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The World War II persecution of Serbs, also known as the Serbian Genocide,[8][9][10][11] refers to the widespread genocidal persecution of Serbs that included extermination, expulsions and forced religious conversions of large numbers of ethnic Serbs by the Ustaše regime in the Independent State of Croatia, and also the atrocities carried out by Albanian collaborators and Axis occupying forces during World War II.
The number of Serbs persecuted by the Ustaše is very high, but the exact extent is the subject of much debate and estimates vary widely. Yad Vashem estimates over 500,000 murdered, 250,000 expelled and 200,000 forcibly converted to Catholicism.[12] The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has estimated that Ustaša authorities murdered between 320,000 and 340,000 ethnic Serb residents of Croatia and Bosnia between 1941 and 1945 (the period of Ustaše rule), of whom between 45,000 and 52,000 were murdered at the Jasenovac concentration camp alone.[13] According to the Federal Institute for Statistics in Belgrade, the "actual" figure of the casulties suffered within Yugoslavia's border of war-related causes during the second world war was ca. 597,323 deaths. Of these, 346,740 were Serbs and 83,257 were Croats.[14]
In April 1941, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was invaded by the Axis powers. Subsequently, the newly created Axis puppet state known as the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) implemented genocidal policies against its Serb, Jews and Romanis.[15] The NDH utilized the Ustaše movement to persecute Serbs by killing thousands of them and forcing large numbers of people to convert to the Roman Catholic faith.[16]
The word Ustaša (plural: Ustaše) comes a variation of the Croatian word ustanik (plural: ustanici). It is derived from the verb ustati (Croatian for rise up). Their name derives from the intransitive verb ustati which means "to rise up", hence Ustaša would mean an insurgent, or a rebel. The ideology of the Ustaše movement was a blend of Nazism[17] and Croatian nationalism. The Ustaše supported the creation of a Greater Croatia that would span to the River Drina and to the outskirts of Belgrade.[18] The movement emphasized the need for a racially "pure" Croatia and promoted the extermination of Serbs, Jews[19] and Gypsies.[20]
A major ideological influences of the Croatian nationalism of the Ustaše was the 19th century Croat Ante Starčević.[21] Starčević was an advocate of Croatian unity and independence and was both anti-Habsburg and anti-Serb.[21] He envisioned the creation of a Greater Croatia that would include territories inhabited by Bosniaks, Serbs, and Slovenes, considering Bosniaks and Serbs as Croats who had been converted to Islam and Orthodox Christianity and considering the Slovenes to be "mountain Croats".[21] He argued that the large Serb presence in territories claimed by a Greater Croatia was the result of recent settlement, encouraged settlement by Habsburg rulers, and influx of groups like Vlachs who took up Orthodox Christianity and identified themselves as Serbs.[22] The Ustaše used Starčević's theories to promote the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina to Croatia and recognized Croatia as having two major ethnocultural components: Catholic Croats and "Muslim Croats",[23] as the Ustaše saw the Islam of the Bosnian-Muslims as a religion which "keeps true the blood of Croats."[23] Armed struggle, genocide and terrorism were glorified by the group.[24]
After Nazi forces entered into Zagreb on April 10, 1941 Pavelić's closest associate Slavko Kvaternik proclaimed the formation of the Independent State of Croatia on a Radio Zagreb broadcast. Meanwhile, Pavelić and several hundred Ustaše volunteers left their camps in Italy and travelled to Zagreb, where Pavelić declared a new government on 16 April 1941.[25] He accorded himself the title of "Poglavnik" (German: Führer, English: Chief leader. The Independent State of Croatia was declared to be on Croatian "ethnic and historical territory".[26]
