Serbs, expelled 250,000 and forced 250,000 to convert to Catholicism. They murdered thousands of Jews and Gypsies."
The Jasenovac Memorial Area, currently headed by Slavko Goldstein, keeps a list of 59,188 names of Jasenovac victims that was gathered by government officials in Belgrade in 1964. The previous head of the Memorial Area, Simo Brdar, estimated at least 365,000 dead at Jasenovac.
The Belgrade Museum of the Holocaust compiled a list of over 77,000 names of Jasenovac victims. It was previously headed by Milan Bulajić, who supported the claim of a total of 700,000 victims. The current administration of the Museum has further expanded the list to include a bit over 80,000 names. During the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, Alexander Arnon (secretary of the Jewish Community in Zagreb) testified about the treatment of Jews in Yugoslavia during the war.
Alexander Arnon's testimony included estimates of six hundred of thousand killed in the Jasenovac concentration camp.
During World War II, various German military commanders gave different figures for the number of Serbs, Jews and others killed on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia. They circulated figures of 400,000 Serbs (Alexander Lehr); 350,000 Serbs (Lothar Rendulic); between 300,000 (Edmund Glaise von Horstenau); more than "3/4 of a million Serbs" (Hermann Neubacher) in 1943; 600-700,000 until March 1944 (Ernst Fick); 700,000 (Massenbach).
The first group of camps was formed in the spring of 1941. These included:
These six camps were closed by October 1942. The Jasenovac complex was built between August 1941 and February 1942. The first two camps, Krapje and Bročica, were closed in November 1941. The three newer camps continued to function until the end of the war:
There were also other camps in:
Numbers of prisoners:
The Ustaše held the position that Eastern Orthodoxy, as a symbol of Serbian nationalism to them, was their greatest enemy. The Ustaše never recognized the existence of a Serb people on the territories of Croatia or Bosnia. They recognized only "Croats of the Eastern faith." They also called Bosnian Muslims "Croats of the Islamic faith,"(the latter which they wanted to force to convert to Christianity) but they had a stronger ethnic dislike of Serbs.
Some former priests, mostly Franciscans, took part in the atrocities themselves. Miroslav Filipović was a Franciscan friar (from the Petrićevac monastery), who joined the Ustaša army on 7 February 1942 in a brutal massacre of 2730 Serbs of the nearby villages, including 500 children. Filipović became Chief Guard of Jasenovac concentration camp, where he was nicknamed ""Fra Sotona"" by the camp inmates. He was hanged for his war crimes in his Franciscan robes.
For the duration of the war, the Vatican kept up full diplomatic relations with the Ustaša state (granting Pavelić an audience), with its papal nuncio in the capital Zagreb. The nuncio was briefed on the efforts of religious conversions to Roman Catholicism. After the Second World War was over, the Ustaše who had managed to escape from Yugoslav territory (including Pavelić) were smuggled to South America. It is widely documented that this was done through rat lines operated by members of the organization who were Catholic priests and had previously secured positions at the Vatican. Members of the Illyrian College of San Girolamo in Rome were reputedly involved in this: friars Krunoslav Draganović, Petranović, and Dominik Mandić.
The Ustaše regime had sent large amounts of gold that it had plundered from Serbian and Jewish property owners during WWII into Swiss banks. Of a total of 350 million Swiss Francs, about 150 million was seized by British troops; however, the remaining 200 million (ca. 47 million dollars) reached the Vatican. Allegations exist that it is still being kept in the Vatican Bank. This was reported by the American intelligence agency SSU in October 1946. This issue is the theme of a recent class action lawsuit against the Vatican Bank and others.
Adolf Eichmann trial witness Alexander Arnon testified about the Roman Catholic Church stance that time:
Unfortunately there were no protests. Croatia was definitely a Catholic state. Not even the Catholic Church in Zagreb said one word against the deportations and sufferings of the Jews.
E. Fratini and D. Cluster wrote in their book "The entity: Five centuries of secret Vatican espionage:"
The Archbishop of Zagreb, Monisgor Alojzije Stepinac, provided Catholic support to the Pro Nazi government of Ante Pavelic; knew right from the start about the massacres and extermination of Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies; and was one of the pillars of the effort to help Nazi and Croatian criminals to escape to South America after the Second World War.
Archbishop Stepinac also said this on 28 March 1941, in note of Yugoslavia's early attempts to unite Croatians and Serbs: "All in all, Croats and Serbs are of two worlds, northpole and southpole, never will they be able to get together unless by a miracle of God. The schism (Eastern Orthodoxy) is the greatest curse in Europe, almost greater than Protestantism. Here there is no moral, no principles, no truth, no justice, no honesty."
At the end of war, Ustaše continued fighting for a short while after the formal surrender of German Army Group E on 9 May 1945, and many refugees attempted to escape to Austria. Pavelić, however, with the help of associates among the Franciscans, managed to escape and hide in Austria and Rome, later fleeing to Argentina.
The remaining Ustaše went underground or fled to South America and countries such as Canada, Australia, Germany, with the assistance of Roman Catholic churches and their grassroots supporters Some of them persisted in their crusade against Yugoslavia.