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WHAT WAS
JASENOVAC?
From August 1941 to April 1945, hundreds of thousands of
Serbs, Jews, and Romas, as well as anti-fascists of many
nationalities, were murdered at the death camp known as
Jasenovac. Estimates of the total numbers of men, women and
children killed there range from 300,000 to 700,000. And yet,
despite the scale of the crimes committed there, most of the
world has never heard of Jasenovac.
Following the Nazi invasion and dismemberment of Yugoslavia
in April 1941, the "Independent State of Croatia"
was established as a pro-Nazi government. It was dedicated
to a clerical-fascist ideology influenced both by Nazism and
extreme Roman Catholic fanaticism. On coming to power, the
Ustashe Party dictatorship in Croatia quickly commenced on a
systematic policy of racial extermination of all Serbs, Jews
and Romas living within its borders.
Jasenovac was actually a complex of five major and three
smaller "special" camps spread out over 240 square
kilometers (150 square miles) in south-central Croatia.
Along with hundreds of thousands of Serbs, some 25,000 Jews
and at least 30,000 Romas were murdered in these camps. The
names of some 20,000 murdered children of all three
nationalities collected thus far by historians provides only
a hint of the scale of the crimes committed there against
children. Jasenovac is also known for having been one of the
most barbaric death camps of the Holocaust for the extreme
cruelty in which its victims were tortured and murdered.
Jasenovac was not the only death camp in fascist occupied
Yugoslavia, but it was by far the largest and the one in
which a majority of the some one million victims of racial
genocide in World War II fascist Croatia were exterminated.
But its significance also lies in the way in which the
crimes have been concealed. Historians have called Jasenovac
"the dark secret of the Holocaust" and "the
suppressed chapter of Holocaust history." Public
recognition of the tragedy that occurred there has been
suppressed either partially or completely by governments and
institutions for a variety of reasons. Today Jasenovac is
located in the newly created state of Croatia, whose
government has vandalized the site and refused to
acknowledge the horrors that took place there. The failure
of some leading Western academic and humanitarian
institutions to fully recognize the historic dimensions of
Jasenovac is a shameful omission that will tarnish their
reputations forever.
But the enormity of the crimes committed at Jasenovac, the
fact that the majority of the victims were Serbs who were
killed simply for being Serbs, and the fact that the
perpetrators included the Catholic Church, have made it an
extraordinary and explosive issue that Holocaust deniers and
historical revisionists cannot successfully manipulate for
long should we focus all of our energies on bringing the
truth to light. In doing so, we shall also unravel the whole
ball of lies told about the history of Yugoslavia.
From the Brochure of the Jasenovac Research Institute,
written by JRI Research Director Barry Lituchy, (c) 2000.
JASENOVAC
Entry in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, edited by Israel
Gutman, vol.1, 1995, pp.739-740
JASENOVAC, the largest concentration and extermination camp
in CROATIA. Jasenovac was in fact a complex of several
subcamps, in close proximity to each other, on the bank of
the Sava River, about 62 miles (100 km) south of Zagreb. The
women? s camp of Stara Gradiška, which was farther away,
also belonged to this complex.
Jasenovac was established in August 1941 and was dismantled
only in April 1945. The creation of the camp and its
management and supervision were entrusted to Department III
of the Croatian Security Police (Ustaška Narodna Služba:
UNS), headed by Vjekoslav (Maks) Luburi6, who was personally
responsible for everything that happened Some six hundred
thousand people were murdered at Jasenovac, mostly Serbs,
Jews, GYPSIES, and opponents of the USTASA regime. The
number of Jewish victims was between twenty thousand and
twenty-five thousand, most of whom were murdered there up to
August 1942, when deportation of the Croatian Jews to
AUSCHWITZ for extermination began. Jews were sent to
Jasenovac from all parts of Croatia from Zagreb, from
Sarajevo, and from other cities and smaller towns. On their
arrival most 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, a particularly cruel
regime, and unbelievably 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.
