Holocaust Research in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia. An Inventory

Introduction

In January 2017, the Amsterdam-based Anne Frank House and its Croatian partner institution, the Croatian Education and Development Network for the Evolution of Communication (Hrvatska edukacijska i razvojna mreža za evoluciju sporazumjevanja, HERMES), a non-governmental organisation (NGO) engaged in history-teaching, opened an exhibition in a school in the Dalmatian town of Šibenik on the fate of Anne Frank. The travelling exhibition—previously shown in 40 European cities without incident, including 23 Croatian cities—presents the history of the Second World War and the Holocaust in Europe. At the same time, it documents specific national contexts. With regard to Croatia, the exhibition discusses inter alia the crimes committed by the Croatian Ustasha against Jews, Serbs, and other minorities. The principal of the school where the exhibition was installed argued that while the exhibition portrayed the Croatian Ustasha negatively, it spoke of the antifascist partisans positively and concealed the atrocities they committed. When the organisers of the exhibition invited him to develop further panels at his school and present these issues, he refused without giving a comprehensive explanation. Finally, HERMES withdrew the exhibition.^[1]

If the incident in Šibenik had been an isolated event, then the diverse national and international reactions would not have been so vast. However, this was rather an event symptomatic for Croatian society’s process in coming to terms with their history. In November 2016, Croatian veterans of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s installed a memorial plaque in the small town of Jasenovac, near the memorial site of the former death camp, to commemorate their fellow combatants killed there between 1991 and 1995.^[2] The problem with this plaque was that it showed the unit’s official coat of arms, which includes the slogan Za dom spremni (‘For the homeland – ready’). This slogan was used by the Ustasha between 1941 and 1945 as an official salute—it was written on every official document. Its meaning and relevance was (and is) similar to the German Heil Hitler. And again, the dilemma of the Croatian society became obvious. On the one hand, the coat of arms was legally listed in the register of associations, approved by the Ministry of Public Administration (Ministarstvo uprave), in 1998. However, on the other hand, having those words on a plaque near the former camp, where thousands of Jews, Serbs, Roma and other persecuted groups were killed by the very Ustasha, is garish to say the least. The Croatian public and politicians only reacted after representatives of the Jewish and Serbian minorities in Croatia protested against the installed plaque. In order to emphasise their protest, the Croatian Jewish communities decided to boycott the state-run Holocaust commemoration on 27 January 2017.^[3]

Large parts of the political representatives as well as society seem to be unable to comprehend or admit that the Ustasha regime of the Independent State of Croatia (ISC)—installed by the German and Italian aggressors in April 1941—was responsible for a nefarious system perpetrating mass murder. It is still (close to) impossible to speak exclusively of victims of this regime as being Croatian Jews, Serbs, and other groups, as it is to speak exclusively of the Ustasha perpetrators as being Croats. The immediate reaction is to refer to ‘the other agent’ in the war, namely the communists, and their victims, as to also include Croatian victims. Indeed, the crimes committed by the Yugoslav partisan units during the war, and the persecution of former opponents after the war, is still an insufficiently researched issue. But the knee-jerk references to the Croatian victims of the postwar era are not only a pointer to a scientific desideratum. Denial, or at least belittlement, of the Holocaust and the genocide against the Serbs is part and parcel to such reactions that even engulf a universally acknowledged figure like Anne Frank.

What are the reasons for these recurring manifestations of a problematic historical awareness and a careless exposure of Croatia’s own history? Motives may be diverse, but one reason undoubtedly is connected to the lack of profound and non-ideologically laden history education. A second reason, which may likewise be a cause and a consequence of the absent education, is that of a lack of scientific research. Based on these assumptions, I argue that a comprehensive Holocaust research discourse, supported considerably by politics, would objectify and de-emotionalise public debates in the long-run. The question arises, however, how scholars can focus on the Holocaust in Yugoslavia, that is on the systematic annihilation of Croatian and Bosnian Jews in the Independent State of Croatia (1941-1945), given that other groups—in particular Serbs and Roma—were simultaneously persecuted and killed, above all while considering that their marginalisation and destruction has also been neglected by scholars and ignored by society.

The focus of this paper is thus on the historiography of the Holocaust in the region that was included in the Independent State of Croatia during the Second World War, i.e. centrally today’s Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Specifically, I will assess the systematic annihilation of Croatian and Bosnian Jews in the larger framework of the destruction of the European Jews, thereby paying tribute to the special place this genocide holds in European history and in historiography. I argue that the state of Holocaust research and the knowledge about the Holocaust do in fact reveal a level of society’s maturity and capability in terms of dealing with its own history generally.

First, I assess the research conducted on the Holocaust in post-1945 Yugoslavia. Secondly, I give an overview of the post-Yugoslav, that is to say Croatian, Bosnian, and Serbian efforts to investigate the local history of the Holocaust. And finally, I ask in what ways the exploration of the history of the former Yugoslav contexts have enriched international—mainly German and English speaking—Holocaust research.

Did Holocaust Research Exist in Socialist Yugoslavia?

