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September 2016
Nazi-Hunter Warns Croatia Over ‘Fascist Nostalgia’ The chief Nazi-hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Efraim Zuroff, told BIRN that the next Croatian government must confront politicians who try to rehabilitate the country’s World War II fascist regime. SVEN MILEKIC | BIRN | ZAGREB
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fraim Zuroff, who was vocal in his criticism of Croatia’s last centre-right government over its attitude towards the country’s WWII history, the Nazi-aligned Independent State of Croatia and the wartime Ustasa movement, said in an interview that the next administration must distance itself from the fascist past. “The Ustasa were mass murderers, genocidal, and basically don’t deserve any recognition or honour. They are an embarrassment to Croatia, not the pride of Croatia,” Zuroff, the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s Israel and Eastern Europe office, told BIRN during a visit to Zagreb. One of the main targets of his criticism was the controversial culture minister in the Croatian Democratic Union, HDZled government, Zlatko Hasanbegovic, who wrote for a fascist bulletin while he was a student in the 1990s. “There’s no room in theory for a person like him in the government of an EU country. This guy is a Ustasa supporter or sympathiser, whatever you want to call it,” Zuroff said. Hasanbegovic has rejected any suggestion that he sympathises with criminals: “I have never in any way been an apologist for any criminal regime, regardless of whether it was an Ustasa or Communist regime,” he said in February. But Zuroff insisted that if the HDZ-led government returns to power – as appears certain after last weekend’s elections – but does not deal with the Ustasa nostalgia within its ranks, then the problem could escalate and be further exacerbated by the country’s economic woes. He also pointed a finger at the EU, which he said should be more critical of Croatia, not only because Zagreb should uphold European values, but also because the distortion of WWII history is a wider problem in Central and Eastern Europe. “There is no question that this is not a problem that is unique to Croatia. The spread of Holocaust distortion has spread throughout Eastern Europe. In Baltic countries, in Hungary, in Romania, in Ukraine and Croatia - those are the main offenders,” he said. “The problem is, a country needs heroes. And many of these heroes in these post-communist countries fought against Communists, murdered Jews and Serbs during the Shoah [the Hebrew word for the Holocaust] and WWII, which in theory should disqualify them from being heroes, but that’s not the case,” he explained. Zuroff criticised the process of canonisation of the Croatian WWII Catholic Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac, who was legally rehabilitated in July by Zagreb county court, which quashed a Communist-era verdict convicting him of collaborating with Nazi Germany. “Any person that served the Ustasa re-
Efraim Zuroff. Photo: Sven Milekic/BIRN.
gime doesn’t deserve that honour [canonisation],” he argued. He also suggested that people who claim that fascist crimes were no different from Communist crimes were seeking to “free themselves from their responsibility for the Holocaust crimes”. In Croatia, the deaths at the Ustasa-led Jasenovac concentration camp are often compared to the killings of Ustasa and NDH prisoners and civilians by Yugoslav Partisan forces who were bringing them back from the Austrian municipality of Bleiburg in May 1945. Between 1941 and 1945, Serbs, Jews, Roma and Croatian anti-fascists were killed at Jasenovac by the Ustasa. The Jasenovac Memorial Site has managed to name 83,145 victims of the camp, while the total death toll is generally believed to be between 100,000 and 110,000. After Ustasa and NDH forces - as well as other Yugoslav forces that collaborated with the fascists - surrendered to the British Army at Bleiburg, the Communist Partisans killed an unknown number of them, along with an unknown number of civilians who were accompanying them. In Yugoslav times, victims’ families gathered at Bleiburg to commemorate the dead, but also partly to praise the fallen NDH, making it a symbolic place for Croatian right-wingers. After Croatia became independent from Yugoslavia, the state started to use the event to officially commemorate the crimes. Zuroff however cautions that “Bleiburg is not Jasenovac” because some of the prisoners who were killed on the way back from Austria were Nazi collaborators. “So this whole business is simply an attempt to relativise everything,” he argued. Pseudo-historians and far-right media in Croatia have also tried to minimise the scale of the crimes committed at Jasenovac. A documentary film released earlier this year, ‘Jasenovac - The Truth’ by Croatian director Jakov Sedlar, again questioned the
Memorial at the site of the former Jasenovac concentration camp. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Bern Bartsch.
“The Ustasa were mass murderers, genocidal, and basically don’t deserve any recognition or honour. They are an embarrassment to Croatia, not the pride of Croatia,” Zuroff, the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s Israel and Eastern Europe office, told BIRN during a visit to Zagreb. death toll at the concentration camp. Zuroff said that this was possible because there has never been “an authorised joint international commission that would investigate the crimes” in order to establish the total number of victims.
He believes that one of the most positive things Croatia has done in dealing with its troubled past was securing the extradition of Dinko Sakic, the former Ustasa commander at Jasenovac, from Argentina in 1998 and putting him on trial. Sakic was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2000 for the murder of 2,200 people. “Regarding his case, I would raise a different issue. For some reason, he was not tried for genocide. That’s a political decision. But… the truth of the manner is that only successful criminal prosecution of a Nazi war criminal in Eastern Europe… was the Sakic case,” Zuroff said, mentioning two other cases in Lithuania in which fascist criminals were convicted but never served their sentences. However he expressed concerns that Croatia was regressing, citing the popularity of nationalist singer Marko Perkovic Thompson, who uses the Ustasa chant ‘Za dom spremni’ (‘Ready for the Home(land)’) in his songs. Thompson also performs a song called ‘Jasenovac and Gradiska Stara’, in which Ustasa crimes are directly praised, while his fans often chant anti-Serb slogans at his concerts and some wear Ustasa insignia. “If Thompson is the most popular singer in Croatia, you know something is wrong here. If people come to his concerts with those Ustasa caps, then something is wrong,” Zuroff said. At the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jersusalem, Zuroff pursues Nazis and their collaborators who were responsible for war crimes during WWII. “There are hundreds of Nazi war criminals who are still alive, who can be brought to justice, but almost all of them won’t be brought to justice and the reason is that there is only one country which is actively doing anything to bring Nazis to justice and that’s Germany,” he said. He explained that Germany’s success in prosecuting war criminals arises from changes in the country’s prosecution policies; anyone who served in a Nazi death camp or was a member of SS death squads can now be automatically convicted of “at least [being an] accessory to murder”. Before these changes, a court had to prove that an individual crime was committed against a specified victim or victims. He said that this was why the Croatian former Auschwitz guard Jakob Denzinger evaded prosecution and died without being brought to justice in the Croatian city of Osijek in February this year. “The Germans notified Mladen Bajic, who at that time was Croatian state attorney. They [the Croatian state attorney’s office] initiated the investigation and investigated him [Denzinger], but the law didn’t change in Croatia and the prosecution policy did not change in Croatia,” Zuroff said. “If that person was in Germany, he could be prosecuted, but he couldn’t be prosecuted in Croatia.”