Around 300 of Croatia’s Jewish population held a vigil outside the country’s most notorious concentration camp in protest at the government’s alleged failure to challenge rising neo-Nazi sentiment in the country.

Part of this failure concerns the downplaying of the crimes of Croatia’s pro-Nazi regime. The ultra-nationalist and antisemitic Ustaša regime took power on August 10, 1941, after Axis forces had invaded Yugoslavia on April 6, 1941.

Concentration camps were built nationwide to ‘purge’ Croatian society of ‘foreign elements’. This extended to Jews, Serbs, Roma and non-Catholic minorities.

Ustaša fascists exterminated over 500,000 Serbs. They forced 250,000 into exile and made 250,000 more Serbs convert to Catholicism under pain of death, according to Yad Vashem.

The fascist regime murdered  75 per cent of Croatia’s pre-war Jewish population of 40,000. Jews in Croatia now make up 1 per cent of the general population.

Between 15,000 and 20,000 Roma were also murdered by the Ustaša regime, as were between 5,000 and 12,000 ethnic Croats and Muslims.

Croatia’s largest concentration camp was the Jasenovac complex, a string of five camps along the Sava River, east of Zagreb. Close to 100,000 people were murdered in this camp between 1941 and 1945.

Prisoners at the Jasenovac camp received little food. Shelter and sanitary conditions were minimal at best. Guards tortured, assaulted and murdered prisoners with impunity.

The tools of murder included hammers, knives, bars and axes. They also used blowtorches and welding rods to torture prisoners.

Eduard Sajer, a survivor of the Jasenovac concentration camp, recalled how guards had segregated barracks for Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews and Serbs. When not working as an electrician in the camp, Sajer had to dig graves for individuals murdered by a blow to the head from a mallet. He bore witness to the murder of his brother and lost his parents and other siblings in the camp. He watched others being burnt alive.

Granik and Gradina also served as local killing fields.

Croatia’s surviving Jews were deported to Auschwitz between 1942 and 1943.

According to Marko Attila Hoare, an expert on genocides the region “the Ustasha  extermination  of  Serbs  provided  a  catalyst  for  Chetnik  massacres  of  Croat  and  Muslim  civilians“.

Dinko Sakic, commander of the Jasenovac camp, had fled to Argentina after the war and was eventually found guilty of crimes against humanity in 1999. Sakic was responsible for the murder of more than 2,000 Serbs, Jews and Roma. He ordered executions, refused to treat the sick, worked people to death and tortured some with a blowtorch. The courts found that Sakic had personally shot dead two prisoners for smiling.

Croatia’s independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, saw attempts to rehabilitate the image of the Ustaša. Fascists veterans received benefits from government officials. The  late president Franjo Tudjman, who died in 1999, was often accused of Holocaust revisionism.

The funeral of Dinko Sakic proved a lavish affair in 2008. According to local media, he  was buried in the Ustasha uniform and described by the priest at the funeral as “a person Croats must be proud of”. Israel’s former ambassador, Shmuel Meirom, condemned the funeral.

Now in 2016, there is a sense of a neo-Nazi revival. Ultra-nationalists shouted pro-Nazi slogans at a rally attended by thousands of people, including Deputy Parliamentary Speaker Ivan Tepes in January.

Similar chants were heard during a recent football match between Israel and Croatia.

The Croatian government is now taking steps to allay fears. President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic met representatives of Jews, Serbs, Gypsies and anti-fascists. Prime Minister Tihomir Oreskovic issued a statement condemning the Ustashe regime.a

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A mayoral candidate in the upcoming Bucharest election had denied Romania’s complicity in the Holocaust in a 1994 news article.

Marian Munteanu now of the National Liberal Party (PNL), had founded the ultra-Christian and nationalist Movement for Romania (Mişcarea pentru România) in 1991. The accusations surfaced in their newspaper ‘Mişcarea’ in June 1994. The party foleded in 1996 as Munteanu pursued other interests.

He denied that Romania had experienced an anti-Jewish Holocaust and the 400,000 deaths were no more than a ‘deeply flawed assessment’.

Much of Romania’s Holocaust denial concerns the actions of Nazi collaborator General Ion Antonescu. His antisemitism is, however, without question. In a 1941 session of the Council of Ministers he said: “I give the mob complete license to massacre [the Jews]. I will withdraw to my fortress, and after the slaughter, I will restore order.”

Antonescu ordered pogroms and the closure of all ‘Jewish communist cafes’. The repressive regime had proved one of Hitler’s most consistent allies during the Second World War. General Antonescu had met with Hitler in 1943 to reassure him of Romania’s unconditional support.

