Jasenovac Unmasked

The case in point here is an obscure WW2 concentration camp in present-day Croatia, by the name of Jasenovac. The camp—which operated for around three and a half years, from mid-1941 until war’s end—is, by any reasonable accounting, all but irrelevant to the Holocaust story. Even according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, only some “12,000 to 20,000 Jews” died there, which means that the camp accounts for, at best, 0.33% of the presumed Jewish death toll of 6 million. Were it not for a recent blunder by the Jerusalem Post, I would likely never have spent a moment on the topic. In the grand Holocaust narrative, there are much larger fish to fry. But the latest gaff gives us a chance to shine a light on the on-going fraud that is the Holocaust. When the Jews themselves put a foot in their collective mouths, we should make the most of it.

The subject at hand is an article that briefly appeared on the Post website, titled “This disgraceful mocking of the Holocaust needs to stop now” (now available here; the original URL has been deleted). Written by an Australian journalist named David Goldman, the short essay obsesses over a three-year-old Croatian television interview in which historian and Croatian Jew Ivo Goldstein expounds on the “increasingly problematic” camp at Jasenovac. The interview, from 2018, included this question of Goldstein: “Many have commented on the lack of forensic evidence from this particular camp. Can you explain why this is the case?” (meaning, why there is an absence of evidence). Goldstein then dropped his “bombshell” reply:

“Because in April 1945, Hitler flew in special machines to Jasenovac. These machines were used to dissolve the bones that were left.”

Several points here: One, in all of Holocaust historiography, there is no actual or even rumored documentation of any such “bone dissolving machines.” There were alleged bone crushers, driven by diesel engines; here is one alleged photo. But these have been shown to be fraudulent.[1] The Nazis also allegedly used chlorinated lime (quicklime) to try to decompose corpses at Treblinka and Belzec, but this chemical, when used, only reduces the odor; it does nothing to hasten decomposition. “Dissolving,” especially for bones, implies the use of acid or some other strong chemical process, but again, such claims are completely unknown in the literature. Hence Goldman rightly refers to these as “hitherto unheard-of machines.” Perhaps there was some confusion on Goldstein’s part, and he actually meant ‘crushing,’ not ‘dissolving.’ But again, we have no reliable evidence that such crushing machines were ever used by the Germans.

Two, this idea seems to be a pure invention by Goldstein to explain away a troublesome fact, namely, lack of forensic evidence at Jasenovac—meaning any corpses, ash, or other human remains. And by “pure invention,” I mean an outright lie. By all accounts, Goldstein lied to cover up a critical and damning fact. Anyone who has studied the Holocaust story knows that such lies are legion.[2]

Three, the whole premise that the Germans, in the final throes of defeat, would take the trouble to send anything like “bone dissolving machines” to an obscure camp in Croatia is patently absurd, as Goldman points out. The whole idea is nonsense.

Perhaps most significantly, this little episode brings to mind similar claims about the more important camps like Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Belzec. Lacking physical evidence, how can we justify claims of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or a million Holocaust victims at these camps? For the journalist Goldman, however, the lies about Jasenovac only “contaminate” the larger Holocaust story, which he accepts unquestioningly. As he says, “Why allow the contamination of Holocaust history with a place [Jasenovac] that cannot provide any independent forensic evidence past a few thousand victims, and that has an ever-increasing—including in 2021—victim list that has been repeatedly proven to have been doctored?” Indeed; and we can ask the same question about virtually all of the conventional Holocaust sites. The implications are dire for Jews everywhere.

A Short Course on Jasenovac

It is worthwhile taking a moment to review the conventional history of this camp, given the many lessons it offers here. It is undisputed that Jasenovac was established under the auspices of the Nazi-aligned government of occupied Croatia known as the Ustasa (or Ustase, or Ustashi). The camp was constructed in August 1941, not long after Hitler began his invasion of the Soviet Union. It consisted of five separate facilities, two of which were short-lived, but the other three—Ciglana, Kozara, and Stara Gradiska—operated right until the virtual end of the war in April 1945. The purpose of the camp is disputed; some claim it was strictly a detention and work camp, whereas others declare it to be an extermination center on par with the worst camps of Poland. By all accounts, several thousand people died there—mostly Serbs, but also Jews, Roma, and scattered numbers of Muslims and Croatian political enemies.

