A Croatian and Catholic State. The Ustasha Regime and Religious Communities in the Independent State of Croatia

Abstract

This paper will analyze the status that various religious communities enjoyed in the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska; hereafter NDH), focusing on the legal status and relations, both practical and financial, these communities enjoyed with the Ustasha movement and state authorities. The religious question was a key political problem in the NDH: the treatment of different religious communities serves as a paradigm of the character of the NDH as a state. Numerous studies have been written on the participation of Catholic clergy in the atrocities of the Ustasha movement and the NDH with the earliest being published immediately after the end of the war in 1945. The persecution of the Serbian Orthodox Church has been well documented in a number of important studies. Instead, this article will focus on legal and administrative issues and financial exchange between various religious communities and the NDH authorities as well as the state’s program of mass religious conversion since these illustrate the authentic intentions of the Ustasha regime and the Roman Catholic Church in Croatia, as the dominant social and political forces in the state, regarding state religious policy. The article is largely based on primary archival sources drawn from the Croatian and Serbian state archives.