Ivo Goldstein – Croatia, the War, and the Future

Croatian Academy HAZUDD To Jerusalem Post

September 5, 2021 by inavukic 6 Comments

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

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Blanka Matkovic, Communist Yugoslavia, Croatia, David Goldman, Dejan Ristic, Efraim Zuroff, Esther Gotman, Gideon Greif, Igor Vukic, Independent State of Croatia, Ivo Goldstein, Jasenovac, Jerusalem Post, NDH, non-Jewish victims of Holocaust, Post World War Two Jasenovac, Stipo Pilic, World War Two Serbia

Croatia: Seems The Jerusalem Post Prefers Ivo Goldstein’s Lies To Truth!

August 29, 2021 by inavukic 2 Comments

And so, of course I wrote to the Jerusalem Post Editor on 25 August 2021 alerting them to Ivo Goldstein’s lies presented to the public through the Jerusalem Post but, as could well be expected, the Jerusalem was not interested in correcting the lies to their readers, they appear more interested in expanding on them, or maintaining them.

Jerusalem Post preferred to publish an opinion piece written by the frequently obnoxious Efraim Zuroff, where he attacks WWII Croatia and, as per usual always tries to make WWII Serbia grand and fair even though it was one of the first countries in Europe that declared itself Jundnfrei/ Jew Free, by May to August 1942 when Serbs brought to slaughter and extermination 94% of its Jews. Zuroff and the likes will keep telling you that it was not the Serbs who exterminated these Jews, that it was the German occupiers, and yet the absolute fact is that the German occupying forces did not know who was Jewish, and who was not! It was the Serbian Milan Nedic Government who knew who the Jews were!

And Zuroff will tell you that he “was very well acquainted with the horrors of the camp (Jasenovac), since I had been very actively involved more than two decades ago, in facilitating the extradition from Argentina and prosecution in Zagreb of Dinko Šakic, one of its commanders…”, but Efraim Zuroff will not tell you that in his said work hunting WWII Nazis and their alleged collaborators he followed religiously, at least victim number of stories and manner of deaths, the fabricated stories concocted by the communists and Serbs. And Zuroff will call anyone a revisionist if their researched truth points to the lies and distortions of WWII reality peddled to the world since 1945 by Yugoslav and Serb communists but also by those like he himself. He will shower Ivo Goldstein with praises and yet the lies Ivo Goldstein has come out with are absolutely depraved and not fit for human consumption as far as I am concerned.

And so, on 25 August 2021 I sent this letter to the Editor of the Jerusalem Post believing they would want to correct the lie Ivo Goldstein had written and they published:

“…Then, I also refer to the Editorial ‘Don’t hijack the Holocaust’, published 22 August 2021 in which the public is told: ‘Last week The Jerusalem Post published in these pages an opinion piece which unfortunately failed to go through a sufficient vetting system. We sincerely regret this error. The oped, written by an Australian under the name of David Goldman, was titled: ‘This disgraceful mocking of the Holocaust needs to stop now.’ In it, he ridiculed and belittled Croatian Holocaust scholar Dr. Ivo Goldstein. Dr. Goldstein was given the right of reply which appeared in yesterday’s Post opinion pages under the title ‘A collage of lies.’

As a Jerusalem Post reader and a member of the public who has been served lies by Ivo Goldstein’s above article, I write this with the understanding that in my capacity as a reader for whom the article was meant, I have the right of reply. I do reside in Australia and have not met David Goldman. I wish to ask you to please publish this letter of feedback from me as like myself, I am certain that you, your newspaper the Jerusalem Post and your readers above all cherish the truth. When it comes to the Holocaust, the truth is particularly pertinent to a respectful memory of all who so tragically perished. Hence, I hereby draw your attention to the part of Ivo Goldstein’s reply to David Goldman’s article that is a blatant and evidently purposeful lie and most probably an attempt to fabricate or falsify history of Jasenovac, as if it already hasn’t had enough lies or half-truths said or written about it.