In 1945, only some 15,000 of the Jews who had been living in Yugoslavia before the war survived, with approximately 80 to 85% of Croatian, Bosnian, and Serbians Jews having been killed.^[4] The great majority of them were annihilated in territories of the Independent State of Croatia, in German-occupied Serbia, or in the German death camps in Poland, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka. During socialist Yugoslavia, almost no research on the Holocaust was conducted. To be sure, this did not mean that the systematic annihilation of the majority of the Yugoslav Jews was forgotten or ignored; rather, the focus was on identifying war crimes and atrocities that had been committed in general. As early as November 1943, the Antifascist Council of the People’s Liberation of Yugoslavia (Antifašističko vijeće narodnog oslobođenja Jugoslavije, AVNOJ)—a wartime deliberative assembly with effective state-building functions—decided to establish a State Commission for the Investigation of the Crimes of the Occupation Forces and Their Collaborators (Državna komisija za utvrđivanje zločina okupatora i njihovih pomagača). Until April 1948, the State Commission, and the various local commissions established to support it, collected information about the crimes and atrocities that had been committed.^[5] These were supposed to be identified in order to ensure postwar prosecution. The commissions never tried to emphasise the suffering of a single group; instead, all victims were seen equal in their victimhood.^[6]

In the eyes of the Yugoslav survivors of the Holocaust, this official approach to the almost complete annihilation of Jugoslav Jewries did not sufficiently document their rich and tragic history. It was by the merit of Albert Vajs—a prewar Zionist, lawyer, poet, and Holocaust survivor—that the atrocities committed against the Yugoslav Jews were explicitly documented. Vajs, originally from Serbia, was appointed to the State Commission, where he became the driving force behind the documentation of Jewish suffering. At the same time, Vajs realised the need to gather information on the prewar lives of the Yugoslav Jews. On his initiative, the Jewish communities—of which only 36 of the original 121 survived after 1945—began to gather testimonies of Jewish life, culture, and experience in the different Yugoslav regions.^[7] Shortly after the first postwar constitution of the Federation of Jewish Communities had been drafted in August 1945, the Federation called on all Holocaust survivors to gather any information regarding the murder of Jews, the destruction of their property, as well as their resistance. In 1947, the Federation decided to establish a central Jewish archive in Belgrade, thereby acknowledging the city as the capital of the now socialist state. A year later, it set up a special department that started to, officially and actively, collect archival material from all parts of the country. In that same year, Vajs was elected president of the Federation. He remained in this position until his death in 1964.^[8]

The collection of documents, testimonies, photographs, books, and artefacts, led to the foundation of the Jewish Historical Museum (Jevrejski istorijski muzej) in Belgrade in 1952, as well as to the creation of an archive within the museum. Although the museum did not officially open until 1960, it already installed temporary exhibitions on Jewish life in Belgrade throughout the 1950s.^[9] Not until 1969 was a permanent exhibition opened, which continues to exist even today. Although the Jewish communities throughout Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Macedonia have been trying to establish archives of their own, the most significant documents on the history of the Holocaust are located in Belgrade. Today, the archive within the Jewish Historical Museum contains some 1,000 metres of shelves.

In the period of socialist Yugoslavia, Jewish life was reactivated, although almost half of the Yugoslav Holocaust survivors (around 6,000 people) emigrated to Israel between 1948 and 1952. The Federation and Jewish communities as well as individuals published journals, books, and articles about Jewish prewar life, and in particular concerning the period between 1941 and 1945. One of the first comprehensive presentations was published by the Holocaust survivor Zdenko Levntal in 1952.^[10] He provided a survey of the persecution and annihilation processes in the different parts of Yugoslavia, which had been under different occupational forces. In 1954, the Federation started the journal Jevrejski almanah (Jewish Almanac), inter alia featuring memoirs and testimonies of survivors.^[11]

Indeed, since these first initiatives, innumerable survivors’ memoirs and testimonies have been published and collected in various journals and magazines, which today serves as an extremely relevant corpus of sources.^[12] In addition to shorter texts within the journals, numerous survivors have published their memoirs as monographs, which give important insights into the individual experience of persecution, detention, liberation, and the aftermath of the Holocaust.^[13] In 1971, the Jewish Historical Museum started to publish a periodical anthology (entitled Zbornik) that has since assembled scientific contributions on the various topics of Jewish history in the Yugoslav territories. Besides these articles in the Zbornik that not only cover the Holocaust but other aspects of Jewish history as well, several monographs and volumes were published until the 1980s. Among those are works of Jaša Romano and Ženi Lebl, who contributed immensely to the understanding of the Holocaust.^[14] Lebl, a survivor from Serbia, left the country in 1954 for Israel and devoted her life to researching the history of Jews in Yugoslavia. Like Lebl, many other Jews from Yugoslavia— who either emigrated to Palestine before the Second World War or to Israel after the Holocaust—were engaged in documenting and preserving the history of the Yugoslav Jews and the history of the Holocaust. In 1951, Yugoslav émigré Jews in Israel started the journal Bilten Hitachdut Olej Yugoslavia, which served as their mouthpiece while simultaneously gathering testimonies, memoirs, and research articles.^[15] Menachem Shelach, a Holocaust survivor from Yugoslavia, was the first to edit a comprehensive study on the topic in the Hebrew language.^[16]

