The scale and scope of Croat Nazi and their Bosnian Muslim helpers' atrocities perpertrated on the helpless Serbian population is impossible to present in a short text. Many, many thick books were written after WWII on the subject. Unluckily, most of them remained untranslated. The West did not have much interest to know (other than few professionals in the Western governments who knew fully well and were to use the historical grievance as a leverage in destroying multiethnic Yugoslavia).

What Croatian Nazis (known as Ustashas) tried to do to the Serbian people of Bosnia and Krajina in 1940's can only be characterized as - GENOCIDE. No other word fits.

What the US and Germany did in 1990's is nothing else but continued genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Western (Bosnia, Krajina) and Southern (Kosovo) Serbs. In doing so they followed exactly in the footsteps of Hitler and Mussolini.

Ignorance was the key: The world knows what happened to the Jewish people during WWII. The world is still ignorant at scale and type of brutalities performed by Croat Nazis on the Serbian civilians -- men, women and children. Because the suffering of the Serbian people was largely unknown to the Western public, the United States and Germany could exploit the fact, re-open the old wounds and even paint the Serbs of Krajina and Bosnia, who tried to defend their right to exist, as intolerant - even Nazis!

The task of this page is to show that there was NO EXCUSE for out-right slaughter of the Serbian civilians. Absolutely no excuse. The only reason the Serbs were murdered is because they were the Serbs. Period.

Here, we will dare compare a few inexcusable events of WWII when Nazis massacred Christian civilian populations. In their twisted minds, Nazis had "an excuse," (actually a military objective) for the crimes perpetrated.

Examples of brutal Nazi war crime:

WHEN:
October 20 and 21, 1941

WHERE:
Kragujevac, Central Serbia

The victims:
7,000 Serbian men, some as young as 18 years old

The perpetrators:
The regular German Nazi (Wehrmacht) troops

The event:
German soldiers collected thousands of Serbian males from their work places, high-school children from their classrooms, and summarily mechine-gunned them.

The "excuse:"
Outright revenge for killed German soldiers.

The Serbs were the first to start mass armed resistance to Nazis in Nazi occupied Europe. Fierce fighters the Serbs were able to liberate most of Montenegro and large parts of central Serbia. The liberated territory was almost the size of Switzerland! In the process many Germans were killed and many more captured. All of this was happening only few months after Hitler conquered and partitioned Yugoslavia. It was also the time when Nazis were pushing hard to take Moscow and Leningrad. To stop the partisan resistance on the territory they already occupied and to free troops for Eastern Front the Germans decided to introduce a revenge ratio: For every killed German soldier 100 Serbian civilians will be executed.

The net result was that the guerilla movement stopped acting in Serbia and moved into Croat-Nazi controlled Bosnia.

Status:
Most of the world still does not know about Kragujevac massacre. Kragujevac was also seat of the factory that produced Yugo cars. During NATO's attack on Yugoslavia in March, April, May, June of 1999, Kragujevac was heavily bombed and Yugo factory destroyed. Parts of the park dedicated to commemoration of the massacre was also damaged by NATO bombs.

The Serbs keep commemorating the martyrdom of Kragujevac male population each year on the day of the massacre.

To learn more...
please, visit this web page.

WHEN:
June 10, 1942

WHERE:
Lidice, Czech Republic

The victims:
All together 340 Lidice (Czech) citizens were murdered.

The perpetrators:
German SS

The event:
The Nazi SS flooded the village. Lidice men (173 of them) were caught and shot right away. Small children were poisoned by gas. Older children were "sent for re-education" to Germany. Women were sent to concentration camp Ravensbruck. Out of those 143 survived and 7 children were, after the war, found and returned to their mothers.

The "excuse:"
On May 27, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the RSHA, the Reichsprotektor of Czechoslovakia was mortally wounded in a grenade attack on his car near Prague by two Czech parachutists sent from London by the Czech government-in-exile. The war crime in Lidice was perpetrated as an act of reprisal and as a tactic in stifling popular enthusiasm for resistance. There was no repetition of Nazi assassination in Czechoslovakia after this reprisal.

Status:
This is a well known Nazi war crime. There is a memorial park and a museum at Lidice village.

To learn more...
please, visit this web page and this one.

WHEN:
June 10, 1944

WHERE:
Oradour sur Glane, France

The victims:
Estimated at 648 (French) residents of the town and the surrounding countryside were murdered.

