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Intervention, Return, and Reinterpretation: The Jasenovac Memorial Museum Collection, 1991–2006

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2022

Alexandra ZarembaOpen the ORCID record for Alexandra Zaremba[Opens in a new window]
Alexandra Zaremba*
Affiliation:
Department of History, American University, 4400 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20016-8007, United States
*
az3330a@american.edu
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Abstract

This article recalls an important episode in the history of Jasenovac Memorial Museum (JMM). It traces the formative process through which the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and US Department of State intervened to retrieve the Jasenovac collection from Banja Luka in 2000, acted as its temporary guardian until returning it to Croatia in 2001, and continued to assist JMM with its creation of a new permanent exhibition. Situating this moment in the site's history at the intersection of Yugoslavia's dissolution and aftermath, the end of the Cold War and changes to US cultural policy, and the opening of the USHMM, this article analyses how these institutions and associated actors negotiated each other's interests and frameworks. It challenges the notion that museums are strict sites of political hegemony. It shows instead how interactions in and between museums unsettle and reconfigure the local and global power systems that surround us.

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Contemporary European History , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , May 2024, pp. 669 - 684
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

On 13 November 2001, a set of shackles, identification patches and miniature animal sculpturesFootnote 1 and various killing implements from the Jasenovac Concentration Camp were laid out in the Rubenstein Auditorium of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC. Located approximately 100 kilometres from Croatia's capital Zagreb, Jasenovac was the largest site where the Nazi collaborationist Ustaše worked to fulfil their desire to create an ethnically pure Croatian state, by interning and murdering Serbian, Jewish, and Roma citizens during the Second World War.Footnote 2 Almost one year after they negotiated an agreement with Croatian and Bosnian Serb leaders to bring the displaced Jasenovac Memorial Museum (JMM) collection to Washington, DC, USHMM executives presented this array of objects to a group of invited ambassadors and US Department of State officials from former Yugoslav republics and surrounding states. Two weeks later, the USHMM formally returned the collection to JMM in Croatia via its US Embassy, roughly a decade since a curator evacuated the collection ahead of armed conflict on the site in 1991.Footnote 3

Since Yugoslavia began to destabilise in the 1980s, Jasenovac Concentration Camp has occupied a precise position in regional political imaginations and associated scholarly literature. For scholars studying Yugoslavia's memory culture and official ideology, examining Jasenovac's commemorationFootnote 4 has been a means through which to understand how the state negotiated the camp's narrative through the ideological spheres of Brotherhood and Unity and the Partisan Myth.Footnote 5 For others focused on war time and post-Yugoslav memory culture, studies of Jasenovac's legacies explore how Serbian and Croatian nationalist governments revised, manipulated, and propagated the camp's history for their political needs. This includes analysis of both Serbian and Croatian leaders’ and institutions’ politicisation of ethnic identities and justification of pre-emptive and reactive violence during the 1990s conflict.Footnote 6 But it also encompasses leaders’ use of Jasenovac and Holocaust commemoration as a means of conducting foreign policy and demonstrating their dedication to European values while simultaneously maintaining nationalist identities in the present.Footnote 7

However, between this transition from the socialist Yugoslav past to the post-Yugoslav nationalist present lies an important episode in Jasenovac's post-1945 history. This article examines the USHMM/US Department of State collaboration to bring the displaced Jasenovac collection to Washington, DC in 2000 and the USHMM/JMM partnership that followed. While scholars have assessed how the Europeanisation of Holocaust memory played into the conceptualisation of JMM's 2006 permanent exhibition, this article locates the USHMM's intervention with the Jasenovac collection as a critical moment in the site's post-Yugoslav development needed to better understand the transition that JMM underwent between 1991 and 2006. It locates this event at the intersection of several processes including the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia into independent nation-states, the end of the Cold War and changes to US cultural policy, and the opening of the USHMM. In doing so, this study assesses how the collection came into the USHMM's possession, its role in conceptualising JMM's 2006 permanent exhibition, and JMM's negotiation of Holocaust education and commemoration tactics imported from the United States and the European Union. This case study thus fills an important gap in the history of Jasenovac and its place in post-Yugoslav society while also reassessing the nature and function of museums in our local and global societies.

Scholarship on memory culture in the former-Yugoslav region often characterises museums exclusively as ideological and political spaces. Developed in a political vacuum, they are portrayed as establishing and containing power relations while also setting ideological boundaries and expectations to achieve administration contingent policy goals.Footnote 8 As mentioned, scholars have primarily studied JMM as a way of examining Yugoslav socialist ideology and post-Yugoslav European and regional politics. While they have demonstrated that this was certainly the case and political actors’ influence in and mobilisation of museums for domestic and foreign policy goals cannot and should not be denied or downplayed, this description implies a level of hegemony that inadequately articulates how museums shape and reflect systems of power surrounding them, particularly as they pertain to issues of historical memory and commemoration.

As historians and other scholars of museums have shown, museums are sites of socio-cultural production which negotiate and unsettle dominant discourses rather than simply affirming them.Footnote 9 This is perhaps most acute in transnational contexts where global and local elements converge most explicitly. What can we learn about museums by unpacking their roles in diplomatic entanglements? Where does power lie in these relationships? Asking and answering these questions through this case study helps us to better understand how institutions arbitrate and repurpose competing official expectations and obligations, while also pursuing local community and other institution-contingent goals. Because of the encounters they facilitate and participate in, museums can, and often do, reconfigure the very power structures they are instrumentalised to create and maintain.

At first glance, the USHMM's intervention and recovery of the Jasenovac collection appears to place JMM and other actors in a subordinate position. In its mission to preserve evidence of the Holocaust and further education efforts, the USHMM, with the US Department of State, inserted itself as the appropriate arbitrator to resolve the matter of the Jasenovac collection, understanding Bosnian-Serb and Croatian leaders as too impassioned to do so because of political implication and ongoing national hostilities from the recent war. After conserving the collection, microfilming it for its own archive, and returning it to Croatia in 2001, the USHMM sustained its relationship with JMM to bring it up-to-date with modern, acceptable modes of Holocaust representation, commemoration and education, which it played a key role in defining. Yet, as this article shows, this was not a linear relationship of domination and subordination for the USHMM, JMM, or any actors involved in their encounter. Rather, their relationship to each other, stakeholders, and competing political systems was defined by numerous contingencies, negotiations and ambiguities, and fluidity and multivocality in exchange and collaboration which ultimately suited both institutions' needs. The USHMM ‘rescued’ the Jasenovac collection, returned it to its legal owner, and was able to successfully act out its official mandate within the first decade of its existence, a major accomplishment for any institution, let alone one of its stature. Its activities with JMM affirmed its position as a global leader in Holocaust commemoration and education, even as it struggled to balance numerous sometimes contentious interests related to Jasenovac and Holocaust memory in Croatia. Simultaneously, however, by collaborating with the USHMM, JMM and Croatian state authorities were able to reclaim ownership of the JMM collection and maintain a politically and institutionally useful partnership. By working with the USHMM, JMM was able to learn and apply its (and related international organisations’) frameworks for Holocaust remembrance in such a way as to bolster the state's EU accession efforts, fulfil associated requirements and join the European community of education and commemoration while still maintaining a revisionist and nationally accepted interpretation of the camp. Embedded in their individual contexts which determined their interest in this partnership, each institution pursued their specific goals even as they negotiated each other's influence, ideas, and various needs. The USHMM's intervention in the Jasenovac collection's fate and its multiyear exchange with JMM that followed was thus not so much an ‘unintended consequence’ of transnational Holocaust remembrance frameworks imported from the United States, European Union or elsewhere,Footnote 10 but instead speaks directly to the nature of museums and their innate negotiation of local and global power systems and other social, political, contextual, and institutional factors.

