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You're listening to season 11 of Mobile Suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast covering the entirety of sci fi mega franchise Mobile suit Gundam from 1979 to today.

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Welcome back to Mobile Suit Breakdown and the third episode of our Yugoslavia Interlude. The Questionable Croatians While the Luftwaffe was blasting away at Belgrade, the ministers of the royal government fled into the mountains, bound for a sheltered airfield and escape after King Peter II himself and new Prime Minister Dushan Simovic. The most important among them was a 62 year old Croatian, the Vice Prime Minister Vladko Macek. He was a holdover from the previous cabinet and had been dubious about the new government's intentions, but because he believed it offered the best chance of keeping the country together and out of the war, he allowed himself to be convinced to join the new cabinet. His job would be to secure continued Croatian commitment to Yugoslavia. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia had never managed to fully reconcile the Serb and Croat peoples. Though the two shared a language, Serbo Croatian and the same South Slavic ancestry, their union into a single country was not easy, nor had it been inevitable. For more than 2,000 years, the Balkan Peninsula had been a liminal zone between Western and eastern spheres of influence, between the Roman Republic and the kingdoms of the Diadochi, between the Latin and Greek speaking parts of the Roman Empire, between Catholics and Orthodox, Franks and Byzantines, Habsburgs and Ottomans. Throughout all of that, the lands that are now Croatia and the lands that are now Serbia were on opposite sides of the dividing line by the early 1900s. The Croatian people had answered to the Hungarian and Habsburg monarchs for some 800 years, but their position on the border with the Ottoman Empire had guaranteed them a certain amount of autonomy and an independent identity within the empire. As the Ottoman threat declined, though, the imperial authorities in Budapest began a pressure campaign meant to force the Croatian people to assimilate into Hungarian culture, known as Magyarization. The earliest stirrings of nationalism in the northern Balkans grew out of resentment both towards the erasure of Croatian culture and the concomitant erosion of Croatia's traditional political autonomy that Magyarization sought to achieve. As in Serbia, the new Croatian nationalism developed in two parallel courses. The first was our old familiar friend Yugoslavism, that is, the dream of uniting all South Slavic peoples into a single nation. But the second argued that Croatia had existed as a long standing historic nation with its own laws, institutions and culture since before its integration into the empire, and therefore it had a right to exist as a state. The movement arguing for this Croatian state right coalesced around the Party of right in the 1860s and their philosophy of Prvasto, literally rightism. The Croatian state right was a direct challenge to great Serbianism. That philosophy argued that political nations are derived from ethnic ones, that people are born Serbian or Croatian or whatever, and that national borders ought to be redrawn or populations moved or removed if necessary, in order to create a Serbia that includes all Serbs. But under the state right theory, the opposite is existing. Political nations create ethnic ones. All the people living within the borders of Croatia are are Croats, no matter what their language, religion or ancestry might be. We know, of course, that the Yugoslavists got their wish for a South Slav state after the breakup of the Austro Hungarian Empire. But this did not mean that Yugoslavism enjoyed broad popular support among the Croatian people. No one asked them. In fact, in October 1918, together with the Slovenes and some of the Serbs living inside the old borders of the empire, the Croatians declared their own independent country, the very short lived state of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs. Unfortunately for the new state, they were treated as part of the losing side in the First World War, and much of their land had already been claimed as spoils by Italy. With the Italian army advancing, the state looked to a different, victorious Serbia for protection. It seemed like the best of bad options. In November of 1918, Croatian representatives met with a Serbian delegation in Zagreb to discuss the form that the new united state would take. The Croatians tried to bargain for a federation of co equal, autonomous states. But this idea was rejected out of hand by the Serbian negotiator, a certain General Dushan Simovic. God, this guy's like the Forrest Gump of Yugoslavia. With no leverage. Italian soldiers already occupying Istria and Dalmatia, and Serbian soldiers occupying the rest of the country. All of the Croatian leaders decided that they needed to accept whatever it was Serbia was offering. All the Croatian leaders. No one obscure political party held out against Serbian domination. None other than our old friend Stjepan Radic of the Croatian Peasant Party. He urged his colleagues not to rush headlong into union with Serbia, calling them drunken geese wandering blindly into the fog. He was the only member of the National Council's Central Committee to vote against sending delegates to Belgrade. And his staunch opposition to unification, at least so long as it came on Serbian