World War II persecution of Serbs

The World War II persecution of Serbs, also known as Serbian Genocide,  refers to the widespread persecution of Serbs that included extermination, expulsions and forced religious conversions of large numbers of ethnic Serbs by the Ustaše regime in the Independent State of Croatia, and killings of Serbs by Albanian collaborators and Axis occupying forces during World War II.

The numbers of Serbs persecuted by the Ustaše were very large, but the exact extent is the subject of much debate and estimates vary widely. Yad Vashem estimates over 500,000 murdered, 250,000 expelled and 200,000 forcibly converted to Catholicism. The estimate of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is that the Ustaša authorities murdered between 320,000 and 340,000 ethnic Serb residents of Croatia and Bosnia during the period of Ustaše rule, out of which between 45,000 and 52,000 were murdered in the Jasenovac concentration camp.

Terminology
In Serbian historiography, this persecution has also been referred to as the Serbian Genocide (Геноцид над Србима у Другом светском рату, Genocid nad Srbima u Drugom svetskom ratu). The description of the persecution of Serbs in World War II as genocide has been challenged by David Bruce MacDonald.

Background
In April 1941, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was invaded by the Axis powers. Subsequently, the newly created Axis puppet state known as the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) implemented genocidal policies against its Serb, Jews and Romanis. The NDH utilized the Ustaše movement to persecute Serbs by killing thousands of them and forcing large numbers of people to convert to the Roman Catholic faith.

The word Ustaša (plural: Ustaše) comes a variation of the Croatian word ustanik (plural: ustanici). It is derived from the verb ustati (Croatian for rise up). Their name derives from the intransitive verb ustati which means "to rise up," hence Ustaša would mean an insurgent, or a rebel. The ideology of the Ustaše movement was a blend of Nazism and Croatian nationalism. The Ustaše supported the creation of a Greater Croatia that would span to the River Drina and to the outskirts of Belgrade. The movement emphasized the need for a racially "pure" Croatia and promoted the extermination of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies.

A major ideological influences of the Croatian nationalism of the Ustaše was 19th century Croatian activist Ante Starčević. Starčević was an advocate of Croatian unity and independence and was both anti-Habsburg and anti-Serb. He envisioned the creation of a Greater Croatia that would include territories inhabited by Bosniaks, Serbs, and Slovenes, considering Bosniaks and Serbs as Croats who had been converted to Islam and Orthodox Christianity and considering the Slovenes to be "mountain Croats". He argued that the large Serb presence in territories claimed by a Greater Croatia was the result of recent settlement, encouraged settlement by Habsburg rulers, and influx of groups like Vlachs who took up Orthodox Christianity and identified themselves as Serbs. The Ustaše used Starčević's theories to promote the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina to Croatia and recognized Croatia as having two major ethnocultural components: Catholic Croats and "Muslim Croats", as the Ustaše saw the Islam of the Bosnian-Muslims as a religion which "keeps true the blood of Croats." Armed struggle, genocide and terrorism were glorified by the group.

Ustaše persecution in the Independent State of Croatia


On 10 April, the most senior home-based Ustaše, 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). Meanwhile, Pavelić and several hundred Ustaše left their camps in Italy and travelled to Zagreb, where Pavelić declared a new government on 16 April 1941. He accorded himself the title of "Poglavnik" — a Croatian approximation to "Führer" and translating to something like "Headman" in English. The Independent State of Croatia was declared to be on Croatian "ethnic and historical territory".

"This country can only be a Croatian country, and there is no method we would hesitate to use in order to make it truly Croatian and cleanse it of Serbs, who have for centuries endangered us and who will endanger us again if they are given the opportunity"

- Miroslav Žanić, the minister of the NDH Legislative council, on 2 May 1941

Under Ante Pavelić's leadership and command, the Ustaše subjected ethnic Serbs, together with much smaller minorities of Jews and Roma, to a campaign of genocidal persecution.

Jasenovac concentration camp
The Ustaše slaughtered their victims with a merciless tenacity. A large portion of the atrocities occurred in the notorious Jasenovac concentration camp. It was the largest extermination camp in the Balkans and among the largest in Europe.

The Ustaše interned, tortured and brutally executed men, women and children in the camp. Serbs constituted the majority of inmates. Upon arrival at the camp, the prisoners were marked with colors, similar to the use of Nazi concentration camp badges: blue for Serbs, and red for communists (non-Serbian resistance members), while Roma had no marks. In several instances, inmates with blue badges were killed immediately upon arrival because of their Serbian ethnicity and most Serb inmates considered it to be the only reason for their imprisonment.