In the 12^th paragraph of the said article Ivo Goldstein writes: ‘In the TV show Sunday at 2, which is quoted by Goldman, I did not mention Hitler – this is another lie. I put forward a thesis that the corpses were also destroyed with a ‘bone crushing machine,’ which was used by the Nazis during the well-known ‘Aktion 1005’ cover-up. The Ustasha cooperated closely with the Nazis in various ways, and there are clear indications that they did so in this case as well.’

Ivo Goldstein did not put forth any thesis in that TV Show TV Show Sunday at 2 (June 20, 2018) as he tries to convince your readers and the public of his infallibility. Instead of a thesis in the article you published he categorically claimed the following as if it was proven fact instead of a product of his evidently twisted imagination: ( from 28min01 sec to 29 min 23 sec) ‘…On the other hand, already at the beginning of April 1945, just before the end of the war, the Ustashas, a large number of butchers from 1942., those who ordered mass crimes, were somewhere in late March early April 1945 after two years, two and a half years of absence from Jasenovac, because in 1942 there were the most crimes, 43. much less and 44., returned to Jasenovac Filipovic and Majstorovic, so the former Franciscan who was expelled from the Franciscan Order membership 41 and 42., knew best those graves, he went to Hebno so that the Nazis could instruct him how to destroy corpses, they even brought machines that destroy bones, and there were, therefore, in early April some 500 to 600 camp internees who worked on that destruction by systematic destruction of corpses. In one part they were burned on bars, and then the ashes would be returned to the graves, in the other part the bones they found or excavated were destroyed in these machines.’

These Ivo Goldstein’s gruesome fantasies about bone-crushing machines in Jasenovac camp area and systematic destruction of corpses by some 600 camp detainees working in unison on such depraved tasks, dressed up in categorical claims without a shred of evidence, and not theses, can be checked and validated by watching the relevant Youtube video of the said TV Show and the link is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhNp1iGKFsk

Hence, as far as this is concerned Goldstein did not write the truth in the article you published. That is, he did not offer a thesis about Jasenovac on television, he offered a categorical claim about bone-crushing-machines without offering any verifiable evidence.

Suffice to say that Ivo Goldstein had had an another attempt of placing this gruesome fantasy about the World War Two Jasenovac camp and that was in May 2018 when Magazine Globus published an interview with him, three months before the above TV Show, and both events were about his coming book, which, I’m quite certain, does not mention any bone-crushing machines nor do any of his subsequent publications pursue the matter further.

Many believe, though, Ivo Goldstein has fabricated or embellished the story of bone-crushing machines to rely on it in his rather frequent claims that digging-up Jasenovac for forensic evidence would achieve nothing towards clarifying historical facts. It seems that inside Ivo Goldstein’s mind forensic science and DNA tracing are at the same level as they were in 1964 Yugoslavia (Goldstein is notorious for claiming that nothing could be found in 1964 because of wear and tear through time and, hence, nothing will be found today!). The fact that Ivo Goldstein comes out with these impossible, if not ridiculous, claims about the Holocaust does in fact suggest that there is, in fact, regretfully, mocking of the Holocaust in his ways.

Furthermore, since Ivo Goldstein in his article mentions the Australian Croatian community, of which I am a member, in a derogatory manner, mocking some of its members for ‘openly celebrating their Ustasha links’, I can assure you and your readers that no member of the Australian Croatian community, or any other community for that matter, has or would celebrate any links that are considered by the authorities a danger in any way for the Australian people or state or the world! I can assure you and your readers that the majority of Australian Croatians are a shiny example for humanity and what it means to endure decades of humiliation and vilification to survive and stay strong for the battle of achieving the independence of Croatia started during World War II. This is not a revisionist statement, as Ivo Goldstein or others who begrudge Croatia the freedom and independence from communist Yugoslavia it had achieved, might be tempted to claim, this is and was the truth. If people like Ivo Goldstein were as vocal about massive communist crimes perpetrated by Yugoslav communists, particularly post-WWII, as they are about Jasenovac, then perhaps there would be no mocking of the Holocaust, no need to fabricate numbers of victims at Jasenovac or bone-crushing machines because both the Holocaust and the Communist purges were abominable outcomes of hunger for political power and superiority.” Ina Vukic