terms, wound up getting him removed from his position and then arrested. But it also catapulted him to nationwide prominence. He was convinced that the majority of Croatians opposed the proposed unification. And he was probably right. His peasant party had languished in obscurity for a decade before becoming the party of Croatian autonomy. Just two years later, it had become the dominant and very nearly the only political party in Croatia. You could imagine a timeline in which the Croatian people are deeply worried about Serbian hegemony in 1918 and flock to Radi's opposition banner, only to then drift gradually away again over the following years as evenhanded and competent governance out of Belgrade allayed their unfounded fears. But no, the dispute over Croatia's place within Yugoslavia, known as the Croatian Question, only grew worse throughout the interwar period. Besides airy, abstract political questions about nationhood, self determination, and the wrangling of elites to decide who would fill the top jobs, there were solid material issues in play too. In their book the Economy of Yugoslavia, economists Fred Singleton and Bernard Carter put it like the former Habsburg territories Croatia and Slovenia, which had enjoyed access to a Central European market of some 60 million people and whose industries, lines of communication, and financial institutions were developed to serve the needs of the imperial monarchy, found themselves after 1918 forced to look inward to an underdeveloped Balkan market of only 12 million. Serbia, on the other hand, was able to reach out from its former situation as a small, landlocked state of under 3 million to become the dominant element in a new Yugoslav unit four times larger. The Serbs were the largest single group, and they had the advantage of bringing to the new kingdom the experience of governing themselves within an independent state. They provided the royal house, the nucleus of the army, and the civil service. It was not surprising, therefore, that Serbian influence dominated the new state. Although Croatia and Slovenia were economically more developed than Serbia and still remained major centers of banking, finance, and insurance, political and military power were concentrated in Belgrade. To make matters worse, or at least to prevent them ever getting better, the Serbian politicians who designed the country's first constitution had put their thumb on the scale to frustrate any attempts at reform. Ignoring calls from the Slovene and Croat contingents for a federal style constitution with some level of regional autonomy, the Serbian king simply declared that the new state would adopt a unitary model in which all power flowed from the central government physically located in Serbia. Led by a Serbian king and dominated by Serbian politicians, electoral districts were drawn to create Serb majorities wherever possible. Pretty standard gerrymandering stuff, but they also used Pre World War I census figures when apportioning representation to each province. Since Serbia had lost something like a quarter of its total population during the war, while the northern Croat and Slovene regions of the country suffered far fewer casualties, this method gave the districts in Serbia disproportionate representation in The Yugoslav parliament. The disparity was so bad that some regions of Serbia received more than twice as many delegates per capita as were allotted in Croatia, and the state apparatus was deeply involved in everyday economic life. Clientelism was rampant. Good jobs like factory manager or railroad executive were often public employment doled out by politicians as favors. The central government also directed new investments in industry and logistics to the relatively underdeveloped and Serb dominated southern regions of the country, where workers were prepared to accept much lower wages. This proved profitable for politically connected investors, while depressing pay for Slovene and Croat workers in the more industrialized north. Or, as Singleton and Carter put it, there was a slight shift of industries to the larger urban centers of the south and some economic growth in Serbia, but the rural masses were virtually unaffected. The kingdom did little to redress the imbalance between the regions. What little was done merely irritated the northerners without noticeably benefiting the southerners. For the Croatian people, membership in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia seemed to mean little more than political impotence, economic decline, and Serbian chauvinism. In Zagreb, then, the Croatian question could be expressed as and what are we going to do about it? To the Serbian leadership in Belgrade, it sounded more like what is the minimum amount of power and wealth we need to give up in order to get Croatia to settle down and accept the new order? Well, tell a lie. To most of the leadership in Belgrade, the Croatian question was should we use the truncheon or the pistol to shut them up? Stepan Radic was just one prominent Croat murdered by the regime or its allies for asking the Croatian question too loudly. Throughout Alexander's reign, opposition politicians and intellectuals were routinely imprisoned and sometimes assassinated, whether by royal police or by paramilitaries acting under their protection. As usual, the Left, and especially the Communists, bore the brunt of. During the three year period from 1928 to 1931, seven high ranking members of the League of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia, four of