Croatia: Transition from Communism Must Accommodate Prosecution of Communist Crimes

“If some groups of victims are considered less worthy, it means that the racist ideology still lives on,” said Rosetta Katz, a Holocaust survivor in Parliament of Germany on Friday 27 January 2023, International Holocaust Victims Remembrance Day, which marked the first time, after many years of lobbying, German parliament has focused in annual Holocaust memorial commemorations on people persecuted and killed for their LGBTQ or gender identity by the National Socialism regime.

It’s a pity that such great words are not understood or accepted to apply globally to victims of communism as well.  In view of the terrifying list of crimes committed in the name of promoting geopolitical supremacy by all warring sides during World War II and after it, every condemnation of crimes committed in the name of the theory of class struggle and the principle of the dictatorship of the proletariat seems justified. It would appear to be equally justified to put the perpetrators of communist crimes on trial before the international community, as it was the case with the terrible crimes of National Socialism, i.e., Holocaust.

But once one says that and means it, respecting all victims of crimes, the wretched and derogatory label of Historical Revisionism is slapped onto one to intimidate and bully those engaging in research efforts to bring out the facts of history and equal respect all victims of all totalitarian regimes. One class of victims, hence, in the eyes of the world, becomes worthier than the other. For lasting peace and prosperity in the world the crimes in the name of communism should be assessed as crimes against humanity in the same way Nazi crimes were assessed by the Nuremberg Tribunal. Legal provisions should be introduced that would enable courts of law to judge and sentence perpetrators of Communist crimes and to compensate victims of Communism. But victims of communism largely remain anonymous, faceless, without personal photographs, just piles of skulls and rotting bones in pits, mass graves or piled up into walls of remembrance.

History is undeniably part of an individual and collective awareness and creates identity. It serves to affirm one’s own norms and values, to legitimise rule and claims to leadership, and to develop perspectives for the future. But when that history such as Croatia’s World War II one has been written and kept on life support by the communists with evident help of political aims among the Allies who won the War and when that history has been proven over and over again that it contains significant fabrications in order to justify the communist Yugoslavia enormous crimes against its political opponents then it is our obligation to pursue research and revision of that unjust written history.

“Croatia has to face the culture of remembering that is different from what we would like. We are Europeans now. We have integrated firmly into Europe, which is wonderful news, but mentally we have not entered it. You with the Ustashiade simply cannot go further than Brezice (a small town in Slovenia near the Croatian border). That doesn’t work in Europe. Liberal Europe does not accept Croatia like this,” concluded historian and former communist Yugoslavia fan Ivo Goldstein concluded in his address for the Croatian media the day leading up to the Holocaust Victims Remembrance Day 2023.

Evidently, whether of Jewish heritage, like Goldstein, or not, former communists and those who follow in their mental footsteps today in Croatia fail miserably to acknowledge and accept with open arms the liberal Europe they boast of belonging to. It’s a double standard nobody should tolerate. The Liberal Europe Goldstein refers to had ever since 2009 condemned by parliamentary declaration both the Communist and the Fascist regimes (to which the WWII Ustashe regime is arguably erroneously allocated) because of the totalitarian cloth they wrapped themselves in. For comparison’s sake the communist Yugoslavia murdered or exterminated many more innocent people than what the Ustashe regime did. But, it seems, to people like Goldstein, the term Holocaust holds much more weight for human condemnation and repugnance than what communist crimes do. This is, of course, a catastrophe for humanity as it classifies victims not by their suffering but by their ethnicity, religion, or political leanings. And so, in the case of WWII and post-WWII Croatia, victims of communist purges and exterminations appear insignificant to people like Goldstein, but victims of the Holocaust are significant.

The crux of the matter is that the Ustashe regime fought for independence of Croatia from any Yugoslav conglomerate and the communists fought for a third Yugoslavia (the first two being kingdoms of Yugoslavia ruled by the Serbian oppressive and dictatorial Monarchy). And Yugoslav communists or their indoctrinated descendants evidently loathe the fact that Croats fought for self-determination and independence during WWII. Hence, a clear reason why they keep spinning the lie that they freed or liberated Croatia in 1945! Liberated from whom? Its own people who wanted independence and fought for that in the most difficult of circumstances in the history of the 20th century? In fact, they forced the Croatian people who wanted independence back to a Yugoslavia that took revenge against the Croatian patriots and murdered so many that Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito has been placed on the list of “Top” 15 mass murderers of political opponents of the 20th Century.

Furthermore, it is evident that the more the facts of WWII Croatian history are uncovered and the more these facts show that the history of WWII Croatia written by the communists of Yugoslavia and their allies (including in relation to the numbers of Jews and others perished under the blanket of the Holocaust) who won the War was alarmingly falsified and fabricated, obviously for political dominance reasons and for social engineering communist Yugoslavia practiced, the more we experience people like Goldstein regurgitating the worn-out and intentionally intimidating term of the so-called historical revisionism. Historical revisionism should have positive connotations because it seeks to either prove as correct the historical records published so far or to disprove them as blatant politically motivated lies. Perhaps Goldstein and those like him in these matters harbour a sense of dread and fear that “their” history books will end up in trash bins or in bon fires across the world!?

There must be a politically “strong” reason why Ivo Goldstein, when he was the Ambassador of Croatia to France 2012-2017, kept a portrait of former communist Yugoslavia President Josip Broz Tito on his Embassy office walls.

Did this practice mean that Goldstein did not and does not accept the independence of Croatia from communist Yugoslavia for which terrible price in Croatian blood was paid amidst Yugoslav Army and Serb aggression in early 1990’s? While there were complaints to the Croatian government about this photo of Tito on Croatia’s Embassy walls from Croats living in France the best the communist bent government of Croatia could reply was that there was no law in Croatia forbidding the hanging of pictures on the wall! The eradication of succinct lines of communist mindset and practice in official Croatia has a long way to go yet.

The opening of State Archives after Croatia seceded from communist Yugoslavia in 1991 is indeed bearing fruits that have the potential of exonerating to a great extent the WWII Independent State of Croatia of many crimes and victim numbers that have been peddled to the world against it for over seventy years!  The more the credible research into facts and archival documents of WWII Croatia reveals a completely different truth, the actual truth, to the one peddled for decades, Goldstein and those like him seem to waffle on increasingly about anti-Semitism in Croatia, as well as accusations of relativising Ustasha crimes through historical revisionism, i.e., through archival research! These kinds of public outbursts are akin to attempts to intimidate and suppress the factual truth from coming out.

Leading contemporary historians and researches into WWII Croatia, including factual victim numbers and rescue of the Jews, have been several and it is worthwhile mentioning some in this article whose work has attracted much public interest even if the Croatian government  remains largely and unfairly uninterested in such facts of history that have been denied for decades : Esther Gitman, Roman Leljak, Blanka Matkovic, Stipo Pilic, and Igor Vukic,  

“Ustasheism and historical revisionism have been coming at us from all sides for the past eight years,” Goldstein said in his public statement last week, failing miserably to reveal the indisputable outcomes of historical research that has been conducted in the past decade that more and more place his historical writings under severely unsafe historical records which cannot be trusted by those pursuing justice for all victims of state war and post-war crimes. It would appear apparent that he has personal interests in speaking against research or revision of written history and Ustashe regime of WWII Croatia. He has announced a new book he is writing on Historical Revisionism, and one must wonder how much of historical and general tripe, concoctions of biased personal views and biased content that book will have? If one is to judge from his past pro-communist agenda authoring works then Croatians, in readiness, need to keep their fingers pressed against the toilet flush button.  No historian on Croatia, on the need to revise historical records through factual research, who fails to condemn the communist regime after 94% of voters condemned it in 1991 Croatian referendum, who fails the victims of communist crimes while tagging the victims of Ustashe crimes with precious worth, is worth the embrace by the public as a truth-bearer or authority on history. Such a book Goldstein is announcing seems nothing more to me, and I believe to multitudes, than an opportunistic gimmick to “earn a buck” and a promotion as worthwhile and “to them glorious” the murderous communist regime of Yugoslavia, which European Union has included in its condemnations many years ago as criminal.

