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Postwar Yugoslavia estimated the number to be 700,000. However, the number I quoted appears to be on the higher end of the estimates - the Simon Wisenthal Center estimated 500,000 which is probably the number that I will use in the future to avoid controversy. Either way many Serbian civilians were killed in death camps by the Ustase during WWII and that is why Serb civilians were ready to fight, die and kill rather than end up under Croatian rule again. Here is the link to Wikipedia article which discusses the widely varying estimates of the number of dead which range from 30,000 (very low) to 1 million (very high). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usta%C5%A1e#World_War_II

Here's a hint, Simon Wiesenthal is full of crap with their numbers on this matter as well. The 700,000 number came from Communist sources who put the total number of dead in YU during the war at 1.7 million in order to get more reparations from Germany. This was admitted by Milovan Djilas, a Politburo member and one of the 4 most powerful men in YU at the time.

The numbers that you want to use are those found in two studies, one by the Serbian Bogoljub Kocovic and the other by the Croatian Vladimir Zerjavic. Their studies were scientific and independent of each other, yet they both came to almost identitical numbers.