Citizens and Thieves: “Aryanization” in Wartime Varaždin

Abstract

In the spring of 1941, Artur Polak, a Yugoslav Jew, returned from the front lines to his home in Varaždin, Croatia. Unarmed and dressed in his medical officer’s uniform, he arrived unannounced to his family’s great delight. Only a few days passed with Artur at home before the Polaks received another set of unexpected guests. This time, however, the visitors were unwelcome. Božidar Gregl, the local police chief, marched into the Polak’s home with two German officers who arrested Artur for allegedly being a “dangerous spy.” As the officers led Artur out of his home, Gregl turned to Elza, Artur’s wife, and demanded that she hand over her husband’s stamp collection.¹ A few months later, Gregl contacted the Varaždin town council, asking to buy furniture from multiple Jewish homes, including the Polaks.² He also, for a period, served as trustee for the local silk textile plant.³ While Gregl himself had organized the scheme to steal Artur Polak’s stamp collection, his later gains came through the new government: the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH).

The creation of the NDH came with the Axis invasion of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in April 1941. The disorganized Yugoslav army quickly succumbed to the Axis forces, collapsing in a matter of days, as did the Yugoslav state shortly thereafter. As part of their occupation plans, the Axis carved out the NDH and handed control to the Ustaša, after the Croatian Peasant Party (Hrvatska seljačka stranka, HSS) leader, Vladko Maček, rejected their offer.⁴ The new Ustaša government rapidly issued a plethora of laws excluding “non-Aryans” from “Aryan” society. As violence erupted through the NDH in summer 1941, in Varaždin, Božidar Gregl led the local Ustaša police in organizing the deportation of the town’s Jews. By mid-July 1941, Gregl reported to his superiors that Varaždin was “free of Jews,” making it the first such settlement in the NDH.⁵

The deported Varaždin Jews left behind most of their property: not only their homes, but also furnishings, and most of their personal belongings. Soon after deportation, local bureaucrats confiscated, catalogued, and began redistributing this property to the rest of Varaždin’s populace. This rapid timeline suggests that Varaždin’s Croat majority supported the Ustaša, leading to the persecution of local “non-Aryans” and the spoliation of their property. Yet the majority of Varaždin’s citizens did not support the Ustaša in the interwar period, nor did they persecute their neighbors in the early months of the NDH. Despite the initial indifference expressed by many local Croats to the new state ideology, property expropriated by NDH authorities was nevertheless widely redistributed throughout the town’s public and private spaces. Examining property requests received by Varaždin’s city council (Gradsko poglavarstvo Varaždin, GPV), which handled much of the process of expropriation, elucidates relationships between ordinary Croats and the NDH, as well as the normalization of theft in wartime society. The ubiquity of racialized theft and redistribution meant that even those who did not request property were aware of and complicit in attempts to “Aryanize” Varaždin. As such, I argue that we should consider the NDH’s expropriative projects as a method through which the state could communicate Ustaša ideology to its citizens and attempt to create a loyal society through implicating individuals in theft and violence. Those who received property, no matter their reasoning, physically linked themselves to the intertwined logic of genocide and racialized expropriation.

Historiography

In recent decades, historians such as Martin Dean, Frank Bajohr, Dieter Pohl, and Philipp Ther have produced a wide body of scholarship examining the mass expropriation of Jewish-owned property during the Holocaust.⁶ Socialism’s end in Eastern Europe and the subsequent opening of previously inaccessible archives facilitated research on the Holocaust throughout Europe at national, regional, local, and micro-historical levels.⁷ Studies at the local level have proven especially fruitful because they highlight the influence of specific actors, including, for example, Svetlana Suveica’s study of the centrality of Bessarabian public employees in driving the expropriation of Jewish-owned property.⁸ Micro-historical analyses have also highlighted the flaws of the “bystander” concept, showing both the dynamic nature of individuals’ actions, as well as the widespread involvement of non-Jewish populaces in the persecution of Jews—including in the theft of their homes, businesses, and personal belongings.⁹

But while the historiography of Aryanization in Axis Europe is broad, as Rory Yeomans discusses, the topic in the context of the NDH is comparatively understudied.¹⁰ During the Yugoslav period, the Ustaša’s spoliation of property received passing attention in the encompassing surveys of the NDH by historians like Bogdan Krizman and Fikreta Jelić-Butić.¹¹ The second volume of Jozo Tomasevich’s seminal War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945 speaks briefly of the NDH’s economic persecution of Serbs and Jews, though it does not discuss such campaigns against Roma.¹² Some recent and valuable works on Aryanization in the NDH include Vladimir Šadek’s study of Koprivnica and Đurđevac, Zlata Živaković-Kerže’s article on Osijek, Dallas Michelbacher’s study of the State Directorate for Economic Regeneration’s activities in Sarajevo, and Goran Miljan’s chapter on the Ustaša Youth’s central participation in the process in Varaždin, Bjelovar, and Karlovac.¹³

Research on Aryanization in the NDH is a small but growing subfield, and studies on the Ustaša and the NDH in general have moved away from the margins of scholarship. The last decade has seen detailed monographs published on the Ustaša Youth, intercommunal violence in rural Bosnia and Herzegovina, the NDH’s cultural politics, and community relations in Axis Sarajevo, among others.¹⁴ In newer works on the Ustaša, as Alexander Korb notes, the movement’s self-perception is taken more seriously, and scholars analyze their actions as part of the “broader European scene of anti-liberal and fascist movements” instead of an expression of the primordial violence allegedly found throughout the Balkans.¹⁵ Analyzing a state-led project like Aryanization further contributes to such endeavors by creating a better understanding of the Ustaša’s goals and the extent of their successes in reaching the masses to create the fascist society they envisioned.