Thus, during the time of socialist Yugoslavia, remembering and researching the Jewish experience of the Second World War was neither forbidden nor suppressed. Then again, neither politicians nor academia granted the Holocaust a place in history of its own right. This attitude of downplaying the Holocaust did not differ from the official approach regarding history politics in other socialist states in Eastern and Southeastern Europe. In documenting persecution during the Second World War, no ethnic and/or religious group was to be singled out. Yet even though no explicit acknowledgement of Jewish suffering during the Second World War was granted, the efforts of—in the first place—the survivors were impressive. And indeed, in collective volumes on the Second World War, be it on the People’s Liberation Movement, or on the diverse camp systems in Croatia and Serbia, for example, the systematic persecution and extermination of Jews were always mentioned, yet never seen as an independent field of research.^[17]Annual commemorations of the deportation of Macedonian Jews to Treblinka, or of the so-called ‘round-up’ in Vojvodina in 1942, were officially accepted and respected, but were initiated exclusively by the survivors. In 1988, an exhibition that documented the rich and old history of the Jews in Yugoslavia was shown in Zagreb, Sarajevo, and Belgrade.^[18] Once more, also this well-received exhibition had been initiated by survivors. Hence, it is not exaggerated to conclude that in socialist Yugoslavia, not only commemoration acts, but literally all publishing and archival efforts came from Jewish survivors.

At the end of the day, the examination of the Holocaust and its historical significance in socialist Yugoslavia did not radically differ from the state of things in wider Europe, in particular Germany—at least not until the beginning of the 1980s. Here too, the occasional studies and investigations were initiated by individuals and/or survivors. Researching and commemorating the destruction of the Jews was to their credit rather than to academia or politics.^[19] The role survivors played in researching and remembering the Holocaust was tremendous all over the world, not only in Yugoslavia.^[20] More recently, researchers have also started to debate the concept of ‘survivor’ itself. This reconceptualisation identifies several turning points that have changed the meaning of ‘survivor’ since 1945, and researchers have begun to refer to these multiple dimensions of the concept.^[21] It could be a worthwhile effort to research the commitment of the Yugoslav Holocaust survivors and the impact of their work in terms of a conceptual history of what ‘survivor’ meant in (post-)Yugoslavia throughout time.

Holocaust Research in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia since the 1990s

As did the rest of Yugoslav society, also the Jewish communities experienced radical changes in the course of the 1990s, when the country collapsed violently. Many Jews sought to emphasise their loyalty towards what became their new homeland, i.e. one of the Yugoslav successor states. Others refused to position themselves and, once more, sought the solution of emigrating to Israel (or elsewhere overseas). The Federation of Jewish Communities of Yugoslavia was officially dissolved in 1993, with Jewish communities in Croatia already having left the joint organisation in 1991.^[22] The economic hardships which followed the Yugoslav wars have been intensified by the financial crises since 2008, making it very difficult for all former Yugoslav postwar societies to recover in a satisfactory way. Consequently, the Jewish communities, their archives, and the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade have since been struggling with many problems. They face huge financial difficulties to maintain their records and to preserve them for the future. For example, they have been unable to digitalise archival records and various Jewish publications. The Federation of Jewish Communities in Serbia, which has acted as the official governing body of the museum since 1992, lacks the financial resources necessary to create a new and updated exhibition. Moreover, in all post-Yugoslav states there has been a lack of political will to maintain and save Jewish heritage—including the archives and libraries. Some of them, like the important archive and library of the Jewish community in Zagreb, have even been closed for years. In spite of this situation, in September 2016, with the personal engagement and dedication of the voluntary staff, this community managed to open their first ever Jewish Museum in Zagreb.^[23] It has collected mostly religious objects and old books, however a critical analysis of the history of the Croatian Jews in the 20th century has not (yet) been provided.

The Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade operates similarly due to the personal and voluntary commitment of the members of the Jewish community. The volunteer staff can, however, barely afford to pay for archiving and research related tasks. Thousands of documents, books, pamphlets, and newspapers are threatened by the ravages of time. The efforts of many committed Yugoslav Jews in documenting Jewish history and heritage throughout the 20th century are endangered. Currently, there is no significant international initiative that is trying to help to save this patrimony—possibly with one exception. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has reproduced a great number of documents and transferred these copies to Washington DC. And yet, the materials stored there is only a small extract of the materials kept in Belgrade.

Even though these technical difficulties and problems connected to the preservation of archival materials speak for themselves, the broader question about the attitude and politics of the new states towards Holocaust research and Holocaust education remains a valid one. Have there been scholarly initiatives, supported by politics, since the 1990s that have gone beyond individual Jewish endeavours? As a matter of fact, Holocaust Studies as a branch of historical studies has not yet been established in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, or Serbia. Nevertheless, and despite the lack of institutionalised research contexts, numerous studies on local Jewish history have been published.^[24] Most of these books and articles are written in a descriptive manner. If they deliver information on the period between 1941 and 1945, then they do so without providing any deeper analysis or a critical reflection of the historic developments and contexts, let alone connect to international research contexts.

