Jasenovac - Donja Gradina: Industry of Death 1941-45 edit

The documents quoted are not reliable. There's no such "Archive of the NDH", as the source claims.--Thewanderer (talk) 20:28, 29 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

Wanderer, I'm sure you're right there's no such "archive". However the group of documents of which this is one shows up in a few places such as here [1] - although I think pavelicpapers.com and jasenovacinfo.com are the work of the same group of people. My feeling (no more than that) is that the document concerned is genuine and it's only the bit about "NDH archive" that's wrong. Perhaps it's from documents that survived the exodus from Zagreb. I've read in a few places that Laxa was sufficiently disturbed about Ustaše excesses to put his disquiet on paper. I'll see what else I can find. Have you got anything on it yourself? AlasdairGreen27 (talk) 20:59, 29 February 2008 (UTC)Reply
I do not consider either pavelicpapers.com or jasenovacinfo.com as very reliable, as I've seen irregular material before. It's not so difficult for the site to state "Serbian State archives", etc. as the real source, if the documents are real. [hrcak.srce.hr/file/4778] has part of the first letter, also cited from a Serbian source printed in 1993. I guess that's good enough to verify it. To understand the confusion about the NDH and surviving documents, it's important to consider the fact that the NDH's surviving documents are split between several national archives (Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, and perhaps others) with no dedicated archives of its own, which makes comprehensive and verifiable studies very difficult.
If we consider the letters as real, we have to be careful about what they're claiming. The Ustasha movement was a formalized organization, unlike the Chetniks. Laxa is talking about "wild Ustashe", not real members of the Ustasha Army. Especially telling is when he says, "These "SO CALLED USTASE" crushed the noble ideals of Ustase movement, undermined its reputation and brought the hatred of the population against it".--Thewanderer (talk) 15:48, 3 March 2008 (UTC)Reply
Agreed. The article refers to "Ustaše irregulars" which I hope makes clear that those whom Laxa was asking to be brought under control were not actually part of his armed forces (well, obviously, otherwise I suppose he could've done it himself). If you want to reword that sentence or add anything I've got no objections. AlasdairGreen27 (talk) 16:13, 3 March 2008 (UTC)Reply