The constant distortion of history by keeping the fabricated historical facts alive, by devaluing historical research through labelling it as historical revisionism with relativisation does nothing for the fact that the radical left (especially communists and former communists still holding a candle for communism) just like the radical right also must come to terms with its own history in Croatia and elsewhere. Without such confrontation no lasting peace or absolute respect of human rights can be achieved.

What to remember and how to remember is, in Croatia as in many countries, a very topical and urgent question that keeps both historians and politicians occupied. It does not only concern schoolbooks and history teaching, but also the use of public space to represent history whether in the form of monuments, museums, mainstream media or otherwise. Often decisions of this kind lead to fierce political debates and they are certainly not limited to aesthetic values of monuments of past regimes, even the criminal ones. And the truth or revealing it without condemnation suffers. The politics of the past keeps haunting Croatia and without the removal of World War II touted communist contribution for an independent Croatia from the historical narrative preamble to the Constitution the hundreds of thousands of victims of communist crimes have no chance for deserved and due justice.  Ina Vukic

Croatia: The Real Jasenovac

The need to resist falsifications of history in historical science of former Yugoslavia should and must be recognised by the Croatian government as a national problem and priority. The Croatian governments since year 2000 have failed consistently and, evidently purposefully, to recognise publicly and in their national strategy the need for corrective measures that would address historical misinformation and falsified Croatian history from World War Two. This need for corrective measures arose and persists given that falsifications have cruelly blackened the reputation of Croatian people worldwide and people and communities suffer because of that. It is a widely accepted fact that misinformation occurs when people hold incorrect factual beliefs and do so confidently. The problem, first conceptualised by the American political scientist James H. Kuklinski and colleagues in 2000, plagues political systems and is exceedingly difficult to correct. Over time, scholars have elaborated on the psychological origins of political misinformation and although there is an extensive body of research on how to correct misinformation, this literature is less coherent in its recommendations but, overall, scholarly research on political misinformation illustrates the many challenges inherent in representative democracy. And Croatia is no exception – relatively too many members of parliament are either former communists of Yugoslavia or their children who all, one may safely assume, either participated in falsification of Croatian WWII history or supported the falsifications.

It is regrettable that the Croatian government has not supported, nor does it support those whose research has taken them and takes them to uncovering the historical truth and correcting the misinformation sowed by Yugoslav communists and their supporters for decades throughout the world, often making the life of Croatian expats living in the diaspora a nightmare fuelled by lies, defamation and degradation spilling down from the communist agenda that relied on misinformation for its survival.  Whether, therefore, Croatian powers that be hold that lying is a virtue, just as communists did, is a question that may not be difficult to answer even though the answer shocks every decent and truth-loving human being. The fact that no Croatian government since year 2000 has in any shape or form supported the research undertaken to uncover the terribly defiled truth of WWII Jasenovac camp, such as the most credible research including the ones carried out and completed by Stipo Pilic and Blanka Matkovic or Igor Vukic … speaks volumes of how very profoundly the Croatian governments have been and are saturated with communist ideology, mental set and cover-up of communist crimes including those perpetrated at Jasenovac camp post WWII by communist Yugoslavia. Perhaps a future government, different from the Croatian Democratic Union/HDZ or Social Democratic Party/SDP ones Croatia has had so far will have the courage to assist the passage of historical truth to the surface. 

When people firmly hold beliefs that happen to be wrong, as is the case due to falsified history of WWII Croatia making it about victims of the Ustashi regime, grotesquely inflating the numbers of people that perished, instead of making it about the fight for freedom from oppressive and dictatorial, harsh Serb-led Kingdom of Yugoslavia,  efforts to correct the misinformation will be and is met with resistance and this resistance is frequently labelled as “revisionism” in the negative sense even though revisionism is a positive concept as it seeks to correct the wrongs. The truth will out though, eventually, thanks to dedicated historians some of whom I have mentioned above. The myth and lies about Jasenovac will fall one day under the overwhelming weight of truth.

The latest addition to the above-mentioned research and pursuits of truth about WWII Jasenovac is a new book titled “The real Jasenovac” (Stvarni Jasenovac), written by Tomislav Vukovic, with the subtitle “documents and discussions”. The book brings more than 150 documents, photos, and facsimiles, many of them for the first time in public! The book was published by the Society for the Research of the Triple Jasenovac Camp, and it strongly adds to the increasing body of scientific and truth research works on the World War Two (WWII) concentration camp in Jasenovac, Croatia, aiming to correct the misinformation about the camp (and WWII Croatia) served to the world by Yugoslav communists and their friends.

From the back cover of the book we find that “the documents, photographs and reprints presented in this book show the real Jasenovac as opposed to the ideologised and exaggerated depiction of the camp as it prevailed in the period of communist socialist Yugoslavia. Such a distorted view has survived in some circles to this day in the independent Republic of Croatia. The author of the book is Tomislav Vukovic, a long-time journalist and the editor of the Zagreb Voice of the Council and a contributor to a number of other Croatian public media did what every historian dealing with this topic should do: he went to the Croatian State Archives and looked for documents about Jasenovac that were discussed in public. He found them, read them and photographed. On this basis, a newspaper feature in Glas Koncila was created, which was also the basis for this book. In addition to the documents, there are also a number of reviews and polemics with the advocates of the falsified and mythologised depiction of the camp in Jasenovac. The book is therefore a valuable contribution to the discussion of history the camp and the effort to present it in a realistic form…”

The book ‘Real Jasenovac’, authored by Tomislav Vukovic, is a continuation of Igor Vukic’s contribution to the elucidation of the ‘Jasenovac myth’. What particularly impresses is that the book was printed with financial assistance not from the Government or government agency but from the Canadian-based Croatian expat benefactor Dr. Ivan Hrvoic.

The book is full of valuable documents, photographs and sources of literature that can be checked and independently verified. The author of the book is well acquainted with the subject he is writing about, so the book is worth reading.

“WWII Independent State of Croatia/NDH and Jasenovac mythology”, which the world has been faced with for decades since WWII, are based on the fictional and malicious stories of how Croatia’s Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac personally slaughtered Serbian children in Jasenovac. Or that every fourth victim of ‘Jasenovac’ was a child, or that the Ustashas competed with each other who would kill more internees during the day, and many other ‘hunting stories’ designed and concocted to hide communist crimes.

Reading Vukovic’s book (based on documents) one learns that the Ustashas were not as the ‘anti-fascist’ (communist) literature describes them, and that the camps in ‘Jasenovac’ were treated better than in camps on other continents. Packages regularly arrived at the camp, work was done, crafts were studied, cultural events and sports competitions were held, etc.

Certainly, life in the camp was not a personal choice, and everyone who survived the camp or lost someone in it is rightfully outraged. But due to historical untruths, outright lies and fabrications, it is essential to rise above the personal level and look at the picture in a wider context.

In line of this Dr Ivica Tijardovic, Croatian scientist and publicist, put forth into the public domain recently that there are several questions that need to be answered when writing about or discussing the WWII Jasenovac camp.

First question: How many lives did “Jasenovac” save? In other words, those survivors would not have been so lucky in any other place.

Second question: How many criminals and how many political prisoners were imprisoned in the camp? It is known that many lawbreakers were taken to ‘Jasenovac’ to serve out their prison sentences.

Third question: How many inmates were released after serving their sentence or after being pardoned? The figures in this context from Vukovic’s book are astonishing.

Fourth question: How many inmates went to work in Germany or in real concentration camps somewhere in the north of Europe? It is also an interesting question worth investigating.

