The text is taken from the first issue of the journal “Centar” of the CSPR RS

Observing from perspective of society and science, to what extent do we understand today what happened to the Serbs during the Second World War? Did 1941 truly represent, for the Serbs, a year of biblical significance? How did the Serbian people respond when confronted with evil in form of a state system, during the greatest conflict in the history of civilization? These are just some of the questions to which answers must persistently be given, not only in order to understand the past, but likewise so that we, as descendants of both victims and heroes of resistance, may define our stance toward the present and the future of the Serbian people and the Republic of Srpska.

The Genocide against the Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia (1941–1945) was an attempt by that state to completely destroy the Serbs within its territory. (In its briefest definition, genocide is an attempt at the systematic, premeditated destruction of a racial, ethnic, religious or national group.) The Independent State of Croatia (NDH) was established on April 10, 1941, following the Axis powers’ attack on the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. It encompassed most of the territory of present-day Croatia, the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina and smaller parts of Serbia (Srem up to Zemun and part of Raška for a shorter period). The execution of the genocide against the Serbs in the NDH and the creation of an ethnically pure Croatian state had been planned even before the outbreak of the Second World War. This was shaped by the ideology of Croatian Party of Rights and the activity of the Roman Catholic Church, united in the idea of the so-called Croatian state and historical right, that is, in the concept of a single political nation, which matured in Croatian circles in the mid-19th century, although the historical roots of intolerance and the dehumanization of the Serbs are much deeper. The leaders of the terrorist Croatian Ustaša movement, while still in exile in the interwar period, studied forms of mass violence – such as the genocide against the Armenians carried out by Turkey – with the intention of applying similar methods against the Serbs. Later, during the war, after taking power in the NDH, they continued consultations with their Nazi partners and role models.

The target was around 2,000,000 Serbs, who had been the indigenous population and lived within the then territory of the then Independent State of Croatia for centuries. NDH had an overall population of about 6,000,000 and was proclaimed within the framework of the Nazi order. The expulsion and forced conversion of Serbs to Catholicism were only one part of the project. The more drastic and most visible aspect of this effort, in addition to individual and mass killings, included the establishment of a large number of extermination camps. One of the characteristics of the genocide in the NDH was the particularly brutal manner in which the crimes were carried out: victims were thrown into karst pits in Lika, Dalmatia and Herzegovina, as well as in other areas. A defining feature of the monstrosity of these crimes was the direct contact between perpetrator and victim and a difficult-to-explain degree of sadism: throat-cutting, killings with mallets and other blunt objects, hangings… Even members of German and Italian units were appalled by the monstrosity of these crimes.

From the very beginning, the genocide was approved and directed by the state. The NDH used its entire bureaucratic, military, police, transportation and other infrastructure to carry out the crimes. Racial and anti-Serb laws and decrees were part of a system of destruction modeled on Nazi racial regulations and legislation. In addition to the numerous perpetrators, a large number of people in NDH society supported these crimes while there were also those who observed everything and did nothing to prevent it. The few, more courageous individuals who condemned such actions ended up in camps or joined resistance movements. A large number of Muslims took part in the crimes against the Serbs in the NDH and, especially at the beginning of the war, enjoyed a special status within this ally of the Nazi order. Across the NDH, major mass crimes were committed against the Serbs. Places such as Prebilovci and Pridvorica in Herzegovina, Stari Brod on the Drina, Drakulić, Šargovac and Motike near Banja Luka, Garavice near Bihać, Glina, Livno and others became scenes of almost unimaginable atrocities against thousands of women, children and men who were killed because of their Serbian Orthodox identity.

From across the entire territory of the NDH, railway transports carried large numbers of Serbian prisoners who were destined for extermination. According to historians, 24 camps and hundreds of other detention and transport sites operated within the NDH. The two largest death camp systems were Gospić–Jadovno–Pag, which functioned from April 1941 to August 15, 1941, and the Jasenovac death camp system, which operated from the end of August 1941 until April 22, 1945, when the last group of Jasenovac prisoners staged a breakout. Most Serbs were killed at hundreds of local execution sites throughout the country, while the large camp systems became a symbol of the overall suffering in the NDH. The two major death camp systems, Gospić–Jadovno–Pag and Jasenovac, operated sequentially throughout the entire existence of the Independent State of Croatia. In a way, they constituted its essence—the axis of its (meaningless) purpose. The primary goal of the NDH was the destruction of the Serbs, followed – in accordance with the new Nazi order and with very little outside initiative in aligning with the European Nazi framework – the destruction of Jews and Roma. These were closely interconnected events on the ground, though they unfolded with different dynamics. The destruction of the Jews was also carried out within the broader European context of the Holocaust.

The Jasenovac death camp system became a symbol of what the Serbs endured in the NDH. This camp system, notorious for its brutality, covered an area of 210 square kilometers and included camps (which in historiography are numbered I to V: Krapje, Bročica, Ciglana, Kožara and Stara Gradiška), as well as execution sites, among which the largest was Donja Gradina (today located in the municipality of Kozarska Dubica in the territory of the Republic of Srpska), and other camp locations and facilities. The Jasenovac suffering escalated particularly after the German-Croatian offensive on Kozara. Nazi Germany thus played a role not only as an international patron of the genocide against the Serbs in the NDH but also as its direct executor. As a consequence of Jasenovac, specialized NDH camps were also established solely for Serbian children: Jastrebarsko, Gornja Rijeka and Sisak. Likewise, numerous sites in the NDH operated where women and children were imprisoned and executed. This will remain recorded in the history of civilization.

To all of this, the Serbian people – faced with total annihilation – responded with a mass uprising against the NDH in the summer of 1941 and an anti-occupation movement whose sole aim was survival. Only later was this movement divided into the communist–revolutionary faction and the royalist, or Chetnik, faction, which sparked a brutal civil war on an ideological basis and brought new losses to the Serbian people. The majority of the partisan movement across the former Yugoslavia—which, after the war, became a state under an atheist communist party aligned with the Allies—was composed of Serbs who carried the weight of the anti-fascist and anti-occupation struggle. Although the official postwar Yugoslav narrative was based on a false, ideologized image of equal contribution by all peoples and nationalities to the struggle, as well as a false symmetry in their sacrifices, the Serbian people preserved an alternative familial memory outside the communist ideological system, creating a kind of defensive reflex to prevent Jasenovac and the NDH from recurring.

At the moment when, in the early 1990s, Yugoslavia was disintegrating under external and internal pressures, the Serbian people as a defensive mechanism, alongside the existence of Serbia, established the Republic of Serbian Krajina and the Republic of Srpska. This was a form of collective “NO” to the repetition of the crime of genocide. The Republic of Serbian Krajina disappeared under the assaults of the Croatian army in 1995, while the Republic of Srpska was recognized by an international peace agreement as an entity with significant state powers within Bosnia and Herzegovina. Together with Serbia, we are today obliged to systematically research, preserve the memory of the victims and strive to understand the lessons from the difficult past of our people.

The Serbian Orthodox Church has included the New Martyrs of Jasenovac and others in the covenantal vertical of the Serbian people’s memory. Their suffering is today understood through the perspective of Golgotha and the Resurrection. Likewise, the focus on the personal and family stories of the victims, from this eschatological perspective, aligns fully with the contemporary multidisciplinary approach to memorialization.