The diversity of the spaces that came under Ustaša control means that local studies hold particular value in exploring the different forms and timelines violence took throughout the NDH. Mark Biondich’s 2002 article on Ustaša forced conversions highlights the need for future studies that explore local histories, noting, for example, instances where local officials organized the mass conversions of Orthodox Serbs to Catholicism before central leadership even considered such ideas.¹⁶ Lovro Kralj’s recent study of Osijek further suggests that power struggles between local Ustaša, Nazis, and Arrow Cross members, whereby each faction attempted to outdo the other in pursuing their antisemitic and nationalistic goals, may have caused the stalled deportation of the city’s Jews in comparison to other towns.¹⁷ Filip Erdeljac’s chapter on everyday life in wartime Karlovac has also emphasized the various tactics, like social programs, employed by Ustaša authorities to legitimize their rule.¹⁸

Studying the NDH’s expropriation of property in the context of Varaždin can thus illuminate the interactions between state leadership’s aims, lower-level actors, and conditions on the ground. It also allows the opportunity to explore the factors that impacted expropriation and how such campaigns fit into Ustaša plans for the murder of Jews, Serbs, and Roma. Though some of Varaždin’s characteristics, like its ethnic homogeneity, its strategic positioning, or its status as a county seat, differed from many areas that became part of the NDH, noting both its particularities and commonalities helps researchers better understand processes of violence throughout the NDH. While I propose ideas about Aryanization based on events in Varaždin, it is certain that research on other areas of the NDH will further explicate how local contexts and dynamics particularly shaped the wartime spoliation of “non-Aryan” property.

By examining property redistribution in Varaždin, I intend also to elucidate how participants in expropriation and “bystanders” experienced a range of feelings toward the Ustaša while nonetheless being complicit in the NDH’s violence. Thus, this study does not examine NDH state policy in depth or analyze the economic consequences of Aryanization, but rather attempts to understand how such policies played out in a community. Alexander Korb suggests that a wide range of individuals took part in the mass thefts in the NDH, and that expropriated property often enriched elites or was used to secure political loyalty.¹⁹ This study will consequently focus on the range of connections that average citizens had to the state with respect to seized property.

It is important to note the level of chaos and corruption associated with the NDH’s “Aryanization” projects. While the state wanted to enforce “legal” expropriation and prevent “wild Aryanizations,” whereby individuals seized property of their own accord without following the intended bureaucratic process, it often failed to do so. Uncontrolled and spontaneous mass expropriations occurred frequently, especially in rural areas.²⁰ Poor management of seized businesses was also common. Such issues occurred in Varaždin as well, where the county administration (Velika Župa Zagorje, the County of Zagorje)²¹ based in the town, writing to Ante Pavelić in September 1941, accused the local Ustaša leader of extorting three million kuna from local Jews. The governor demanded that punitive action be taken to preserve the Ustaša’s reputation, which had been tarnished as a result of this theft.²² Despite this scandal, when Varaždin’s town council issued a public notice letting locals know they could request expropriated property, many soon acted on the opportunity.²³ Such blatant corruption on the part of local Ustaša, and the town’s general disapproval of their actions, clearly did not prevent some from exploiting racialized expropriation for their own benefit.

On terms

In this article, I define Aryanization as the NDH’s seizure and redistribution of Jewish, Serb, and Roma-owned property. My use of “Aryan” and related terms, however, requires some explanation. First, applying “Aryan” to Croats, considering that Nazi ideology deemed Slavs as “racially inferior,” seems at first contradictory.²⁴ Without wholly digressing into the development of Ustaša racial thought and NDH racial policy, the Ustaša argued that Croats—defined as Catholic Croats and Bosnian Muslims—were “Aryan.” NDH racial laws firmly outlined Jews and Roma as “non-Aryan.” Such laws did not address Serbs, however, because like “Aryan” Croats, the NDH viewed Serbs as composed of various ethnic strains, and thus did not legally define their racial status. This flexibility in codification aided the Ustaša in their persecution of Serbs along political, social, and racial lines.²⁵ The Nazi leadership’s views on the “racial purity” of Croats is secondary because the NDH carried out its crimes in accordance with Ustaša ideology and did not fully adopt Nazi racial theories. German occupation authorities in the NDH’s German occupied zone, the area to which Varaždin belonged, encouraged the Ustaša’s persecution of Jews and tolerated anti-Serb campaigns to the extent that the latter did not cause major instability.²⁶

As Rory Yeomans notes, historical sources do not use the term “Croatianization,” and to call the process such would be inaccurate.²⁷ Expropriated property was available to all “Aryans,” not only Croats, and recipients included other groups like ethnic Germans and Slovenes. This process differentiates the NDH from Romania, for example, where the state preferred redistributing to ethnic Romanians over Hungarians and Germans in its “Romanianization” campaigns.²⁸ Though Ustaša racial ideology did not effectively reach much of the “Aryan” public, as will be discussed, I believe the term “Aryanization” reflects the racialized nature of expropriation more accurately than nationalization, another common phrase used by the NDH.

Another central problem with the use of “Aryanization” is that “Aryan” and all its derivative terms are pseudoscientific and racist concepts. As such, I use quotation marks around “Aryan” and “non-Aryan” when referring to individuals or groups of people. To avoid the problem of constantly repeating perpetrator language, I use other phrases, like “expropriation” or “theft,” to describe these NDH projects as much as possible.

