Croatian Ustashi victims pictures

[michael mills]

I have a question about the statistics.

It is stated that 530,000 Serbs died during the war, of which 131,000 died in Croatia, ie 399,000 died elsewhere.

It is stated that 192,000 Croats died, of which 106,000 died in Croatia, ie 86,000 died elsewhere.

Where did the Serbs and Croats die who did not die in Croatia?

Does the reference to "Croatia" include Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was part of the Ustasha Croatian state?

I suspect it does not, and that the 86,000 Croats who did not die in Croatia and the vast majority of the 399,000 Serbs who did not die in Croatia actually were inhabitants of Bosnia-Herzegovina and met their deaths there.

I would think that the vast majority of the 530,000 Serbs who died were killed in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina by forces of the Ustasha State, both Croat and Serb, as part of the "ethnic cleansing" of that area that was carried out contrary to the wishes of the German and Italian occupiers. The much smaller number of Serbs killed in Serbia were victims of the German Army.

But who killed the 192,000 Croats? I suppose some of them were killed by Serb nationalist forces (the "Chetniks") in reprisal actions, and some by Tito's partisans, the bulk of which were ethnic Serbs from Bosnia and Croatia who had fled the "ethnic cleansing" (the Communist leaders were however more often Croat), in the course of the fighting against the Ustasha.

In any case, it is good to see that the exaggerations and distortions of the Tito era are now being revised downward. One reason for that is that those exaggerations and distortions were all in one direction, unfairly loading the guilt onto ethnic Croats, who then had a vested interest in seeking revision.

I wonder if similar revision has been undertaken of similar post-war claims, especially those made by the Soviet Union. I guess that in modern Russia, in contrast with Croatia, there is no-one with a vested interest in such a revision.

One interesting aspect of the revisionism being carried out in the former Yugoslavia is the role ascribed to the camp at Jasenovac, in Bosnia. That camp, run by the wartime Croatian Government, used to be called the "Yugoslav Auschwitz", and was presented as a place of mass-extermination, at which hundreds and thousands of Serbs and Jews had been burned in giant incinerators.

Now the view is that the number of victims of that camp was far smaller, and that it was not really an extermination camp. Most of the people killed by the Ustasha did not die in camps, but were killed in their villages.

A revealing anecdote, told by the Croatian socialist leader, Vladko Macek, who was imprisoned in Jasenovac for his opposition to the Pavelic regime.

Macek was a witness to the atrocities committed by the camp commandant, but also noted that he was a pious Catholic who prayed every night. He decided to tackle the commandant about the conflict between his religious faith and the crimes he was committing.

When Macek asked the commandant whether he was afraid of divine judgement for what he was doing, the commandant answered: "I know that I will burn in Hell for what I have done to the Serbs - but at least I will burn for Croatia!"

That's nationalism for you.

[Roberto]

Genocide in Satellite Croatia during the Second World War

Menachem Shelah

The state of Croatia, the subject of this essay, no longer exists. It was a short-lived German satellite, set up by the Germans and the Italians after the collapse of Yugoslavia in April 1941. It encompassed the former provinces of Croatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina. The number of its inhabitants was approximately 6.5 million, of whom 3.3 million (51 percent) were Croats (Roman Catholics); 2 million (30 percent), Serbs (Pravoslavs); 0.7 million (11 percent), Moslems; 45,000 (0.7 percent), Jews; 27,000 (0.3 percent) Gypsies and other minorities, such as Germans, Hungarians, etc.
The leaders of the so-called Independent State of Croatia were members of the prewar Croatian ultranationalistic terror organization called “Ustasha.” The Ustasha movement, because of its uncompromising and violent attitude towards the Yugoslav state, had been outlawed. Many of its members found refuge in fascist Italy, which gave them some political and military backing, depending on the fluctuations of Italian Balkan policy.
A prominent intellectual and Ustaha ideologue, A. Seitz, proclaimed that “the bell tolls. The last hour of those foreign elements, the Serb and the Jew, has arrived. They shall vanish from Croatia. It shall be done by the army and the Ustasha movement.” Similarly, a Ustasha priest, the Reverend Dijonizije Jurichev, said:

In this country, no one can live except Croatians. We know very well how to deal with those that oppose conversion [to the Roman Catholic faith]. I personally have put an end to whole provinces, killing everyone – chicks and men alike. It gives me no remorse to kill a small child when he stands in the path of the Ustasha.