Ivo and Slavko Goldstein’s book ‘The Holocaust in Zagreb’ (Holokaust u Zagrebu), published in 2001, can be seen as a milestone within the Croatian academic discussion on the Holocaust. ^[25]Although they also avoid an in-depth analysis, their work is an important reference book, which compiles various aspects and topics of, and sources relevant to, the Holocaust in Zagreb. No similar overview exists for other parts of Croatia. Ivo Goldstein and his father Slavko,^[26] well-known public figures in Croatia, have contributed enormously to the growing awareness of the history of the Holocaust in their country. In 1996, they initiated an important volume—edited by the president of Zagreb’s Jewish Community, Ognjen Kraus—which dealt with antisemitism, the Holocaust, and the political dimensions of antifascism.^[27]

In general, and without a doubt, awareness of issues surrounding Jewish history has been growing in Croatia and Serbia. In 2005, Croatia became a member of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), and since then has also officially been commemorating the International Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27 January. IHRA is an intergovernmental body that supports Holocaust education and research, both on a national and international level. Croatia has since implemented national agencies that support education on the Holocaust, particularly in cooperation with the Jasenovac Memorial Site. The trouble is that, despite these agencies and IHRA membership, there has neither been significant critical research on the Holocaust, nor any noteworthy education on this topic. Young people hardly know anything about the history of the Holocaust in Croatia, because it is not part of the school syllabus. When they do hear about the Jasenovac Memorial Site, it more often than not is via the news rather than at school. The case of Croatia shows, in an impressive manner, how close the ties are between political agendas and the awareness and sensibility for the history of the Holocaust.

As noted previously, in November 2016 the town of Jasenovac became the centre of controversy regarding a memorial plaque, however discussions already erupted in the spring of that year. On 22 April 2016, the Croatian National Front (Hrvatski nacionalni front, HNF)—an extremely nationalist association glorifying the Ustasha regime—laid down a wreath at the Jasenovac Memorial Site, claiming to commemorate all victims of the Jasenovac camp from 1941 to 1951.^[28] This act was not only distasteful but deliberately insulting, and can be interpreted as a wilful attempt to trivialise the Ustasha regime and its victims. The concentration camp in Jasenovac was operated by the Ustaha between August 1941 and April 1945. It is estimated that some 85,000 people—mainly Serbs, Jews, Roma, and Croatian opposition members—were killed there.^[29] In the debate that took place, some groups and individuals, including the then minister of culture, Zlatko Hasanbegović, seemingly attempted to relativise the victims of the Ustasha regime. They argued that the communists had killed a great number of Croats, and that they themselves, after 1945, operated Jasenovac as a camp to detain Croatian opposition members, i.e. former Ustasha.^[30] Therefore, they claimed to remember all victims of Jasenovac, namely also the Croats who had been allegedly killed in the Jasenovac camp after April 1945. Due to these arguments—shared by certain sections of the government—and the ongoing public controversies, the Jewish and Serbian associations boycotted the official commemoration ceremony held on 22 April 2016.^[31]These associations were offended as on the same day 71 years earlier in 1945, some 600 Jewish and Serbian inmates tried to escape from the Jasenovac camp, but were overwhelmed by Ustasha guards, who then proceeded to kill most of them. Only 106 inmates succeeded with their escape.

In fact, since the end of World War Two, the discussions, controversies, and ideological battles fought over the Jasenovac camp, and the number of its victims, have been endless. Innumerable articles and books—certainly with varying qualities and political aims—have been published on Jasenovac.^[32] Since the beginning of the 1960s—the Memorial Site was opened in 1968—Jasenovac has been a symbol and a point of convergence of almost all debates on remembrance politics in the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav contexts.^[33] One of the biggest issues within these controversies—besides the debate on the total amount of victims— has been the questions as to whether, how long, and by whom, the Jasenovac camp was operated after 1945. Even if researchers may plausibly prove that a camp—operated by the communists—continued to exist in Jasenovac after 1945, then laying down a commemoration wreath on 22 April and claiming to remember the victims and their murderers—even if the latter may have become victims too—is highly cynical. The internationally renowned Croatian writer Miljenko Jergović, in his essay entitled ‘Father’, explains the Croatian ‘difficulties’ on confronting its past and taking responsibility for the Holocaust:

‘Perhaps it is because of the artisanal and intimate nature of the Ustasha crimes, that sixty-five years later Croats still find it difficult to deal with and reflect upon their own, unique and local Holocaust and genocide; they only very reluctantly accept it, and do so full of objections and counter-accusations.’^[34]

As a writer and a poet, Jergović understands and has the ability to portray the mentality of his compatriots. In 2016, the ‘objections’ and ‘counter-accusations’ came to affront and were mirrored by some parts of society regarding the public discussions around Jasenovac. Both controversial instances, i.e. the laying of the wreath and the installation of the plaque, revealed the lack of profound research-based knowledge whereby responsibility can be taken for the past. Undoubtedly, the former concentration camp at Jasenovac is insolubly intertwined with the general history of the Second Word War in Yugoslavia. But beyond this, it is almost impossible to deal with the history of this camp without also taking the controversies around it into account, which have been going on for decades.

Thus the significant question is whether it is possible, even legitimate, to research the history of the Jasenovac camp exclusively in terms of the history of the Holocaust. Should researchers by default have to point to the mass murder of Serbs, Roma, and others as well, when examining the annihilation of Jews in this camp? Ultimately, the vast majority of the Croatian and Bosnian Jews were killed in the camp at Jasenovac. In Yad Vashem’s Hall of Remembrance, the names of the 22 biggest concentration and death camps are engraved. Among them is the Jasenovac camp—as the only non-German camp. It was an integral part of the systematic destruction of Jews; therefore it must be considered as an integral part of Holocaust research. Examining the Jewish victims of this camp, without referring to other groups of victims, certainly is a coherent approach. Researchers could ask whether the Jews were treated differently than other inmates; whether they were separated when they were killed; and what their chances to survive were. By focusing on one persecuted group—in this case on the Jews (men and women)—and by analysing the camp’s operating system from their perspective, could enrich our knowledge on the one hand of the Jewish inmate world, and on the other hand of the guards’ specific behaviour towards Jews, including the policies they were pursuing and/or executing.

