Emperor's Clothes Newsletter * 10 January 2007 http://www.tenc.net
Please forward this text or send the link to a friend. You may post this text on the internet as long as you credit TENC and the author(s). http://emperors-clothes.com/croatia/encr.htm To subscribe to our free newsletter and receive articles and documents posted on Emperor's Clothes, send a blank email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] We'll send you a confirmation; please hit 'reply' to finalize your subscription. Our readers make TENC possible. Please donate: http://emperors-clothes.com/donate.html ==================================== Dear readers, Below is the third installment of "The Suppressed History of the Holocaust in Croatia." This Newsletter includes the section on the Croatian Ustashe's genocide of the Serbs, and the beginning of the section on the Ustashe's extermination of Jewish Croatians and Jewish Bosnians, from the "Encyclopedia of the Holocaust" entry on Croatia, which TENC is publishing unabridged on the Internet for the first time. (We have changed the spelling of a few words, as explained in footnote [1A].) We will send out the rest of the entry on Croatia as well as the entry on the Jasenovac death camp in the next and final Newsletter in this series. To read the rest of the Encyclopedia material now, or the contents of the previous two Newsletters, including Jared Israel's analyses of the opening of the Croatian government's Holocaust-denying exhibition at Jasenovac, and of the US State Department's attempt to market Holocaust denial, see the *Table of Contents* at the end of this Newsletter. Best regards, Samantha Criscione Emperor's Clothes ===================================== "The Suppressed History of the Holocaust in Croatia" - Third installment of 4-part mailing: ===================================== II. CROATIA by Menachem Shelah "Encyclopedia of the Holocaust," Yad Vashem, 1990, pp. 323-329. To access the PDF file scanned from the "Encyclopedia" go to http://emperor.vwh.net/croatia/encr.pdf For bibliographical note, including source of photographs and maps, see foonote [1] Capitalized words refer to other articles in the "Encyclopedia." ===================================== [Page 323] CROATIA (Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska, or Independent State of Croatia; NDH), puppet state in YUGOSLAVIA, established during World War II, that was in existence from April 1941 to May 1945. Its area which underwent many changes owing to annexations consisted of what are today the Federative Republic of Croatia and the Federative Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a total of approximately 38,600 square miles (100,000 sq km). Its capital was Zagreb; it had a population of 6.3 million, of whom 3.3 million were Catholic Croats, 1.9 million Orthodox Serbs, 700,000 Muslim Croats, 170,000 Germans, 75,000 Hungarians, 40,000 Jews, 30,000 Gypsies, and 100,000 members of other minorities. *Serbian Minority.* Croatia was set up by the Germans and the Italians on April 10, 1941, as part of their plan for the dismemberment of Yugoslavia. Ante PAVELICH, leader of the secessionist USTASHA movement, was made head of state. Shortly after taking control, the Ustasha, with the support of many Croatians, embarked upon what it called "the purge of Croatia from foreign elements," which had as its main purpose the elimination of the Serbian minority. In a brutal terror campaign, more than half a million Serbs were killed, a quarter-million expelled, and two hundred thousand forced to convert to Catholicism. The Ustasha regime in Croatia, and particularly this drive in the summer of 1941 to exterminate and dispossess the Serbs, was one of the most horrendous episodes of World War II. The murder methods applied by the Ustasha were extraordinarily primitive and sadistic: thousands were hurled from mountaintops, others were beaten to death or had their throats cut, entire villages were burned down, women raped, people sent in death marches in the middle of winter, and still others starved to death. *Jews.* The Jews of Croatia lived mainly in the larger cities: Zagreb (11,000), Sarajevo (10,000), Osijek (3,000), and Bjelovar (3,000). Sixty percent are estimated to have been Ashkenazim and the rest Sephardim. Most of the Jews belonged to the middle class; they were civil servants, merchants, and professionals such as doctors and lawyers. Zionists controlled the communities. Croatian Jewry carried on a wide range of activities; it had its own school network, weekly newspaper, welfare institutions, and youth movements. The NDH regime categorized the Jews as one of the "foreign elements" that had to be purged, and the Ustasha's German patrons encouraged it in its drive against the Jews. In pursuing this course, the Ustasha was motivated by desires to please the Germans and to acquire the Jews' property, rather than by ideological antisemitism. Three government departments were involved in Jewish affairs. The Ministry of the Interior, with Andrija Artukovich as minister, dealt with anti-Jewish legislation; the security police (Ustashka Nadzorna Sluzba), under Eugen Dido Kvaternik, arrested, imprisoned, and murdered Jews, and ran the concentration camps; and the Ministry of Finance, under Vladimir Kosak, was charged with the depredation of Jewish property. *Anti-Jewish legislation.