Croatia and the Rise of Fascism by Miljan Goran;

Author:Miljan, Goran;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2018-07-21T16:00:00+00:00

Immortal Youth

Joining the Ustasha movement implied willingness and readiness to sacrifice one’s life for the nation and state. Those who did so were considered heroes, even martyrs. Early on, the Ustashas started creating their pantheon of martyrs. After the assassination of Toni Schlegel in March 1929, the police arrested several members of the HSP. Two of them, Matija Soldin and Marko Hranilović, were sentenced to death in 1931, while Stipe Javor was kept in prison, where he was tortured and eventually died in 1936. A description of his torture was first published in 1931, and was later highlighted during the Ustasha regime,118 in the text of Zvonimir Korenički. In his foreword, Korenički argued that the Croatian nation always stood on the frontier of Europe and was always ready to sacrifice lives in order to safeguard it. He argued that Croatian history is a history of life and death struggle, a history of “the centuries-old struggle of [the] Croatian people for their freedom and independence [who] decorated their own temple of victims with the blood of their martyrs”.119 He further explained that while sacrificing one’s life for homeland was persistent throughout Croatian history, it was throughout “the last decades of Croatian fight, that the blood of martyrs has soaked the native soil”.120 He finished the description of Javor’s tortures by saying: “Stipe Javor is the nicest flower in the wreath of Croatian national martyrs.”121 Stories of such sacrifice continued during the regime, especially in the youth publications and through public performances as memorial services.122 For example, Ustaška mladež published an article entitled “Mladež u borbi za slobodu” (“The Youth in the Fight for Freedom”) in which the torture of Hranilović was described. The article stated that “today, the Ustasha graves speak best, blood has remained eternal [. . .] Yes, the eternal blood of our martyrs is our eternal connection with them.”123 Journalist Ivo Balentović asked for the education and molding of the “new” Croat by stating that what was needed was a belligerent youth, the youth ready to make “sacrifices in blood and graves [. . .] it asks from Croatian youth the sacrifice of the contemporary generation for Croatia”.124

When Mijo Babić, who executed Schlegel in 1929 and then joined the Poglavnik as one of the first Ustashas, died on July 3, 1941, his obituary stated

the Ustasha, fighter, escorts his comrade to his grave in the Ustasha way, quietly and with dignity [. . .] struggling with this great pain of a lost comrade, while simultaneously envying him that he had the honor and luck to, in noble and honest loyalty to the Poglavnik in executing his Ustasha duty, die before him.125

His death, although portrayed as a tremendous loss for the Ustashas, was seen as an exemplary model to which every “new” Croat – the Ustasha should strive to work “as he worked, to conduct all that, which he, as a complete Ustasha had to and wanted to conduct”.126 His funeral as well as those of other Ustashas was used by the regime to strengthen the idea of martyrdom.

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