Book Review

The Holocaust in Yugoslavia

The word Holocaust has come to describe the horrors of the planned extermination campaigns launched by Nazi Germany and its allies during World War II. These campaigns resulted in the murder of Jewish people of various European nationalities – about one third of the Jewish people of the world at that time. Many millions of others perished (the USSR lost close to 27,000,000 people – Editor) in the concentration camps, in mass killings used as reprisals for partisan attacks, the policies of forced labour and food deprivation, designed by the Nazis and their fellow fascists to work and starve "inferior races" to death.

But the history of the Holocaust during World War II is not at all well known. Had it been better known, liberal minded people of the world might not have responded to the propaganda used to line up support for Croatian and Bosnian separatists during the Yugoslav civil war of the 1990’s, which had created a new "former Yugoslavia" whose map and whose "favoured nations" resembles the map that was drawn up by Hitler and Mussolini in 1941.

The Janesovac Institute was founded by Barry Lituchy and others to educate people internationally about the other Holocaust in Yugoslavia. I am proud to be a member of the Institute’s Board and an active supporter and contributor to its mission.

The Institute’s name derives from the Janesovac complex of murder camps run by the Ustasha, a Croatian nationalist organization which the Nazis put intro power over Croatia and Bosnia, when they dismembered Yugoslavia in 1941. Janesovac was the third largest extermination camp in Europe, after Auschwitz and Treblinka, and the only extermination camp not being run by the German SS. In it, hundreds of thousands of Serbians, mostly from Croatia and Bosnia, perished (an estimated 600,000-700,000) along with thousands of Jewish and Roma (Gypsies) people. (The Communists were the first ones rounded up and killed in these camps – Editor.)

The scholars of the Janesovac Institute held many conferences and historical analyses about the guilt of the Croatian fascists and the Vatican, and others in perpetrating these crimes.

This book also discusses the ability of certain Ustasha fascist war criminals to escape punishment with the direct assistance of the Vatican and the US government.

One example of this collusion by the US and the Vatican is the former Secretary General of the United Nations and the Austrian president Kurt Waldheim, a former Wehrmacht officer whom Yugoslavia had declared a war criminal in 1947, but who covered up his tracks for decades. Among these war criminals was Andrija Artukovic, the former "Justice Minister" for the Ustasha regime, who played a leading role in implementing its racist policies. Artukovic is known to have been in direct contact with the CIA in his activities, actually lived in California, avoiding extradition to Yugoslavia until the mid-1980s.

Part two of the book tells the survivors’ stories, which are accounts of horror and courage. The Yugoslav Partisans led by the Yugoslav Communist Party fought the German divisions and their Ustasha allies, made a very important contribution to the war effort in Europe, and eventually liberated Yugoslavia to a very large considerable degree.

Yugoslav attempts to try and to capture and punish these fascist war criminals, both German and their collaborators, were stymied by the NATO bloc’s intelligence and police agencies, who simply re-christened these fascist elements as "refugees" and "freedom fighters" from the "captive nations" of Eastern Europe.

This book is a must read to get a factual history of the tragedies that were committed and then absolved by US-NATO-Vatican in order to hide the truth from the people of the world.