Jasenovac, Yugoslavia's Dissolution and the 1990s in a Transnational Historical Perspective

The Jasenovac Memorial Museum opened in 1968, two years after its larger memorial site was officially established in 1966, and more than two decades after the end of the Second World War.Footnote 11 Over the next twenty plus years, JMM developed two permanent exhibitions, hosted regular commemorations, public programmes, youth initiatives, and various publishing activities. Like all sites associated with the National Liberation War (Narodna Oslobodilačka Borba or Second World War) in socialist Yugoslavia, it was designed to emphasise the Partisan Myth and Brotherhood and Unity, downplaying the precise ideology of the ultra-nationalist fascist Ustaše and placing them and their ethnically targeted victims into broad and imprecise categories of ‘fascist occupiers’ and ‘victims of fascism’.Footnote 12

By 1990, the place of Jasenovac in Yugoslav society and politics had shifted as the state destabilised. It is difficult to point to a single most critical factor which led to Yugoslavia's violent dissolution, but scholars identify a confluence of factors including the Yugoslav system's need and unwillingness to transfer to a democratic system, the rise of nationalisms across the region and the role of religious, social, and cultural institutions in bolstering ethnonationalism, political elites’ manoeuvres to maintain or in some cases establish power and eliminate alternative nonnational reformers through fear and violence, economic and geopolitical factors shaped by the emerging post-Cold War world order, as well as (in)action from international political actors.Footnote 13 In any case, as nationalist propaganda rose, so did conflict over the Yugoslav past, which was a key site for nationalist elites’ public disputes. Jasenovac took on a place of prominence particularly in the Croatian context as both Croatian and Serbian nationalist leaders manipulated the camp's history to justify pre-emptive and reactive violence and link political goals and actions with ethnicity to mobilise their respective publics.Footnote 14

Under these circumstances, Jasenovac once more became a site of violence in September 1991. Located at the very border of the Serb-dominated region of Bosnia and Hercegovina, museum staff understood that the site would likely come under threat as armed conflict began and undertook measures to relocate the collection to Zagreb. However, fighting between Serbian and Croatian military forces reached the site faster than expected. In response, Serbian curator Sime Brdar quickly moved the collection to Banja Luka, likely protecting it from the plunder and destruction JMM and its larger site experienced between 1991 and 1995.Footnote 15 Jasenovac was located in the Serb-held territory of Krajina until 1995, when Croatian forces successfully executed Operation Storm, ending the war in Croatia.Footnote 16 After 1995, the Jasenovac collection remained in Banja Luka, but was also used for Serb nationalist propaganda exhibitions there and in Serbia's capital, Belgrade, until 2000.Footnote 17

While Yugoslavia descended into violent conflict on one side of the Atlantic, on the other, partisan debates over American ideals, morality, and identity were occurring in the first post-Cold War decade. Scholars mark the Cold War as an important turn in US investment in cultural policies and programming. During the Cold War, government-funded institutions, organisations and programmes, and individuals were sent abroad to defeat communism by communicating the innate superiority of the open and supposedly democratic American way of life.Footnote 18 However, globalisation and the larger shift towards neoliberalism brought growing privatisation of cultural institutions and initiatives. Concurrently, with the Cold War's conclusion and the start of the ‘culture wars’, the US government reduced its support for arts and cultural programming, since their diplomatic purpose abroad was no longer urgent, and their messages contested. Although this ideology re-surfaced in US culture generally, scholars argue that only in the wake of the 11th of September terrorist attacks and War on Terror did the US government once again find their funding of cultural programming urgent and financially justified.Footnote 19 This shift in US cultural policy over the course of the 1990s encourages us to ask how and why the US Department of State became involved in the Jasenovac collection's recovery in 2000, more than a year before substantial financial support for cultural policies and programs returned.

While this article cannot provide a single coherent answer, the USHMM's opening several years earlier helps to contextualise this action. From its establishment in 1993, the USHMM had an international and activist orientation.Footnote 20 This, coupled with museum leadership's understanding of the United States as ‘the standard bearer for freedom and human rights’ and as a nation with the ‘broadest and gravest responsibilities in the world’, suggested that it would conduct much of its collection, preservation and memorialisation, education and advocacy efforts adjacent to US diplomacy.Footnote 21 Moreover, the USHMM's mixed federal and private budget provided it with not only the funds but the networks and relationships necessary to carry out this kind of quasi-political work.Footnote 22 An obvious example is the Committee on Conscience, a public-private partnership between the US government and a privately-funded think tank venture, created and operated as a part of the museum itself. From its establishment in 1995, the USHMM worked with the US government to bring attention to human rights violations. It also collaborated with the US Department of State on an ongoing basis to strategically bring foreign dignitaries to the museum as part of state visits.Footnote 23

In fact, a significant part of the USHMM's early work as a ‘living’ and thus active memorial and institution involved concern for the Jasenovac Memorial Site. Expressed through official US government institutions, these actions laid the foundation for their joint role in the collection's recovery. In 1994, then Director of Collections and Acquisitions Jacek Nowakowski, and USHMM Council Chairman Miles Lerman, used US diplomatic channels to inquire about the Jasenovac site's status after armed conflict.Footnote 24 In 1996, after the conclusion of the war in Croatia, the USHMM made its first major initiative related to Jasenovac, when it was in direct conversation with the Croatian government. It utilised US diplomatic channels through the Department of State to pressure President Franjo Tuđman to halt his plans to make Jasenovac a site of Croatian national reconciliation.Footnote 25 Thus before 2000, when it recovered the collection, the USHMM had already established a record of successfully intervening on Jasenovac issues through the US Department of State. From its establishment, USHMM action at Jasenovac was an opportunity to put ideals into practice and set an institutional standard that it could continue to build from.

Intervention: Navigating the Jasenovac Collection's Recovery

US perceptions of Yugoslavia's violent dissolution are key to further unpacking the USHMM/US Department of State intervention in the Jasenovac collection's recovery. While scholars today reject the ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’ thesis – the idea that the peoples of the former-Yugoslavia were at war with one another because of their essential, violent, and impassioned nationalisms and inherent incompatibilities – as the cause of the Yugoslav wars, this rhetoric encompassed popular and political media on the conflict daily, between 1991 and 1995.Footnote 26 But that narrative was not novel when it gained new popularity in the 1990s. Western characterisation of Yugoslavia and the broader Balkan region as a backwards and regressive in-between space, frozen in time, appeared in the nineteenth century and was solidified over the course of the twentieth, when violence as a ‘Balkan’ characteristic was specifically assigned.Footnote 27 As noted by Maria Todorova, the Balkans function(ed) as a repository for all of Europe's negative characteristics and was a space ‘against which a positive self-congratulatory image of the West’ was constructed.Footnote 28 While it is nearly impossible to determine which media and politics USHMM and US political officials precisely consumed, Western governments, institutions, and publics could hardly remove themselves from this narrative and the broader socio-cultural and political landscape through which it was constructed and perpetuated.Footnote 29 It functioned as a pre-determined set of conventions that the US Department of State and USHMM were guided by and built on during the collection's recovery and over the course of their relationship with JMM.

Internal correspondence and reflections between USHMM staff and US Department of State officials involved in the collection's recovery demonstrate how this discourse functioned to render Bosnian Serb and Croatian officials incapable of negotiated conflict over the collection because of recent ethnic hostilities and their potential for inflammation. This logic positioned the USHMM as the proper intermediary and rationalised their intervention as part of its institutional mandate while also drawing on a related and long-standing tradition of museums and collections.Footnote 30

The USHMM received information on the Jasenovac collection's location and poor condition from one of its own staff, Sanja Primorac, who was traveling through Bosnia and the former-Yugoslav region surveying collections for the USHMM archive. Primorac was approached by local archivists concerned about the collection and reached out to USHMM higher-ups to determine what they could do. Executives like USHMM Director Sara Bloomfield were initially hesitant to intervene and recover the collection, unsure if ‘the museum should be in the business of removing artifacts of national heritage from a nation’.Footnote 31 Advocates of USHMM intervention like Radu Ioanid of the International Archives Division, however, stressed that Republika Srpska authorities would not directly return the collection to Croatia because of ‘the recent bloody past’.Footnote 32 He likewise stressed that USHMM involvement in the collection's recovery would provide the opportunity to ‘push’ Croatian authorities to reopen Jasenovac and demonstrate the USHMM's positive influence.Footnote 33 Despite early hesitation, the USHMM decided to work with the US embassies in Zagreb and Sarajevo to recover the collection, deeming it an action essential to its institutional objectives.Footnote 34

While the USHMM would fulfil a public facing role to carry out the collection's recovery, behind the scenes US Department of State officials like Charge d'Affaires Charles L. English and Human Rights Officer Richard Reiter of the US Embassy in Zagreb developed potential strategies to forge an agreement with Croatian and Bosnian-Serb officials. English and Reiter saw the USHMM and US Department of State as doing Croatia a favour because of its willingness to negotiate with Bosnian Serb officials. The possible courses of action they crafted and pursued followed existing Department of State protocol and were previously approved by unnamed senior officials.Footnote 35 While a direct handover from the archive in Banja Luka to JMM was considered, it was internally deemed unlikely and was never presented to Croatian or Bosnian-Serb officials. Reiter and English assumed and agreed that Republika Srpska Prime Minister Milorad Dodik could never carry out such an agreement since a direct transfer to Croatia would reflect poorly on his post-war nationalist government. They instead unilaterally conceived of an alternate option to ‘sell’ Dodik on this project.

