Categories

Srdja Trifković, PhD
Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Banja Luka
Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina

 

USTAŠA CRIMES, SERBIAN VICTIMS, NUMBERS AND POLITICS: TOWARD A RATIONAL DEBATE

Vol. XXXVIII, 1/2020, pp. 203–222
https://doi.org/10.29362/ist20veka.2020.1.tri.203-222

 

ABSTRACT/RESUME:

There is no more thankless task for a historian than to try to determine the number of victims of any single episode of mass murder in which the 20th century was abundant. All over the world we encounter the sanctification of numbers unsupported by scientific evidence and the misuse of the term “genocide” for political purposes.

The issue of the number of Serbs who were murdered by the Ustaša regime in the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH) under the 1941–45 Axis occupation is also still contentious, even though there is broad agreement on the figures among expert historians of the period.

Ever since the Ustaša movement was founded in the 1930’s, anti-Serb genocidal intent had been immanent to its ideology. After the fall of Yugoslavia in April 1941, the Ustaša regime applied its exterminationist agenda with murderous gusto. After the first wave of genocidal terror, however, it was not able to complete its design against the Serbs – Ustašas’ primary foes – for four key reasons. First, after the initial shock in July 1941, the Serbs rose to arms all over the NDH; Secondly, the Italian Army tried to restrain Ustaša killers in its zone of occupation, and failing that extended it to the western half of the NDH in September 1941, expelling all Ustaša death squads; Thirdly, in late 1942 the Wehrmacht imposed strict controls over the Ustaša militia down to the company level, thus restraining their murderous sorties until the second half of 1944; and Fourthly, the methods used by Ustaša killers were savage: one-on-one sadistic murders, using mostly clubs and knives; but they were unable to produce the number of victims needed for the task.

Methodologically unimpeachable research indicates that the number of Yugoslav citizens killed in 1941-45 was around 1.1 million, out of 17 million. The Ustaša regime murdered some 300,000 Serb civilians. The Jasenovac camp system accounted for around 130,000 victims, two-thirds of them Serbs. The Ustaša wanted to do better, but they were restrained by the four limiting factors listed above.

Some Serb laymen find these figures too low. This creates an opportunity for quasihistorians unburdened by the canon of scientific discovery. Their compilations claim, with no proof, that 700-800,000 were murdered in Jasenovac alone, and over a million in the NDH. Such falsehoods need to be discredited. The truth about the Ustaša terror is awful enough. Inflated numbers should not morph into myths which, in the final instance, always hurt the most those who invent them.

 

KEYWORDS: Ustaša, Ideology, Victims, Genocide, Jasenovac, Croatia, Serbs, Jews, Nazism

 

REFERENCES:

  • Antonić, Slobodan. Ko je napravio Jasenovac – fašisti ili Hrvati? http://sveosrpskoj.com/komentari/antonic-ko-je-napravio-jasenovac-fasisti-ili-hrvati/
  • Burgwyn, H. James. Empire on the Adriatic: Mussolini’s Conquest of Yugoslavia, 1941–1943. New York: Enigma Books, 2005.
  • Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. New York: Basic Books (reprint), 2012.
  • Cvetković, Dragan. „Geostatistička analiza ljudskih gubitaka u koncentracionom logoru Jasenovac“. Istorija 20. veka, 37, 1, (2019), 93–120.
  • Davies, R.W. and S. G. Wheatcroft. The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–33.New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
  • De Waal, Thomas. Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
  • Đuretić, Veselin. Saveznici i jugoslovenska ratna drama: Između nacionalnih i ideoloških izazova, I, II. Beograd: SANU, 1985.
  • Ellman, Michael. “The Role of Leadership Perceptions and of Intent in the Soviet Famine of 1931–1934”. Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 57, no. 6, (2005), 823–841.
  • Glez fon Horstenau, Edmund. Između Hitlera i Pavelića. Beograd: Nolit,
  • Goldstein, Slavko. Holokaust u Zagrebu. Zagreb: Novi Liber-Židovska općina, 2001.
  • Greif, Gideon. Jasenovac – Aušvic Balkana. Beograd: Knjiga komerc, 2018.
  • Karganović, Stefan. Dokazivanje Srebrenice pred Haškim tribunalom. Beograd: Istorijski projekat Srebrenica, 2016.
  • Kočović, Bogoljub. Žrtve Drugog svetskog rata u Jugoslaviji. Harrow: Naše delo, 1985.
  • Korb, Alexander. “The disposal of corpses in an ethnicized civil war: Croatia, 1941–45”. In: Human remains and mass violence: Methodological approaches. Elisabeth Anstett and Jean-Marc Dreyfus (editors), 106–128. Manchester University Press, 2014.
  • Kostić, Lazo M. Hrvatska zverstva u Drugom svetskom ratu: prema izjavama njihovih saveznika. Čikago: Srpska narodna odbrana, 1974.
  • Lajbenšperger, Nenad. „Presenting and Establishing the Number of Yugoslav Casualites of World War II from Liberation until 1951“. Tokovi istorije, br. 3, (2017), 143–164.
  • Lincoln, W. Bruce. Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989.
  • Lowe, Norman. Mastering Twentieth-Century Russian History. London: Palgrave, 2002.
  • Lukacs, John. The Hitler of History. New York: Vintage Books, 1998.
  • Nikodijević, Dušan. Jasenovac između broja i žrtve. Beograd: Muzej žrtava genocida, 2019.
  • Patenaude, Bertrand M. The Big Show in Bololand. The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.
  • Rinke, Stefan and Michael Wildt. Revolutions and Counter-Revolutions: 1917 and Its Aftermath from a Global Perspective. Campus Verlag, 2017.
  • Simonović, Budo. Ognjena Marija Livanjska (5th edition). Cetinje: Svetigora, 2015.
  • Steinberg, Jonathan. “Types of Genocide? Croatians, Serbs and Jews, 1941–45”. In: Final Solution: Origins and Implementation. Editor David Cesarani, 175–193. London: Routledge, 1996.
  • Trifković, Srđa. Ustaše: Balkansko srce tame. Beograd: Catena Mundi, 2016.
  • Trifkovic, Srdja. Ustaša: Croatian Fascism and European Politics, 1929–1945. Chicago: The Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies, 2011.
  • Trifkovic, Srdja. “Balkan Bloodbath Before Wannsee: Croatia 1941”. In: Israeli-Serbian Academic Exchange in Holocaust Research – Collection of Papers from the Conference in Jerusalem-Yad Vashem, 15-20 June 2006. Editor Jovan Mirković, 47–64. Beograd: Muzej žrtava genocida, 2008.
  • Trifkovic, Srdja. “Rivalry between Germany and Italy in Croatia, 1942–1943”. The Historical Journal,36, 4, (1993), 879–904.
  • Trifkovic, Srdja. “The First Yugoslavia and the Origins of Croatian Separatism”. East European Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 3 (1992), 345–370.
  • Virtue, Nicolas Gladstone. “Occupation Duty in The Dysfunctional Coalition: The Italian Second Army and Its Allies in The Balkans, 1941–43”. Journal of Military and Strategic Studies, 14, 1 (2011), 344–373.
  • Yeomans, Rory. Visions of Annihilation: The Ustasha Regime and the Cultural Politics of Fascism 1941–1945. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013.
  • Žrtve rata 1941–1945. Rezultati popisa. Beograd: Savezni zavod za statistiku, 1966 (1992).