Croatia Must Not Whitewash the Horrors of Jasenovac
An article published by Croatia’s best-read newspaper downplaying the atrocities at the Jasenovac concentration camp was an attempt to rehabilitate Croatia’s WWII fascist Ustasa regime and deny its complicity in the Holocaust [...]
There are horrific realities of history that must not be questioned, distorted or denied by anyone with even the slightest integrity or sense of decency.
The slaughter of millions of Jews in the death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Majdanek, Belzec, Chelmno and Sobibor during the Holocaust of World War II falls squarely in this category.
So does the fundamental fact that this ultimate crime against humanity was perpetrated by Nazi Germany and its multinational fascist accomplices.
Any attempt to deny or to attempt to trivialise or minimise the enormity of this genocide, or to rehabilitate its perpetrators in any way whatsoever, is, simply put, morally obscene.
This is why denying the Holocaust is a criminal offence in Germany, France, Russia, Italy, Austria, Romania, and numerous other countries. Pope Francis has denounced Holocaust denial as “madness”, and his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, called it “intolerable”.
It is also important to bear in mind that the Germans were not the only mass killers of Jews, Roma, and others during the Holocaust.
In the Transnistria region, part of Romania at the time, the Hitlerite ally Ion Antonescu’s Iron Guard enthusiastically took part in the slaughter of between 150,000 and 250,000 Jews. And in the Independent State of Croatia, the fascist Ustasa, led by Ante Pavelic, perpetrated a brutal genocide against Serbs, Jews, and Roma.
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Croatian authorities murdered between 320,000 to 340,000 ethnic Serb residents of Croatia and Bosnia during the period of Ustasa rule, and more than 30,000 Croatian Jews were killed either in Croatia or at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
In order to carry out their genocidal scheme, the Ustasa established a network of home-grown concentration camps infamous for their brutality and comparable to the barbarity of the German death and concentration camps.
The most notorious of these was a group of five camps collectively named Jasenovac, near Zagreb, often referred to as the “Auschwitz of the Balkans”.
Again, according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, somewhere between 77,000 and 104,000 Serbs, Jews, Roma, and Croat opponents of the Ustasa regime were brutally murdered there. The Jasenovac Memorial Site has identified by name 83,145 Serbs, Jews, Roma, and anti-fascists who perished in these camps.
For years, extremist elements in Croatia have sought to rehabilitate the Ustasa and downplay the atrocities perpetrated at Jasenovac.
Ivkosic writes admiringly and seemingly unashamedly about a book entitled Labour Camp Jasenovac by Igor Vukic, which, according to Ivkosic, “is in fundamental opposition to the decades-long myth of Jasenovac”.
While acknowledging that conditions there were severe, Ivkosic grotesquely declares that “there was fun in the camp. There were sporting matches, especially football, concerts, theatrical performances, among which were pieces that were created by the inmates themselves.”
Fun? At Jasenovac? Ivkosic’s attempt to cleanse Jasenovac and the Ustasa of their evil essence is reprehensible. So is his contemptuous reference to a “myth of Jasenovac”.
Jasenovac reality
The brutal murder of tens of thousands of human beings at Jasenovac is not a myth, Mr. Ivkosic.
“Jasenovac was an unheard death camp, no similar in the whole world existed,” former prisoner Milo Despot said in an oral history interview taken by and maintained at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
“The Germans liquidated the inmates in a modern way, while in Jasenovac the killing was most cruel – by mallets, hammers and knifes, the least by bullets,” he said.
“There were no gas chambers, but there was also no shortage of barbarity. Many prisoners had their throats slit or their skulls smashed; others were shot or hanged from the trees that lined the Sava,” reporter Nicholas Wood wrote about Jasenovac in the New York Times in 2006.
I wonder whether Ivkosic considers any of the following four examples of the Ustasa’s behavior at Jasenovac to have been “fun” for the camp’s inmates.
In his oral history interview, Milo Despot described witnessing how a Ustasa unit took more than 100 Serb girls on a barge, ordered them to take off their clothes and then grabbed them by their hair, cut their throats, and threw their corpses into the river.
In another interview, Mara Vejnovic said that she saw the Ustasa kill a group of children with poisonous gas in a barracks at Jasenovac.
Eduard Sajer was assigned to dig a mass grave in one of the Jasenovac camps. He described how Ustasa guards killed inmates by hitting them on the head with mallets, including Eduard’s younger brother, and how he and his fellow grave diggers had to drag the corpses into the mass grave. All Eduard could do for his brother was to take him in his arms and put him gently to rest.