* A few days after taking control, the Ustasha enacted anti-Jewish legislation, most of it based on the precedents set in the Third Reich, the GENERALGOUVERNEMENT, and SLOVAKIA. It included racial statutes on the model of the NUREMBERG LAWS, which defined who was a Jew and stripped the Jews of their civil rights. But there was an innovation in these laws a paragraph empowering the head of state to bestow the title of "Honorary Aryan" which provided an opportunity for corrupt practices. Most of the legislation dealt with economic affairs: Aryan trustees [End of page 323] *** [Page 324] CROATIA, 1941 to 1945. [Map of Yugoslavia in text, showing the location of Croatia's extermination camps and the areas occupated by Germany, Italy and Hungary from 1941 to 1945 - posted at http://emperors-clothes.com/croatia/encr.htm#map324 ] [Text continues] were appointed to take over Jewish businesses; Jewish factories, enterprises, and real property were "nationalized"; Jewish civil servants were dismissed; and Jewish professionals (lawyers, doctors, veterinarians, and so on) were prohibited from dealing with non-Jewish clients. Collective fines, which had to be paid in gold or its equivalent, were imposed on the Jewish communities. Overnight, a pseudolegal expropriation drive was launched, which before long turned into an unbridled countrywide campaign of plunder and pillage in which everyone who stood to profit took part trade unions, youth organizations, sports clubs, the armed forces, and government officials of all ranks. Ordinary citizens also took part in this campaign wherever they could; indeed, the share of "private" elements in the plunder was enormous at least half of the property of which the Jews were robbed apparently never reached the state treasury but remained in the hands of individual Croatians. According to an estimate by the Ministry of Finance published in 1944, the value of the Jewish property it acquired was 25 billion dinars ($50 million, according to the prewar rate of exchange). Presenting the state budget for the 1942-1943 fiscal year, the minister of finance, Vladimir Kosak, said that the deficit would be covered by proceeds from the sale of Jewish property. In the first few months of Ustasha rule, various other decrees were passed, mostly by local authorities, designed to restrict the Jews' freedom of movement and the places where they could live, and thereby to isolate them from the rest of the population. In May 1941 an order was announced under which the Jews had to wear the yellow Jewish BADGE with the letter Z (from Zidov, "Jew") prominently displayed on it. *Roundup, incarceration and murder.* The first arrests made among the Jews were part of a general preventive measure to forestall the rise of any anti-government organiza- [End of page 324] * * * [Beginning of page 325] [Photograph in text, posted at http://emperors-clothes.com/croatia/encr.htm#children Caption: Children liberated from a Croatian concentration camp.] [Text continues] tions. It affected the active members of left-wing parties, Serbian parties, democrats, and left-wing intellectuals. Included in that wave of arrests were some one hundred Jewish youngsters who had been active in Zionist youth movements in Zagreb, as well as the Jewish lawyers in that city; both groups were taken to concentration camps that had been established in the country, where most of them were killed. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the incidence of sabotage acts in Croatia rose sharply and the situation of the Jews deteriorated further, as acts of sabotage led to retaliatory measures in which many Jews were executed (with the authorities stressing their Jewishness). The mass arrest of Jews was set in motion with a decree issued by Ante Pavelich on June 26, 1941, that accused the Jews of spreading lies in order to incite the population and of interfering with the orderly supply of essential commodities, "well known black-marketeers that they are. I declare that the Jews are collectively guilty and order them to be imprisoned in concentration camps." The onslaught of the Jews of Zagreb had begun a few days earlier, on June 22. By the end of the month several hundred Jewish families had been seized and, for the most part, put into the Pag and Jadovno concentration camps. In July it was the turn of the smaller communities, such as Varadin, Koprivnica, Ludbreg, Karlovac, and Bjelovar. The prisoners were first assembled in the former trade-fair grounds in the heart of Zagreb and from there dispatched to various camps. This was followed, at the beginning of August, by a drive against the Jews of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the first