Josef Mengele, the Nazi SS officer and doctor at Auschwitz, escaped justice in Europe by fleeing to South America. He conducted horrific medical experiments on concentration camp inmates, crimes which fell into the category of crimes against humanity. In 1945, he fled Europe amidst the ruins of the war.

He found refuge in South American nations.

First settling into a new life in Argentina after the war, he died in Brazil, with family and friends. His sanctuary was protected by a network of sympathisers. Living under a pseudonym, he nevertheless lived openly, set up businesses and bought farmland. He went canoeing with his grandchildren and the kids of family friends.

The Auschwitz doctor found, if not Nazis, then people who viewed his perspective sympathetically, among Germans in Brazil and Argentina. He lived for approximately 40 years after the end of WW2, dying of a stroke in 1979. While resident in Argentina and Brazil, he made overseas trips to West Germany. He could not have done so without authenticating his true identity.

What has all this got to do with Croatian expats?

Jasenovac, a concentration camp in Croatia during WW2, is the Auschwitz of the Balkans. Created and maintained by the Nazi satellite state of the Ustasha (Insurgent) movement, the atrocities committed by the Ustasha state have been systematically downplayed and minimised by Croatian expatriate communities in Australia, the United States, Britain and other countries.

No, not every expat Croatian is a Nazi. But the Jasenovac camp has been the target of a relentless campaign by the Croat expat community. To what end? To minimise the horror and cruelty of the genocidal crimes committed by the Croat ultranationalist Ustsha regime, thus rehabilitating its doctrines and the personnel who implemented them.

Let’s sort all of this out.

To be clear, no, the Germans in Brazil were not all Nazi fugitives. There is a long history of German immigration to Brazil. Thousands of Germans settled in that country from 1815 onwards, at the invitation of the Brazilian government. The latter nation, newly independent, offered German farmers land, seed and agricultural equipment for them to settle.

In the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, the German states were impoverished, land was devastated, and economic prospects were poor. Brazil provided a combined package – land and startup money for German farmers. Thousands took up this offer, and settled in Brazil over the years.

There was another motivation underlying the Brazilian government’s offer – to whiten the population. Germans being good white European stock were acceptable migrants. Let us also remember that German settlers, having taken up farming in Brazil, were also required to serve in the army. The Brazilian emperor, Don Pedro I, launched a series of frontier wars against the indigenous people. German soldiers participated in massacres of indigenous nations, and that is the bleak side of the German immigration success story.

It is wrong to portray Germans in Brazil as being composed of former Nazi fugitives. However, there were Mengele sympathisers ready and willing to provide sanctuary for the Auschwitz doctor.

While Auschwitz has come to symbolise a place of unspeakable racist-driven horrors and cruelties, the Croatian concentration camp Jasenovac has escaped such a culturally iconographic status – if such a positive description can be used for a place of inhumanity. The Independent State of Croatia (called Nezavisna Država Hrvatska in Croatian, NDH) lasted from 1941 to 1945, under German protection. Its leader, Ante Pavelic, modeled his movement the Ustasha on the Italian fascist government.

Identifying strongly with the Nazi regime, the NDH established the Jasenovac concentration camp on their own initiative, not at the request or instruction of the Nazi leadership. It was the only instance of a Nazi satellite state establishing its own concentration camp, in direct imitation of Nazi Germany.

Serbs, Jews, Roma, and antifascist Croatians were routinely massacred using gruesome methods. Jasenovac was the only camp that had a separate sub-camp for children. Prisoners were dispatched with sledgehammers, knives, and pregnant women had their uterus cut out. The NDH passed racial laws, copying the example of the 1935 Nuremberg racial exclusion laws in Germany.

Pavelic and his colleagues wanted to create an ethnically pure Croatia, cleansed of all non-Croat communities and cultures.

This particular camp has become the topic of intense controversy and debate, particularly among the expatriate Croatian population. Let’s accept the lower estimates of the number of victims killed in this camp – 100 000. Let us say for the moment, that the postwar Yugoslav Communist authorities exaggerated the numbers of those murdered at Jasenovac. Correcting an overinflated figure is one thing.

What is occurring however, is not just an academic exercise in correcting misinformation. The mainstream Croatian expatriate organisations have engaged in a systematic, persistent exercise in denial and Holocaust obfuscation, minimising and even denying that Jasenovac was a death camp.

By denying the racialised criminality of the NDH regime, they have helped to rehabilitate this so-called independent Croatia, obfuscating its ideological similarities and military ties with Nazi Germany. The far right inside Croatia today draw their strength from expatriate communities.

This rightwing revisionist rewriting of Jasenovac’s history is not confined to recent times. In 1991, Croatian president Franjo Tudjman, declared that the high point of Croatia’s long centuries of history, was the 1941-45 NDH regime. He conveniently omitted to mention that it was a blood-drenched murderous Nazi satellite state.

We deplore those German immigrants who gave sanctuary to the Angel of Death, the Auschwitz Doctor Josef Mengele. What can we say about those in the Croatian diaspora who insist on rehabilitating the Auschwitz of the Balkans? Jasenovac demonstrates that rather than revive the past glories of Croatian history, the 1941-45 NDH chapter forms one of the most shameful chapters in that nation’s history.