Offers a complex consideration of the relationship of mass terror and utopianism under the fascist government of wartime Croatia. The essays in The Utopia of Terror provide new perspectives on the relationship between the politics of construction and destruction in the wartime Independent State of Croatia (1941-1945) ruled by the fascist Ustasha movement. Bringing together established historians of the Ustasha regime and an emerging generation of younger historians, The Utopia of Terror explores various aspects of everyday life and death in the Ustasha state that untilnow have received peripheral attention from historians. The contributors argue for a more complex consideration of the relationship of mass terror and utopianism in which the two are seen as part of the same process rather than asdiscrete phenomena. They aim to bring new perspectives, generate original thinking, and provide enhanced understanding of both the Ustasha regime's attempts to remake Croatian society and its campaign to destroy unwanted populations. Rory Yeomans is a fellow in history at the Wiener Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, Vienna, Austria. A fellowship from the Cantemir Institute at the University of Oxford in 2013 supported the research for and the writing and editing of this book.

In Racial Science in Hitler's New Europe, 1938-1945, international scholars examine the theories of race that informed the legal, political, and social policies aimed against ethnic minorities in Nazi-dominated Europe. The essays explicate how racial science, preexisting racist sentiments, and pseudoscientific theories of race that were preeminent in interwar Europe ultimately facilitated Nazi racial designs for a "New Europe." The volume examines racial theories in a number of European nation-states in order to understand racial thinking at large, the origins of the Holocaust, and the history of ethnic discrimination in each of those countries. The essays, by uncovering neglected layers of complexity, diversity, and nuance, demonstrate how local discourse on race paralleled Nazi racial theory but had unique nationalist intellectual traditions of racial thought. Written by rising scholars who are new to English-language audiences, this work examines the scientific foundations that central, eastern, northern, and southern European countries laid for ethnic discrimination, the attempted annihilation of Jews, and the elimination of other so-called inferior peoples.

The fascist Ustasha regime and its militias carried out a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing that killed an estimated half million Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies, and ended only with the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II.

In "Visions of Annihilation, " Rory Yeomans analyzes the Ustasha movement's use of culture to appeal to radical nationalist sentiments and legitimize its genocidal policies. He shows how the movement attempted to mobilize poets, novelists, filmmakers, visual artists, and intellectuals as purveyors of propaganda and visionaries of a utopian society. Meanwhile, newspapers, radio, and speeches called for the expulsion, persecution, or elimination of "alien" and "enemy" populations to purify the nation. He describes how the dual concepts of annihilation and national regeneration were disseminated to the wider population and how they were interpreted at the grassroots level.

Yeomans examines the Ustasha movement in the context of other fascist movements in Europe. He cites their similar appeals to idealistic youth, the economically disenfranchised, racial purists, social radicals, and Catholic clericalists. Yeomans further demonstrates how fascism created rituals and practices that mimicked traditional religious faiths and celebrated martyrdom.

"Visions of Annihilation" chronicles the foundations of the Ustasha movement, its key actors and ideologies, and reveals the unique cultural, historical, and political conditions present in interwar Croatia that led to the rise of fascism and contributed to the cataclysmic events that tore across the continent.