Bosnian Holocaust Historiography: A corrective note.

Earlier in the month, the leader of the Bosnian-Serb faction in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Milorad Dodik made a series of remarks about the Holocaust in the former Yugoslavia whilst on a lobbying trip to Washington DC. Mr. Dodik’s remarks, made with political aims in mind (namely the break up of Bosnia and Herzegovina), emphasise aspects of local history that he hopes will gain him support from the current American administration. These remarks, simply put, allege that Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) were enthusiastic supporters of, and participants in, the Holocaust.

It is important to address these allegations fully because, despite the belief here in the Balkans that ‘lies have short legs’ (U laži su kratke noge) meaning that they cannot travel far; half-truths, myths, uses and abuses of history, especially that of the Holocaust, continue to abound in the region. 

During WWII, Serbs, Jews and Roma in the region were victims of a genocide, carried out by Croatia’s Nazi-allied “Ustasha” government. Executed with a physical, visceral brutality, even the Nazis were a little shocked, prompting them to complain to Himmler. Alongside Serbs, Jews and Roma, were killed those who fell foul of the regime, including many non-Ustasha Croats, and Bosnian muslims (Bosniaks), over 1,000 of whom were also killed in the concentration camp Jasenovac. 

The Ustasha, with Hitler’s blessing, took over most of Croatia, large parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina and a small part of Serbia. Before the Nazi leadership had even sat for their conference in Wannsee, the Ustasha had begun massacring Zagreb’s Jews, filling pits around Mt. Velebit with their bodies.  

Whilst Jews and Roma were all to be killed, Serbs, for whom the Ustasha reserved the most hatred, were to be subjected to a programme of thirds: murder a third, convert a third (from the Orthodox faith to the Catholic), and the final third, expelled. 

Jasenovac, a concentration camp little known outside the Balkans, was the apogee of Ustasha brutality. Somewhere between 80,000 to 100,000 Serbs, Jews and Roma were murdered there – along with others mentioned – between 1941 and 1945. The testimonies from the Jewish, Serbian and Roma survivors tell of atrocities such as throat-cutting competitions and other bestial acts.

Support for the Ustasha amongst Croatians was initially high, but tapered off in the war’s later years. A minority of Croats resisted from the start, joining the communist Partizans. Of the few Jews who remained alive, many also joined the Partizan movement. Serbs, whose population was physically split between the Ustasha’s ‘Independent State of Croatia’ and the German-ruled actual state of Serbia, were largely split between the Tito-led Partizan movement (in which they comprised a majority), and the Serbia-based ‘Chetniks’, a nationalist-royalist outfit that couldn’t decide who was the greater enemy, the Germans or the Partizans, and in the end, often allied with the former against the latter. 

During their most active years, the Chetniks often saw fit to massacre Bosniak villagers, especially in the regions around Srebrenica (a pattern that returned in 1990’s). As the Chetniks drew closer to the Germans, they became increasingly antisemitic and, as noted by Yad Vashem, either handed Jews over to the Wermacht, or simply murdered them themselves. In this, they were joined by a quisling government in Belgrade (composed of Nazi-sympathetic Serbs under Milan Nedić) who, according to historian Marko Hoare, were “very eager to please the Germans”, their gendarmerie being highly active in assisting the Nazis in rounding up Belgrade’s Jews (roughly) 12,000 Jews, most of whom were dead by 1942.

Where did the Bosniaks fit into all of this? The Ustasha movement featured several notable Bosniak figures. Two brothers, Osman and Džafer Kulenović, Bosnian-Croatian Muslims served as Vice-Presidents of the Ustasha state. Ademaga Mešić, Mehmed Alajbegović, Alija Šuljak, Ismetbeg Kapetanović and several others also held roles in the Ustasha government. Historian Max Bergholz has documented Bosniak participation in Ustasha massacres against Serbs led by the Ustasha in western Herzegovina. Massacres of Serbs in the villages of Rasćica Gaj and Pridvorica in south eastern Bosnia were carried out by the Ustasha ‘Black Legion’, a unit that contained primarily Bosniak volunteers, formed in response to earlier Chetnik massacres. 

