The Death Camps of Croatia: Visions and Revisions, 1941-1945

Front Cover
Transaction Publishers, Mar 4, 2013 - History - 225 pages
In The Death Camps of Croatia, Raphael Israeli shows that throughout Yugoslavia during World War II, anti-semitism was both deeply rooted and widespread. This book traces the circumstances and the historical context in which the pro-Nazi Ustasha state, encompassing Croatia and Bosnia, erected the Jadovno and Jasenovac death camps. Israeli distills fact and historical record from accusation and grievance, noting that seventy years later, the gap in research and the collection of data, memoirs, and oral histories has become almost irreparable. This volume meets the challenge, basing its conclusions on evidence from participants from the period. The battle between the Serbs and the Croats is not likely to be settled any time soon. Both sides have accused the other of the wrongdoings that everyone knows occurred. While the German Nazis, Croat Ustasha, Serbian collaborators, Cetnicks, and Bosnian Hanjar recruits are often seen as the wrongdoers, there were individuals who helped the Jews, hid them at great risk, and enabled them to survive. These people absorbed the Jews in their own ranks, and gave them the means to fight; they were the only people who helped the Jews. This volume is not about judging one side or the other; it is about acknowledging the evil all sides inflicted upon the Jewish minority in their midst. Serbs, Muslims, and Croats continue to dominate the ex-Yugoslavian scene. It has been their arena of battle for centuries, while the flourishing Jewish minority culture in that area has all but come to a historical standstill and has almost completely vanished. Yet the struggle over the historical record continues.
 

Contents

1 The German Expansion into the Balkans
1
2 The Roots of the Ustasha Regime
43
3 The Jadovno Complex
65
4 The Middle East Connection
85
5 The Muslim Connection and Haj Amin alHusseini
103
The Routinization of Mass Murder
127
7 The Suppression of War Memories and Their Reemergence
147
8 Summary and Postscript
171
Bibliography
191
Analytical Index
195
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2013)

Raphael Israeli teaches Islamic, Chinese, and Middle Eastern History at Hebrew University. Israeli is the author of forty-six books and one hundred scholarly articles in the fields of Islamic studies, the Modern Middle East, and the opening of China by the French.

Bibliographic information