This country can only be a Croatian country, and there is no method we would hesitate to use in order to make it truly Croatian and cleanse it of Serbs, who have for centuries endangered us and who will endanger us again if they are given the opportunity. — Milovan Žanić, the minister of the NDH Legislative council, on 2 May 1941, [27]
A large portion of the atrocities occurred in the notorious Jasenovac concentration camp. It was the largest extermination camp in the Balkans.[7]
The Ustaše interned, tortured and brutally executed men, women and children in the camp. Serbs constituted the majority of inmates.[3][7] Upon arrival at the camp, the prisoners were marked with colors, similar to the use of Nazi concentration camp badges: blue for Serbs, and red for communists (non-Serbian resistance members), while Roma had no marks. In several instances, inmates with blue badges were murdered immediately upon arrival.[28]
Serbs were predominantly brought from the Kozara region, where the Ustaše captured areas formerly held by Partisans.[29] These were brought to the camp without sentence, most destined for immediate execution, accelerated via the use of machine-guns.[30] Aside from sporadic and random killings and deaths due to the poor living conditions, many inmates arriving at Jasenovac were scheduled for systematic extermination. An important criterion for selection was the duration of a prisoner's anticipated detention. Strong men capable of labor and sentenced to less than three years of incarceration were allowed to live. All inmates with indeterminate sentences or sentences of three years or more were immediately scheduled for execution, regardless of fitness.[31]
The so-called "manual-means-of-execution", the Ustaše's favorites, were executions that took part in utilizing sharp or blunt craftsmen tools: knives, saws, hammers, etc. The preferred manual-weapon of many Ustaše guards was the Srbosjek (or Serbcutter). This knife was originally a type of agricultural knife manufactured for wheat sheaf cutting.[32] The upper part of the knife was made of leather, as a sort of a glove, designed to be worn with the thumb going through the hole, so that only the blade protruded from the hand. It was a curved, 12 cm long knife with the edge on its concave side. The knife was fastened to a bowed oval copper plate, while the plate was fastened to a thick leather bangle.[33]
These mass-executions took place in various locations:
On the night of 29 August 1942, the prison guards made bets among themselves as to who could slaughter the largest number of inmates. One of the guards, Petar Brzica, boasted[37] that he had cut the throats of about 1,360 new arrivals.[38] A gold watch, a silver service, a roasted suckling pig and a bottle of Italian wine were among his rewards.[39] Others who confessed to participating in the bet included Ante Zrinušić, who killed some 600 inmates, and Mile Friganović, who gave a detailed and consistent report of the incident. Friganović admitted having killed some 1,100 inmates. He specifically recounted his torture of an old man, known as "Vukasin"; he attempted to compel the man to bless Ante Pavelić, which the old man refused to do, even after Friganović had cut off his ears, nose and tongue after each refusal. Ultimately, he cut out the old man's eyes, tore out his heart, and slashed his throat.
In April 1945, as Partisan units approached the camp, the camp's supervisors attempted to erase traces of the atrocities by working the death camp at full capacity. On 22 April, 600 prisoners revolted; 520 were killed and 80 escaped.[40] Before abandoning the camp shortly after the prisoner revolt, the Ustaše killed the remaining prisoners and torched the buildings, guardhouses, torture rooms, the "Picili Furnace", and all the other structures in the camp, apparently in an effort to make the number of victims impossible to definitively ascertain. Upon entering the camp, the Partisans found only ruins, soot, smoke, and the skeletal remains of thousands of victims.