No wonder the local press coined the slogan (it rhymes in the original) “Serb, crawl or perish!” (Ili se pokloni ili ukloni).
There is usually a certain discrepancy between ideology and praxis, between words and deeds. But alas, it was not so in this case. The Ustasha acted brutally and shamelessly on their declarations. Genocide of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies, was the first, foremost and most consistent item on their political agenda. Wholesale massacres of the Serbian population commenced in Croatia even before the consolidation of Ustasha power, and continued until its collapse in May 1945. It began in mixed regions such as Lika and Kordun. There the local Croatian inhabitants, led by Ustasha members, killed their Serb neighbors, pillaged Serb property, burned Serb houses, and raped Serb women. It is almost unbelievable that people of the same ethnic origin, speaking the same language, living together for generations, could turn on one another in such a terrible way. Despite the religious discord between the Serb Pravoslavs and the Croat Roman Catholics, and despite the pent-up political grievances from the Yugoslav period, the intensity and brutality are inexplicable in rational terms. As the French historian Jacques Sabille wrote:

The Ustasha bands spread terror throughout the countryside, directed against Serb Orthodox Christians and Jews. Whole families were murdered, towns were completely gutted, terrible acts of sadistic cruelty were perpetrated … The Ustasha chapter written in the summer of 1941 was one of the most gruesome in the history of the World War II, which is saying a lot.

