Mapping the Holocaust in
Croatia

The Ustaša regime and its local activists employed a variety of methods to strip groups identified as Ustaša enemies—Jews, Serbs, Roma, Croat “national renegades,” Freemasonry, Rotary International, the Serbian Orthodox Church, and others—of their property and use this combined wealth to fill state coffers and finance the Ustaša national revolution and nation-building project. Witness and survivor Aleksandar Zrkić from Šid recounted some of the ways in which the regime in Zagreb and local Ustašas dispossessed the town’s Jews and Serbs, shedding light on Ustaša officials’ corruption and widespread embezzlement, a phenomenon that was ubiquitous across the Independent State of Croatia.

After the Axis powers created the Independent State of Croatia and installed the Ustaša movement to head the new state, requiring “contribution” or “tribute” payments became a common method of extortion against Jewish communities in localities across Ustaša Croatia. Promising protection and cessation of persecution, Ustaša authorities baited local Jews to deposit large sums of money and valuables as one of the first steps in targeted, all-encompassing transfer of Jewish property to so-called “Aryan” hands. Economic dispossession was therefore one of the first steps in the genocide against Croatia’s Jews.