stage, those living in small towns were arrested; at the end of the month, it was the turn of Sarajevo, where the roundup of the Jews took longer than expected and was completed only in November 1941. The concentration camp of JASENOVAC was constructed in August 1941, and after its completion most arrested Jews were sent there. Some Jewish women of Sarajevo were imprisoned in a special women's camp that had been set up in the town of Djakovo for lack of space in the other camps. [End of page 325] * * * [Beginning of page 326] By the end of 1941, two-thirds of Croatian Jewry had been taken to Croatian concentration camps; most were killed on arrival or soon after. The Jews who had not yet been imprisoned were regarded as indispensable to the state's economy, were married to non-Jews, or had personal ties to members of the ruling clique. Some Jews also managed to flee to the Italian zone of occupation. In an interview with a German newspaper at the end of the summer of 1941, Pavelich declared: "The Jews will be liquidated within a very short time." Jews were imprisoned in the following concentration camps: *1.* Danica, near Zagreb. This camp was established in April 1941 and was disbanded at the end of the year. Most of the inmates were political prisoners; the Jewish lawyers of Zagreb were also incarcerated here. *2.* Jadovno, in the Velebit Mountains. Established in May 1941 and disbanded in August of that year, when the area was about to be handed over to the Italians. It was here that the Jewish youngsters from Zagreb were imprisoned and murdered. *3.* Pag, on Pag Island in the Adriatic. Established in June 1941 and dismantled by the end of August of that year. In the few weeks of its existence, hundreds of people were murdered in this camp. An inquiry commission set up by the Italian army when it took control of the area in August 1941 reported that shocking acts had been committed there. Among the murder victims were many of the people who had been seized in the first wave of arrests. *4.* Kruscica, in Bosnia. Established at the beginning of August 1941 and disbanded by the end of the following month. This was mainly a transit camp for the Jewish women arrested in Bosnia and Herzegovina. *5.* Loborgrad, in northern Croatia. Set up in September 1941 and dismantled in October 1942. It served as a camp for women and children and was run by VOLKSDEUTSCHE (ethnic Germans). In May 1942 the women and children prisoners were deported to AUSCHWITZ. *6.* Djakovo, in southeast Croatia. Established in December 1941; in existence until June 1942. This was another camp where women amid children were imprisoned. Several hundred prisoners died in a typhus epidemic that broke out there; the rest were transferred, in the summer of 1942, to Jasenovac, where they were killed on arrival. *7.* Tenje, near Osijek. Set up in March 1942 and disbanded in August of that year, when all its prisoners were deported to Auschwitz to be gassed. *8.* Jasenovac, 62 miles (100 km) from Zagreb. Established in August 1941; in existence until April 1945. This was the largest and best-known concentration camp in Croatia, the place where most of its Jews went to their death. It was also in Jasenovac that hundreds of thousands of people belonging to other nationalities were killed Serbs, GYPSIES, and various non-Jewish opposition elements. ["The Suppressed History of the Holocaust in Croatia" continues with the second part of "Croatia" from Yad Vashem's "Encyclopedia of the Holocaust," and with the unabridged entry "Jasenovac," which will be sent to you shortly. To continue reading now go to http://emperors-clothes.com/croatia/encr.htm#II.2.3 The entire Table of Contents is posted with hyperlinks following the fundraising appeal.] ===================================== Emperor's Clothes Needs Your Help! ===================================== Our work depends on donations. If you find Emperor's Clothes useful, please help us to pay website, research and technical expenses. Every donation helps, big or small. If you would like to donate but can't afford to now, you can help by posting Emperor's Clothes articles on websites and discussion lists, and distributing them by email. If you can afford to donate now, please do. Our best is yet to come! Here's how to make a donation: * At our secure server https://emperor.securesites.com/transactions/index.php * Using Paypal https://www.paypal.com/xclick/[EMAIL PROTECTED]&no_shipping=1 * Mail a check to: Emperor's Clothes P.O. Box 610-321 Newton, MA 02461-0321 USA * Or, call us at 1 617 916-1705 (If you get voicemail, please leave your phone number and we will call you back.) Thank you! ===================================== Footnotes and Further Reading ===================================== [1] Menachem Shelah, "Croatia," in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, published in Hebrew and English, by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, Jerusalem, 1990. Hebrew edition: ha-Entsiklopedyah shel ha-Sho'ah / 'orekh rashi, Yisra'el