Jasenovac – istina (English: Jasenovac – The Truth) is a 2016 Holocaust denial documentary film by the Croatian filmmaker Jakov Sedlar. The film contends that the extent of The Holocaust in the Independent State of Croatia, an Axis puppet state, and the World War II-era genocide of the country's Serb population was exaggerated through post-war communist propaganda. It focuses primarily on Jasenovac, a concentration camp run by state’s wartime fascist Ustaše government where an estimated 100,000 are believed to have perished, and suggests that the actual death toll never exceeded 18,000. The film also argues that Jasenovac continued being used as a concentration camp by Yugoslavia's communist authorities well after World War II, and that more inmates perished when it was run by the communists than when it was run by the Ustaše.
It premiered in Tel Aviv in February 2016 and in Zagreb two months later. Its Croatian premiere was attended by Minister of Culture Zlatko Hasanbegović, who is alleged to have made a number of pro-fascist statements in the past, as well as by the Israeli ambassador to Croatia. The film was panned by scholars, journalists and politicians from the Croatian left, who accused the filmmakers of minimizing and relativizing Ustaše atrocities. It was also alleged that the filmmakers had fabricated or misrepresented a number of photographs, correspondences and newspaper reports seen in the film, as well as that they had manipulated videotaped survivor testimony through selective editing. The Israeli ambassador strongly criticized the film and accused the filmmakers of historical negationism, as did representatives of the Croatian Serb and Croatian Jewish communities.
The film has been shown as an educational feature in a number of Croatian schools, causing further controversy. Sedlar has said that he intends to screen the film at Holocaust museums and Jewish community centres, and indicated that copies will be donated to university libraries in Europe and North America. In July 2016, a non-governmental organization called the Anti-Fascist League of Croatia filed a lawsuit against Sedlar alleging the film incited ethnic intolerance and promoted Holocaust denial.
Production During World War II, Croats were divided between the communist Partisans, led by Josip Broz Tito, and the fascist Ustaše, led by Ante Pavelić. Pavelić came to power following the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, declared independence from Yugoslavia, and ruled the fascist puppet state of Croatia as a dictator until 1945, when the Ustaše were defeated and the country was reintegrated into Yugoslavia, which fell under communist rule at the war's end. While in power, the Ustaše had pursued a campaign of extermination against Croatia's minorities, particularly Serbs, Jews and Roma (Gypsies). Between 1941 and 1945, they set up a number of concentration camps, the largest of which was Jasenovac, which survivors dubbed the "Auschwitz of the Balkans". An estimated 100,000 prisoners perished at the camp, which was only liberated following Pavelić's defeat in April 1945. Wartime events continue to influence 21st-century Croatian politics. "For many Croats," The Economist reports, "voting has less to do with left- or right-leaning ideological beliefs than with whose side one's family was on during the Second World War."
The film was directed and produced by Jakov Sedlar, written by novelist Hrvoje Hitrec, and narrated by Croatian actors Dragan Despot and Sanja Marin. Sedlar was the Croatian Government's "official propagandist" during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, according to the historian Vjekoslav Perica. Sedlar became known for films such as Gospa (Madonna) and Četverored (Four by Four), which portray the events of World War II and the Cold War from a Croatian nationalist perspective. He also made a number of documentaries glorifying wartime President Franjo Tuđman and his party, the right-wing Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska Demokratska zajednica; HDZ). In an apparent bid to increase their credibility abroad, several were filmed in the English language, with actor Martin Sheen narrating. Hitrec was another close associate of Tuđman, as well as one of the founding members of the HDZ. In 1990, he was appointed director of Croatia's state broadcaster, Croatian Radiotelevision. Between March and July 1991, he served as Croatia's Minister of Information.
The film was produced through the donations of Croatian Canadian businessman Anton Kikaš and retired Croatian Australian footballer Josip Šimunić. Kikaš was a prominent émigré fundraiser supporting Croatian nationalist causes during the 1980s and 1990s. On 30 August 1991, at the height of the Croatian War of Independence, he was arrested at the Zagreb Airport for attempting to smuggle a large cache of weapons to the Croatian National Guard, after the European Community and United Nations had imposed an arms embargo on the former Yugoslavia. Three months later, he was released in a prisoner exchange. In 2013, Šimunić earned a ten-match suspension for chanting the Ustaše-era slogan Za dom spremni (For the homeland ready) following a 2014 FIFA World Cup qualifying match, forcing him to miss the tournament.
