NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/soc/culture/europe/10748

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Date: 23 Dec 1992 15:21:29 -0600
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   Midstream - November, 1992

     Holocaust History Misappropriated

     Philip J. Cohen

     In conjunction with the war in former Yugoslavia,  Serbia has undertaken a
     campaign to persuade the  Jewish community of Serbian friendship for Jews.
     This same campaign portrays Croats as a common threat  to  both  Jews  and
     Serbs,  in  an  attempt to gain Jewish sympathy and support at a time when
     most nations have isolated Serbia as a Balkan pariah.   However,  even  as
     Serbia  courts Jewish public opinion, their propagandists conceal a histo-
     ry of well-ingrained antisemitism, which continues unabated  in  1992.  To
     make  their  case, Serbs portray themselves as victims in the Second World
     War, but  conceal the systematic genocide that Serbs had committed against
     several  peoples,  including  the  Jews. Thus,  Serbs have usurped as pro-
     paganda the Holocaust that  occurred in neighboring  Croatia  and  Bosnia,
     but  do  not  give an honest accounting of the Holocaust as it occurred in
     Serbia.

     During four centuries of Ottoman rule in the Balkans,  the Jewish communi-
     ties of Serbia enjoyed religious tolerance, internal autonomy, and equali-
     ty before the law, that  ended with the breakup of the Ottoman Empire  and
     the   emergence  of  the  Serbian state. Soon after a Serbian insurrection
     against Turkish rule in 1804, Jews were expelled   from  the  interior  of
     Serbia  and  prohibited  from  residing   outside of Belgrade. In 1856 and
     1861, Jews were again  expelled from the  interior,  in  conjunction  with
     laws  forbidding  Jews the right of domicile, and Jews were further prohi-
     bited from travel for the purpose of  trade.  In  official  correspondence
     from the late 19th century, British diplomats detailed the cruel treatment
     of the Jews of Serbia, which  they  attributed  to  religious  fanaticism,
     commercial  rivalries,  and the belief that Jews were the secret agents of
     the Turks:  Article 23 of the Serbian  constitution  granted  equality  to
     every  citizen,  but  Article  132 forbade Jews the right of domicile. The
     treaty of Berlin of 1878, which formally established  the  Serbian  state,
     accorded political and civil equality to the  Jews of Serbia, but the Ser-
     bian Parliament resisted abolishing restrictive  decrees  for  another  11
     years.  Although  the   legal  status of the Jewish community subsequently
     improved, the view of Jews as an alien presence persisted.

     Although Serbian historians contend that the persecution of  the  Jews  of
     Serbia was entirely the responsibility of  Germans and began only with the
     German occupation,  this is self-serving fiction. Fully six months  before
     the Nazi  invasion of Yugoslavia, Serbia had issued legislation  restrict-
     ing Jewish participation in the economy  and  university  enrollment.  One
     year later on 22 October 1941, the rabidly antisemitic "Grand Anti-Masonic
     Exhibit" opened  in occupied Belgrade, funded by the city of Belgrade. The
     central theme was an alleged Jewish-Communist-Masonic  plot for world dom-
     ination. Newspapers such as Obnova  (Renewal) and Nasa Borba  (Our  Strug-
     gle)  praised this exhibit, proclaiming that Jews were the ancient enemies
     of  the Serbian people and that Serbs should not wait for the  Germans  to
     begin the extermination of the Jews. A few  months later, Serbian authori-
     ties issued postage stamps  commemorating the opening of this popular  ex-
     hibit.  These stamps, which juxtaposed Jewish and Serbian symbols (but did
     not contain Nazi symbols), portrayed  Judaism as the source of world  evil
     and advocated the humiliation and violent subjugation of Jews.

     Serbia as well as neighboring Croatia was under Axis occupation during the
     Second  World  War. Although the efficient destruction of Serbian Jewry in
     the first two years of German  occupation  has  been  well  documented  by
     respected  sources,  the  extent  to which Serbia actively collaborated in
     that destruction has been less recognized.  The Serbian  government  under
     General  Milan  Nedic   worked closely with local Nazi officials in making
     Belgrade  the first Judenfrei city of Europe.  As  late  as  19  September
     1943, Nedic made an official state visit to Adolf Hitler.  Serbs in Berlin
     advanced the idea that Serbs were the  Ubermenschen (master race)  of  the
     Slavs.