Romania and other Axis allies were part of the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Odessa, a city in the Ukraine, was home to 180,000 Jews – around a third of the population. Before Romanian occupation, around half of Odessa’s Jewish population had fled.

On October 22, 1941, an explosion at Romania’s military headquarters in Odessa had left 67 dead, including the Romanian military commandant.

This provided the pretext for genocide. Troops had shot dead many of the 19,000 Jews rounded up near the habour areas. Others were doused with petrol and burned alive.

Romanian forces took 20,000 Jews to the village of Dalnik. Some Jews were shot. Others found themselves locked into a warehouse which was then set ablaze. Troops shot any fleeing individuals.

The Romanian administration then ordered the surviving Jews into two ghettos. Many died as a result of malnutrition, disease and exposure. In 1942, Romanian authorities deported almost 20,000 Jews from the Odessa ghettos to camps and ghettos in Transnistria, including the Bogdanovka, Domanevka, and Akhmetchetka regions.

Like other European countries, antisemitism had existed in the pre-war years. The fascist Iron Guard found broad political support for their antisemitic violence and propaganda during the 1920s and 1930s.

King Michael of Romania arrested Antonescu in 1944. The former general returned to Romania to face trial in 1946. And he admitted signing the order to massacre Jews in Odessa.

Antonescu believed that “Judaic and Masonic” influences corrupted Romanian life. He built his nationalism on a wave of antisemitism and anti-Roma sentiment. In spite of his public statements after the failure to capture Stalingrad, in private, Antonescu did believe he was at war with Jews.

His regime had overseen the murder of roughly 280,000 Jews and 11,000 Roma people — more than any other country except Germany.

A firing squad killed Antonescu and three others found guilty of war crimes in 1946.

Attempts to rehabilitate General Antonescu were most pronounced in the 1990s. Iosif Constantin Dragan had used his wealth and ownership of the weekly newspaper Europa to question the Holocaust until his death in 2008. In 1991, articles the Europa weekly denied Romanian complicity in the Holocaust. Europa even gave column space to Romania’s extreme-right.

The fraudulent antisemitic conspiracy ‘Protocol of the Elders of Zion’ was even serialised in the right-wing press. Other magazines published their own Holocaust denial in 1994.

In 2003, Romania’s Ministry of Information denied the existence of the Holocaust. The statement was soon withdrawn. Legislation passed in 2002 meant that Holocaust denial could result in a six year prison sentence. That legislation, however, did little to stop the flow of Holocaust denial literature.

In spite of the overwhelming evidence, Holocaust denial and Romania’s complicity in genocide continued. Part of the problem is collective historical memory. Children were not taught about the Holocaust in schools until 1998. Only in the last decade have secondary-school children been able to take special classes on the Holocaust. Yet it has not addressed the nationalist assumptions embedded in pre-communist Romania.

Legislative amendments passed in 2015 made Holocaust denial illegal. And it also sought to weaken far-right movements who lionize Antonescu and the Iron Guard.

The Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of Holocaust in Romania criticised Munteanu’s views on the Holocaust, according to the Agerpres news website.

Munteanu insists that his quotes were taken out of context.

There’s growing pressure on the PNL to withdraw Marian Munteanu’s candidacy due to his ‘fascist sympathies’.

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The year is 1933 and Hitler’s rise to power is imminent. Days earlier and the Nazis had exploited the burning of the Reichstag, home of the German parliament, for votes.

Armed security forces patrolled public buildings. On the streets,  Sturmabteilung (SA) ‘brown shirts’ had their violence legitimised by decree. Political violence and intimidation, however, did not grant Hitler his parliamentary majority. The March 5 elections gave the Nazi Party 43.9 per cent of the vote and 288 parliament seats out 647.

On March 10, 1933, Dr Michael Siegel visited a Munich police station on behalf a client. Dr Siegel was one of roughly 4,000 Jewish lawyers in Germany. They held senior positions in the court system, bar association and justice ministry. In 1933, racist laws pushed saw many lose their jobs. The indignity of this discrimination was was compounded by further arrests and violence.

Dr Siegel had entered a Munich police station on behalf of Max Uhlfelder, the Jewish owner of a large city-centre store. Nazi Party members had taken positions of office in Munich a day earlier. Heinrich Himmler, the SS commander, now commanded the Police Authority. The Swastika flew atop public buildings. Nazi paramilitaries had smashed Mr Uhlhelder’s shop windows and deported him to Dachau concentration camp.

Instead of listening to Dr Siegel’s complaint, the police assaulted him. SA ‘brown shirts’ had perforated Dr Siegel’s eardrum. The force of their punches had broken several teeth. They had cut his trousers from the knee down.

