The Racial Idea In The Independent State Of Croatia

This book traces the intellectual origins of race theory in the pro-Nazi Ustasha Independent State of Croatia, 1941-1945. This race theory was not, as historians of the Ustasha state have hitherto argued, a product of a practical accommodation to the dominant Nazi racial ideology. Contrary to the general historiographical view, which has either downplayed or ignored the important place of race, not only in Ustasha ideology and politics, but more generally in modern Croatian and Yugoslav nationalism, this work stresses the significant role that theories of ethnolinguistic origin and racial anthropology played in defining Croat nationhood from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Upon the basis of older ideological and cultural traditions, the Ustasha state constructed an ideal Aryan racial type.

A historical study of the treatment of Jews in Yugoslavia after Nazi ideology was adopted, with an emphasis on the ways Jews survived and were rescued by those who put their own lives in great peril. When Courage Prevailed examines the ways Jews were rescued and survived in a country which the Ustaše, with their roots in Yugoslavia's nationality conflicts and politics, adopted the Nazi ideology which emphasized that there could be no compromise in regard to the Jewish Question and the Final Solution: no Jews deserved rescue. Survival of Jews was complicated by Yugoslavia's dismemberment at the hands of the Axis Powers; Germany and Italy and its satellites and puppets. The Nazi propaganda machine advocated that Jews must be exterminated for the good of the Aryans which included the Volksdeutsche, (Yugoslav of German ancestry), the Croats and the Muslims. Those who dared to defy German commands suffered severe penalties.

From 1941 to 1945, a small number of Jews were given the rights of Aryan citizens in Croatia by the pro-Nazi Utasha regime. This study seeks to explain why these exemptions from Ustasha racial laws came to be, how they were justified by the race theory of the time, and how the "Croats of the Mosaic faith" were eventually rejected as racial aliens.

A fundamental reassessment of the ways that racial policy worked and was understood under the Third Reich. Leading scholars explore race's function, content, and power in relation to society and nation, and above all, in relation to the extraordinary violence unleashed by the Nazis.

In Racial Science in Hitler’s New Europe, 1938–1945, international scholars examine the theories of race that informed the legal, political, and social policies aimed against ethnic minorities in Nazi-dominated Europe. The essays explicate how racial science, preexisting racist sentiments, and pseudoscientific theories of race that were preeminent in interwar Europe ultimately facilitated Nazi racial designs for a “New Europe.” The volume examines racial theories in a number of European nation-states in order to understand racial thinking at large, the origins of the Holocaust, and the history of ethnic discrimination in each of those countries. The essays, by uncovering neglected layers of complexity, diversity, and nuance, demonstrate how local discourse on race paralleled Nazi racial theory but had unique nationalist intellectual traditions of racial thought. Written by rising scholars who are new to English-language audiences, this work examines the scientific foundations that central, eastern, northern, and southern European countries laid for ethnic discrimination, the attempted annihilation of Jews, and the elimination of other so-called inferior peoples.

The fascist Ustasha regime and its militias carried out a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing that killed an estimated half million Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies, and ended only with the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II. Rory Yeomans analyzes the Ustasha movement's use of culture to appeal to radical nationalist sentiments and legitimize its genocidal policies. He shows how the movement attempted to mobilize poets, novelists, filmmakers, visual artists, and intellectuals as purveyors of propaganda and visionaries of a utopian society. Yeomans chronicles the foundations of the movement, its key actors and ideologies, and reveals the unique conditions present in interwar Croatia that led to the rise of fascism.

This book is the first historical work to examine the notion of national territories in Yugoslavia – a concept fundamental for the understanding of Yugoslav history. Exploring the intertwined histories of geography as an emerging discipline in the South Slavic lands and geographical works describing interwar Yugoslavia, the book focuses on the engagement of geographers in the on-going political conflict over the national question. Duančić shows that geographers were uniquely equipped to address the creation of the new country and the numerous problems it faced, as they provided accounts of Yugoslavia’s past, present, and even future, all of which were understood as inherently embedded in geography. By analyzing a large body of geographical narratives on the Yugoslav state, the book follows both the attempts to “naturalize” and present Yugoslavia as a sustainable political and cultural unit, as well as the attempts to challenge its existence by pointing to unresolvable, geographically conditioned tensions within it. The book approaches geographical discourse in Yugoslavia as part of a wider European scientific network, pointing to similarities and specifically Yugoslav characteristics.

A ground-breaking study that looks at why European nations sent troops to take part in Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union.