Today there are Croat emigrant circles whose members claim such statements are sheer Communist propaganda intended to smear the Croat nation and hamper its fight for liberation. As a professional historian I can assure you that the account set forth in this essay is based on massive documentation and contemporary evidence, most of it from Nazi German, Fascist Italian, and Ustasha Croat sources.
It is very difficult to give the precise number of Serb men, women and children killed by the Croats. It depends very much on whom you include among the victims. Do you count only those killed outright in the murder orgy in the first months: those butchered by knife, thrown into deep ravines in the mountains, burned alive in Pravoslav churches and their homes? Or do you also include the thousands who died in the big expulsions, perished from hunger, exposure, and epidemics in the camps on their way into exile? By a rough calculation, the number of Serbs killed in Croatia reaches the 200,000 mark in the first year of Ustasha rule, about 10 percent of the Serb population in Croatia. During that period, special attention was given by the Ustasha to members of the Serbian elite. The percentage of murdered Serbian doctors, lawyers, teachers, priests and intellectuals was much higher than the average. In that manner the Ustasha tried to destroy potential Serbian leadership.
As a consequence of the widespread terror, in many parts of Croatia total anarchy prevailed. The Serbs, with whatever arms they had, tried to defend themselves and the country was plunged into a state of civil war. It was perfectly clear, at least to the Germans and the Italians stationed in Croatia, that continuation of the Ustasha rampage could jeopardize their rule and encourage the growing resistance movement.
Moreove, the Italians took advantage of the situation and helped the Serbs against the Ustasha to enlarge their territorial domain in Croatia. Hitler, in his meetings with Minister of War Slavko Kvaternik in July 1941, and with the Ustasha “Führer” Ante Pavelic in June 1941, encouraged him in their genocide of the Serbs and, of course, Jews. Hitler said that if Croatia wanted to exist, her policy in the next fifty years must be one of “national intolerance”.
The Germans stationed in Croatia were aware that the Ustasha rampage and anarchy could damage German interest in Croatia and push the harassed Serbs into the resistance movement. In their messages to Berlin the Germans emphasized the “unorganized” and “uncivilized” manner of the Ustasha killings while at the same time firing squads of the German Army stationed in Serbia executed thousands of Serbs and Jews in a much more “civilized” way.
After a few months of indiscriminate killings, even the Ustasha government realized that the so-called Serb question in Croatia could not be solved by total annihilation. They started to look for other ways and means, including legal harassment. In an avalanche of laws (many of them affecting Jews and Gypsies as well), the Ustasha tried to isolate, pauperize, and collectively outlaw the Serb minority. By prohibiting the Serbs from taking part in most economic enterprises, appointing Croat commissars in Serb factories and shops, imposing collective fines on the community, and so on, they denied the Serb minority their livelihood. Other laws prohibiting Serb residence in certain neighborhoods and imposing restriction on movement and curfews turned the Serbs into pariahs without any legal protection. But even then the Serbs did not vanish from Croatia. “Let the Serbian horde run to Serbia,” decided the Ustasha leadership. But the Ustasha couldn’t simply drive hundreds of thousands of people into territory governed by their German allies. The German military administration in Serbia vehemently opposed that plan on practical grounds, such as lack of food and accommodations. At last some sort of agreement was reached. The Croatians agreed to take in a few hundred thousand Slovenes from annexed Slovenia, and the Germans would accept the expelled Serbs. The eviction campaign commenced, and whole districts (mainly in northwestern Bosnia, near the Serb border) were made Serbrein.
These forced expulsions were carried out in an especially unpleasant manner. Thousands upon thousands of women, children and elderly people were cruelly herded into transit camps without proper arrangements for food or hygienic facilities. Epidemics such as typhus raged and killed thousands. The people were totally denuded of their belongings and, on arrival in Serbia, were left on their own. During the first year of Ustasha rule, around 200,000 Serbs were expelled from their homes and thrown into Serbia. Then in the beginning of 1942, the German authorities in Belgrade, for their own reasons, stopped this appalling exodus. Another solution to the Serbian question was blocked. And all that time, some of the Ustasha leaders and “intellectuals” had kept an ace up their sleeves. Mladen Lorkovitch, the Croat minister of foreign affairs, formulated it like this: “In Croatia, we can find few real Serbs. The majority of Pravoslavs are as a matter of fact Croats who were forced by foreign invaders to accept the infidel faith. Now it’s our duty to bring them back into the Roman Catholic fold.” In short, the Ustasha decided that whoever might fight them must be forced to join them. With tacit local (and Vatican) ecclesiastical approval, a most energetic and brutal conversion campaign began. Catholic priests, escorted by armed Ustashas, descended on Serb towns and villages and in a matter of hours converted hundreds of “lost” Pravoslav souls. Taking into account that the alternative was death or imprisonment, the outstanding success of the crusade is perfectly understandable. Those “dedicated” Catholic priests were ordered to deny the benefit of conversion to Serb intellectuals and community leaders and instead to hand them over to the proper authorities to be killed or incarcerated in concentration camps. In this manner about a quarter of a million Serbs were converted during 1941 and 1942.
As a result of the Ustasha genocide, the local Serbs tried both to defend themselves and to take revenge. The country was plunged into civil war. Partisans and bands of resistance armies roamed the woods and mountains. Thus, a very complex situation developed in Yugoslavia during the Second World War. The Ustasha Serbophobia was transformed in that context into “the fight for Croat national independence.” The atrocities perpetrated by almost everybody in 1942 were part of the fighting that was going on among all kinds of groupings. For instance, the terrible genocide of the Serb civil population of the Kozara District during the summer of 1942, in which the current Austrian President Kurt Waldheim took part, was a collective Ustasha-German enterprise that was part of an anti-partisan drive. The whole population of the district – about 60,000 persons – was driven on foot to the notorious Jasenovac concentration camp, where most of the men were killed outright, the women sent to Germany, and the children – 20,000 of them – killed or dispersed throughout Croat orphanages.
The Ustasha government of the Independent State of Croatia undoubtedly initiated, prompted, organized, implemented and carried out a policy of genocide against the Serb population of Croatia. It did so by wholesale killings, massive expulsions, forced conversions, and deliberate forcing of unlawful legislation, imprisonment and bodily and spiritual damage.
The Ustasha also took part in the extermination of a group whose terrible fate during the Nazi period has scarcely been mentioned in the history of this period. One reason is that the documentary and oral evidence is scarce. Only a few German and satellite documents specifically mention the murder of Gypsies; they are part of the whole picture, a nomadic, so-called asocial group that had no place in the New Order. In Croatia the fate of the Gypsies was particularly cruel. The local Ustasha didn’t need German help to do the job. They carried out the Gypsy killings on their own. By a rough estimate, out of 27,000 Croat Gypsies, more than 26,000 were murdered. Some of them tried to save their lives by cooperating with the Ustasha as grave diggers and helpers in the mass killings, but in the end they too were murdered.
As a historian I am obligated to certain standards of objectivity. But in this case my objectivity was jeopardized by the fact that I am a Croatian Jew, on of the very few Jews of that country who escaped the Ustasha killers. Can I possible present the case of genocide in that country without compromising the Croat side? It is for you to decide, but let me remind you that before me stood the modest maxim, “Facts are facts are facts.” And in my opinion the facts are true, their historical and moral impact is clear, and their contemporary importance is enormous. I would like to finish with these line written by Auden:

