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Jasenovac concentration camp (Croatian, Serbian: Logor Jasenovac; Cyrillic script: Логор Јасеновац) was the largest concentration and extermination camp in Croatia during World War II. It was established by the Ustaše (Ustasha) regime of the Independent State of Croatia ("NDH") in August 1941. It was dismantled in April 1945. Unlike other concentration and extermination camps, in Jasenovac the largest number of victims were ethnic Serbs, whom Ante Pavelić considered the main racial enemy of the NDH. The camp also held Jews, Roma, and large numbers of Croatian resistance members, most notably Partisans.

Jasenovac was a complex of five subcamps and three smaller camps spread over 240 square kilometers (93 square miles) on the banks of the Sava river. The largest camp was at Jasenovac, about 100 km (62 miles) southeast of Zagreb. The complex also included large grounds at Donja Gradina directly across the Sava river, a camp for children in Sisak to the northwest, and a women's camp in Stara Gradiška to the southeast.

Prelude

Some of the first legal orders of the NDH reflected the acceptance of the ideology of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, with an emphasis placed on Croatian national issues. The "Legal order for the defence of the people and the state" dated April 17 1941 ordered the death penalty for "infringement of the honour and vital interests of the Croatian people and the survival of the Independent State of Croatia". It was soon followed by the "Legal order of races" and the "Legal order of the protection of Aryan blood and the honour of the Croatian people" dated April 30 1941, as well as the "Order of the creation and definition of the racial-political committee" dated June 4 1941. The enforcement of these decrees was done not only through the regular court system, but also through new special courts and mobile court-martials with extended jurisdiction.

When existing jails could no longer sustain the rate of new inmates, the Ustaša government started preparing the grounds what would become the Jasenovac concentration camp in July 1941. The Jasenovac complex was built between August 1941 and February 1942. The first two camps, Krapje and Bročica, were closed in November 1941.

The three newer camps continued to function until the end of the war:

  • Ciglana (Jasenovac III)
  • Kozara (Jasenovac IV)
  • Stara Gradiška (Jasenovac V)

The camp

The camp was constructed, managed and supervised by Department III of the Ustaška Narodna Služba or UNS (lit. "Ustaše People's Service"), a special police force of the NDH. Vjekoslav "Maks" Luburić was head of the UNS. Individuals managing the camp at different times included Miroslav Majstorović and Dinko Šakić.

The Ustaše interned, tortured and executed men, women and children in Jasenovac. The largest number of victims were Serbs, but other victims included Jews, Bosniaks,Gypsies, and Croatian resistance members opposed to the regime (i.e. Partisans or their sympathizers, categorized by the Ustaše as "communists"). Upon arrival at the camp, the prisoners were marked with colors, similar to the use of Nazi concentration camp badges: blue for Serbs, and red for communists (non-Serbian resistance members), while Gypsies had no marks (this practice was later abandoned.) Most victims were killed at execution sites near the camp: Granik, Gradina, and other places. Those kept alive were mostly skilled at needed professions and trades (doctors, pharmacists, electricians, shoemakers, goldsmiths, and so on) and were employed in services and workshops at Jasenovac. The living conditions in the camp were extremely severe: a meager diet, deplorable accommodations and cruel behavior by the Ustaše guards. The conditions improved only for short periods during visits by delegations, such as the press delegation that visited in February 1942 and a Red Cross delegation in June 1944.

Most of the Jews at Jasenovac were executed prior to August 1942, when the NDH started to deport them to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Jews had been sent to Jasenovac from all parts of Croatia after being gathered in Zagreb, and from Bosnia and Herzegovina after being gathered in Sarajevo. Some came directly from other cities and smaller towns.

Mass murder and cruelty

A knife worn over the hand that was used by the Ustaše militia for the speedy killing of inmates in concentration camps.

In the late summer of 1942, tens of thousands of Serbian villagers were deported to Jasenovac from the Kozara mountain area (in Bosnia) where NDH forces were fighting against Partisans. Most of the men were killed at Jasenovac, the women were sent to forced labor in Germany, and the children were taken from their mothers; some were murdered and others were dispersed to Catholic orphanages.

On the night of August 29 1942, bets were made among the prison guards as to whom could liquidate the largest number of inmates. One of the guards, Petar Brzica reportedly cut the throats of 1,360 prisoners with a butcher knife that became known as srbosjek ("serb-cutter").

Witnesses later reported Ustase guards among other brutalities throwing a baby in the air and making it land on a bayonet. They tied down one prisoner on a table and put a rat on his belly, then laid a plate bucket to trap the rat inside and then held a torch against the bucket. The rat, desperate to get out, dug a hole into the prisoners skin while the prisoner was alive. The Ustase had a cage wrapped up with barb wire in a swamp near the camp where they would lock in any prisoner asking for more food, sometimes for 2-4 days.

