Philip J Cohen

Biography

Cohen attended New College of Florida in Sarasota where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree, graduating in 1975. In 1983, he completed his Doctor of Medicine at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. In 1993, he wrote a position paper on ending the war in the former Yugoslavia for President Bill Clinton's transition team. The following year, he was Advisor for Policy and Public Affairs with the United Nations Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

During the Yugoslav Wars, Cohen had close ties with Croatia's ruling party, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ). In 1998, Franjo Tuđman, the President of Croatia, awarded Cohen the Order of Danica Hrvatska (for culture), the 13th highest award in the Croatian honours system, for his "contribution in spreading the truth about the aggression against Croatia" and "exposing Great Serb and anti-Croat propaganda" through his books, Serbia’s Secret War: Propaganda and the Deceit of History and The World War II and contemporary Chetniks: Their historico-political continuity and implications for stability in the Balkans.

Serbia's Secret War: Propaganda and the Deceit of History

Texas A&M University Press published Cohen's Serbia's Secret War: Propaganda and the Deceit of History in 1996. The foreword was written by David Riesman, Professor Emeritus of Social Sciences at Harvard University. Its front cover included a reproduction of an anti-Semitic postage stamp printed in January 1942 to mark the Grand Anti-Masonic Exhibition that opened in Belgrade on 22 October 1941. On its back cover, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Margaret Thatcher described the book as "a useful counter to current myths about Serbia's history during the Second World War", and the Library Journal recommended it highly as an "impressive, scholarly book offering a wealth of new information".

On 7 October 1996, the book was reviewed by Professor Brendan Simms, Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, in the Times Higher Education Supplement. Simms observed that Cohen's book was "a revisionist work in that it overturns conventional wisdom, but not in the murky or dubious sense connotated by Holocaust "revisionism". First of all, Cohen never disputes that hundreds of thousands—but not millions—of Serbs died horribly, and often for no other reason than that they were Serbs. Second, despite the fact that Cohen is not a trained historian, his central thesis of extensive Serbian collaboration with Nazi Germany is well supported by the evidence". Simms mentioned that Cohen "somewhat blurs" but does not suppress the fundamental qualitative difference between the Croatian and Serbian involvement in The Holocaust, in that the Croatian involvement was led by the Croatian fascist Ustaše with German assistance, but the Serb involvement was led by the Germans with support from collaborationist Serbs. Simms noted that "in places Cohen gives the Croats the benefit of the doubt", but states that "[N]one of this affects Cohen's central argument: "Serbia" and many Serbs collaborated with Nazi Germany".

In December 1997, Cohen's book was reviewed by Professor Charles W. Ingrao of Purdue University's History Department in Nationalities Papers. Ingrao described the book as a "well-written, heavily footnoted narration" which "details the degree to which the Serbs of what is today Rump-Yugoslavia collaborated with the Nazis, both before and immediately after the April 1941 German invasion". He noted that, "It is difficult to refute his contention that it was the Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, and Jews of multiethnic Bosnia and the Krajina that provided the backbone to the anti-fascist war effort at a time when both the Četniks and Nedić regimes of Serbia were pursuing their own agenda of an ethnically pure Greater Serbia". Ingrao observed that while scholars were already familiar with a great deal of the material included in the book, Cohen's exposé on the Serbian-Jewish Friendship Society founded by Slobodan Milošević was new evidence about an organisation that was used to convince the international community of the common bond between Serbs and Jews. Ingrao concluded that, while Cohen overplayed the evidence at a couple of points in the book, he was impressed by both its factual accuracy and balanced judgements.

In February 2000, Dennis Reinhartz, Professor of History and Russian at the University of Texas at Arlington reviewed Cohen's book in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Reinhartz stated that Cohen's book belonged to "the current popular-historical and journalist literature that seeks to demonize and condemn more than to chronicle and elucidate fairly". He added that the book was "in danger of degenerating itself into an irrational conspiracy history and belongs to those history works of the Balkans that contribute little to our understanding of past events and their impact on the present".

The French journal Cahiers de l'URMIS published in its 2000 issue a paper by Marko Živković, an associate professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, which criticised Cohen's book. In it, Živković, himself a Serbian Jew, stated that Serbia's Secret War: Propaganda and the Deceit of History was the culmination of a two-track strategy by the Croatian media aimed at "damage control" regarding Croatian atrocities against Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia during World War II. Živković stated that this strategy involved presenting anti-Semitism in the NDH as an import from Nazi Germany, and in trying to show that the Serbs were no better, and possibly worse in their treatment of Jews during World War II than the Croats. Živković observed that Cohen had not lied or distorted the sources, but had failed to weigh the evidence regarding whether anti-Semitism was marginal or dominant in Serbia during the war.

