Language:
English
Year of publication:
2009
Titel der Quelle:
Holocaust and Genocide Studies
Angaben zur Quelle:
23,2 (2009) 263-284
Keywords:
Tuđman, Franjo
;
Jasenovac (Concentration camp)
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
Abstract:
In his 1989 monograph "The Wasteland of Historical Facts", Franjo Tudjman (he later became president of Croatia) depicted Jewish prisoners of the Jasenovac camp in a negative light, based on highly problematic Serbian eyewitness accounts collected in 1942 by the Serbian Commissariat for Refugees and Resettled Persons. A conflict emerged between some Jews and some Serbs in Jasenovac in March 1942, and this may explain in part why some Serbian refugees in Croatia made negative remarks about "Jewish" behavior. Analyzing the most antisemitic witness account, by Vojislav Prnjatović, concludes that it is unreliable and makes undue generalizations. Although some Jews indeed gained privileged positions in the camp, this does not mean that all Jews were privileged or preferred by the Ustaša guards. The Jews certainly did not perpetrate killings of Serbs alongside the Ustašas. Argues that Tudjman deliberately used problematic sources for his book in order to blame the victims themselves, and thus to relativize the Ustaša terror and foster political support within the Croatian nationalist diaspora.
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