In 1946, the National Commission for the Determination of the Crimes of the Occupiers and Their Helpers of the Republic of Croatia Crimes in the Jasenovac camp concluded that 500.000 to 600.000 people lost their lives in the Jasenovac camp. However, in 1947, the same commission made the first name list of NDH camp victims and collected 15.792 names of Jasenovac and 2927 Stara Gradiška victims, but only from the territory of the Republic of Croatia (not BiH!).
The Croatian Land Commission apparently took the figure of 500.000 to 600.000 Jasenovac victims from partisan propaganda, which - after all, that was its function - exaggerated the already serious crimes of the Nazis, fascists and their domestic collaborators, in order to encourage their fighters. to hit the enemy as hard as possible. Those numbers were not invented to inform, but to inflame anger and the will for an uncompromising fight with the enemy. Thus, during the war and after it, large numbers of Jasenovac victims were reported on various occasions, up to 700 victims, and in the following years this figure became established in the public eye. Over time, it became practically official, although no one has ever officially presented it, much less verified it.
DOUBTS AND LISTS
As it was usual in an authoritarian society like the Yugoslavian socialist one, in the later years and decades everything that significantly deviated from that figure was "corrected" or suppressed, and through self-censorship and de facto forbidden. And there were several reasons to suspect that these data did not correspond to the truth.
Namely, immediately after the war, demographers Ivan Lah and Dolfe Vogelnik calculated that the demographic loss of Yugoslavia during the Second World War was 1.700.000 people - therefore, it is not only about those who died in the war (on all sides - both the partisan and on the collaborationist one), but also to those who emigrated after the war, as well as to unborn children. However, for the purposes of the Peace Conference in Paris in 1946, that figure was converted into the number of dead. It was a political decision to give as much importance as possible to the People's Liberation War, that is, to position Yugoslavia with 1,7 million victims in third place in terms of the number of war victims in Europe (behind the USSR and Poland).
It was clear to anyone who had any understanding of history and related professions that the number of dead was significantly lower than the declared 1,7 million. About forty years later, Vladimir Žerjavić and Bogoljub Kočović, independently of each other, will establish that about a million people or slightly more died in Yugoslavia during the Second World War. Consequently, this means that it is not possible that 700.000 people perished in Jasenovac alone (or only Serbs!), because then all the dead partisans, victims of fascism, dead soldiers on the collaborationist side and civilians inclined to them would be only 300.000, and we know that those many more people died.
Additional doubt about the number of 700.000 Jasenovac victims was introduced by the first scrupulously compiled list of Jasenovac victims published in 1964 by the Federal Statistical Office of the SFRY. It lists the names of 59.188 victims, of which 49.602 were in Jasenovac, and 9586 in Stara Gradiška. In that census from 1964, 33.944 Serbs, 9044 Jews, 6546 Croats, 1471 Roma, 949 Muslims, 194 Slovenians, and 105 other persons were mentioned by name. nationality and 6850 "nationally unidentified".
Following that figure from the Federal Institute, it was clear that the sacrosanct number of 700.000 Jasenovic victims could not survive. And that shouldn't have happened, so someone in the nomenclature decided to keep those results secret - the list was printed only for internal use and in only a few copies. The Yugoslav authorities did not have the strength to deal with that problem, just like with other taboo topics mainly from the Second World War, but also from other periods.
EXAGGERATION AND MINIATURE
Since the eighties of the 20th century, with the strengthening of nationalist-chauvinist ideologies and their implementing policies, the politicization and manipulation of the Jasenovac topic has been increasingly present. This topic is traumatic in itself, and any one-sided approach makes it even more traumatic. Discussions began to dominate, and for the most part continue to this day, the agonizing argument about the undetermined number of victims, charged with personal and national resentments, blocked by strong political prejudices, sometimes even morbid. Not taking into account that the number of 700.000 is exaggerated and unrealistic, with those numbers, and even larger ones, they tried to prove that Jasenovac was a huge factory of death for Serbs, Jews and Roma, which, according to its proportions, turns into an indictment against an entire nation, which is accused of genocide. On the other hand, cover-ups and concealments suggested the image of Jasenovac mainly as a labor camp and a legally based institution for the internment of proven opponents of the regime, thus directly rehabilitating the genocidal policy of the Ustasha NDH.