The Serbs were predominantly brought from the Kozara region, where the Ustaše captured areas that were held by Partisan guerrillas. These were brought to the camp without sentence, almost destined for immediate execution, accelerated via the use of machine-guns. Besides sporadic and random killings and deaths due to the poor living conditions, many inmates arriving at Jasenovac were scheduled for systematic extermination. An important criterion for selection was the duration of a prisoner's anticipated detention. Strong men capable of labor and sentenced to less than three years of incarceration were allowed to live. All inmates with indeterminate sentences or sentences of three years or more were immediately scheduled for execution, regardless of their fitness.

The so-called "manual-means-of-execution", the Ustaše's favorites, were executions that took part in utilizing sharp or blunt craftsmen tools: knives, saws, hammers, etc. The preferred manual-weapon of many Ustaše guards was the Srbosjek (or Serbcutter). This knife was originally a type of agricultural knife manufactured for wheat sheaf cutting. The upper part of the knife was made of leather, as a sort of a glove, designed to be worn with the thumb going through the hole, so that only the blade protruded from the hand. It was a curved, 12 cm long knife with the edge on its concave side. The knife was fastened to a bowed oval copper plate, while the plate was fastened to a thick leather bangle. Its agricultural purpose was to make it easier for the field workers to cut wheat sheaves open before threshing them. The knife was fixed on the glove plate in order to prevent injuries and to prevent taking care of a separate knife in order to improve the work speed.

These mass-executions took place in various locations:
 * Granik: Granik was a ramp used to unload goods of Sava boats. In winter 1943–44, season agriculture laborers became unemployed, while large transports of new internees arrived and the need for liquidation, in light of the expected Axis defeat, were large. Therefore, "Maks" Luburić devised a plan to utilize the crane as a gallows on which slaughter would be committed, so that the bodies could be dumped into the stream of the flowing river. In the autumn, the Ustaše NCO's came in every night for some 20 days, with lists of names of people who were incarcerated in the warehouse, stripped, chained, beaten and then taken to the "Granik", where weights were tied to the wire that was bent on their arms, and their intestines and neck were slashed, and they were thrown into the river with a blow of a blunt tool in the head. The method was later enhanced, so that inmates were tied in pairs, back to back, their bellies were cut before they were tossed into the river alive.
 * Gradina: The Ustaše utilized empty areas in the vicinity of the villages Donja Gradina and Ustice, where they encircled an area marked for slaughter and mass graves in wire. The Ustaše slew victims with knives or smashed their skulls with mallets. When gypsies arrived in the camp, they did not undergo selection, but were rather concentrated under the open skies at a section of camp known as "III-C". From there the gypsies were taken to liquidation in Gradina, working on the dike (men) or in the corn fields in Ustice (women) in between liquidations. Thus Gradina and Ustica became Roma mass grave sites. Furthermore, small groups of gypsies were utilized as gravediggers that actually participated in the slaughter at Gradina. Thus the extermination at the site grew until it became the main killing-ground in Jasenovac. Grave sites were also located in Ustica and in Draksenic.
 * Mlaka and Jablanac: Two sites used as collection and labor camps for the women and children in camps III and V, but also as places where many of these women and children, as well as other groups, were executed at the Sava bank in between the two locations.
 * Velika Kustarica: According to the state-commission, as many as 50,000 people were killed here in the winter amid 1941 and 1942. There is more evidence suggesting that killings took place there at that time and afterwards.

On the night of 29 August 1942, the prison guards made bets among themselves as to who could slaughter the largest number of inmates. One of the guards, Petar Brzica, boasted that he had cut the throats of about 1,360 new arrivals. A gold watch, a silver service, a roasted suckling pig and a bottle of Italian wine were among his rewards. Others who confessed to participating in the bet included Ante Zrinušić, who killed some 600 inmates, and Mile Friganović, who gave a detailed and consistent report of the incident. Friganović admitted to having killed some 1,100 inmates. He specifically recounted his torture of an old man named Vukasin; he attempted to compel the man to bless Ante Pavelić, which the old man refused to do, even after Friganović had cut off his ears, nose and tongue after each refusal. Ultimately, he cut out the old man's eyes, tore out his heart, and slashed his throat.

In April 1945, as Partisan units approached the camp, the camp's Croatian Fascist supervisors attempted to erase traces of the atrocities by working the death camp at full capacity. On 22 April, 600 prisoners revolted; 520 were killed and 80 escaped. Before abandoning the camp shortly after the prisoner revolt, the Ustaše killed the remaining prisoners and torched the buildings, guardhouses, torture rooms, the "Picili Furnace", and all the other structures in the camp. Upon entering the camp, the Partisans found only ruins, soot, smoke, and the skeletal remains of thousands of victims.

