Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was the first patron of the Ustase, providing financial and military aid to the group shortly after Ustase founder
Ante Pavelic went into exile in 1929, and acting as host to the
poglavnik for most of the next dozen years. The
Duce protected Pavelic after the assassination of Yugoslav King Alexander and French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou in Marseilles, France in 1934, and provided the Ustase with training camps near Siena to replace those shuttered by the Hungarian government following an outcry in the League of Nations.
The Ustase fell into disfavour in official circles after Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law and foreign minister, orchestrated a rapproachment with Yugoslavia in March 1937 and sought to draw the country into the Fascist orbit. Official meetings with Pavelic resumed following the Czechoslovak crisis and Italy's absorbtion of Albania, out of fear that the Ustase would turn to Germany and bring the Nazis to the Adriatic. Relations soured again after the establishment of the Independent State of Croatia, when Pavelic agreed to surrender a large portion of Dalmatia to the Italians and faced criticism from his own inner-circle. Following Italian intervention to prevent the Ustase massacre of Serbs and Jews, Pavelic reoriented a shift in the NDH's position to the Germans, relying particularly upon his personal relationship with Adolf Hitler.
