Intertwined Genocides: Mass Violence in Western Yugoslavia during the Second World War

After the German and Italian attack on Yugoslavia, Croatian fascists - the Ustasha - declared the independence of Croatia in April 1941. This short-lived state became one of the most significant theatres of genocide of wartime Europe. In an attempt to create an ethnically homogeneous nation-state, Ustasha militias committed three intertwined genocides of Serbs, Jews, and Roma. This triggered a Serb uprising that led to a bloody civil war and, ultimately, to the rise and victory of Tito’s Partisans. At the same time; German and Italian forces carried out massacres, and the Germans included Croatians in the European Holocaust.Alexander Korb analyzes this violent chaos and explores the patterns and the internal logic of mass violence. With great clarity, Intertwined Genocides distinguishes between the actions of local forces and the German and Italian occupiers, and discusses how genocide, the Holocaust, and the Second World War were locally intertwined and shaped by domestic factors. The book argues that the Croatian fascists were not German puppets, but presents them as modern thinking nationalists and independent agents with their own agendas.