them Croats, were killed by police or died in prison under what a generous person might call mysterious circumstances, as in the strange case of the prisoner who shot himself twice and then jumped out of a window. Kind of mysterious, but for what I assume must have been the very first time in history. Violent reprisals against the leaders of a minority rights movement did not make the problem go away. Imagine for a moment that you live in a country where certain regions are systematically alienated from national political power through an electoral system designed to preserve the power and influence of whichever group happened to be in control when the rules were first written, a country in which the wealth of the nation as a whole is being systematically redirected into the pockets of the ruling cohort's friends and family members, while state sponsored thugs go around killing opponents of the regime with impunity. Just imagine how mad you would be all the time if you lived in a country like that. But we were talking about Vladko Maciek, who believed, despite all of this, that a negotiated compromise could still resolve the Croatian question. He had been a friend and close political ally of Radi, was jailed several times for his work with the Peasant Party, then elected to the National assembly in 1925. When Radic was killed in 1927, Maczek was chosen by the party leadership to succeed him. He was imprisoned again during King Alexander's crackdown on minorities and dissidents, only to be released in the wake of the king's assassination in Marseilles in 1934. Intriguingly, during Macek's imprisonment, King Alexander apparently began to reconsider his hardline position on the Croatian question. He and Maciek had a friend in common, a Croatian lawyer and politician named Ivan Ubai, who was on the one hand a member of the Peasant Party and a political ally of Maciek, and on the other, a firmly committed royalist and veteran of the First World War who had won the confidence of the crown when he volunteered to fight for the allies at Salonika through Sub. Alexander and Maciek kept up an irregular correspondence, and in a twist more suitable for historical drama than real life, Alexander apparently promised Maciek that he would review all his Croatian policies just as soon as he returned from his upcoming trip to France. Unfortunately, he did not convey this intention to Prince Paul, and it was dropped after his death. But the regent was more politically permissive than his late cousin in some ways. Although opposition parties like Macek's remained officially forbidden during the early years of Prince Paul's tenure, the regent did tolerate a certain amount of quasi legal campaigning. So throughout the 1930s, Maciek assembled a united opposition coalition from all nationalities and across the political spectrum. But at the same time, Radic's assassination, the brutality and illiberalism of the royal dictatorship that followed Belgrade's continuing intransigence on the Croatian question and the cascading economic crises of the 30s drove more and more Croatians toward violent extremism. Maczek remained a committed pacifist, and by and large the Croatian people stood behind him. But many younger members of the party began drifting toward the proto fascist USTAA movement in the 1938 general election, Maciek's united opposition achieved its greatest showing, receiving 45% of the votes, although thanks to gerrymandering and election control measures enacted under King Alexander's 1931 constitution, this translated to a cool 18% of the seats in Parliament. Formally, this was a victory for the royal government. But the unexpectedly strong showing by the opposition had spooked Prince Paul. Now convinced that a change in strategy was necessary if Yugoslavia was ever going to survive, he appointed a new prime minister, one Dragisha Tsvetkovic, and instructed him to negotiate with Maciek on a compromise in late summer of 1939. These negotiations produced the landmark Svetkovic Macek Sporasum, or agreement. The Sperazium would give Croatia something very close to autonomy, with its own governor, called a ban, its own parliament, and a quota of five seats in Svetkovic's cabinet. Maczek himself became the vice prime minister, and Ivan Chubasic, the guy who had run messages between King Alexander and Maciek when he was in prison, became the first ban. He was starting to make a career out of being the one man acceptable to both sides in an intractable dispute. The Sporotsum was still in effect, and Svetkovich, Macek and Shbasic were all still in their posts. Two years later, when the Simovich coup deposed Prince Paul, Svetkovic was ousted with him, and there was real concern that the new government intended to annul the Speratsum. The coup had been a Serbian project. The officers who carried it out were great Serbia nationalists, and many of them openly resented the Sporazum for making so many compromises to the Croatian minority. In the last installment, I suggested that the junior officers who actually carried out Simovich's coup d' etat may not have been motivated purely by revulsion at Prince Paul's conciliatory attitude towards Nazi Germany, nor for the sake of Simovich's personal ambitions. This, I think, was the real grievance. They hated everything the Sperazym represented, and they blamed both Paul and Svetkovi for it. When a golden opportunity for revenge presented itself, they took it. There was resentment in Croatia too. The Speratsum looked good on paper, but its implementation had been