ABSTRACT
This chapter reconstructs the Ustasha culture of martyrdom through an examination of its relationship to mass killing. Focusing on the statewide commemorations in the aftermath of the deaths of two of the most important early Ustasha militia martyrs, Mijo Babić and Antun Pogorelec, it argues that between 1941 and 1945, the Ustasha state developed a sacralised public culture which not only served to legitimise the campaign of terror against the state's Serbian population, but to mobilise popular opinion in support of an intensification of that campaign. This chapter also argues that there was a symbiotic relationship between martyrdom culture and the state's campaigns of mass killing, with commemorations of the Ustasha dead becoming less intense as the sanguinary cleansing campaigns by militias in the countryside were replaced by more bureaucratised forms of mass extermination. This study of how one fascist movement in Southeastern Europe conceived martyrdom, violence, and the body provides a useful comparative model through which to examine the outlook of other European fascist parties and states on violence and self-sacrifice. In so doing, it tells us important things about the ideological relationship between “peripheral” Eastern European fascisms and “core” fascisms and broader processes of ideological transference.