Connected post article HERE.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Croatia, Efraim Zuroff, Ivo Goldstein, Jasenovac camp, Jerusalem Post, lies andt Holocaust

About Serb Deliberate Manipulation And Mocking Of Holocaust History

August 22, 2021 by inavukic 15 Comments

PHOTO SCREENSHOT 22 August 2021 Pressreader/Jerusalem-Post

I have been writing here for almost 10 years and often addressed the depraved and incessant attempts by Serbia (in or out of former communist Yugoslavia) to inflate the numbers of people who perished in the WW2 Jasenovac camp in Croatia, while ignoring or blaming others or covering up the fact of 94% of Serbian Jews having been exterminated for the sake of Serbia’s WWII status as one of the first Jew-free (Judenfrei) states of Europe. The past several weeks have produced articles of similar content or intention in other media sources such as American Thinker and The Jerusalem Post, which caught not only my attention but also the attention of many around the world and especially across Croatia, Serbia and Israel.

However, The Jerusalem Post had within two or three days taken down from its portal the article written by David Goldman, “This disgraceful mocking of the Holocaust needs to stop now” and yet kept on its portal the article written by a Serb from Serbia, Dejan Ristic, in reply top David Goldman’s article.

Hence, not only would the reader of Jerusalem Post not be afforded the decency and the right to compare on its portal both Goldman and Ristic articles, but we have here evidently yet another example how deeply rooted support for Serbian lies and depravity regarding WW2 events in Europe and its victims appears to be. So, in case you, the reader, are reading in Jerusalem Post the Dejan Ristic, tripe published on 17 August 2021, so that you may know what he is referring to I will publish in its entirety the article Jerusalem Post published on 15 August 2021 and written by David Goldman, and taken down by the Jerusalem Post within a couple of days, but kept online by the Pressreader.

The greatest problem and threat to the truth is that Dejan Ristic in his reply to David Goldman’s article holds that Goldman “…tried to make meaningless 76 years of continuous research, both by experts and institutions of Yugoslavia – later Serbia and Croatia – as well as institutions such as Yad Vashem and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM)….” The problem and threat to the truth is that research done by Yugoslavia cannot be trusted as its outcome was nothing more than communist propaganda against Croatia’s independence fighting in WWII and Serbs were an important part of that propaganda and they continued so, maintaining a lie of numbers of victims, even after Yugoslavia was smashed apart in the 1990’s despite the Serbian aggression and atrocities committed as Serbs tried to stop the breakup of communist Yugoslavia. All Croatian research has proven that both Yugoslav and Serbian research are incorrect, devoid of many most relevant historical facts and charged with political propaganda in favour of the Greater Serbia agenda.

What David Goldman’s articles appear to pursue is the truth, bare truth and facts and Serbs don’t like this, neither do those who stand behind the Jerusalem Post it seems.

On July 11, 2021, an Australia-based journalist David Goldman wrote an article “Erasing the History of the Holocaust” published on the American Thinker portal and in it, among other things, Goldman writes:

“…However, one of the most insidious Holocaust relativization battles is occurring in the Balkans, where the very soul of Holocaust history is being ‘stolen’ by another group and where one of the main weapons of choice is a WW2 concentration camp called Jasenovac.

While there is no doubt that it was a place of brutality, Jasenovac is also used as a wellspring of fake news to underline Serb ‘martyrdom,’ with the camp’s death toll exaggerated by Serbian historians in order to ‘prove’ that their suffering was equal to or greater than that of the Jews, so that in the Balkans, at least, Jews are being Photoshopped out of the Holocaust and replaced with Serbs.

The site, which Yugoslavia in 1979 rebranded as ‘The Auschwitz of the Balkans,’ also has the dubious honor of being the only former concentration camp that is unable to provide any forensic evidence for its claims, while at the same time publishing stolen pictures of Nazi horrors from Treblinka, Ukraine, Latvia, and Poland in lieu of providing any evidence of its own.

