The Holocaust in the Independent State of Croatia (ISC) Event

On 10 April 1941, the ISC was proclaimed due to the Nazi victory over the Yugoslav army. Power was taken by the Ustasha, the Croatian pro-Fascist and pro-Nazi movement. In the following years the Ustasha committed genocide against the Serbs, Roma and the Jews and mass crimes against the Croats and the others. On 30 April 1941, racial laws were proclaimed defining Aryan and non-Aryan origin, which were the foundation for all later anti-Jewish measures. In a very short time, the ISC readily accepted the Nazi legal system, and in some areas even exceeded it. Till June/July 1941 Jews lost citizenship, they were forbidden to sign business contracts, they were ordered to wear yellow bands, compelled to forced labour, provisions were enacted about sending them to camps, their property was requisitioned, etc. Before the war NDH territory had almost 40,000 Jews, and only about 9,000 survived. Only several hundred of the survivors greeted the end of the war on occupied territory, thanks to personal and family connections, corruption, and intercedence of the Catholic Church. Fewer than 1,000 returned from the camps. At least 7,000 saved themselves by joining Tito's Partisans and fleeing to the Italian occupied zone or Italy itself. The Germans in 1942 and 1943, judged that the Ustashas were not carrying out the "final solution" thoroughly enough despite all their cruelty, and themselves organized raids and took the remaining Jews to their own death camps.

Speaker information

Ivo Goldstein is a History graduate of the University of Zagreb, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Belgrade. Since 2001 he has served as a full professor at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. His initial areas of expertise were Byzantium and Croatian history in the Middle Ages, but since the late 1990s he has focused on the Croatian history of 20th century. Goldstein served as ambassador of Croatia to France and UNESCO (2013-2017). He has published over 20 books, including Holokaust u Zagrebu [Holocaust in Zagreb] (Novi liber – Židovska općina Zagreb 2001), published in English translation by USHMM & the University of Wisconsin Press in 2016. Goldstein is also the author of: Židovi u Zagrebu 1918-1941 [Jews in Zagreb 1918-1941] (Novi liber 2004); and Hrvatska 1918-2008 [Croatia 1918-2008] (EPH Press 2008), which is a synthetic view of the last 90 years of Croatian history; and editor in chief of The Biographical Lexicon of the Jews of Croatia (Leksikografski zavod Miroslav Krleža, 2018). In 2019, he became member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina.