The Independant State of Croatia (Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska)was declared in Zagreb on Thursday, April 10, 1941 by Slavko Kvaternik, Deputy Head of State, with Dr Ante Pavelic as its head. At that time, Croatia exercised all the functions of a  sovereign state by maintaining law and order, effective administrative control, instituting and maintaining courts of justice and adopting or imposing laws regulating the relations of the inhabitants of the territory to one another and government. Countries such as Germany, Japan, Hungary,  Slovakia, Italy, Bulgaria, Romania, Spain, France, Finland, Portugal,Nanking China, The Philippines and The Vatican  acknowledged,through formal declaration, the existence of Croatia.As Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac said in 1946 : "The Croatian people declared by plebiscite their own State of Croatia, and I would be a blackguard if I did not feel the pulse of the Croatian people who were slaves in the former Yugoslavia". Croatia existed until 1945 when international communism opened the gate for hegemonists and converted a peaceful and freedom-loving Croatia into a bloody batleground. Tito's Partizan's and Draza Mihajlovic's Chetniks tried to eradicate the Croatian people by burning villages and massacring thousands of innocent people. Croatians tried to fight back but lost at the "battles" of the international conferences at Teheran and Yalta. The Allies supported Tito and provided the Communists with the power to form a government and the new Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia was established on November 29, 1945.This artificial state did not last. True Croatians worldwide continued their struggle for independance, culminating in theestablish of the modern Republic of Croatia on May 30, 1990.