These two books, published in 2018, deal generally with the same subject—the Croatian Nazi-fascist movement of the Ustaša and their puppet Independent State of Croatia (ISC, Nezavisna Država Hrvatska–NDH). Both books describe, from specific perspectives, the criminal character of the Ustaša movement and the ISC, in which genocide against the Serbs, Roma, and Jews, as well as mass crimes against various Croatian opponents were committed. Adriano and Cingolani tell the story of the Ustaša movement from its origins until 1941, when the ISC was founded. They proceed with the war period, describing the main processes in the Ustaša state and around it. The third part of the book is dedicated to the time when Ustaša members were forced flee from the country and, finally, find shelter in the New World.
Nevertheless, Adriano's and Cingolani's book has some shortcomings, in the first place the fact that the manuscript is sometimes inconsistent. The pre-war years are almost exclusively dedicated to Italian-Ustaša relations, possibly due to the access the authors had to Italian archives. Although this dimension of the history of the Ustaša movement is extremely important, there are some other aspects to its history, which are rarely debated or not mentioned at all. The description of the political situation in Argentina, where many Ustaša found shelter after the war, is too long (353–76), and there are some other inconsistencies.
The authors did not take account of a few important works, some published sources, and archives. For example, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration (2001) by Jozo Tomashevich, is an inescapable foundation that no new research into the Second World War on the territory of former Yugoslavia is able to bypass, but Adriano and Cingolani do not quote it.
They solidly documented the contacts of the Italian authorities with Vladko Maček, the leader of the strongest Croatian party of that time, the Croatian Peasant Party (Hrvatska seljačka stranka—HSS). But to understand the totality of the activities of Maček and his collaborators, one needs to consult, among other works, Ljubo Boban, Maček i Politika HSS (1974), which Adriano and Cingolani did not. From what Boban wrote, the authors could have understood that despite contacts with Rome, Maček's major concern was Italian revisionism, that is to say, Mussolini's imperialistic plans to dominate or even conquer the eastern Adriatic coast. According to Adriano and Cingolani, it turns out that Maček was closely cooperating with Ante Pavelić, but in fact Maček was moderate and quite far from Pavelić’s extremism. Important contributions by Bogdan Krizman were quoted—Ante Pavelić i ustaše (1978) and Pavelić u bjekstvu (1986)—but these deal only with the pre-war and after-war period. Three others, however—NDH između Hitlera i Mussolinija (1986) and Ustaše i Treći Rajk (v. 1–2, 1983–1986)—were not used by the authors, although they give abundant information about the crucial period of the Second World War. Perhaps these sources would not have changed the book's contents essentially, but they certainly would have affected some details.
There are also cases of imprecision. Mihovil Pavlek Miškina was not “one of Croatia's best writers,” but a distinguished member of the HSS (killed in Jasenovac); the names of the camps were not Jablanak and Slano, but Jablanac and Slana; the village is not Suvaj but Suvaja; the motto “Za dom spremni!” (For the homeland, ready!) is not a “Croatian motto,” but an “Ustaša motto.” The authors are allegedly quoting my book Hrvatska 1918–2008 (2008), stating that I wrote that in “July 1941 at least 1800 Serbs were killed in Lika.” I never wrote that (and in fact, many more Serbs were killed). They are allegedly quoting the book I wrote with my father Slavko, Holokaust u Zagrebu (2001), translated into English as The Holocaust in Croatia, (2016), for the number of victims of te so-called “Bleiburg and the Way of the Cross.” We did not discuss that subject in the above mentioned book, however. We were writing extensively about Bleiburg in some other books (for example, Jasenovac i Bleiburg nisu isto, 2011) and I do it in some of my other books, but we do not assess the number of victims up to twenty thousand, as Adriano and Cingolani allegedly quote. Rather, we think that the number is as high as fifty thousand (including the Ustaša members and civilians, both Croats and Muslims, citizens of both Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina). These mistakes would have been regarded a minor problem, if there had not been even bigger ones.
Namely, in the short chapter (219–22) dedicated to the Yugoslav National Liberation Movement (or Tito's partisans), one reads that partisans and the Serbian nationalistic Četnik movement were “two resistance movements.” In the historiography today, there is practically unanimous agreement that the Četniks were not only collaborators but also a pro-fascist (or pro-Nazi) movement that committed genocide against Muslims and Croats and mass crimes against their own Serbs and Montenegrins.
The statement that “the Italian initiative” in 1941 to reconquer some areas behind the eastern Adriatic coast “can not be considered as hostile” (219) is also unacceptable. This decision was simply the result of fascist imperialism, the fact that the Italians were an occupying force in that region. The occupiers committed numerous crimes against the civilian population, including mass deportations and executions. Adriano and Cingolani later state the Yugoslav authorities presented a list of 447 names to the UN War Crimes Commission after the war, including Italian commanders, officers, internment camp managers, soldiers, and civilian staff members for whom they asked for prosecution and trial. This number of likely war criminals, despite the possibility of exaggeration, shows the true nature of that occupation, which, according to Adriano and Cingolani, “can not be considered as hostile.” Despite all these mistakes, the book written by Adriano and Cingolani can be regarded as useful in certain aspects, because there is no such study available in the English language.
Goran Miljan graduated in Zagreb and defended his doctoral thesis at the Central European University in Budapest. In his book about Ustaša youth, he exhibits a distanced objectivity characteristic for a person from another country, but with an active level of knowledge about the subject at hand, which is often only possible for someone writing about the history of their own country.
For a long time, the subject of the Ustaša youth (Ustaška mladež) was historiographically neglected as the research topic, as were other elements of Ustaša ideology. In the last two decades things have begun to change. There is now a list of books and key papers that have attempted to situate various aspects of Ustaša rule in the context of pan-European Nazi-fascism. For example, Martina Bitunjac recently published a very informative analysis of the role of Ustaša women, Le donne e il movimento ustascia (2009), and Verwicklung, Beteiligung, Unrecht: Frauen und die Ustasa-Bewegung, (2018).
Miljan's book for the first time examines and analyzes the ideology, practices, and international connections of the Ustaša youth organization. The Ustaša youth was an all-embracing fascist youth organization established in 1941 by the Ustaša. It was closely modelled after the youth organizations in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The goal of the organization was to reeducate young people in the model of an ideal “new” Croat. This youth organization presented a crucial element in the Ustaša's all-embracing, totalitarian, national revolution, which in reality consisted of specific interconnected, mutually-dependent practices. The Ustasha poglavnik (or, “führer”) Ante Pavelić stated in 1941 that our youth “must be raised” in such spirit that “it will be determined in ideas, decisive in its will, determined to be the first battalion in the most difficult times to its people” (Ustaški godišnjak, February 17, 1945, 15). On the one hand, persecution, oppression, mass murder, and the genocide, and on the other, youth regimentation and reeducation that served the purpose of creating a “pure” and “new” Croatian nation.
The first versions of the Miljan's paper were published in Zagreb, with some chapters published elsewhere. This text is a broadened version. It gives a well-documented picture of an important and integral part of the Ustaša movement. Miljan's book is certainly an inescapable foundation that no new research into the history of the Ustaša movement will be able to bypass.
