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Vladimir Žerjavić (August 2, 1912 - September 5, 2001) was a Croatian economist and a United Nations specialist who published a series of revisionist historical articles and books during the 1980s and 1990s in which he argued that the scope of the Holocaust in World War II-era Croatia was exaggerated. Zerjavic also known for alleged inflating of death count during war 1991-1995 (compared to ICTY data, the counts are inflated) and also for making alledgedly inflated counts of the killed Ustaše soldiers in Bleiburg. Most Serbs and Serbian historians see him as a holocaust denier and discount his claims completely, though there are some exceptions, most notably Bogoljub Kočović. But even Bogoljub Kocovic, who is often quoted together with Zerjavic, claimed that in the 90s Zerjavic has become an open Croatian nationalist, and has distanced from Zerjavic.
Žerjavić asserted that Yugoslavia lost 1,027,000 people in World War II. Of that, 295,000 died in Croatia, and 328,000 in Bosnia and Herzegovina (both part of the Independent State of Croatia and under the Ustaše regime at the time), and another 36,000 from those countries died abroad. His claim includes 153,000 civilian victims in Croatia and 174,000 in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and of that, 85,000 people from Bosnia and Herzegovina and 48,000 from Croatia died in concentration camps. This was substantially smaller than in all officially accepted estimates before, especially with regard to previous estimates of hundreds of thousands of Serbian deaths in Jasenovac and other places.
With regard to the Serbs, Žerjavić's calculation ended with a total of 197,000 Serbian civilian victims on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia: 50,000 in the Jasenovac concentration camp, 45,000 killed by the Germans, 34,000 civilians killed in battles between Ustaše, Chetniks and Partisans, 28,000 killed in prisons, pits and other camps, etc. Another 125,000 Serbian people from NDH were killed as combatants, raising the total to 322,000.
This has caused many, especially among Serbian historians, to accuse Zerjavic of politically motivated and doctored estimates, which went so far as to call Zerjavic a holocaust denier. For instance, Zerjavic used growth rate for Serbs in Bosnia as 1,1%(as for all nations together), while critics point out that growth rate for Serbs was 2.4% (1921-1931) and 3.5% (1949-1953).
Some international agencies have accepted Croat Žerjavić's (and almost equal data achieved by Serbian statistician Bogoljub Kočović) calculations as the most reliable data on war losses in Yugoslavia during WW2.
Žerjavić's (and Bogoljub Kočović's) calculations of war losses in Yugoslavia during WW2 were accepted by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, together with other typically higher estimates:
- "Due to differing views and lack of documentation, estimates for the number of Serbian victims in Croatia range widely, from 25,000 to more than one million. The estimated number of Serbs killed in Jasenovac ranges from 25,000 to 700,000. The most reliable figures place the number of Serbs killed by the Ustaša between 330,000 and 390,000, with 45,000 to 52,000 Serbs murdered in Jasenovac."
The Simon Wiesenthal Center and Yad Vashem on the other side did not accept Žerjavić estimates .
Žerjavić inflated 5 times Croatian death count during 92/95 war
According to investigations of Vladimir Zerjavic overall there are 220,000 victims in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 92-95 war of which 160,000 Muslims, 30,000 Croasts and 25.000 Serbs. The number of people killed in the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina was around 102,000, according to research done by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (I