Mapping the Holocaust in
Croatia

Deportations to the Jasenovac Camp Complex commenced much earlier, but on November 25, 1941, they acquired a legal basis when Ante Pavelić issued a decree detailing the procedure for arrest and deportation to camps. The decree stipulated a minimum incarceration period of three months and a maximum of three years. Yet, the veneer of due process espoused by the decree was misleading. The regulations were a specious pretext for large-scale deportations of Jews, Roma, and Serbs. Despite the imposition of sentences, camp guards in Jasenovac often murdered prisoners immediately upon their arrival. Those who managed to stay alive until the completion of their sentences were rarely released. At the same time, thousands of people were deported to the camp complex without any formal sentencing, particularly during large-scale ethnic cleansing operations targeting Serb communities.

In mid-1942, the Jasenovac Camp Complex became the epicenter of state-organized destruction in the Independent State of Croatia. In the winter of 1941/1942, the perpetrators struggled with burying the bodies due to the frozen ground and in early spring because of flooding. However, by late April, the camp complex was ready to receive an unlimited number of prisoners, as this missive documents. The subsequent correspondence shows the missive’s circulation within the administrative apparatus of the Independent State of Croatia.

Prisoners in the Jasenovac Camp Complex endured perpetual starvation. The meager sustenance led to illnesses, contributing to high death rates. In this except from a report to the Serbian Commissariat for Refugees, Vojislav Prnjatović, a Serb prisoner, provided a detailed account of the severe food scarcity in Jasenovac III. He was released from the camp and deported to Serbia in the spring of 1942.

The possibilities for prisoners in the Jasenovac camp complex to contact friends and families outside the camp were very limited. The only option sanctioned by the camp administration was through small letter cards. In Jasenovac, prisoners were first issued such cards in April 1942. However, this “privilege,” as the camp administration dubbed it, was occasionally withdrawn as a collective punishment after escape attempts. At the same time, the letter cards were censured by the camp administration. For this reason, their content does not describe true conditions in the camp complex. In most letter cards, prisoners asked relatives or friends to send food, reflecting the chronic malnutrition in the camp complex.

This letter card was written in 1944 by the prisoner Ilija Ivanović, who was sixteen years old at the time. Its brevity is explained by the fact that the letter cards were not allowed to exceed twenty words. In the letter, Ivanović wrote, “Dear mother. I am healthy. I wrote, but I did not get a reply. Send me a packet if you can. Greetings to you all, Ilija.”

In the hope of ensuring the release of family members or friends incarcerated in the Jasenovac camp complex, many people wrote letters to the police authorities in the Independent of State Croatia. Since the Ustaša regime primarily targeted Jewish men in the initial phase of the Holocaust in the Independent State of Croatia, letters from 1941 were for the most part written by Jewish women. In such letters, the writers would often stress the innocence and patriotism of the person in question. Unfortunately, these efforts rarely had any results. In this letter, Marjana Štern from the town of Daruvar pleaded for the release of her husband Hugo Štern, who was incarcerated in the Jasenovac camp complex.

Until mid-1943, all the prisoners in the main camp of the Jasenovac Camp Compex, Jasenovac III, were men. Female prisoners deported to the camp were either murdered immediately upon arrival or deported to the Stara Gradiška camp. Yet, in June 1943, the first female prisoners arrived from the Stara Gradiška. At first, they were placed at the area dubbed "the economy" inside the main camp, but, in September, the camp section for women was moved to the east of the camp between the outer wall and the barbed-wired inner part. The conditions were extremely difficult and many perished due to starvation, illness and the terror of the guards. On April 21, Ustaša guards murdered the around 600 surviving women in the camp.

In this document, recorded by the Commission for Determining the Crimes of the Occupiers and their Helpers, Sofija Spoljarić from the town of Novska testified about her imprisonment in the women’s section of the camp complex.

In the Stara Gradiška Camp and later also in Jasenovac III, there were not only men but also women among the guards. Several of these women acted just as cruel and brutal towards the prisoners as their male counterparts. The commander of the women’s section of the Stara Gradiška Camp was Maja Buždon. Immediately after the collapse of the Independent State of Croatia, Buždon was captured by the Communist authorities and sentenced to death by a military court. In this excerpt from her interrogation, she candidly talked about her crimes, which included murder of prisoners and participation in selections for extermination.

When examining interrogation records from the immediate postwar period in Socialist Yugoslavia, such as Maja Buždon’s, it is important to keep in mind that investigators often used coercion to elicit confessions from suspects. Although torture during interrogations was officially prohibited, it was a common practice in 1945 and 1946. Nevertheless, Buždon’s culpability is confirmed by numerous survivor testimonies.