Lastly, I use the term “Aryanization” broadly, and do not focus solely on the confiscatory measures taken against “non-Aryans.” I draw on the work of Hana Kubátová and Jan Láníček on Czech and Slovak antisemitism in which Aryanization refers to measures that deprived “non-Aryans” of their economic rights, removed them from public and economic life, and subsequently “tied the majority society to the regime.”²⁹ While occasionally this piece discusses expropriated businesses and landholdings, most of the property I refer to includes movable items within the purview of the GPV. My aim is to understand how the expropriation and redistribution of property implicated Varaždin’s “Aryan” residents and reshaped the town’s public and private spaces.

Sources and challenges

The sources for this study are primarily from the GPV and its “Jewish department” (židovski odsjek, ŽO) and testimonies from Varaždin’s Jewish survivors. Documents from the GPV include requests from local residents and organizations, as well as communications between other NDH offices and the GPV. Though requests to the GPV are plentiful, many are sparse in content and reveal only individuals’ names and the property they desired. Alongside these requests, I have also used local interwar and wartime newspapers, especially Hrvatsko Jedinstvo (Croatian Unity). While newspapers say more about the thoughts of their writers and editors than those of their readership, they provide insights into local, national, and international events and reflect the social and political contexts in which they were produced. Lastly, reports from Partisans operating in northwest Croatia also provide insight into events in and around Varaždin during the Second World War.

The use of Jewish survivor testimonies aims to ameliorate some of these sources’ shortcomings, among them being that most reflect the perspectives of perpetrators, the beneficiaries of persecution, or “bystander” populations and say little about the NDH’s victims. Jewish survivor memories also illuminate Varaždin’s social atmosphere in the interwar and early wartime periods before the deportation of its Jews. Survivors speak to prewar Jewish community life, relationships with Varaždin’s non-Jews, and the wartime and postwar experiences of themselves, their families, and their friends. Like any source, these testimonies come with their own limitations. Among them is that few of Varaždin’s Jews survived the Holocaust and even fewer recorded their memories.³⁰ The interviews, primarily conducted by the USC Shoah Foundation, were recorded between the 1990s and the 2000s, when most survivors were quite elderly. All individuals appeared, nonetheless, to recall events clearly. While interview scripts can constrain survivor narratives, the interviewer-interviewee rapport appeared positive and survivors spoke at length in their responses. Consequently, I use these testimonies with little reservation, especially considering the lack of other personal sources I have found, like diaries, from local Jews during this period. Unfortunately, no similar interviews exist for other local victims of the Ustaša: Serbs and Roma. Varaždin’s Serbs are occasionally referenced in the sources I have found, but rarely; Roma go unmentioned. Where possible, I discuss Serbs and Roma, though future research hopefully will be able to recover their experiences in better detail.

Readers familiar with the NDH will notice the absence of documents from state departments like the Ministry of Treasury (Ministarstvo državne riznice) or its Office for Nationalized Property (Ured za podržavljeni imetak). The focus on local government documentation is intentional and is meant to keep analysis bound to Varaždin and its residents. It also reflects the Aryanization process in the town, as the GPV handled much of the expropriation that occurred between 1941 and 1943. When the NDH declared state ownership of Jewish property in Fall 1942 and control of this property fell under the Ministry of Treasury’s offices, the GPV had almost completed its liquidation of movable property and the Treasury allowed them to complete this process.³¹ Various NDH departments, such as the short-lived State Directorate for Economic Regeneration, handled matters related to expropriation such as commissioner appointments over businesses.³² While I thus focus primarily on more “mundane” property under the town council’s control, examining its redistribution illuminates the everyday dimensions of theft at the local level. Naturally, this approach has limitations, and additional research utilizing regional and national material will reveal more about Varaždin. My intention is not meant to definitively examine expropriation in the town, but to shed light on theft in wartime society in the NDH and throughout Axis Europe.

Contexts

Varaždin on the eve of the Axis invasion was one of the more important cities in the Banovina of Croatia. Despite its small population, it held historical importance as a previous Habsburg capital, as well as strategic importance given its location on the Drava River close to the Hungarian and Slovenian borders. Economically, however, Varaždin had remained comparatively marginal from the mid-nineteenth century until the interwar period. Ivančica Jež has attributed this state of affairs to the Habsburg railroad projects that did not go through the town and whose isolating effects the 1873 financial crisis further amplified. While cities connected by railway to the rest of the empire like Zagreb and Osijek industrialized and rapidly grew in population size, Varaždin stagnated in comparison.³³

The expansion of the local textile industry and improvements to transportation infrastructure in the interwar period helped reverse these trends and modernize the local economy, which in 1910 had mostly consisted of agricultural workers, craftsmen, and a mixture of merchants, traders, and other occupations.³⁴ While many workers in the textile plants lived in nearby villages and commuted to the town for their shifts, the living conditions of those workers in Varaždin were poor owing to their low salaries.³⁵ Due to the town’s lower level of industrialization, however, most townspeople generally fit an urban middle-class profile.