In this period, the government of Croatia underwent its own critical changes that help us to better contextualise Dodik's conversations with the USHMM and Croatia's own interest in collaborating with the USHMM and US Department of State. Croatian President Franjo Tuđman's death at the end of 1999 concluded his long era of historical revisionism (1990–9). After 2000, Croatia was run by social democrats and not the right-wing Croatian Democratic Union. While the political parties who ruled Croatia from this point still pursued national interests, they defined them much differently than Tuđman's 1990s government and held an increasingly Europe-friendly disposition.

It was in this context, with pressure from US Ambassador to Bosnia Thomas J. Miller, and through other unnamed incentives provided to ‘sweeten the deal’, that Dodik agreed to Reiter and English's plan B, or the Washington scenario. The Jasenovac collection would be brought to Washington, DC for a year and then returned to Croatia. Correspondence between Reiter, English, and other officials does not indicate tangible benefits that Dodik or his government might have received by agreeing to this deal. They only recognised that this option would provide Republika Srpska with needed political cover for this controversial act, and provide the USHMM with the opportunity to conserve, catalogue and maybe even exhibit the collection. For the US Department of State this was the ideal option because it provided both the USHMM and Government of Croatia good publicity while also spurring conversation on contested Second World War history in the region.Footnote 36

The USHMM staff who travelled to the former Yugoslavia to carry out the agreement and recover the collection further demonstrate how the well-established script for interpreting and interacting with the region informed their understanding of the USHMM's role in this intervention. Radu Ioanid and Collections Director Diane Saltzman arrived in Zagreb on 27 October 2000, to review the signed agreement with the Croatian Ministry of Culture. That same day, they travelled to Banja Luka to retrieve the collection and obtain Dodik's signature. Recounting these events, Ioanid noted that ‘in a less civilized world’ the USHMM could have kept the collection for itself since the ‘people in Banja Luka . . . did not know that in a normal world we should give it back to its legal owner’.Footnote 37 Ioanid likewise recalled how uncomfortable he felt driving through war-ravaged Eastern Bosnia, describing it as ‘like a mouth in which every other tooth is missing’, indicating how ‘neighbours killed or chased away neighbours’ in the recent war.Footnote 38 Saltzman remembered posturing from the side of RS officials who questioned the USHMM's presence and motivation, and described the experience as feeling like ‘a spy novel’.Footnote 39

When all was said and done, by signing agreements with the USHMM, the Croatian Minister of Culture agreed that the USHMM hold temporary custody of the collection for one year. During that time, needed conservation efforts and duplications of the collection would be made by the USHMM, after which it would return it to Croatia. Milorad Dodik, on behalf of Republic Srpska, relinquished custody and control of the collection, transferring it to the USHMM, surrendering any and all claims of any nature against the USHMM. Finally, the USHMM agreed to undertake all reasonable measures for the care of the collection and promised to return it to Croatia at the end of the twelve-month period.Footnote 40

The archivist who initially approached the US Embassy in Croatia perhaps never anticipated that their effort to improve the Jasenovac collection's condition would result in its total removal from the region – even on a temporary basis – or a scenario in which the collection's fate would be tied to that of USHMM/US Department of State goals. Both organisations leveraged their own positions of power in a foreign cultural conflict to pursue a plan of recovery and preservation that centred their own norms, without consulting relevant communities or institutions in the region (like JMM for instance). Despite their own political and institutional interests which drove their approach in this intervention, they understood and positioned themselves as purely objective actors. But as analysis below shows, the discussions, exchanges, and negotiations between the USHMM, JMM, the Croatian government, and stakeholder community groups that occurred thereafter, demonstrate how these encounters of power consistently undermined USHMM hegemony as both museums pursued their unique and localised goals during and after the collection's return to Croatia.

Stakeholder Communities and Croatian Politics Shape USHMM Interventions

Four main stakeholder groups, some interrelated and with varying levels of influence and involvement during different periods, emerged in the twelve months that the USHMM was guardian of the Jasenovac Collection: the government of Republika Srpska (RS), the Serbian Orthodox Church and Serbian-American community, the Croatian-Jewish and Roma communities, and the government of Croatia. Each of their interests informed the other and influenced the USHMM's actions and recommendations for the collection's access and JMM's reopening.

While reaction from the RS government was at first most alarming to USHMM executives, it was largely artificial and ultimately powerless in the aftermath of the collection's exchange. By publicly attempting to pursue the USHMM and lay claim to the Jasenovac collection, RS political elites presented themselves as taking a hardline stance to satisfy the nationalist outcry, even though they knew they would be unable to regain the collection and had little interest in doing so.Footnote 41 The USHMM likewise contended with resistance from the Serbian-American community and the Serbian Orthodox Church (SOC), who expressed concern over how the collection would be used in JMM once returned to Croatia. They wanted to be sure that Ustaše crimes and Serbian victims were properly represented. To recognise Serbian-Americans and the SOC's concerns, the USHMM welcomed their representatives, including Patriarch Pavle, the highest figure of the SOC at the time, to visit the museum and meet with staff. The USHMM assured both the RS government and the SOC that, once catalogued, they would receive microfiche copies of the collection's records.Footnote 42

It's important to point out that while the USHMM contacted and included Jewish and Roma representatives in discussions related to JMM, archival evidence reflects that their engagement with these groups was most limited. USHMM executives were in contact with survivors and representatives of Jewish communities in Belgrade and Zagreb as well as the Croatian Roma community, and met with them during formal trips to the region. In these discussions, members of the Jewish community in Belgrade especially insisted that JMM remain under ‘international supervision with a written guarantee from the Croats’.Footnote 43 But beyond these one-time meetings, discussion of archival documentation the USHMM sought to acquire from these communities, and occasional correspondence, it does not appear that this was as significant or sustained an engagement as that which the USHMM had with the Serbian American community or SOC. It is difficult to discern why, particularly because the USHMM's Holocaust memorialisation efforts naturally focus on the Shoah, and only marginally on victims of domestic nationalist collaborationist regimes that pursued their own population goals. On the one hand, this can be attributed to these communities’ small size and somewhat fragmented nature. But the rationale is more to be found in the USHMM's perception of the region and the root conflict over Jasenovac. While the former concentration camp was of course a Holocaust site, it was also one the USHMM understood as defined by conflict between Serbs and Croats that it needed to arbitrate in order to preserve and better commemorate Jasenovac into the future. While Jewish and Roma community representatives were never excluded from conversations or events, Serbian-American/SOC and Croatian state stakeholders required the most attention from USHMM officials, who spent significant time centring and mediating their concerns (along with USHMM interests).

Still, significant interest from each of these stakeholder communities and the USHMM's knowledge of Croatian political elite's recent relativisation of Jasenovac in the 1990s shaped its decision to form a long-term partnership with JMM. USHMM staff's biggest recommendation was that the Croatian parliament and JMM create an international advisory board for Jasenovac, made up of representatives from ethnic communities outside of Croatia as well as representatives from the USHMM, Yad Vashem and relevant scholars, many of whom were of the region but not working out of universities in it.Footnote 44 Simultaneously, the USHMM encouraged JMM to develop a liaison project with the International Task Force for Holocaust Remembrance (ITF). Writing to Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev, USHMM Director of External Affairs Wesley A. Fischer argued that along with the ‘unique’ opportunity to shape the presentation of Holocaust history in the former Yugoslavia, memorialise those murdered at Jasenovac, and give ‘an appropriate role to the Task force’, they might even ‘contribute a little to peace in the Balkans’.Footnote 45 USHMM executives fundamentally assumed that without a level of international oversight, Holocaust history would not be appropriately represented in Croatia due to distrust between Serbs and Croats. Simultaneously, they did not question if international leaders or organisations had expertise in twentieth-century Croatian/Yugoslav history, needed to perform such work.

