Abstract
Among the many controversial problems in the history of Yugoslavia during World War Two few issues seem to agitate the minds in Serbia and Croatia as much as the Jasenovac camp, the largest of the concentration camps run by the Ustaša regime in the so-called Independent State of Croatia (NDH). The disagreements concern both the size and the character of the camp: was it primarily an extermination camp, where people were brought in order to be killed, like Auschwitz, or was it rather a labour camp comparable with the Soviet gulag, where the prisoners were set to work and died of exhaustion, malnutrition, and the guards’ generally cruel treatment? Those who adhere to the former view, unsurprisingly, tend to operate with very high death numbers, running from several hundred thousand up to more than a million. The labour camp thesis normally leads to much lower estimates, down to 30–40,000 deaths. A few Croatian extremists have claimed that not more than a few thousand died in Jasenovac.1 The official list of victims published by the Jasenovac memorial centre today includes the names of 72,193 persons, of whom 40,251 are identified as Serbs, 14,750 as Roma, 11,723 as Jews, and 3,583 as Croats.2
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Notes
See e.g. Mladen Ivezić, ‘Profiteri Jasenovačke laži’, Hrvatski list (21 June 2007), pp. 27–34.
Poimenični popis žrtava Koncentracijskog logora Jasenovac: 1941–1945 (Jasenovac: Spomen područje Jasenovac, 2007); Filip Škiljan, Politički zatvorenici u logorima Jasenovac i Stara Gradiška (Jasenovac: Spomen područje Jasenovac, 2009), p. 7.
According to one count, by 2000 there had been published 1,188 monographs on Jasenovac, along with 1,482 articles. Jovan Mirković, Objavljeni izvori i literatura o jasenovačkim logorima (Belgrade and Banja Luka, 2000), www.jerusalim.org/cd/izvori/index_l.html, pp. 329–497 [accessed on 19 May 2010].
Philip J. Cohen, Serbia’s Secret War: Propaganda and the Deceit of History (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1996), p. 64.
Mišo Derverić and Ivan Fumić, Hrvatska u logorima 1941–1945 (Zagreb: Savez antifašističkih boraca i antifašista Republike Hrvatske, 2008). Stara Gradiška is sometimes treated as a separate camp.
Franjo Tuđman, Horrors of War: Historical Reality and Philosophy, trans. from Croatian by Katarina Mijatović (New York: M. Evans, 1996), pp. 55–56 and 64.
See e.g. Antun Miletić, ‘Establishing the Number of Persons Killed in the Jasenovac Concentration Camp’, in Barry M. Lituchy (ed.), Jasenovac and the Holocaust in Yugoslavia: Analyses and Survivor Testimonies (New York: Jasenovac Research Institute, 2006), p. 4.
Josip Jurčević, Die Entstehung des Mythos Jasenovac, trans. Kristina Reiser Dumbović (Zagreb: n.p., 2007), p. 88; Vladimir Žerjavić, Opsesije i megalomanije oko Jasenovca i Bleiburga: Gubici stanovništva Jugoslavije u drugom svjetskom ratu (Zagreb: Globus, 1992), pp. 15–18; and Cohen, Serbia’s Secret War, pp. 106–109.
Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration (Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 734.
Ibid., p. 733.
Meho Visočak i Bejdo Sobica (eds), Jasenovac: žrtve rata prema podacima statističkog zavoda Jugoslavije, reprint (Sarajevo: Bošnjački institut, 1998), p. 2.
Bušić’s article was first published in Hvratski kniževni list in 1969, no. 15. It has later been republished a number of times, for instance in V. Nikolić, Bleiburška tragedija hrvatskog naroda, 4th ed. (Zagreb: Art Studio Azinović, 1995), pp. 466–474. In 1971, Bušić: was arrested for his participation in the nationalist Maspok movement, and in 1978 he was assassinated in Paris.
See Marcus Tanner, Croatia: A Nation Forged in War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 205.
Franjo Tuđman, Bespuća povijesne zbiljnosti: rasprava o povijesti i filozofiji zlosilja (Zagreb: Nakladni zavod Matice hrvatske, 1990), p. 316.
Milan Bulajić, ‘Jasenovački mit’ Franje Tuđmana (Belgrade: Naučna knjiga, 1994); and Milan Bulajić, Tudjman’s ‘Jasenovac Myth’: Genocide Against Serbs, Jews and Gypsies, trans. from Serbian by Miroslava Janković and Ann Pešić (Belgrade: Stručna knjiga, 1996).
Josip Pečarić, Serbian Myth about Jasenovac, trans. from Croatian by Ivana Pečarić (Zagreb: Stih, 2001), p. 42.
Ibid., p. 70.
Ibid., pp. 32 and 463–464.
