Those are some parts from handout writen by HOLOCOUST MUSEUM
about Nazi Croatia, Jews and Serbs. Since I've seen some are
posting Croat neo-nazi pamphlets on the net, it is time to
check out some other sources.
I tried to maintain the layout (overall text and text boxes),
but, now that I look at it, it may be hard to read without
printing it out first. Sorry.
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* Front Page
GENOCIDE IN YUGOSLAVIA DURING THE HOLOCAUST
United States Holocaust Museum
[by Christopher R. Browning, Pacific Lutheran University
p.s. I think he wrote this since his name is at the end of
the document]
* Page 2
Yugoslavia, the union of the South Slavs. was first formed at
the end oE World War I, when the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Turk
empires that had dominated the Balkan region collapsed in defeat.
Serbia, Macedonia, and Montenegro contained primarily Orthodox
Christian populations that formerly had been within the Turkish
sphere, but also significant Albanian Muslim, Hungarian, and German
minorities. Slovenia and Croatia contained mostly Catholic popula-
tions and had been part of the Austrian empire. However, Croatia was
also home to many Orthodox Serbs whose ancestors had fled Turkish
domination and resettled inside the Austrian frontier. Bosnia-
Hercegovina had a mixture of Croatian Catholic, Orthodox Serbs, and
[Photo with caption: SS Chief Heinrich Himmler reviews the
Muslim "Croat SS Volunteer Division."]
Muslim populations. For centuries, this region had been under
Turkish rule, but after 1878 fell under Austrian control. The Bosnian
Muslims were not Turks, however, but rather indigenous Slavs who
had converted to Islam during the period of Turkish domination.
--- Page 2 ----
In the inter-war period the newly-formed multi-etllnic state of
Yugoslavia experienced much internal conflict between the nationalities.
Tensions ran high in particular between the Serbian desire for greater
centralization and Croatian aspirations for greater autonomy. Within a
decade of the founding of the state, parliamentary government broke down,
and the Serbian monarch set up a royal dictatorship.
Nazi Germany invaded and conquered Yugoslavia in April 1941.
Partition followed. Macedonia was given to Bulgaria: the Backa region to
Hungary: Montenegro, southern Slovenia, and the coastal region of
Croatia went to Italy. Northern Slovenia was anllexed to the Third Reich, and
Serbia was kept under German military administration. Because the pre-war,
mainstream political leadership in Croatia declined Hitler's terms of
collaboration, the bulk of Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina were formed into
a German satellite state. Officials of this puppet government belonged to
the violent,
The Holocaust in Serbia
On May 29, 1942, the German embassy in Belgrade reported to
Berlin, "The Jewish Question in Serbia is no longer acute."
Serbia was, in fact, the first region of the Nazi Empire outside the
Soviet territory to be declared "free of Jews."
The precipitous destruction of the Serbian Jews began in the
summer of 1941, when the German army routinely executed "Jews and
communists" in response to Partisan attacks. The "retailation" policy
was systematized by the German High Command with an order in mid-
September 1941, to shoot 50-100 communists for every German soldier
killed by the resistance. The local commander, Austrian General Franz
Bohme, not only chose the highest ratio, 100-1, but on his own
initiative expanded the retailation pool to include male Jews and Roma
(Gypsies). As sufficient numbers of communists to fill the retailation
quotas were difficult ot capture, interned Jews and Roma were a much
easier target. By November 1941, German army firing squads had
murdered almost the entire adult male Jewish and Romani population of
Serbia.
In December 1941, Jewish women, children and elderly were
interned in a camp at Semlin, across the Sava river from Belgrade. In
March 1942, after a winter of terrible hardship for prisoners of
Semlin, a gas van arived from Berlin. Every morning, except Sundays
and holidays, and two or three afternoons each week, the gas van
picked up victims at the Semlin camp, drove across the one undemaged
bridge span over the Sava River and through downtown Belgrade to the
burial site at Avala. The Jews were, of course, dead upon arrival. By
late May, Semlin was empty of Jews, and Serbia was declared judenfrei.
--- Page 3 ---
pro-Nazi movement of Croatian ultra-nationalists known as the Ustasha. The
German partition and occupation soon led to resistance civil war, ethnic
cleansing, and ultimately genocide.