Some Belgrade circles exaggerated the already exaggerated figures; General Velimir Terzić stated in 1983 that "one million Serbs were killed in Jasenovac alone, not counting members of other nations", then Srboljub Živanović claimed that "at least 700.000 victims were buried in the area of Jasenovac and Gradina", Vuk Drašković in 1990 that "Jasenovac 40 times bigger than Mauthausen", and Radomir Bulatović confidently wrote "that in Jasenovac over 1.110.929 people, women and children". And yet, from the end of the eighties until his death in 2009, Milan Bulajić was the key person in that business. Heavily burdened by conspiracy theories, Bulajić claimed that "for more than half a century after World War II, the truth about the most brutal death camp has been hidden and prevented." Bulajić never said that 700.000 people were killed in Jasenovac, but he literally and persistently quoted all those who emphasized that number. He never argued with those statements, but he argued with all those who mentioned lower figures.
Since 1989, efforts have been made in Croatia to minimize the Jasenovac crime. A book The pathlessness of historical reality Franje Tuđmana, published in 1989, aimed, among other things, to dispel the "Jasenovac myth" about the 700.000 victims in that camp, in which she largely succeeded. However, Tuđman falls into the other extreme in places. With a one-sided selection of data, he inappropriately minimizes the number of total victims, especially Serbs, claiming that "several (probably 3-4) tens of thousands of detainees, mostly Gypsies, Jews, Serbs, and Croats, actually perished in the Jasenovac camp."
There were also those in the Croatian public who completely denied the Jasenovac crime. For example, Mirjana Pavelić, the daughter of chief Ante, during the NDH, a complete adolescent with an address in a stolen villa in the elite Tuškanac district of Zagreb, stated that "we did not persecute Jews. We persecuted communists, and as far as I know, communists were interned in Jasenovac. If there were Jews among them, that is a secondary matter". She also stated that "no Jew, Serb or Gypsy during the NDH was killed because he was a Jew, Serb or Gypsy, but only because he was an enemy of the Croatian state". Tuđman and Mirjana Pavelić are just some of the examples of how the number of victims in Jasenovac was reduced in Croatia.
GENOCIDE VICTIMS MUSEUM AND MEMORIAL-AREA JASENOVAC
At the turn of the 80.000s and 90.000s, Vladimir Žerjavić published two fundamental books on the total victims of the Second World War in Yugoslavia: in them he determined that around 48.000 to 52.000 people were killed in Jasenovac, including Stara Gradiška. Furthermore, he estimated that among them there were 13.000 to 12.000 Serbs, 10.000 Jews, XNUMX Croats, and XNUMX Roma. Serbian
statistician Dr. Bogoljub Kočović, who lived in Paris in the late eighties, independently of Žerjavić, conducted statistical and demographic research and came to approximately similar results - that between 150 and 200.000 Serbs lost their lives in the NDH camps, which he stated later Žerjavić to (quite logically) conclude that Kočović would estimate that around 70.000 people died in Jasenovac.
The most ambitious attempt to question the results of these two researchers is the book by Životi Đorđević Losses of the population of Yugoslavia in the Second World War - it was the first criticism of Kočović and Žerjavić on methodologically similar grounds, because all other authors argued with those two more on the basis of emotions than rationally collected and interpreted facts. However, in addition to presenting a typical nationalist narrative, Đorđević also predicted the rate of annual population growth - absolutely too high - and came up with completely different results - he claims that 1.607.000 Serbs were killed during the war (Kočović 487.000, Žerjavić 530.000). that 66.000 Croats were killed (Kočović 207.000, Žerjavić 192.000). However, even Đorđević did not dare to state the final number of Jasenovac victims: "in order to stop bidding and the 'numbers game', which would be inappropriate, and when it was about much less important recalculations, the only way is to arrive at the correct of the number of Jasenovac victims, their name-by-name enumeration came".