Though there were a number of larger merchant firms owned by Jews in the town during the Habsburg period, the number declined after World War I, and according to Magdalena Lončarić, most of Varaždin’s Jews were involved in small family textile or mixed-goods small businesses before 1941. Fewer worked as tradesmen or in other service professions. While Jews headed most large textile plants in Varaždin, there were only a few of these factories, which suggests that rich families overall were a minority among a mostly middle-class population.³⁶ I have found less information about local Serbs, but in the region of Zagorje as a whole, the Serb minority tended to work in local administration or for government services like the railway system.³⁷

At the time of the last Yugoslav census, taken in 1931, Varaždin’s population stood at 14,612 inhabitants, the vast majority of whom were Serbo-Croatian speaking Catholics. Such homogeneity fit the general profile of Zagorje, as over 95 percent of the region’s residents were ethnic Croats prior to World War II, though it was not characteristic of most areas that came under control of the NDH.³⁸ Only 486 Varaždin inhabitants declared themselves Jewish and 709 Orthodox Christians, of whom most can be assumed to be ethnic Serbs given the census data.³⁹ Jews lived alongside their non-Jewish neighbors and were well-integrated into the town’s social, economic, and political fabric by virtue of their professions, membership in civic organizations, and participation in local government.⁴⁰

In general, Varaždin’s political and social climate during the interwar period was moderate. As was the case elsewhere in Yugoslavia, political debates revolved around the (de)centralization of the Yugoslav government. The popular HSS found support in Varaždin, but many were pro-Yugoslav or otherwise pro-autonomy, not radically pro-independence. Fascism remained on the margins. From the perspective of one local Ustaša Student Militia member, having joined the illegal movement in the late 1930s, the majority of Varaždin’s residents “did not understand” Ustaša ideals or him and his fellow radicals and instead espoused the “precise opposite” of Ustaša beliefs.⁴¹

Varaždin’s newspapers provide more insight into the town’s interwar political atmosphere. Varaždinske Novosti (Varaždin’s News) the town’s primary paper between 1929 and 1937, initially began as the government-sanctioned outlet during the period of King Aleksandar’s dictatorship. The newspaper continued after the dictatorship ended in 1931 and retained a liberal slant until its denouement with the establishment of the NDH.⁴² Local pro-HSS individuals revived Hrvatsko Jedinstvo in 1937, after the first iteration’s ban in 1924, suggesting a contingent passionate enough to return the newspaper and a political environment favorable to its restoration. Hrvatsko Jedinstvo, however, became the sole town newspaper and an NDH mouthpiece in 1941, raising the question of compatibility between HSS and Ustaša politics. As Filip Erdeljac has discussed, scholarship on interwar Croatia has often stressed the apparent incompatibility between HSS “moderate” politics and Ustaša ideology, while overemphasizing the marginality of the Ustaša themselves.⁴³ For Varaždin, the seamless transition in Hrvatsko Jedinstvo’s leadership before and after April 1941 already disproves a supposed incompatibility between the two movements. But, while Erdeljac notes key areas where HSS and Ustaša politics overlapped, he also recognizes that certain Ustaša tenets, such as racial ideology, did not reach much of the Croat populace.⁴⁴ HSS supporters, considering the party’s wide popularity, could have thus welcomed the NDH’s creation as a net positive—a chance at “independence,” or freedom from the Yugoslav state—without fully grasping or accepting Ustaša ideology or the implications of their rule.⁴⁵

While Jewish survivors from Varaždin spoke positively of their relationships with local townspeople before 1941, some nonetheless noted that they perceived a shift in the collective mood after the Anschluss and the beginning of the war. Eva Akerman, a teenage girl at the time, noted that the youth “didn’t think about certain things.” She also recalled, however, that her history teacher refused to speak to her and the other two Jewish students in her class for an entire schoolyear. Despite outright ignoring them, he still gave them all passing grades.⁴⁶ Milan Blass remembered the disbelief his Jewish friends and relatives in Varaždin expressed when he described the treatment of Austrian Jews, which he witnessed while in Vienna during the Anschluss.⁴⁷ Only a few of Varaždin’s Jews understood that events in Germany, Austria, and elsewhere might be replicated in Yugoslavia itself.⁴⁸ Among them was Franjo Erić, who Croaticized his surname in 1938 and destroyed his registration cards to conceal his Jewish background. This, he felt, protected him from the Ustaša while he lived in Zagreb.⁴⁹ Erić was the only one in his family (the Ernsts) to take such actions. Like Milan Blass’s friends and family, most saw few signs that Yugoslavia’s Jews would also experience such persecution. By the early 1940s, however, the Yugoslav government too began passing anti-Jewish legislation, bending to pressure from Nazi Germany.⁵⁰ While Yugoslav Jews were aware of domestic political tensions and international developments, and witnessed the growing number of Jewish refugees in Yugoslavia, these realities were juxtaposed with other factors—anti-Jewish violence in the country was rare, debates about Jews were not central to domestic interwar political discussions, and, as Ivo Goldstein has noted, while antisemitism existed in Yugoslavia, no major organized political movements maintained antisemitism as a central tenet.⁵¹

While the fault lines of interwar Yugoslav politics were thus reflected in Varaždin, in both local and national contexts, they did not exactly follow the agitation for Croat independence from the Yugoslav state or the popular rise of fascist or racial thought. Nothing about Varaždin in this period suggested it could become the first town in the NDH to be “free of Jews.” Turning to the first months of the new regime, born out of the Axis invasion, helps explain how the deportation of the town’s Jews and the expropriation of their property became possible.

Transition, deportation, and seizure: April 1941 to August 1941

The Axis invasion of April 1941 and the subsequent creation of the NDH presented a plethora of unknowns for the new state’s residents. While some rejoiced in the creation of an “independent” Croatia, others feared what the Nazis’ arrival and the creation of a collaborationist regime might bring. Yet in some areas, everyday life did not radically change. In general, as Hrvoje Matković has discussed, the process of forming new government structures came easier for the NDH in Croat-dominated areas (like Varaždin) where already a majority of previous functionaries were Croat and could be named trustees before the formalization of positions took place over the subsequent weeks.⁵² Many townspeople with roles in local politics or government thus often made the transition into the new state’s ruling structures or otherwise remained influential in the town’s social or economic spheres.⁵³ Perhaps as a consequence, many locals appeared ambivalent, or even confused, as to what Ustaša rule entailed. The individuals who did grasp the significance of the new order and acted accordingly, becoming central in driving the persecution of Varaždin’s “non-Aryans,” including their deportation, and the seizure and redistribution of their property.