They sometimes cut open the bellys of pregnant women and cut out the babies and then threw the bodies into the river. Other waysof murdering was tying up two prisoners together on a cliff near Sava river and shooting one of them in the head and see the other one fall down the cliff with the dead body and then drown or break the neck.

Dragging large groups of 20-100 prisoners into open fields and letting them dig holes in the ground was not rare either. When the prisoners were finished digging the guards would beat them all to death with riflebutts, sledgehammers or spiked clubs and slit the throats or mutilate the ones that had survived the beatings.

The Ustase many times hit women and children unconscious with sledgehammers and then threw the bodies into the furnace they had built (and later destroyed it for reasons unknown).

One time the Ustase poured cold water on a prisoner tied up in the snow, the water then froze to ice and the prisoner suffocated under the layer of ice.

One Ustase bragged to his men about how fun it was slitting throats of partizan babies.

One witness reported that in one day in February in 1942 five prisoners was found out to have been digging up raw potatoes to eat, the guards took them to camp commander Matkovic Ivica who ordered the men to strip naked in the freezing cold. They were all tied up to hang there for an hour while all other prisoners were watching. They were then untied and shot.

Prisoner Rudolf Richter from Zagreb stated later that on one night in December 1942, the Ustase entered the barracks and grabbed the Jews from their bunks. They threw them out of the barracks and beat them with bats and kicked them, fracturing their legs and ribs. Many Jews were beaten to death, and many died later that night. Richter said "later we found out that the reason for all of it was because guards found the corpse of an Ustase guard in the camp, and two Jewish prisoners had escaped from the camp. The Ustase suspected the Jews had killed the guard."

The food for the prisoners was very poor and the prisoners were always starving. They received meals two times a day sometimes and other times it could take 20 days for the prisoners to get any food at all. Many of them died of starvation.

At noon they would receive cabbage, bean or potato soup, in which there were a few vegetables, a potato or a bean, and in the evening they would receive similar fare. The inmates called the soup "hominy." The soups were described by a witness as "muddy water". Sometimes they got to eat pigs food, because it could be ordered in big groups and for less price by the Ustasa.

Prisoners remaining in Jasenovac were forced to drink water from the Sava river contaminated with ren (horseradish). At the last moment, in January 1945, more than 50,000 prisoners who were able to walk, were led from the camp.

End of the camp

In April 1945, as Partisan units approached the camp, the Ustaše camp supervisors attempted to erase traces of the atrocities by working the death camp at full capacity. On April 22, 600 prisoners revolted; 520 were killed and 80 escaped. Before abandoning the camp shortly after the prisoner revolt, the Ustaše killed the remaining prisoners, blasted and destroyed the buildings, guard-houses, torture rooms, the "Picili Furnace" and the other structures. Upon entering the camp, the partisans found only ruins, soot, smoke, and dead bodies.

During the following months of 1945, the grounds of Jasenovac were thoroughly destroyed by prisoners of war, 200 to 600 Home Guard members captured by the Allied forces. The laborers completed destruction of the camp, leveling the site and dismantling the two-kilometer long, four-meter high wall that surrounded it.

Number of victims

There are various estimates about the number of victims who died in the Jasenovac camp. Estimates range from tens of thousands of deaths, which is the most commonly cited contemporary figure, to hundreds of thousands, which was the most common estimate prior to the 1990s.

The estimates vary due to lack of accurate records, the methods used for making estimates and sometimes, due to differing biases of the estimators. Examples of difficulties in compiling accurate counts include: cases where entire families were exterminated with no one left to submit their names to the lists; inclusion of names of people who were killed elsewhere, or who survived but were not heard of, or that were duplicates.

Estimates by Local Institutes

The Jasenovac Memorial Area maintains a list of the names of 69,842 Jasenovac victims, including: 39,580 Serbs, 14,599 Roma, 10,700 Jews, 3,462 Croats, as well as people of some other ethnicities.

The Belgrade Museum of the Holocaust keeps a list of the names of 80,022 victims (mostly from Jasenovac), including: around 52,000 Serbs, 16,000 Jews, 12,000 Croats and nearly 10,000 Roma.

Antun Miletić, a researcher at the Military Archives in Belgrade, has collected data on Jasenovac since 1979. His list contains the names of 77,200 victims, of which 41,936 are Serbs.

In 1998, the Bosniak Institute published SFR Yugoslavia's last List of war victims from the Jasenovac camp from 1992. The list contained the names of 49,602 victims at Jasenovac, including 26,170 Serbs, 8,121 Jews, 5,900 Croats, 1471 Roma, 787 Muslims, 6,792 of unidentifiable ethnicity and the rest identified as "others".