The Croatian parliament's answer to the USHMM's call for an international advisory board demonstrates how their two visions for JMM's governance and more general political assumptions clashed. In March 2001, the Croatian parliament passed the Law on Jasenovac, which, among other things, required the creation of a ‘Jasenovac Council’ made up of appointees from the Croatian parliament, Ministry of Culture and Municipality of Jasenovac, survivor organisations and the Association of Antifascist Fighters, as well as representatives from Roma, Serbian, and Jewish communities in Croatia. Members of this committee were appointed in August 2001. The director of JMM would serve as chair, and the council would be tasked with setting and overseeing the museum's research, programming and budgetary, exhibition and publication, and other agendas.Footnote 46 Containing no representatives from victim communities outside of Croatia or foreign institutions, this was notably not the same committee the USHMM called for and continued to advocate for to Croatian political elites.

But the Croatian parliament did not give in to the USHMM's will and continued to demonstrate how it would shape new interpretations at JMM. The Croatian Ministry of Culture shared its plan to invest $2 million in the Jasenovac Memorial Site with USHMM executives. They also assured them that Croatia's new Jasenovac Council would be oriented to international relations and activities which were already underway.Footnote 47 However, their continued international cooperation would be contingent on ‘no mistrust of Croatia, no additional requests and no mistrust of representatives appointed to their Jasenovac Council’.Footnote 48 They accepted many of the USHMM's interpretative and governing requests, but on terms that most suited their needs and national context. While USHMM officials believed that this legislation and new international orientation at Jasenovac were fruitful changes, USHMM executives’ vision for a permanent international Jasenovac advisory board was never fulfilled.

The Jasenovac collection was returned to Croatia via diplomatic envoy on 27 November 2001 following the USHMM's press conference a few weeks earlier. Even though up to 30 per cent of the collection was never retrieved and remains lost or destroyed until today, several days later, in early December 2001, Croatia's Ministry of Culture held an event at Jasenovac to celebrate the collection's return. Although this celebration completed the collection's journey after its initial displacement nearly a decade earlier, JMM and USHMM officials would continue to use it to tell Jasenovac's story as their partnership continued over the next several years.

Negotiating IPAM and Confronting the Holocaust in Croatia

To formally solidify its relationship with JMM, the USHMM applied for an International Partnership Among Museums (IPAM) grant shortly after the USHMM returned the Jasenovac Collection to Croatia in November 2001. Established in 1980 and funded and operated by the US Department of State through the American Alliance of Museums, IPAM was a vestige of Cold War-era US cultural diplomacy when the USHMM and JMM applied and were selected for the programme.Footnote 49 While further research on the history of IPAM (especially in the 1980s) is needed, it seems that many (though not all) of the museum partnerships forged through this programme in the ten to fifteen years after the Cold War were post-socialist.Footnote 50 It is possible that IPAM was a means through which the United States hoped to influence and support states’ post-socialist transition. Continuing into the 2000s, the programme intended to promote America's standing and ideals through exchange and ‘mutually beneficial sustainable linkages between museums in the U.S. and abroad’.Footnote 51 In this case, IPAM was a mechanism used by the USHMM to oversee and aid in JMM's development of a new permanent exhibition and, indirectly, a venue for US officials to remain informed about Croatia's cultural political activities during the first decade of its democratic transition and path towards EU membership.Footnote 52 But just as the Croatian parliament and Jasenovac stakeholder communities undermined and reshaped USHMM goals in the previous year, JMM staff quickly demonstrated how they in their own right would negotiate their relationship with the USHMM through IPAM to fulfil their own complex institutional needs.Footnote 53

The activities in the first phase of the JMM-USHMM IPAM partnership focused on exporting US museum practices and Western frameworks for Holocaust education and remembrance. These techniques and frameworks were intended to help transform JMM into the kind of institution that could ‘properly’ preserve, memorialise and exhibit Jasenovac as understood and deemed appropriate by the USHMM and international interlocutors. To that end, activities in the first IPAM grant included a thirty-day exchange in April 2002, wherein USHMM Registrar Heather Erskine travelled to JMM to assist with upgrades to its preservation, collections, and conservation practices and procedures.Footnote 54 Erskine was also present for JMM's soft reopening that same April and noted positive responses from US Embassy officials in Croatia, the Croatian prime minister and participation from various survivor communities and organisations. Upon sharing a cable report from US Ambassador to Croatia Larry Rosin with other USHMM executives, Arthur Berger, Director of Communications and External Affairs, concluded, ‘clearly the Croatians are moving in the direction we wanted’, demonstrating the level of influence the USHMM intended and believed it was exerting.Footnote 55

Other activities this grant supported included JMM Director Nataša Jovičić's travels to Washington, DC, where she learned about the USHMM's work with Holocaust education and exhibition methods, their relationship with survivors and other scholarly efforts.Footnote 56 As per Collections Director Diane Saltzman's email to AAM, Jovičić left the USHMM with hundreds of ideas, pages of notes and new strategies for implementing Holocaust education, remembrance and exhibition at her own institution.Footnote 57 Along with trips to the USHMM, Jovičić and other JMM staff visited several Holocaust memorials/museums in Germany and Poland, as well as Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. The techniques and frameworks they took away from these visits focused largely on the experiences of individual victims, a growing trend in Holocaust museums during this period that gave minimal attention to perpetrators in order to return victims’ dignity. These exchanges complemented what JMM staff gained in their IPAM partnership and were formative to their conceptualisation of a new permanent exhibition.

JMM staff's negotiation of the frameworks it received from its IPAM partnership with the USHMM became evident during their second grant cycle, which was organised and funded in conjunction with the ITF.Footnote 58 The goal of this second grant was to further support the design of a new permanent exhibit by creating an international committee of scholars and museum professionals to serve as its consultants. Meeting twice in 2004, the council included experts from: The Topography of Terror, Anne Frank House and The State Museum Auschwitz, Memorial Museum Terezin and The Imperial War Museum, the USHMM and Yad Vashem.Footnote 59 This committee notably did not replace the Jasenovac Council established through Croatian law in 2001, and it is unclear what became of that group and if or how it was in dialogue with this committee. Rather, this group was self-affirming. It intended to ensure that Jasenovac history was properly exhibited, or in other words, exhibited through prominent frameworks of Holocaust education and memorialisation it established and worked to maintain.

True to the nature of cultural processes, however, JMM staff did not arbitrarily transfer the victim-centred pedagogical approach they had learned in the last several years to their new exhibit. While we can only speculate how personal, political, and institutional agendas influenced JMM curators’ application of this framework, it is evident that it was uncritically implemented and even appropriated to meet institutional goals that were tailored to domestic political, international and community entanglements. Presenting the outline for their new exhibition to the international committee, JMM staff contended that this concept was exceptionally fit for their museum, which they argued had previously left individual victims invisible and exploited for socialist and later nationalist propaganda. Curators argued that they wanted to ensure that crimes at Jasenovac would not be relativised and would not present mutilated or dead bodies of victims or include weapons of murder or torture in their exhibition.Footnote 60 At the same time, however, they intended to maintain a sense of neutrality through their employment of object-based teaching. Objects, documentary evidence and photos, and other materials would ‘pass on to visitors certain content and ideas, without the exhibit authors interpreting them or imposing certain ideological and emotional frameworks of understanding’.Footnote 61 It is strange to consider that leading Holocaust commemoration and education experts endorsed a museum concept which did not directly communicate who was responsible for crimes at Jasenovac, what those crimes were, and why victim groups were targeted in a robust and nuanced context, but a report on the advisory council's meeting stressed that representatives from the USHMM, Anne Frank House and Yad Vashem particularly appreciated and supported this approach. Perhaps this was because international participants on this committee were not experts on the Second World War and the Holocaust in Croatia and believed that Western methods of remembrance could be seamlessly transplanted into any context. Yet, they did urge JMM staff to use individual stories to draw out the local nature of the Holocaust at Jasenovac.Footnote 62 In any event, much as with the international council that the USHMM originally advocated for to the Croatian parliament, there was no way to force JMM curators to apply these suggestions to their final exhibit.

