German historical revisionism in the Balkans at the turn of the 21st century

and engaged in the destruction Orthodox churches... He said that cer-
tainly the Franciscans in Bosnia and Herzegovina behaved in the same
shameful way. A civilized man cannot be doing such things, let alone a
spiritual leader (...) The Germans recognized the Croatian Orthodox
Church only when they, together with us,... killed all Orthodox priests
and when more than 350 thousand Serbs perished...”.
How does Alexander Korb treat the forced conversions of Serbs
to Catholicism in Croatia between 1941 and 1945? He simply asserts
that the Ustashe regime had a “predominately secular character” (pg.
29) and that the forced conversion of Orthodox Serbs was merely a
“secular project by the Croatian state, in order to resolve the ‘Serb-
ian question’ as the previous strategy of mass killings turned out to
be impractical, and the strategy of forcing Serbs from their homes
reached the limits of its effectiveness” (pg. 265-286). Korb simply dis-
qualifies authors who hold opposing views and cite a sizeable number
of primary historical sources to back up their claims, labelling them as
“anti-clerical” (pg. 35).
He allows for one more possibility: “It seems that the attacks on
Catholicism in post-WWII Yugoslavia served to camouflage national-
istic intentions. That communist paradigm was, after the 1980s, trans-
formed without much difficulty into a Serbo-nationalist paradigm”
(pg. 30). That is all he has to say about this issue.
We will conclude this part of the paper with one more quote, yet
another example of Korb’s attitude towards Jasenovac and the Cath-
olic Church:
“The example of thousands of Serbian children who were brought
to the camp after offensives on Partisan-controlled areas demonstrates
that deportation to the Jasenovac concentration camp didn’t necessar-
ily mean a death sentence. In one instance that was coordinated by a
private individual, with the help of the Red Cross and the Catholic
Church, those children were successfully released and relocated to or-
phanages and camps for children” (pg. 329). Whether out of ignorance
or deliberately, he does not mention the identity of said “private indi-
vidual”, the noble and brave Austrian nurse Diana Budisavljević, who
really did help rescue thousands of Serbian children from Croatian
death camps between 1941 and 1945.
Regarding her meetings with Catholic Archbishop Aloysius
Stepinac and her plea for the highest ranking official within the Cro-
atian Catholic Clergy to help her in her humanitarian effort, Diana
Budisavljević writes on two instances in her diary:
A note from December 3 1941 states: “My first audience with the
Archbishop Dr. Stepinac: The outcome of the meeting was completely
negative....”
A note from May 6 1942 sounds even more resigned: “The Arch-
bishop is very reserved. He does not want to engage with it. He says he
has no influence on the government. He told me that he visited one of
the government ministers regarding the apartment of a Jewish woman.
The minister promised him that this woman would be able to remain
in her home, but now they are planning on forcing her out regardless. I
told him that I came here to save an entire people, and he is talking to
me about one apartment.”
Maybe, however, her diary also belongs to “Serbo-nationalist”,
“Serbo-communist”, i.e. “anti-clerical” and thus meritless historical
sources? Hardly, but clearly not impossible, because as Friedrich
Nietzsche claimed: “There are no facts, only interpretations.” Nietz-
sche, however, was no historian.
It is not important what one says or does.
What is important is whose interest it serves.