Fifth question: How many camp inmates were killed by the Ustasha, and how many by the partisans, i.e., ‘anti-fascists’ (Yugoslav communists)? Given that the Jasenovac camp, as we know it, remained operational after the arrival of the partisans in 1945; more research on this topic is more than welcome. Namely, in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, there were about eighty concentration camps with about 200 thousand internees a few years after the end of the Second World War.

Sixth question: Why was Croatian WWII history falsified, and there is still an unsuccessful attempt to hide the truth with which a growing number of people from Croatia and the world are becoming more and more familiar?

The only unequivocal answer to that question is the following. Given that the crimes against Croats after the end of the Second World War were so monstrous, with the ‘myth of Jasenovac’, thanks to the communist dictatorship, terrible atrocity in the long history of Croats was successfully hidden. The truth will out with all thanks to the several historians who pursue research, often at personal peril and cost, with view to present the truth of WWII Croatia history to the world and the financial and moral support they receive from the Croatian diaspora. Ina Vukic

Croatian Academy HAZUDD To Jerusalem Post

Dear Sir/Madam,

Your editorial from August 22 and the reactions of Dejan Ristic and Ivo Goldstein and Efraim Zuroff to the article by David Goldman, which you in the meantime withdrew from your website but left the above articles, prompted us to this reaction, hoping for at least some balance, which in fact represents the reality on the world stage of opinions and historical facts discovered to date, on this topic in your newspaper.

There is no need to fear that the Holocaust, as a unique form of collective persecution of the Jewish people, will fall into oblivion, as long as children are taught about it in school history classes. Anyone with a modest knowledge of foreign languages ​​and history today can access information about the results of the census in Central and Eastern Europe and be convinced that during Nazi rule, Jews disappeared in large numbers as well as their religious and cultural objects (synagogues, schools, etc.). If not killed or destroyed, any reasonable person would wonder where millions of people and their places of worship could have gone?

This applies both to both the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), which existed in 1941-45 and included the territory of today’s Croatia (for the most part) and Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as Serbia. The fact that many more Jews survived the Holocaust in Croatia, in both number and percentage of the Jewish population, than in Serbia, is the result of continuous, extensive rescue operations by the domicile Croatian population and the Catholic Church led by Archbishop Stepinac of Zagreb. While for Archbishop Stepinac, saving Jews was a daily task of caring, the heads of the Serbian Orthodox Church praised Hitler and openly sided with the Nazis against the Jews. If it wasn’t for the works of Esther Gitman, a Fulbright Scholar, (sources: “When Courage Prevailed – rescue and survival of Jews in the Independent State of Croatia 1941-1945” 2011 and “Alojzije Stepinac: Pillar of Human Rights” 2019), which are hardly mentioned in the press, the significant actions of rescuing Jews in the NDH would remain almost completely silenced. The efforts of many Jews to achieve the proclamation of Archbishop Stepinac as Righteous Among the Nations have so far been futile, thus creating a large stain on the reputation of the state of Israel among Croats. There were not many individuals in the enslaved Europe who, like Archbishop Stepinac, dared during the war of 1942 to declare publicly that there was only one race: the race of God (Esther Gitman research).

Despite the facts, the Serbian side on one hand expands the term Holocaust without foundation and thus dilutes it to the suffering of Serbs (Croats), and on the other hand narrows it to the Jasenovac camp, which is thus given mystical properties. An uninformed reader of the Serbian press could conclude that World War II took place mainly in the Jasenovac camp, where Croats killed 800,000 to a million Serbs, and that the Holocaust was a minor side event.

For many years, the number of 5 million non-Jewish Holocaust victims has been bandied around worldwide, and Israeli Gideon Greif, in his work entitled “Jasenovac, Auschwitz of the Balkans”, published by Knjiga komerc Serbia in 2018, claims by pure speculation of other speculators of history, and without exact evidence, that one million, if not more, Serbs lost their lives as victims of the Holocaust in Croatia! So, in such dark alleys along which Greif evidently also moves, a fifth of all non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust in Europe were Serbs! This is the number of victims without scientific basis, and the well-known Nazi and their collaborators hunter, the late Simon Wiesenthal, once said that this number of non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust was “intended to increase sympathy for Jewish suffering but is now more used to obscure it.” Sure, there were many non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust, but inventing the magnitude of that number, as has been done for decades for Serb victims, evidently seeks to diminish or dilute the severity of the tragedy experienced by the Jewish people in the Holocaust.

