At the top of the Ustasha chain of command, or hierarchy, were high-ranking officials, politicians and ideologues of the Ustasha movement. The main initiator of terror and the originator of the idea of the Independent State of Croatia was the head of state Ante Pavelić. Ustasha ideological orientations were publicly proclaimed as early as 1933 in exile, when Ustasha principles were accepted as the fundamental law of the Ustasha organization. According to the Ustasha understanding, the Croatian people are independent, which resulted in the aspiration to create an independent Croatian state. They considered the overthrow of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia the only way to achieve their goal, and the Serbs were considered collectively guilty of the attitude of Karadjordjevic's government towards the Croats in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.
In the editorial of the first issue of the newspaper Ustasha from February 1932, it was stated that "in the struggle for sacred goals, all means will be allowed, even the most terrible ones; "knife, revolver, machine gun and hell machine, these are idols, these are bells, which will herald the dawn and the resurrection of the Independent State of Croatia."
Following the example of the Third Reich, the ustasha authorities adopted National Socialist racial interpretations on the basis of which they passed a series of racial legal provisions against Jews and Roma during May and June 1941. Ante Pavelić, Andrija Artuković, Mirko Puk and other members of the government and the Main Ustasha Apartment are responsible for the legalization of crimes.