The film opens by stating that the number of inmates who perished at Jasenovac has never been accurately ascertained, with estimates ranging from 49,000 to 700,000 dead. It brings up a document from 1946 in which the president of the State Commission on Ascertaining Crimes Committed by Occupying Powers and Their Helpers reports that 15,792 inmates were killed at Jasenovac. The film then offers a glimpse at the 1945 British documentary
A Painful Reminder: Evidence for All Mankind, in which it is stated that 20,000 perished at the camp. After
World War I, the film asserts, Croatia was occupied by
Greater Serbian expansionists and royalist guerrillas known as
Chetniks, who relegated Croats to the status of second-class citizens. It highlights a number of alleged murders of Croats in
interwar Yugoslavia committed by Chetniks. In Jasenovac, the film claims, a Serb merchant named
Lazar Bačić led a band that killed five Croats and terrorized countless others between 1918 and 1941. During this period,
King Alexander's government implemented discriminatory laws targeting Croats, used the
Royal Yugoslav Army to crush a number of peasant revolts and organized the killing of
Croatian Peasant Party leader
Stjepan Radić, after which Alexander declared himself royal dictator. Yugoslav jails became filled with Croatian patriots, the film explains, and the name Croatia was erased from all maps. In response to this oppression, a Croat lawyer named Ante Pavelić founded the Ustaše, a patriotic movement whose aim was to defend Croatian national interests in "all the lands that Croats have historically inhabited". Pavelić was soon exiled to
Italy, where he continued plotting against the "
Belgrade regime". In 1934, the Ustaše helped organize King Alexander's assassination in
Marseille. His funeral was attended by
Philippe Pétain and
Hermann Göring. This fact, the film maintains, was deliberately omitted from Yugoslav
historiography. In April 1941, amid the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia and in response to a Serbian militia's
massacre of dozens of defenseless Croats near
Bjelovar, the Ustaše proclaimed the establishment of the Independent State of Croatia.
Serbian nationalists, unwilling to live in an independent Croatian state, revolted against the Ustaše and initiated a campaign of genocide against the Croatian population. Following the Axis
invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, a large number of these nationalists joined the Partisans in terrorizing Croat population centres. Pavelić, meanwhile, was misled into implementing German-style
anti-Jewish laws, similar to those that Yugoslavia had implemented even before the invasion. Bačić and his son fled Jasenovac and sought refuge in Serbia, it is said, where they offered their services to the collaborationist leader
Milan Nedić. Bačić's property, which housed a brick factory prior to the invasion, was transformed into a "concentration and labour" camp and resumed production. At its height, the camp's brick factory employed 180 inmates. Hundreds of workers died from disease, exhaustion, or by drowning in a nearby marsh. The camp was used to detain all opponents of Pavelić's regime regardless of ethnicity, the film asserts, and it is claimed that most inmates were Croats. Thousands of Jews are said to have sought refuge in Croatia before 1941, enticed by the Croats' historical
Judeophilia. Hundreds converted to
Roman Catholicism at the urging of Archbishop
Aloysius Stepinac, thereby saving their own lives. Pavelić's wife, the film claims, was Jewish herself, as were many senior Ustaše officials. The viewer is shown a letter allegedly authored by Pavelić, asking government minister
Mile Budak to spare the lives of Jews who had not committed any crimes against the state. The film claims that hundreds of Jasenovac inmates were killed in
Allied bombing raids in 1944–45. Between 1941 and 1945, inmates were allowed to stage concerts, book readings and play football, the film maintains, and conditions were more humane than those in German camps. The narrator states that post-war communist propaganda inflated the number of people killed at Jasenovac, from an estimated 18,000 to 600,000–700,000. The viewer is shown a headline from the Partisan newspaper
Vjesnik, said to be dated from April 1945, which says that corpses tossed into the
Sava River at Jasenovac had reached
Zagreb. The narrator questions the veracity of this claim, explaining that the Sava flows away from Zagreb and not towards it. The film expresses doubts about the incomplete list of over 83,000 victims compiled by the Jasenovac Research Institute, which supposedly includes the names of individuals who had been killed elsewhere by the
Germans and Chetniks. It then claims that the Partisans used Jasenovac as a concentration camp of their own between 1945 and 1951, and that more inmates lost their lives while it was run by the communists than when it was run by the Ustaše. The narrator concedes, however, that there is no documentary evidence proving this hypothesis. Over several months in the summer of 1945, the film contends, the
Partisans massacred hundreds of thousands of Croats along the Austrian border, thereby committing one of the worst genocides in European history. Many of those who participated in the killings, it claims, were former Chetniks who had only recently changed allegiance and joined the Partisans. The narrator warns viewers against believing mainstream historical accounts of Croatia's wartime history and states that a number of prominent Croatian citizens, including former presidents
Stjepan Mesić and
Ivo Josipović, as well as a number of left-leaning historians and journalists, are conspiring against the country by perpetuating left-wing historical narratives. The film ends with the narrator calling the aforementioned individuals "
liberal fascists". ==Release and reception==