The Stara Gradiška concentration camp was built at the site of the Stara Gradiška prison. The camp was specially constructed for women and children[41] and it became notorious for the crimes committed against them. The camp was guarded by the Ustaše and several female Croatian nurses. Inmates were killed using different means, including firearms, mallets, machetes and knives. At the "K", or "Kula" unit, Jewish and Serbian women, with weak or little children, were starved and tortured at the "Gagro Hotel", a cellar which an Ustaša named Nikola Gagro used as a place of torture.[42]
Other inmates were killed using poisonous gas. The first to be gassed were the women and children that arrived from camp Djakovo with gas vans that Simo Klaić called "green Thomas". The method was later replaced with stationary gas-chambers with Zyklon B and sulfur dioxide.[43] Gas experiments were conducted initially at veterinary stables near the "Economy" unit, where horses and then humans were killed using sulphur dioxide and later Zyklon B. Gassing was tested on children in the yard, where the camp commandant, Ustaša sergeant Ante Vrban, viewed its effects. Most gassing deaths occurred in the attics of "the infamous tower", where several thousand children from the Kožara region were killed in May, and 2,000 more in June 1942.[44][45][46] Subsequently, smaller groups of 400-600 children, and a few men and women, were gassed. At his trial, Vrban stated:
According to a witness, Milka Zabičić, the gassing stopped due to a scheduled visit from a Red Cross delegation in 1943, which did not, however, arrive until June 1944.
At Sisak, situated near Jasenovac, the Ustaše presence was vigilant. Early in 1942, the local synagogue was vandalized and robbed utterly by Croat extremists, and the building was later transformed to house a worker's hall.[48] The inhabitants of Sisak were quickly brought to the Ustaše's attention, and those of them that were of Serbian and other, non-Croat kinship were tormented.[49]
A large camp was later erected and it held more than 6,600 Serb and Roma children throughout World War II. The children, aged between 3 and 16, were housed in abandoned stables, ridden with filth and pests. Malnutrition and dysentery seriously impaired their health. They were fed daily with a portion of thin gruel and treated horribly by their captors.[50]
The camp housed Serbian children between the ages of one month to fourteen years[51] and was operational for two months in 1942. The camp was set up specifically for Serb children from the Kozara region of Croatia. During its two months of operation, 1,018 children died in the camp. Ilovara Francis, a gravedigger who was paid "per piece", claimed to have buried 768 children in a six-week period.[52] Another 1,300 children were transported to Jasenovac. On 26 August 1942, the Yugoslav Partisans liberated the camp, freeing approximately 700 children.
The Jadovno concentration camp was located in а valley near Mount Velebit. It occupied an area of 1250 square meters and was fenced with barbed wire 4 metres high. The guards were posted 1 km all around the concentration camp's barbed wire. Prisoners, mostly Serbs, arrived from the town of Gospić where the Ustaše selected their victims. The Jadovno Victims Association has stated that in 132 days in the camp 40,123 victims were killed. Among them 38,010 were Serbs, 1,998 were Jews, 88 Croats, 11 Slovenes, 9 Muslims, 2 Hungarians, 2 Czechs, 1 Russian, 1 Roma and 1 Montenegrin.[53]
The atrocities committed by the Ustaše stunned many observers. Brigadier Zagreb."[54]
The Ustaše also cremated living inmates, who were sometimes drugged and sometimes fully awake, as well as corpses. The first cremations took place in the brick factory ovens in January 1942.[55] Engineer Hinko Dominik Picilli perfected this method by converting seven of the kiln's furnace chambers into more sophisticated crematories.[56][57] Some bodies were buried rather than cremated, however, and exhumed after the war.
