Pls. fwd. to everyone.
http://www.balkanstudies.org/blog/holocaust-deniers-us-state-department
Holocaust Deniers at the U.S. State Department
By Srdja Trifkovic
Saturday, 20 Mar 2010
The latest U.S. Department of State human rights report on Croatia, released on
March 11, 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; a daily scene from Jasenovac, l.]. This remarkable
claim is the exact moral and factual equivalent of asserting that “tens of
thousands” of Jews and others were killed in Auschwitz or Treblinka.
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 for saying “Thank
God, my wife is neither a Serb nor a Jew.” 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 – not six
million. He has also asserted that not more than 70,000 Serbs died at the hands
of the Ustashe – most historians say around 400,000 were killed.” (The New York
Times, 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 people were murdered at
Jasenovac, mostly Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, and opponents of the Ustasa regime.”
The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team: “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 the 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 dignitary:
“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
and incontrovertible evidence that Yad Vashem’s researchers had exaggerated the
number of victims at Jasenovac a hundredfold or more, that German eyewitnesses
were wrong, that even the Holocaust-denying President Tudjman was wrong, and
that the number of victims was indeed in some “thousands” rather than tens or
hundreds of thousands.
If it does, the State Department should make such evidence for its claims
public. If it does not, it should issue a detailed correction and an unreserved
apology.
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