Ustaša, also spelled Ustasha, plural Ustaše, Croatian fascist movement that nominally ruled the Independent State of Croatia during World War II. In 1929, when King Alexander I tried to suppress the conflict between Croatian and Serbian political parties by imposing a personal dictatorial regime in Yugoslavia, Ante Pavelić, a former delegate to Parliament and an advocate of Croatian separatism, fled to Italy and formed the Ustaša (“Insurgence”) movement. Dedicated to achieving Croatian independence from Yugoslavia, the ustaše modeled themselves on the Italian Fascists and founded terrorist training centres in Italy and Hungary. To foment political crises in Yugoslavia, the Ustaša’s members attempted to incite a peasant rebellion in northern Dalmatia in 1932 and participated in the assassination of King Alexander in 1934 at Marseille.

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The Ustaša achieved its goal after the Axis powers invaded and partitioned Yugoslavia in April 1941. Pavelić then returned to Croatia and, under the sponsorship of the Italians, formed the government of a Croatian state that had been expanded to include some of Serbia and all of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Ustaša also conscripted an army to join the Axis powers and to fight the resistance movements that were beginning to operate in the Yugoslav lands. To make their state more purely Croatian, the ustaše set about exterminating its Serb, Jewish, and Gypsy inhabitants with a brutality that shocked even the Germans and occasionally obliged the Italians to intervene. Although many Yugoslavs reacted to their brutality by joining the resistance movements, the Ustaša remained in control of Croatia until May 1945, when the German army protecting them collapsed and Pavelić and his supporters fled before the communist Partisans.