A large number of massacres were committed. The most notable ones were:
The Ustaše recognized both Roman Catholicism and Islam as the national religions of Croatia, but held the position that Eastern Orthodoxy, as a symbol of Serbian identity, was their foe.[67] They never recognized the existence of the Serb people on the territories of Croatia or anywhere else in the world, for that matter – they referred to them only as "Croats of the Eastern faith", also referring to Bosnian-Muslims (or Bosniaks) as "Croats of the Islamic faith". The Ustaše in power banned the use of the expression "Serbian Orthodox faith" and mandated the use of the expression "Greek-Eastern faith" in its place.[68] Some 250,000 Serbs were converted into Catholicism in a six-month-period in 1941.[69] Hundreds of Serbian Orthodox Christian churches were closed, destroyed, or plundered during Ustaše rule.[68] On 2 July 1942, the Croatian Orthodox Church was founded to replace the institutions of the Serbian Orthodox Church.[70]
In a six-month period in 1941, some 120,000 Serbs were expelled to Nazi-occupied Serbia, and tens of thousands fled.[69] The general plan was that prominent people be deported first, so that property could be nationalized and the remaining Serbs be more easily manipulated. By the end of September 1941, about half of the Serbian Orthodox clergy, 335 priests, had been expelled.[71]
In 1941, the Nazi puppet Independent State of Croatia banned the use of Cyrillic,[72] having regulated it on 25 April 1941,[73] and in June 1941 began eliminating "Eastern" (Serbian) words from the Croatian language, and shut down Serbian schools.[74][75] Ante Pavelić ordered, through the "Croatian state office for language", the creation of new words from old roots (some which are used today), and purged many Serbian words.[76]
Between 18–21 October 1941, men and boys were rounded up by German soldiers and members of the Serbian Volunteer Command from the vicinity of Kragujevac, Serbia. All males from the town between the ages of sixteen and sixty were assembled, including high school students; 2,778 were shot.[77]
Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel had issued an order on 16 September 1941, applicable to all of occupied Europe, to kill 50 communists for every wounded German soldier and 100 for each German soldier killed. German soldiers were attacked in early October by the Communist Partisans and by Chetniks under Draža Mihajlović near Gornji Milanovac, and the massacre was a direct reprisal for the German losses in that battle.[78]
The German High Command was furious as the bodies of German soldiers had reportedly been mutilated by the guerrillas, so it was decided that the punishment must be particularly harsh. A German report stated "The executions in Kragujevac occurred although there had been no attacks on members of the Wehrmacht in this city, for the reason that not enough hostages could be found elsewhere."[79][80]
During the four years of occupation, the Axis forces committed numerous war crimes against civilian population: about 50,000 people in Vojvodina were murdered and about 280,000 were arrested, violated or tortured.[81] The victims belonged to several ethnic groups that lived in Vojvodina, but the largest number of the victims were of the Serb, Jewish and Romani ethnicity.[82]
The most notable war crime during the occupation was the mass murder of the civilians, mostly of Serb and Jewish ethnicity, performed by Hungarian Axis troops in January 1942 raid in southern Bačka. The total number of civilians killed in the raid was 3,808. Locations that were affected by the raid included Novi Sad, Bečej, Vilovo, Gardinovci, Gospođinci, Đurđevo, Žabalj, Lok, Mošorin, Srbobran, Temerin, Titel, Čurug and Šajkaš.[83]
According to historian Dragoljub Živković, approximately 55,000 civilians died in Vojvodina during the Axis occupation.[84]
According to demographer Slobodan Ćurčić, the total number of people murdered by the Nazis and Ustaše between 1941 and 1944 throughout the entire Vojvodina was 55,285, including:[85]
"The Kosovars are 850,000 Albanians, strong of body, firm in spirit, and enthusiastic about the idea of a Union with their Homeland. Apparently, the Serbians are terrified of them. Today one must ... chloroform the Yugoslavians. But later on one must adopt a politics of deep interest in Kosovo. This will help to keep alive in the Balkans an irredentist problem which will polarize the attention of the Albanians themselves and be a knife at the back of Yugoslavia.."
During World War II, with the fall of Yugoslavia in 1941, the Italians placed the land inhabited by ethnic Albanians under the jurisdiction of an Albanian quisling government, including Kosovo, whose inclusion into a geo-political Albanian entity was followed by extensive persecution of non-Albanians (mostly Serbs) by Albanian fascists. Most of the war crimes were perpetrated by the 21st Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Skanderbeg (1st Albanian) and the Balli Kombëtar.[87]
"We should endeavor to ensure that the Serb population of Kosovo should be removed as soon as possible ... All indigenous Serbs who have been living here for centuries should be termed colonialists and as such, via the Albanian and Italian governments, should be sent to concentration camps in Albania. Serbian settlers should be killed."