In his memoir, 44 Months in Jasenovac, Egon Berger described the Croatian Franciscan friar Tomislav Filipovic Majstorovic, also known as Fra Sotona (‘Brother Satan’), the notorious commandant of Jasenovac:
“Friar Majstorovic, his face all made-up and powdered and dressed in an elegant suit and a green hunting hat, watched his victims with delight. He approached the children, even stroked their heads. He was accompanied by Ljubo Milos and Ivica Matkovic.
Friar Majstorovic told the mothers that their children would be baptized and took them from the mothers, the child whom Friar Majstorovic had in his arms, innocently touched his killer’s made-up face. The mothers, distraught, recognized the situation. They offered their lives in exchange for mercy for the children. Two children were placed on the ground, while the third was thrown like a ball into the air. Friar Majstorovic, pointing a dagger up, missed three times, but the fourth time with a joke and a laugh, the child was impaled on the dagger.
The mothers threw themselves on the ground, pulling their hair, and began to shout dreadfully. The Ustasa guards of the 14th Division from Osijek took them away and killed them. Once all three children had been so brutally killed, these three two-legged beasts exchanged money, because they seemed to have a bet who would be the first to stick a dagger in a child.”
By distorting the gruesome reality of Jasenovac, Milan Ivkosic has desecrated the memory of the thousands upon thousands of innocent men, women, and children who were murdered there.
And by publishing Ivkosic’s shameful column, Vecernji list has become complicit in the impermissible campaign to rehabilitate the Ustasa and whitewash its crimes. Both Ivkosic and Vecernji list must now be held to account.
Croat soldiers in Jasenovac after killing the prisoners by knives
Originally published on 2018-08-27
About the author: Menachem Z. Rosensaft is General Counsel of the World Jewish Congress. He teaches about the law of genocide at the law schools of Columbia and Cornell Universities in the United States.
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
The Independent State of Croatia (NDH) was a World War II puppet state of Germany and Italy, which was established in parts of Axis-occupied Yugoslavia. The NDH was founded on 10 April 1941, after the invasion of Yugoslavia by the Axis powers.A poster from the WWII Nazi Ustashi Independent State of Croatia with the state flag (Source: Instagram)The NDH consisted of modern-day Croatia and most of Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as some parts of modern-day Serbia and Slovenia. The regime targeted Serbs, Jews, Roma people and anti-fascist or dissident Croatians and Muslims, as part of a large-scale genocide campaign ...
The Axis powers invaded Yugoslavia on 6 April 1941. Vladko Maček, the leader of the Croatian Peasant Party (HSS) which was the most influential party in Croatia at the time, rejected offers by the Nazi Germany to lead the new government. On 10 April the most senior home-based Ustaša, Slavko Kvaternik, took control of the police in Zagreb and in a radio broadcast that day proclaimed the formation of the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH). The new Independent State of Croatia" was established as a pro-Nazi government. It was dedicated to a clerical-fascist ideology influenced both by ...
In early 1944, Mirjana Babunovic-Dimitrijevic, a 22-year-old middle-class woman living in Sarajevo, was arrested by the Ustasa police. After she was arrested along with her mother and aunt, they were all deported to the Jasenovac concentration camp, for refusing to convert to Catholicism. All three women died there in late 1944.These women were among more than 80,000 victims who perished at Jasenovac between 1941 and 1945. While we don’t know precisely how they died nor what happened during their short lives in the camp, two things are certain.First, their deaths were the direct result of deliberate political decisions. Second, they ...
Last week Pontian Greeks throughout the world justifiably recognized a tragic day in their history that has come to be known as the Pontian Genocide.I wrote about the anniversary, obscure to most people around me who are not well-versed in Greek history and even had to repeatedly change my auto-correct on my computer, which insisted on changing the word Pontian to Pontiac.This anniversary was followed by another recognition of yet another genocide of Greeks— officially commemorated on April 6 and recalling the tragic events targeting the Greeks of Eastern Thrace— the region known today as European Turkey or the lands ...
IntroductionThe article will examine the model for the creation of a Greater Croatia designed by a Croatian nobleman, publicist and historian Pavao Ritter Vitezović (1652–1713). The article will offer a new interpretation of the substance and significance of Vitezović’s political ideology. Many historians have viewed Vitezović’s political thought and his developed ideological framework of a united South Slavic state as part of a wider pan-Slavic world. According to the prevailing notion, Vitezović was a precursor of the idea of Yugoslavism (a united South Slavic nation-state) and even Pan-Slavism - a pan-Slavic cultural and political reciprocity. Yet a closer look at ...
