page_title: Ustaše
section_title: Ethnic and religious persecution
hierarchical_section_title: Ustaše / Ethnic and religious persecution
caption_attribution_description: English: Serbian civilians who are being forced to convert to Catholicism by the Ustasa regime stand in front of a baptismal font in a church in Glina.
context_page_description: The Ustaša – Croatian Revolutionary Movement, commonly known as Ustaše or by anglicised versions Ustasha or Ustashe, was a Croatian fascist, ultranationalist and terrorist organization, which was active, as one organization, between 1929 and 1945. Its members murdered hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Roma as well as political dissidents in Yugoslavia during World War II. They were known for their particularly brutal and sadistic methods of execution, which often included torture and dismemberment.
  Much of the ideology of the Ustaše was based on Nazi racial theory. Like the Nazis, the Ustaše deemed Jews, Romani, and Slavs to be sub-humans. They endorsed the claims from German racial theorists that Croats were not Slavs but a Germanic race. Their genocides against Serbs, Jews, and Romani were thus expressions of Nazi racial ideology. However, the Ustaše viewed the Bosniaks as "Muslim Croats," not Slavs, and as a result did not persecute Muslim Bosniaks on the basis of race.
  In addition to Nazi racial theory, the Ustaše ideology incorporated fascism, Roman Catholicism and Croatian nationalism.
context_section_description: The Ustaše intended to create an ethnically "pure" Croatia, and they viewed the Serbs living in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina as the biggest obstacle to this goal. Ustaše ministers Mile Budak, Mirko Puk and Milovan Žanić declared in May 1941 that the goal of the new Ustaše policy was an ethnically pure Croatia. The strategy to achieve their goal was:
  One third of the Serbs were to be killed
  One third of the Serbs were to be expelled
  One third of the Serbs were to be forcibly converted to Catholicism
  The NDH government cooperated with Nazi Germany in the Holocaust and exercised their own version of the genocide against Serbs, Jews and Roma (aka "gypsies") inside its borders. State policy towards Serbs had first been declared in the words of Milovan Žanić, a minister of the NDH Legislative council, on 2 May 1941:
  This country can only be a Croatian country, and there is no method we would hesitate to use in order to make it truly Croatian and cleanse it of Serbs, who have for centuries endangered us and who will endanger us again if they are given the opportunity.
  The Ustaše enacted race laws patterned after those of the Third Reich, which persecuted Jews, Romani and Serbs, who were collectively declared to be enemies of the Croatian people. Serbs, Jews, Roma and Croatian and Bosniak dissidents, including Communists, were interned in concentration camps, the largest of which was Jasenovac. By the end of the war the Ustaše, under Pavelić's leadership, had exterminated an estimated 30,000 Jews and 26–29,000 Roma, while the number of Serb victims ranges as low as 200,000 to as high as 500,000 with historians generally listing between 300,000–350,000 deaths.
  The history textbooks in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia cited 700,000 as the total number of victims at Jasenovac. This was promulgated from a 1946 calculation of the demographic loss of population (the difference between the actual number of people after the war and the number that would have been, had the pre-war growth trend continued). After that, it was used by Edvard Kardelj and Moša Pijade in the Yugoslav war reparations claim sent to Germany. In its entry on Jasenovac, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says:
  Determining the number of victims is highly problematic, due to the destruction of many relevant documents, the long-term inaccessibility to independent scholars of those documents that survived, and the ideological agendas of postwar partisan scholarship and journalism, which has been and remains influenced by ethnic tension, religious prejudice, and ideological conflict.The Ustaše murdered between 320,000 and 340,000 ethnic Serb residents of Croatia and Bosnia during the period of Ustaša rule; more than 30,000 Croatian Jews were killed either in Croatia or at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
  The USHMM notes that estimates on the number of Serb victims, the Ustaše's primary victims, vary tremendously and that "the most reliable figures place the number between 330,000 and 390,000, with 45,000 to 52,000 Serbs murdered in Jasenovac."
  The Jasenovac Memorial Area maintains a list of 83,145 names of Jasenovac victims that was gathered by government officials in Belgrade in 1964, as well as names and biographical data for the victims identified in recent inquiries. As the gathering process was imperfect, they estimated that the list represented between 60%–75% of the total victims, putting the number of killed in that complex at between roughly 80,000–100,000. The previous head of the Memorial Area Simo Brdar estimated at least 365,000 dead at Jasenovac. The analyses of statisticians Vladimir Žerjavić and Bogoljub Kočović were similar to those of the Memorial Area. In all of Yugoslavia, the estimated number of Serb deaths was 487,000 according to Kočović, and 530,000 according to Žerjavić, out of a total of 1.014 million or 1.027 million deaths (respectively). Žerjavić further stated there were 197,000 Serb civilians killed in NDH (78,000 as prisoners in Jasenovac and elsewhere) as well as 125,000 Serb combatants.
  The Belgrade Museum of Holocaust compil
caption: Serb civilians forced to convert to Catholicism by the Ustaše in Glina
exif: {}