http://www.balkanstudies.org <http://www.balkanstudies.org/>
March 20, 2010 Holocaust Deniers at the U.S. State Department </blog/holocaust-deniers-us-state-department> The latest U.S. Department of State human rights report on Croatia <http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2009/eur/136025.htm> says, matter of factly, that “on September 24 [2009] ... Cardinal Josip Bozanic visited Jasenovac, the site of the largest concentration camp in Croatia during World War II where *thousands* of Serbs, Jews, and Roma were killed” [emphasis added]. This remarkable claim is the exact moral and factual equivalent of asserting that “tens of thousands” of Jews and others were killed in Auschwitz. The number of victims at Jasenovac is still uncertain. The lowest estimate with any pretense to methodological seriousness – /tens of thousands/ of victims – was made by the late Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, famous forsaying “Thank God, my wife is neither a Serb nor a Jew.” <http://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/11/world/tudjman-is-dead-croat-led-country-out-of-yugoslavia.html?pagewanted=3> Tudjman’s “estimate” on Jasenovac fits in with his other assessments: “In his book /Wastelands: Historical Truths/, published in 1988, Mr. Tudjman wrote that the number of Jews who died in the Holocaust was 900,000 – notsix million. He has also asserted that not more than 70,000 Serbs died at the hands of the Ustashe – mosthistorians say around 400,000 were killed.” (The New York Times <http://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/20/world/a-would-be-tito-helps-to-dismantle-his-legacy.html?pagewanted=1>, August 20, 1995) Other sources provide estimates tens of times greater than Dr. Tudjman’s, and /hundreds of times/ greater than that presented as fact by the U.S. State Department: “JASENOVAC” by Menachem Shelach in /Encyclopedia of the Holocaust/, Yad Vashem, 1990, pp. 739-740: “Some six hundred thousand <http://www.holocaustrevealed.org/_domain/holocaustrevealed.org/Jasenovac/Jasenovac.htm> people were murdered at Jasenovac, mostly Serbs, Jews, GYPSIES, and opponents of the USTAŠA regime.” The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team <http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/othercamps/jasenovac.html>: “It is estimated that close to 600,000 … mostly Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, were murdered at Jasenovac.” So much for the Jewish sources. This is what the contemporary German allies of the Ustasa regime had to say on this subject. Hermann Neubacher, Hitler’s foremost political expert for the Balkans, in his book /Sonderaufrag Südost 1940-1945. Bericht eines fliegenden Diplomaten/ (Goettingen: Muster-Schmidt-Verlag, 1957, p. 18): “The prescription for the Orthodox Serbs issued by the leader and Führer of Croatia, Ante Pavelić, was reminiscent of the religious wars of the bloodiest memory: One third must be converted to Catholicism, another third must be expelled, and the final third must die. The last part of the program has been carried out.” [i.e. one-third of cca. 1.9 million were killed] In a report to Himmler, SS General Ernst Frick estimated that “600 to 700,000 victims were butchered in the Balkan fashion.” General Lothar Rendulic, commanding German forces in the western Balkans in 1943-1944, estimated the number of Ustaša victims to be 500,000. In his memoirs /Gekaempft, gesiegt, geschlagen/(Welsermühl Verlag, Wels und Heidelberg, 1952, p.161) he recalled a memorable exchange on this issue with a Croat official: “When I objected to a high official who was close to Pavelic that, in spite of the accumulated hatred, I failed to comprehend the murder of half a million Orthodox, the answer I received was characteristic of the mentality that prevailed there: /Half a million, that’s too much – there weren’t more than 200,000!/” The U.S. Department of State may have in its possession some newly discovered, incontrovertible evidence that Yad Vashem’s researchers had exaggerated the number of victims at Jasenovac hundredfold or more, that German eyewitnesses were wrong, that even the Holocaust-denying President Tudjman was wrong, and the number of victims was indeed in the “thousands” rather than tens or hundreds of thousands. If it does, it should make it public. If it does not, it should issue a correction and an apology.