Moreover, recent independent research has shown its victim database as being 89% unverifiable or fake, while the original official death toll has increased 40-fold since 1945 — and is incredibly still growing in 2021!

This deliberate manipulation of Holocaust history has been given legitimacy by many in the liberal elite like Wiesenthal Center head Ephraim Zuroff, U.K. historian Rory Yeomans, and many others, who seem determined in supporting a Wag the Dog–like farce promoted by the same people who in July 1995 used their Jasenovac claims as justification of their genocidal slaughter at Srebrenica.

This substitution of the Jewish Holocaust for the mythical ‘suffering’ of Serbs,’ or what some writers termed the ‘hijacking of the Shoah,’ represents an existential threat to accepted history, exemplified by Serb nationalist Vuk Draskovic, who has erroneously claimed: ‘It is by the hands of the same executioners that both Serbs and Jews have been exterminated at the same concentration camps, slaughtered at the same bridges, burned alive in the same ovens, thrown together into the same pits.’

So as the actual Jewishness of the Shoah is further diluted, the warnings from Holocaust experts like Professor Lea David from the University of Haifa grow louder. ‘The Serbian political elite has hijacked Holocaust imagery and symbolism to present Serbians as righteous victims and justify a new nationalist ideology,’ she says.

But these are just some of the threats to Holocaust history, mostly underwritten not by tiki torch–carrying white supremacists, nationalist populists, or radical jihadists, but rather by those tasked to honor and protect the lessons of the Holocaust — not just for the Jewish people, but for the entire world.”

“This disgraceful mocking of the Holocaust needs to stop now” The Pressreader as it appeared in The Jerusalem Post · 15 Aug 2021 · • By DAVID GOLDMAN The author is an Australian writer and freelance journalist and director of the thegoldmanreport.org, a site dedicated to exposing Nazi collaborators and neo-Nazis living Down Under.

“When on a hot and balmy June weekend in 2018, as Dr. Ivo Goldstein was being interviewed for Croatia’s popular Sunday at 2 TV show on the increasingly problematic Jasenovac concentration camp, little did he know the maelstrom he would ignite.

Some 28 minutes into the interview, Goldstein was asked by the host: ‘Many have commented on the lack of any forensic evidence from this particular camp. Can you explain why this is the case?’

That’s when Goldstein, one of the most respected historians in the Balkans, dropped his bombshell. ‘…this is because in April 1945, Hitler flew special machines to Jasenovac. These machines were used to dissolve the bones that were left…,’ he said.

At a time when antisemitism is growing exponentially with one in four American millennials believing the Holocaust was faked while just over half of Germans believe that Jews overplay the Holocaust, Goldstein’s claim that as Berlin was being pummelled into dust by Russian artillery, Adolf Hitler found time to fly a hitherto unheard-of machine into some Balkan boondoggle in order to ‘dissolve’ human bones was not only tin-foil hat fantasy, but the last thing that Jews need right now.

More to the point, why allow the contamination of Holocaust history with a place that cannot provide any independent forensic evidence past a few thousand victims and that has an ever-increasing – including in 2021 – victim list that has repeatedly been proven to have been doctored?

Furthermore, why did groups like Yad Vashem and the US Holocaust Museum for decades look the other way as the Jasenovac Memorial Site stole pictures from Treblinka, Ukraine, Poland and elsewhere in order to bolster its inflated claims? And why do these organizations to this day continue to substantiate ex-Yugoslavia’s claims of an astronomical World War II death toll, despite three of its own official population censuses showing otherwise?

Located in Croatia about 100 kilometres south of the capital Zagreb, Jasenovac was established by the collaborationist Ustashi in August 1941. According to most sources, about 85% of inmates were Serbs, Roma, Bosnians and Croats, while the remaining 15% being Jews. In 1947/48 Yugoslavia’s forensic examination of the camp and surrounding county found that all up, between 2,500 and 4,500 were killed in the camp.