Estimates by Holocaust institutions

Memorial signs with Serbian claims of victim counts, situated on the Republika Srpska side of the Sava river

The Yad Vashem center claims that over 500,000 Serbs were killed in the NDH , including those who were killed at Jasenovac, where approximately 600,000 victims of all ethnicities were killed. Some Croatian commentators have criticized these victim counts as exaggerated. It is also not clear how the Center has reached this figure.

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the victim figures are as follows:

Between its establishment in 1941 and its evacuation in April 1945, Croat authorities murdered thousands of people at Jasenovac. Among the victims were: between 45,000 and 52,000 Serb residents of the so-called Independent State of Croatia; between 8,000 and 20,000 Jews; between 8,000 and 15,000 Roma (Gypsies); and between 5,000 and 12,000 ethnic Croats and Muslims, who were political and religious opponents of the regime.

The Croat authorities murdered between 330,000 and 390,000 ethnic Serb residents of Croatia and Bosnia during the period of Ustaša rule; more than 30,000 Croatian Jews were killed either in Croatia or at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The Jewish Virtual Library agrees with these figures for.

Contemporary sources

German generals issued reports of the number of victims as the war progressed.German military commanders gave different figures for the number of Serbs, Jews and others killed on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia. They circulated figures of 400,000 Serbs (Alexander Löhr); 350,000 Serbs (Lothar Rendulic); around 300,000 (Edmund Glaise von Horstenau); more than "3/4 of million of Serbs" (Hermann Neubacher) in 1943; "600-700,000 until March 1944" (Ernst Fick); 700,000 (Massenbach).

Vjekoslav "Maks" Luburić, commander-in-chief of all the Croatian camps, announced the great "efficiency" of the Jasenovac camp at a ceremony on October 9 1942. During the banquet which followed, he reported with pride: "We have slaughtered here at Jasenovac more people than the Ottoman Empire was able to do during its occupation of Europe."

A report of the National Committee of Croatia for the investigation of the crimes of the occupation forces and their collaborators, dated November 15 1945, which was commissioned by the new government of Yugoslavia under Tito, stated that 500,000-600,000 people were killed at the Jasenovac complex. These estimates were supported by the government of Yugoslavia while it existed. These figures were cited by researcher Israel Gutman in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, by the Simon Wiesenthal Center and others. Proponents of these numbers were subsequently accused of artificially inflating them for purpose of obtaining war reparations. The state's total war casualties of 1,700,000 as presented by Yugoslavia at the Paris Peace Treaties, were produced by a math student, Vladeta Vučković, at the Federal Bureau of Statistics. He later admitted that his estimates included demographic losses (i.e. also factoring in the estimated population increase), while actual losses would have been significantly less.

Forensic sources

In the 1960s, exhumations of bodies and use of sampling methods was conducted at Jasenovac by a team of researchers. The team consisted of anthropologists, medical doctors, archaeologists and other experts, who had experience in similar research at Auschwitz and used the same methods. During the Yugoslav Wars, Serbian anthropologist, Srboljub Živanović, published what he claimed were the full results of the studies, which had allegedly been suppressed by Tito's government in the name of brotherhood and unity, in order to put less emphasis on the crimes of the Ustashe. According to Živanović, the research gave strong support to the victim counts of more than 500,000, with estimates of 700,000-800,000 being realistic. Other team members assert that the Jasenovac researchers never discussed victim counts in preparing their report.

Statistical estimates

In the 1980s, calculations were done independently by Croat economist Vladimir Žerjavić and Serb statistician Bogoljub Kočović, who each claimed that total number of victims in Yugoslavia was less than 1.7 million, an official estimate at the time, both concluding that the number of victims was around one million. Žerjavić claimed that number of victims in the Independent State of Croatia was between 300,000 and 350,000, including 80,000 victims in Jasnovac, as well as thousands of deaths in other camps and prisons. Kočović, who made an estimate of the total number of victims, accused Žerjavić of being motivated by nationalism.

Commentators in Serbia criticized these estimates as too low, since the demographic calculations assumed that the growth rate for Serbs in Bosnia (which was part of the Independent State of Croatia during the war time) was equal to the total growth rate throughout the former Yugoslavia (1.1% at the time). According to Serbian sources, however, the actual growth rate in this region was 2.4% (in 1921-1931) and 3.5% (in 1949-1953). This method is considered very unreliable by critics because there is no reliable data on total births during this period, yet the results depend strongly on the birth rate - just a change of 0.1% in birth rate changes the victim count by 50,000.

Fates of camp officials

Some of the camp officials and their post-war fate are listed below:

Later events

Yugoslav Marshal Josip Broz never visited the site.

The Jasenovac Memorial Museum was temporarily abandoned during the Yugoslav wars. In November 1991, Simo Brdar, a former associate director of the Memorial, collected the documentation from the museum and brought it to Bosnia and Herzegovina. Brdr kept the documents until 2001, when he transferred them to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, with the help of SFOR and the government of Republika Srpska.

