"The Holocaust in History"

Back Cover:

"Accurate and discerning, ranging over the vast literature... An ideal introduction to the subject for any student of the Holocaust, and an authoritative summary for the expert."
Yehuda Bauer, Institute of Contemporary Jewry,
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Pages 75 - 78

German Satellites

In one form or another, the debate over responsibility for the Final Solution echoes through the literature on Germany's satellites - Slovakia, Croatia, Rumania, Hungary, and Bulgaria. In each case there were German demands to participate in the Final Solution. Each satellite responded differently, sometimes with dramatically different results... In both Slovakia and Croatia, countries that owed their very existence to the Third  Reich, the Germans set up aggressive, extreme right-wing conservatives - the clerical corporatist father Jozef Tiso in Bratislava in 1939, and the terrorist Ustasha leader Ante Pavelic' in Zagreb in 1941. Each was bent on establishing a strongly authoritarian, nationalist regime in which there was no place for Jews...

All five satellites moved against the Jews on their own, issuing definitions and discriminatory legislation  and confiscating Jewish property... With the exception of Bulgaria, there seems little doubt that powerful indigenous forces accounted almost entirely for the wave of anti-Jewish measures that continued up to the German attack on the Soviet Union... The overall level of violence was highest in Croatia, where Pavelic's Ustasha movement devised the most thoroughly totalitarian state of any satellite and pursued a merciless, bloody assault on the country's two million Serbs...

In Croatia, many thousands of Jews were marked for annihilation within the  country - part of the vicious war against Serbs, Gypsies, and others deemed outsiders. Camps run by the Ustasha worked thousands to death; other perished from typhus and terrible abuse. Shooting parties roamed the country, killing presumed enemies of the new Croatian state. A third of the Jewish population of about thirty thousand may thus have been killed before the end of 1941. There were already many thousands of victims of the Ustasha regime when Zagreb agreed to deportations in the summer of 1942, and the Final Solution had already been in effect for some time...

(End quote)

The same author talks also about the suffering of Serbs and Jews in the Nazi occupied Serbia.