The fledgling Ustaša government quickly began establishing the legal framework for the state-sanctioned robbery and overall persecution of targeted minorities. Among the first pieces of new legislation was the Legal Provision on the Preservation of Croatian National Property, enacted on April 18, 1941.⁵⁴ The law nullified any business transactions conducted by Jews in the two months prior to the NDH’s establishment. As Goran Miljan has noted, NDH leadership ratified some of the first antisemitic property laws before it enacted its racial laws, the latter of which came at the end of April.⁵⁵ By early June, the regime ratified the Legal Provision for the Mandatory Registration of Jews and Jewish Companies, forcing Jews to register their personal and private property with the state. Varaždin’s Jews thus disclosed their property addresses for their businesses and homes, while the town’s Jewish community reported its cash holdings and other valuables kept in the synagogue and community buildings.⁵⁶ These waves of registrations later facilitated the deportation of local Jews, as the Ustaša police now possessed lists of their residences.

The measures passed by the NDH in the first weeks of its existence initially caused little worry among most of Varaždin’s Serbs and Jews. Throughout Zagorje, as Filip Škiljan has discussed, the Serb minority’s small size meant that the Ustaša did not perceive them as an immediate threat and local Serbs did not become victims of massacres as in some areas of the NDH during this early period.⁵⁷ In April 1941, only a few individuals submitted applications to Varaždin’s town council requesting formal conversion to Catholicism. The number of applicants, both Orthodox and Jewish, hoping to find protection in conversion rose in the coming months as the Ustaša’s intentions became more evident.⁵⁸ In late April, even the local authorities’ demand that Varaždin’s Jews give up their radios alarmed few members of the Jewish community. Milan Blass recalled officials affably conversing with local Jews as they handed over their radios. Blass remarked that most of Varaždin’s Jews, including himself, thought such restrictions were temporary.⁵⁹ Franjo Erić’s testimony confirms the same lack of initial worry among many of Varaždin’s Jews. Appearing to be safe in Zagreb and unaffected by the regime’s new laws due to the precautionary measures he took during the interwar period, Erić attempted to convince his younger sister, Miroslava, to stay with him for her own safety. She declined, soon becoming a victim of the July deportation.⁶⁰

The trust that most of Varaždin’s Jews held for the majority non-Jewish community in which they lived speaks to their level of integration prior to 1941. Many saw no reason to fear their fellow townspeople; they had lived together peacefully for decades. Likely adding to such opinions was also that many of Varaždin’s Croats did not change their behaviors after the formation of the NDH. In June 1941, one month before the deportation of Varaždin’s Jews, even local bureaucrats appeared to not fully comprehend Ustaša ideology or that the regime surveilled citizens for adherence to Ustaša codes of behavior. On the Feast of Corpus Christi, four clerks left the procession occurring near St. Florian’s Church to lunch at Marko Gold’s. An Ustaša noticed and reported it to the local camp, which reacted immediately, writing to the GPV to demand that the clerks explain themselves:

Let these individuals give their statements and reasoning as to how they could now, being that the Ustaša Croatian government’s stances are well-known and clear to everyone, leave a great Catholic event to go to a Jew’s for free food and drink. Do these clerks, even now, still not see that the Jewish-liberal times have passed and that these actions are considered to be clearly against the Croatian Ustaša government and movement? Because of these reasons, I am ordering that these clerks’ statements be delivered to me within 48 hours, upon which I will make my next decision.⁶¹

While the clerks delivered their statements on time, the Ustaša camp leadership did not accept their excuses as valid and their punishment entailed depositing half their salaries into the town’s social fund.⁶²

In the early months of the NDH, many of Varaždin’s Croats had not yet enthusiastically embraced the new order. A June 1941 article in Hrvatsko Jedinstvo admitted the difficulties the Ustaša faced in finding supporters in the town and surrounding areas during the April regime change. They were only able to muster about thirty individuals, most of them youths. The writers also lamented the “unconscious disinterest” present among much of the populace toward the Ustaša movement and its goals.⁶³ It does appear that Varaždin’s locals either did not pay attention to the litany of new laws or thought some of them, especially regarding “race,” did not need to be taken seriously. Perhaps this disinterest is best illustrated by one of the aforementioned clerks, I. Hercezi, who claimed he did not know about the ban on entering Jewish-owned buildings.⁶⁴

The contingent that the Ustaša did recruit became essential in driving the most radical events in the town. Božidar Gregl, who personally arranged the deportation of Artur Polak, became central in organizing the deportation of Varaždin’s Jews.⁶⁵ Gregl issued the notice for the deportation of Jews on July 12 alongside another notice mandating the registration of local Serbs.⁶⁶ He and a small corpus of armed Ustaša police were more than capable of handling the deportation of the town’s Jewish community. The Ustaša went to Jewish residences throughout the evening and into the night, giving families only a few moments to pack their essentials.⁶⁷ Panic set in among Varaždin’s Jews, and multiple individuals attempted suicide. Among them were Bene and Fritzi Moses, who realized that the Ustaša wanted them gone and also wanted their property. When the Ustaša entered the Moses’s home, they found a small pile of valuables on the table next to their dead bodies.⁶⁸ That most of Varaždin’s populace were not fervent Ustaša did not matter—they did not or could not resist the deportations of their neighbors, and this was enough for the deportations to occur.

