[BeadCounter]

Short answer: The Ustashi.

The Croats were allied with Nazi Germany and the Croats had their own “bad guys”, the Ustashi.

[Verginius Rufus]

The Ustashi were not good guys--they were genocidal maniacs, but they were a fringe group in Croatia that was put in power by the occupying German forces.

The Ustashi leader (Pavelic) was a terrorist living in exile--the Germans used him because the leader of the main Croatian political party, the Peasant Party, refused to collaborate. It's as if an outside power had made Timothy McVeigh President of the US.

The current government of Croatia has no links to the wartime puppet government--it is legally the successor to the Communist regime that ruled Croatia as one of the republics in Yugoslavia from 1945 to 1991.