The Historiography of the Holocaust

462 Florin Lobont
Tito’s authoritarian regime had banned any discussions of the various massacres
perpetrated by members of ethnic groups living in the reunified Yugoslavia. As
Robert Hayden points out:
The fascist [Croat]...state had both a policy and a well-developed practice
of genocide against Serbs, Jews and Gypsies, complete with concentration
camps and village massacres. Official Yugoslav historians after the war
declared that over 700,000 Serbs had been killed by the Ustaša....the actual
number of victims of the Ustaša may have been inflated.... Even so, the
view that the ‘Independent State of Croatia’ practiced genocide did not
receive serious public challenge within Yugoslavia until 1990. 81
With the fall of communism, the newly acknowledged massacres of the Ustaša
state’s troops and personnel by the communists in 1945 were used by the
Croat nationalists as a means of neutralizing the allegations about the Croat
mass murders. Basically, this aimed at contesting communists’ moral superiority
and credibility and at claiming victimhood, to which they appear to attribute
a redemptive function in this context. The goal of legitimizing the independent
post-communist Croatia was linked to justifying the Ustaša regime’s legal
statehood.
In societies accustomed to rituals of liturgical nationalism like those of former
Yugoslavia, one of the most powerful mechanisms of symbolic politics is the
‘transfiguration of the dead into martyrs’. 82 The whole Serbian-Croat polemic
has revolved around this drive to assert the martyrdom of one’s own ethnic
kin. In this bitter duel, the Jewish ordeal was used as a mere means of vilifying the
adversary. For example, ‘the Ustaša particularly were reviled...[and portrayed
as a] “genocidal people” [by the Serbians involved in the debate]...because of
their genocide against Jews, Serbs and Gypsies, and were seen as having been
worse than the Nazis in their cruelty’. But in the end, the point these arguments
want to make is one and the same: ‘“Ustaša crimes do not fade with time”...
“No people, except Serbs, has experienced such a Golgotha.”’ 83
In their turn, newly minted Croat nationalists endeavour to minimize the
Ustaša genocidal actions in order to parry the implications of communist postwar
historiography and portray the Ustaša state as simply another of history’s
brutal actors, with nothing particularly noteworthy or blameworthy about the
Croatian genocide. Moreover, claims like Tudjman’s went as far as grotesquely
attributing responsibility for the Holocaust to Jews themselves.
Serbia itself was not devoid of antisemitism under Miloševic. Self-victimizing
conspiratorial diatribes attributed the pariah status of the state not to the
aggression and ethnic cleansing ordered by the Serbian leadership against Muslims
and Albanians, but to a conspiracy set up by Germany, the Vatican and, of
course, the western media, dominated by Jews. 84