What is, in comparison, the situation of memorial sites pertaining to camps in neighbouring Serbia? What is the state of public debates and of research there? In the past two decades, several works have been published that have dealt with Jewish history in Yugoslavia, with a focus on Serbia,^[35] and specifically in reference to the Holocaust,^[36] and in some cases also on concentration and detention camps.^[37] A former camp and today a memorial site with a public significance similar to that at Jasenovac in Croatia is located in an urban neighbourhood of Belgrade, Staro Sajmište (Judenlager Semlin). In the complex of this former concentration camp almost 7,000 Serbian Jews were killed between the end of 1941 and spring of 1942. In the short time between March and May 1942, all Jewish women and children who had survived the winter were killed in a mobile gas van, which had been sent from Berlin to Belgrade.^[38] After 1942, the concentration camp was transformed into a detention camp (Anhaltelager Semlin) and more than 30,000 inmates—mostly political prisoners and forced labourers—passed through it on their way to labour camps in and outside of Serbia.^[39] Since the 1980s, public debates on an appropriate current use of the former camp have occurred periodically, specifically on the former camp becoming a memorial site.^[40] Nobody questions the atrocities that were committed there. However, history politics in the 1990s instrumentalised the Staro Sajmište camp and turned its remembrance into a symbol of Serbian suffering and ‘martyrdom’. In the course of this, the annihilation of Jews was marginalised and ‘excluded from public memory’.^[41] Furthermore, the roles played by Serbian collaborationists, policemen and guards at the Staro Sajmište camp have also been close to elimination from public debates. In October 2014, a committee consisting of politicians, historians and representatives of the Jewish and Roma minorities, was set up to elaborate on a memorial complex. To date, three years on, there is still no plan on how to design and rebuild the site. Proposed legislation caused criticism in March 2017, as it allegedly trivialised the Nazi-allied Serbian administration and relativised the Holocaust.^[42] Thus the level of controversies, and the tendency to create a one-sided perspective on history, is similar to the debates surrounding the Jasenovac camp in Croatia.^[43]

In Serbia, besides the Staro Sajmište camp, several other debates and controversies connected to the Second World War are worth mentioning, all of them linked to the history of the Holocaust. There has been for example an ongoing campaign for several years—initiated by diverse groups and actors like the Association of Political Prisoners and Victims of the Communist Regime (Udruženje političkih zatvorenika i žrtava komunističkog režima), the Serbian Liberal Party (Srpska liberalna stranka), or by relatives and descendants. The proponents of the campaign demand the political rehabilitation of Serbian actors and politicians, such as Milan Nedić, Dimitrije Ljotić, and Draža Mihailović.^[44] Nedić was the prime minister of occupied Serbia from 1941-1945 and he was at least co-responsible for the persecution of the Serbian Jews; Ljotić was an antisemite and a fascist who collaborated with the German occupiers; and Mihailović was the leader of the Chetniks, who were loyal to the Serbian (Yugoslav) king and played an ambivalent role during World War Two. As in Croatia, the debates and controversies in Serbia reveal unresolved historical questions, which erupt from time to time to dominate current politics and their agenda.

In 2011, Serbia, too, became a member of the IHRA. With regard to historical research, this membership—a kind of precondition for the accession process to the European Union—has not had much impact, though. Serbia, struggling with political and economic problems, offers working conditions to scholars that are far from adequate. All the more impressive is the fact that several exhibitions on Jewish life before and during the Holocaust were set up. In Belgrade, a temporary exhibition on the ‘Jewish Camp Zemun – Holocaust and Collaboration in Serbia’ opened in the city library in January 2013. The initiators—the Jewish Community Zemun, the historians Milan Koljanin and Milan Fogel—presented aspects of the history of the Holocaust in Serbia, in particular the role of the Serbian collaborationist government during the German occupation.^[45] In 2014, the Belgrade Municipal Archive hosted the exhibition ‘Jews in Belgrade – Life and Holocaust’^[46] and in May 2015 an exhibition at the site of the former concentration camp at Staro Sajmište presented hundreds of photographs of Serbian Jews before 1941.^[47] The photographic exhibition was initiated by the Federation of Jewish Communities in Serbia, in preparation of digitalisation, i.e. in order to organise the basis for the planned digitalisation. These exhibitions, along with international students’ initiatives, have been aimed at a broader national and international audience for the history of the Holocaust in Serbia, and in particular for Staro Sajmište as a place closely connected to the annihilation of Serbian Jews.^[48]

