page_title: Genocide of Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia
section_title: Toll of victims and genocide classification
hierarchical_section_title: Genocide of Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia / Toll of victims and genocide classification
caption_attribution_description: English: Description: Photograph 6 (Box 1, Folder 15) Creator/Photographer: Raphael Lemkin, 1900-1959 Medium: Black and white photographic print Date: undated Persistent URL: digital.cjh.org/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&amp;object_id=373647 Collection: Raphael Lemkin collection, undated, 1763, 1915-1919, [c.1921], 1933, 1941-1952, 1983, 1989 Repository: American Jewish Historical Society Call Number: P-154 Rights Information: No known copyright restrictions; may be subject to third party rights. For more copyright information, click here. See more information about this image and others at CJH Digital Collections. To inquire about rights and permissions, or if you have a question regarding the collection to which the image belongs, please contact the Reference Department of the American Jewish Historical Society by email. Digital images created by the Gruss Lipper Digital Laboratory at the Center for Jewish History
context_page_description: The Genocide of the Serbs was the systematic persecution of Serbs which was committed during World War II by the fascist Ustaše regime in the Nazi German puppet state known as the Independent State of Croatia between 1941 and 1945. It was carried out through executions in death camps, as well as through mass murder, ethnic cleansing, deportations, forced conversions, and war rape. This genocide was simultaneously carried out with the Holocaust in the NDH, by combining Nazi racial policies with the ultimate goal of creating an ethnically pure Greater Croatia.
  The ideological foundation of the Ustaše movement reaches back to the 19th century. Several Croatian nationalists and intellectuals established theories about Serbs as an inferior race. The World War I legacy, as well as the opposition of a group of nationalists to the unification into a common state of South Slavs, influenced ethnic tensions in the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The 6 January Dictatorship and the later anti-Croat policies of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav government in the 1920s and 1930s fueled the rise of nationalist and far-right movements.
context_section_description: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website states that "Determining the number of victims for Yugoslavia, for Croatia, and 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".
  In the 1980s, calculations of World War II victims in Yugoslavia were made by the Serb statistician Bogoljub Kočović and the Croat demographer Vladimir Žerjavić. Tomasevich described their studies as being objective and reliable. Kočović estimated that 370,000 Serbs, both combatants and civilians, died in the NDH during the war. With a possible error of around 10%, he noted that Serb losses cannot be higher than 410,000. He did not estimate the number of Serbs who were killed by the Ustaše, saying that in most cases, the task of categorizing the victims would be impossible. Žerjavić estimated that the total number of Serb deaths in the NDH was 322,000, of which 125,000 died as combatants, while 197,000 were civilians. Žerjavić estimated that a total of 78,000 civilians were killed in Ustaše prisons, pits and camps, including Jasenovac, 45,000 civilians were killed by the Germans, 15,000 civilians were killed by the Italians, 34,000 civilians were killed in battles between the warring parties, and 25,000 civilians died of typhoid. The number of victims who perished in the Jasenovac concentration camp remains a matter of debate, but current estimates put the total number at around 100,000, about half of whom were Serbs.
  During the war as well as during Tito's Yugoslavia, various numbers were given for Yugoslavia's overall war casualties. Estimates by Holocaust memorial centers also vary. The historian Jozo Tomasevich said that the exact number of victims in Yugoslavia is impossible to determine. The academic Barbara Jelavich however cites Tomasevich's estimate in writing that as many as 350,000 Serbs were killed during the period of Ustaše rule. The historian Rory Yeomans said that the most conservative estimates state that 200,000 Serbs were killed by Ustaše death squads but the actual number of Serbs who were executed by the Ustaše or perished in Ustaše concentration camps may be as high as 500,000. In a 1992 work, Sabrina P. Ramet cites the figure of 350,000 Serbs who were "liquidated" by "Pavelić and his Ustaše henchmen". In a 2006 work, Ramet estimated that at least 300,000 Serbs were "massacred by the Ustaše". In her 2007 book "The Independent State of Croatia 1941-45", Ramet cites Žerjavić's overall figures for Serb losses in the NDH. Marko Attila Hoare writes that "perhaps nearly 300,000 Serbs" died as a result of the Ustaše genocide and the Nazi policies.
  Tomislav Dulić stated that Serbs in NDH suffered among the highest casualty rates in Europe during the World War II. The genocide scholar Israel Charny lists the Independent State of Croatia as the third most lethal regime in the twentieth century, killing an average of 2.51% of its citizens per year. Charny's definition of domestic democide doesn't only include genocide, but also politicide and mass murder, as well as forced deportation causing deaths and famine or epidemic during which regime withhold aid or act in a way to make it more deadly. American historian Stanley G. Payne stated that direct and indirect executions by NDH regime were an “extraordinary mass crime”, which in proportionate terms exceeded any other European regime beside Hitler's Third Reich. He added the crimes in the NDH were proportionately surpassed only by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and several of the extremely genocidal African regimes. Raphael Israeli wrote that “a large scale genocidal operations, in proportions to its small population, remain almost unique in the annals of wartime Europe.” 
  In Serbia as well as in the eyes of Serbs, the Ustaše atrocities constituted a genocide. Many historians and authors describe the Ustaše regime's mass killings of Serbs as meeting the definition of genocide, including
caption: Raphael Lemkin, the initiator of the Genocide Convention described the Ustaše crimes against Serbs as genocide
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