While the USHMM was but one institution on this larger international committee, its staff occupied a privileged role on it because they had a significant history with JMM, were JMM's direct partners through IPAM, and had helped usher JMM into the larger international community of Holocaust remembrance and governance. Despite expressed concerns for the exhibit, the USHMM continued to support JMM's work and JMM staff and curators continued to leverage this relationship as their new exhibition was built. This dynamic was highlighted in February 2005 when Croatian Minister of Culture Božo Biskupić and Croatian Ambassador to the United States Mario Zubović visited the USHMM with Jovičić. As Jovičić commented in an email to USHMM staff, this visit reflected directly on her position, and she needed it to go well. She had to show that the USHMM trusted her and that JMM was its true partner to further legitimise JMM's new permanent exhibit to Croatian government officials.Footnote 63 The USHMM in turn was happy to continue positioning itself as the main party responsible for JMM's recent efforts which appeared to model their understanding of Holocaust memorialisation ideals and related themes like democracy and human rights. USHMM staff and the larger international committee were seemingly unaware of how JMM understood and shaped those frameworks and their meanings for its own needs.

Archival evidence shows, however, that like the international committee on Jasenovac, USHMM staff were not without serious constructive commentary and suggestions for JMM's reconceptualisation of the victim-centred interpretive paradigm. Handwritten notes on a JMM exhibition brief from Steven Luckert, a curator for the USHMM's permanent exhibit, already alluded to shortcomings JMM would later be criticised for. Luckert noted that the topic of mass murder could not be avoided and would have to be directly confronted in the exhibition; despite JMM's desire to move attention away from discussing perpetrators, the Ustaše should be named and clearly presented as responsible for crimes at Jasenovac. Luckert also suggested the exhibit indicate why Serbian, Jewish and Roma victims were targeted, and the level of devastation each community experienced. On a section of the brief centred on the theme of death, which would be presented indirectly, he asked if this was ‘sanitizing the history of Croatian fascism.Footnote 64 It is unclear if these specific notes made it to Jovičić or her staff, but it is difficult to imagine that in the years of meetings, emails, and phone calls between JMM and the USHMM that these topics were not discussed. The fact that they were not responded to and addressed in the new 2006 permanent exhibition's design and narrativisation of Jasenovac indicates an intentional institutional and likely political choice.

To understand why JMM curators didn't amend their new permanent exhibit to address at least some of these issues, we must reflect on the nature of its relationship with the USHMM (and through it the larger international Holocaust memorialisation community), the role of the Croatian parliament, and its stakeholder communities. While there was no known explicit political pressure from the Croatian government, it seems that Jovičić and JMM staff were trying to appease all involved parties; in centring victims they intended to recognise those communities murdered at Jasenovac, which helped to fulfil its purpose and the education and interpretive standards set by the USHMM and ITF. However, they did so without explicitly examining Ustaše ideology or the development of Croatian nationalism to avoid upsetting the state government, potentially local visitors, and official support for the exhibit. As Greg Naranjo, a USHMM exhibition specialist who served on the international advisory committee for Jasenovac reflected in retrospect, JMM's goal was to get the new exhibit done while juggling each of these obligations.Footnote 65

Conclusion

JMM's new permanent exhibition opened in November 2006, five years after the USHMM returned its collection to Croatia and more than fifteen years since it was last on public display on site. As a clear upgrade from the socialist era presentation, the new 2006 permanent exhibition received considerable and immediate acclaim. The USHMM's Diane Saltzman and Arthur Berger attended the formal reopening and commented how ‘worthwhile and impressive’ the exhibit was, ‘especially considering where Croatia was just a few years ago’.Footnote 66 But critical voices from survivor communities, scholars, and political elites quickly emerged to critique its lack of historical context which had been exchanged for a victim-centred focus, resulting in an obscured image of who the Ustaše were and what their ideology was. While the exhibit communicated that Jasenovac was a place of mass murder of Serbs, Jews, and Roma, it divorced the camp from its local context and at best relied on the larger framework of the Holocaust and Nazi perpetration to avoid key location specific information critical to understanding the site's history.Footnote 67 Whether due to the project's completion or rising criticisms the exhibit was increasingly under fire for, the USHMM slowly distanced itself from JMM after 2006.Footnote 68

Given the negative impression of the 2006 permanent exhibition on the international community, it bears asking if we can call the USHMM's initial intervention with the Jasenovac collection a ‘success’. The USHMM's original intention was to ‘save the evidence’ and ensure that the Jasenovac collection was conserved, properly preserved, catalogued, and eventually returned to its rightful owner while using the scenario as a means through which to perform its institutional mandate. It achieved this not by facilitating direct negotiations between Bosnian Serb and Croatian political elites who they had determined unable to act without assistance, but by positioning itself as the ideal and perhaps only suitable arbiter who could ensure the collection's safe recovery and return. In this sense, the USHMM was successful – the collection was brought to the United States, given all necessary preservation treatments, duplicated for its archive, and returned to Croatia. Yet this was not a linear process. USHMM officials were influenced by a number of stakeholder communities from the United States and former Yugoslav region who helped shape its actions and continued interests in JMM. As this partnership grew over time, Croatian officials and JMM staff, for their part, sought to use their relationship with the USHMM and negotiate the commemorative frameworks drawn from it for their own political and institutional needs, eventually resulting in a problematic permanent exhibit which remains on display today. Given this fact, it is difficult to term the collection's recovery, return, and reinstallation a ‘success’, but it does provide important takeaways, nonetheless.

In its recollection and recovery of this important period in JMM's history over the course of roughly fifteen years, this study has challenged the idea that museums are sites of political hegemony. Instead, it has shown how museums negotiate various systems of power which interact within its literal and proverbial space. In this case, JMM constantly negotiated USHMM and other Western Holocaust remembrance frameworks and influences, while the USHMM regularly negotiated stakeholder communities’ interests, the Croatian parliament's pushback, and JMM actions in their exchange. For both institutions, this was an encounter determined by numerous contingencies, ambiguities, competing voices, and other contextual factors as each museum sought to pursue their separate agendas. This was not novel to the USHMM/JMM intervention and exchange but implicit to how we should understand the capacity of museums in our local and global societies to unsettle and reconfigure the power systems that surround us. Examining this function enables us to not only better assess museums as historical actors and their place in foreign policy, but as sites of cultural production where social and political status quos are continually shifting and re-established over time.

Acknowledgements

Research for this article was funded by the author's tenure as a Summer Graduate Research Fellow with the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Centre for Advanced Holocaust Research at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The archival material this article is based on was gathered from the USHMM's institutional archive as well as a handful of interviews with USHMM staff directly involved in the Jasenovac collection's recovery during the author's tenure as a USHMM Summer Graduate Research Fellow. These materials required a laborious phase of examination to reconstruct a timeline and various actors’ and institutions’ involvement. Because analysis is primarily based on evidence from the USHMM's institutional archive, it is hard to precisely determine the US Department of State's interest in this intervention despite their role in negotiations, though the author does make plausible inferences based on the historical context.

Footnotes

1 The Jasenovac Concentration Camp compound included a ceramics workshop and brick factory which prisoners were forced to labour in. These figurines were created there by Croatian-Jewish sculptor and ceramicist Slavko Brill, who was murdered by the Ustaše in Jasenovac in 1943.

2 The Ustaše were brought to power by Nazi Germany and installed to carry out its racial and strategic goals. The movement grew out of interwar Croatian nationalist parties like the Party of Rights and its more extreme branch, the Frankist movement, which were discontent with the interwar Yugoslav state and Serbian hegemony. Understanding Serbs as the obstacle to Croatian statehood and the Croatian people's development, the Ustaše's goal was to create an ethnically pure Croatian state through the elimination of unwanted populations, most especially Serbs, as a national political category. Historians continue to examine the organisation and (dys)function of the Ustaše regime, its ideology, population goals, state institutions, structures, and the nature of their mass killings. Nevertheless, Jasenovac was the largest site where Ustaše ideological/population goals were pursued. The historiography on this subject is expansive, but essential readings include: Tomislav Dulić, Utopias of Nation: Local Mass Killing in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1941–42 (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 2005); Mark Biondich, The Balkans: Revolution War and Political Violence Since 1878 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Max Bergholz, Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016); Ivo and Slavko Goldstein, The Holocaust in Croatia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016); Newman, John Paul, ‘War Veterans, Fascism, and Para-Fascist Departures in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, 1918–1941’, Fascism, 6, 1 (23 June 2017), 42–74; Ivo Goldstein, Jasenovac (Zagreb: Fraktura, 2018); Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).

3 Nataša Mataušić, Jasenovac 1941–1945. Logor Smrti i Radni Logor (Jasenovac: Spomen-produčje Jasenovac, 2003), 157–8.

4 Here I mean the Jasenovac Memorial Site and museum, as well as other official state discourses, local initiatives, publications, documentary films, and more.