Stara Gradiška concentration camp
The Stara Gradiška concentration camp was built at the site of the Stara Gradiška prison. The camp was specially constructed for women and children and it became notorious for the crimes committed against them. The camp was guarded by the Ustaše and several female Croatian nurses. Inmates were killed using different means, including firearms, mallets, machetes and knives. At the "K", or "Kula" unit, Jewish and Serbian women, with weak or little children, were starved and tortured at the "Gagro Hotel", a cellar in which Ustaša Nikola Gagro used as a place of torture.

Other inmates were killed using poisonous gas. The first to be gassed were the women and children that arrived from camp Djakovo with gas vans that Simo Klaić called "green Thomas". The method was later replaced with stationary gas-chambers with Zyklon B and sulfur dioxide. Gas experiments were conducted initially at veterinary stables near the "Economy" unit, where horses and then humans were killed using sulphur dioxide and later Zyklon B. Gassing was also tested on children in the yard, where the camp commandant, Ustaša sergeant Ante Vrban, viewed its effects. Most gassing deaths occurred in the attics of "the infamous tower", where several thousand children from the Kožara region were killed in May and 2,000 more in June 1942. Subsequently, smaller groups of 400-600 children, and a few men and women, were gassed. At his trial, Vrban stated:


 * "Q. And what did you do with the children?
 * A. The weaker ones we poisoned
 * Q. How?
 * A. We led them into a yard ... and into it we threw gas
 * Q. What gas?
 * A. Zyklon."

According to witness Milka Zabičić, the gassing stopped due to a scheduled visit by a Red Cross delegation in 1943, which did not arrive until June 1944.

Sisak children's concentration camp
In the town of Sisak, situated near Jasenovac, the Ustaše's presence was vigilant. Early in 1942, the local synagogue was vandalized and robbed utterly by Croat extremists, and the building was later transformed to house a worker's hall. The inhabitants of Sisak were quickly brought to the Ustaše's attention, and those of them that were of Serbian and other, non-Croat kinship were tormented.

A large camp was later erected and it held more than 6,600 Serbian and Roma children throughout World War II. The children, aged between 3 and 16, were housed in abandoned stables, ridden with filth and pests. Malnutrition and dysentery seriously impaired their health. They were fed daily with a portion of thin gruel and treated horribly by their captors.

Jastrebarsko concentration camp
The camp housed Serbian children between the ages of one month to fourteen years and was operational for two months in 1942. The camp was set up specifically for Serb children from the Kožara region of Croatia. During its two months of operation, 1,018 children died in the camp. Ilovara Francis, a gravedigger who was paid "per piece", claimed to have buried 768 children in a six-week period. Another 1,300 children were transported to Jasenovac. On 26 August 1942, the Yugoslav Partisans liberated the camp, freeing approximately 700 children.

Jadovno concentration camp
The Jadovno concentration camp was located in а valley near Mount Velebit. It occupied an area of 1250 square meters and was fenced with barbed wire 4 meters high. The guards were posted 1 km all around the concentration camp's barbed wire. Prisoners, mostly Serbs, arrived from the town of Gospić where the Ustaše selected their victims.

The Jadovno victims association states that in 132 days in the camp 40,123 victims were killed. Among them 38,010 were Serbs, 1,998 were Jews, 88 Croats, 11 Slovenes, 9 Muslims, 2 Hungarians, 2 Czechs, 1 Russian, 1 Roma and 1 Montenegrin.

Atrocities
The atrocities committed by the Ustaše stunned many observers. Brigadier Sir Fitzroy Maclean, Chief of the British military mission to the Partisans commented, "Some Ustaše collected the eyes of Serbs they had killed, sending them, when they had enough, to the Poglavnik ... for his inspection or proudly displaying them and other human organs in the cafés of Zagreb."

The Ustaše also cremated living inmates, who were sometimes drugged and sometimes fully awake, as well as corpses. The first cremations took place in the brick factory ovens in January 1942. Engineer Hinko Dominik Picilli perfected this method by converting seven of the kiln's furnace chambers into more sophisticated crematories. Some bodies were buried rather than cremated, however, as was discovered by exhumations of bodies after the war.