In April 1943, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler created the 21st SS Division manned by Albanian and Kosovar Albanian volunteers. From August 1944, the division participated in operations against the Yugoslav Partisans and in massacring local Serbs.[90] SS-Brigadeführer August Schmidthuber, one of the commanders of the division, was captured in 1945 and turned over to Yugoslav authorities. Schmidthuber was put on trial in February 1947 by a Yugoslav military tribunal in Belgrade, on charges of participating in massacres, deportations and atrocities against civilians. The tribunal sentenced him to death by hanging and he was executed on 27 February 1947.[91]
Overall, it is estimated that between 40,000 and 60,000 Serbs were killed and another 200,000 driven out of Kosovo during WWII.[92][93][94]
Many Croats, including politicians, have attempted to minimise the seriousness of the crimes committed against ethnic Serbs during the Holocaust by the Ustaše.[95]
In 1989, future President of Croatia, Franjo Tuđman, who had been a Partisan during WWII, but later embraced a radical nationalism, published Horrors of War: Historical Reality and Philosophy, in which he questioned the official numbers of victims killed by the Ustaše during the Second World War. In his book, Tuđman claimed that fewer than thirty-thousand people died at Jasenovac.[13] Tuđman estimated that a total of 900,000 Jews had perished in the Holocaust.[96] Tuđman's views and his government's toleration of Ustaša symbols frequently strained relations with Israel.[97]
Possibly the most overt and well-known example of ultranationalist, anti-Serb sentiment in contemporary Croatian public life is Thompson, a Croatian rock band that has on numerous occasions been protested against for having sung Ustaše songs, most notably Jasenovac i Gradiška Stara. People publicly displaying Ustaše affiliation at major Thompson concerts in Croatia and elsewhere is a frequent occurrence, leading to complaints from the Simon Wiesenthal Center.[98]
In 2006, a video was leaked showing Croatian President Stipe Mesić giving a speech in Australia in the early 1990s, in which he said that the Croats had "won a great victory on April 10th" (the date of formation of the Independent State of Croatia in 1941), and that Croatia needed to apologize to no one for Jasenovac.[99]
In 2008, in Melbourne, Australia, when a restaurant owned by people of Croatian descent held a celebration to honour Ustaša leader Ante Pavelić. The event was an "outrageous affront both to his victims and to any persons of morality and conscience who oppose racism and genocide", Dr. Efraim Zuroff, of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, stated. According to local press reports, a large photograph of Pavelić was hung in the restaurant, T-shirts with his picture and that of two other commanders in the 1941–1945 Ustaše government were offered for sale at the bar, and the establishment of the Independent State of Croatia was celebrated. Zuroff noted this was not the first time that Croatian émigrés in Australia had openly defended Croat Nazi war criminals. "It is high time that the authorities in Australia find a way to take the necessary measures to stop such celebrations, which clearly constitute racist, ethnic, and anti-Semitic incitement against Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies".[100]
"The Ustaša movement is based on religion. Therefore, our acts stem from our devotion to religion and to the Roman Catholic church."
