German troops entered Zagreb on the 10th of April 1941. After the leadership of the Croatian Peasants’ Party declined the offer of the Axis powers to establish an independent Croatian state, the representatives of the Ustasha movement declared the Independent State of Croatia (NDH). The NDH extended over Bosnia and Herzegovina, while some parts of Dalmatia were annexed by Italy, and parts of Medjimurje by Hungary. Demarcation line split the NDH to German and Italian interest zones. In close cooperation with the representatives of German diplomacy and police authorities, the NDH modelled its policy towards Jews on the example of Nazi Germany. In the first weeks of its existence, the government began the prosecution of Jews on the NDH territory by combining intense antisemitic propaganda, racial laws, registration and expropriation of Jews, killing Jews as hostages, burning synagogues and Jewish religious communities, even defiling tombstones in Jewish cemeteries. The first antisemitic measures were introduced in the middle of April 1941, followed by intense and aggressive antisemitic propaganda. Between April 1941 and October 1942, the NDH enacted at least 30 legal orders, commands and other legal acts and decisions on the state level, and many more on the local level, which determined the status of Jews in the new state, regulated the expropriation and redistribution of Jewish property, and closed down Jewish communities and other Jewish organizations. Most of the legal orders were enacted in the first two months of the NDH’s existence. The first legal orders pertaining exclusively to Jews were those regulating Jewish property, and the three key anti-Jewish legal orders, which we call racial laws, entered into force on the 30th of April 1941.
The first concentration camp Danica, near the town of Koprivnica, was founded on the 15th of April 1941. Besides Jews and Roma, The NDH authorities persecuted Serbs and political dissenters. At the same time, arrests begun in Zagreb, targeting mostly Jewish youth and prominent Jewish intellectuals. There were also other measures against Jews, one of which proscribed the wearing of label on the left-hand side of the chest, which you saw earlier in the picture.