George Mauropoulos, "The Forgotten Genocide of the Greeks of Asia Minor", AHIF Policy Journal, American Hellenic Institute Foundation, Inc., Vol. 8, Spring 2017, pp. 3Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
Split, Croatia, September 14th, 2018: "Kill Serb" written on the car with the plates from SerbiaThe mugshots show Ivo Goldstein, a Jewish librarian and book dealer, looking bright-eyed and calm — even after nine days of confinement in a Croatian police cell. One of the prints bears the number 28888 and a date: April 21, 1941.Seventy-six years after they were taken by a police photographer, the photos hang as a triptych on the bedroom wall of Goldstein’s son, Daniel, in a drab apartment block in Zagreb’s Zaprudje neighborhood.Daniel, 85, is a historian and human rights activist. He was nine when ...
Tito’s policy in the 1970s of the so-called “encourage and suppress” for the sake to struggle against politically undesirable and threatening ethnic nationalisms especially the Croat and the Serb ones appeared to be incoherent one. In another words, while some ethnic nationalisms and their ideologies were considered to be dangerous to the system and, therefore, were suppressed and their advocates were jailed or banned from employment[i] (the case, for instance, of the Serbian dissident professors from Belgrade University), other nationalisms, supposed to be non-dangerous for the regime were encouraged by the local Communist elites (for instance, the Albanian nationalism in ...
When we use the genocide label for other kinds of killing (e.g. death through neglect, or bureaucratic elimination) do we diminish the weight of the word genocide? Many non-Indigenous Canadians bristle at the notion that a label like genocide applies to Canada.As early as November, 1907, the Canadian press was acknowledging that the death rate within Indian residential schools exceeded 50% (see Appendix, “Key Newspaper Articles”).And yet the reality of such a massacre has been wiped clean from public record and consciousness in Canada over the past decades.Small wonder; for that hidden history reveals a system whose aim was to ...
The book of evidence about ethnic cleansing and policy of genocide committed by the neo-Nazi Ustashi government in Croatia against its own citizens of the Serb nationality in August 1995. That was a third genocide against the Serbs committed by the Croats in the 20th century: 1. during the WWI; 2. during the WWII; 3. in the 1990s. Today, Croatia is almost totally ethnically cleanced from all non-Croats like Kosovo and Albania from all non-Albanians. During the WWII, around 700.000 Serbs were brutally killed by the Croats and Bosnian Muslims on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia.Read our ...
One sharp and interesting analysis of situation in Serbian province of Kosovo Metohija came last week from Andrew Korybko, program host at Radio Sputnik.Mr. Korybko speaks on how the whirlwind of geopolitics, military interests and global giants of business, as well as the change of US administration, could impact the fragile peace in Balkans and what’s behind the latest tensions:”Serbia’s NATO-occupied province of Kosovo has been up to its old tricks lately in trying to provoke Belgrade into another military confrontation conveniently timed to coincide with Trump’s inauguration.The former so-called “Prime Minister” of Kosovo, Ramush Haradinaj, was detained in France ...
Why, after almost fifty years, should there be a reprint of Karlheinz Deschner’s work God and the Fascists (Mit Gott und den Faschisten)? Because it is very topical. Because it is, fully unfairly, in danger of being forgotten. Because it disrupts a process of suppression, or better, indeed the deliberate policy of disinformation, pursued by the Vatican. It reminds us of the Vatican’s collaboration not only with Hitler, the greatest criminal of all time, but also with Mussolini, Franco, and the little-known Pavelić, the Fascist leader in Croatia who, along with Cardinal Stepinac, was responsible for the concentration and death ...
Part IPart IIThe Grand Duchy of Lithuania in Vitezović’s anthropological-political ideologyOne of the most significant questions of our interest, which needs a satisfactory answer, is: Why P. R. Vitezović considered Lithuania as a Croato-Slavonic land, and therefore, Lithuania’s inhabitants as the Croato-Slavs?The most possible and realistic answers to this question are:1) Because of the historical development of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which brought the ethnic Lithuanians into very closer cultural relations with the Slavs (the Eastern and the Western) that resulted in the graduate process of Slavization of Lithuania’s cultural life and Lithuania’s ruling class. This historical fact influenced ...
