Collection of documents of Ustasha Atrocities presented at the Begin Center - opinion

Following the end of World War II, Odić, as an officer in the State Security Directorate, had access to German archival records, including those of the German commander of the Security Police and the Security Service in Occupied Serbia.

The police file from which this collection was created is based on documents of various origins, collected by the Gestapo in Occupied Serbia from the summer of 1941 until the middle of the following year. The main reason for collecting these documents was to monitor the situation in the Ustaša Independent State of Croatia, a puppet state of Nazi Germany (1941-1945), primarily its implementation of the policy of genocide against Serbs, its course, and consequences.

Although the largest number of documents relates to the genocide against Serbs, they are also very important for research into the Holocaust in the Independent State of Croatia. They show that Nazi representatives monitored the course of the Holocaust there in parallel with the genocides against Serbs and Roma.

The main conclusion that can be drawn from the documents, according to Dr. Milan Koljanin, who prepared this collection, is that the annihilation of Jews during this period was at the hands of the Ustaša state and was carried out almost exclusively in camps, first in the Gospić-Jadovno-Pag camp system, and then in Jasenovac.

Based on the documents, it can be seen that the German representatives in Zagreb viewed the issue of the persecution of Jews from the perspective of German-Italian relations, and that in the summer and autumn of 1941, they were dissatisfied with the pace of the implementation of the Holocaust. One can also find information about the institutions that carried out the looting of Jewish and Serbian property, such as the State Directorate for Re-enactment.

However, it is an inescapable conclusion that both Serbs and Jews were interned and killed en masse in the Ustaša camps, and that the camp authorities sought to create as much division as possible among the prisoners themselves to carry out their liquidation as efficiently as possible. It can be seen that the Ustaša authorities in the camps sought to create antagonism not only between Serbs and Jews, but also among the Jews themselves.

The documents also contain testimonies about individual crimes committed against imprisoned Jews, such as a description of the killing of a Jewish prisoner over an ear of corn. The book contains documents describing some of the crimes committed against Jews outside the camps, the most significant of which is certainly the brutal murder of 300 Jews of all ages on a bridge over the Sava River in Brčko, Bosnia, on December 12, 1941.

The presentation at the Begin Center was attended by researchers from Bar-Ilan, Reichman, Ben-Gurion, and Tel Aviv universities, Yad Vashem, the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People at the National Library of Israel, representatives of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem headed by Archbishop Aristarchos of Constantina, embassies, and members of the Serbian community in Israel.

It included presentations by Dr. Nebojša Kuzmanović, director of the Archives of Vojvodina, editor-in-chief, on sources of the documents and their significance; Dr. Kiril Feferman, head of Holocaust History Center at Ariel University, on the Holocaust and genocide in Yugoslavia during World War II - a European perspective; Dr. Milan Koljanin, artistic and program director, head of the Department for Educational Affairs at the Staro sajmište Memorial Center, on the content and understanding of the documents in the context of a historical constellation; Dr. Efraim Zuroff, Holocaust historian, on the campaign to find and prosecute Jasenovac commander Dinko Šakić; Jovan Ćulibrk, Bishop of Pakrac and Slavonia, about Yugoslavia as the Research Lab for the term of Genocide; and the author of this text, on the topic of the distortion of the Holocaust and genocide to the absurdity of victim apologetics.

The English edition of the collection was published in 2025, five years after its Serbian edition.

Despite the fact that among the plaques marking the central death camps and sites of murder in the Hall of Remembrance at Yad Vashem, there is one dedicated to Jasenovac, the general public, especially in Israel, is insufficiently familiar with the bestial, manual murders of prisoners: Serbs, Jews, and Roma, the targets of genocide, but also anti-fascist Croats and members of other peoples and faiths.

The reasons for this gap in knowledge should be sought in the distortion, not denial, of the Holocaust and genocide perpetrated during the decades under Tito's socialist Yugoslavia. On monuments, such as the Stone Flower at the Jasenovac Memorial Site, and school textbooks, it was written to the victims of fascism, without specifying who the victims were, by whom they were killed, and for what motive.

This was a widespread phenomenon throughout the countries behind the Iron Curtain, but Yugoslavia was unique in many ways. First, it was not an integral part of the Warsaw Pact, but, more importantly, it was unique in that the largest number of victims of genocide were not the groups targeted by racial laws - Jews and Roma - as in other parts of occupied Europe, but, instead, Serbs, a fact which fundamentally burdened future coexistence.

The state motto was Brotherhood-Unity, on the basis of which cooperation between the two key peoples of the Yugoslav community, Croats and Serbs, was to be built. A special role in this concept was played by Serbian communists, intimidating even the relatives of the slaughtered, their own compatriots.

An additional and crucial feature concerns the massive participation of persecuted Serbs in resistance movements. In their heroic struggle against Nazism and fascism, against occupiers and domestic collaborators, they were joined by numerous Jews.

A large portion of the Serbian people, in all areas of the former Yugoslavia, sincerely accepted Yugoslavism as their ideology, renouncing the glorious, rich, spiritual, and historical Serbian heritage. With the disintegration of Yugoslavia, these Serbs began to turn inward, becoming increasingly interested in the suffering in the Independent State of Croatia, as well as in general during World War II, and in the years after liberation, including critical aspects of forensics.