Roman Catholicism was identified with Croatian nationalism,[29] while Islam, which had a large following in Bosnia and Herzegovina, was praised by the Ustaše as the religion that "keeps true the blood of Croats.

Many members of the Ustaše militia and Croatian Home Guard who subsequently fled the country were taken as prisoners of war and subjected to forced marches and executions during the Bleiburg repatriations.

Mussolini's son-in-law and Italian foreign minister Count Galeazzo Ciano noted in his diary that "The Duce is indignant with Pavelić, because he claims that the Croats are descendants of the Goths.

[55] These principles called for the creation of a new economic system that would be neither capitalist nor communist[28] and which would emphasize the importance of the Roman Catholic Church and the patriarchial family as means to maintain social order and morality.

[49][clarification needed] The Ustaše recognized both Roman Catholicism and Islam as national religions of the Croatian people but initially rejected Orthodox Christianity as being incompatible with their objectives.

[71] The Ustaše persecuted Jews who practiced Judaism but authorized Jewish converts to Catholicism to be recognized as Croatian citizens and be given honorary Aryan citizenship that allowed them to be reinstated at the jobs from which they had previously been separated.

Jozo Tomasevich in his book War and Revolution in Yugoslavia: 1941–1945, states that "never before in history had Croats been exposed to such legalized administrative, police and judicial brutality and abuse as during the Ustaša regime."

On 22 March 1929, Zvonimir Pospišil, Mijo Babić, Marko Hranilović, and Matija Soldin murdered Toni Šlegel, the chief editor of newspaper Novosti from Zagreb and president of Jugoštampa, which was the beginning of the terrorist actions of Ustaše.

[82] In November 1932 ten Ustaše, led by Andrija Artuković and supported by four local sympathizers, attacked a gendarme outpost at Brušani in the Lika/Velebit area, in an apparent attempt to intimidate the Yugoslav authorities.

[citation needed] The Ustaše's most infamous terrorist act was carried out on 9 October 1934, when working with the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO), they assassinated King Alexander I of Yugoslavia in Marseille, France.

[86] After March 1937, when Italy and Yugoslavia signed a pact of friendship, Ustaše and their activities had been banned, which attracted the attention of young Croats, especially university students, who would become sympathizers or members.

[88] In February 1939 two returnees from detention, Mile Budak and Ivan Oršanić, became editors[citation needed] of the pro-Ustaše journal Hrvatski narod, known in English as The Croatian Nation.

On 10 April the most senior home-based Ustaše, Slavko Kvaternik, took control of the police in Zagreb and in a radio broadcast that day proclaimed the formation of the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH).

Reflecting on the photos of Ustaše crimes taken by Italians, Steinberg writes: "There are photographs of Serbian women with breasts hacked off by pocket knives, men with eyes gouged out, emasculated and mutilated".

A Gestapo report to Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, dated 17 February 1942, stated:Increased activity of the bands [of rebels] is chiefly due to atrocities carried out by Ustaše units in Croatia against the Orthodox population.

[94] Fighting continued for a short while after the formal surrender of German Army Group E on 9 May 1945, as Pavelić ordered the NDH forces to attempt to escape to Austria, together with a large number of civilians.

The strategy to achieve their goal was:[106][107] The NDH government cooperated with Nazi Germany in the Holocaust and exercised their own version of the genocide against Serbs, Jews and Roma (aka "gypsies") inside its borders.

By the end of the war the Ustaše, under Pavelić's leadership, had killed an estimated 30,000 Jews and 26,000–29,000 Roma,[109] while the number of Serb victims ranges as low as 200,000 to as high as 500,000[110] with historians generally listing between 300,000 and 350,000 deaths.

During World War II various German military commanders and civilian authorities gave different figures for the number of Serbs, Jews and others killed inside the territory of the Independent State of Croatia.

Here is how the Croatian Catholic Bishop of Mostar, Alojzije Mišić, described the mass killings of Serb civilians just in one small area of Herzegovina, just during the first 6 months of the war:[123]People were captured like beasts.

[141] This despite the fact that the Ustaše had already proclaimed measures prohibiting Serbs, Jews and Gipsies to serve as policemen, judges and soldiers, and making easy for the state officials to fire members of those ethnic/religious groups from the public administration,[142] and he knew they were preparing Nazi-style racial laws, which Pavelić signed only 2 days after.

[147] Yet in its pastoral letter of 24 March 1945, the Croatian Catholic Church still proclaimed its support for the puppet state and its rulers, despite the fact that most senior regime figures were preparing to flee the country.

Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac, Archbishop of Zagreb, was accused and sentenced to prison after the end of World War II by Yugoslav communist authorities of supporting the Ustaše and of exonerating those in the clergy who collaborated with them and were hence complicit in forced conversions.

"[158] On 22 July 2016, the Zagreb County Court annulled his post-war conviction due to "gross violations of current and former fundamental principles of substantive and procedural criminal law".

At the same location the Pope proclaimed the beatification of a Roman Catholic layman Ivan Merz (1896–1928), who was the founder of the "Association of Croatian Eagles" in 1923, which some view as a precursor to the Ustaše.

Despite representing opposing nationalisms, when confronted with the growing strength of their common enemy (i.e. the partisans), Ustaše and Chetniks throughout the Independent State of Croatia signed collaboration agreements in the spring of 1942, which for the most part held until the very end of the war.

[161] The Ustaše signed collaboration agreements with key NDH Chetnik commanders, in the following order: On 26 May 1942, the Ustaše minister, Mladen Lorković, wrote in a communique to local NDH authorities, that pursuant to these agreements "Home Guard Headquarters agrees with your proposal to grant one million kuna aid to the leaders of the Greek-Eastern community [i.e. Serb Orthodox], Momčilo Djujić, Mane Rokvić, [Branko] Bogunović, Paja Popović and Paja Omčikus, 200 Yugoslav guns and 10 machine guns".

[190] Despite protests by Jewish and other organizations, this was allowed to remain until criticism by the US State Department special envoy on Holocaust issues,[191] forced the government to move it to a nearby town.

[citation needed] Since the end of World War II, Serbian historians have used the Ustaše to promote that Serbs resisted the Axis, while Croats and Bosniaks widely supported them.

[198] Historians in Belgrade during the 1980s who had close government connections often went on television during the evenings to discuss real or invented details about the Ustaše genocide against Serbs during World War II.