Dr Siegel was then made to walk the streets of Munich bloody and barefooted. Surrounded by ranks of SA paramilitaries, Dr Siegel wore a sign that read: “I will never again complain to the police”.

Some debate the actual wording of the sign. Dr Siegel had told his children that it read: “Ich bin Jude aber ich will mich nie mehr bei der Polizei Beschweren”(I am a Jew but I will never again complain to the Police).

Heinrich Sanden, the photojournalist who immortalised this humiliation, disagreed. Dr Siegel soon became an international symbol of the antisemitic persecution in Germany. He did not learn of the photo until the 1970s.

Despite the growing climate of antisemitic violence and discrimination, Dr Siegel and his family remained in Munich. He had passport revoked in 1934 and reinstated in 1935. Local farmers warned Dr Spiegel about the impending Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938. He fled to Luxembourg and returned some weeks later, only to lose his legal license. Few Germans protested this flagrant discrimination.

At the start of 1939, the Siegel family left their home and found other accommodation. Their new ground floor served as an emergency synagogue,  the Nazis had razed the city’s main synagogue. Dr Siegel’s 18-year-old son Peter and 14-year-old daughter Beate soon emigrated to England.

Dr Siegel and his wife Mathilde sought asylum in Peru but were rejected. In a remarkable stroke of luck, a student teaching Dr Siegel Spanish was a nephew of the Peruvian Minister of the Interior.

The arduous road to Peru began in 1940. They travelled through Lithuania, Siberia, Russia and Japan before arriving in Peru. Dr Siegel took up work in a Lima bookstore. In the post-war years, he worked to establish an embassy for the Federal Republic of Germany in Peru’s capital, Lima. He soon became the Rabbi of the German-Jewish community in Lima. By 1953, Dr Siegel could again practise law in Germany, despite the geographical difference.

Dr Siegel helped German Jewish refugees in Peru and other parts of Latin America.

In 1971, at the age of 89, he received the Grand Cross of Merit of the German Republic ‘in recognition of his exceptional services to the state and people’. He accepted the award on behalf of all German Jews in Lima.

In spite of his growing age, Dr Siegel never stopped pursuing restitution cases. He died in 1979 at the age of 96.

Dr Siegel never forgot the ordeal he faced in Munich. In  a 1987 article, The Association of Jewish Refugees retold the story of Dr Siegel’s life and journey to Peru.

The authors, H.P. Sinclair and M.B. Green, wrote that Dr Michael Siegel had one thought in his mind: ‘I shall survive you all’. And he did. But according to Sinclair and Green, he bore no grudge against the German people. For he had known “too many decent ones for that“.

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Nationalists marched in Kaunas, a city east of Lithuania’s capitol of Vilnius, to celebrate alleged Nazi collaborators.

Members of defendinghistory.com – a website dedicated to exposing extremism in Lithuania monitored the 16 February march.

The Union of Nationalist Youth of Lithuania organised the march to fall on the anniversary of Lithuania’s declaration of independence in 1918.

Under the banner “We Know Our Nation’s Heroes”were pictures of Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, Jonas Noreika, Povilas Plechavičius, Kazys Škirpa, Antanas Baltūsis-Žvejas, and Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis. Individuals accused of direct complicity in the Holocaust or fighting alongside Nazi forces.

The Soviet Union invaded Lithuania in 1940. And within two months had annexed the country. A year later and Lithuania had absorbed Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi tyranny in Poland. This swelled Lithuania’s Jewish population to 250,000 (10 per cent of the population).

Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis formed a provisional government after Nazi Germany had expelled the Soviets. Nazi Germany had banned the preferred choice of Kazys Skirpa from returning to Lithuania. It lasted for six weeks. Some accuse it of it complicity with the invading Nazi forces. Others would argue that it attempted in vein to restore statehood.

The provisional government had welcomed the Nazi vision for a ‘new Europe’. And its staunch anti-Bolshevism.

Journalist Vidmantas Valiušaitis, however, sought to draw a line between the actions of the provisional government and that of the Lithuanian Activist Front. The antisemitic elements of the latter had denounced Lithuanian Jews as ‘traitors’. And might have been behind the paroxysms of antisemitic violence that began before the arrival of Nazi Germany.

The efficiency of Nazi genocide in Lithuania owes in part to complicity. Lithuanian auxiliaries worked with Einsatzgruppen units to eradicate most Jews in rural Lithuania in August 1941. More than 30,000 of Vilna’s Jews died in Ponar, a wooded area outside the city.

