Historical revisionism concerning the fascist Ustasha movement’s role in World War II has become embedded in contemporary Croatian politics and society.
Olivera Simic
The two primary WWII commemorations in Croatia remain Jasenovac and Bleiburg.
The former was an infamous Ustasha-run extermination camp, where the US Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that between 77,000 and 104,000 Serbs, Jews, Roma, and Croat opponents of the Ustasha regime were brutally murdered.
The latter commemorates mass killings by the Partisans, mainly of Ustasha and Ustasha-allied civilians. It has become known in Croatia and among Croatian émigré communities as the ‘Bleiburg tragedy’, after the border town in Austria where British forces surrendered the fleeing soldiers and civilians to the Partisans.
Vjekoslav Maks Luburic, the mastermind behind the Ustasha concentration camps, led the retreat of NDH forces towards the Austrian border in early May 1945 and which would eventually end up in Bleiburg. Luburic himself returned to Croatian territory to lead the guerrilla resistance and later settled in Franco’s fascist Spain.
Since 1990, those who died, many of them Ustasha combatants, have come to be known in Croatia as “innocent victims of the Way of the Cross”.
According to Vjeran Pavlakovic, professor at the Faculty of Philosophy in the northern Croatian port city of Rijeka, the Bleiburg narrative in the 1990s was imported from the Croatian diaspora, which characterised the post-WWII killings as a genocide against Croats rather than part of the revenge and political repression unfolding across post-war Europe.
“This interpretation of Bleiburg served to reinforce the idea that any Yugoslav, communist, or Serbian state would seek to eliminate the Croats as a nation, which was often emphasised at the commemoration,” he said.
Cipek said that, in its symbolism and speeches, the annual memorial event not only commemorated the victims but was also an attempt “to rehabilitate the Ustasha NDH, a fascist ally and regime with racial laws, in which genocide was committed against Jews and Serbs”.
According to Cipek, Austrian officials came to view the gathering at Bleiburger Field as an act of historical revisionism that glorified fascism.
In 2020, the Austrian parliament adopted a non-binding resolution calling for a ban on commemorations of the Ustasha regime and the Bleiburg killings on Austrian soil.
“The holy mass at Bleiburger Field is part of an event which is politically instrumentalised and part of a politico-national ritual that serves one selective perception and interpretation of history,” lawmakers said in the resolution.
After the resolution was adopted, the event has been held in Zagreb and other parts of Croatia.
The annual commemoration of Jasenovac has also undergone a change.
It was once used by pro-European Union politicians in Croatia to argue for the anti-fascist tradition of the Croatian Partisans, said Pavlakovic, but since the HDZ’s return to power in 2015, “the commemoration no longer features political speeches”.
“In recent years, right-wing revisionists have sought to deny that the concentration camp murdered tens of thousands of people, claiming that it is all a communist lie and that in fact Jasenovac was just a labour camp with minimal victims,” he said.
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