While Gregl soon reported to his superiors that Varaždin was “free of Jews,” a few remained in the town. Among them was Milan Blass, who avoided the July deportation by not registering his location, as he was staying in his cousins’ home. He consequently hid unnoticed as the Ustaša arrested his family members. Blass’s boss, Zvonko Čanić, further protected him by requesting a deportation exemption due to Blass’s essential role as an engineer in a local textile factory.⁶⁹ Varaždin residents also successfully petitioned to have Zora Blau returned to the town after the deportation. They requested that Blau should be allowed to stay in Varaždin on account of her deceased husband, Hinko’s, many contributions to the town during his lifetime.⁷⁰ Though Blau and Blass survived the war in this manner, they were a small minority. Escaping the first deportation was no guarantee of safety; in 1942 and 1943, many Jews remaining in Varaždin fell victim to second and third “cleansings” carried out by the Ustaša.⁷¹

Redistribution: 1941 to 1945

Before the GPV could redistribute property left behind by the town’s deported Jews, they needed staff to catalogue, organize, and assess its value. In August 1941, Dragutin Petković was appointed commissioner tasked with managing the ŽO, and shortly thereafter, the local court approved a few trustees to assist with the paperwork behind expropriation. Over the next two years, the ŽO’s work almost never ceased; after the completion of the initial cataloging, they then responded to a plethora of property requests and organized the logistics of redistribution. In 1943, Petković requested a pay raise to better compensate him for the labor he conducted often late into the night on behalf of the ŽO.⁷²

The variety of property requests underscores the ubiquity of redistribution in the town. Some individuals were, of course, interested in valuable immovable and movable property. While many seized businesses were initially managed by appointed trustees, others later became available for purchase.⁷³ Many property requests came from ordinary townspeople seeking necessities such as winter clothing or firewood. The conditions of everyday life, characterized by a floundering wartime economy and continuing supply shortages,⁷⁴ prompted many individuals into accepting the logic of NDH violence against “non-Aryans.” The visibility of the deportation and redistribution process made clear to Varaždin’s “Aryans” the meaning of state ideology and how they could benefit from it.

Many property requests to the ŽO came from organizations seeking furniture, decorations, or other items for their offices. The local male Ustaša Youth branch, for example, asked for books, bookshelves, and sports equipment like skis and tennis rackets.⁷⁵ The female branch of the Ustaša Youth wrote asking for bedsheets, porcelain, and cookware.⁷⁶ Local Nazi organizations asked for rugs, as well as Croatian- and German-language typewriters and reading material.⁷⁷ Other requests came from NDH government offices or state-run institutions: the local tax office, the hospital, the high school, the post office, and so on.⁷⁸ The behavior of such groups is predictable; affiliated with Nazis, the Ustaša or the state, their leadership had no qualms in obtaining expropriated property.

A number of requests came from local civic and cultural organizations. The town’s museum obtained a variety of valuable items, including a chandelier, Persian rugs, lithographs, paintings, porcelain and alabaster figurines, and pieces of Biedermeier-style furniture.⁷⁹ A 1943 pamphlet commemorating the museum’s twentieth anniversary included descriptions and photographs that overlapped with some items received from the ŽO.⁸⁰ The museum director, who wrote the pamphlet, listed the origins of some, but not all, items on display. Illustrative is the example of Artur Krajanski, Eva Akerman’s father, who had committed suicide in April 1941 upon news of the Axis invasion.⁸¹ Though the pamphlet lists Artur’s voluntary prewar donations, files from the ŽO reveal that a painting confiscated from the Krajanskis later in 1941 ended up in the museum’s possession as well.⁸²

Confiscated and redistributed musical instruments provide another example of the visible movement of stolen property throughout Varaždin. The state took over twenty pianos and organs from Jewish homes and redistributed them to schools, music societies, the town museum, and the homes of some individuals, including the wife of leading Ustaša Mate Frković.⁸³ The conspicuousness of moving pianos again highlights the conspicuousness of the expropriation process. Moving pianos out of buildings, pushing them across town, and maneuvering them to their new locations were not simple tasks. These instruments were certainly used in music lessons and performances, thus visibly entwining local culture with the products of robbery and genocide.

Varaždin’s churches also became implicated in theft. Besides musical instruments, some local churches requested that benches and other seating be stripped from the town’s synagogue and given to them:

In the local Jewish synagogue there are a number of good benches of various sizes as well as about ten loveseats. In the parish church the benches are quite worn out and should have been replaced long ago, but there were not the financial means to do so. Since Jewish items are being sold in the town, and likely no one else will buy the benches, we ask that you gift the parish church twenty-six larger benches and five loveseats, as well as twelve smaller benches to the chapels of St. Fabian and Sebastian.⁸⁴

This letter raises a number of issues. First is the normalization of stripping assets from one house of worship for the benefit of another. Second is the request’s reasoning: the church leadership did not want to pay a discounted rate—they wanted the benches for free—and chose the language of economic need over other rhetoric, whether racial, religious, or national. Third, the letter’s language indicates that it was common knowledge that the town was selling stolen Jewish property. The reality of the deportation of Varaždin’s Jews and the theft of their property had quickly become a fact of everyday life.