Three slaughterers and a commandant of the Jasenovac camp:
Stipe Prpic, friar Miroslav Filipovic-Majstorovic, and Jerko
Maricic
The acts of murder and of cruelty in the camp reached their
peak in the late summer of 1942, when tens of thousands of
Serbian villagers were deported to Jasenovac from the area
of the fighting against the partisans in the Kozara
Mountains. Most of the men were killed at Jasenovac. The
women were sent for forced labor in Germany, and the
children were taken from their mothers; some were murdered
and others were dispersed in orphanages throughout the
country.
In April 1945 the partisan army approached the camp. In an
attempt to erase traces of the atrocities, the Ustaše blew
up all the installations and killed most of the internees.
An escape attempt by the prisoners failed, and only a few
survived.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Romans, J. Jews of Yugoslavia, 1941- 1945: Victims of
Genocide and Freedom Fighters. Belgrade, 1982.
Sindik, D., ed. Secanja Jevreja JasenovacBelgrade, 1972.
from the JASENOVAC EXHIBITION CATALOGUE OF THE MUSEUM OF THE
VICTIMS OF GENOCIDE, BELGRADE, (Belgrade, 1997).
Memorial Day for the Victim's of Genocide was established in
the Law founding the Museum of the Victims of Genocide (Article
2), on the day which commemorates the day when the prisoners
of the Ustasha camp Jasenovac broke out (April 22, 1945), as
a memorial to the Serb, Jew, and Romany victims of genocide.
This exhibition has been prepared for the United Nations,
because in the Archives of the Concentration Camps and War
Criminals in New York, there is no mention either of Maks
Luburic or Andrija Artukovic, and in the register there is
no mention of the Jasenovac camp. In the archives of the
International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva there are
only 20 photographs of >>potemkin villages<<,
which show the Ustasha death camp at Jasenovac as a labor
camp.
On the Day of Human Rights, December 11, 1991, at the time
when the Jasenovac camp was desecrated by the Croatian Armed
Forces, the exhibition named Auschwitz: A Crime Against
Humanity was opened, where it was stated that Auschwitz was
the last of the large death camps which was evacuated,
functioning at full capacity to the end of November, 1944.
At the last moment, in January, 1945, more than 50,000
prisoners who were able to walk were led from the camp. The
Ustasha camp of death Jasenovac, worked at full capacity all
the way to the end of April, 1945.
Belgrade was liberated on October 20, 1944. The corpses of
Jasenovac's victims, which floated down the Sava River to
the shores of Belgrade, have not been excavated and no
requiem sung for them, not even after fifty years.
The Ustasha death camp Jasenovac was in fact, a system of
death camps covering 210 square kilometers from the Dubica
lime pits to Stara Gradiska, a road of death along the Sava
River.
In the discussions about a political solution to the
Yugoslav crisis, about the maps dividing Croatia, the Serb
Republic and Republic of Serbian KraJina, the question of
the status of Jasenovac must be asked - Jasenovac, the
Ustasha death camp.
It must not be allowed that Jasenovac the Ustasha death camp
- is destroyed by the transformation of administrative
borders into international borders.
In the name of the victims of genocide - the Serbs, the
Croat-Yugoslavs, the Jews and Romanies, the antifascists -
the proposal of Franjo Tudjman, the head of the HDZ and
president of Croatia, must be rejected. He proposes that the
memorial area of Jasenovac should be turned into a general
memorial center for all the Croatian victims in the Second
World War - and that would mean the victims and war
criminals alike.
The exhibition "Jasenovac - The Ustasha Camp of Death"
carries with itself a message, an appeal to the
international protection of the United Nations to save the
Memorial Area of the camp system, the structures and the
burial places, as a pail of world cultural heritage, in
accord with the resolution of the European Council in 1993.
Dr. Milan Bulajic
Director
Museum of the Victims of Genocide
I. THE CREATION OF THE INDEPENDENT STATE OF CROATIA- 1941
After the short-lived war in April of 1941, the Kingdom of
Yugoslavia was divided among the aggressor countries: Nazi
Germany, fascist Italy, Horti's Hungary and Boris III's
Bulgaria. In the meantime, while the war was still being
fought, the founding of the Ustasha's Independent State of
Croatia (abbreviated as NDH from the Serbo-Croatian "Nezavisna
Drzhava Hrvatska") was proclaimed on April 10, 1941;
territories besides those which were traditionally settled
by the Croats were grafted into this state, including all of
Bosnia- Herzegovina and parts of Serbia.
