How the Independent State of Croatia attempted to eliminate its Serbian population during WWII

History · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Established as a puppet state by Axis powers in 1941, the Independent State of Croatia launched a brutal campaign of genocide against Orthodox Serbs. Through mass killings, forced conversions, and expulsions, the Ustaša regime sought to create an ethnically pure territory, leaving hundreds of thousands of victims in its wake.

The Independent State of Croatia, or NDH, emerged in 1941 following the Axis occupation of Yugoslavia. Led by Ante Pavelić, the Ustaša regime implemented a one-party fascist government that targeted more than one million Orthodox Serbs living within its borders. This campaign was not merely a byproduct of war but a systematic effort to reshape the demographic landscape of the region, which included parts of modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina and Dalmatia.

The regime's methods were multifaceted, involving the forced conversion of Serbs to Catholicism, mass expulsions, and direct liquidation. Estimates regarding the scale of the atrocities vary, with some sources suggesting that approximately 250,000 Serbs were killed in these campaigns. Broader assessments of the regime's total victims—including Jews, Roma, and anti-fascist Croats—place the death toll between 350,000 and 450,000 people. The brutality of these actions marked the NDH as a particularly lethal component of the Axis alliance.

Resistance to the Ustaša regime was primarily organized by the communist Partisans, commanded by Josip Broz Tito. By 1945, the war concluded, the NDH ceased to exist, and Croatia was integrated as a republic into the newly formed federal Yugoslavia. The legacy of this period remains a complex historical chapter, as the state's collapse led to a transition into a new political order that sought to manage the deep ethnic tensions exacerbated by the wartime genocide.

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