JU-I (Amselfeldrede –Izetbegovic –Tudjman) 1. Ich ... - Labournet

claim you unfortunately misinformed your American audience. Yugoslavia had about 70,000
Jews before the WWII. About 4,500 of those, or more than 6 percent of the total Jewish population,
took part in the national liberation war. That means that the participation of Jews in the
antifascist struggle was proportionally larger than that of any other nation on the territory of
ex-Yugoslavia.
You tried to convince your American audience that Kuna is an appropriate choice for the name
of the Croatian currency. You said: "I personally do not see that as a connection with the
fascist period." Ustashe ISC was just the first state to name the Croatian currency Kuna. But
what sort of connection could that have with our "most democratic country in Europe" [a common
phrase in the Croatian press, referring to Croatia].
Commemoration of the 50 years since the liberation of Auschwitz has recently taken place in
Poland. Eli Wiesel, Nobel Prize winner, and, as you said, your friend from the death march in
January of 1943 took part in the commemoration. you quoted his words: "To forget is to kill
the victims for the second time. We could not stop their death the first time round. We must
not allow them to be killed again." Don't you also find intolerable the rehabilitation of Ustashe
ISC, which was until the last moment of the Third Reich its ally in the most horrendous
genocide in history?
The author is a writer and translator, ex-secretary of Croatian PEN and a longtime member of the Jewish Community
Council in Zagreb
(‹www.balkan-archive.org.yu/kosta/ndh/ndh-trpimir.html ›; erläuternde Einfügungen in eckigen
Klammern von der Website).
NAZI NOSTALGIA IN CROATIA ‹www.emperors-clothes.com›
by Diana Johnstone - Sept. 6, 1999
When I visited Croatia three years ago, the book most prominently displayed in the leading
bookstores of the capital city Zagreb was a new edition of the notorious anti-Semitic classic,
"The Protocols of the Elders of Zion". Next came the memoires of the World War II Croatian
fascist Ustashe dictator Ante Pavelic, responsible for the organized genocide of Serbs, Jews
and Romany (gypsies) that began in 1941, that is, even before the German Nazi "final solution".
However, if the Croatian fascists actually led, rather than followed, the German Nazis down
the path of genocide, that doesn't mean they have forgotten their World War II benefactors.
After all, it was thanks to Hitler's invasion of Yugoslavia that the "Independent State of Croatia"
was set up in April 1941, with Bosnia-Herzegovina (whose population was mostly Serb
at the time) as part of its territory. And the hit song of 1991, when Croatia once again declared
its independence from Yugoslavia and began driving out Serbs, was "Danke Deutschland" in
gratitude to Germany's strong diplomatic support for Zagreb's unnegotiated secession.
In the West, of course, one will quickly object that the Germany of today is not the Germany
of 1941. True enough. But in Zagreb, with a longer historical view, they are so much the same
that visiting Germans are sometimes embarrassed when Croats enthusiastically welcome them
with a raised arm and a Nazi "Heil!" greeting.
So it should be no surprise that this year's best seller in Croatia is none other than a new edition
of "Mein Kampf ". This is not a critical edition, mind you, but a reverently faithful reproduction
of the original text by that great European leader, benefactor of Croatian nationalism
and leader of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler.
The magazine "Globus" reported that "Mein Kampf " is selling like hotcakes in all segments
of Croatian society. For those who want to read more, there is a new book entitled "The Protocols
of Zion, the Jews and Adolf Hitler" by Mladen Schwartz, leader of the Croatian neo-
Nazi party New Right, and "Talks with Hitler" by the Fuhrer's aide Hermann Rauschnig, as
well as various other memoires celebrating the Ustashe state whose violent massacres of Serbs
shocked the Italian fascist allies and even German diplomatic observers at the time.
The dissident Croatian writer Predrag Matvejevic, who has Italian citizenship, has sent the Ri-
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