Niccolo Machiavelli
Alexander Korb’s doctoral dissertations represents without a doubt a
new kind of quality, but not the intended kind, in the sense of a revolu-
tionary and successful revision of positive historical science, but rather
in the context of a political project of the German State and the West in
general, which can be seen at work as far back as the early 1990s. This
carefully orchestrated project began with a political media campaign.
Thus, in August of 1991 we have the example of a Croatian Catholic
priest, Josip Dubovečak from Varaždin, who in one German news-
paper voiced one of the fundamental, almost paradigmatic claims put
forth by the aforementioned campaign: “Hiding within the Serbs is
something Satanic, something genetically wrong.”
Neither the editorial staff of this newspaper nor the tens of thou-
sands of its readers (with the exception of one) reacted to this state-
ment, nor did they distance themselves or protest against this “mil-
itantly violent attempt to invalidate and negate the civilized and
cultural achievements of a society”, which would indicate the “collapse
of social and moral values” (Richard Albrecht, 1989) and the revival of
a Nazi-esque and racist, i.e. Ustashe-esque and racist vocabulary in the
modern “fair and democratic” German State.
Nevertheless, even at that time German academic institutions – at
first carefully and away from public view, and later more openly and
publically – began to give their unique contribution to this project,
whose very pinnacle (new quality) is embodied in Alexander Korb’s
study.
For example, between 1991 and 1992 a similarly themed doctoral
dissertation was proposed and officially accepted at the Goethe Uni-
versity in Frankfurt. This dissertation was not one-sided or biased
and it used reputable historical sources in its analysis of the role that
the Vatican and the Croatian Catholic clergy played in the events sur-
rounding the genocide of Serbs, Roma, and Jews in the Croatian State
between 1941 and 1945.
The initial evaluations were positive and recommended a very high
grade; the committee for evaluation was selected and the final defense
was scheduled. The research was then made available for public view-
ing at the university. Immediately after that a massive campaign was
launched within the university itself, the result of which was the can-
cellation of the final defence and the removal of the author from the list
of official doctoral candidates.
Academic and professor Dr. Milorad Ekmečić made the following
statement regarding this case:
“The European historical and scientific discipline cannot remain
silent in light of this suppression of historical truth (...) This book
is at the same time a form of protest against the collaboration of the
German historical discipline with its government’s politics of the day
and the project of destroying the Yugoslav state...”.

II
Revisionism of Balkan history by German universities and academ-
ic institutions with regards to the time of the Ottoman occupation
of Serbian lands and the time of the first migrations of Slavs to the
Balkan Peninsula.
I will reference one confirmed case from the 1990s in Germany
that also served to disqualify and dehumanize a particular group
(Serbs), which reflected the political agenda of the German state at
that time. I am referring to a series of lectures and their concluding
statements, which were organized during the winter semester of the
1995/1996 school year for students of humanist studies at the Friedrich
Wilhelms University in Bonn. The organizers were the university and
the academic “Society for the research of South-Eastern Europe” from
Munich. The project leader and one of the authors, editor-in-chief and
publisher of the proceedings, was the long-time professor of Slavic
studies from the university in Bonn, Dr. Wilfred Pothof.
The general theme was: “Conflict Region South-Eastern Europe,
the Past and Perspectives.” Important for this theme were primar-
ily the writings of Pothof himself, and also the writings of Bosnian
Muslim author Smail Balić. I still have the aforementioned works
by both authors in my personal archives. The same goes for my own
reply to said authors, entitled “Critique of Impure Reason” (deliberate
reference to Immanuel Kant), which was at the time published only
by the students of the university in Bonn, in their official paper. The
thematic context of Pothof’s presentation was essentially the history
of literature, and the focus was placed on epic hero Marko Kraljević
in Serbian national poetry; thus, something that can be politicized
only as a result of a deliberate and extensive effort. A former student
of the university in Zagreb, Pothof did not hesitate to put in that very
effort and he began his literary and historical analysis by referring to
“Homeric Croatians and atavistic Serbs.” When he later comes to talk
about Serbian hajduks (in national poetry), he immediately establishes
a connection with the latest Civil Wars that took place on the territory
of the Former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Serbian hajduks are, for him:
“Blood-thirsty highwaymen (...) and all of that surfaced again from
atavistic depths of the mind....”
In Serbian national poetry the heroic deeds of Marko Kraljević are
“terrible” and “barbarian”, and Serbian nobleman Miloš Obilić, who
killed the invading Turkish Sultan Murad on the Field of Blackbirds
in Kosovo in 1389, is for him a “man of questionable morals, which
arises from his dual role as an insidious killer and a hero.” The Serbian