Žerjavić, Opsesije; and Vladimir Žerjavić, Gubici stanovništva Jugoslavije u drugom svjetskom ratu (Zagreb: Jugoslavensko viktimološko društvo, 1989).
Tomasevich, War and Revolution, pp. 764–765; and Sabrina P. Ramet, The Three Yugoslavias: State-Building and Legitimation, 1918–2005 (Washington DC and Bloomington: The Wilson Center Press and Indiana University Press, 2006), p. 161.
Radomir Bulatović, Koncentracioni logor Jasenovac’s posebnim osvrtom na Donju Gradinu: istorijsko-sociološka i antropološka studija (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1990).
Ibid., p. 413.
Vladimir Dedijer and Antun Miletić, Protiv zaborava i tabua: Jasenovac 1941–1991 (Sarajevo and Belgrade: I.P. ‘Progres’ i Udruženje za istraživanje genocida i ratnih zločina, 1991), pp. 31–32.
Jasenovac Research Institute Newsletter, vol. 1, no. 1 (April 2005), p. 3.
Ibid., vol. 1, no. 2 (Summer 2005), p. 1
See e.g. Milan Bulajić, ‘Jasenovački mit’ Franje Tudđmana: genocid nad Srbima, Jevrejima i Ciganima (Belgrade: Stručna knjiga, 1994), pp. 42–47.
Đorđe Miliša, U mučilištu-paklu Jasenovac (Zagreb: Nakl. Piščeva, 1945), p. 217, reprinted in Jurčević, Die Entstehung, p. 137.
Vladimir Dedijer, The Yugoslav Auschwitz and the Vatican: The Croatian Massacre of the Serbs during World War II, trans. from Đurađica Đurković’s German translation by Harvey L. Kendall (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1992), pp. 230–267.
Simo Brdar, ‘An Introduction to Donja Gradina the Largest Execution Site of the Jasenovac Concentration Camp’, Jasenovac Research Institute Quarterly Magazine, vol. 1, no. 2 (Summer 2005), p. 7.
Ljubo Boban, ‘Jasenovac and the Manipulation of History’, East European Politics and Societies, vol. 4, no. 3 (September 1990), p. 590.
See e.g. Bulatović, Koncentracioni logor, p. 221; Slobodan Kljakić, A Conspiracy of Silence: Genocide in the Independent State of Croatia (Belgrade: Ministry of Information of the Republic of Serbia, 1991), p. 20.
Atanasije Jevtić, Velikomučenički Jasenovac (Belgrade: Sfairos, 1990), p. 384.
Jasenovac, mjesto natopljeno krvlju nevinih (Belgrade: Izd. Sveti arhijerejski sinod Srpske pravoslavne crkve, 1990), p. 1 (emphasis in the original).
Milan Bulajić, Ustaški zločini genocida: suđenje Andriji Artukoviću (Belgrade: Rad, 1988).
See e.g. Fred Singleton, A Short History of the Yugoslav Peoples (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 177; Ivo Goldstein, Croatia, a Short History (London: C. Hurst, 2001), p. 137. This division into three parts is identical with the Jewish policy often attributed to the Russian statesman Konstantin Pobedonostsev.
Bulatović, Koncentracioni logor, p. 11; Večan pomen: Jasenovac, Mjesto natopljeno krvjlu nevinih (Belgrade: Sveti arhijerejski sinod Srpske pravoslavne crkve, 1990), p. 5.
Vasilije Dj. Krestić, Through Genocide to a Greater Croatia, trans. from Serbian by Boško Milosavljević (Belgrade: BIGZ, 1998), p. 175.
Ivo Banac, ‘Historiography of the Countries of Eastern Europe: Yugoslavia’, American Historical Review, vol. 97, no. 4 (October 1992), p. 1101.
Ibid.
See e.g. Jasenovac: Spomen područje, 45 slika u boji, 8th ed. (Zagreb: Turistkomerc, 1974).
S. Stamenković, ‘Istaći nacionalnost žrtava Jasenovca’, Politika (Belgrade), 2 July 2009, at www.politika.rs/ [accessed on 30 July 2010].
Dragan Cvetković and Ivan Graovac, Ljudski gubici Hrvatske, 1941–1945. (Zagreb: Zajednica istraživača dijalog, 2005), as quoted in Jovan Byford, ‘When I Say “The Holocaust”, I Mean “Jasenovac”: Remembrance of the Holocaust in Contemporary Serbia’, East European Jewish Affairs, vol. 37, no. 1 (April 2007), pp. 54–55.
Ibid., p. 55.
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Kolstø, P. (2011). The Serbian-Croatian Controversy over Jasenovac. In: Ramet, S.P., Listhaug, O. (eds) Serbia and the Serbs in World War Two. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230347816_11
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