Opposing sides manipulated Jasenovac death toll numbers from a million down to sixty thousand

Evidence

Just as Kosovo Albanians were, as a group, held responsible for German collaborators in World War II, all Croats came under suspicion for Ustashe activities in World War II. Both sides manipulated numbers. Serb nationalists claimed that anywhere from 700,000 to more than a million Serbs were killed at Jasenovac. Croat nationalist and historian Franjo Tudjman started low (6o,ooo) and kept revising downward. In such an environment, every sign becomes a symbol, every symbol becomes charged. Thus, a provocative ruling by the newly independent Croatian state limiting the official use of the Cyrillic alphabet, used by Serbs in certain areas, inflamed Serb fears and angers. The adoption by the Croat state of a flag based upon the checkerboard pattern was, for Croat nationalists, an assertion of an ancient Croatian symbol dating back into the medieval times; for many Serbs, the checkerboard was the prime symbol of their Ustashe persecutors of World War II. — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 186

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the generic-collective-blame mechanism shown earlier with Kosovo Albanians in the same chapter.