Corresponding author: Vjeran Pavlakovic (
The Jasenovac Concentration Camp prevails as one of the most potent symbols that continues to fuel ideological and ethno-national divisions in Croatia and neighboring Yugoslav successor states. We argue that mnemonic actors who distort the history, memory, and representations of Jasenovac through commemorative speeches, exhibitions, and political discourse are by no means new. The misuses of the Jasenovac tragedy, vividly present during socialist Yugoslavia, continue to the present day. Drawing upon the history of mediating Jasenovac as well as recent examples of commemorative speeches and problematic exhibitions, this article highlights some of the present-day struggles surrounding this former campscape.
In April 2019, as in the previous three years, Jewish, Serb, and antifascist organizations in Croatia boycotted the official annual commemoration for the victims of the Jasenovac concentration camp.
Jasenovac is a site of memory where the dominant narrative is not easily converted into political memory by the state, but rather is frequently contested by multiple actors. At the heart of these contestations are rival interpretations of the nation- and state-building processes invariably linked with the wars of the last century, and the problematic categorization (and mediation) of victims and perpetrators from these conflicts. Since Croatia’s entry into the European Union in 2013, various Croatian governments shifted the emphasis of their commemorative speeches from being part of the European Holocaust remembrance paradigm to allowing space for revisionist interpretations and even silencing of the commemoration (
While the cultural memory of Jasenovac has sparked numerous polemics within Croatia, politicians in Bosnia and Herzegovina (
On 5 May 2019, the highest government officials from Serbia and the
The manipulations and misuses of Jasenovac’s tragic past originated at the end of the Second World War and permeated socialist Yugoslavia. However, the distortions reached a new level in the second half of 1980s. A delegation of the Serbian Academy of Science and Art (
Both exhibitions, the second permanent exhibition and its travelling exhibition, are examples of how Serb nationalists instrumentalized and misused the cultural memory of the Jasenovac concentration camp, playing upon the traumas of the Croatian Serb population as justification for rejecting Croatian independence during the political crisis that engulfed Yugoslavia. The activities of the Jasenovac Memorial Site, including its problematic permanent exhibition, were also used for the abovementioned aims on behalf of
Moreover, the historiography dealing with the issue of Jasenovac underwent a number of different phases, beginning with the state-controlled historical discourse during socialist Yugoslavia. At the end of the 1980s and the early 1990s, historians in both Croatia and Serbia engaged in new, independent research, but the interpretations were strongly influenced by the predominant nationalist atmosphere. Although in the early 2000s historical research included comparative studies that drew upon a body of international Holocaust and genocide studies scholarship, in the past decade there has been a new wave of reactionary revisionism. Since there was virtually no independent historical research on Jasenovac that could yield a broader consensus among researchers until after 2000, perhaps a better term for the 1945–2000 period would be historical manipulations, as epitomized by the abovementioned exhibitions. In contrast, a new wave of drastic ´re-interpretation´ of Jasenovac’s history appeared in the last decade, which can be described as genuine historical revisionism, since it challenges facts around which there is already overwhelming consensus among experts (Odak, Benčić Kužnar and Lucić in press).
A good example of the latter was the recent exhibition “Jasenovac – The Right Not to Forget”, which was organized by the Serbian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and shown at the headquarters of the United Nations in New York on 25 January 2018. The main author and lead curator of the exhibition “Jasenovac – The Right Not to Forget” was Greif, the Israeli historian who spoke at the Donja Gradina commemoration in 2019. The exhibition embodied a series of historiographical mistakes, without using the archival sources from the Jasenovac Memorial Site – the biggest collection related to the Jasenovac concentration camp with more than 10,000 documents, objects, photos, and testimonies. In fact, the Jasenovac Memorial Site, which has been doing scientific research for over fifty years, was not even contacted by Greif and his team. The texts in the exhibition panels were framed in such a way to directly compare Jasenovac to the most infamous Nazi extermination camps. For example, one of the introductory panels was titled “Jasenovac – the most brutal and most notorious out of the total of eight extermination camps,” implying that Jasenovac was worse or more systematic than Auschwitz, Chelmno, or Majdanek, although gas chambers were never used in Jasenovac. An analysis of the photos presented on that panel shows that the photo of a naked man does not represent a prisoner from Jasenovac, but rather a prisoner from Majdanek during the liberation. A smaller photo on the same panel shows the barbed wire from Auschwitz, and not from Jasenovac.
In addition to the other factual and interpretative errors, one of the most problematic aspects of the exhibition, which led to a diplomatic scandal between Serbia and Croatia, was the panel that emphasized the figure of 700,000 victims. When the Croatian Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs condemned the attempt of “misusing the United Nations for manipulation and the placement of false data” according to which organizers were forced to remove “the crudest forgeries,” including the panel with the exaggerated number of victims, the United Nations disassociated itself from the exhibition.
Although there is no doubt that the tragedy of Jasenovac needs to be remembered and researched scientifically, this particular exhibition, which legitimately proved as propagandistic and reflective of significant lack of knowledge, intended to provoke greater division among the Yugoslav successor states rather than foster reconciliation. The nationalist rhetoric at the Donja Gradina commemoration and the production of exhibitions that distort historical facts are themselves problematic, but the most troubling are similarities with the propagandistic second permanent museum exhibition at the Jasenovac Memorial Site. It is difficult not to notice parallels with the memory politics of Slobodan Milošević’s Serbia that ultimately led to the tragic wars in Croatia and
Andriana Benčić Kužnar, Jasenovac Memorial Site
Vjeran Pavlaković, University of Rijeka
The Ustaša regime established the Jasenovac concentration camp system in 1941 and attempted to destroy the evidence of its existence in the spring of 1945, immediately prior to the victory of the communist-led Partisan forces. The annual commemoration takes place on the closest viable date to 22 April, the day in 1945 when the remaining prisoners attempted a final breakout.
Slobodna Dalmacija 2019 (12 April 2019): https://www.slobodnadalmacija.hr/novosti/hrvatska/clanak/id/598497/dramaticni-govor-ognjena-krausa-u-jasenovcu-zasto-nitko-nije-reagirao-na-ustaski-dernek-u-splitu-do-kad-ministre-policije-i-premijeru-neka-se-kazne-oni-koji-negiraju-zrtve-ndh (accessed on 1 July 2019).
The Ustaša (plural: Ustaše) movement, after the Croatian word for “insurgent”, declared the NDH fascist puppet state on 10 April 1941 after the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was invaded and occupied by the Axis powers. This radical Croatian separatist movement was dedicated to the violent destruction of the Yugoslav state and was alternatively supported and suppressed by Mussolini’s Italy before being brought to power by Nazi Germany. For overviews in English see Ramet (2007) and Yeomans (2013).
Individual List of Victims of Jasenovac Camp conducted by Jasenovac Memorial Site, Croatia, http://www.jusp-jasenovac.hr/Default.aspx?sid=6711 (accessed on 23 July 2019); Individual List of Victims conducted by Museum of Victims of Genocide, Belgrade, https://www.muzejgenocida.rs/ (accessed on 23 July 2019).
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum (2019) estimates between 56,000 and 97,000 victims, online at https://web.archive.org/web/20090916030858/http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005449 (accessed on 2 July 2019).
A memorial site at Donja Gradina was established in 1975 as part of the Jasenovac Memorial Site (Croatia), but after the 1990s wars in Yugoslavia, Jasenovac Memorial Site in Croatia and Donja Gradina Memorial Site in the RS were spatially and administratively divided into two independent institutions.
Ekspres, 7 February 2019, https://www.ekspres.net/politika/hrvatska-ima-genocidnu-proslost (accessed on 9 July 2019).
See RTS (2019) – Dan sećanja na žrtve ustaškog zločina u Donjoj Gradini, 5 May 2019, http://www.rts.rs/page/stories/sr/story/11/region/3510496/dan-secanja-na-zrtve-ustaskog-zlocina-u-donjoj-gradini-.html (accessed on 9 July 2019).
See RTS coverage of the 2019 Donja Gradina commemoration at http://www.rts.rs/page/stories/sr/story/11/region/3510496/dan-secanja-na-zrtve-ustaskog-zlocina-u-donjoj-gradini-.html (accessed on 2 July 2019).
Glas Srpske, 22 December 2018, https://www.glassrpske.com/lat/novosti/vijesti_dana/Dodik-Vucic-Podrska-izgradnji-novog-memorijalnog-kompleksa-u-Donjoj-Gradini/275711 (accessed on 2 July 2019).
JUSP Jasenovac archive; Zbirka fotografija – friz muzejskog postava, inv. broj 82–100, stara signatura.
JUSP Jasenovac archive, Predmet: Dragoje Lukić i Antun Miletić, Tematsko kompozicioni plan sa materijalizacijom stalne postavke memorijalnog muzeja ˝Koncentracioni logor Jasenovac 1941.–1945.˝, Zapisnici, sekundarna građa, nesređeno.
Nataša Mataušić, Internal Report on UN exhibition sent to Croatian Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs in February 2018, within the Croatian delegation of IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance).
Nataša Mataušić, ibid.
Dnevnik.hr, Dačić se oglasio o izložbi o Jasenovcu: ˝Ona je uperena protiv zločinaca i onih koji žele da se to zaboravi i izbriše˝, 26 January 2018, https://dnevnik.hr/vijesti/svijet/ivica-dacic-se-oglasio-o-izlozbi-jasenovac-pravo-na-nezaborav---504467.html (accessed on 9 July 2019).