Original scientific paper
CONNECTIONS OF THE EXILED USTASHA LEADERSHIP WITH THE CRUSADERS, 1945-1947
Zdenko Radelić
; Croatian Institute of History, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The author presents the attempt of the exiled Ustasha leadership, which left Croatia in May 1945, to gain information about the political and military situation in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. They also wanted to find out whether there is an anticommunist and anti-Yugoslav resistance movement called “The Crusaders”, and the real strength of that movement. In order to gain that information the exiled leadership sent several groups into Croatia. Their objective was to connect with the Crusaders and obtain useful information for the exiled Ustasha leadership. The article gives information about all groups which attempted of succeeded infiltrating into Croatia. Beside the literature about this subject, published both in exile and in Yugoslavia, the author also used documents of the Ministry of internal affairs of the Socialist Republic of Croatia and other documents of the Yugoslav state security, which have been made available to the historical research only recently. Most of this documents were previously unknown and completely unresearched. The exiled Ustasha leadership overestimated the strength of the guerilla movement. The activities of Crusaders gave them a false hope, after the disasterous defeat of the Independent State of Croatia at the end of the World War II. They hoped they would reestablish the independent Croatian state with the help of the western allies. For this reason they encouraged the infiltration of groups which had to collect the information about the situation in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Numerous failures of the infiltrated groups and several negative reports about the situation were not enough to prove to the exiled leadership that they cannot achieve their plans. Unrealistic political ambitions prompted the exiled Ustasha leadership to organize an elaborate plan which aimed at infiltrating larger number of Ustasha officers and officials which would unite and control all the guerilla groups. The plan was known under the code name “April 10th” (Independent State of Croatia was proclaimed on April 10, 1941) and it ended in failure after the Yugoslav police organized Operation Gvardijan and during 1947 and 1948 successfully captured large numbers of Ustasha representatives who had infiltrated into Croatia. The failure of this action finally brought to light the real situation in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. In late 1940-ies many exiled Croats lost hope that the violent overthrow of the Yugoslav communist regime was possible, although even the previous attempts were completely illusory.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
161936
URI
Publication date:
26.4.2002.
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