Summary
The film opens by stating that the number of inmates who perished at Jasenovac has never been accurately ascertained, with estimates ranging from 49,000 to 700,000 dead. It brings up a document from 1946 in which the president of the State Commission on Ascertaining Crimes Committed by Occupying Powers and Their Helpers reports that 15,792 inmates were killed at Jasenovac. The film then offers a glimpse at the 1945 British documentary A Painful Reminder: Evidence for All Mankind, in which it is stated that 20,000 perished at the camp.
After World War I, the film asserts, Croatia was occupied by Greater Serbian expansionists and royalist guerrillas known as Chetniks, who relegated Croats to the status of second-class citizens. It highlights a number of alleged murders of Croats in interwar Yugoslavia committed by Chetniks. In Jasenovac, the film claims, a Serb merchant named Lazar Bačić led a band that killed five Croats and terrorized countless others between 1918 and 1941. During this period, King Alexander's government implemented discriminatory laws targeting Croats, used the Royal Yugoslav Army to crush a number of peasant revolts and organized the killing of Croatian Peasant Party leader Stjepan Radić, after which Alexander declared himself royal dictator. Yugoslav jails became filled with Croatian patriots, the film explains, and the name Croatia was erased from all maps. In response to this oppression, a Croat lawyer named Ante Pavelić founded the Ustaše, a patriotic movement whose aim was to defend Croatian national interests in "all the lands that Croats have historically inhabited". Pavelić was soon exiled to Italy, where he continued plotting against the "Belgrade regime". In 1934, the Ustaše helped organize King Alexander's assassination in Marseille. His funeral was attended by Philippe Pétain and Hermann Göring. This fact, the film maintains, was deliberately omitted from Yugoslav historiography.
In April 1941, amid the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia and in response to a Serbian militia's massacre of dozens of defenseless Croats near Bjelovar, the Ustaše proclaimed the establishment of the Independent State of Croatia. Serbian nationalists, unwilling to live in an independent Croatian state, revolted against the Ustaše and initiated a campaign of genocide against the Croatian population. Following the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, a large number of these nationalists joined the Partisans in terrorizing Croat population centres. Pavelić, meanwhile, was misled into implementing German-style anti-Jewish laws, similar to those that Yugoslavia had implemented even before the invasion. Bačić and his son fled Jasenovac and sought refuge in Serbia, it is said, where they offered their services to the collaborationist leader Milan Nedić. Bačić's property, which housed a brick factory prior to the invasion, was transformed into a "concentration and labour" camp and resumed production. At its height, the camp's brick factory employed 180 inmates. Hundreds of workers died from disease, exhaustion, or by drowning in a nearby marsh. The camp was used to detain all opponents of Pavelić's regime regardless of ethnicity, the film asserts, and it is claimed that most inmates were Croats.
Thousands of Jews are said to have sought refuge in Croatia before 1941, enticed by the Croats' historical Judeophilia. Hundreds converted to Roman Catholicism at the urging of Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac, thereby saving their own lives. Pavelić's wife, the film claims, was Jewish herself, as were many senior Ustaše officials. The viewer is shown a letter allegedly authored by Pavelić, asking government minister Mile Budak to spare the lives of Jews who had not committed any crimes against the state. The film claims that hundreds of Jasenovac inmates were killed in Allied bombing raids in 1944–45. Between 1941 and 1945, inmates were allowed to stage concerts, book readings and play football, the film maintains, and conditions were more humane than those in German camps. The narrator states that post-war communist propaganda inflated the number of people killed at Jasenovac, from an estimated 18,000 to 600,000–700,000. The viewer is shown a headline from the Partisan newspaper Vjesnik, said to be dated from April 1945, which says that corpses tossed into the Sava River at Jasenovac had reached Zagreb. The narrator questions the veracity of this claim, explaining that the Sava flows away from Zagreb and not towards it.
The film expresses doubts about the incomplete list of over 83,000 victims compiled by the Jasenovac Research Institute, which supposedly includes the names of individuals who had been killed elsewhere by the Germans and Chetniks. It then claims that the Partisans used Jasenovac as a concentration camp of their own between 1945 and 1951, and that more inmates lost their lives while it was run by the communists than when it was run by the Ustaše. The narrator concedes, however, that there is no documentary evidence proving this hypothesis. Over several months in the summer of 1945, the film contends, the Partisans massacred hundreds of thousands of Croats along the Austrian border, thereby committing one of the worst genocides in European history. Many of those who participated in the killings, it claims, were former Chetniks who had only recently changed allegiance and joined the Partisans. The narrator warns viewers against believing mainstream historical accounts of Croatia's wartime history and states that a number of prominent Croatian citizens, including former presidents Stjepan Mesić and Ivo Josipović, as well as a number of left-leaning historians and journalists, are conspiring against the country by perpetuating left-wing historical narratives. The film ends with the narrator calling the aforementioned individuals "liberal fascists".
Release and reception