A large number of massacres were committed. The most notable ones were:
 * Gudovac massacre — 184–196 Serbs were massacred by the Ustaše.
 * Glina massacre — 260 Serbs were herded into a church and killed by gunfire. Those who converted to Catholicism were spared.
 * Javor massacre — Hundreds of Serbs massacred in Javor, near Srebrenica and Ozren.
 * Korita massacre — 176 Serbs were massacred and their bodies were thrown into a pit called the Koritska Jama.
 * Kosinj massacre — Approximately 600 Serbs massacred by the Ustaše.
 * Metković massacre — 280 Serbs killed by the Ustaše in Metković on 25 June 1941.
 * Otecac massacre — 331 Serbs were executed by the Ustaše, including a Serbian Orthodox priest forced to convert to Catholicism before having his heart cut out of his chest.
 * Prebilovci massacre — Approximately 650 Serbs were executed by the Ustaše.

Religious persecution
The Ustaše recognized both Roman Catholicism and Islam as the national religions of Croatia, but held the position that Eastern Orthodoxy, as a symbol of Serbian identity, was their greatest foe. They never recognized the existence of the Serb people on the territories of Croatia or anywhere else in the world, for that matter – they referred to them only as "Croats of the Eastern faith." They also called Bosnian-Muslims "Croats of the Islamic faith," but they had a much stronger dislike of ethnic-Serbs.

The Ustaše in power banned the use of the expression "Serbian Orthodox faith" and mandated the use of the expression "Greek-Eastern faith" in its place. Hundreds of Serbian Orthodox Christian churches were closed, destroyed, or plundered during Ustaše rule. On 2 July 1942, the Croatian Orthodox Church was founded to replace the institutions of the Serbian Orthodox Church.

Kragujevac
Between 18–21 October 1941, men and boys were rounded up by German soldiers and members of the Serbian Volunteer Command from the vicinity of Kragujevac, Serbia. All males from the town between the ages of sixteen and sixty were assembled, including high school students, and 2,778 victims were selected from amongst them and shot. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel had issued an order on 16 September 1941, applicable to all of occupied Europe, to kill 50 communists for every wounded German soldier and 100 for each German soldier killed. German soldiers were attacked in early October by the Communist Partisans and by Chetniks under Draža Mihajlović near Gornji Milanovac, and the massacre was a direct reprisal for the German losses in that battle. In addition, the German High Command was furious because the bodies of the German soldiers had reportedly been mutilated by the guerrillas, so it was decided that the punishment must be particularly harsh. A German report stated that: "The executions in Kragujevac occurred although there had been no attacks on members of the Wehrmacht in this city, for the reason that not enough hostages could be found elsewhere.

Vojvodina
During the four years of occupation, Axis forces committed numerous war crimes against the civilian population in Vojvodina where about 50,000 people were murdered and about 280,000 arrested, violated or tortured. The victims were mostly Serbs but also included Jews and Romani.

During the four years of occupation, the Axis forces committed numerous war crimes against civilian population: about 50,000 people in Vojvodina were murdered and about 280,000 were arrested, violated or tortured. The victims belonged to several ethnic groups that lived in Vojvodina, but the largest number of the victims were of the Serb, Jewish and Romani ethnicity.

1942 raid
The most notable war crime during the occupation was the mass murder of the civilians, mostly of Serb and Jewish ethnicity, performed by Hungarian Axis troops in January 1942 raid in southern Bačka. The total number of civilians killed in the raid was 3,808. Locations that were affected by the raid included Novi Sad, Bečej, Vilovo, Gardinovci, Gospođinci, Đurđevo, Žabalj, Lok, Mošorin, Srbobran, Temerin, Titel, Čurug and Šajkaš.

Total number of victims
According to historian Dragoljub Živković, approximately 55,000 civilians died in Vojvodina during the Axis occupation.

According to demographer Slobodan Ćurčić, the total number of the people killed by the occupants between 1941 and 1944 in the entire Vojvodina was 55,285, including:
 * 18,193 people who were killed directly
 * 19,004 people who were sent to concentration camps and killed there
 * 4,168 people who were sent to forced labour and killed there
 * 3,286 people who were mobilized and later killed
 * 10,634 killed members of the resistance movement

Albanian role and Kosovo
During World War II, with the fall of Yugoslavia in 1941, the Italians placed the land inhabited by ethnic Albanians under the jurisdiction of an Albanian quisling government. That included Kosovo. Kosovo's inclusion into a geo-political Albanian entity was followed by extensive persecution of non-Albanians (mostly Serbs) by Albanian fascists. Most of the war crimes were perpetrated by the 21st Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Skanderbeg (1st Albanian) and the Balli Kombëtar.

