[sergey1973]

Thanks Lion in Winter. Another terrible and not well publicized chapter of WWII. Hitler knew how to manipulate ethinic and historical hatreds and he used ethnic strifes to secure the position of the Third Reich in Yugoslavia and Soviet Union.

[Banat]

There was not much hatred between Serbs and Croats prior to WWI. In fact, as early as the 1850s, intelligentsia from both Serbia and Croatia (then under Austro-Hungarian rule) collaborated and worked on the unification of all the Southern Slavs (the roots of Yugoslavia).

During WWI Croatian soldiers of the A-H Army committed atrocities against the Serbian population in Croatia and Bosnia. They would do the same some 25 years later - to a much greater extent - in WWII.

700,000 Serbs perished in Croatian concentration camps during WWII.