The bigger tragedy in this prevailing modern world ping pong game about which Holocaust victim was a bigger victim, Jew or non-Jew, lies in the fact that Serbs, with the help of people like Efraim Zuroff and Gideon Greif, seem to have managed to cleanse Serbian hands as the culprits for the extermination of 94% of Serbian Jews in World War II and by August 1942 achieving the status of one of the first countries in Europe to be “Judenfrei” (Jew-free). It is clear to all but Serbs and their political friends that the Serbs and their government of Milan Nedic, not the German Nazis, attached the “Star of David” to Jewish chests and painted it on the facades of Jewish homes, thus marking Jews for extermination.

It is precisely for the removal of this systematic, long-standing blurring of facts, mentioned by David Goldman, that a thorough, multidisciplinary investigation of the events in the Jasenovac camp is necessary as this in itself is indicated by very diverse findings:

1. According to Ivo Goldstein and others, the Jasenovac camp did not cease operating on April 22, 1945, but served as a camp for internment of opponents of Tito’s Yugoslav communist regime to at least May 1951.The Bjelovar Divisional military court findings on 8/28/1946 regarding detainee escape from the camp on 28.08.1946 (source: Croatian State Archives), as well as a 1951 CIA report, serve as evidence of that fact. It is not known that, to date, anyone has systematically deal with research of the victims of the Jasenovac camp after April 22, 1945. Perhaps there were Jews among them also?

2. Analysis of the official list of victims of the Jasenovac camp, managed by the state institution JUSP Jasenovac, using Data Science methods, showed that the list is for the most part (89% of entries) unreliable. The current census, for example, lists victims born in 1969 and 1975, respectively.

3. Contrary to the testimonies of the alleged mass executions in the Jasenovac camp in the period 1941-45, there are also testimonies of men who were boys of that time, who attended trade classes in the camp, that there were no such events.

4. When Bosnian Serbs had to leave the conquered territories around Sarajevo in 1996 as a result of the Dayton Accords, they exhumed the remains of their loved ones in front of TV cameras and took them to their new places of residence. With these acts they strongly showed their stand that remains of their loved ones should not remain in enemy territory. It is interesting that no such request for exhumation of post mortal remains was requested for the Jasenovac camp, which is located on the territory of Croatia.

5. Prompted by the above facts, forensic experts (e.g. letter from prof. dr. sc. Simun Krizanac published in “Hrvatski tjednik” weekly magazine on 12.07.2018 ) already contacted authorities and requested the search and exhumation of the human remains in Jasenovac, believing that firm conclusions about such a camp must be based on forensic medicine research methods.

6. The general progress of science has led to the fact that reconstruction and identification can be carried out for centuries-old human remains.

7. World War II archives are gradually opening up and, hence, opening up space for new insights and new interpretations.

It is clear from the abovesaid that the actual Holocaust on the territory of the then Independent State of Croatia, for which the NDH authorities are co-responsible, is clouded and confused by Serbia’s attempts to portray the course of World War II in Croatia primarily as genocide against the Serbian people. They are wholeheartedly helped by the descendants of the Yugoslav communist rulers (the so-called Red Nobility), who still rule Croatia today, who in this way want to cover up the crimes of their ancestors perpetrated immediately after World War II and during the 45-year reign of fear over Croats until 1990. If it is shown that Croats committed collective genocide during World War II, then by that same logic it would be correct for the Yugoslav Communists to commit comprehensive and protracted revenge and re-education, right?