In April 1943, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler created the 21st SS Division manned by Albanian and Kosovar Albanian volunteers. From August 1944, the division participated in operations against the Yugoslav Partisans and in massacring the local Serb inhabitants. SS-Brigadeführer August Schmidthuber, one of the commanders of the division, was captured in 1945 and turned over to Yugoslav authorities. He was put on trial in February 1947 by a Yugoslav military tribunal in Belgrade, on charges of participating in massacres, deportations and atrocities against civilians. The tribunal sentenced him to death by hanging. He was executed on 27 February 1947.

Overall, it is estimated that some 40,000 to 60,000 Serbs were killed and another 200,000 driven out of Kosovo in a mass-exodus during WWII.

Revisionism in modern-day Croatia
Many present-day Croats of note as well as politicians have attempted to minimise the seriousness of the crimes committed against ethnic-Serbs during the Holocaust by the Ustaše.

In 1989, the future President of Croatia, Franjo Tuđman, who, ironically, had been a Partisan during WWII, but later embraced a radical nationalism (perhaps to further his political goals), published his most famous work, Horrors of War: Historical Reality and Philosophy, in which he questioned the official numbers of victims killed by the Ustaše during the Second World War. In his book, Tuđman claimed that fewer than thirty-thousand people died at Jasenovac. Tuđman estimated that a total of 900,000 Jews had perished in the Holocaust. Tuđman's views and his government's toleration of Ustaša symbols frequently strained relations with Israel.

The most notable occurrence of ultra-nationalist and Serbophobic sentiment in Croatian public life is Thompson, a Croatian rock band that has on numerous occasions been protested against for having sung Ustaše songs, most notably Jasenovac i Gradiška Stara. People publicly displaying Ustaše affiliation at major Thompson concerts in Croatia and elsewhere is a frequent occurrence, leading to complaints from the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

In 2006, a video was leaked showing Croatian President Stipe Mesić giving a speech in Australia in the early 1990s, where he said that the Croats had "won a great victory on April 10th" (the date of formation of the Independent State of Croatia in 1941), and that Croatia needed to apologize to no one for the crimes that Croat fascists committed in the Jasenovac concentration camp.

Revisionism in Croatian diaspora
In the Croatian diaspora, there have been several incidents of denial and historical revisionism. The most notable occurrence was in 2008, in Melbourne, Australia, when a restaurant with owners of Croatian descent held a celebration to honour Ustaša leader Ante Pavelić. The event was an "outrageous affront both to his victims and to any persons of morality and conscience who oppose racism and genocide", the Simon Wiesenthal Center's chief Nazi-hunter and Israel director Dr. Efraim Zuroff stated. According to local press reports, a large photograph of Pavelić was hung in the restaurant, T-shirts with his picture and that of two other commanders in the 1941–1945 Ustaše government were offered for sale at the bar, and the establishment of the "Independent State of Croatia" was celebrated. Zuroff noted this was not the first time that Croatian émigrés in Australia had openly defended Croat Nazi war criminals. "It is high time that the authorities in Australia find a way to take the necessary measures to stop such celebrations, which clearly constitute racist, ethnic, and anti-Semitic incitement against Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies".

Position of the Roman Catholic Church
For the duration of the war, the Vatican kept full diplomatic relations with the Independent State of Croatia and granted Pavelić an audience with its papal nuncio in the capital Zagreb, albeit not an official diplomatic meeting. The nuncio was briefed on the efforts of the Ustaše to convert ethnic-Serbs to Catholicism. Some former priests, mostly Franciscans, particularly in, but not limited to, Herzegovina and Bosnia, took part in the atrocities themselves.

Miroslav Filipović was a Franciscan friar (from the Petrićevac monastery) who joined the Ustaše on 7 February 1942 in a brutal massacre of 2,730 Serbs of the nearby villages, including 500 children. He was subsequently reportedly dismissed from his order. He became the Chief Guard of the Jasenovac concentration camp where he was nicknamed "Fra Sotona" ("Friar Satan"). When he was hanged for war crimes, he wore his clerical garb.

Ustaše gold
The Ustaše had sent large amounts of gold that it had plundered from Serbian and Jewish property owners during World War II into Swiss bank accounts. Of a total of 350 million Swiss Francs, about 150 million was seized by British troops; however, the remaining 200 million (ca. 47 million dollars) reached the Vatican. In October 1946, the American intelligence agency SSU alleged that these funds are still held in the Vatican Bank. This issue is the theme of a recent class action suit against the Vatican Bank and others.

Commemoration


The Jasenovac Memorial Museum reopened in November 2006 with a new exhibition designed by the Croatian architect, Helena Paver Njirić, and an Educational Center designed by the firm Produkcija. The Memorial Museum features an interior of rubber-clad steel modules, video and projection screens, and glass cases displaying artifacts from the camp. Above the exhibition space, which is quite dark, is a field of glass panels inscribed with the names of the victims.