gradual, patchy. Maciek's willingness to negotiate with the despised central government had diminished his authority among younger Croatian nationalists. They no longer wanted a better deal within Yugoslavia. For 20 years, the Greater Serbian politicians in the Karadjordjevic dynasty had used the dream of Yugoslavism as a cudgel to keep the national minorities in line, and in the process, they had convinced many young Croats that for Croatia to live, Yugoslavia had to die. Still, even on the eve of war, Maciek remained the most influential politician in Croatia and one of the most respected in all of Yugoslavia. His position was further bolstered when, rather than annulling the Sporadium and stacking his cabinet with Serbs, new Prime Minister Simovic asked Maciek to stay on as vice prime minister in a new government of national unity. Maczek was reluctant, refusing entreaties from the young king and his prime minister, but relented after Ban Shubai again interceded on their behalf. For a few days there was hope that the fragile Serb Croat compromise he had forged might endure. But on April 8, two days after fleeing Belgrade with the rest of the government, Maciek informed Prime Minister Simovic that he had no intention whatsoever of going into exile. The other ministers could do as they pleased, but he was going to stay in Croatia with his people. He resigned his post, delegated two of his deputies to represent the Croatian Peasant Party in exile, and returned to Zagreb. It is hard to estimate just how much damage sprung from this one decision to Maczek personally. Yugoslavia as a whole and Croatia in particular. Though Simovi and the king probably did not know it, by the time Maciek arrived in Belgrade and accepted their offer to continue on as vice premier, he was already in contact with German undercover agents in Zagreb. Among them was an SS colonel, Edmund Wiesenmaier, at this time probably the world's foremost on the ground expert in regime change. He had played a key role in engineering the Anschluss between Germany and Austria, then participated in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and the co opting of the new Slovakia, and would, at the end of the war, oversee the German takeover of Hungary. But for the moment, he was operating inside Zagreb and carrying in his pocket a new answer to the Croatian question. The state of play in Croatia at this point was complex. Beneath Maczek was the Peasant Party, which directly controlled two separate paramilitary organizations, the Peasant Guards in the countryside and the Civic Guards in the cities. In Zagreb, the latter were also recognized as an official police auxiliary. There was also the ustae, Croatia's homegrown fascist party, who were divided into two groups, neither of them the domestic Ustasha, who had managed to avoid government persecution and remained in country, and the exiles waiting for a chance to return. The domestic group were led by a retired army colonel named Slavko Kvaternik and were effectively working for Wiesenmaier and the Germans. The exiles, including party leader Ante Pavelic, resided in Italy and were considered agents of Mussolini. The exiles had some paramilitaries available to them too, but no more than a few hundred men. The Royal Yugoslav army was present as well, including the 4th army deployed in northern Croatia. However, the chief of staff of the 1st Army Group, with authority over the 4th army was already an USTAA collaborator. The Germans approached Majek to be their man in Croatia, the leader of the new puppet government they planned to install. They were looking for a friendly but above all, quiet Croatia with leaders that required little to no material support from their Axis patrons to keep the peace. Pavelic and the Ustasha were marginal players. They had a tiny base of support, and the man himself was erratic, tending towards brutality. He desperately wanted to be another Hitler, and since this is still part of a Gundam podcast, I can call him Gyirenesque and expect you to know what I mean. But imitation had not endeared him to the Nazi leaders. Plus, he was under Mussolini's thumb, and the Germans would have preferred not to have an Italian client state on their southern border. Maciek, on the other hand, was a steady, experienced leader who still possessed tremendous prestige and had large armed militias at his disposal. He did not share the Nazi worldview, but perhaps that would be better. Actually, if he could keep the Croats happy under German domination in their nominally independent state for the duration of the war, then so much the better. A more permanent solution could be found for them in due time. So the Germans approached him several times. First before he left to join the Simovich government, and again after he returned. But Maciek rebuffed them. He was a pacifist, a true hardcore pacifist, and he had no interest in running the government of a country engaged in a war. So they went with Plan B, Pavelic and the Ustasha. But by returning to Zagreb instead of fleeing abroad, Maciek had made himself susceptible to German pressure. His physical body was there. They could talk to him, they could threaten him. They could induce him to use his remaining influence on their behalf. On April 10, as German ground forces approached the city, Wissenmaier and Kvaternik approached Maciek and convinced him to sign a declaration announcing his support for the new Nazi aligned Croatian government, calling on all Croatians to obey them and ordering his followers in the