Look at Brueghel’s painting of Icarus for instance:
How everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Could we be like that ploughman? Can we sail calmly on ?

Published in: A Mosaic of Victims. Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis, edited by Michael Berenbaum, 1990 New York University Press, pages 74-79.

[Roberto]

As mentioned in the previously quoted article, the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) comprised the provinces Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina of former Yugoslavia.

According to Croatian historian Vladimir Zerjavic, a total of 322,000 Serbs lost their lives during World War II on the territory of the NDH. 217,000 of these are categorized by Zerjavic as “victims of fascist terror”. The figure seems to be composed of the following partial figures:

Taken to the German camp Sajmiste in Belgrade: 20.000
Died of typhus: 25.000
Killed by Germans: 45.000
Killed by Italians: 15.000
Killed in fights with ustashas, chetniks, and Partisans: 34.000
Killed in ditches, prisons and other camps: 28.000
Killed in Jasenovac camp: 50.000
Total: 217.000

Killed by Germans and Italians: 80.000
Killed in Ustaha prisons and camps: 78.000
Killed in fights with ustashas, chetniks, and partisans: 34.000
Died of typhus: 25.000
Total: 217.000

The above figures were taken from Zerjavic’s article “The Inventions and Lies of Dr. Bulajic on Internet”, to be found under

http://www.hr/darko/etf/bul.html

[Serbisches-Freiwilliger]

Ok, first of all, i dont think that an American expert in ww2 can be better then the Yugoslav experts (atleast for the territory of yugoslavia). Besides your figures are all wrong. You can find it even in the Croatian literature that 1.600.000 people died in Yugolsavia. More then a million were Serbs, only a few hundred thousand were Croatian or Muslim.

Are you trying to tell me that the chetniks were killing Muslims and Croats before the German ocupation?

As for that quote, its a total bullshit. The whole book is a big lie, i wont even comment it.

As for the expelled Italians, I never sad that they were expelled during ww2. They were however expelled after the war. You dont actually bellive that Serb partisans expelled Itlaians from Dalmatia, Istra do you?
At the end of the war many Ustashis moved to the partisan side, so guess what were they doing.

Miller, as i allready sad i just posted the link so that you could see the picts.

[HS]

Ok, first of all, i dont think that an American expert in ww2 can be better then the Yugoslav experts (atleast for the territory of yugoslavia). Besides your figures are all wrong. You can find it even in the Croatian literature that 1.600.000 people died in Yugolsavia. More then a million were Serbs, only a few hundred thousand were Croatian or Muslim.