Looking towards Bosnia, there are very few studies on the history of the Holocaust to be detected in recent years. Among the most comprehensive works is Eli Tauber’s ‘Holocaust in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, focusing on the legal and economic changes after 1941, on anti-Jewish incidents in various Bosnian cities, as well as on numerous concentration, detention, and transit camps that existed in the Independent State of Croatia.^[49]Tauber works for the Institute for the Research of Crimes against Humanity and International Law (Institut za istraživanje zločina protiv čovječnosti i međunarodnog prava), established in 1992 and associated with the University of Sarajevo. This institute focuses on the war in Bosnia from 1992-1995; yet, it has also published two further studies on the Holocaust, one of them comparing the Holocaust and the genocide of Bosnian Muslims during the Bosnian War in the 1990s.^[50] While on the whole, Bosnian academia in recent times has not contributed much in gaining a more profound understanding and knowledge of the Holocaust, Bosnian scholars have been focusing on comparative genocide studies, as a promising approach to the violent history of the 20th century in this region. Diverse ethnic and religious groups, among them the Bosnian Jews, were subject to persecution in Bosnia in the course of the 20th century, and with the genocide committed against Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995, such an approach in fact seems imperative. Albeit, retaining an explicit focus on the Holocaust remains a legitimate approach also with regard to Bosnian history, and if only because one needs to know one’s topic in order to compare it properly. To be sure, history politics, academia, and society as a whole need to approach the Holocaust, as well as its pre- and post-history, as an integral part of a society’s past. As the public debates in Croatia and Serbia illustrate, for the history of the Second World War in Yugoslavia it is very difficult to separate or to isolate Jewish suffering from the suffering of other victims, since mass murder and mass violence against all groups happened simultaneously, and more often than not in the same place. The idea to create institutions that research the Holocaust and other genocides simultaneously seems particularly pertinent in Bosnia, but could also be taken into account in Croatia and Serbia. An entangled approach is a necessity in the post-Yugoslav states, both in political and social terms. As the example of the Anne Frank exhibition vividly shows, projects focusing ‘only’ on one persecuted group always risk to evoke protest from representatives of other groups who feel neglected. Furthermore this negligence significantly varies in comparison to analogous debates in other contexts, such as Germany or the US, where the unique position of the Holocaust in the history of mankind has remained substantially unchallenged. This has occurred in spite of the many voices of other victim groups that have worked towards a more adequate recognition of their suffering.

In order to overcome ideologically motivated and rather blatant ‘competition’ among victims, sound scholarly research is very much needed. What is more, any adequate approach to the history of the Second World War (and the other wars in the region) would require joint commissions, institutions, and scholarly projects assembled by scholars in the successor states of Yugoslavia. The project to renew a former Yugoslav pavilion at Auschwitz-Birkenau, has proven how difficult and complex it is to find an appropriate mode how to represent the many victims. Since 2012, scholars from almost all post-Yugoslav states (except Kosovo), as well as from Germany, Austria, France and representatives of the UNESCO, have been coming together to discuss the conceptualisation of the new post-Yugoslav pavilion. Annual meetings have been held and the discussions have been going on without finding any concrete solution so far.^[51]

Although there is still no new, post-Yugoslav exhibition in Auschwitz-Birkenau, this international committee has the potential to serve as a role model for future cooperative ventures. In the least, a dialogue would be initiated and maintained that has been radically cut by the Yugoslav wars of dissolution in the 1990s. To give but another example, in January 2017 the Croatian prime minister Andrej Plenković announced that his government will install an international group of experts to examine the history of the Second World War, including that of Jasenovac. His statement came shortly after the mentioned incidents in Jasenovac and Šibenik, and immediately after his visit to Israel and Yad Vashem.^[52] Indeed, a thoughtfully composed group of international experts that includes historians from Serbia, Bosnia, and other post-Yugoslav states would be an important step towards a more fruitful reappraisal of the history of the Holocaust, as well as other genocides in this region.

What Attention Has the Holocaust in Yugoslavia Received in International Holocaust Research?

The analysis of the history of the persecution and extermination of Jews has expanded considerably in the German and English language historiographies since the 1990s. This is why—in this concluding section on international research contexts—they stand at the centre of attention. The German historian Peter Longerich stated that, due to extensive research over the past two decades, we are bound to have a ‘comprehensive picture of the mass murders in most of Europe’.^[53] Indeed numerous studies focused on the Holocaust in Eastern European territories, such as Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Estonia, Hungary, and the North Caucasus.^[54] Several important studies on the Holocaust in Greece were also published.^[55] The investigation of local dynamics, circumstances, and perpetrators does in fact add value to the knowledge of the systematic annihilation of European Jews. Significantly, these new investigation efforts were made possible by the opening of archives in Eastern Europe since the beginning of the 1990s. Particularly young scholars in Germany and the Anglosphere—equipped with the necessary linguistic skills—showed an interest in Eastern Europe.

