Collaboration with the Axis Powers

OPLENAC - The terrorist assassination of King Alexander I Karadjordjevic of Yugoslavia (1888-1934) was an event that made history as his death was essentially the first shot of WWII, Serbian PM Milos Vucevic said at the main state ceremony at Oplenac, central Serbia, that commemorated the 90th anniversary of the assassination.

BELGRADE - In occupied Europe during WWII, only the Ustasha Independent State of Croatia had specialised death camps for Serb, Jewish and Romani children, notes a resolution on Ustasha killings of Serb, Jewish and Romani children in death camps for children in the Independent State of Croatia between 1941 and 1945.

The Serbian Museum of Genocide Victims said on Friday that it has obtained a list with the names and details of 5,800 Serbian children rescued from Ustasa death camps in the Nazi-allied Independent State of Croatia, which was thought to have been lost or destroyed.

The Holocaust in the Independent State of Croatia was, for a long time, seen as an event in which Nazis played the dominant role. According to this narrative, the Ustasa were nothing more than executioners of their will while fascism and anti-Semitism were foreign ideas without any real roots in Croatia.

Tens of thousands of names are written on the walls of the former Jasenovac camp complex. They are the names of the victims, whose old clothes are on display what is now a memorial site, reinforcing a sense of horror at the conditions in which they were forced to live and die.

A woman holds a picture of Alozije Stepinac at an open-air mass in Zagreb in June 2011. Photo:EPA/ANTONIO BAT.

The Higher State Prosecution launched an investigation into the mass killings in July 2019, and political parties and civic activists called on the authorities to exhume the remains from the cave and identify the victims.

Serbia's Academy of Sciences and Arts, SANU, has dismissed as an "inflammatory political pamphlet" a paper drafted by its Croatian counterpart setting out the demands it says Zagreb should make as part of the negotiation process on the European Union accession of Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The central ceremony at the Monument to the Victims of Genocide in the complex of the former Nazi camp Staro Sajmite is led by President Aleksandar Vui.

"Very concerned about restauration plans for Xhafer Deva's house, a known Nazi collaborator/protagonist of infamous SS Skanderbeg Div. No history whitewashing! Don't distort the truth about the Holocaust or war crimes committed by the Nazis and local collaborators. Protect the facts," the German ambassador said on Twitter.