The perpetrators:
Nazi German 2nd SS Panzer Division 'Das Reich'

The event:
The SS occupied the town. The entire population of the town was rounded up. Men were separated, locked in garages and barns and then shot.

The SS then closed 452 women and children in the town church and killed them by smoke and sharpnel grenades lobbed through the church windows. Only one woman, Mme Rouffanche, escaped to tell the story.

The "excuse:"
The D-Day operation of attacking German Nazi empire from the West started only four days before the war crime occured. The D-Day started on June 6, 1944 in Normandy, France. French resistance was particularly active in the area of Oradour sur Glane. German sources claim that 139 Germans were killed by the resistance. Some of the killed (the SS alleged) were German prisoners. Bodies of 62 mutilated German soldiers were found by SS in nearby Tulle. Also, Helmut Kämpfe, the popular German commander of III./SS-Panzergrenadierregiment 4 'Der Führer' was abducted by the resistance and never found back.

Pressed from two large fronts and attacked from the rear German SS wanted to revenge their dead and "teach resistance a lecture."

Status:
This Nazi war crime is quite well known in world literature.

After the war the French government decided to leave Oradour sur Glane as German SS left it - in ruins. The village is to serve as a monument of civilian suffering at hands of the Nazis.

To learn more...
please, visit this web page and this one.

Examples of GENOCIDE:

WHEN:
The night between August 3rd and 4th, 1941

WHERE:
Glina church, Serbian Krajina (later part of Tito's "Croatia")

The victims:
Some 2,000 Serbian civillians. Almost all men.

The perpetrators:
Nazi Croats local to Glina area.

The event:
Nazi Croats (known as Ustashas) collected any male Serb they could find in vicinity of Glina village. They then pushed as many of these people into Glina church. During the night the Ustashas came with knives and slaughtered them all. One by one.

The "excuse:"
None. A simple case of genocide which Ustasha called cleansing. The Ustashas started slaughtering their Serbian neighbors as soon as German armies installed them to power. The slaughter had no military or any other excuse. It only boosted guerilla movement among the Serbs who saw no other way to survive but to fight. This Ustasha bestiality shocked even German Nazis who were angered that Ustasha deeds are only producing strengthened resistance in the central Balkans.

Status:
In 1995, as new Ustashas got to power (with help of Germany and US), they expelled the remaining, unslaughtered Serbian population. They then shelled and looted the new church rebuilt at the place where Ustashas slaughtered the Serbs and ruined the old church in 1941. The memorial plaque commemorating the 1941 slaughter was smashed, too.

To learn more...
please, read the survivor's testimony.

WHEN:
The next day: August 4, 1941

WHERE:
Prebilovci, Serbian Herzegovina

The victims:
Some 800 Serbian men, women, children. Almost all inhabitants of Prebilovci.

The perpetrators:
Muslim and Croat neighbors who joined Ustasha troops.

The event:
On August 4, 1941, some 3,000 Ustashas got to Prebilovci. Serbian women and children were either captured and herded into the elementary school or killed in their homes. Atrocities began in the village including the killing of 50 infants who were swung by their legs so that their heads could be dashed against the school wall. There was continuous rape of the young girls. Remaining villagers were slaughtered (or thrown alive) into deep mountain crevices.

The "excuse:"
None. A simple case of genocide which Ustasha called cleansing.

Status:
Only in 1991 did the local Serbs dare exhume their dead. Tito had ordered mountain crevices be cemented. The bones of the martyrs were brought to a newly-made monastery. On November 5, 1992, the Croats dymanited and destroyed the monastery.

To learn more...
please, visit this web page.

Obviously the scope of this analysis was very narrow: Nazi war crime of WWII Europe. A slightly broader scope would easily prove allied bombing of Dresden as a war crime. The excuses were similar. If we are to broaden the analysis to include the rest of the planet then American mass-murder at Hiroshima should be mentioned. The excuse is even more difficult to accept in that case... But Americans certainly did not want to exterminate and/or expel all Japanese people from Japan. Croat and Muslim Nazis did want to get rid of every living Serb in the areas they got to control. That is the difference. The Ustashas were perpetrating a genocide.

IT WAS A GENOCIDE!

Examples of brutal Nazi war crime:

Examples of GENOCIDE:

The truth belongs to us all.

Last revised: December 19, 2003