Are you trying to tell me that the chetniks were killing Muslims and Croats before the German ocupation?

As for that quote, its a total bullshit. The whole book is a big lie, i wont even comment it.

As for the expelled Italians, I never sad that they were expelled during ww2. They were however expelled after the war. You dont actually bellive that Serb partisans expelled Itlaians from Dalmatia, Istra do you?
At the end of the war many Ustashis moved to the partisan side, so guess what were they doing.

Miller, as i allready sad i just posted the link so that you could see the picts.

Offcours American expert ( history professor) 'can be better' , its a question of bias as most of Yugoslav/Serb experts have been instructed to follow official line.
As far as Croatian literature goes , read the work done by Croatian historian Vladimir Zerjavic in that link provided by Roberto.
Chetniks were doing their killing about the same time as Ustashe.This is what happens in a brutal ethnic civil war.

I'm realy amused by your statement that 'many Ustashis moved to partisan side" , if you mean Domobrani ( Home Guard) yes some were conscripted by partisans but domobrani were never Ustashe.
Besides at the end of the war when the Germans and the Ustashe were in retreat many of your chetniks joined up with partisans , whole brigades.

Interesting to read from "A Mosaic of Victims. Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis" provided by Roberto on the Kozara episode where Ustashe and Germans undertook that campaign against local Serb population.
There was an 'ethnic cleansing' incident that took place prior to this and can be descibed as example of Chetnik terror on non Serb population in Bosnia , from
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Cabi ... story1.htm

In the beginning of April 1941, Yugoslavia disintegrated, and the Prijedor, Sanski Most and Kljuc areas joined the Independent State of Croatia. The area around the Sana and Vrbas rivers included the Sana-Luka Zupanijas (districts of a "zupan" or prefect), with its administrative, political seat in Banja Luka.

From mid 1941 until the end of the war, local Serbs were organized in Chetnik or Partisan units. They committed mass crimes and initiated the "ethnic cleansing" of the local non-Serb population.

On May 16, 1942, Serbian Partisans from the Kozara Mountain killed over 1,100 residents of Prijedor, exclusively Muslims and Catholics. Some 400 residents were buried in a mass grave near the Prijedor church, while the other bodies lay scattered in Cela, Gomjenica, Hambarine, Crna Dolina, Kozarac, Majkovaca and other villages. All of the victims were brutally tortured and massacred, especially state officials, prominent citizens and their family members. This brutal conduct culminated in the murder of the Mayor of Prijedor, Miralembeg Kapetanovic. Serbian gangs were known for their massacres, tortures, looting and extortion. The main perpetrators of these crimes were the Communists Mile Rajlic and Pero Glamoca. The first was a Partisan commander, and the latter a member of the secret service.

In the autumn of 1942, Serbian Communists from the village of Rasavci, led by Jovo Bobovic, tricked an entire Croatian Home Guard unit (regular Croatian army in World War I and II) into surrendering and then slaughtered them, along with more than half of the villagers (among whom there were many women and children) of Alisici. They tortured the old village khoja, Alija Alisic, and slaughtered him on the threshold of his mosque. Then they looted and burnt the whole village.

The Partisans from the Kozara and Grmec Mountains along with the Chetniks from Manjaca cleansed the cities of Kljuc, Prijedor, and Sanski Most, and the nearby villages of Croatian Catholics and Muslims in the name of Yugoslavianism and internationalism. Amongst the numerous documents which clearly described the fundamental aspects and aspirations of the Serbian program, the "Order by the Supreme Commander of the "Serbian Royal Army", Chetnik Draza Mihajlovic", dated May 1942, defined the nature of their military campaign. The Order consisted of six articles:

Article 4: All non-Serb national minorities in New Yugoslavia must be destroyed.

Article 5: Muslims and Croats from Sandzak and BosniaHerzegovina must be destroyed.