5 Brotherhood and Unity and the Partisan Myth were part of Yugoslav socialist ideology which promoted fraternity among nationalities and narrativised the Second World War as a period of joint suffering among Yugoslav peoples who together defeated fascist occupiers and their collaborators to achieve a better future. This framework did not acknowledge the collaborationist movements which committed crimes against various ethnic groups in Yugoslavia or their ideologies, but rather created broad politically useful categories. Hoepken, Wolfgang, ‘War, Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Society: The Case of Yugoslavia’, East European Politics and Societies, 13, 1 (1998), 190–227; Karge, Heike, ‘Mediated Remembrance: Local Practices of Remembering the Second World War in Yugoslavia’, European Review of History, 16, 1 (2009), 49–62; Jovan Byford, Picturing Genocide in the Independent State of Croatia (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), especially chapters three through five; Joel Palhegyi, ‘Tito Under Glass: “Tito Under Glass: Museum and Myth in the Making of Croat Yugoslavism”’ (PhD diss., University of California, San Diego, 2019); Horvatinčić, Sanja, ‘Formalna heterogenost spomenicke skulpture i strategije sjecanje u socijalistickoj Jugoslaviji’, Anali galerije Antuna Augustincica, 31 (2012), 81–106.

6 Byford, Picturing Genocide in the Independent State of Croatia, chapters six and seven; Mila Dragojević, Amoral Communities: Collective Crimes in Time of War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), especially chapter five; Vjeran Pavlaković, “Flirting with Fascism: The Ustaša Legacy and Croatian Politics in the 1990s,” 115–143, in Darko Gavrilović, ed., The Shared History: The Second World War and National Question in Ex Yugoslavia (Seville: Center for History, Democracy and Reconciliation, 2008); Jasna Dragović-Soso, Saviours of the Nation: Serbia's Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002).

7 Jelena Subotić, Red Star, Yellow Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019); Radonić, Ljiljana, ‘Slovak and Croatian Invocation of Europe: The Museum of the Slovak National Uprising and the Jasenovac Memorial Museum’, Nationalities Papers, 42 (2014), 489–507; Ana Milošević and Heleen Touquet, ‘Unintended Consequences: The EU Memory Framework and the Politics of Memory in Serbia and Croatia’, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 18, 3 (3 July 2018), 381–99; Radonić, Ljiljana, ‘The Holocaust Template – Memorial Museums in Hungary, Croatia, and Bosnia and Hercegovina’, Annals of the Croatian Political Science Association: Political Science Journal, 15, 1 (2018), 131–54; Gal Kirn, ‘Transnationalism in Reverse: From Yugoslav to Post-Yugoslav Memorial Sites’, in C. de Cesari and Anne Rigney, eds., Transnational Memory. Circulation. Articulation. Scales (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2016), 313–38; Subotić, Jelena, ‘Foreign Policy and Physical Sites of Memory: Competing Foreign Policies at the Jasenovac Memorial Site’, International Politics, 57, 6 (2018), 1012–29.

8 See footnotes 6–7.

9 Important museum historiography to examine here includes Steven D. Lubar, Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Past and Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); Steven Conn, Do Museums Still Need Objects? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Robert C. Post, Who Owns America's Past?: The Smithsonian and the Problem of History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Alison Landsberg, Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Malgorzata Rymsza-Pawlowska, History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Neil Harris, Capital Culture: J. Carter Brown, the National Gallery of Art, and the Reinvention of the Museum Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Ana Lucia Araujo, Alice L. Conklin, Steven Conn, Denise Y. Ho, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, and Samuel J. Redman, ‘AHR Conversation: Museums, History, and the Public in a Global Age’, The American Historical Review, 124, 5 (1 Dec. 2019), 1631–72; Literature on cultural theory is also critical to understand this relationship. See especially Stuart Hall, ‘Notes on Deconstructing the Popular’, ‘Rethinking the “Base and Superstructure” Metaphor’, and ‘Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse’, in David Morley, ed., Essential Essays, Volume 1: Foundations of Cultural Studies (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2019), 143–71, 257–76, 347–61.

10 Ana Milošević and Heleen Touquet, ‘Unintended Consequences: The EU Memory Framework and the Politics of Memory in Serbia and Croatia’, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 18, 3 (3 July 2018), 381–99.

11 Karge, ‘Mediated Remembrance’, 49–62.

12 Mataušić, Jasenovac 1941–1945, 151–4; Alexandra Zaremba, ‘Constructing a Useable Past: Changing Memory Politics in Jasenovac Memorial Museum’, in Ana Milošević and Tamara Trošt, eds., Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 97–120.

13 Eric D. Gordy, The Culture of Power in Serbia: Nationalism and the Destruction of Alternatives (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999); Jasna Dragović-Soso, Saviours of the Nation: Serbia's Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002); Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1995); Tea Sindbeak Anderson, Useable Past? Representations of Yugoslavia's Difficult Past from 1945–2002 (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2012); Sabrina Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1962–1991 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); V.P. Gagnon, The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013); Mila Dragojević, Amoral Communities: Collective Crimes in Time of War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019).

14 Dragojević, Amoral Communities, 11; Byford, Picturing Genocide in the Independent State of Croatia, chapter 7.

15 Nataša Mataušić argues that it is impossible to determine to what degree Serbian or Croatian forces were responsible for the destruction of JMM and the larger memorial site given their shifting occupation and use of the space. Mataušić, Jasenovac 1941–1945, 155–6.

16 Operation Storm or Oluja was a massive military operation launched by Croatian forces on the Republic of Serbian Krajina (Republika Srpska Krajina), which resulted in the forced migration of between 150,000–200,000 Serbian civilians from Croatia. Nikica Barić, Srpska pobuna u Hrvatskoj (Zagreb: Golden Marketing, 2005), 533–67.

17 Mataušić, Jasenovac 1941–1945, 158.

18 Turner's The Democratic Surround is an excellent example of how this would be achieved. See also: Covert, Lisa Pinley, ‘The GI Bill Abroad: A Postwar Experiment in International Relations’, Diplomatic History, 40, 2 (Apr. 2016), 244–68; David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy During the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Nicholas Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); John Fousek, To Lead the Free World: American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

19 Brown, ‘Cold War, Culture Wars, War on Terror’.

20 Edward Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), xiii, 37–8.

21 Linenthal, Preserving Memory, 65.

22 While there was significant debate around the establishment of the USHMM and the historical narrative it would convey, it seems that the USHMM escaped the same kind of intense public and political debate related to other facets of culture at the time. Plausible explanations include the long-term planning for the museum from the late 1970s, the level of private funding from benefactors that supported the USHMM in conjunction with that of the US government, along with the simultaneous boom in global Holocaust memorialisation after the Cold War.

23 ‘Governing Body: Committee on Conscience’, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (last visited 10 July 2021), //www.ushmm.org/genocide-prevention/simon-skjodt-center/committee-on-conscience; Jacqueline Trescott, ‘Judgment at Washington: Despite a Few Missteps In Its First Five Years, The Holocaust Museum Is a Resounding Success’, The Washington Post (1974-Current File), 22 Apr. 1998, D1, https://www-proquest-com.proxyau.wrlc.org/hnpwashingtonpost/docview/1620399161/F2AEA20CD0094D96PQ/2?accountid=8285.

24 Writing to US embassies in Zagreb and Belgrade as well as to United Nations Ambassador Madeline Albright, they were notified that the Jasenovac Memorial Area experienced damage but that its collection was unaccounted for; Letter from Director of External Affairs Ralph Grunewald to Stuart Eizenstat, Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade, 10 July 1996; Letter from Chairman Miles Lerman to President Franjo Tuđman, 18 Mar. 1996; Letters from Chairman Miles Lerman to US Representative to the United Nations Madeline Albright, 13 Sept. 1994; Letter from Director of Collections and Acquisitions Jacek Nowakowski to the American Embassy in Zagreb, 19 Sept. 1994; in ibid., ASC 2007.084, Box 1: Collection, Correspondence with other institutions, Folder 39: Jasenovac; Letter from Director of External Affairs Ralph Grunewald to Samuel Berger of the National Security Council, 1 Aug. 1996; Letter from Chairman Miles Lerman to President Franjo Tuđman, 24 Apr. 1997; Director Ralph Grunewald's Country Correspondence Files, 1995–1998, in ibid., ASC 2002.072 Box 2, Folder 8.