Gutman. [Jerusalem] : Yad va-Shem ; Tel-Aviv : Sifriyat po'alim, 1990. English edition: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust / Israel Gutman, editor in chief, New York/London, Macmillan, 1990, pp 323-329. Note on Pictures: In "Acknowledgements," p. xix of the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, it states: "We would like to thank Martin Gilbert for his permission to use some of the maps from The Macmillan Atlas of the Holocaust (New York, 1982). "We also wish to express our thanks and appreciation to the various institutions and libraries that have kindly granted us permission to reproduce photographs in their possession. Appropriate credit lines appear with each such photograph. All photographs without attribution were provided by the Yad Vashem archives in Jerusalem." The PDF file of "Croatia" is at http://emperor.vwh.net/croatia/encr.pdf [1A] Serbo-Croatian has diacritics (accent marks) that cannot be displayed in the text version of emails. We have therefore changed the spelling of the words listed below. -- 'Drzava' ('state') has a caron (inverted circumflex accent mark) on 'z' -- 'Sluzba' ('office') has a caron on 'z' -- 'Varazdin' (name of town) has a caron on 'z' -- 'Zidov' ('Jew') has a caron on 'z' -- 'Ustasha' is written 'Ustasa' with a caron on 's' -- 'Ustashka' is written 'Ustaska' with a caron on 's' -- 'Artukovich' is written 'Artukovic' with an acute accent on 'c' -- 'Pavelich' is written 'Pavelic' with an acute accent on 'c' The letter 'z' with caron is pronounced like the 's' in 'vision' (voiced postalveolar fricative in the notation of the International Phonetic Association - IPA http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/ipa/index.html ). The letter 's' with caron is pronounced like the 'sh' in 'sheer' (voiceless postalveolar fricative in the IPA notation). The letter 'c' with acute accent is pronounced like the 't' in 'nature' (voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate in the IPA notation). In the HTML-version of this newsletter the spelling is rendered with diacritics as in the original text of the "Encyclopedia" entry. -- SC * * * =================================== * Table of Contents * http://emperors-clothes.com/croatia/encr.htm#contents =================================== * The Suppressed History of the Holocaust in Croatia * For the first time on the Internet, the article "Croatia" transcribed from Yad Vashem's Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; also from the same source, the article "Jasenovac," on Croatia's main death camp. http://emperors-clothes.com/croatia/encr.htm * I. Introductory note by Jared Israel Edited by Samantha Criscione http://emperors-clothes.com/croatia/encr.htm#I Summary: Why the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust articles on Croatia and Jasenovac are key documents that the US and German (and Croatian) governments and the Vatican kindly request you don't read. * I.1 The Croatian Government's Holocaust-Denying Exhibition at the Jasenovac Death Camp by Jared Israel http://emperors-clothes.com/croatia/encr.htm#I.1 Summary: The media suppresses evidence of Croatian leaders' fascist views, evidence belying their claim to have rejected Croatia's Ustasha past. The Croatian government's newly opened exhibition at the Jasenovac death camp is a fraud; it is tragic that Serbian, Jewish and Roma ('Gypsy') groups have let themselves be used to hide its Holocaust-denying character. * I.2 How the US State Department Misuses Washington's Holocaust Museum to Market Holocaust Denial by Jared Israel http://emperors-clothes.com/croatia/encr.htm#I.2 Summary: Evidence is presented that Washington's Holocaust Museum, which is playing a major role in the legitimization of Croatia's Holocaust-denying spin, is a tool of the US foreign policy establishment. * II. Croatia by Menachem Shelah http://emperors-clothes.com/croatia/encr.htm#II Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Jerusalem/Tel Aviv, 1990; English translation, New York/London, pp. 323-329. II.1 Serbian Minority II.2 Jews II.2.1 Anti-Jewish legislation II.2.2 Roundup, incarceration and murder II.2.3 German role in deportation and extermination II.2.4 Italian protection II.3 Catholic Church II.4 [Jewish] Communities * III. Jasenovac by Menachem Shelah http://emperors-clothes.com/croatia/encr.htm#III Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Jerusalem/Tel Aviv, 1990; English translation, New York/London, pp. 739-740. * * * Please forward this text or send the link to a friend. You may post this text on the internet as long as you credit TENC and the author(s). http://emperors-clothes.com/croatia/encr.htm To subscribe to our free newsletter and receive articles and documents posted on Emperor's Clothes, send a blank email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] We'll send you a confirmation; please hit 'reply' to finalize your subscription. Our readers make TENC possible. Please donate The Emperor's New Clothes (TENC) * http://www.tenc.net