While the subject remains marginalized and under-researched within Holocaust studies, recent research suggests that homosexual intimate relations were quite common both among female and male prisoners in the SS concentration camps. This excerpt from a report written by the Communist self-help organization in the women’s section of the Stara Gradiška camp indicates that this was also the case in this setting. The leadership of the Communist partisan movement in Yugoslavia associated homosexuality with bourgeois “decadence”; a perspective that may have influenced the negative attitude expressed by the author of the report.

Most of the guards stationed at the Jasenovac camp complex were extremely brutal, beating or killing prisoners for the most trivial infractions or simply out of boredom. Yet, before they were recruited, most of the rank-and-file guards were not devoted Ustašas. In the Independent State of Croatia, young Croat and Bosniak men generally faced the choice of joining an Ustaša unit or serving in the Home Guard [The regular Military in the Independent State of Croatia]. To dissuade youngsters from joining the Home Guard, Ustaša recruiters promised higher salaries and better food besides various other benefits. The extract from the memoirs of the survivor Cadik Danon Braco offers an illustrative description of a young man who appears to have volunteered due to rather mundane considerations.

The memoirs of Ilija Jakovljević is one of the most important sources for understanding perpetrators in Stara Gradiška camp. As an acclaimed novelist from Herzegovina who the Ustaša regime unsuccessful had tried to win over to their side, Jakovljević was treated relatively tolerable during his incarceration in the camp, which lasted from October 1941 to December 1942. His special status gave him opportunity to converse with some of the men who administrated the camp and routinely participated in violence.

Among these figures was the Ustaša Nikola Gagro, who oversaw a prison in the camp where numerous political prisoners starved to death. The following extracts contain some of Jakovljević's conversations with Gagro, revealing both the extreme ruthlessness of the man but also a more complex dimension to his character.

To make room for incoming prisoners, the Ustaša camp leadership routinely organized selections among the existing prisoner population in the main camp, Jasenovac III. Those chosen were sent to Gradina, a destination synonymous with death. In principle, the selections aimed to maintain the efficiency of the work force by eliminating “excess” prisoners perceived as too weak for forced labor. The camp leadership cynically called the process “rejuvenation,” a grotesque distortion of its true nature. However, in practice, the criteria for selection were often arbitrary, influenced by personal predilections and animosities of the perpetrators. This extract from the memoirs of survivor Đorđe Miliša vividly captures the intricate psychological interplay and attempts at impression management as prisoners sought to evade the grim fate of selection.

Before Gradina became the main killing site, the camp personnel perpetrated most of the mass killings inside Jasenovac III or just east of the camp. However, as the ground froze in January 1942, making it difficult to dig mass graves, a crematorium was created inside the brickyard. Engineer Hinko Pičili designed the crematorium and supervised its construction. In survivor testimonies and memoirs, the crematorium is sometimes referred to as “Pičili’s oven.”

While the exact dates are unknown, the crematorium was in operation from February to May 1942. During this period, camp personnel murdered prisoners within the brickyard and incinerated their bodies in the crematorium.

In the historiography, it is disputed if some prisoners were burned alive. Another contested point is to what extent the crematorium was inspired by SS concentration and death camps. At this temporal stage, there were crematoria in most of the concentration camps inside Nazi Germany as well as in Auschwitz-Birkenau, but not yet in the “Operation Reinhard” death camps (Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka). It is also contested if the crematorium was demolished because the smell disturbed Croat civilians residing near the camp or because its capacity was inadequate.

This extract from a postwar testimony by Jewish survivor Egon Berger gives insights into the establishment and operation of the crematorium.

Officers in the Jasenovac Camp Complex were not “desk murderers” who ordered killings of prisoners from afar, but hands-on perpetrators. Through their own heinous comportment, they set an example which the rank-and-file guards modelled their own behaviour after. As this excerpt from the postwar testimony of Jasenovac officer Ljubomir Miloš indicates, the commander of the Ustaša Defense, Vjekoslav Luburić, played a key role in fomenting the violent climate that came to pervade the camp.

Murder of prisoners in the Jasenovac camp complex occurred in a multitude of situations, running the gamut from killings by individual guards to large-scale organized mass killings inside or near the camp complex. One form was executions by shooting inside the camp complex. Prisoners caught trying to escape or suspected of planning to escape were frequently the victims. Executions served as a warning and were public in the sense that all prisoners had to attend and watch. Whereas the guards murdered most of the victims at Gradina and other killings sites with mallets, axes, or hammers, the use of firearms at public executions sought to convey an impression of regulated “justice.” The names of the prisoners and the purported reason for their executions were recorded, which this document sent by the camp administration to the Ustaša Surveillance Service in Zagreb is testament to.

