Pamphlet: "The Victorious Axis"
This pamphlet titled "The Victorious Axis" was printed in Italy and smuggled into Yugoslavia. It is typical of the Ustase's attitude toward Vladko Macek and the Croatian Peasant Party (HSS) following the latter's signing of the Sporazum, or agreement with the monarchy on forming an autonomous Croatia within Yugoslavia, in August, 1939. During the same month the Sporazum was signed, Pavelic once again came into favour in official circles in Italy and began receiving a healthy stipend from the Fascist government to pay for attack propaganda such as this. "Democratic" as used here is a pejorative; though some would later claim otherwise, the Ustase in 1941 were under no illusions regarding their own fascist and anti-Semitic orientation.

 

Today, when the victory of totalitarian Italy and Germany is practically complete, mentioned gentlemen (that is, from the leadership of Croatian Peasant Party) still lead double lives: on one side they "sympathize" with the totalitarian states, and on the other they support full military mobilization and persecute Croatian nationalists - they even keep them in prisons! We ask: against whom is this mobilization directed? It proves that those democratic gentlemen still keep hoping that "maybe something will change at the last moment." Versailles has fallen and with it must fall everything that was created there! And in Versailles our dungeon, Yugoslavia, was created. Now it is time for Croats to fulfil our rights and to stop... once and for all... to be prey, a colony for Serbs, an asylum for various newcomers and the "promised land" for the Jews!

.... By the force of events they suddenly became friends of the Axis, at whom they up to recently growled like curs, and if the Axis would show their weakness they would most readily leave them immediately. They are bread-fighters, career-hunters, vultures, to whom the national ideal is only a pretext to achieve their egoistical goals. Can one be a genuine Croat and at the same time call the one who recently butchered his folk a brother, the same one who keeps in "preparation" hundreds of thousands Croatian sons, ready to send them to the slaughterhouse for the so-called western democracies, creators and protectors of the greatest dungeon of Croats: Yugoslavia.

 

:: filing information ::
Title: Pamphlet: "The Victorious Axis"
Source: Pobjeda Osovine (The Victorious Axis), March 1941. Quoted in Novak, Viktor. Magnum Crimen, pp 530-531. Zagreb, 1948. Translated by Sinisa Djuric.
Date: March 1941 Added: March 9, 2003