25 Tuđman was a major proponent of historical revisionism in Croatia, downplaying Ustaše crimes committed at Jasenovac, reducing the number of victims, and relativising the Ustaše as national heroes in the fight for an independent Croatian state. See his Horrors of War: Historical Reality and Philosophy (M. Evans, 1989/1996). In 1996, Tuđman envisioned a general war memorial that would promote reconciliation by burying Ustaše remains on the former concentration campground. For more on this, see Vjeran Pavlaković, ‘Red Stars, Black Shirts: Symbols, Commemorations, and Contested Histories of World War Two in Croatia’, The National Council for Eurasian and East European Research Report, 1 Jan. 2008, 26–7. USHMM intervention in Tuđman's plans was encouraged by the Croatian Jewish community and also included an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal written by USHMM Director Walter Reich. It is unclear just how formative USHMM action was in derailing this plan, but President Tuđman unofficially abandoned it within the year, likely as a result of diplomatic pressure from the United States and EU. Letter from Chairman Miles Lerman to Franjo Tuđman, 18 Mar. 1996, with response from Ivo Sanader (Tuđman's chief of staff), 6 May 1996, in ibid., ASC 2007.084, Box 1: Collection, Correspondence with other institutions, Folder 39: Jasenovac; Correspondence from Ivo Goldstein of the Croatian Jewish community to Director of External Affairs Ralph Grunewald, 31 May 1996, in ibid., ASC 2002.072 Box 2, Folder 8; Reich, Walter, ‘A Plan that's Bad to the Bone’, Wall Street Journal, 3 Apr. 1996.

26 For a text that epitomises these kinds of orientalist tropes see Robert D. Kaplan's, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (New York: Picador, 1993). Print media on the wars of Yugoslavia's dissolution is immeasurable, but relevant examples include: John Pomfret, ‘Balkans Must Confront a History of Hatred: Facing the Future in the Balkans (First of Three Articles)’, The Washington Post, 17 Dec. 1995. http://proxyau.wrlc.org/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.proxyau.wrlc.org/historical-newspapers/balkans-must-confront-history-hatred/docview/903470153/se-2?accountid=8285; Tom Gjelten, ‘The Fires of Ancient Hatreds’, The Washington Post, 9 Oct. 1994. http://proxyau.wrlc.org/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.proxyau.wrlc.org/historical-newspapers/fires-ancient-hatreds/docview/750866162/se-2?accountid=8285; Celestine Bohlen, ‘Fragile Truce in Yugoslavia: The Fighting Wanes, but Hatreds Smolder Shaky Yugoslav Truce’, New York Times, 8 Aug. 1991. http://proxyau.wrlc.org/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.proxyau.wrlc.org/historical-newspapers/fragile-truce-yugoslavia/docview/108702018/se-2?accountid=8285; Stephen Engelberg, ‘Brutal Impasse: The Yugoslav War, a Special Report: Yugoslav Ethnic Hatreds Raise Fears of a War without an End’, New York Times, 23 Dec. 1991. http://proxyau.wrlc.org/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.proxyau.wrlc.org/historical-newspapers/yugoslav-ethnic-hatreds-raise-fears-war-without/docview/108772435/se-2?accountid=8285; Pierre Hart, ‘Yugoslavia's Legacy of Ancient Hatreds’, Wall Street Journal, 8 Sept. 1992. http://proxyau.wrlc.org/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.proxyau.wrlc.org/historical-newspapers/yugoslavias-legacy-ancient-hatreds/docview/135646082/se-2?accountid=8285.

27 Todorova, Maria, ‘The Balkans: From Discovery to Invention’, Slavic Review, 53, 2 (1994), 453–82, here 458–61, 473–74.

28 Todorova's work draws on several examples from the twentieth century and earlier. It includes the 1993 Carnegie Endowment Report, ‘The Other Balkan Wars’, as a prime example of how Balkan othering functioned amidst Yugoslavia's dissolution. This report, originally written on the 1912/13 Balkan Wars, drew a direct line between that conflict and the 1990s conflict in Yugoslavia. It suggested that the causes and circumstances of the 1990s conflict were unchanged and a continuation of national political conflict that took place roughly eighty years earlier, implying the region and its peoples’ incompatibility and predisposition to violence and obscuring the contextual, contingent, and processual factors which produced Yugoslavia's destabilisation and violence in the region. Todorova, ‘The Balkans’, 455. See also Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

29 There is a need for additional analysis on Western and especially US media reporting on Yugoslavia's dissolution. The following texts, however, are relevant given Western political institutions’ joint maneuvering of Yugoslavia's dissolution and offer useful starting points that help us interpret the American context: Robison, Bridget, ‘Putting Bosnia in its Place: Critical Geopolitics and the Representation of Bosnia in the British Print Media’, Geopolitics, 9, 2 (2004), 378–401; Hammond, Andrew, ‘Balkanism in Political Context: From the Ottoman Empire to the EU’, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 3, 3 (2006), 6–26; Riikka Kuusisto, ‘Savage Tribes and Mystic Feuds: Western Foreign Policy statement on Bosnia in the Early 1990s’, in Andrew Hammond, ed., The Balkans and the West: Constructing the European Other, 1945–2003 (London: Taylor and Francis, 2004), 169–83; Lene Hansen, Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (London: Routledge, 2006); Margit V. Wunsch Gaarmann, The War in Our Backyard: The Bosnia and Kosovo Wars Through the Lens of the German Print Media (Berlin: Neofelis Verlag, 2015).

30 For more on the history of museums and their self-prescribed role in these kind of interventions, see Shepard Keach III, Collecting Native America, 1870–1960 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999); Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); Tony Bennett, Fiona Cameron, et al., Collecting, Ordering, Governing: Anthropology, Museums, and Liberal Government (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017); Chip Colwell, Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America's Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

31 Email correspondence, 2000, personal archive of Radu Ioanid, Director of the International Archival Program at the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies.

32 Footnote Ibid.

33 Footnote Ibid.

34 Letter from USHMM Director Sara Bloomfield to Charge d'Affaires Charles L. English of the US Embassy in Croatia, 11 Oct. 2000, in ibid.

35 Memo from Human Rights Officer Richard Reiter of the US Embassy in Zagreb to USHMM, 29 Sept. 2000, in ibid.

36 Footnote Ibid.

37 Radu Ioanid, author interview, 13 Aug. 2019.

38 Footnote Ibid.

39 Diane Saltzman, author interview, 25 July 2019.

40 Agreement between the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia and the USHMM, 27 Oct. 2000; Agreement Between Republika Srpska and the USHMM, 27 Oct. 2000; Country correspondence files with foreign govs, 2001–2005, ASC 2010.076, Box 1 Folder 20: Jasenovac Press and Other, in ibid.

41 This idea was based on intel from the Department of State, who received internal information from Banja Luka on political reactions to US intervention on the Jasenovac collection. As a part of this political performance, the RS parliament created a commission to investigate the collection's removal from Banja Luka, the ‘Inquiry Commission on Jasenovac’. Internal email correspondence, 13–14 and 21 Feb. 2001, Collections Director: Records relating to USHMM efforts to rescue the collection at the Jasenovac Memorial Museum, Croatia, 2000–2005, ASC 2015.094 Box 1, Bundle 3, in ibid.; internal email correspondence, 13–14 Feb.; Letter from Republika Srpska Prime Minister Mladen Ivanic to USHMM, 12 Feb. 2001; Letter from Director Sara Bloomfield to Miroslav Mikes Chairman, Parliamentary Inquiry Commission on Jasenovac Republika Srpska, 22 Feb. 2001; Country correspondence files with foreign govs, 2001–2005 ASC 2010.076 Box 1 Folder 18, in ibid.

42 Internal email correspondence: 14 Mar. 2001; 15 Nov. 2001; 23 July 2001; Letter from Serbian Unity Congress to Director Sara Bloomfield, 16 Nov. 2001; Letter from Fr. Irinej Dobrijević, Executive Director of External Affairs for the Serbian Orthodox Church in the USA and Canada, 15 Nov. 2001, 000000 in ibid.; Invitation from USHMM Chairman Rabbi Irving Greenberg to Serbian Orthodox Patriarch Pavle, 29 June 2001; Letter from Director of External Affairs Wesley A. Fischer to Executive Director of External Affairs of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the USA and Canada, 23 Apr. 2001; Letter from Patriach Pavle to USHMM Chairman Rabbi Irving Greenberg, 6 July 2001; Country correspondence files with foreign govs, 2001–2005 ASC 2010.076 Box 1 Folder 17, in ibid.

