The Death Camps of Croatia: Visions and Revisions, 1941–1945 by Raphael Israeli (review)

Historiographic literature on the Second World War in Croatia has focused on the atrocities perpetrated against Jews, Serbs, and Roma by the Axis Powers and their local collaborators—the Ustaše, both Croats and Muslims, and the Volksdeutsche, Yugoslav citizens of German ancestry. The Četniks, a remnant of the Royal Serbian army, primarily hunted the Jews. Historians as well as survivors were eager to expose the atrocities so that people around the globe would know what had happened. Although there is a plethora of historiographic literature on the machinery of murder in the Serbian and Croatian death camps, it is plagued by disputes over the number of victims. Moreover, much of it is written to defend one or another ethnic perspective. Thus, Raphael Israeli writes that he came "to the mixed conclusion that the horrors of Jadovno and Jasenovac have to be reported to the public in some nonpartisan way." His intent to revisit the subject of Croatian death camps might seem a refreshing approach.

Israeli's actual text consists of 194 pages, comprising a foreword, an introduction, and eight chapters: "The German Expansion into the Balkans"; "The Roots of the Ustaše Regime"; "The Jadovno Complex"; "The Middle East Connection": "The Muslim Connection and Haj Amin al-Husseini"; "Jasenovac: The Routinization of Mass Murder"; "The Suppression of War Memories and Their Reemergence"; and "Summary and Conclusions."

Unfortunately, the book fails to provide new insights into the conflict between the Serbs and Croats, neither about the wartime atrocities nor about the number of victims. Because Israeli does not know Serbo-Croatian, his bibliography lacks primary sources, including diaries, memoirs, contemporary newspapers, and interviews with those who experienced these years. The book is based essentially on secondary sources, predominantly books written or translated into English (pp. 191–193). Israeli's unfamiliarity with Serbo-Croatian also results in frequent misspellings of individuals' names and locations.

The Death Camps of Croatia loses focus on its stated subject when it ventures from wartime Yugoslavia and its concentration camps to present-day conflicts. In particular, by introducing a totally irrelevant Middle East connection with a follow-up on the Muslim connection and Haj-Aminal-Husseini, it needlessly confuses readers. Despite Israeli's intent to relate his subject to current issues, his chapter "The Suppression of War Memories and Their Reemergence" largely ignores the current situation in Croatia. Although Josip Broz Tito's regime restricted the use of official archives to a few select historians, the situation has long been much different. After the Yugoslav wars of separation in the 1990s, the Croatian state archives in Zagreb were opened to the public. Microfilms of all the Holocaust-related documents are available at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Scholars who are interested and know Serbo-Croatian or have local researchers are able to benefit from these materials.

Moreover, Israeli frequently misstates or misinterprets passages from other authors. For example, he cites my book When Courage Prevailed (2012) in discussing the rescue of Jews by Serbs (pp. 41–42 n. 24); however, that book's focus is the rescue of Jews by Croats. Israeli provides no page number for his citation. Another note (p. 42 n. 11) cites an Internet link (http://www14.brinkster.com/philayu/SR/serbia3.htm) to a display of Serbian stamps, which is unrelated in any apparent way to the text, which compares Milan Nedić (the acute accent over the 'c' is missing in Israeli's book), a Serbian general in the former Yugoslav royal army whom the Nazis appointed to head occupied Serbia and support their plan to exterminate the Jews, to the Serbian Partisans who shielded the Jews (42 n. 11).

These problems and scores of others lead one to wonder about what motivated Israeli, a professor of Islamic, Chinese, and Middle Eastern history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to "set straight" the historical account of Croatia's...