Let’s finish with Croatia. In the very centre of Zagreb, in Praška Street, there is a parking lot on the site where the synagogue demolished in 1941-42was. This is the simplest proof that the Holocaust took place in Croatia as well. Tito’s Yugoslav communist government, hostile to Jews and Israel, not only did not rebuild it, but demolished the remaining synagogues and many Jewish cemeteries, and built a department store on the site of the Zagreb synagogue, which burned to the ground in a mysterious fire in 1980.

From President Tudjman onwards, the Croatian authorities proposed to the two Jewish communities the reconstruction of the synagogue, which has not happened so far, because the Jewish communities could not agree on the basic parameters. Ivo Goldstein, who never declared himself publicly as a Jew or a believer during Yugoslavia, also plays a not insignificant role in that community. At that time, neither his late father Slavko nor he condemned the demolition of synagogues, for example in Rijeka in 1948, or the anti-Semitic attitude of Tito’s regime, and such dishonourable conduct is not mentioned even today. In addition, the so-called scientist opposes both questioning and further research on the topic of the Jasenovac camp, thus violating the foundations of scientific methodology, to which, as a university professor, he should be deeply loyal.

In Croatia, and especially in Zagreb, there are many valuable real estates, which were taken from the Jews during the Second World War and were never returned to them. They are now inhabited by members of the “red nobility”, who, like Ivo Goldstein and Ognjen Kraus, invent fascism in Croatia, and have never advocated for the correction of injustice against Jews by returning stolen Jewish property.

From all of the above said it follows that the state of Israel, the Jewish people and their reputable media such as the Jerusalem Post, should devote themselves to a detailed investigation of all potential execution sites of Jews during the Holocaust. But if researching the execution sites of Jews during the Holocaust is an area that newspapers like the Jerusalem Post cannot deal with, because such an activity is not on their list of activities for which they are legally licensed, then those same newspapers should contribute to the research of truth and facts by also publishing written articles in relation to all research on the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust in Croatia (eg Esther Gitman) and on Jasenovac after the Second World War (eg Blanka Matković, Stipo Pilić, Igor Vukić, etc.). It is unworthy of the oldest nation in history to be represented in any part of the world by individuals like Ivo Goldstein, ready at any moment for an anti-scientific invention like the notorious bone crusher. This achieves the exact opposite effect, which Goldman rightly observes. Namely, the suspicion that Israel and Serbia have a joint propaganda venture of exaggerating the victims of World War II is completely unnecessarily fuelled. While Serbia abuses victims tenfold (and more) as a justification for hegemonic action in its neighbourhood, it is unclear why the state of Israel clearly does not distance itself from such dishonourable actions.

And even if Ivo Goldstein is completely right with his claim about the bone crusher, which the Ustashas would use just before the end of the war to remove the remains of their victims, (and it cannot be, because neither he nor anyone else mentions it in his and other authors’ numerous books!), then it would be a huge challenge for scientists in the field of forensics and forensic medicine to use the territory of Jasenovac as a testbed for methods of identifying post mortal remains originating in particularly difficult conditions. Judging by his publications and public appearances, Ivo Goldstein has never met a forensic expert or does not know that such a profession exists at all.

A scientist who, in today’s age of reliable analytical and diagnostic methods, claims that everything has been researched and should no longer be researched, recalls into memory the embarrassment of Thomas Watson, the former head of IBM, and thus disqualifies himself in scientific and professional circles.

The diametrically different attitudes towards the smouldering Israeli-Arab conflict, which escalates every now and then, in the successor states of the former Yugoslavia clearly shows which nations, states and political currents are turned to Jews with fraternal respect and understanding, and which with intolerance prone to totalitarian movements and parties. It would be nice if the Jerusalem Post devoted more space to such differences and reflections, instead of history innovator Ivo Goldstein or Dejan Ristic and their collaborator Efraim Zuroff, who present themselves as Holocaust investigators while denying the genocide in Srebrenica, which the Serbian army perpetrated 26 years ago literally in front of TV cameras.

With regards

Dr. sc. Josip Stjepandic, President, Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in the Diaspora and Homeland / HAZUDD

 Mr. sc. Ina Vukic, Vice President, HAZUDD

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