18th April, 2023 in Biography & Memoir, History, Society & Culture

The Butcher of the Balkans: Andrija Artuković

By Judy Piercey

Fate called Andrija Artuković out of exile, back to his homeland. It was time to start building the Croatia that he’d been fighting for his entire adult life. At the age of 41, Artuković was assigned an important post in Ante Pavelić’s new cabinet: Minister of the Interior, tasked with setting up concentration camps and assuming their overall command.

Also in the cabinet was another of Pavelić’s and Artuković’s fellow law school alumni, Mile Budak. He was given the crucial post of Minister of Education, Religion and Culture. A couple of months later, he gave a speech and publicly proclaimed his party’s mission to wipe out all Serbs in Croatia. His vision was distilled into a formula that was easy to remember: kill one-third of Serbs, expel another third and force the remaining third to convert to Catholicism.

‘The basis for the Ustasha movement is religion,’ Budak declared. ‘For minorities such as Serbs, Jews and Gypsies, we have three million bullets.’

The Ustasha’s reign of terror was about to begin. Over the next four years, the campaign would involve Pope Pius XII, Adolf Hitler and his protégé, Poglavnik Ante Pavelić. The unrivalled brutality of the Ustasha would cause the Nazis to shudder.

At the centre was Andrija Artuković, the man whose Catholic community had nurtured him since childhood. The boy, named for the saint known as a messenger, whose Croatian name meant ‘warrior’, was about to embark upon a new destiny. The man who had failed to achieve his ambition of becoming a doctor because he couldn’t stand the sight or smell of blood was about to earn a new name: ‘Butcher of the Balkans’.

His reputation for bloodthirsty hatred would set him apart in a way that seems incongruous with his spiritual devotion and desire to become a healer: the war crimes Andrija was about to oversee were so repulsive that even the Nazis complained. Their concerns became part of historical records, advising Hitler that the Ustasha were making them, the Nazis in Croatia, look bad.

As the Minister of the Interior in Pavelić’s cabinet in Zagreb, Andrija Artuković held a key post in establishing the new Croatia. The new government acted swiftly. On 21 April 1941, a Zagreb newspaper reported: ‘The Minister of Public Safety, Dr. Artuković has stated […] that the Croatian government wishes to solve the Jewish problem in the same way as the German government did. The Minister added that he will strictly monitor the application of racial laws, soon to be adopted.’

A few days later, Artuković signed a decree prohibiting Jews from entering coffee houses, restaurants and hotels. Merchants picked up on the new rule and began to post their own signs in shop windows saying Jews were not allowed. Next, the word ‘Jew’ was stencilled in large yellow letters on the windows of Jewish businesses.

Artuković and the other members of Pavelić’s cabinet set out to obliterate the signs of Serbian rule that had chafed for most of their adult lives. They ripped down every sign on streets named for Serbian kings or containing the words ‘Yugoslav’ or ‘Royal’. Suddenly, streets all over Zagreb had been rendered nameless. They painted over the word ‘Royal’ on postal trucks, leaving delivery trucks to be identified simply as ‘Post’. And, to drive home how much they hated how the victors of the First World War had usurped Croatia, Paveli

Artuković and the other members of Pavelić’s cabinet set out to obliterate the signs of Serbian rule that had chafed for most of their adult lives. They ripped down every sign on streets named for Serbian kings or containing the words ‘Yugoslav’ or ‘Royal’. Suddenly, streets all over Zagreb had been rendered nameless. They painted over the word ‘Royal’ on postal trucks, leaving delivery trucks to be identified simply as ‘Post’. And, to drive home how much they hated how the victors of the First World War had usurped Croatia, Pavelić’s government wiped out every sign that bore anything in English.

Artuković was finally in a position to realise the dream that he and other students had fought for back at the University of Zagreb. Their protests against the restrictions imposed on Croatians by Serbian rulers had taken twenty years to come to fruition. Thanks to Hitler, the promise of a new world order seemed feasible. Artuković had spent over half his life fighting for Croatians to have a homeland of their own, and now, after two decades of scrambling and scraping, he was at the top, playing a role in designing the new Croatia. His faith had kept him strong. And every day, Artuković prayed, thanking God for giving Croatians a Catholic homeland.

With Yugoslavia’s King Peter in exile in England, Pavelić seized the opportunity to further ingratiate himself to Mussolini by appointing an Italian, the Duke of Spoleto, to the throne; on 19 May, wire services delivered news to the world that the new king would be known as King Aimone of Croatia. The Associated Press reported to its American readers that ‘the throne was offered by Ante Pavelić, Croatia’s Poglavnik (Croat equivalent of Duce or Fuehrer) before a glittering audience at Quirinale Palace in Rome. Afterwards, Pavelić was given a private audience with Pope Pius XII.’

Extracted from The Fierce by Judy Piercey