Alongside this, whilst the Nazi leadership believed that whilst the muslim nations themselves were racially inferior, they held a great admiration for the religion of Islam and had more pragmatic hopes to secure the alliances with Muslim peoples in order to break the British grip on the Middle East. Out of this confused mix of need and ideology (which saw the Nazi leadership authorise attempts to advertise “Hajj Muhamed Hitler” to Muslims as a returned Christ, tasked with killing the Jewish antichrist) was born the idea of creating two primarily Balkan-Muslim SS divisions: the Albanian SS Skenderbeg, and the primarily Bosniak SS Handschar, formed in 1944 and 1943 respectively. The fact that Bosniaks were largely slavic and therefore considered racially inferior was creatively worked around. In order to bolster recruitment, the then grand-mufti of Jerusalem, Hitler-ally and fanatic antisemite, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, was twice brought to Sarajevo to encourage local muslims to participate. 

Despite Al-Husseini’s visit, and support from some of the clergy, local Bosniaks did not join the unit in the numbers hoped for. Himmler was forced to both reduce it in size and fill it with local Croatians. By the time SS Handschar was pressed into service, most of the Jews in Sarajevo and elsewhere in Bosnia were already dead. The unit served briefly in north-eastern Bosnia towards the end of the war as the Red Army advanced on the region. They are recorded as having participated in brutal crimes against the few Serbs left, and as having massacred 22 Hungarian Jews in Tuzla. At the war’s end, its members deserted, several were captured and later hung by the Partizans. Others made their way into various Arab countries and later participated in the wars against Israel.

Mr Dodik’s remarks then, are not without some historical accuracy, but they deliberately leave unsaid a very important part of the history, for which we are now grateful of the opportunity to tell.

Outside of those who supported the Ustasha, Bosniaks were present in the Partizan movement (fighting against the Ustasha) counting for as many as twenty percent of the forces in muslim regions (though only between two and three percent overall). Secondly, many predominantly Muslim towns and villages, caught between the ebb and flow of Ustasha / Partizan / Chetnik offensives tried to form their own defence militias. Some made direct appeals to Hitler to create a Bosnian statelet within the Reich. Many however, chose a path of open objection towards the Ustasha and the Nazis. It is with these stories that we would like to finish. 

In late 1941, the leaderships of Bosnia’s regional muslim communities issued a series of declarations condemning (after the fact) Ustasha atrocities against Muslims, Serbs and Jews across Bosnia and Herzegovina. Whilst often quite timid in their language and clearly concerned with their own fate, the appeals did nevertheless constitute a direct request by the muslim leadership for the Ustasha to stop the carnage. There are also plenty of recorded instances of Muslim religious leaders from Bosnia’s smaller towns, petitioning the then Grand Mufti, Fehim Spaho, to help Jewish friends. 

There are many stories of rescue, over one hundred of them have been collected together in an edited volume by Bosniak academic, Dževada Garić, which was published in 2025. The most famous story is that of the rescue of the Sarajevo Haggadah, by Imam and academic, Derviš Korkut. On hearing that an ancient Haggadah could be found in Sarajevo, the Germans dispatched a Nazi officer to capture it. Catching wind of this, Korkut took the book and had it hidden in a mosque. Korkut’s family then took in and hid a Jewish girl, eventually escorting her to safety. Another powerful example can be found in the actions of the Hardaga family, who hid the Jewish Kabilijo family in their home in Sarajevo. The Kabilijo family survived, escaped and made it to Jerusalem. During the Bosnian-Serb army’s siege of Sarajevo in the early 90s, (in which six Jews were killed) the Kabilijo family returned the favour, rescuing Zejneba Hardaga and her family, bringing them to Israel. Zejneba’s daughter, Sarah, went on to work at Yad Vashem and converted to Judaism. These stories are well-known, trotted out on numerous occasions every year to demonstrate how Bosniaks supported their Jewish friends and neighbours. Beyond them are a myriad smaller actions that frequently go unmentioned. Bosniaks would secretly transport Jewish friends down to the Italian-controlled regions, others would aid them with false identity documents. Bosniak women would provide Jewish women with veils and Islamic dress so they could go to the cinema and go shopping. We have stories of similar civil disobedience from all round the country. With Jews banned from shops, muslim neighbours would shop for them. When Jews were publicly humiliated by the Ustasha in towns such as Tuzla, people would protest and simply refuse to watch, thus depriving the Ustasha of the chance to humiliate the Jews in public. One Tuzla resident, Ferid Smajić was outraged however, and persistently went out to his Jewish friends on the street, offering them tobacco, chocolate and, apparently, slices of cornbread. Several Bosniaks were arrested and prosecuted for their help, including one Mehmed Ćehagic, who in his position as a police officer, issued falsified documents to over forty Jews and their families, allowing them to escape. He was arrested for this (and also for failing to charge for said documents), tortured and died very soon after. Hasan Ahmić and his family hid the Jewish Pesah family for three weeks in 1941. Sadly, they were found and killed. The Ustasha then beat Ahmić to death. 