The church’s request resembles the written requests by Varaždin’s residents in search of clothing at free or reduced prices. In early 1942, one woman asked permission to buy dresses from the ŽO, as buying women’s clothing in the town was impossible without specific vouchers that she did not have.⁸⁵ In her words, such a situation “forced” her to make such a request, otherwise she would not have any appropriate winter clothing.⁸⁶ Another man made a similar claim, stating that because no Varaždin shops had suits available, he needed to purchase one from the ŽO to be properly dressed for the winter.⁸⁷ A number of impoverished women made similar requests. One woman justified her request for clothing because her husband was interned in a German prisoner-of-war camp and unable to provide for the family.⁸⁸ Another cited her personal poverty and reminded the town council she was caring for another person’s child, for which she received no financial assistance.⁸⁹ These types of requests cited the regime’s limitations and its failure to deliver on the promises that they had made to its citizens. Writing in Fall 1941, for example, one mining employee whose home was bombed during the Axis invasion stated that neither the German government nor “our state” had, to date, compensated him for his losses.⁹⁰ Thus he turned to the city council in an attempt to receive expropriated furniture. While personal beliefs are impossible to parse from the bare language of many requests, their wording suggests that individuals often pursued other alternatives before turning to the town council. Nonetheless they, in the end, saw expropriated property as a form of support available to them.

Petitions by Croat refugees living in Varaždin also made up a large portion of the property requests. Many came from nearby Čakovec or other Međimurjan towns now occupied by Hungary. While the state allowed them to lease a seized apartment, some requested rent decreases due to the poor condition or small size of the housing.⁹¹ A number of these letters underscore the complications of property redistribution and hint at social dynamics within Varaždin itself. One Međimurjan, F. Škvorc, complained to the county of Zagorje. He was upset that he had requested clothing and firewood from Varaždin’s ŽO, but had only received one raincoat. He bemoaned the treatment of “us Međimurjan refugees” by Varaždin’s long-time residents, who “always look at us with a watchful eye.” The governor’s office directed the GPV to give Škvorc at least some firewood, on account of his documented loyalty to the NDH.⁹² Such an example raises important questions: how did the ŽO decide what to give to whom? Were local bureaucrats also wary of Međimurjans, or did they prefer giving property to familiar townspeople?

Unfortunately, some requests are missing confirmations, and thus it is not possible to fully answer these questions. But, Škvorc’s complaint reveals certain aspects of property redistribution, namely, by reflecting individuals’ attempts to navigate the NDH bureaucracy to achieve their desires—even if they initially made appeals to the incorrect offices (a common occurrence).⁹³ While Škvorc reminded the county administration of his dedication to the Ustaša cause, and thus the state’s obligation to provide for him, other individuals with no such background could also attempt to signal their loyalty to the regime. Following the legally mandated requirement to place “za dom spremni!” (for the homeland—ready!) in their signature lines or the new orthography of Croatian propagated by the state demonstrated people’s awareness of Ustaša ideals and laws. Considering that, as Rory Yeomans has noted, the regime struggled to mandate the use of “za dom spremni,” especially in common speech, using the line, as many requests in Varaždin did, demonstrates at least a basic compliance with such codes of conduct, even if it was for the self-interested reason of acquiring property.⁹⁴

The redistribution of everyday items—bedlinens, shoes, clothing—further echoes Ustaša ideology among Varaždin’s populace. Some were like Gregl and Škvorc: undisputable Ustaša ideologues. Many, however, appeared to be ordinary individuals navigating the new system in which they lived for their own benefit, however modest. But what is particularly salient is the minimal degree to which Ustaša racial thought appears in individual requests. References to the “race” of previous owners were superficial. Usually the requests simply noted the availability of Jewish and Serb property.⁹⁵ Despite there being little surviving documentation (to my knowledge) detailing the GPV handling Serb-owned property in Varaždin, multiple requests indicate that the department managed such property, or at least people thought that it did.⁹⁶ Thus, even if there was less Serb-owned property controlled by the GPV compared to Jewish property, or perhaps none at all, individuals understood the NDH’s campaigns against both groups and assumed that the government handled their property in similar ways. Furthermore, the fact that people readily asked for items intimately used by “non-Aryans”—their clothing, furniture, and cookware, among others—reflects a point made by Carolin Lange in her examination of non-Jewish German reactions to expropriation: if people were so “disgusted” by the previous property owners’ race, they would have refrained from living in their homes or using their belongings.⁹⁷ A spectrum of material motives, ranging from greed to the desire for basic needs, appeared to shape many ordinary individuals’ requests for property in Varaždin.

That Varaždin remained firmly under state control between 1941 and 1945 certainly affected the speed with which local offices could handle expropriation requests. The presence of Ustaša and German forces made it difficult for the Partisans to infiltrate the town and effectively organize among the townspeople.⁹⁸ Yet the moods of many Varaždin residents toward the Ustaša remained ambivalent as the years passed. One report from Ustaša police chief Krunoslav Batušić written in mid-1943 is illustrative:

The celebration of Worker’s Day [an NDH state holiday] was held in Tomislav’s Square this morning, where there was an official Holy Mass with about 2,500 to 3,000 people in attendance—but it became noticeable, that during the time of [leading Ustaša theorist Aleksandar] Seitz’s speech which was broadcast via radio that almost everyone left—barely a hundred people remained.⁹⁹

Certainly, this is not the behavior of a populace enthralled by Ustaša ideology, but neither is it indicative of a town in revolt. One might characterize such actions as passive resistance or attribute them to simple disinterest in listening to a political speech on a holiday. But such an episode adds layers of complexity to understanding Aryanization and Ustaša rule more generally in Varaždin. There were plenty of Ustaša supporters, but others could feel less positively about the movement yet still accept the NDH’s authority and cooperate with its laws and policies, especially if it yielded some advantage to them.