By November of that year, the Nazis had murdered most of the Jews in ghettos of the larger cities. Of the remaining 40,000 or so Jews resided in ghettos. Overcrowding, food shortages, and outbreaks of disease were products of inhumane living conditions.

In response to mass murderer, resistance movements grew across the existing ghettos. In Vilna, Abba Kovner (1918-1988) urged Jews to rise up and fight at a meeting of Zionist youth groups on 1 January 1942. Kovner argued with passion that  “the only reply to the murderer is revolt!” Within weeks of this speech, Zionist youth leaders and Communists formed the Fareynegte Partizaner Organizatsye (United Partisan Organization; FPO).

The FPO had a number of aims: to inspire Jews outside of Vilna to use armed resistance, carry out sabotage and unite resistance groups. Their successes included destroying a German military train and smuggling weapons into the ghetto. They also managed to send emissaries into the Warsaw and Bialystok ghettos to warn them of the genocide.

In 1943, the Nazis cracked down on FPO activities. German police officials threatened to liquidate the Vilna ghetto and its 20,000 inhabitants if they failed to hand over FPO leader Yitzhak Wittenberg. Armed groups within the ghetto had freed Wittenberg from custody but he later turned himself in in light of the group’s decision. He would then take his own life in German custody.

The liquidation of smaller ghettos in other parts of Lithuania took a matter of days to complete. In Švenčionys, in northeastern Lithuania, it took the Nazis and ‘patriot’ collaborators just two days to murder 8,000 Jews. Nazi collaborators saved ammo by smashing the heads of children into trees. Some say the violence had left its own scars upon the trees.

A survivor of this liquidation, Zhenja Gurevich, recalled boarding a train to Kovno. When it arrived at the killing fields of Ponar, many Jews fled into the forests. Gurevich did not escape capture and soon found herself in the Vilna ghetto.

Following the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943, the Nazis became more aware of armed resistance in the ghettos. In response, the authority over Lithuania’s ghettos switched to the SS. On 21 June 1943, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler had ordered the liquidation of all ghettos in the Reichskommissariat Ostland. The Ostland was a German civil administration that covered the Baltic states and western Belorussia.

Nazi forces began deporting Jews from the Vilna ghetto to Estonia. Estonian security forces assisted in the arrests and deportations. The FPO gathered around 100 armed members to resist. Some had escaped and reentered the ghetto hoping to inspire a mass revolt that did not arrive. As the spectre of liquidation drew near, their leader Abba Kovner and others escaped. They later joined Soviet partisan missions to liberate Vilna in 1944.

If the complicity of others underpinned genocide, what of Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis? He did sign an order to build a concentration camp and establish a ghetto in Kaunas. Others maintain he was a staunch anti-Nazi upon leaving the provisional government. According to BNS, four members of that provisional government ended up in concentration camps.

In 2012, the deep trauma of the Holocaust re-entered the Lithuanian political debate. The then government had set aside 30,000 litas ($11,000) for the burial and repatriation of Brazaitis. Former Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius had defended this move in spite of understandable outrage from Jewish voices. Kubilius cited a 1975 investigation from US Immigration that absolved Brazaitis of pro-Nazi complicity. A number of liberal intellectuals had condemned Kubilius’s plan.

Up to 95 per cent of Lithuania’s Jews died as a result of the Holocaust. Their Jewish culture, including its own unique dialect of the Yiddish language, was almost lost to the winds of history. Crushed by the racist, antisemitic totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and its complicit allies.

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The story of Jan Karski’s bravery in the Second World War came to life in a recent documentary in his native Poland.

Sławomir Grünberg’s ‘Karski and the Lords of Humanity‘ (Karski i władcy ludzkości), blends archival footage, animation, and interviews to retell a story of wartime heroism.

Born in the Polish city of Łódź in 1914, the youngest of eight Catholic children, Jan Romuald Kozielewski later adopted the nom de guerre of Karski. The city exposed a young Karski to multiculturalism. He found himself living alongside Germans, Jews, Russians and Poles. That exposure to Jewish life created an affinity within Karski.

Academic pursuits helped him join Poland’s diplomatic service. When interning for the foreign minister, he found himself in Nuremberg, Germany. Karski saw the Nazi propaganda rallies in 1933 and the toxicity of Nazi antisemitism. It created a deeper sympathy for their plight and a sense of foreboding.

Other diplomatic assignments brought him to London and Paris.

But the outbreak of war brought a career change as he enlisted in the army in 1939. In a few short weeks, invasions from German then Soviet troops divided Poland.