Two German-language monographs on the systematic murder of Jews in Yugoslavia mark the two ends of the past two decades. In 1995, the Austrian political scientist Walter Manoschek published ‘“Serbia is Jew-free”. Politics of military occupation and the annihilation of Jews in Serbia’^[56] and in 2013, Alexander Korb published ‘In the shadow of the World War. The Ustasha’s mass violence against Serbs, Jews, and Roma in Croatia 1941-1945’.^[57] While Manoschek focused on the murder of Jews in Serbia and on the role of the Austrian members of the occupation forces in the genocide, Korb was comprehensively interested in mass violence in the Independent State of Croatia. The methodological potential of the more recent study lies in the connection between the murder of Jews and the more general history of genocide and violence in the Croatian context, which has never been attempted before. Korb combines findings of Holocaust research with methodological achievements of comparative genocide studies.^[58]While indeed several historians and sociologists have demanded that the Holocaust be examined in an interdisciplinary manner and as part of the great complexes of violence of the 20^th century, thus as one genocide among many,^[59] others have expressed their concerns about such an approach.^[60] The German historian Dieter Pohl aptly summarised the two sides of the coin. He, too, conceded that an integrative and comparative study of the Holocaust with other forms of violence committed within the national socialist sphere of influence—including the occupied territories—against the non-Jewish population indeed bears the potential to expand the knowledge about the dynamics of manifold violence.^[61] Nevertheless, he also saw how comparing ‘isolated cases of genocides’ bears the danger of ‘decontextualising’ the respective historical settings.^[62] The fact that the very concept of genocide is an elusive one, since it has constantly been redefined, makes it extremely difficult to compare the mass murder of the European Jews with, say, the mass murder of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire or the mass murder of the Tutsis in Rwanda. Contexts were too different to allow for an easy joint conceptual umbrella as ‘genocides’.^[63]

Alexander Korb’s approach is different, though. He looked at what he defined as a ‘space of violence’ (Gewaltraum)^[64] in the Independent State of Croatia. Rather than comparing mass murders set apart by time and space, he analysed mass violence against different groups in a single regional context. The difficulties inherent in this approach are immediately obvious: The mass murder of Serbs was an event in the context of the World War Two that pertained to Yugoslavia; the mass murder of Jews, however, was part of a general policy pursued by the Nazis and their allies throughout Europe. Thus, one would suspect that assessing the different motivations, dynamics, and courses of execution of violence against the persecuted groups in terms of one single ‘space of violence’, can only partially explain the highly complex process of the persecution of Jews in the Independent State of Croatia. Prewar antisemitism and a stepwise disfranchisement and marginalisation of the Jews need to be taken into account here too, as in other European settings, while their entanglement with processes of political radicalisation and low barriers towards violence may be an idiosyncrasy of the Yugoslav context. Therefore, it is conceptually difficult to study the Holocaust in a complex setting of mass violence even in one single context like the Independent State of Croatia.

Korb and Manoschek both approached their subjects of research from methodological standpoints current to their times. Some twenty years ago, Manoschek focused on the persecution apparatus and the perpetrators. The larger part of his study is devoted to the analysis and presentation of the system of persecution through which those responsible carried out the murder of Jews in Serbia. In the same vein, many other studies have focused on the national socialist persecution apparatuses and their diverse units. For example, a large number of studies was published on Nazi Germany’s military (Wehrmacht) and paramilitary organisation (Schutzstaffel, SS), including the security service agency (Sicherheitsdienst, SD), the security police (Sicherheitspolizei, Sipo), and their deployment troops (Einsatzgruppen).^[65] This examination of the persecution apparatuses triggered a scholarly interest in the actors ‘on the ground’ and on individual perpetrators. In the course of the 1990s, international historiography turned increasingly to perpetrator research (Täterforschung), which has since become a subdiscipline of Holocaust research.^[66] In Manoschek’s work on Serbia, too, in fact, important clues can be found in the examination of some individual perpetrators—mostly representatives of the military elite and so-called desk murderers (Schreibtischtäter).

The turn to historical subjectivities, to the ‘ordinary men’, as Christopher Browning called them in his groundbreaking study in 1993, has amplified the history of the Holocaust in a significant manner, developing new perceptions of who the perpetrators were.^[67] They were increasingly seen as autonomous actors, conscious of their actions and responsibilities. From then on, the focus was set on individual motivations, options for action, and the scope of decision-taking of perpetrators. Researchers in Germany and the Anglosphere have since published numerous biographies on the elites, the so-called desk murderers—like members of the SS, or the security police—as well as on the guards of concentration camps.^[68] The men and women who were on location and directly involved in the mass murder of the Jews were particularly difficult to identify. Some years ago, Angelika Benz and I published a volume on the various types of guards and the aspects of their daily life in concentration camps across Europe. The two studies on the Jasenovac camp and the Jastrebarsko camp in the Independent State of Croatia contained in this volume have remained until today the only studies written in German about the perpetrators in these camps,^[69]next to Carl Bethke’s study on the Volksdeutsche guards in the woman’s camp at Loborgrad in Croatia, published a few years earlier.^[70] Yet, more than fifty types of camps existed solely in the Independent State of Croatia, including detention camps, transit camps, women’s and children’s camps, and camps with the explicit goal of physical destruction. In Dalmatia, which was under Italian occupation until September 1943, still other types of camps existed.^[71] In fact, this great variety of settings alone seems to defy the argument that a biographical approach towards the perpetrators of the Holocaust is too narrow to fully grasp the sociopolitical contexts of the national socialist system.^[72] Indeed, the vast majority of Holocaust researchers value this approach, acknowledging that it has helped to better understand both the role of the individual and the circumstances that turned men and women into murderers.

Yugoslavia between 1941 and 1945 has thus rarely been part of Holocaust research carried out by scholars in Germany and the Anglosphere, be it with regard to the persecution apparatuses or the individual perpetrators on location. In addition to the publications previously mentioned, a number of further publications are relevant. These include Ben Shepherd’s study of the Wehrmacht in Serbia; Jonathan E. Gumz’s research article on the Wehrmacht in Croatia; and lastly, the American historian Mark Mazower pointed to the role of several German occupation institutions in the Yugoslav territories.^[73] Alas, well-grounded studies on the interactions of the German occupation institutions with the domestic Croatian and Serbian collaborationist forces, and on their activities and responsibility regarding the destruction of the Yugoslav Jews, have not been undertaken by international scholars.

