This is the English translation of a monumental work that was first published in Croatian in 2001. Despite its formidable length, its subject matter is of sufficiently broad interest, and considerably controversial to justify making it available to an English-language audience. As is to be expected from a book of this size, it provides, on the one hand, a lot of detail on the history of the genocide of the Jews of Croatia during World War II. On the other, it includes chapters on a range of questions that those interested in the subject will want addressed: in particular, on the role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust in Croatia; on calculations of the numbers of victims; on the Jasenovac death-camp; on the relationship of Jews to the Partisan movement; and on historical revisionism by Croat nationalist historians. The last of these includes a devastating dissection of the revisionist writings of the late Franjo Tudjman, subsequently the first president of independent Croatia in the 1990s, who sought to relativize Jewish suffering and Ustaša murderousness, among other things, by highlighting what he claimed to be the privileges and abusive behavior of Jewish inmates in Jasenovac. Goldstein and Goldstein thoroughly expose and demolish Tudjman's politically-motivated and dishonest use of extremely dubious sources.

The subject matter is dealt with sensitively and with nuance. The authors describe the role of the Croatian Ustaša regime and the puppet “Independent State of Croatia” in the Holocaust in a less two-dimensional way than was the case with much of the historiography in the Yugoslav era. The Ustašas enthusiastically carried out the genocide of the Jews in conjunction with the Nazis; there were none of the moral reservations or mitigating factors that some revisionists have attributed to them. Yet, antisemitism and biological racism were not as central to Ustaša ideology as they were to Nazism; like Italian Fascism, the movement had included Jewish and partially Jewish supporters, and one of the principal architects of the genocide, Eugen Dido Kvaternik, had a Jewish grandfather—Josip Frank, who was also the political grandfather of the movement as a whole. There was consequently a certain opportunistic flexibility in the Ustaša implementation of the genocide; seventy-six Jewish doctors were spared deportation so they could be sent to Bosnia to deal with a syphilis epidemic. This was not because the regime wished to be merciful to the Jews in question, but simply because the priority of combating disease in Bosnia at a certain moment outweighed the priority of genocide.

Similarly, the authors sensitively discuss the ambiguous role of the controversial Croatian Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac, who was a religious anti-Semite and identified with the Nazi puppet-state right up to the end, but nevertheless increasingly condemned its atrocities and tried to protect and intercede for Jewish and Serb victims, some of whose lives he consequently saved. Stepinac is frequently whitewashed by Croat nationalists and demonized by Serb nationalists, but here he is treated with balance and objectivity; the authors portray a man torn between his ideological sympathy for the supposedly “independent” Croatian state on the one hand and his conscience on the other, with his Catholicism pulling him both ways at once. The authors conclude “Alojzije Stepinac was a man who faced many dilemmas during a painful time, when it was not easy to find clear answers, and often he did not find them” (502).

This English edition would have benefited from more careful editing and peer-review. There is no introduction or preface whatsoever, so the book's goals are not explained. It is primarily a book about the land of present-day Croatia with a particular focus on Zagreb, rather than on the puppet-state as a whole (which included Bosnia-Herzegovina), though this is not immediately clear. The authors provide a brief historical introduction to Croatia, then trace the history of the Jews there, the history of antisemitism in Croatia and interwar Yugoslavia, the relationship of the Ustaša movement to antisemitism and the experience of Croatia's Jews with persecution and genocide. This is history that focuses on the victims rather than on the perpetrators. Missing are a proper analysis or description of the organization of the Ustaša movement, the puppet-state, and a broader outline of their history, which could have explained the wider historical context in which the genocide occurred.

These are comparatively minor flaws when set against the book's achievements. Ivo and Slavko Goldstein's impressive work will serve as a solid foundation-stone for all future research into the subject.