THE 1946 AND 1964 OFFICIAL LISTS OF THE CASUALTIES OF WAR

State and regional commissions for the establishment of war crimes committed by the occupying forces and their collaborators in 1946 made a census of the victims of fascist terror (it excluded the lists of the slain resistance fighters and the lists of the so-called quislings and collaborators). The lists were most probably completed in collaboration with regional, republic and federal bureaus of statistics. They were aimed to support the reparation requests submitted to the International Reparation Commission in Paris. However, the results of the listing were not officially published, although the census costs were enormously high. In my own investigation I found out that the Croatian Archives filed detailed listings for the Republic of Croatia. The Archives also has a list by names, entered into 22 books. The list cites 138,984 individuals; out of whom 6,670 were killed in Germany, 22,376 were killed by Germans in the Yugoslav territory, 1,255 were killed by Germans and Italians, 8,111 were killed by Italians, and 42,250 were killed in concentration camps.

Data compiled by the State Commission for Bosnia-Herzegovina, according to Dorde Pejanovic's Stanovnistvo BiH (Population of Bosnia-Herzegovina), Naucna knjiga, Beograd, 1955), mention 174,084 victims. Listings compiled by the Regional Commission for Srijem state 21,597 victims, while the Regional Commission for Backa and Baranja listed 17,399 victims. Other data compiled in 1946 has not been available. In the year 1988, the Sarajevo files were in complete disorder, while the officials of the Serbian Archives, the Belgrade Archives, and the Yugoslav Archives claimed that they were not in possession of such data.

However, in 1988, I found out that the Yugoslav Archives have registered data on listings completed by the Federal Bureau of Statistics in 1964, which contained names of all resistance fighters killed and other victims of the war, as well as resistance fighters and others who survived the war. All the listed data were kept in 2,948 boxes, out of which 4 a day are available to each researcher. When I asked why the data were not classified according to republics, provinces, and nationality, I was told that the Archives lacked personnel for such activity.

Only after the journalists of "Danas", Zeljko Kruselj and Duro Zagorac published the data from these listings ("Danas", November 21, 1989), we found out that this was not true. The listings were compiled at the request of the Federal Republic of Germany, because Germany did not agree to the repeated Yugoslav request for reparation negotiations, as long as they were based on the figure of 1,706,000 victims of war, as submitted to the Paris Reparation Commission in 1946. The "Danas" journalists wrote:

"The first phase of the listing, conducted in October and November 1964, and concluded with the preliminary summary of data on the republic level, did not suggest the forthcoming embargo. The consolidation of the data by the Federal Commission in Belgrade caused real panic. The witnesses claim that the almost unanimous reaction was: Impossible! The records were returned to the republic commissions and to the municipalities. There were minor corrections in few cases, but the overall results did not change. The Federal Commission itself came to a similar conclusion, asserting that the listings comprised 1,107,172 people engaged in the war, out of which 597,323 people were killed in different ways. The opinion is that migrations and extermination of entire families and small villages in the mountain areas influenced the scope deficiency in listings. The deficiency is estimated at 20-30%. Supposedly, the listing compiled according to nationality was the most unjust towards Serbians, Muslims, and Croatians. In the case of Slovenian, Macedonian, and Montenegrin victims the figures were fairly correct."

On the assumption that the listing has a 20-30% deficiency, the estimated number of killed resistance fighters and civilians would reach 750,000 to 780,000. Together with 200,000 killed collaborators and quislings, the total number would reach about one million.

Concerning the embargo, the "Danas" journalists said:

"It is not known when the state formally classified the list of the war victims as a top secret, but it is almost certain that the data was submitted to the government of the Federal Republic of Germany. In this context, certain issues are connected to the embargo on the list for the Yugoslav public, which sew long- lasting dissension among the researchers of this phenomenon. This policy of double standards, that is, truths which are suitable only for use abroad, caused a considerable amount of distrust in the official standpoint of the Yugoslav authorities, and this on the part of its own citizens."

This survey clearly shows that the results of the 1946 and 1964 listings were not published because they substantiated that the actual population losses in Yugoslavia during the Second World War were considerably less than the number submitted to the International Reparation Commission in Paris, i.e. the official 1,706,000 victims, the figure also known to the Yugoslav public.

While every other conscientious and responsible state leadership would take all measures in order to establish the real truth, i.e. important and crucial data for the people of a country, the Yugoslav leadership of the time eliminated all summary documents (they were allegedly burned). This resulted in fabrications and combinations by various authors about where the large losses occurred. Finally, the Serbian writers and historians agreed that the largest losses occurred in the notorious Jasenovac-Gradina concentration camp.