For the duration of the war, the Vatican kept full diplomatic relations with the Independent State of Croatia and granted Pavelić an audience with its papal nuncio in the capital Zagreb, albeit not an official diplomatic meeting. The nuncio was briefed on the efforts of the Ustaše to convert ethnic-Serbs to Catholicism. Some former priests, mostly Franciscans, particularly in, but not limited to, Herzegovina and Bosnia, took part in the atrocities themselves. Miroslav Filipović was a Franciscan friar (from the Petrićevac monastery) who joined the Ustaše on 7 February 1942 in a brutal massacre of 2,730 Serbs of the nearby villages, including 500 children. He was reportedly subsequently dismissed from his order. He became the Chief Guard of the Jasenovac concentration camp where he was nicknamed "Fra Sotona" ("Friar Satan"). When he was hanged for war crimes, he wore his clerical garb, although some claim he had been defrocked.[102]
The Ustaše had sent large amounts of gold that it had plundered from Serbian and Jewish property owners during World War II into Swiss bank accounts. Of a total of 350 million Swiss Francs, about 150 million was seized by British troops; however, the remaining 200 million (ca. 47 million dollars) reached the Vatican. In October 1946, the American intelligence agency SSU alleged that these funds are still held in the Vatican Bank. This matter is the crux of a recent class action suit against the Vatican Bank and other defendants.[103]
The Jasenovac Memorial Museum reopened in November 2006 with a new exhibition designed by a Croatian architect, Helena Paver Njirić, and an Educational Center, designed by the firm Produkcija. The Memorial Museum features an interior of rubber-clad steel modules, video and projection screens, and glass cases displaying artifacts from the camp. Above the exhibition space, which is quite dark, is a field of glass panels inscribed with the names of the victims.
The New York City Parks Department, the Holocaust Park Committee and the Jasenovac Research Institute, with the help of then-Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-NY), established a public monument to the victims of Jasenovac in April 2005 (the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the camps.) The dedication ceremony was attended by ten Yugoslavian Holocaust survivors, as well as diplomats from Serbia, Bosnia and Israel. It remains the only public monument to Jasenovac victims outside the Balkans.
To commemorate the victims of the Kragujevac massacre, the whole of Šumarice, where the killings took place, was turned into a memorial park. There are several monuments there: the monument to the murdered schoolchildren and their teachers, the "Broken Wing" monument, the monument of pain and defiance and the monument "One Hundred for One", the monument of resistance and freedom. Serbian poet Desanka Maksimović wrote a poem about the massacre titled Krvava Bajka ("A Bloody fairy tale").
Historians have had difficulty calculating and agreeing on the number of victims. The first figures to be offered by the state-commission of Croatia ranged from around 500,000 to 600,000 people killed. The official estimate of the number of victims in Yugoslavia was 700,000; however, beginning in the 1990s, the Croatian side began suggesting substantially smaller numbers. The exact numbers continue to be a subject of great controversy and hot political dispute, with the Croatian government and Croatian institutions pushing for a much lower number even as recently as September 2009. The estimates vary due to lack of accurate records, the methods used for making estimates, and sometimes the political biases of the estimators. In some cases, entire families were exterminated, leaving no one to submit their names to the lists. On the other hand, it has been found that the lists include the names of people who died elsewhere, whose survival was not reported to the authorities, or who are counted more than once on the lists. The casualty figures for the whole of Yugoslavia sways between the maximum 1,700,000 and the more conservative figures between 1,500,000.[104] or one million.[105]
An accurate total number of all those murdered at Jasenovac may never be definitively established but current estimates are around the 100,000 mark.[106][107]
The documentation from the time of Jasenovac revolves around the different sides in the battle for Yugoslavia: The Germans, Italians and Ustaše on the one hand, and the Partisans and the Allies on the other. There are also sources originating from the documentation of the Ustaše themselves and of the Vatican. German generals issued reports of the number of victims as the war progressed. German military commanders gave different figures for the number of Serbs, Jews, and others killed by the Ustaše on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia. They circulated figures of 400,000 Serbs (Alexander Löhr); 350,000 Serbs (Lothar Rendulic); around 300,000 (Edmund Glaise von Horstenau); in 1943; "600-700,000 until March 1944" (Ernst Fick); 700,000 (Massenbach).
stated:
The recipe, received by the Ustaše leader and Poglavnik, the president of the Independent State of Croatia, Ante Pavelić, resembled genocidal intentions from some of the bloodiest religious wars: "A third must become Catholic, a third must leave the country, and a third must die!" This last point of the Ustaše's program was accomplished. When prominent Ustaše leaders claimed that they slaughtered a million Serbs (including babies, children, women and old men), that is, in my opinion, a boastful exaggeration. On the basis of the reports submitted to me, I believe that the number of defenseless victims slaughtered to be three-quarters of a million."