The Soviets arrested Karski and placed him in a detention camp; but a lucky escape meant he avoided execution. A fate other Polish officers did not escape.

After returning to Warsaw, he joined Poland’s Underground State as a courier. A photographic memory and language skills made Karski a valuable asset.

A courier’s job was to cross enemy lines and liaise between Polish forces and Western allies. But in 1940, while on a mission in Slovakia, the Gestapo captured Karski. Under the pain of torture, and fearing he might reveal secrets, he slashed his wrists and ended up in hospital. Karski was later smuggled out of hospital and able to resume his work.

Against that backdrop, it had taken the Nazis less than a year to enclose Warsaw’s main Jewish areas in barbed wire. The birth of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940 gave way to first mass deportations of Jews to death camps in 1942.

In that same year, Karski received the most important mission of his life – to travel to England and expose the plight of Jews in Poland.

Before departing, he met with various underground factions, including the Jewish Zionist and the Jewish Socialist Bund movements. The underground leaders informed Karski that the Nazis had deported more than half of the 500,000 Jews inside the Warsaw Ghetto to death camps, where roughly 1.8m had already died. Their final message to Karski was simple: “Our entire people will be destroyed“.

In August 1942, resistance groups smuggled Karski into the Warsaw Ghetto. From inside he observed emaciated Jews struggling to survive. He also posed as a guard at the Izbica transit camp, where he observed the mass transportation of Jews to death camps.

Karski received a hollow key that contained microfilm evidence of genocide in Nazi-occupied Poland. He crossed Europe on local rail networks at a great personal risk before arriving in London.

But others did not welcome Karski’s evidence of genocide. Superior Polish diplomats worried that it would undermine their own appeals for international support.

Worse still was British indifference. In 1943, he met with Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. Eden had retorted “that Great Britain had already done enough by accepting 100,000 refugees”.

In London, Karski met Szmul Zygielbojm, of the Jewish Socialist Bund, and member of the Polish government in exile, to detail active resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Zygielbojm questioned Karski’s intentions because he was not Jewish. Only after explaining his role as courier for the Jews in Warsaw and their plight did Zygielbojm calm down. He interrupted Karski’s testimony by replying “You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know”.

After arriving London in 1942, Zygielbojm had microfilm evidence of genocide in Nazi-occupied Poland. The information made its way to the Telegraph newspaper – who revealed the use of gas chambers as tools of genocide since 1941.

Yet, in spite of its headline “Germans murder 700,000 Jews in Poland,” the story only made page five of a six-page newspaper.

In 1943, the Allies agreed to a secret conference to discuss the plight of European Jewry in Bermuda. It lasted nine days and began on the same day as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Allies denied the Joint Distribution Committee and the World Jewish Congress entry.

A fog of indifference clouded the conference. Neither government referenced the “Final Solution”. The U.S. government sent a low-level delegation and refused to reduce strict quotas to let in more Jewish refugees. From a British perspective, there was a refusal to aid Jewish migration to Palestine.

The only success was to create a refugee centre in North Africa; but that took more than a year to establish.

Britain and the United States “ruled out the possibility of taking in Jewish refugees from Nazism” fearing that the Nazis would accept.

On 11 May 1943, as the Nazis murdered more than 10,000 Jews to crush the second Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Nazis then deported the remaining 56,000 Jews to the Treblinka death camp. The added failure of the Bermuda Conference compounded Zygielbojm’s misery. He took his own life in a final protest against Holocaust indifference.

After the war, Karski spoke about the impact of Zygielbojm’s death.

Karski arrived in the United States in the middle of 1943. He spoke with President Roosevelt (and other officials) of the Nazi’s genocide but their reaction was of disbelief. It took the U.S. government six months to establish the War Refugee Board – to assist those displaced by Axis tyranny.

After the war, Karski settled into a professorship at Georgetown University, in Washington DC (until his retirement in the 1980s). He did not speak about his wartime activities until Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 documentary, Shoah.

Yad Vashem recognised Jan Karski as Righteous Among the Nations in 1984. In 1992, he suffered the tragedy of his wife taking her own life. He married Pola Nirenska, a dancer and choreographer in 1965, the daughter of an observant Jewish father. The Nazis murdered her family.

In 1994, Karski became an honoury citizen of Israel. In his speech he stated:

“This is the proudest and the most meaningful day in my life. Through the honorary citizenship of the State of Israel, I have reached the spiritual source of my Christian faith. In a way, I also became a part of the Jewish community… And now I, Jan Karski, by birth Jan Kozielewski – a Pole, an American, a Catholic – have also become an Israeli”.

Jan Karski died on 13 July, 2000, at the age of 86.

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