The New York City Parks Department, the Holocaust Park Committee and the Jasenovac Research Institute, with the help of US Congressman Anthony Weiner, established a public monument to the victims of Jasenovac in April 2005 (the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the camps.) The dedication ceremony was attended by ten Yugoslavian Holocaust survivors, as well as diplomats from Serbia, Bosnia and Israel. It remains the only public monument to Jasenovac victims outside of the Balkans. To commemorate the victims of the Kragujevac massacre, the whole of Šumarice, where the killings took place, was turned into a memorial park. There are several monuments there: the monument to killed schoolchildren and their teachers, the "Broken Wing" monument, the monument of pain and defiance and the monument "One Hundred for One", the monument of resistance and freedom. Serbian poet Desanka Maksimović wrote a poem about the massacre titled Krvava Bajka ("A Bloody fairy tale").

Total number
Historians have had difficulty calculating and agreeing on the number of victims. The first figures to be offered by the state-commission of Croatia ranged from around 500,000 to 600,000 people killed. The official estimate of the number of victims in Yugoslavia was 700,000; however, beginning in the 1990s, the Croatian side began suggesting substantially smaller numbers. The exact numbers continue to be a subject of great controversy and hot political dispute, with the Croatian government and Croatian institutions pushing for a much lower number even as recently as September 2009.

The estimates vary due to lack of accurate records, the methods used for making estimates, and sometimes the political biases of the estimators. In some cases, entire families were exterminated, leaving no one to submit their names to the lists. On the other hand, it has been found that the lists include the names of people who died elsewhere, whose survival was not reported to the authorities, or who are counted more than once on the lists. The casualty figures for the whole of Yugoslavia sways between the maximum 1,700,000 and the more conservative figures between 1,500,000. or one million.

An accurate number of all people killed at the Jasenovac camp might not ever be known but current estimates are around the 100,000 mark.

Historical documentation sources
The documentation from the time of Jasenovac revolves around the different sides in the battle for Yugoslavia: The Germans, Italians and Ustaše on the one hand, and the Partisans and the Allies on the other. There are also sources originating from the documentation of the Ustaše themselves and of the Vatican. These sources are at times considered contemporary because German and Ustaše sources tend to exaggerate, but the comparison of all different sources can give a reliable portrait of the historical truth.

German generals issued reports of the number of victims as the war progressed. German military commanders gave different figures for the number of Serbs, Jews and others killed by the Ustaše on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia. They circulated figures of 400,000 Serbs (Alexander Löhr); 350,000 Serbs (Lothar Rendulic); around 300,000 (Edmund Glaise von Horstenau); in 1943; "600-700,000 until March 1944" (Ernst Fick); 700,000 (Massenbach). Hermann Neubacher stated:"The recipe, received by the Ustaše leader and Poglavnik, the president of the Independent State of Croatia, Ante Pavelić, resembled genocidal intentions from some of the bloodiest religious wars: 'A third must become Catholic, a third must leave the country, and a third must die!' This last point of the Ustaše's program was accomplished. When prominent Ustaše leaders claimed that they slaughtered a million Serbs (including babies, children, women and old men), that is, in my opinion, a boastful exaggeration. On the basis of the reports submitted to me, I believe that the number of defenseless victims slaughtered to be three-quarters of a million.'"

Italian soldiers, who were overwhelmed and disgusted by the atrocious slaughter, also reported similar figures to their commanders. The Vatican's sources also speak of similar figures, that is, for an example, of 350,000 ethnic-Serbs slaughtered by the end of 1942 (Eugen Tisserant)

The Ustaše themselves gave more exaggerated assumptions of the number of people they killed. Vjekoslav "Maks" Luburić, the commander-in-chief of all the Croatian camps, announced the great "efficiency" of the Jasenovac camp at a ceremony as early as 9 October 1942. During the banquet which followed, he reported with pride, obviously intoxicated: "We have slaughtered here at Jasenovac more people than the Ottoman Empire was able to do during its occupation of Europe." Other Ustaše sources give other estimates: a circular of the Ustaše general headquarters that reads: "the concentration and labor camp in Jasenovac can receive an unlimited number of internees". In the same spirit, Miroslav Filipović-Majstorović, once captured by Yugoslav forces, admitted that during his three months of administration, 20,000 to 30,000 people died. Since it became clear that his confession was an attempt to somewhat minimize the rate of crimes committed in Jasenovac, having, for an example, claimed to have personally killed 100 people, extremely understated, Miroslav's figures are evaluated so that in some sources they appear as 30,000-40,000. A report of the National Committee of Croatia for the investigation of the crimes of the occupation forces and their collaborators, dated November 15, 1945, which was commissioned by the new government of Yugoslavia under Josip Broz Tito, stated that 500,000-600,000 people were killed at the Jasenovac complex. These figures were cited by researchers Israel Gutman and Menachem Shelach in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust from 1990 and Simon Wiesenthal Center. Menachem Shelach will in his book speak that number, of some 300,000 bodies being found and exhumed is reliable Mosa Pijade and Edvard Kardelj used this number in the war reparations meetings. Thus the proponents of these numbers were subsequently accused of artificially inflating them for purpose of obtaining war reparations. All in all, the state-commission's report has been the only public and official document about number of victims during 45 years of second Yugoslavia.