Article 6: ALL Muslims and Ustashas (i.e. all Croats) who have offended the Serbian nation must be exterminated. I CALL ON ALL SERBS AND PARTISANS TO FOLLOW ME IN THIS GLORIOUS STRUGGLE FOR OUR KING AND OUR COUNTRY.

The Chetnik massacres against the non-Serb population in this area escalated in the summer of 1943 when the Bosanska Krajina Chetnik Corps was formed. The Corps included the notorious Chetnik regiment "Manjaca" and the Chetnik units "Petar Kocic" i "Kralj Petar II" (King Peter II), led by the Chetnik Vojvoda (Chetnik officer), Uros Drenovic, from Sitnica near Kljuc. Prior to this, he had been a Partisan. Among numerous crimes committed by the Chetniks in this area under the pretense of creating Nedic's (the leader of the Serbian Fascist government) "All-Serbia" were the murders of all Catholic villagers of Krnjeusa and Vrtoc near Bosanski Petrovac, on August 1941. Numerous Muslim villages were razed to the ground, their people slaughtered, as in Volari near Sipovo, Divulje near Bosanska Kostajnica, Agici near Banja Luka and others.

Crimes against the Croatian and Muslim populations culminated in the massacre of over 3,500 prisoners from Bleiburg Croatian Home Guardsmen and civilians - in Podgradci on the Kozara Mountain, on June 23, 1945 (the War ended on May 8, 1945).

[LuftStuka]

You can find it even in the Croatian literature that 1.600.000 people died in Yugolsavia.

Think he referring to Croatian books published after the war because that number seams too high (propaganda books)

Don’t understand why Serbisches-Freiwilliger insists or rejecting the truth when it is so clearly right in front of him. Guess it has to do with indoctrination, hatred; ignorance well not ignorance that may be a wrong word to use more like narrow mindless and acceptance of new ideas. Guess it due to the environment he grew up in

[sLOVEne]

You can find it even in the Croatian literature that 1.600.000 people died in Yugolsavia.

Think he referring to Croatian books published after the war because that number seams too high (propaganda books)

Don’t understand why Serbisches-Freiwilliger insists or rejecting the truth when it is so clearly right in front of him. Guess it has to do with indoctrination, hatred; ignorance well not ignorance that may be a wrong word to use more like narrow mindless and acceptance of new ideas. Guess it due to the environment he grew up in

I don't know how relevant or important this is, but Slovenian sources also claim numbers around that which date after independance. So Luftstuka, are these propaganda books as well? Also Western literature also claims that number, why refute it?

[David Thompson]

Let's see some source references on these figures.

[LuftStuka]

Slovene you misunderstood the point, the point is that all Balkan books tend to exaggerate in the numbers killed. If you read the hall post you would see that “Western” books state lover numbers of killed from credible scholars and historians not public books printed by the government! Slovenes books could tend to be bias too because they draw there info from old Yugoslav sources.

[Roberto]

Let's see some source references on these figures.

I can offer Prof. Christopher Browning:

During World War II, roughly 1.5 million Yugoslavs - 10 percent of the population - lost their lives. The demographic catastrophe occurred in many forms, but three were most prominent: (1) the genocidal massacres of the Nazi-sponsored Ustash regime in Croatia, (2) the veritable civil war between various ethnic groups and political movements in Yugoslavia unleashed by the German dismemberment of the country, and (3) the occupation policies of the German military itself aimed at crushing partisan resistance. If the German occupiers were indirectly responsible for the first two forms of bloodletting, they were directly responsible for the third.[...]

Source of quote: Christopher R. Browning, Germans and Serbs: The Emergence of Nazi Antipartisan Policies in 1941, in: A Mosaic of Victims. Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis. Edited by Michael Berenbaum. New York University Press, 1990.