There are forty-nine people from Bosnia and Herzegovina listed by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations, twenty-eight of these were Bosniak, the rest were mostly Bosnian Serbs. Given the country’s small population at the time, this is a remarkably high number.  

The history of the Holocaust in Bosnia and Herzegovina should not be viewed with a focus on the rescuers however. The real tragedy is the same as everywhere else in Europe: in 1941, Bosnia and Herzegovina had roughly 14,000 Jews, a population who had been living there for almost 400 years. By 1945, 12,000 of them were dead. Survivors, with nowhere else to go, left for Israel. The ideology that drove this is still active. Over the past few days, the Israeli ambassador to the region, Galit Peleg, was forced to issue strong condemnation following a concert held by popular Croatian singer, Marko Perković Thompson in Herzegovina, the southern region of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Thompson’s ultra-nationalist stances, reflected in the lyrics of songs about the Holocaust in Croatia, have been reported on several times already by TOI. His repertoire, which he has toned down recently, includes songs celebrating Jasenovac Concentration Camp, and the activities of the Black Legion mentioned above. There is an ongoing investigation by local police as to whether Nazi sentiments were expressed during the concert, as videos from the concert plainly show mainly young men giving Hitler salutes. 

Following the concert and the criticism, Thompson himself is quoted in local media as stating: “It is beautiful to promote our values ​​through music, which we inherited from our fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers. It is something that unites us in communion with our Lord Christ.” 

The social ties between Jews and Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina, forged for over 400 years are remarkable. Local Jewish historians tell of two Purims that took place, where Bosniaks intervened to save Jews from Ottoman rulers.  Added to this are the stories of rescue and help recounted above. When Yugoslavia violently fell apart in the early 90’s, most of the rest of Bosnia and Sarajevo’s Jewish community headed again for Israel. Those who remained in the city during the war, opened the Synagogue and their cultural centre to serve as a hospital and kitchen and communication centre, thus coming to the succour of their muslim neighbours, returning the help bestowed on them fifty years previously. Leader of the Jewish community have commemorated Srebrenica, and leaders of the Muslim community continue to commemorate the Holocaust. During the 28th commemoration of the Srebrenica genocide, the director of the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial and genocide survivor himself, Dr. Emir Suljagic addressed members of the World Jewish Congress present for the event, issuing an apology for the Bosniak crimes against the Jews during the Holocaust. On Holocaust Memorial Day in 2024, the Bosnian Grand Mufti and head of the WJC, Menachem Rosensaft signed an agreement in the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial agreeing to work together to fight both antisemitism and islamophobia. Beyond this Bosniak researchers and academics have published critical works on the Bosniak role in the Ustasha regime, so whilst this history certainly not as widely discussed or known as it should be, it certainly is not denied either. These relations have remained stronger, and lasted for longer than elsewhere in the world, but they are certainly not guaranteed. 

Finally, whilst the glorification of the Ustasha in certain parts of Croatian society is open and easy to see, misrepresentation of the facts of the Holocaust in Bosnia and Herzegovina can be harder to spot, and harder to stop. Lies it turns out, actually have very long legs. In response to Mr Dodik’s remarks, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s (Jewish) ambassador to the US, Sven Alkalaj, urged that such statements should be considered with historical accuracy and moral clarity – something that has hopefully been done here. In a world vastly more antisemitic following Hamas’ attack on 7th October 2022, telling half-truths about the Holocaust for political gain, something defined by the IHRA as Holocaust distortion, is likely to continue to cause more damage still, both to the memory of those lost, and to the small communities of Jews still living in Sarajevo, Banja Luka, Mostar and other cities around the region.