Jasenovac
document count: 17
The largest concentration camp in the Balkans, opening in September 1941 and functioning up until its liberation in the Spring of 1945, when the remaining inmates were slaughtered and the buildings demolished by the retreating Ustase. Plans for the camp were drafted by Maks Luburic while the Ustase were still in exile. Worked in tandem with the Sisak camp, specializing in killing children, and Stara Gradiska, the women's camp supervised by Nada Luburic-Sakic, Maks Luburic's sister and wife of Jasenovac commandant Dinko Sakic. Linked to railways which brought Jews, Serbs, Roma and political prisoners from across the NDH. Among the first detainees at Jasenovac was Croat Peasant Party leader Vladko Macek, who described in his memoirs how the "screams and wails of despair, broken by intermittent shooting, accompanied all my waking hours and followed me into sleep at night."
From concentration camps run by Germans in the occupied territories, two things distinguished Jasenovac: the brutal methods of execution preferred by the Ustase and the participation of dressed Catholic clergy in the atrocities committed. Strangulation and killing their victims by knives, axes, ropes, chains or live burning or burial were preferred to Zyklon-B. Several Franciscan priests, such as Fra Miroslav Filipovic-Majstorovic, were among Jasenovac's executioners.
Franjo Tudjman in Wastelands of Historical Reality argued that only 60-70,000 non-combatants were killed across the NDH, including in Jasenovac. Journalist Sam Vaknin: "The very use of the word 'only' in this context ought to send a frisson of repulsion down the spines of civilized men." The Jewish death toll up until August 1942, after which most Croatian Jews were sent instead to Auschwitz, was 18,000, according to historian Ivo Goldstein. The standard number given today for Jasenovac's death toll is "at least 200,000," though the truth will never be known. Tudjman later expressed a desire to disinter the remains of Ustase and place them in Jasenovac, thus forcing a "reconciliation" between the victims and their executioners unparalleled at any Holocaust memorial in Europe.
Documents below include those having to do directly with the operation of the Jasenovac camp, as well as the victims who never made it that far: the ones who died in anonymous pits, in ravines or were murdered in their beds. For more accounts of the terror in the NDH, see also Ante Pavelic, Andrija Artukovic and the NDH Archive.
Decree: "On Racial Affiliation"
April 30, 1941: English Translation of the Ustase Law
April 30, 1941: English Translation of the Ustase Law
Decree: "On the Protection of Aryan Blood"
April 30, 1941: English Translation of the Ustase Law
Order: The White Armbands
May 13, 1941: Order to the municipal leadership ordering all Serbs to wear a white armband designating them as Orthodox
Order: Expulsion of Serbs from Slavonia and Srem
June 2, 1941: Just six weeks after the founding of the NDH, organized mass explusions begin
Judicial Testimony: Measures Taken Against the Jews
Testimony by Alexander Arnon on anti-Jewish laws passed immediately after the founding of the Independent State of Croatia
Adolf Friedrich, Jasenovac Survivor
Memories of Jasenovac by Adolf Friedrich, a Jewish inmate
Article: Ivo Goldstein at the Sakic War Crimes Trial
June 1, 1999: Historian Ivo Goldstein on Jasenovac and the Jewish Problem
Letter: Glaise von Horstenau on the Ustase Concentration Camps
Gen. Glaise von Horstenau's inspection of an Ustase Concentration Camp
Book Excerpt: The Efficiency of Mass Slaughter
October 9th, 1942: Maks Luburic on the efficiency of his concentration camp system
Letter to Minister Anthony Eden
November 13, 1942: An official with the Yugoslav Government-in-Exile in London informs the British Foreign Office of reports of mass slaughter in the NDH
Special Assignment in the Southeast
Dr. Hermann Neubacher, the German Plenipotentiary in SE Europe, on the "Croatian Crusade of Destruction"
A Jasenovac Survivor's Testimony
Dr. Nikola Nikolic on the Franciscan executioner, Fra Miroslav Filipovic-Majstorovic
Letter: Glaise von Horstenau on the Ustase Massacres
"The 'lucky' inhabitants were consigned to one of the fearsome boxcar trains; many 'passengers' cut their veins on the journey."
Book Excerpt: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust
From the "Jasenovac" Entry
Article: As the Surviving Jews Remember Artukovic
March 9, 1958: Transcript of an article from the Yugoslav Press on Jews' memories of Andrija Artukovic
Article: A Camp Called Jasenovac
Sept 26, 1992: Journalist Robert Fisk's Visit to Jasenovac
Article: A Vow of Silence
March 30, 1998: "Did Gold Stolen by Croatian Fascists Reach the Vatican?"
Crimes in the Jasenovac Camp
A new translation of the official state report on the largest concentration camp in Southeast Europe, including statements from the handful of inmates who survived Jasenovac
A new translation of the official state report on the largest concentration camp in Southeast Europe, including statements from the handful of inmates who survived Jasenovac