However, the recent research of two historians working independently of each other, the Croatian Vladimir Zerjavic and the Serbian Dr. Bogoljub Kocovic, has come up with somewhat lower figures. Zerjavic concluded on an actual demographic loss (i.e. minus the effects of lower birth rate) of 1,696,000 and a death toll of 1,027,000 during the World War II years. Kocovic's figures are even lower. The figures established by both historians can be viewed under

http://www.hr/darko/etf/bul2.html

It seems that the postwar government of Yugoslavia equated the country's entire demographic loss between 1941 and 1945 with violent deaths resulting from war and atrocities.

[David Thompson]

Thanks Roberto! You're always good about giving your sources. Hopefully some of the newer members will follow the examples of you and the other, more knowledgable posters. Source references make the subject much easier to discuss.

[michael mills]

The statistical analyses by Kocovic and Zerjavic, to which a link was given by Roberto, are very interesting, and may provide a model for assessing similar losses in other countries.

First, they estimate what the population would have been in 1948 in the absence of wartime losses, based on the average population growth in the period. Then they deduct the actual population in 1948 to arrive at the demographic deficit.

The next step is to deduct from the total demographic deficit the losses due to emigration and natural decrease (excess of deaths over births caused by increased mortality and decreased natality). What remains is the estimated number of those actually killed in the war.

The most surprising fact is that both Kocovic and Zerjavic find that the number of killed was only a bit more than half the total demographic deficit. The main factor for that seems to have been the relatively large emigration, accounting for about one-third of the total demographic deficit. I would presume that most of that emigration consisted of refugees who fled with the German army at the end of the war, or shortly thereafter.

Another factor was natural decrease, accounting for about 15-17% of the demographic deficit.

The question is how far that model can be applied to demographic deficit occurring in other countries, eg the Soviet Union or Poland. One factor that might be different is the large contribution of emigration to the demographic deficit in the case of Yugoslavia; that was probably a minor factor in the case of the Soviet Union, and not so important in the case of Poland relative to Yugoslavia.

However, the impact of natural decrease was quite possibly similar across a number of countries, since the contributing factors would have been much the same.

If we take the Yugoslav experience as a model, then the impact of natural decrease can be quantified by taking it as a proportion of the expected population increase from the start of hostilities until the next measuring point.

In the case of Yugoslavia, the expected population increase from 1941 to 1948 was between 1.4 and 1.5 million. The estimated natural decrease was between 0.326 and 0.333 million, or about 20% of the expected population increase.

I would suggest that that proportion could be used as a ball-park figure for estimating losses due to natural decrease in other countries that suffered major losses during the war, eg Poland and the Soviet Union, and perhaps some others. That is, the expected population increase in those countries could be estimated, and the ball-park figure of 20% applied to it to arrive at an estimate of actual population losses due to natural decrease. That estimate would then have to be taken into account in arriving at an estimated for numbers actually killed.

[Roberto]

I would suggest that that proportion could be used as a ball-park figure for estimating losses due to natural decrease in other countries that suffered major losses during the war, eg Poland and the Soviet Union, and perhaps some others. That is, the expected population increase in those countries could be estimated, and the ball-park figure of 20% applied to it to arrive at an estimate of actual population losses due to natural decrease. That estimate would then have to be taken into account in arriving at an estimated for numbers actually killed.

Such considerations may have been applied already in establishing the death toll directly attributable to war and occupation in the countries mentioned, as opposed to the demographic loss. Let's look at Ukraine, for instance, where during Soviet times already there seems to have been a distinction between demographic loss on the one hand and the death toll of war and occupation violence on the other.