In April 1945, as the advances of the Yugoslav partisans drew increasingly close, the Ustaša camp leadership prepared to disband the main camp, Jasenovac III. On April 21, camp guards brutally murdered the surviving female prisoners. The same day, they brought the male prisoners who were still alive to a large building, which until then had been the camp’s tailor and shoemaker workshop. Sensing the imminent threat, the prisoners organized an uprising the follow morning. Historians Dorđe Mihovilović and Dejan Motl estimate that ninety of the around 600 prisoners who took part in the breakout survived. Weakened by starvation and illness, around 470 prisoners lacked the strength to join the attempt. The same day, the prisoners in Jasenovac VI also broke out. Among the approximately 125 prisoners in this group, twelve survived.

In this excerpt from his testimony, survivor Jakica Finci recounts the breakout.

Throughout the existence of the Jasenovac camp complex, only around 300 prisoners succeeded in escaping the horrors of the camp, thereby eluding near certain death. Escape was extremely difficult. The camp complex was well guarded. The prisoners were physically weak and exhausted due to malnutrition. Even for prisoners who managed to cross the barbed-wire fences, the path to freedom was rife with dangers. In cases of escape, the camp administration immediately notified the central police authorities in Zagreb, which in turn alerted other authorities in the NDH asking them to assist in tracking down the escaped prisoners. This missive from the regional police branch in the town of Varaždin to the local authorities in Čakovec-Prelog in Northern Croatia is suggestive of just how widely disseminated news of prisoner breakout were within the Ustaša administrative apparatus.

Though scholarly attention to the subject has only started to emerge, forced singing was an integral part of the Holocaust. This was also the case in the Jasenovac Camp Complex, where forced singing occurred in a multitude of situations. Prisoners were often forced to sing during forced labor, when they were transferred between camps, and when they were brought to the killing sites. Recent research suggests that while forced singing often served as a form of entertainment for the perpetrators, its deeper significance lay in its contribution to the systematic negation of the victims´ individuality. Coerced participation in musical acts not only robbed prisoners of their autonomy but also reinforced a collective identity imposed upon them by their oppressors. Through forced singing, the perpetrators sought to erase the individual voice of the victims, replacing them with an ethnically essentialized group identity.

The extract from the testimony of the Jewish survivor Albert Maestro illuminates how a group of Serb prisoners were forced to sing before they were murdered.

In the SS concentration camps in Nazi Germany, prisoners had their hair shaved upon entry and were forced to wear striped uniforms. A marking system of colored triangles sewn unto uniforms identified the reason for the prisoner’s incarceration. These measures are widely recognized as contributing to a systematic process of deindividuation and dehumanization.

In the Jasenovac camp complex, the situation was different. New prisoners were either allowed to keep the clothes they came in or were given worn-out rags instead. While what was deemed excessively long hair and beard were forbidden, most prisoners were not forcibly shaven. The use of colored emblems to mark the ethnicity of the prisoners was by all accounts confined to occasions when German officials were visiting as the Ustašas sought to convey an image of an efficient camp based on “modern” organizing principles. However, the absence of such measure does mean that Jasenovac was less brutal than concentration camps in Nazi Germany. Yet it does indicate that at least in Jasenovac, they were not a prerequisite for the heinous treatment prisoners were subjected to.

This document is an extract from an article published in the newsletter “Hrvatski Vojnik” about a reporter’s visit to the camp complex in February 1945.

During the Holocaust, adaption of a non-Jewish identity was a survival strategy fraught with perils and with slim chances of survival. In Holocaust historiography, the phenomenon of “passing as gentile” has primarily been analyzed in the context of Jewish people who sought to evade deportation to death camps. However, recent research trends suggest that passings also occurred in camp settings in spite of tremendous difficulties and severe constraints. This excerpt from a report documents how members of the Communist self-help organization in the Stara Gradiška camp managed to register some of the Jewish and Serb prisoners as Croats in a bid to protect them from deportation and impending death at Jasenovac III. While this underscores a remarkable display of interethnic solidarity, it is important to acknowledge that these efforts were limited to individuals affiliated with the organization, referred to as the “community” in the document. The dangers of such an intervention, as well as uncertainties surrounding the exact extent of the organization’s scope of agency, nevertheless warrant a cautious evaluation rather than hasty condemnation.