Croatian president Franjo Tudjman made an official visit to the site in 1994.

The New York City Parks Department, the Holocaust Park Committee and the Jasenovac Research Institute, with the help of US Congressman Anthony Weiner, established a public monument to the victims of Jasenovac in April 2005 (the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the camps.) The dedication ceremony was attended by ten Yugoslavian Holocaust survivors, as well as diplomats from Serbia, Bosnia and Israel. It remains the only public monument to Jasenovac victims outside of the Balkans. Annual commemorations are held there every April.

The Jasenovac Memorial Museum re-opened in November 2006 with a new exhibition designed by the Croatian architect, Helena Paver Njirić, and an Educational Center designed by the firm Produkcija. The Memorial Museum features an interior of rubber-clad steel modules, video and projection screens, and glass cases displaying artifacts from the camp. Above the exhibition space, which is quite dark, is a field of glass panels inscribed with the names of the victims. Helena Njirić won the first prize of the 2006 Zagreb Architectural Salon for her work on the museum.

Notes

  1. *Bosniaks in Jasenovac Concentration Camp—Congress of Bosniak Intellectuals, Sarajevo. ISBN 9789958471025. October 2006. (Holocaust Studies)
  2. Timebase Multimedia Chronography(TM) - Timebase 1945
  3. Southeast Times: Exhibition aims to show truth about Jasenovac
  4. ^ Anzulovic, Branimir. Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide, Hurst & Company. London, 1999
  5. ^ Bošnjački Institut. Jasenovac: Žrtve rata prema podacima statističkog zavoda Jugoslavije. Bošnjački Institut Sarajevo, Sarajevo 1998.
  6. http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%205930.pdf
  7. Yad Vashem
  8. Professor Josip Pecaric, Serbian myth about Jasenovac (summary)
  9. Marijana Cota, “The Šakić Case - Disinformation and Ill Will”, The Home Club of the Bosnian Posavina, Zagreb 1999, p. 136.
  10. Jasenovac
  11. Jasenovac
  12. ^ Vladimir Zerjavic - How the number of 1.7 million casualties of the Second World War has been derived
  13. Jasenovac - Donja Gradina: Večan pomen Jasenovac
  14. Politika Newspapers & Magazines d.o.o. - Ilustrovana Politika
  15. Vladimir Zerjavic - Anthropological Survey
  16. President Mesić in Vojnić
  17. "Clear denouncement of crimes in Jasenovac and Bleiburg will stabilize Croatia and its position in the world."Nacional, 2002.

References

http://pavelic-papers.com/features/jasenovac/contents.html

  1. The Yugoslav Auschwitz and the Vatican, Vladimir Dedijer (Editor), Harvey Kendall (Translator) Prometheus Books, 1992.
  2. Witness to Jasenovac's Hell Ilija Ivanovic, Wanda Schindley (Editor), Aleksandra Lazic (Translator) Dallas Publishing, 2002
  3. Crimes in the Jasenovac Camp, State Commission investigation of crimes of the occupiers and their collaborators in Croatia, Zagreb, 1946.
  4. Ustasha Camps by Mirko Percen, Globus, Zagreb, 1966. Second expanded printing 1990.
  5. Ustashi and the Independent State of Croatia 1941-1945, by Fikreta Jelic-Butic, Liber, Zagreb, 1977.
  6. Romans, J. Jews of Yugoslavia, 1941- 1945: Victims of Genocide and Freedom Fighters, Belgrade, 1982
  7. Antisemitism in the anti-fascist Holocaust: a collection of works, The Jewish Center, Zagreb, 1996.
  8. The Jasenovac Concentration Camp, by Antun Miletic, Volumes One and Two, Belgrade, 1986. Volume Three, Belgrade, 1987. Second edition, 1993.
  9. Hell's Torture Chamber by Djordje Milica, Zagreb, 1945.
  10. Die Besatzungszeit das Genozid in Jugoslawien 1941-1945 by Vladimir Umeljic, Graphics High Publishing, Los Angeles, 1994.
  11. Srbi i genocidni XX vek (Serbs and XX century, Ages of Genocide) by Vladimir Umeljić, (vol 1, vol 2), Magne, Belgrade, 2004. ISBN 86-903763-1-3
  12. Magnum Crimen, by Viktor Novak, Zagreb, 1948.
  13. Caput, by Curzio Malaparte, Napoli, 1943.
  14. Der koatische Ustasa-Staat 1941-1945, Schriftenreihe der Vierteljahrshefte fűr Zeitgeschichte, by L. Horry and Martin Broszat, Stuttgart.

See also

External links

45°16′54″N 16°56′06″E / 45.28167°N 16.93500°E / 45.28167; 16.93500

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