The numbers of victims, and especially the numbers of Jews, are the main points of contention. Like most Holocaust camps and death sites, the range of estimates is vast. Individuals sympathetic to the Ustasa regime, like former president Franjo Tudjman, regularly gave figures of just 3,000 to 4,000 total. Such numbers date back to the first forensic examinations of the camp in 1947. But by the 1970s and 1980s, the numbers were rising; the 1990 Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (p. 189) claimed, without evidence, that around 300,000 bodies were discovered and exhumed there.

Yet even this number was insufficient for our Holocaust propagandists. One recent article notes that, over past decades, “historians have estimated that between 700,000 and 1,000,000 people were killed at Jasenovac.” Serbian publications of the 1990s cited figures as high as 1.2 million.[3] Of these, around 15% are claimed to have been Jews—meaning, potentially 100,000 to 150,000. At that upper estimate, this would put Jasenovac well ahead of Majdanek camp in terms of Jewish death toll, and approaching the status of Sobibor. If, on the other hand, Jews were 15% of, say, 3,000 fatalities, it would mean an utterly inconsequential 400 or 500 deaths. Much is at stake.

Today, though, the more commonly accepted estimates are much closer to the low end than the high. The current Croatian government seems to accept a figure of 83,000 total deaths. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum claims that “the Ustasa regime murdered between 77,000 and 99,000 people in Jasenovac between 1941 and 1945.” Of these, some 12,000 to 20,000 are claimed to have been Jews. Still, the USHMM is not very sanguine about their own estimates:

Determining the number of victims for…Jasenovac is highly problematic, due to the destruction of many relevant documents, the long-term inaccessibility to independent scholars of those documents that survived, and the ideological agendas of postwar partisan scholarship and journalism, which has been and remains influenced by ethnic tension, religious prejudice, and ideological conflict. The estimates offered here are based on the work of several historians who have used census records as well as whatever documentation was available in German, Croat, and other archives in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere.

As I noted above, even 20,000 Jewish deaths are largely irrelevant to the broader Holocaust narrative.

A Rebuttal

Goldman’s short essay drew a quick and furious response from Dejan Ristic, the acting director of the Serbian Museum of Genocide Victims. It was published in the Jerusalem Post just two days after Goldman’s original piece. Serbia, of course, has an incentive to promote high numbers of victims, and especially high numbers of Serbs, because it enhances their victimhood status and promotes their nationalist agenda. But more important than high numbers is the overall integrity of the camp as a legitimate Holocaust site and not as a whimsical political ragdoll that has victim numbers ranging over nearly three orders of magnitude, and that is entirely lacking in relevant evidence.

Ristic’s rebuttal—“Shame on those who seek to revise history of the Holocaust”—is as poorly argued as it is poorly written. (Though, oddly, the Post website still displays this rebuttal, whereas the original essay is long gone.) Ristic expresses “astonishment” at the “pseudo-scientific and revisionist text” by Goldman, which contains, he says, little more than “a series of inaccurate statements and semi-information.” Ristic is incensed that Goldman dares to cite the ragged history of victim numbers; the Museum clearly accepts a figure in the mainstream range (80,000 to 90,000), though with the opportunity for higher figures in the future. Ristic writes:

“As the research of the experts of the Museum […] continues, it is to be expected that the number of Jasenovac victims will be corrected. […] The estimated total number of victims is, unfortunately, far higher than the one that historical science will ever be able to identify with the precise data.”

He is anxious to quell all thoughts of a mere few thousand deaths, and he equally seeks to avoid any suggestion that the figure approaches a million or more; as he well knows, both extremes threaten to undermine all credibility about the camp.