The state's total war casualties of 1,700,000 as presented by Yugoslavia at the Paris Peace Treaties, were produced by a math student, Vladeta Vučković, at the Federal Bureau of Statistics. He later admitted that his estimates included demographic losses (i.e., also factoring in the estimated population increase), while actual losses would have been significantly less. This number of victims was rejected by Germany during war reparations talks.

Forensic investigations
Between 22 and 27 June 1964, exhumations of bodies and the use of sampling methods was conducted at Jasenovac by Vida Brodar and Anton Pogačnik from Ljubljana university and Srboljub Živanović from Novi Sad university. During the Yugoslav Wars, Serbian anthropologist Srboljub Živanović published what he claimed were the full results of the studies, which in his words has been suppressed by Tito's government in the name of Brotherhood and Unity, in order to put less emphasis on the crimes of the Ustaše. According to Živanović, the research gave strong support to the victim counts of more than 500,000, with estimates of 700,000-800,000 being realistic, stating that in every mass grave there are 800 skeletons.

Victim lists

 * The Jasenovac Memorial Area maintains a list of the names of 80,914 Jasenovac victims, including 45,923 Serbs, 16,045 Romanies, 12,765 Jews, 4,197 Croats, 1,113 Bosnian Muslims and 871 people of some other ethnicities. The memorial estimates total deaths at 85,000 to 100,000.


 * The Belgrade Museum of the Holocaust keeps a list of the names of 80,022 victims (mostly from Jasenovac), including approximately 52,000 Serbs, 16,000 Jews, 12,000 Croats and 10,000 Romanies.


 * Antun Miletić, a researcher at the Military Archives in Belgrade, has collected data on Jasenovac since 1979. His list contains the names of 77,200 victims, of which 41,936 are Serbs.


 * In 1998, the Bosniak Institute published SFR Yugoslavia's final List of War Victims from the Jasenovac Camp (created in 1992). The list contained the names of 49,602 victims at Jasenovac, including 26,170 Serbs, 8,121 Jews, 5,900 Croats, 1471 Romanies, 787 Bosnian Muslims, 6,792 of unidentifiable ethnicity, and some listed simply as "others". Another list from that institution, naming victims that died between April and November 1944, lists 4,892 names.

Estimates by Holocaust institutions
The Yad Vashem center claims that more than 500,000 Serbs were murdered in Croatia, 250,000 were expelled, and another 200,000 were forced to convert to Catholicism. including those who were killed at Jasenovac. The same figures are concluded by the Simon-Wiesenthal center.

Menachem Shelach and Israel Gutman state the number of victims as 600,000 in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust from 1990, and that 20,000-25,000 of them were Jews. However, they only mention Jasenovac as the site where the murders took place. Further, they mention that most of the Croatian Jewish victims after August 1942 were deported to Auschwitz. On the other hand, however, as of 2012, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that the Ustaše regime murdered between 45,000 and 52,000 ethnic Serbs in Jasenovac between 1941 and 1945, and that during the period of Ustaše rule, a total of between 320,000 and 340,000 ethnic Serbs were killed in Croatia or Bosnia.

Statistical estimates
In the 1980s, calculations were done by Serb statistician Bogoljub Kočović, and by Croat economist Vladimir Žerjavić, who claimed that total number of victims in Yugoslavia was less than 1,700,000 which was the official estimate at the time, both concluding that the number of victims was around one million. Žerjavić calculated furthermore, claiming that the number of victims in the Independent State of Croatia was between 300,000 and 350,000, including 80,000 victims in Jasenovac, as well as thousands of deaths in other camps and prisons.