[...]Certainly the most painful loss to the Ukrainian nation during World War II was its people. The exact figures of those losses are not known; the best that we can do is to estimate on the basis of incomplete factual data. While doing that, we should keep in mind that when we speak of Ukrainian human losses, we speak of the decline of the population, which includes those who were killed as well as those who were evacuated or deported and never returned. Considering a total demographic picture of the Ukraine, we observe that in January 1941 the population was 41.9 million, of whom 14 million lived in the cities. By the end of the war in 1945, the total population had declined to 27.4 million and the city population consisted of only 7.6 million inhabitants. Hence, a loss of 14.5 million people. Other sources give somewhat lower figures, 13,614,000 and 11 million.
As far as human losses in terms of those killed, most estimates range between 5.5 million and 7 million. This includes some 600,000 Jews who fell victim to the German extermination policy.[my emphasis]
Table 12.1 conveys the magnitude of the Ukraine’s demographic losses.

Table 12.1
Estimates of Direct World War II Population Losses in the Ukraine

1. Ukrains’ka RSR v velykli vitchyz’nianii viini, vol. 3 (Kiev, 1969), p. 150
Civilian population losses: 3,898,457
Military personnel killed or died as POW: 1,366,588
Losses of Zakarpattia and Crimea: 250,059
Total: 5,515,104

2.a. Iu. V. Arutiunian. Sovetskoe krest’iantstvo v gody velikoi otechetvennoi voiny (Moscow, 1963), pp. 390, 392.
Losses in Ukrainian villages (working population): 2,500,000
2.b. Akademiia Meditsinskykh Nauk Ukrainskoi SSR, Ochet komissii po obsledovaniiu poter i sanitarnykh posledstvii voiny (Kiev, 1946), pp. 18, 19.
Losses in Ukrainian towns: 3,500,000
Total: 6,000,000

3. V.V.Shcherbyts’kyi, Radians’ka Ukraina, October 18, 1974
Total: 6,750,000

4. M.M. Palamarchuk, Ekonomichna heohrafiia Ukrains’koi RSR (Kiev, 1975), p. 80
Total “more than” 5,000,000

Source: Stephen G. Prociuk, “Human Losses in the Ukraine in World War I and II”, in The Annals of the Ukrainian Academy of Art and Sciences in the United States (New York, 1973-77), 13:36[...]

[Krasnaya Zvezda]

Look, I read every post here. I did not see that site with pictures from the victims and have no plan to see it. If you want to argue about the figures and validity of html links you can do so.

I think more important is that as Croatia was established as an independent country , the focus of the country became the extermination of Serbs, Gypsies and Jews. It tried to be a mirror image to Nazi Germany but only in areas of ruthlessness and violent persecution of other nations adding the so familiar Balkan brutality and sadism. As many as 350,000 to 450,000 victims were killed in Usta?e massacres and in the notorious concentration camp at Jasenovac and this is the most accepted number, quoted even in E. Britannica.

So, the point is that you have a state (Croatian) on one side with a state doctrine and mechanisms to enact the holocaust and such thing did not existed in Serbia or Serbian history against the Croats before WWII. It is only the Serbs, Jews , gypsies that suffered from a state organized holocaust and this can not be equated with killings in the civil war that was going in parallel between multiple Balkan fractions. The NDH was a state where genocide was encouraged unlike in the other Balkan states.

This may be off topic, but the understanding of this fact brings to light the the origins of events for the war in 90's in Yugoslavia. In former Yu after the WWII there was never (like anywhere else in communism) a trend like it existed in Germany of denazification , process where everything is put on the table, guilt admitted and peace established with the notion that it should never happen again. Instead, Ustase were told to be anti communists that were not supported by the Croats who wanted Yugoslavia and communism, and the same was told of Chetnicks. The results are the Serbs always felt oppressed by the Croats given the history where they always suffered from the State of Croatia (not the people) , guilts never admitted. So, it was impossible to secure the peace in the 90's. The whole process was never really understood well by the west, and that contributed to a major failure leading to blood shed Balkan style. As I see it is still not understood.

[viriato]

Krasnaya Zveda wrote:

Croatia was established as an independent country , the focus of the country became the extermination of Serbs, Gypsies and Jews.

Yet the first country to try to get rid of the Jews was Serbia and not Croatia. And at the end of the war it seems that there were more Jews surviving in Croatia than in Serbia