43 Internal email correspondence, 5 July 2001, Collections Director: Records relating to USHMM efforts to rescue the collection at the Jasenovac Memorial Museum, Croatia, 2000–2005, ASC 2015.094 Box 1, Bundle 3, in ibid.

44 Potential historians included, Mark Biondich (University of Toronto), John Lampe (University of Maryland), Ivo Banac (Yale University), Dennis Reinhartz (University of Texas), Reneo Lukić (Laval University), and Sabrina Ramet (University of Washington). The only scholar listed in the former Yugoslavia was Ivo Goldstein, who later led the Jasenovac Committee established by the Croatian parliament; Handwritten notes, Country correspondence files with foreign govs, 2001–2005, ASC 2010.076. Box 1 Folder 17: Jasenovac main title, in ibid.

45 Emphasis mine. Letter from Director of External Affairs Wesley A. Fisher to Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev, 11 Apr. 2001, Collections Director: Records relating to USHMM efforts to rescue the collection at the Jasenovac Memorial Museum, Croatia, 2000–2005, ASC 2015.094 Box 1, Bundle 3, in ibid..

46 Members of this committee included: Slavko Goldstein as representative of the Croatian Jewish community, Katica Sedman, representative of the Croatian parliament, Josip Kolanović of the Croatian State Archive, Zoran Prpić of the Jasenovac Municipality, Branko Petrina, who represented camp survivors, Kresimir Piskulić of the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Veterans in Croatia, Stevo Djurdjević, who represented the Croatian Roma community, Djuro Zatezalo, who represented the Croatian Serb community, and Mate Rupić, Director of JMM; Internal email correspondence, 3 Aug. 2001; Country correspondence files with foreign govs, 2001–2005, ASC 2010.076 Box 1 Folder 17: Jasenovac main title, in ibid.

47 Some of these activities included Croatia's acceptance of the Stockholm Conference declarations, initiatives for training teachers to teach the Holocaust and the creation of associated materials, and participation on matters of Holocaust era property restitution with organisations like the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and International Council of Museum (ICOM); Internal email correspondence, 17 May 2001; Country correspondence files with foreign govs, 2001–2005, ASC 2010.076 Box 1 Folder 17: Jasenovac main title, in ibid.

48 Footnote Ibid.

49 Jack McCray, ‘Avery Museum Chosen for Exchange Program: [FINAL Edition]’, The Post and Courier, 9 Mar. 2004, sec. SCHOOLS PLUS, https://www-proquest-com.proxyau.wrlc.org/news/docview/374021923/89347735FABC43F0PQ/31?accountid=8285 (last visited 6 July 2021).

50 These include (but are not limited to) partnerships between museums in the United States and Moscow, Chile, Germany, Nigeria, Romania, and of course Croatia. ‘Art Exhibits: City Galleries’, Springfield News Leader, 25 Sept. 2008, sec. Weekend, https://www-proquest-com.proxyau.wrlc.org/news/docview/374021923/89347735FABC43F0PQ/31?accountid=8285 (last visited 6 July 2021); McCray, ‘Avery Museum Chosen for Exchange Program’; Harold A. Gushue and Telegram & Gazette Staff, ‘Exchange Program at Museums Links the Old and New Worlds: [SOUTH COUNTY Edition]’, Telegram & Gazette, 14 Apr. 1998, sec. LOCAL NEWS, https://www-proquest-com.proxyau.wrlc.org/docview/268688833/fulltext/44E480951E4441ADPQ/1?accountid=8285 (last visited 6 July 2021); ‘Region in Brief’, The Santa Fe New Mexican, 5 Mar. 1994, sec. SANTA FE/EL NORTE, https://www-proquest-com.proxyau.wrlc.org/news/docview/331251276/89347735FABC43F0PQ/2?accountid=8285 (last visited 6 July 2021).

51 It is worth noting that in the interim period before IPAM began, the Jasenovac Council appointed by the Croatian parliament began its own work (though it's difficult to ascertain the extent to which they were in conversation with JMM and how long the council functioned). The council introduced a resolution to have an annual National Holocaust Remembrance Day in Croatia which would be commemorated annually on 10 Oct., the date in 1941 when the Ustaše destroyed Zagreb's main synagogue. Similarly, the government of Croatia created a special commission that began working on the steps for Croatia's participation in the International Task Force for Holocaust Remembrance. Membership in the ITF would be important to JMM activities in the years that followed. Internal email correspondence, 5 May 2002, Collections Director: Records relating to USHMM efforts to rescue the collection at the Jasenovac Memorial Museum, Croatia, 2001–2005, ASC 2015.094 Box 1, Bundle 3, in ibid.

52 Again, it is next to impossible to determine exact US Department of State or other official interest in JMM through this IPAM partnership. But based on the programme's conceptualisation and goals as well as grant completion reports which assessed these partnerships, it seem that the US not only intended to export its understanding of democratic values through museum exchange but also to monitor how those values were received and implemented abroad.

53 Internal correspondence, 12 Dec. 2000; 6 Mar. 2001; Country correspondence files with foreign govs, 2001–2005, ASC 2010.076 Box 1 Folder 17: Jasenovac main title, in ibid.

54 Report from Heather Erskine to USHMM officials, 14 May 2002; International Partnership Among Museums 2001–2003: Final Report and Evaluation, Collections Director: Records Relating to USHMM Efforts to Rescue the Collection at the Jasenovac Memorial Museum, Croatia 2001–2005, ASC 2015.94 Box 1 Folder 6: Jasenovac IPAM 2003/2005, in ibid.

55 Internal memorandum, 24 Apr. 2002; Country correspondence files with foreign govs, 2001–2005, ASC 2010.076 Box 1, Folder 17: Jasenovac main title, in ibid.

56 Prior to Jovičić's assumption of the role, Marica Karkaš (a Jasenovac Memorial Museum curator) was made interim director. Internal correspondence at the USHMM suggests that this change in JMM leadership was not politically charged but caused by former director Rupić's pursuit of other professional goals; Internal email correspondence, Collections Director, ASC 2015.94 Box 1 Folder 6: Jasenovac IPAM 2003/2005, in ibid.

57 Email from Collections Director Diane Saltzman to K. Lakey with the American Alliance of Museums, 5 Jan. 2003, in ibid.

58 Jasenovac Memorial Museum International Task Force Fund Project Proposal Application, in ibid.

59 Report, International Task Group for Jasenovac, 14–17 Feb. 2004, in ibid.

60 Footnote Ibid.; exhibition brief, 2004, in ibid.

61 Footnote Ibid.

62 Report, International Task Group for Jasenovac, 14–17 Feb. 2004, in ibid.

63 Internal email correspondence, 14–18 Jan. 2005; Country correspondence files with foreign govs, 2001–2005, ASC 2010.076 Box 1, Folder 16, in ibid.

64 Handwritten notes, ‘Concept of a new Permanent Exhibition in the Jasenovac Memorial Museum’, Curator Exhibition Files (Steven Luckert), ASC 2008.219 Box 14 Folder 4: Records from the Curator of the PE related to the exhibition.

65 Greg Naranjo, author interview, 30 July 2019.

66 Internal correspondence between Arthur Berger and Diane Saltzman, 4 Dec. 2006, Collections Director: Records relating to USHMM efforts to rescue the collection at the Jasenovac Memorial Museum, Croatia 2000–2005 ASC 2015.094 Box 1, Bundle 3, in ibid.

67 Zaremba, ‘Constructing a Useable Past’, 110–17.

68 Soon after the 2006 exhibit opened, the USHMM received a letter from Israeli historian and Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff, who was immediately critical of the exhibit but was initially dismissed by USHMM staff as the only ‘sour note’ of the new exhibit's opening. While JMM continued to invite USHMM officials to annual commemorations in Croatia in the years that followed, the USHMM was no longer involved in its activities. Letter from the Efrain Zuroff to the USHMM, Nov. 2006, and internal correspondence between Arthur Berger and Diane Saltzman, 4 Dec. 2006, Collections Director: Records relating to USHMM efforts to rescue the collection at the Jasenovac Memorial Museum, Croatia 2000–2005 ASC 2015.094 Box 1, Bundle 3, in ibid.

Ibid
Ibid
Ibid
Ibid
Ibid
Ibid
Ibid