Neither have the former Yugoslav territories received much attention over the past two decades when it comes to newly established research questions and methodological approaches in international Holocaust research—among them the pre-history and the aftermath of the Holocaust, economic dimensions (e.g. ‘aryanisation’), gender perspectives, the rescue of Jews, Jewish resistance, as well as oral and visual history. Some rare exceptions confirm the rule: As early as the beginning of the 1980s, Christopher Browning pointed out the significance of the Staro Sajmište camp for the German warfare, and in particular for the unleashing of the so-called ‘final solution’ in Europe.^[74] More recently, the English psychologist and sociologist Jovan Byford provided an important study on the Staro Sajmište camp, published in Serbian.^[75] Moreover, he has carried out significant critical research on the Serbians coming to terms with the Holocaust and antisemitism.^[76] Byford is the only scholar who has evaluated interviews with Serbian Holocaust survivors, thereby making a contribution to the otherwise neglected field of oral history in Holocaust research in the region.^[77] To be sure, this is not the first time interviews have been conducted with Holocaust survivors from Yugoslavia; rather it is that they just have never received due attention. Between 70,000 and 100,000 interviews, conducted primarily with Holocaust survivors by American research institutes, such as the Fortunoff Archive at Yale University, the Steven Spielberg Shoah Foundation, or the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, have fostered a victim-centred perspective within research. These databases include more than one thousand interviews conducted with Yugoslav Holocaust survivors. Their examination would enormously enrich our knowledge and presuppositions about the Jewish experience in the Yugoslav territories, including the individual experiences of persecution, discrimination, flight, detention, liberation, and the loss of family members.

In a similar manner, Yugoslav source materials could enrich the fairly recent approach to the Holocaust through visual history. Images and films as sources of their own value have evolved into a separate field of research. These sources do not only portray historical events but also provide information on the visibility of these events as well as the process of making them visible. Much could be gained from research into, for example, drawings and photographs of the Jasenovac camp and of Jews in the streets of Zagreb, Sarajevo, or Belgrade, as well as documentaries and motion pictures made after 1945. This visual documentation has supplementary value to written and oral sources; its critical analysis would provide new insights into the complex history of the Holocaust in this region. As a beginning, the Belgrade Professor for Film Studies Nevena Daković edited, in 2014, several important visual history studies on the Holocaust in Southeastern Europe.^[78]

Conclusion

Compared to other European regions, especially in Eastern Europe, the former Yugoslav territories have been covered only sparingly in international research on the Holocaust. The reasons are of diverse nature: a lack of interest by international Holocaust researchers in this (complicated) European area; a lack of the necessary linguistic skills; and, not least, a lack of data collected by local researchers, which could serve as a basis for a better inclusion in international research contexts. Due to the limitations faced by local researchers, younger scholars have been alienated from the topic. Certain limitations include lacking funds and poor academic infrastructures; other constraints are more visceral such as the way in which public debates have polarised society on issues pertaining to the Second World War. In fact, impulses and suggestions coming from within the region, which could be seized by non-local researchers and integrated into larger research contexts, have been close to nil. And vice versa: The younger generation of Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian scholars has scarcely incorporated approaches and stimuli existing in international research contexts on the Holocaust. This becomes all the more clear with the realisation that there are barely any new research projects, and consequently no new results, on this topic. What is more, considering the intense and highly politicised public polemics, choosing the Holocaust as a research topic is not attractive from the perspective of crafting a successful career in academia, either. All the more important it seems therefore that non-local scholars turn to the history of the Holocaust in the former Yugoslav territories. The combined efforts of both local and non-local researchers would substantially enhance our knowledge, whereby Holocaust Studies in this region could become part and parcel of the international research and teaching agendas. To name but a few topics in need of more research are: the complex contexts of violence; the interrelations between different perpetrators—locals and occupying forces—; the extraordinary pace of the annihilation; the brutality and primitive means of the mass murderers; and finally the quite unique role Yugoslav Jews played in the partisan units. Lastly, an increased awareness is needed in the region that the Holocaust—along with its prerequisites and consequences—does not only belong to Jewish history, but is an essential and comprehensive part of both the past and the present in the Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian societies, as also in the other societies in the region.

In summary and aside from the topics in need of more research, a number of promising conceptual approaches have been addressed in this paper, which can aid to increase awareness on the Holocaust in the region. First, I have suggested an approach that focuses on the commitment of Yugoslav Holocaust survivors and the impact of their work in terms of a conceptual history of what ‘survivor’ meant in (post-)Yugoslavia throughout time. Secondly, a thoughtfully composed group of international experts that includes historians from Serbia, Bosnia, and other post-Yugoslav states would be an important step towards a more fruitful reappraisal of the history of the Holocaust, as well as other genocides in this region. Finally, an approach complementing written with oral and visual sources would enormously enrich our knowledge, help test preconceptions regarding the Jewish experience, and provide more comprehensive critical analysis into the complex history of the Holocaust in this region.