However, these estimates have been dismissed as biased and unreliable especially on the Serbian side. The mere 0.1% change of the (unknown) birth rate would contribute more to the number of victims than Žerjavić's claim of the number of Serbs killed in Jasenovac (50,000) and his calculation has a deficiency rate of 30%. Žerjavić has been dismissed as a nationalist even by Kočović, and his estimates of the number of fatalities in the Bosnian War of the '90s (300,000 killed) was three times greater than ICTY data and Bosnian official estimates after the war (100,000 killed), and sheds light on problems with his credibility. He was accused by some Croatian historians of being a plagiarist and the 'court statistician'.

Commentators in Serbia criticized these estimates as far too low, since the demographic calculations assumed arbitrarily that the growth rate for Serbs in Bosnia (which was absorbed by the Independent State of Croatia during the Second World War) was equal to the total growth rate throughout the former Yugoslavia (1.1% at the time). According to Serbian sources, however, the actual growth rate in this region was 2.4% (in 1921–1931) and 3.5% (in 1949–1953). This method is considered very unreliable by critics because there is no reliable data on total births during this period, yet the results depend strongly on the birth rate - just a change of 0.1% in birth rate changes the victim count by 50,000. According to the census, the number of Serbs between last prewar (1931) and first post war (1948) census has gone up from 1,028,139 to around 1,200,000. The Yugoslav Federal Bureau of Statistics has in 1964 created list of World War II victims with 597,323 names and deficiency estimated at 20-30% which is giving between 750,000 and 780,000 victims. Together with estimated 200,000 killed collaborators and quislings, the total number would reach about one million. This Yugoslav Federal Bureau of Statistics list was declared a state secret in 1964 and it was published only in 1989.

Aftermath
After World War II, the remaining Ustaše went underground or fled to countries such as Australia, Canada, the United States and Germany, with the assistance of Roman Catholic churches and their grassroots supporters. Yugoslav President Marshal Josip Broz Tito never visited the sites where massacres of Serbs took place, particularly Jasenovac, as he sought to make the people of Yugoslavia forget the Ustaše's crimes in the name of "brotherhood and unity". This policy has continued to modern times, as is evidenced by the insufficient amount of media-attention that Fascist war-crimes in the former-Yugoslavia have received.

Israeli President Moshe Katsav visited Jasenovac in 2003. Israeli President Shimon Peres visited Jasenovac on 25 July 2010. He dubbed the Ustaše's crimes to be a "demonstration of sheer sadism".

On 17 April 2011, in a commemoration ceremony, Croatian President Ivo Josipović warned that there were, "attempts to drastically reduce or decrease the number of Jasenovac victims", adding "faced with the devastating truth here that certain members of the Croatian people were capable of committing the cruelest of crimes, I want to say that all of us are responsible for the things that we do." At the same ceremony, then Croatian Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor said, "there is no excuse for the crimes and therefore the Croatian government decisively rejects and condemns every attempt at historical revisionism and rehabilitation of the fascist ideology, every form of totalitarianism, extremism and radicalism," and added, "Pavelić's regime was a regime of evil, hatred and intolerance, in which people were abused and killed because of their race, religion, nationality, their political beliefs and because they were the others and were different."

Notable war-criminals



 * Ante Pavelić, leader of Croatia during the Second World War, shot by Blagoje Jovović, a Montenegrin Serb working for the Yugoslavian secret service, near Buenos Aires, Argentina on 9 April 1957. Pavelić later died of his injuries in a hospital in Madrid, Spain.
 * Dido Kvaternik, was considered the second most important person in Croatia, after Ante Pavelić; died in a car accident along with his two daughters in 1962 in Argentina.
 * Miroslav Filipović–Majstorović, a Franciscan friar, reportedly expelled from the order, who was infamous for his commands of Jasenovac and Stara-Gradiška, was known as Fra Satana (Father Satan) for his cruelty. He was captured by the Yugoslav communist forces, tried and executed in 1946, wearing his clerical garb.
 * Maks Luburić was the commander of the Ustaška Odbrana, or Ustaše Defense, thus being held responsible for all crimes committed under his supervision in Jasenovac, which he visited approximately two to three times per month. He fled to Spain, but was assassinated by a Yugoslav agent in 1969.
 * Mile Budak, a Croatian politician, executed for war crimes and crimes against humanity on 7 June 1945.
 * Dinko Šakić fled to Argentina, but was eventually extradited, tried and sentenced, in 1999, by Croatian authorities to 20 years in prison, dying in prison in 2008.
 * Petar Brzica was an Ustaša officer who, on the night of 29 August 1942, allegedly slaughtered over 1,360 people. Brzica's fellow Ustaše also took part in that crime, as part of a competition of throat cutting. Brzica's post-war fate is unknown.