66 World War Two and the Partisan Struggle
he said, should organize themselves militarily, in order to affirm the dictator-
ship of the proletariat everywhere after the defeat of the occupying regimes.^83
It was clearer to Tito than to Stalin, who was blind to reality, that the war
would not be limited to the capitalist camp, but would also involve the USSR.
Tito paid no attention to anything else in anticipation of this event, which
would give him the chance to realize his revolutionary plans. To Leo Mates,
with whom he shared living quarters, he seemed like a man who kept saying
to himself: “I will, I can and I must be a leader.”^84 He worked so fervently
that he neglected the Croat communists that the Ban (viceroy) Ivan Šubašić
had imprisoned in the castle of Kerestinec, and who had fallen into the hands
of the Ustaša when they proclaimed the Independent State of Croatia. There
were about a hundred of them, including eminent intellectuals. “In the chaos
that reigned, when Pavelić’s regime was not yet firmly in power, since it had
no police and no army,” says Vladimir Velebit in his memoirs, with a hint of
reproach, “it would have been easy to save them.”^85
Since the situation was becoming dangerous in the NDH capital and it was
clear that the communists had little hope of influencing the Croat masses, who
were intoxicated by their newly acquired “sovereignty,” the Politburo decided to
move to Belgrade. There the Germans were still tolerant of the communists.^86
With regards to the Ustaše, no doubt remained as to the criminality of their
proposals. After coming to power under Hitler’s and Mussolini’s tutelage, they
mercilessly persecuted the Jews, “Gypsies,” and especially Serbs, who consti-
tuted more than 30 percent of the entire population of the new “independent”
state. This ethnic complexity was intolerable to Ante Pavelić, who was ready
to consider the Bosnian Muslims, his new subjects, of “pure Croat blood,” and
treat them accordingly, but was determined to get rid of all “foreign” nationali-
ties. Hence, he launched an extermination program against the hated Serbs,
trying to massacre a third of them and deporting the survivors to Serbia or
forcing their conversion from Orthodoxy to Catholicism. Should they convert,
they could be considered pure (or nearly so) Croatians. This policy was imme-
diately put into practice without any firm opposition by a Church that, under
the spell of nationalism, refused to openly condemn it.^87
Tito hurriedly abandoned Zagreb, without even waiting for the birth of his
and Herta Haas’s son.^88 He left on 23 May, a day before the frontier between
NDH and Serbia closed. As he said later, he decided to go, not just because
of the Ustaša but also because some of the Croat communists, believing in the
alliance between Hitler and Stalin, were trying to come to an agreement with
Pavelić in order to separate the CP of Croatia from the CPY.^89 In reply, he