In 1980, a cash-strapped Yugoslavia rebranded Jasenovac as the ‘Auschwitz of the Balkans,’ in a cynical attempt to try and extort money out of West Germany, with the camps’ death toll subsequently being pumped up to 59,000, then 72,000, 77,000, 99,000, 250,000 and all the way up to 800,000 victims, like some macabre game of ‘genocide bingo.’

However, not only could Belgrade not provide any physical evidence to back up these newly inflated numbers, rather it disgracefully announced that a camp with less than 4,500 proven (mainly non-Jewish) victims was now equal to Auschwitz, the site of the ghastly murder of nearly 1.5 million people, most of them Jews.

If there was ever a clear case of antisemitism and self-hatred – especially by those Jewish historians who have allowed the history of Holocaust to become hijacked for what is basically a Balkan territorial dispute – this was it.

It goes without saying that the growing legions of Holocaust-deniers around the world would love nothing more than to be helped in their quest to dent the veracity of the most tragic and evil event of the 20th century. Historians have long commented how to the West, Serbia promotes Jasenovac as part of the Jewish Holocaust, but in the Balkans, Jews have been removed from the Holocaust altogether and replaced with Serbs.

As Dr. Lea David, professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa noted, ‘The Serbian political elite then hijacked the images and symbols of the Holocaust in order to equate Serbian victims with Jewish victims and promote Serbian righteous victimhood as enduring throughout the 1990s wars. Having established Serbs as victims of the Holocaust, the Serbian government then moved to sideline the roles of Serbian Communist partisan fighters and to rehabilitate quisling Chetnik members and other right-wing figures,’ she says.

As the University of Otago’s David McDonald also noted in Globalizing the Holocaust: A Jewish ‘Useable Past’ in Serbian Nationalism: ‘Holocaust imagery pushed the envelope, allowing Serbian nationalist goals to gain wider, more universal appeal. It could resonate with domestic Serbs and those in the Diaspora, as well as with Jews and non-Jews… where myths of Serbian and Jewish suffering were interwoven, providing a new series of national myths.’

As for the US Holocaust Museum, on its website, it admits ‘Determining the number of victims… for Jasenovac is highly problematic, due to the destruction of many relevant documents, the long-term inaccessibility to independent scholars of those documents that survived…’

So why quote figures if they are ‘highly problematic,’ especially considering the museum is aware Yad Vashem throughout the 1990s repeatedly tried obtaining the original Jasenovac documents from Serbia but has been flat-out refused to this day? Just as puzzling was Yugoslavia’s decades-old assertion that more victims’ remains are ‘to be discovered,’ yet during its 47-year rule of the site, it never bothered once to try and locate these mysterious ‘missing’ remains.

Those who have conflated the only wartime concentration camp without any verifiable data with scientifically proven Holocaust facts have done immeasurable harm to Jewish history. In this era of hyper-antisemitism and a world of increasing hatred of all things Jewish, it’s high time that everyone – especially Jews – stopped collaborating with malign actors to mock the Holocaust.”

Regretfully, it seems to me that The Jerusalem Post failed to heed the message in the above David Goldman’s article and continues supporting the Serbian agenda of victim number fabrication and denial of victims made by WW2 Serbia. That is disappointing but not as utterly disappointing as the appalling morality that laces its keeping on its portal the article by Dejan Ristic in reply to David Goldman’s but taking David Goldman’s article down so that readers could not refer to it! Just as well the facts and the truth of history will not cower to or be intimidated by the likes of Greater Serbia propagandists and their entourage. Ina Vukic

THE JERUSALEM POST HAS PUBLISHED AN EDITORIAL ON THE ABOVE MATTER EXPLAINING WHY THEY REMOVED FROM THEIR PORTAL THE ARTICLE BY DAVID GOLDMAN AND THE EDITORIAL CAN BE FOUND VIA THIS LINK

Furthermore, Ivo Goldstein mentioned in the above article by David Goldman has published his reply in Jerusalem Post 21 August 2021 and his reply can be read here