Conclusion

In May 1945, only a few weeks after Varaždin’s liberation, Josip Broz Tito, alongside other high-ranking officials like Andrija Hebrang, Kosta Nađ, and Aleksandar Ranković, made a surprise visit to the town. As Tito leaned out the window of the town command building, he spoke to the crowd that had gathered in the square below, having heard of his arrival. Tito addressed them as a fellow native of Zagorje and praised locals’ efforts in the liberation movement. While looking ahead to the hard work needed to build the new Yugoslavia, he called for unity, stating that “hatred between the peoples of Yugoslavia cannot happen again, because it has brought us much misfortune, suffering, and victims.” Vijesti (News), the town’s new Partisan-run newspaper, (naturally) reported townspeople’s positive reception to “beloved” Tito’s visit and his speech.¹⁰⁰

Eva Akerman also visited Varaždin soon after liberation. As she recalled in an interview published in a Varaždin newspaper in 2013, her return shocked her:

I had to return home to see if anything remained of us, if anyone remained alive. I made it to Gundulić Street and simply fell apart. Something happened within me and I couldn’t even walk or speak. I just stood there in shock. One man who knew me and my family saw me and offered me a place to stay. Only after a few days did I recover from the shock. There were many strangers in my house. That wasn’t my house anymore.¹⁰¹

Akerman ultimately did not decide to stay in her hometown. Indeed, out of Varaždin’s few Jewish survivors, even fewer permanently returned. With only a few Jews living in Varaždin, the town’s Jewish association effectively ceased functioning. The Jewish cemetery, while mostly untouched during the war, steadily dilapidated.¹⁰² The synagogue—intended to be converted by NDH authorities for use by the Croatian Workers’ Union (Hrvatski radnički savez) and thus experienced damage and degradation—at least was spared total destruction by the Ustaša, unlike most synagogues throughout the NDH.¹⁰³

In the postwar period, there was a restitution process, albeit an imperfect one. Victims of expropriation and their heirs could claim their property before it passed fully into the hands of the new state. Yet, as Naida-Mihal Brandl has discussed, many clauses in the statutes providing for restitution could easily be interpreted to reject the claim, especially for productive property that the Yugoslav state wanted to nationalize.¹⁰⁴ Because most Jews and their relatives did not survive the war, did not return to their prewar homes, or soon emigrated from Yugoslavia altogether, much property went unclaimed. For less valuable property stolen during the war, especially basic movables like small household items and clothing, it is logical to assume that much remained in the hands of wartime “Aryanizers.” In the case of Varaždin, that the registry of movable property was burnt also impeded postwar attempts to estimate the actual value of seized property sold by the Ustaša state at minimal prices, though a few Jewish survivors managed to find some of their belongings among the town’s households.¹⁰⁵

The restoration of Zora Blau’s property illustrates the circumstances Ustaša victims navigated in the postwar period. While Varaždin’s residents petitioned to have the elderly Blau returned to the town after the July 1941 deportation, the NDH had already seized her property, and she lived with her former housekeeper until the war’s end.¹⁰⁶ Though Blau had consequently been in Varaždin for most of the war, the local museum returned the property they had received from the city council only in 1946.¹⁰⁷ Blau, whose radio was also confiscated in 1941, left a note on it before handing it over, writing that she would miss her “good friend.” The individual in possession of Blau’s radio knew it was hers, almost certainly knew she came back to Varaždin, yet returned it to her only after the fall of the NDH.¹⁰⁸ Though some of Varaždin’s residents saved Blau, those who had received her property hesitated to challenge the laws that justified the persecution of “non-Aryans.” Only with the war’s end did they feel it was possible to return their gains—or, potentially, that such actions were necessary to avoid punishment in the new postwar state.

The Ustaša failed in many regards to create the fascist state and society they had so desired and aspired toward in the interwar period. But in the four years of their rule, they normalized the logic of racialized expropriation to a wide swath of its citizens, including in Varaždin. A spectrum of people became beneficiaries of racialized theft, ranging from outright fascists to people attempting to navigate everyday life in the midst of war and occupation. Despite any misgivings individuals may have held against the Ustaša, they nonetheless accommodated the logic of racialized seizure and redistribution propagated by the regime. Many of Varaždin’s residents may have not been guilty of violence themselves, but they, in one form or another, linked themselves to the state-led processes that aimed to remove “undesirable” groups from the national body and reshape society along Ustaša lines. Had the majority of “Aryans” in Varaždin and elsewhere condemned robbery or simply showed no interest in seized homes, businesses, and belongings, they would have challenged the rationale driving Aryanization. That they did not meant that otherwise ordinary individuals became central actors in the process of genocide.

Alma Huselja is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she also received her MA in History. Her doctoral research studies “Aryanization” throughout cities under the Independent State of Croatia. In 2022, she was a Summer Graduate Student Research Fellow at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies and is currently a Claims Conference Saul Kagan Fellow in Advanced Shoah Studies.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Karen Auerbach, Chad Bryant, Dirk Moses, and William Sturkey, as well as Nicole Harry, Tess Megginson, and participants in the Carolina Seminar in Russia and its Empires for their suggestions and comments throughout the development of this article. I thank Krešimir Lukinić at the Croatian State Archives in Varaždin and Vladimir Huzjan for their assistance and advice during my research stay in Varaždin in 2021. Lastly, I also thank the anonymous reviewers of Holocaust and Genocide Studies for their feedback.

Funding statement

The Carolina Center for Jewish Studies Graduate Student Research and Writing Grant supported the research for this article.

Footnotes