Croatian Peasant Party to cooperate with the ustaa. USTAE agents, backed up by units from the Peasant and Civic Guards, then disarmed and captured various Royal army units in the area, including the headquarters of the 4th army, murdering some of the captured Serbian soldiers in the process. The new government then welcomed the Germans into the city with open arms and cheering crowds, and a few days later Pavelic arrived from Italy to take control of the state. Maciek tried to withdraw from public life to wait out the war on his farm, but having blessed the new Croatian puppet state, he was soon compelled to witness its worst atrocities. In October 1941, he was removed from his home, where he had been under house arrest, and sent to the Ustasha Run concentration camp at Jasenovac, a hideous nightmare of an institution where over the course of four years, perhaps as many as a hundred thousand people were murdered, mostly one on one, in unutterably sadistic ways. He is said to have asked the camp's commandant whether he feared God's wrath for his crimes, only to receive the reply, I know I will burn in hell for what I have done, but I will burn for Croatia. Not only had Maciek's statement of Support smoothed the USTAA's road to power and put the authority and institutions of the peasant party at their disposal, it also made it easy to blame the Croatian people as a whole for the crimes against humanity they perpetrated. Maczek had devoted his life to improving Serbo Croatian relations, but the harm he did in this one moment may well exceed all the good he ever managed. Meanwhile, his old friend Ivan Shubai, still technically the ban of Croatia, was riding out the war in exile in the United States. He had been sent there on a diplomatic mission by the King and the royal government, then wound up staying to look after Yugoslav interests in the country. Most of his time seems to have been taken up trying to keep the Croatian and Serbian emigre communities of away from each other's throats. Subasic was still in America in late April or early May of 1944 when he received an urgent message from the young king needed his counsel at the soonest possible moment, and he was to be flown over on the first available aircraft. This order, however, had not come from the King, but from Winston Churchill, part of an intensive pressure campaign to convince young Peter II to finally, finally get rid of Chetnik leader and minister of the armed forces, Draza Mihailovi. Two weeks after Chubasish arrived in London, Churchill announced that the King had agreed to dismiss his fourth prime minister, the obscure bureaucrat Perich, and dissolved his government. This announcement was somewhat premature. Peter had not in fact dismissed Perich, though after another week of pressure. He reluctantly caved and gave the order. The king cast about for a potential replacement. He was 19. He'd had it up to here with Churchill's bullying, and by God, he wanted to make his own decisions for once. But none of the men he approached were willing to oust Drazha from government and embrace the partisans. Peter didn't like it, but he understood this had become an absolute requirement for his government to continue receiving Allied support. He concluded that there was only one choice, only one man who was acceptable to partisan leadership, who enjoyed the confidence of the British and American governments, with experience in government and a sterling record of personal loyalty to the Karadjordjevic dynasty. Ivan Ubai, the first Croatian to become prime minister of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the last person ever to hold that title. It would be Subasic, who led the royal government into the standoff with the victorious partisans over the shape of the new Yugoslavia as it emerged from under the Nazi shroud. And his friend Maciek, battered, haunted, discredited. Old Vladko Maciek, leading the diminished rump of the once mighty Peasant Party, would be there too. He had come tantalizingly close to answering the Croatian question twice before swaying King Alexander only for the monarch to get himself assassinated immediately afterwards, then winning the Speratsum only to see it undermined and then undone by the war. He had probably gotten closer than anyone else, and now he would have one last chance. Ironically, after 30 years of Serbian domination, it would mostly be Croatians who determined the shape of the new Yugoslavia. But in the end, Subai and Maciek would both be swept away by another Croatian with a far more radical answer to the question everyone was asking. And in our next installment, we'll finally meet the Communists and see how Tito won the peace. Mobile Suit Breakdown is written, recorded and produced by us, Tom and Nina in scenic New York City within the ancestral and unceded land of the Lenape people and made possible by listeners like you. The opening track is Wasp by Misha Dioxin. The closing music is Long Way Home by Spinning Ratio. You can find links to the sources for our research, the music used in the episode, additional information about the Lenape people, and more in the show Notes on our website gundam podcast.com youm can get in touch with us by email@hostsondampodcast.com if you'd like to support the show, please tell your friends about us. Leave us a nice review. Wherever you listen to podcasts or if you'd like to support us financially, you can do so@gundumpodcast.com Patreon or look for other ways to support the show@gundumpodcast.com support most of all, thank you for listening.