Italian soldiers, overwhelmed and disgusted by the atrocious slaughter, reported similar figures to their commanders.[108] The Vatican's sources also cite similar figures, e.g. an example of 350,000 ethnic-Serbs slaughtered by the end of 1942 (Eugen Tisserant)[109]
Vjekoslav "Maks" Luburić, the commander-in-chief of all the Croatian camps, announced the great "efficiency" of the Jasenovac camp at a ceremony as early as 9 October 1942. During the banquet which followed, he reported with pride, obviously intoxicated: "We have slaughtered here at Jasenovac more people than the Ottoman Empire was able to do during its occupation of Europe."[110] Other Ustaše sources give other estimates: a circular of the Ustaše general headquarters that reads: "the concentration and labor camp in Jasenovac can receive an unlimited number of internees". In the same spirit, Miroslav Filipović-Majstorović, once captured by Yugoslav forces, admitted that during his three months of administration, 20,000 to 30,000 people had been killed.[111] Since it became clear that his confession was an attempt to somewhat minimize the rate of crimes committed in Jasenovac, having, for an example, claimed to have personally killed 100 people, extremely understated, Filipović-Majstorović's figures are deemed to be lower than the true numbers, which some sources have estimated at 30,000-40,000.[112]
"We have slaughtered here at Jasenovac more people than the Ottoman Empire was able to do during its occupation of Europe."
A report of the National Committee of Croatia for the investigation of the crimes of the occupation forces and their collaborators, dated 15 November 1945, which was commissioned by the new government of Yugoslavia under Josip Broz Tito, stated that 500,000-600,000 people were killed at the Jasenovac complex. These figures were cited by researchers Israel Gutman and Menachem Shelach in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (1990) and the Simon Wiesenthal Center.[114] Mosa Pijade and Edvard Kardelj used this number in the war reparations meetings. Thus the proponents of these numbers were subsequently accused of artificially inflating them for purpose of obtaining war reparations. All in all, the state-commission's report has been the only public and official document about number of victims during 45 years of second Yugoslavia.[115]
The state's total war casualties of 1,700,000 as presented by Yugoslavia at the Paris Peace Treaties, were produced by a math student, Vladeta Vučković, at the Federal Bureau of Statistics.[116] He later admitted his estimates included demographic losses (i.e., factoring in the estimated population increase), while actual losses would have been significantly lower.[116] Vučković estimates were rejected by Germany during war reparations talks.
Between 22 and 27 June 1964, exhumations of bodies and the use of sampling methods was conducted at Jasenovac by Vida Brodar and Anton Pogačnik from Ljubljana University, and Serbian anthropologist Srboljub Živanović from the University of Novi Sad. During the Yugoslav wars, Živanović published what he claimed were the full results of the studies, which he claimed had been suppressed by Tito's government to put less emphasis on the crimes of the Ustaše. According to Živanović, the research gave strong support to the victim counts of more than 500,000, with estimates of 700,000-800,000 being realistic, stating that in every mass grave there are 800 skeletons.
The Yad Vashem center claims that more than 500,000 Serbs were murdered in Croatia, 250,000 were expelled, and another 200,000 were forced to convert to Catholicism.[120] including those killed at Jasenovac.[121] The same figures are concluded by the Simon-Wiesenthal center.