     Although the Serbian version of history  portrays   wartime  Serbia  as  a
     helpless,  occupied  territory,  Serbian  newspapers of the period offer a
     portrait of intensive collaboration. In November 1941,  Mihajlo  Olcan,  a
     minister   in  Nedic's  government, boasted that "Serbia has been  allowed
     what no other occupied country has been allowed  and that is to  establish
     law  and  order  with its own armed  forces." Indeed, with Nazi blessings,
     Nedic established the  Serbian State Guard, numbering about  20,000,  com-
     pared  to the 3,400 German police in Serbia. Recruiting advertisements for
     the Serb police force specified that "applicants  must have no  Jewish  or
     Gypsy  blood." Nedic's second in  command was Dimitrije Ljotic, founder of
     the Serbia Fascist party and the principal Fascist ideologist  of  Serbia.
     Ljotic  organized  the Serbian Volunteer Corps, whose primary function was
     rounding up Jews, Gypsies, and partisans for execution.  Serbian  citizens
     and police received  cash bounties for the capture and delivery of Jews.

     The Serbian Orthodox Church openly collaborated with  the Nazis, and  many
     priests  publicly defended the persecution of the Jews. On 13 August 1941,
     approximately 500 distinguished Serbs signed "An Appeal to the Serbian Na-
     tion,"   which called for loyalty to the occupying Nazis. The first  three
     signers were bishops of the Serbian Orthodox  Church. On  30January  1942,
     Metropolitan  Josif,  the  acting   head  of the Holy Synod of the Serbian
     Orthodox Church,  officially prohibited conversions  of  Jews  to  Serbian
     Orthodoxy,  thereby  blocking a means of saving Jewish lives.  At a public
     rally, after the government minister Olcan  "thanked God  that  the  enor-
     mously  powerful  fist  of  Germany had not come down upon the head of the
     Serbian  nation" but instead "upon the heads of the Jews  in  our  midst,"
     the  speaker  of  these words was then blessed by a  high- ranking Serbian
     Orthodox priest.

     A most striking example of Serbian  Orthodox  antisemitism  combined  with
     historical  revisionism  is  the case of  Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic (188-
     1956), revered as one of the  most influential church leaders and  ideolo-
     gists after Saint  Sava, founder of the Serbian Orthodox Church. To Serbs,
     Bishop Velimirovic was a martyr, who survived torture in the  Dachau pris-
     on  camp. In truth, he was brought to Dachau (as  were other prominent Eu-
     ropean clergy), because the Nazis  believed he could be  useful  for  pro-
     paganda.  There  he  spent   approximately  two months as an Ehrenhaftling
     (honor prisoner) in a special section, dining on  the  same  food  as  the
     German  officers,  living  in private quarters, and making excursions into
     town under German escort.  From Dachau, this venerated Bishop endorsed the
     Holocaust:

     Europe is presently the main battlefield of the Jew and  his  father,  the
     devil,  against  the  heavenly Father and his only begotten Son .... Uews]
     first need to become legally equal with Christians  in  order  to  repress
     Christianity next, turn Christians into atheists, and step on their necks.
     All the modern European slogans have been made up by Jews, the  crucifiers
     of  Christ: democracy, strikes, socialism, atheism, tolerance of all reli-
     gions, pacifism, universal revolution, capitalism, and communism  ...  All
     this has been done with  the intention to humiliate Christ .... You should
     think  about this, my Serbian brethren, and correspondingly  correct  your
     thoughts,  desires,  and  acts. (Bishop Nikolaj  Velimirovic: Addresses to
     the Serbian People - Through the  Prison  Window.   Himmelsthur,  Germany:
     Serbian Orthodox  Eparchy for Western Europe, 1985, pp. 161-162).

     Despite Serbian claims to the contrary, Germans were not alone in  killing
     the Jews in Serbia. The long concealed Historical Archives of Belgrade re-
     veal that Bajnica, a concentration camps located in Belgrade, was primari-
     ly  staffed by Serbs. Funding for conversion of the former barracks of the
     Serbian 18th infantry division to a concentration camp, as well as operat-
     ing  expenses of the camp, came from the municipal budget of Belgrade. The
     camp was divided into German and Serbian sections. From Bajnica there sur-
     vive  death lists written entirely in Serbian in the Cyrillic alphabet. At
     least 23,697 victims passed through the Serbian section of this camp. Many
     were Jews, including at least 798 children, of whom at least 120 were shot
     by Serbian guards.  The use of mobile gassing vans by Nazis in Serbia  for
     the  extermination  of Jewish women and children has been well documented.
     It is less appreciated, however, that a Serbian  business  firm  had  con-
     tracted  with  the  Gestapo to purchase these same victim's clothes, which
     sometimes contained hidden money or jewelry  in  the  linings.  In  August
     1942,  following the virtual liquidation of Serbia's Jews, Nedic's govern-
     ment attempted to claim all Jewish property for the Serbian state.  In the
     same  month, Dr. Harald Turner, the chief of the Nazi civil administration
     of Serbia, boasted that Serbia was the only country in which  the  "Jewish
     question"  was solved. Turner himself attributed this "success" to Serbian
     help. Thus, 94 percent of Serbia's 16,000 Jews were exterminated, with the
     considerable  cooperation  of  the Serbian government, the Serbian Ortodox
     Church, the Serbian State Guard, the Serbian police, and the Serbian  pub-
     lic.

