10-20-06, 9:42 am
The word Holocaust has come to describe the horrors of the planned extermination campaigns launched by Nazi Germany and its allies during World War II. These campaigns, as most people know, resulted in the murder of six million Jewish people of various European nationalities, about one third of the Jewish people of the world at the time. Many millions of others perished in concentration camps, in mass killings used as reprisals for partisan attacks, in policies of forced labor and food deprivation designed by the Nazis and their fellow fascists to work and starve 'inferior races' to death.
But the history of the Holocaust during World War II in what was then 'former Yugoslavia' is not at all well known. Had it been better known, liberal minded people might not have responded to the propaganda used to line up support for Croatian and Bosnian separatists during the Yugoslavian civil war of the 1990s, which has created a new 'former Yugoslavia' whose map and whose 'favored nations' resembles the map drawn by Hitler and Mussolini in 1941.
The Jasenovac Institute was founded by Barry Lituchy and others to educate people internationally about the Holocaust in Yugoslavia. I am proud to be a member of the Institute’s Board and an active supporter and contributor to its mission.
The Institute’s name derives from the Jasenovac complex of murder camps run by the Ustasha, a Croatian nationalist organization which the Nazis put into power over Croatia and Bosnia when they dismembered Yugoslavia in 1941. Jasenovac was the third largest extermination camp in Europe after Auschwitz and Treblinka and the only extermination camp not run by Hitler’s SS. In it hundreds of thousands of Serbians, mostly from Croatia and Bosnia, perished (an estimated 600,000-700,000) along with tens of thousands of Jewish and Roma (Gypsy) people.
Based largely on a conference held at Kingsborough Community College in 1997, Jasenovac exposes the horrors inflicted on the people of Yugoslavia, scholarly debates about the complicity of Croatians, the Vatican, and others in perpetrating those horrors, and their effects on the postwar history of the region and the world. Barry Lituchy’s careful, lucid introduction explains both the complicated historical background, the debates among historians, and the testimonies of survivors that the work presents
Contributors to this book include many Yugoslav scholars, such as the distinguished Anton Miletic, director of former Yugoslavia’ military archives. Non-Yugoslav participants included Eli Rosenbaum, Director of the Office of Special Investigations of the Justice Department, which sought to deport and extradite fascist war criminals from the U.S., Charles Allen, who pioneered in exposing the fascist criminals living in the 'free world' from the 1960s on, and Christopher Simpson, author of the classic work, Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and its Disastrous Effects on Our Domestic and Foreign Policies.
The question of records, sources, and numbers of victims is debated by the historians from various perspectives. The book also discusses ability of certain Ustasha war criminals to escape punishment with the assistance of the Vatican and the U.S. government without embellishment. One example was former Secretary General of the UN and Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, a former Wehrmacht officer whom Yugoslav investigators declared a war criminal in 1947, who covered up his past for decades. Among these war criminals was Andrija Artukovic, 'Justice Minister' for the Ustasha regime who played a leading role in implementing its racist policies. Artukovic, whom Charles Allen connects with CIA activities in Latin America, actually lived for decades in California, avoiding extradition to Yugoslavia until the mid-1980s.
Part II of Jasenovac tells the survivors’ stories, which are accounts of horror and courage. Yugoslav partisan forces led by the Yugoslav Communist Party fought German divisions and their Ustasha allies, made an important contribution to the war effort in Europe, and eventually liberated Yugoslavia to a considerable degree.
Even though Yugoslavia did not join the postwar Soviet alliance system, its attempts to capture and punish fascist war criminals, both Germans and their collaborators, were stymied by NATO bloc intelligence and police agencies who simply 'rechristened' these elements anti-Communist 'refugees' and 'freedom fighters' from the 'captive nations' of Europe.
Jasenovac and the Holocaust in Yugoslavia is enormously valuable both for students of the Holocaust and also general readers who want to understand how history is made and unmade. It is a work that helps us to face and understand modern history’s greatest horrors and hopefully through that understanding to act to prevent either their return or historical denial and amnesia that serves as a precondition for their return. For example, the historical amnesia about the Holocaust in Yugoslavia played a significant role in creating popular acceptance of U.S. and NATO bloc policies that dismembered Yugoslavia.