Most amusingly, in his entire lengthy rebuttal, Ristic never once mentions the “bombshell” about the bone-dissolving machines—not once. This is a tacit admission that the point holds, that no evidence was sought or found, and that the whole basis for Jasenovac as a top-tier death camp rests on little more than rumor and innuendo, if not outright falsehood.

The central problem for both Ristic and Goldman, however, is that their back-and-forth arguments promise to expose the far more consequential problems of the main Holocaust camps. In fact, Ristic does the nasty work for us. He writes, “we could ask a question as to whether it is possible to deny, in the same way, the number of 1,200,000 to 1,500,000 killed in Auschwitz since there is no forensic evidence for that claim either?” Touché, Mr. Ristic! The irony is that he is entirely correct, of course. No evidence (or scarcely any) for Auschwitz; none for Treblinka; none for Belzec—the same old story.

Grave Implications

Goldman’s main beef is with the ad hoc lie of the bone-dissolving machines, but this echoes the many, far more grievous lies about Auschwitz, Belzec, Treblinka, and indeed all six of the so-called death camps.[4] Of these, Goldman of course is silent. But he does decry the ongoing process of myth-formation surrounding a camp like Jasenovac, “where myths of Serbian and Jewish suffering were interwoven, providing a new series of national myths” (to cite the author David McDonald). Goldman, though, naturally avoids the similar but far greater myth-formation process about Auschwitz, the other camps, and the broader Holocaust. It is this very myth-formation process that has led to numbers like 1 million Jews gassed at Auschwitz, when, on the far more plausible revisionist thesis, perhaps 150,000 people died there, of whom maybe half were Jews—but none in gas chambers.

Likewise, Goldman ridicules the notion of human remains “yet to be discovered” at Jasenovac, and he rightly jabs a finger at the Yugoslav government, who, “during its 47-year rule of the site, never bothered once to try and locate these mysterious ‘missing’ remains.” The same, of course, can be said for the current Croatian government and its on-going 30-year rule. (One strongly suspects that there are simply no remains to be found there.) But this again raises the same question for the other camps: Where are the remains of anything approaching 1 million Jewish bodies at Auschwitz? Or 900,000 Jewish bodies at Treblinka? Or 600,000 Jewish bodies at Belzec? Do we have anything? Bodies, bones, ash—anything? Do we even have the holes in the ground where the Germans were said to bury the hundreds of thousands of victims, only to later dig them up and burn them “to ash” on open-air fires over wooden logs? Based on my years of research, the answer to all these questions is ‘no.’

What about the alleged 1 million Jews killed in the various ghettos? Where are their remains? What about the alleged 1.6 million Jews killed by shootings, mostly along the Eastern front; where are their remains? (Such figures are stated or implied by all of our experts, and are absolutely required to get us to the mandatory “6 million” total.) Not all of their remains, mind you, or even most of them. We would be satisfied with, say, half, or even a quarter, as long as we had a good explanation for the remainder. But instead we get stories of “600 bodies found here” and “250 bodies found there” and ashes consistent with perhaps “a few thousand bodies” at most. These are so far short of the “6 million” that they constitute an effective refutation of that very figure. Just as the “700,000 to 1 million” at Jasenovac is a farce, so too is the “6 million Jews” for the broader Holocaust.[5]

And yet, our intrepid reporter David Goldman has the gall to write, “Those who have conflated the only [!] wartime concentration camp without any verifiable data, with scientifically proven [!] Holocaust facts, have done immeasurable harm to Jewish history.” He is either ignorant of the truth or deliberately covering up the reality. The true “immeasurable harm” has been done by his fellow Jews and their intellectual lackeys who, for decades, have promoted an unsustainable myth of Jewish suffering.

The days of the “6 million” are numbered, and I suspect that Goldman, Goldstein, and friends know it. When that crumbles, so too collapses what little remains of Jewish credibility. When the orthodox Holocaust story goes down, the dominoes may well begin to fall. And when that happens, all bets are off.

Notes