Ljubica Štefan

Ljubica Štefan (1921–2002) was a Croatian historian. She was awarded honorific title Righteous Among the Nations.

Biography Born in Croatian family in Prilep, Kingdom of Yugoslavia (modern-day North Macedonia) in 1921, Štefan graduated in Krk, Croatia in 1939. She started studying Slavic studies at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in 1939 in Zagreb, but finished in 1949 in Belgrade. She was a professor of slavistics in Belgrade, Kosovo and Vojvodina.

During the Second World War she lived in Karlovac by her uncle Lujo Štefan, with whom she run actions of liberating and saving Jews of Nazi-puppet NDH prosecutions. Consequently, she was awarded honorific title Righteous Among the Nations.

According to sociologist Jovan Byford, Štefan belonged to a group of authors whose works supported the Croatian side against the Serbian side in a "war of words" which became propaganda war after the involvement of various state ministries. These groups of authors depicted Serbs as a genuine "genocidal nation" whose collaborators during WWII, with the blessing of the Serbian Orthodox Church, cleansed Serbia from Jews and committed much worse crimes than the Ustaše.

According to John K. Roth, in her work From Fairy Tale to Holocaust, Štefan falsely alleges that Serbia ran an independent state during the Second World War (the country was under German military occupation). Štefan advocated the unproven theory that the Jasenovac concentration camp was used by Josip Broz Tito and the Yugoslav communist regime to imprison political prisoners after World War II.