In this way, through scientific and professional research, Žerjavić's and Kočović's estimates about the number of Jasenovac victims (albeit almost 30 years old) have not been called into question, but, on the contrary, have been directly or indirectly confirmed more and more by new research efforts.
In the 1964s, the Museum of Genocide Victims and the Federal Statistical Office of Serbia and Montenegro continued to supplement the 1997 census, and in 78.163 they published a list of the victims of the Jasenovac camp, which contains the names of 47.123 people, and the national composition of the identified victims is as follows: 10.521 Serbs, 6.281 Jews, 5836 Croats, 919 Roma, 7483 Muslims and others 2018. By 84.796, the museum had collected the names of 122.300 Jasenovac victims, but in public statements, experts from that institution estimate that between 130.100 and XNUMX people died in Jasenovac.
Since 2005, the Jasenovac Memorial Area has been working on the list of Jasenovac victims, so in a huge book, published in 2007, 72.193 names of victims were collected, and with each of them, the name of the father, year and place of birth, and circumstances of death were listed. In the following years, work on the census continued, so by 2018, 83.811 names and surnames of persons who died in the camp had been collected. Of that number, there are 48.217 Serbs, 16.164 Roma, 13.143 Jews, 4281 Croats, 1143 Muslim-Bosniaks, 271 Slovenians, 119 Czechs, 106 Slovaks, and 367 other and unknown nationalities. To date, these figures have not changed significantly.
CONSENT IN THE PROFESSIONAL PUBLIC
As a researcher of the history of Jasenovac, I claim that these figures are realistic, because they are confirmed by my numerous insights into specific situations in it. For example, the camp existed for 44 months, or about 1340 days. If 700.000 people were really killed, then on average around 520 people would be killed or die every day. And we know, for example, that in Krapje and Bročice, in the first two Jasenovac camps that existed for two and a half months in the fall of 1941, two collective liquidations were organized - first 26 Serbs, then another hundred inmates. On October 18, 1942, on October 800, 1500, in the largest group liquidation of camp inmates who had stayed in Jasenovac III Ciglan, between XNUMX and XNUMX detainees were taken to Gradin and killed there, according to the testimonies of the survivors.
There was also a "peaceful period" ("peaceful year") in Jasenovac from the end of 1942 to the end of 1943 or even April 1944. Then the number of transported detainees decreased - they came in small groups - from ten to a maximum of twenty people, and there were "only" a few mass liquidations, when dozens of detainees were killed. Finally, if the number of corpses per cubic meter in the unexplored and destroyed graves in Gradina and Ustica is equal to that found in the investigated ones, it can be concluded that between 50.000 and 60.000 corpses were buried in the graves there.
These few mentioned, but also many other data strongly suggest that the Belgrade and Jasenovac censuses are approaching some final result, that is, that the mentioned number of 83.811 established Jasenovac victims must increase by 10 to at most 20 percent. It seems that we are finally on the right track to overcome the ugly political and propagandist bids about the number of Jasenovic victims, which for decades prevented that traumatic topic from being approached more objectively and calmly historiographically. The number of victims is generally no longer in dispute even among the international scientific and professional public: the "Simon Wiesenthal" Center claims that 85.000 people perished in Jasenovac, and on the pages of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington it is stated that "it is now estimated that the Ustasha regime between 1941 .and killed between 1945 and 77.000 people in Jasenovac".
The list of victims will never be final because the place of suffering for some victims cannot be determined, and it can be assumed that it was the Jasenovac camp complex, because the registers have been lost in some places, because the pre-war and post-war population censuses did not include the entire population, because foreign nationals who are not registered anywhere were deported to Jasenovac.
Perhaps, in the following years, new research will reveal some more names, but in the circles of scrupulous researchers, it is considered that the list by name is generally completed at the moment when 90 to 95 percent of the presumed victims are on it. Today we have practically reached that stage in research or we will reach it in the next few years. This is how the painful discussion about the number of Jasenovac victims could finally be concluded - of course, if politics allows it.
The author is a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb
