Korb, Alexander Im Schatten des Weltkriegs: Massengewalt der Ustaša gegen Serben, Juden und Roma in Kroatien 1941–1945 (review)

Abstract

SEER, 94, 1, JANUARY 2016 186 when he started his job at SSRCI — he was secretary of the commission for the control of oil companies’ shares — which gave him the opportunity to acquire a Jewish house and other assets’ (p. 82). Chapter five focuses on the tensions between the Romanian authorities and German attempts to benefit from the confiscation of Jewish property, while chapter six examines how Antonescu’s policy affected the Roma in general, and those living in Bucharest in particular. Chapter seven and eight uncover the strategies adopted by Jews and gentiles to bypass Romanianization through what the author terms ‘sabotage/camouflage’. Ionescu argues that despite the misery inflicted on Jews and Roma through expropriation, eviction and compulsory sale of businesses to gentiles, Antonescu failed to complete Romanianization. This was due principally to the sabotage — legal and illegal — conducted by Jews and Roma, in several cases with the collusion of gentiles. An example is the refusal of some gentile managers to fire Jewish employees, either out of friendship or because they needed a skilled workforce and Jews were, in general, the only available candidates (many gentiles having been conscripted into the army). The success of such sabotage played a major role in the economic survival of Bucharest Jews. Legal resistance consisted mainly of tens of thousands of contestations against the Romanianization of houses, which led to the reversal of some expropriations, about 10 per cent, by September 1943, and caused delays for others until the 23 August 1944 coup engineered by the young King Michael halted them. Illegal resistance through camouflage saw fictitious transactions of real estate and companies from Jews to gentiles, thus preventing their expropriation. By the time of Antonescu’s overthrow, Ionescu concludes, complete Romanianization was more of a regime fiction than a reality. UCL SSEES and Georgetown University Dennis Deletant Washington, D.C. Korb, Alexander. Im Schatten des Weltkriegs: Massengewalt der Ustaša gegen Serben, Juden und Roma in Kroatien 1941–1945. Studien zur Gewaltgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Institut für Sozialforschung. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2013. 510 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. €28.00 (paperback). Alexander Korb has named his book very carefully. All the action takes place In the Shadow of the World Wars, with the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) wedged between German and Italian forces and amidst the constant menace of partisans undermining Ustaša control. Korb tells us remarkably little about Ustaša rhetoric or about the prehistory of ethnic relations in interwar Yugoslavia,butthisisbecausehismajorargumentisthatthewaritselfproduced REVIEWS 187 the mass violence against civilian populations in the NDH. Nation-building and ethnic homogenization projects were common throughout Central and South-eastern Europe from the 1870s onward, Korb points out, so why was the violence so much more extreme in the NDH than elsewhere and why did it happen precisely during the early 1940s? Quoting Ustaša propagandists talking about eliminating the Serbs does not explain much either because, as with most fascist movements, Korb says, the Ustaša ‘displayed their program above all through praxis, in the mobilization of emotions and in the exercise of violence’ (p. 56). Rather than looking at either rhetoric or at contingent decisions made in the heat of the moment, Korb suggests that these two approaches, so often polarized in the historiography, interacted with one another in dynamic ways. A functionalist approach that emphasizes the structural and local causes of Ustaša violence nonetheless permeates the book, and Korb assumes that his readers know enough about the Ustaša’s annihilationist rhetoric that he does not need to analyse it once again. As the subtitle suggests, this book is about Ustaša Mass Violence against Serbs, Jews, and Roma in Croatia, 1941–1945. Korb has very few individual characters whose names and personalities enter the text, but his evidence proves convincingly that the major perpetrators were Croatians associated with the Ustaša — not German soldiers or Nazi Stormtroopers. Assigning blame is far from Korb’s mind, however, as he is more interested in explaining why Yugoslav society suddenly become extremely violent. Influenced by Christian Gerlach’s search for multi-causal explanations of mass violence, Korb looks at the creation of ‘violent spaces’, ‘communities of violence...