     Today, many Serbs proudly cite the Chetniks as a resistance force and even
     claim  that the Chetniks were somehow allied with the United States during
     the Second World War,  but this is simply historical revisionism.  Accord-
     ing  to  the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Chetnik resistance against the
     Nazis came to a complete stop as early as the end of 1941. Thereafter, the
     Chetniks actively collaborated with both  Nazis and Fascists, and for this
     reason Jewish fighters found  it necessary to  abandon  the  Chetniks,  in
     favor of Tito's  Partisans.  In reality, the Chetniks, dedicated primarily
     to the  restoration of the Serbian throne and the territorial expansion of
     the Serbian state, were the moral counterpart of  Croatia's Ustasha.  Both
     were quintessentially genocidal; the  Chetniks committed systematic  geno-
     cide  against  Muslims,  who, for nearly all of 500 years had lived peace-
     fully with the  Sephardic Jewish community.  Under  explicit  orders  from
     their  leader Draza Mihajlovic, the Chetniks attempted to  depopulate Ser-
     bia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Croatia of all  non-Serbs and,  in  the  pro-
     cess, massacred most of the 86,000  to 103,000 Muslims who perished during
     the war.

     For years, the Serbian-dominated Belgrade  government  has  supported  and
     trained  PLO terrorists.  Immediately after the murder of Leon Klinghoffer
     aboard the Achille Lauro in 1985, the terrorist mastermind Abu  Abbas  was
     welcomed  in  Belgrade. Since the  late 1980's, Abu-Nidal has maintained a
     large terrorist infrastructure in Yugoslavia, in  coordination  with   Li-
     byan,  Iraqi, and Yugoslav intelligence services. During  the 1991 Persian
     Gulf War, as Iraqi missiles landed in  Israel, Belgrade supported its ally
     Iraq.  Support of antiIsrael terrorism may be a consequence of support for
     nonaligned Arab states, rather than an expression of   anti-Jewish  senti-
     ment.

     Although the Jewish community of Serbia is not currently experiencing per-
     secution,  overt  expressions  of  Serbian antisemitism do surface in such
     mainstream institutions as the Serbian Orthodox Church  and  the  official
     news  media.  The  15January 1992 issue of the official publication of the
     Serbian Orthodox Church, Pravoslavlje  (Orthodoxy), carried an article en-
     titled,  "Jews  Crucify  Christ Again." In this polemic, "treacherous" and
     "surreptitious" Israeli politicians were said to be constrained from   ex-
     pressing  their  "pathological" hatred of Christians openly  because "they
     know that Christian countries gave them the  state." Allegedly,  nuns  are
     so frequently beaten in Israel,  that one nun was actually "happy, because
     they only spit in  her face." Only weeks later, when Russia  extended  di-
     plomatic recognition to the former Yugoslav republics of  Croatia and Slo-
     venia, the official Yugoslav  (Serbian  perspective)  news  agency  Tanjug
     blamed  "a  Jewish  conspiracy"  against Serbia, hauntingly reminiscent of
     the theme of the  1941 anti-Masonic exhibit.

     The essential strategy of Serbian propaganda is to portray  the  spiritual
     kinship between Jews and Serbs as victims  of the Holocaust and endangered
     by Croats.  This  concept   is  disseminated  through  the  Serbian-Jewish
     Friendship   Society,  founded  in  Belgrade  in 1988 and supported by the
     Serbian government. In January and February 1992, Dr.  Klara  Mandic,  the
     secretary  general and principal voice of  this organization, syndicated a
     chilling article in the North  American Jewish press. This article alleged
     that Ankica  Konjuh, an elderly Jewish woman, was tortured and murdered by
     "Croat extremists" in September 1991. However,  even as she released  this
     story  to the press, Dr. Mandic  knew that Ankica Konjuh was neither a Jew
     nor could have  been killed by Croats. Bona-fide witnesses have  testified
     that  Ankica Konjuh, a 67-year-old Croat, was one of 240 civilians  massa-
     cred by Serbian forces after the last armed Croat  defenders  were  driven
     from  the region. Moreover, on 23  December 1991, the Federation of Jewish
     Communities of  Yugoslavia met in Belgrade and demanded  in  writing  that
     Dr.  Mandic  cease  and desist misrepresenting Ankica  Konjuh as the first
     Jewish victim of the war.