Menachem Shelach and Israel Gutman state the number of victims as 600,000 in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust from 1990, and that 20,000-25,000 of them were Jews. However, they only mention Jasenovac as the site where the murders took place. Further, they mention that most of the Croatian Jewish victims after August 1942 were deported to Auschwitz.[122] On the other hand, however, as of 2012, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that the Ustaše regime murdered between 45,000 and 52,000 ethnic Serbs in Jasenovac between 1941 and 1945, and that during the period of Ustaše rule, a total of between 320,000 and 340,000 ethnic Serbs were killed in Croatia or Bosnia.[13]
In the 1980s, calculations were done by Serb statistician Bogoljub Kočović and Croat economist Vladimir Žerjavić, who claimed that total number of victims in Yugoslavia was less than 1,700,000 which was the official estimate at the time, both concluding that the number of victims was around one million. Žerjavić calculated furthermore, claiming that the number of victims in the Independent State of Croatia was between 300,000 and 350,000, including 80,000 victims in Jasenovac, as well as thousands of deaths in other camps and prisons.[123]
However, these estimates have been dismissed as biased and unreliable especially on the Serbian side. The mere 0.1% change of the (unknown) birth rate would contribute more to the number of victims than Žerjavić's claim of the number of Serbs killed in Jasenovac (50,000) and his calculation has a deficiency rate of 30%.
Žerjavić has been dismissed as a nationalist even by Kočović, and his estimates of the number of fatalities in the Bosnian War of the '90s (300,000 killed) was three times greater than ICTY data and Bosnian official estimates after the war (100,000 killed), and sheds light on problems with his credibility. He was accused by some Croatian historians of being a plagiarist and the "court statistician".[124]
Serbian experts criticized these estimates as far too low, since the demographic calculations assumed arbitrarily that the growth rate for Serbs in Bosnia (which was absorbed by the Independent State of Croatia during the Second World War) was equal to the total growth rate throughout the former Yugoslavia (1.1% at the time). According to Serbian sources, however, the actual growth rate in this region was 2.4% (1921–31) and 3.5% (1949–53). This method is considered very unreliable by critics because there is no reliable data on total births during this period, yet the results depend strongly on the birth rate - just a change of 0.1% in birth rate changes the victim count by 50,000. According to the census, the number of Serbs between last prewar (1931) and first post war (1948) census has gone up from 1,028,139 to around 1,200,000. The Yugoslav Federal Bureau of Statistics has in 1964 created list of World War II victims with 597,323 names and deficiency estimated at 20-30% which is giving between 750,000 and 780,000 victims. Together with estimated 200,000 killed collaborators and quislings, the total number would reach about one million. This Yugoslav Federal Bureau of Statistics list was declared a state secret in 1964 and it was published only in 1989.[105]
After World War II, most of the remaining Ustaša went underground or fled to countries such as [125] This policy has continued to modern times, as is evidenced by the insufficient amount of media-attention that Fascist war-crimes in the former-Yugoslavia have received.
Israeli President Moshe Katsav visited Jasenovac in 2003. His successor, Shimon Peres, paid homage to the camp's victims when visited Jasenovac on 25 July 2010 and laid a wreath at the memorial. Peres dubbed the Ustaše's crimes to be a "demonstration of sheer sadism".[126][127]
On 17 April 2011, in a commemoration ceremony, Croatian President Ivo Josipović warned that there were, "attempts to drastically reduce or decrease the number of Jasenovac victims", adding "faced with the devastating truth here that certain members of the Croatian people were capable of committing the cruelest of crimes, I want to say that all of us are responsible for the things that we do." At the same ceremony, then Croatian Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor said, "there is no excuse for the crimes and therefore the Croatian government decisively rejects and condemns every attempt at historical revisionism and rehabilitation of the fascist ideology, every form of totalitarianism, extremism and radicalism," and added, "Pavelić's regime was a regime of evil, hatred and intolerance, in which people were abused and killed because of their race, religion, nationality, their political beliefs and because they were the others and were different."[128]
[interview with Borislav Seva] "they threw Rade Zrnic into the brick factory fires alive!"
No one really knows how many died here. Serbs talk of 700,000. Most estimates put the figure nearer 100,000.
Adolf Hitler, The Holocaust, Einsatzgruppen, Reichsführer-SS, Nazi Germany