1920–2013
○ Natural causes
An independent statistician who recalculated Yugoslavia’s wartime losses
In 1985, he presented Yugoslavia’s wartime losses as separate figures for actual and demographic losses.
Bogoljub Kočović was a Serb jurist and statistician from Sarajevo who studied Yugoslavia’s population and wartime losses. In his 1985 book, he compared the 1921, 1931, and 1948 censuses and estimated about 1.014 million actual losses and 1.985 million demographic losses in Yugoslavia during the Second World War. His work offered an independent estimate distinct from the state figure of 1.706 million and became a central source in the historiographical dispute over the war’s victims.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1947–1952Research assistant, French National Centre for Scientific Research
- 1949Earned a Doctor of Law in Paris
- 1956Earned an MA in economics at Roosevelt University, Chicago
- 1963–1984Administrative and financial director for US firms in Paris
- 1985Published Žrtve drugog svetskog rata u Jugoslaviji
- 1997Published Nauka, nacionalizam i propaganda
- 2005Published Sahrana jednog mita
Related historical events
The postwar numbers dispute and an independent estimate outside state channels
Kočović was the first researcher to subject Yugoslavia's Second World War victim figures to systematic independent examination, arriving at numbers different from those of the state. In Žrtve drugog svetskog rata u Jugoslaviji, published in London in 1985, he compared the 1921, 1931 and 1948 censuses and estimated about 1,014,000 actual losses and 1,925,000 demographic losses, allowing a margin of error of 250,000, while the official figure stood at 1,706,000. He stated explicitly that his estimates depended on assumptions about population growth and emigration, assumptions that were later called into serious question.
Published in London, the book was ignored in his homeland until the breakup of Yugoslavia and was reprinted in Sarajevo in 1990. The dispute also ran along a separate track from the author. The mathematician Vladeta Vučković stated that he had taken part in the 1947 calculation and claimed that the figure of about 1.7 million was an estimate of demographic rather than actual losses; that figure was conveyed to the Inter-Allied Reparations Agency in 1947 by Foreign Minister Edvard Kardelj. Kočović accepted the method and results of the Croatian demographer Vladimir Žerjavić as scientifically valid, and in his 1997 book Nauka, nacionalizam i propaganda he refuted attempts to restore the large victim figures dominant in Communist Yugoslavia.