Using ideas and concepts from Holocaust historiography, Serbian historians alongside church leaders applied it to World War Two Yugoslavia and equated the Serbs with Jews and Croats with Nazi Germans. In relation to World War Two Serb casualties, during the Milošević era Serbian historians and the regime saw it as important to secure support from prominent Yugoslav Jewish individuals and organisations regarding the idea relating to a common Serbian-Jewish martyrdom. As such, a few Yugoslav Jews gave their assistance for the new Serbian historiography. In the 1980s, Serbian historians produced many works about the forced conversion during World War Two of Serbs to Catholicism in Ustaša Croatia. These debates between historians openly became nationalistic and also entered the wider media. Historians in Belgrade during the 1980s who had close government connections often went on television during the evenings to discuss invented or real details about the Ustaša genocide against Serbs during World War Two. These discussions had the effect of being theoretical deductions that served as a precursor for the eventual ethno-demographic engineering that took place in Croatia. During this time some well known Serbian historians such as Vasilije Krestić and Milorad Ekmečić were at the vanguard of the nationalist movement. In 1986, Vasilije Krestić alongside historian Radovan Samardžić were members of a commission that later drafted the "Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts" which referred to a "genocide" being committed against Serbs by Albanians and Croats in Yugoslavia.