Lovro Kralj is an Assistent at the History Department at the University of Rijeka where he also coordinates the Claims Conference University Partnership Program in Holocaust Studies. He specializes in the fields of fascism, antisemitism, and Holocaust studies with a regional focus on Central and South-Eastern Europe.
In his current project, he examines the impact of antisemitic ideology and policies on multiethnic communities in the borderlands of World War II-era Croatia. By utilizing the comparative approach, he aims to examine both cooperation and conflicting visions on how to solve the “Jewish question” among various fascist movements. He investigates how members of these fascist movements, as well as ordinary citizens, interpreted antisemitism and adapted it to their own agendas, thus producing a variety of competing visions of annihilation. Carefully situating antisemitism into a broader perspective of genocidal policies, Kralj focuses on cases where antisemitism become a tool of competitive nation-building among various Holocaust perpetrators. The results were often a proliferation of novel fantasies of ethnic cleansing and destruction of other ethnic and religious groups besides Jews.