Are the numbers of dead in the Jasenovac concentration camp exaggerated?

The following articles and documents challenge the idea of the 700 000 supposedly killed Serbs and other groups who died at the Jasenovac concentration camp. The real number is most likely, according to various sources, between 70-80 000 dead. The idea of almost 1 million Serbs dying at the hands of the Ustase has been used as an excuse for Serbian ultra-nationalism prior to the Serbian invasions of Albanian, Bosnian and Croatian territories.

1. “Serbia’s Suffering in Holocaust Is Exaggerated” according to the News York TImes in 1994.¹
   
   
2. “Despite all the evidence proving that the excessive figure of 700,000 victims propagated in socialist Yugoslavia simply cannot be scientifically confirmed, officials in Serbia and the Republika Srpska (RS) entity in BiH continue to insist on the debunked and exaggerated figure. Historians in both Croatia and Serbia have compiled lists of individuals killed in the concentration camp, which contain from 84,000 (Jasenovac) to 89,000 (Belgrade) victims listed by name and surname.”²
   
   
3. “Despite the persistence of widely exaggerated numbers of the Jasenovac victims, serious scholarship has determined more credible figures, even though the exact number will never be known. Two demographers, a Serb and a Croat, working separately in the late 1980s estimated that between 70,000 (Bogoljub Kocovic) and 83,000 (Vladimir Zerjavic) people were killed at Jasenovac;”³
   
4. “In Yugoslav times, the death toll was often set between 500,000 and 700,000, which some saw as an attempt to put label Croats as ‘genocidal’. The film disputes these exaggerated figures as well as the official, scientifically-produced Jasenovac death toll of 83,145 victims, saying they are all “unreliable”.⁴
   
   
5. “The Serbian Ministry of Information, in conjuction with a nationalist ‘researcher’ Dr. Milan Bulajic [Srebrenica genocide denier] and the Serbian Orthodox Church, took a leading role in propagating the myth of Jasenovac. For a vast majority of Serbs, maintaining a grossly exaggerated number of ‘700,000′ Jasenovac deaths was absolutely central to their national self-identity. A high number ‘proved’ that Serbs were one of the ‘primary victims’ of the World War II, rather than Nazi collaborators (Chetniks) responsible for genocide over the Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) and Jewish population in the Second World War.”⁵
   
   
6. “The estimated loss of up to 6 million dead is founded too much on emotional biased testimonies and on exaggerated data in the post-war…squaring of accounts with the defeated…; that can be concluded, among other things, by the fact that even in serious books… greatly multiplied data on Jasenovac are presented.  The claim is made that 770,000 were killed there, including 20,000 Jews, even though…the Jews from Croatia…were deported to the East, while some found salvation in the Italian zone.  And when the Jasenovac mythical figure appeared realistic, then it is not surprising that even Malaparte’s invented basket of eyes becomes duplicated, probably for the sake of greater authenticity.” 
   – Quotations from “Wastelands of Historical Reality” by President of Croatia Franjo Tudjman
   
   
7. “The number of 700.000 victims (500.000 Serbs among them) was claimed by the Yugoslav regime after WWII, but it has been proved to be significantly over exaggerated in order to gain higher war reparations and is today viewed as totally unrealistic. The number of 81.998 relates to physically identified victims, which is in turn known for not fully capturing the real extent of the crimes. Croatian officials have recently stuck to its usage; at the beginning of the 1990s, however, significant downplaying of the number of victims was common.”⁶
   
   
   
   References

1. https://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/29/opinion/l-serbia-s-suffering-in-holocaust-is-exaggerated-932116.html ↩︎
2. https://ijhmc.arphahub.com/article/71583/ ↩︎
3. https://www.cairn.info/revue-l-europe-en-formation-2010-3-page-125.htm ↩︎
4. https://balkaninsight.com/2017/04/21/dishonour-for-zagreb-over-alternative-facts-about-holocaust-04-21-2017/ ↩︎
5. https://www.instituteforgenocide.ca/examination-of-serbian-deaths-in-jasenovac-camp/ ↩︎
6. https://ims.fsv.cuni.cz/long-live-serbian-nation-republika-srpska-commemoration-jasenovac-victims ↩︎