page_title: Genocide of Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia
section_title: Historical background
hierarchical_section_title: Genocide of Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia / Historical background
caption_attribution_description: „Dr. Ante Pavlrlic, Poglawinnik“
context_page_description: The Genocide of the Serbs was the systematic persecution of Serbs which was committed during World War II by the fascist Ustaše regime in the Nazi German puppet state known as the Independent State of Croatia between 1941 and 1945. It was carried out through executions in death camps, as well as through mass murder, ethnic cleansing, deportations, forced conversions, and war rape. This genocide was simultaneously carried out with the Holocaust in the NDH, by combining Nazi racial policies with the ultimate goal of creating an ethnically pure Greater Croatia.
  The ideological foundation of the Ustaše movement reaches back to the 19th century. Several Croatian nationalists and intellectuals established theories about Serbs as an inferior race. The World War I legacy, as well as the opposition of a group of nationalists to the unification into a common state of South Slavs, influenced ethnic tensions in the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The 6 January Dictatorship and the later anti-Croat policies of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav government in the 1920s and 1930s fueled the rise of nationalist and far-right movements.
context_section_description: Many scholars claimed that the ideological foundation of the Ustaše movement, reaches back to the 19th century, when Ante Starčević established the Party of Rights,  as well as when Josip Frank seceded his extreme fraction from it and formed his own the Pure Party of Rights. Starčević  was a major ideological influence on the Croatian nationalism of the Ustaše, he was an advocate of Croatian unity and independence and was both anti-Habsburg and anti-Serb. He envisioned the creation of a Greater Croatia that would include territories inhabited by Bosniaks, Serbs, and Slovenes, considering Bosniaks and Serbs to be Croats who had been converted to Islam and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Starčević called the Serbs an “unclean race”, a “nomadic people” and “a race of slaves, the most loathsome beasts”, while co-founder of his party, Eugen Kvaternik, denied the existence of Serbs in Croatia, seeing their political consciousness as a threat. He was cited as “father of racism”, while some Ustaše ideologues have linked Starčević's racial ideas to Adolf Hitler's racial ideology.
  Frank’s party embraced Starčević’s position that Serbs are an obstacle to Croatian political and territorial ambitions, and then the aggressive anti-Serb attitudes became one of the main characteristics of the party. The followers of the ultranationalist Pure Party of Right were known as the Frankists (Frankovci) and they would become the main pool of members of the subsequent Ustaše movement. Following the defeat of the Central Powers in World War I and the collapse of  Austria-Hungarian Empire, the provisional state which was formed on the southern territories of the Empire which joined the Allies-associate Kingdom of Serbia to form the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later known as Yugoslavia), ruled by the Serbian Karađorđević dynasty. Historian John Paul Newman explained the influence of the Frankists, as well as the legacy of the World War I on the Ustaše ideology  and later genocidal means. Many war veterans had fought at various ranks and on various fronts on both the ‘victorious’ and ‘defeated’ sides of the war. Serbia suffered the biggest casualty rate in the whole world, while Croats fought in the Austro-Hungarian army and two of them served as military governor of Bosnia and occupied Serbia. They both endorsed Austria–Hungary’s denationalizing plans in Serb-populated lands and supported the idea of incorporating a tamed Serbia into Empire.  Newman stated that Austro-Hungarian officers' “unfaltering opposition to Yugoslavia provided a blueprint for the Croatian radical right, the Ustaše”.  The Frankists blamed Serbian nationalists for the defeat of Austria-Hungary and opposed the creation of Yugoslavia, which was identified by them as a cover for Greater Serbia. Мass Croatian national consciousness appeared after the establishment of a common state of South Slavs and it was directed against the new Kingdom, more precisely against Serbian predominance within it.
  Early 20th century Croatian intellectuals Ivo Pilar, Ćiro Truhelka and Milan Šufflay influenced the Ustaše concept of nation and racial identity, as well as the theory of Serbs as an inferior race. Pilar, historian, politician and lawyer, placed great emphasis on racial determinism arguing that Croats had been defined by the “Nordic-Aryan” racial and cultural heritage, while Serbs had "interbred" with the "Balkan-Romanic Vlachs”. Truhelka, archeologist and historian, claimed that Bosnian Muslims were ethnic Croats, who, according to him, belonged to the racially superior Nordic race. On the other hand, Serbs belonged to the “degenerate race” of the Vlachs. The Ustaše promoted the theories of historian and politician Šufflay, who is believed to have claimed that Croatia had been "one of the strongest ramparts of Western civilization for many centuries", which he claimed had been lost through its union with Serbia when the nation of Yugoslavia was formed in 1918.
  The outburst of Croatian nationalism after 1918 was one of the one of the main threats for Yugoslavia’s stability. During
caption: Ante Pavelić, one of the Frankists and the leading spokesman for Croatian independence in interwar Yugoslavia, founded the Ustaše movement
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