DrConway,
Then you should be accusing the US Holocaust Museum of historical revisionism as well since they don't accept 500,000 either.
For years the standard lie was that 700,000 died at Jasenovac and the Jasenovac Research Institute has a "list of victims" - it does not specific "list of victims of Jasenovac" but that's what they want you to believe.
So 23 people from our village are among 700,000 victims on that list which memorializes Jasenovac. Including my great uncle who died in Dachau. I have asked villagers about the fate of all 23 of the victims - they were all either killed by Italian fascists or German nazis. In one incident German nazis ordered villagers to transport arms and at the end they shot 3 of the 4 in the head and they let another great uncle go because "he wasn't so nervous".
The original number was 700,000 and that was calculated by a 24 year old Serbian mathematician who was told "the numbers should be signficant". Independent research by another Serb Kocovic and Croat Zerjavic debunks the myth of 500,000 or 700,000. Both are in the 80,000 to 100,000 range - terrible crime for sure but certainly not the exaggerated losses that the communists manufactured.
Interestingly Zerjavic's work was partially funded by the Croatian Jewish community. And historians such as Ivo or Slavko Goldstein, Croatian Jews have also stated that 500,000 or 700,000 losses at Jasenovac is not accurate.
The fact that we only have records of about 80,000 killed (in either Belgrade or Zagreb) is pretty telling.
As for the Jewish community, we saw with pre and post war census that the estimates of holocaust deaths was accurate.
On the territory of Yugoslavia, if 500,000 really did die there, there probably would have been very few Serbs in Croatia and a lot fewer in BiH after the war. But the percentage make up in those areas did not differ too much in the post war census than it did in the 1931 census.
Jasenovac was a crime but inflated numbers do not do anything to bring justice to those victims.
quote:
Originally posted by DrConway:
[b]An interesting note regarding the claims of "inflated numbers" at Jasenovac:[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasenovac_concentration_camp]This link[/url] (Wikipedia, but you can check the references yourself) cites a number of different analyses of the death counts and the majority hit 500,000 or so.
I actually find it interesting that the effective equivalent of Holocaust denial is being practiced by Croatians who claim that the calculated death counts are far too high. We would rightly excoriate anyone claiming that only 500,000 Jews died instead of 5 to 7 million.[/b]