     Nevertheless, in late February 1992, when Dr. Mandic  lectured at the Hil-
     lel  House  of George Washington  University in Washington, D.C., she pro-
     vided the rabbi with  a copy of that misleading article, delivered without
     further  comment. It is noteworthy that this speaking engagement  was part
     of a tour arranged by Wise Communications, a  Washington-based public  re-
     lations  firm  representing  the  Serbian oil company Jugopetrol, a thinly
     veiled proxy for  the Communist Belgrade government.  Beginning  with  the
     proposition  that  antisemitism  has  never existed in Serbia,  Dr. Mandic
     portrayed Croatia as preparing to repeat the  Holocaust. She claimed to be
     a  "Jewish  leader," although  Jews are distinctly absent from her consti-
     tuency. Less than  half a dozen Jews are actual members of her society  of
     several  thousand.  She  introduced herself as an "eyewitness" speaking on
     behalf of Croatian Jews, although since the war began, she has had no con-
     tact  with  any of the nine Jewish communities of Croatia. When Dr. Mandic
     was asked to  comment on Serbian (Yugoslav Army) shelling of the synagogue
     of Dubrovnik, the second oldest surviving synagogue  in Europe, she denied
     that the synagogue had ever been  damaged at all.  Meanwhile,  the  attack
     has  been  well  documented  by  the Jewish community of Dubrovnik and the
     World Monument Fund.

     Jewish sensitivity  to  the  Holocaust  is  similarly  exploited   by  the
     Jewish-Serbian Friendship Society of America  (Granada Hills, California),
     an offshoot of Dr. Mandic's  organization.   Its  newsletter  equates  the
     Jewish  and  Serbian   positions  during  World War II, both as victims of
     Croats,  but fails to mention Serbian complicity in the Holocaust,  Serbi-
     an  collaboration  with  the  Nazis, and Serbian genocide  against Croats,
     Gypsies, and Muslims. It warns of an imminent Holocaust being initiated in
     Croatia.  A  contrasting   portrayal  of  Croatia, however, emerges from a
     spectrum of  Croatian Jews, AmericanJews who  have  visited  Croatia,  and
     international  Jewish  agencies monitoring events on site. All concur that
     there is no state-sponsored antisemitism in Croatia;  the  rights  of  the
     Jewish  minority  are  respected;  and antisemitic incidents are virtually
     unknown. Thus, only a  few dozen of the 2,000Jews of Croatia  have  chosen
     to emigrate to Israel since the war began.

     Serbia of today and Germany in World War II offer  striking parallels.  In
     1991,  Vojislav  Seselj,  a member of the Serbian Parliament and leader of
     the  Serbian irregulars who call themselves Chetniks,  declared, "We  want
     no  one else on our territory and we  will fight for our true borders. The
     Croats must either  move or die." Croats in Serbian conquered regions  are
     forced  to  wear  red-and-white armbands, analogous to the yellow armbands
     worn by Jews in Serbia during the Holocaust. The stated purpose of the ex-
     pulsion  of   Muslims and Croats from captured regions is "ethnic  cleans-
     ing." The indigenous non-Serbian populations of the   invaded  territories
     are  being driven from their homes, exterminated, or imprisoned in concen-
     tration camps, to create  regions of Serbian ethnic purity. Jewish commun-
     ity  centers,  synagogues, and cemeteries have been damaged  and destroyed
     by characteristically indiscriminate  Serbian artillery attacks. To all of
     this,  the  Jewish-Serbian   Friendship Society has remained conspicuously
     silent.

     Belgrade has promoted the myth of Serbian kinship with  the Jews as fellow
     victims  of  Nazi  oppression, while concealing the true extent of Serbian
     collaboration with the Nazis.  It is ironic that  Serbia  is  now  seeking
     Jewish  support  for  a  war in which both the ideology and methodology so
     tragically echo nazism. The European Community, the Helsinki   Commission,
     the  United  Nations,  and the United States  have all condemned Serbia as
     the aggressor. Western diplomats have characterized  the  current  Serbian
     regime  as  "a   lying, terrorist criminal organization." Serbia, however,
     claims to be the victim and campaigns for Jewish  sympathy   and  support,
     exploiting  the  powerful  symbolism of the  Holocaust. Serbia's professed
     solicitude for the Jewish people must be reexamined.


     PHILIP J. COHEN is a dermatologist and  immunologist  engaged  in  medical
     research and clinical practice.
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