![]() According to the same list, approximately 60,000 people died or were killed in the camps Jasenovac and Stara Gradiška, where, as the Yugoslav authorities claimed, at least 700,000 people were murdered. The list of victims was finally completed in 1964, but the result was „disappointing“ since the total number was indeed approximately one million, including 597,323 victims of the so-called „fascist terror“. Therefore, the Yugoslav authorities were forced to conduct a new research in order to provide more accurate data. Based on the number of Yugoslav war victims of one million, provided by the USA government in 1954, Germany refused to pay reparations for 1,700,000 alleged victims. However, the number of over 1,700,000 alleged war victims was presented by the Yugoslav representative Edvard Kardelj at the Paris Peace Conference in 1946 and it remained the official one till the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Nevertheless, the number of 1,700,000, that Vučković provided, „either out of ignorance or in order to deceive, the people of the regime turned demographic losses into actual victims, which were according to all investigations scientifically funded something more than a million.“ What is more, that number of one million people was supposed to include also those killed by the Communist forces. He was given two weeks to calculate the total figure of all victims with the instruction that the number „must be impressive, but scientifically-statistically based“. However, Tito’s statement needed scientific confirmation, but the prominent demographer and Professor Dolfe Vogelnik and his assistant Alojz Debevec refused this assignment since there was no population census and instead, they decided to pass it on to Vladeta Vučković, at that time a math student who was working at the Bureau of Statistics in Belgrade. Manipulating the number of Jasenovac victims continued immediately after the end of the Second World War when Josip Broz Tito suggested that „during the four years we have lost one million and seven hundred thousand of our citizens“, and it served as the most important part of exaggerating the number of the war victims in general. The starting point was the existence of the labour camp Jasenovac in the Independent State of Croatia, founded in the summer of 1941, and where, according to the Communist brochure published in late 1942, 300,000 prisoners were murdered by the end of that year. In the first place, the number of victims has been manipulated since 1942 when the Communist propaganda exaggerated the number trying to motivate larger number of people to join their forces. The obstacles, that every historian necessarily has to face while researching this topic, were influenced by several reasons, including political ones. ![]() Researching demographic losses of the former Yugoslavia in the Second World War has remained one of the most controversial topics in the modern history of the Balkans.
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