Day 35: Jasenovac, Ustasha Concentration Camp
Updated: Sep 12, 2022
6/10/22
Another heavy one here. Be advised of dark, violent content.
I'll do my best to cover it.
Jasenovac ("Yas-sano-vats")
The Nazi German Invasion of Yugoslavia called the April War or operation 25 was a German led attack which included a overwhelming air attack of Belgrade. The sudden collapse of Yugoslav forces was blamed on poor training and equipment, and led to the creation of the Independent State of Croatia. This was a puppet state of Nazi Germany and Italy, and was created April 1941 in parts of occupied Yugoslavia, encapsulating Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and parts of Serbia and Slovenia. (Some small parts of Croatia were not included) Yugoslavia was targeted due to the fact that there were vast oil fields in Romania, and this would be advantageous for Germany in the war. The invasion and formation of the I.S.C. drew upon an already extant and organized anti-Serb racial hatred, and this group gained dangerous amounts of power.
The Croatian model for fascism was largely based off the Italian model, with elements of racial integrity and nationalism drawn from Nazism, and was governed by the one party fascist state called the Ustaše/Ustasha, led by Ante Pavelic. The regime targeted Serbs, Jews, and Roma mainly, as well as dissidents and Bosnian Muslims and was one of the most brutal that existed during WW11 due to the genocide they committed. It should be noted that Ustasha was the only regime that was a Nazi collaborationist regime in Europe that operated its own concentration camps. They created 22 concentration camps during their 4 year long regime, the largest and most infamous being Jasenovac.
Just as further evidence of the Ustasha's brutality, they made two camps that only held children.
Most Jewish murders were committed before 1942, and afterwards new Jewish prisoners were transported to Aushwitz. Serbs were the main group here, and they were taken here after refusing to convert to Catholicism. The Ustasha motto on how to deal with Serbs was "one third converted (to Catholicism), one third expelled, one third killed."
The camp spread over 81 square miles on both banks of the sava and una rivers
There were many sub-camps including the "brickworks" camp which was the largest, the Stara Gradiska camp (which was also the primary transport point for Jews in their way to Aushwitz as well, and primarily held women and children), the killing grounds at Gradina Donja, five working farms and the Ustica Roma camp. Conditions were brutal, there was rampant starvation, with meals mainly consisting of soup that was boiled water with starch in it and occasionally a few cabbages leaves in an entire pot. The barracks were filthy and between the illness and brutal forced labor, many passed from illness, starvation and exhaustion.
The freight train that transported prisoners to the camp- and the rail ties that were made into the path to the flower memorial monument.
Jasenovac was the largest concentration camp, named for the town it was established in, in marshland near the Sava and Una rivers. It was one of the top ten largest built in Europe at the time, and by the end was the third largest. Jasenovac is remembered particularly for its brutality, as they did not have the same resources for extermination as the Germans did like gas chambers, and instead had to use more heinous methods like gunfire, knives, hammers and axes to murder individuals.
An estimated 45-52,000 were killed here, followed by Roma at 15-20,000, then Jews at 12,000-20000 and the Croat dissidents and Muslims at 5-12,000 56% of the official memorial list is Serbs at 45,000 out of nearly 81,000 confirmed. The number of Jews is highly debated as well. has been said to have possibly been as much as 2/3 of the entire Croat Jewish population, at 25,000 or as low as 8,000. It should be noted at this point that there is a great controversy over the number of victims, and the numbers above are the most agreed upon.
More than half of these victims were women and children.
One of these mounds is the location of the brick making furnace, which was also used to burn human remains.
There was even a blacksmith shop onsite to make custom murder weapons, designed specifically for efficiently of slitting throats. They would kill so many people in one day that their hand would get tired of wielding the knife, so they invented a device with a blade that attached to the wrist for an easier way to murder.
As mentioned, the methods of execution were especially brutal, and treatment of these people was brutal as well, and this is in part why this camp is so infamous. In April 1945, the last weeks of the camp, there was a rapid killing of prisoners as they knew the collapse of the regime would come soon. They killed the remaining women leaving around a thousand men left, who planned an escape, with only 92 escaping and the rest killed. The Ustasha dug up and burned many of the bodies, which leads to the point of the controversy over the exact number of victims. A large percentage of victims were also dumped into the rivers. There are reports all the way to Belgrade back in Serbia of seeing piles of bodies floating down the Sava.
Most modern sources agree that the number of deaths at Jasenovac was around 100,000, but ranges have been proposed anywhere from 30,000 to 1.1 million This is due to that fact that many victims were never registered and killed immediately upon arrival, and that records that did exist were destroyed and bodies were dug up and burned as noted. Also, this range is in part due to denial from some, as well as gross exaggeration from others.
The Ustasha did not keep detailed and extensive records of their camps that the Nazis did, in fact they kept almost none whatsoever. Additionally toward the fall of the I.S.C., the regime attempted to conceal their crimes (namely destroying the human remains) and in doing so, made it very difficult to know exactly who and how many victims there were. The memorial today contains the names of 83,145 confirmed victims, and the list is subject to change as more is learned, for example in 2007 it only had around 70.000 entries.
To add another disturbing layer to this event, the Catholic Church supported and sponsored it. Cardinal Stepinać especially is known for his support and praising the "liquidation" of Orthodox Serbs as doing God's work. Some clergy members even participated in the killings. The Pope approved his canonization, which was later revoked.
This memorial site was established in 1960, with its central image being the flower memorial which was chosen for a symbol of eternal renewal.
It stands out on the landscape, rising above the silent fields. They found a way to honor this site: something defiantly hopeful coming out of such vast darkness.
A quote remembering the victims and immortalizing their memory.
Note that the bottom bouquet is an offering from a radical pro-Serb group. This is one of many instances of these horrible events being used as political leverage. It saddens me that people abuse the victims' remembrance as such.
More reading and details that include various sources can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasenovac_concentration_camp
Special thanks to my friend and colleague Andora Fess for her presentation and research on this site for our visit, who shared her notes with me.
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