In 2002, Professor David Bruce MacDonald of the University of Otago published his Balkan Holocausts?: Serbian and Croatian Victim-Centered Propaganda and the War in Yugoslavia. In it, he described Serbia's Secret War as "a controversial pro-Croatian revision of Serbian history".

Cohen's book was mentioned in Yugoslavia and its Historians, published by Stanford University Press in 2003. In a chapter titled Clio amid the Ruins. Yugoslavia and Its Predecessors in Recent Historiography, Dušan J. Djordjevich observes that "the quantity and quality of new historiography on Serbs and Serbia are disappointing", and states that "[e]fforts to reinterpret or fill gaps in the literature are often subject to obtrusive, distorting agendas of apology or condemnation". In a footnote to these observations, Djordjevich describes Cohen's and another book as ones which explore important topics, but "in which censorious zeal trumps balanced scholarship".

In 2011, Miroslav Svirčević of the Institute for Balkan Studies of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts reviewed Cohen's book in its journal Balcanica. Svirčević was highly critical of the book, and stated that it belongs to "pseudo-scholarly publications, not infrequently swaying on the verge of ugliest war and racist propaganda". Svirčević further pointed that "In fact, the Cohen's book teems with forgeries, half-truths, incompetent use of historical sources, overstrained theses and ill-intended inferences." In the same year, the historian Klaus Buchenau criticised Cohen for drawing heavily on contemporary press accounts to demonstrate the "fascism" of the Serbian Orthodox Church, and failing to take into account "the omnipresent censorship and manipulation" in the Nedić-controlled newspapers.

In March 2011, Marko Attila Hoare, an associate professor of economics, politics, and history at Kingston University posted a personal blog entry which dealt with a number of issues regarding Cohen's book. He wrote that denial of the genocide at Srebrenica in July 1995 "tends to go hand-in-hand with the denial of the genocidal crimes carried out by Serbian Nazi quislings and collaborators during World War II". He stated that "Great Serbian nationalists of the 1990s waged a hate campaign against Croats and Bosniaks, seeking to equate the entire Croat and Bosniak nations with the Ustashas". He observed that Cohen wrote his book as a response to this propaganda. Hoare recounted meeting with Cohen in the mid-1990s, and stated that the book was "very good". He also noted that attacks on Cohen by Serb nationalists have continued for 15 years, extending to a claim that Cohen hadn't even written the book. Hoare dismissed this claim as a "complete fabrication", stating that he had met Cohen at Yale University during the book's writing, had read the manuscript and discussed it with Cohen at length, and seen Cohen's library and archive.

The following year, an article by Alexander Mirkovic of Northern Michigan University was published in Balcanica. He stated that it is common to find an opinion, even among experienced United States Department of State officials, that the Yugoslav Partisans were mainly supported by anti-fascist Croats and Slovenes. In a footnote to this observation, he states that page 95 of Cohen's book contains the false claim that "[o]verall, from 1941 to 1945, the Partisans of Croatia were 61 per cent Croat and 28 per cent Serb".

In 2013, Raphael Israeli, Emeritus Professor of Middle Eastern, Islamic and Chinese history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem published his book The Death Camps of Croatia: Visions and Revisions, 1941-1945. In that book he referred to Cohen's work as "seminal", and noted that Cohen had "copiously documented" the large amount of anti-Semitic press in the German-occupied Territory of the Military Commander in Serbia. He also observed that Cohen had "definitively demonstrated" that the head of the German-appointed puppet regime, Milan Nedić, along with other members of the Serbian Orthodox Church, "were aware and supportive of the German extermination plan and execution [of Jews], and were not loath to lend a hand when asked". Further, Israeli referenced and quoted Reinhartz's review of Cohen's book, and added a footnote:

Belgrade Jew and author of several books on the Holocaust in Serbia, Jasa Almuly, stated to the press that he doubts that an American doctor [dermatologist] was able to write such a political propaganda pamphlet, and that he believes that it came from the [sic] Tudjman's kitchen in Zagreb, in the form of institute organized [sic] to work as propaganda machinery. He asked in public: what misfortune, or perhaps benefit, made an American Jew participate in such dishonorable deed?