Part IPart II The policy of language and political parties until the prohibition of the Illyrian name (1843)During the years of 1832–1836 the Hungarian assembly (Dieta) hold several sessions in Pozsony (Bratislava/Pressburg), where Croatia-Slavonia’s deputies, particularly count J. Drašković, fought for the introduction of the national (Croat) language in Croatia-Slavonia instead of the Latin or Hungarian, as well as for the Croatian state-historical rights (the so-called Croatian pravice) as they were claimed as such by the Croat political leadership. At the same time, in 1834 Ljudevit Gaj obtained a permission from the Habsburg Emperor Francis I (1806–1835) to publish the first ...
After the catastrophic attacks of September 11 2001 monumental sorrow and a feeling of desperate and understandable anger began to permeate the American psyche. A few people at that time attempted to promote a balanced perspective by pointing out that the United States had also been responsible for causing those same feelings in people in other nations, but they produced hardly a ripple. Although Americans understand in the abstract the wisdom of people around the world empathizing with the suffering of one another, such a reminder of wrongs committed by our nation got little hearing and was soon overshadowed by ...
Hardly any knowledgeable person doubts that Zionist ideology is the purest form of racism. Zionism is Jewish disguised racism as a raison d’etat. Israel comes right after the U. S., as far as racism is concerned. That is why the U. S. donates to this racist regime $ 3.8 bn per year in order to keep this occupation regime going. Should anybody doubt the racism of the Israeli leadership, read the following article.[1]Racism among the Israeli leadership is legendary. It started out with the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, saying: “Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it ...
IntroductionThe aim of this article is to shed new light on the question of how the configuration of post-war Central and South-East Europe was shaped during WWII by the USSR through its relations with the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (the CPY). Relationships between the CPY and the Soviet Union in 1941−1945 depended on the concrete military situation in Europe, and on the diplomatic relationships between the Soviet Union and the other members of the anti-fascist Alliance. For that reason, the Soviet Union and the CPY were cooperating in two directions during WWII. The concrete military situation in the battleground of ...
Part I, Part IISplit, Croatia: "Kill Serbs" written on the car arrived from SerbiaTerritorial imperialism of the HDZ’s CroatiaThe fact was that all ultranationalistic parties and organizations in the 1990s struggled for the creation of a Greater Croatia according to the principle of the ethnographic, historical and even natural rights. In all of those concepts, Bosnia-Herzegovina was seen as an integral part of united Croatia. There were, in principle, two concepts of united Croatia: A minimal concept of Croatia within the borders of the Banovina Hrvatska as it was in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1939−1941 (when a Greater Croatia ...
A project for Greater Albania – conspiracy or legitimate? According to a 2010 Gallup Balkan Monitor report, 83% of Albanians in Albania supported the idea of a Greater Albania, with 81% and 53% of Albanians in Kosovo and North Macedonia respectively supporting such an ambition.The ultimate goal? To have Kosovo and the Preševo Valley in Serbia, southern Montenegro, Epirus in Greece and western North Macedonia into a single Greater Albanian state. Although this may not be official policy of the Albanian Republic, it is ingrained into the Albanian mythos. The very idea of a Greater Albania has roots in the 1913 Treaty of London that left roughly 40% ...
The ethnic division of SFR Yugoslavia in 1991“Thousands joined a peaceful protest on Saturday in the Croatian town of Vukovar to express their anger at Croatian institutions for their “silence” over war crimes committed during the 1990s war” (Balkan Transitional Justice, 2018-10-13).The following essay is my constructive contribution to the above article.PrefaceOn the occasion of more than two decades of the end of the civil war on the territory of ex-Yugoslavia (1991−1995), it is necessary to reassess the real causes and cardinal perpetrators of Yugoslavia’s internal and external bloody destruction. In the western scientific literature of the “liberal democracy” scholars ...
The magazine is covering the research gaps uncovered by global Western hoax mainstream media platforms and academic teaching & research institutions.
This is an alternative information & academic research digest platform with the purpose to offer an alternative “another side of the truth”.
The magazine is independent, private, and free of any influence by any institution, organization, government, or pressure group. URL: www.global-politics.eu
So does the fundamental fact that this ultimate crime against humanity was perpetrated by Nazi Germany and its multinational fascist accomplices.
Jasenovac reality
Croat soldiers in Jasenovac after killing the prisoners by knives
Jasenovac reality