[Photo with caption: Jews deported by Bulgarian authorities from
occupied Macedonia to Treblinka.]
Ethnic cleansing and genocide intensified the horrors of Nazi occupation
and civil war. Within Serbia, the German army shot all male Jews, and Roma
(Gypsies) in the fall of 1941, and murdered the Jewish women and children in
gas vans sent from Berlin in the spring of 1942. Bulgaria rounded up more
than 7,000 Macedonian Jews and turned them over to Germans, who deported them
to the death camp at Treblinka in March 1943. In Croatia and Bosnia-
Hercegovina, the Ustasha regime murdered most of the Jews and Roma locally,
especially in the notorious concentration camp at Jasenovac. Some Jews
managed to flee to the protection of the Italian zone along the coast or
joined the Partisans. Over 7,000 Croatian Jews
Jasenovac
Like its Nazi mentor, the Ustasha regime established a number
of concentration camps as a fundamental element of the terror system of
the police state. Most notorious of these Ustasha camps was Jasenovac,
some 60 miles southeast of Zagreb. Like Auschwitz, Jasenovac was also
the center of a complex of camps in the region. Though never equipped
with gas chambers for assembly-line mass killing like the Nazi
extermination camps in occupied Poland, Jasenovac was the site of the
greatest mass murders of the Ustasha regime and a primitive
extermination camp in practice.
Founded in August 1941, and destroyed on the eve of liberation
by the Partisans in April 1945, Jasenovac has retained tremendous
symbolic value for Serb-Croat relations in the post-war period. Some
Serbs have claimed that as many as 700,000 people perished there. Some
Croats, including Croatian President Tudjman, have belittled that
number and grudgingly conceded that perhaps Jasenovac claimed 40,000
victims. A recent, scholarly estimate attributes more than 200,000
deaths to the Ustasha concentration camp system as a whole with 70,000
killed at Jasenovac.
--- Page 4 ---
who had not been immediately killed by the Ustasha death squads, or unable to
reach the safety ol Italian or Partisan refuge, were turned over to the
Germans and deported to Auschwitz. The Ustasha regime paid the Germans 30
Reichmarks per deported Jew to cover tne cost of their transportation.
Altogether, some 60,000 Jews and 27,000 Roma perished in Yugoslavia during
the Second World War.
But the murder of Jews and Roma was only one aspect of ethnic cleansing
and genocide in war-torn Yugoslavia. Germans expelled many Slovenes, as they
tried to "germanize" the territory of northern Slovenia annexed to the
Third Reich. Many other Yugoslavs perished as prisoners in Germarl concentra-
tion camps such as those at Sajmiste and Banjica. Italy interned under terrible
conditions many Slovenes as well.
But most lethal was the Ustasha attack on the Serbian populations in
Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina. The Ustasha wanted a "Greater Croatia" that
was also "pure" of "foreign elements". Thus in addition to murdering Jews and
Roma the Ustasha regime aimed to eliminate the numerous Serbian communities
within its borders -- nearly two million people constituting 30% of the total
population - through a combination of ethnic cleansing, forced conversion and
mass murder.
Some 300 - 400,000 Serbs were murdered outright: hundreds of thousands
were driven or fled over the border into German-occupied Serbia. German-led
anti-Partisan sweeps through regions of Serbian settlement within the bound-
--- Page 5 ---
aries of the Ustasha state -- such as the systematic depopulation of the Kozara
region and subsequent murder of the deported males in Jasenovac -- added to the
catastrophe. In the end over one million Yugoslavs lost their lives in World
War II from all causes more than half of them as victims of genocide.
Christopher R. Browning
Pacific Lutheran University
......
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, S.W.
Washington D.C. 20024-2150
a ovdje ima par lijepih sličica i nešto texta pa ako ti se da čitati dragi axe, posebno obrati pozornost na lijepe sličice ustaša kako se igraju s ljudima drugih narodnosti i vjeroispovjesti
piše da bi trebalo biti još slika u kopiranom tekstu ali se ne mogu izguglati s toga šta ima slika ima šta nema nema jebga
Muško
Žensko