There were more than two million Serbs living in the newly
created puppet state, who made up one third of the entire
population of the NDH. There were also significant numbers
of Jews, Romanies and members of other national groups. As
soon as the NDH was proclaimed, the leader of this
Italo-German fabrication, the head of the Ustasha named Ante
Pavelic, began to carry out the Ustasha's program of the
creation of a "purely Croatian area for living "
and a " pure Croat nation". Namely, since the
Ustasha were extreme nationalists, chauvinists and racists,
they began to build their own state and institutions which
reflected those of Nazi Germany. According to their
ideologists, the condition for the creation of a purely
Croatian state would be the expulsion of the Serbs ("Greek-
Easterners"), the Jews ("Zhidovi") and the
Romanies ("Gypsieso"). Claiming that the Serbs
were both racially and religiously different from the Croats,
they killed them, deported them or forcibly converted them.
The Jews and Romanies were to be completely annihilated as
they were considered to be lower races. The Ustasha
government and its jurisdiction passed a series of laws,
orders and regulations by which Nazi-fascist methods of
terror and ethnic genocide were made legal (the Regulation
on the Outlawing of the Cyrillic Alphabet, the Regulation on
Racial Affiliation, the Regulation on Citizenship, the
Regulation on Conversion from One Religion to Another, and
so on). Yet, the most massive crime against the Serbs, Jews
and Romanies was carried out outside the framework of those
laws and legal documents. The Ustasha acted on their racial,
religious and national intolerance without regard for any
kind of laws or norms. The Ustasha government was supported
by the greater part of the Catholic clergy and the Muslim
religious community, and the Croatian Peasant also pledged
their allegiance to the Ustasha government.
II. THE BEGINNING OF THE GENOCIDE OF THE SERBS, JEWS, AND
ROMANIES IN THE NDH
The Ustasha's organization was a typically fascist
organization and its military strength was an instrument for
the implementation of the Ustasha's Nazi ideology.
The Ustasha army (>>Ustashka vojnica<<) was
organized by Slavko Kvaternik, the >>second in command<<
and it was made up of Ustasha units (filled out with
volunteers) under the direction of the Central Ustasha
Headquarters, of special police units (>>redarstvo<<)
and the Home Guard (>>domobrani<<), and in
August of 1941 the Ustasha Secret Service (abbreviated UNS
after the Serbo-Croatian (>>Ustashka Nadzorna Sluzhba<<)
was formed, with Eugen - Dids Kvaternik at its head. With
the aid of these organizations, the greatest kind of
genocide was carried out against the Serbs, Jews and
Romanies in the NDH. In order to make it possible for only
Croats and Muslims to live in the NDH, the mass physical
destruction, expulsion and forcible conversion of the Serbs
was carried out, along with the systematic extermination of
the Jews, and the almost complete destruction of the
Romanies. The mass murder of the Serbs began already at the
end of April, 1941, with the massacres in the villages
around Bjelovar, in Banija in May, in Lika in June, in
Kordun, in Bosnian Krajina and in Herzegovina. It is thought
that just in the period from April, 1941, to the middle of
August, 1942, over 600,000 Serbs were killed in the most
brutal ways imaginable, and during the entire war over
180,000 Serbs were deported to Serbia proper.
Jewish children being sent to Jasenovac
The terror of the NDH government was especially aimed at the
Serbian Orthodox Church. Three Orthodox bishops and most of
the Orthodox priests were murdered by the end of 1941 in the
cruelest of manners. During the war, 450 Orthodox churches
were demolished. The exact number of Serbs forcibly
converted to Catholicism has never been established.
III. CONCENTRATION CAMPS IN THE INDEPENDENT STATE OF CROATIA
According to the example of their protectors, Nazi Germany
and the other fascist regimes, concentration camps were
founded in the NDH for the purpose of >>purifying the
nation<< of undesirables. The Ustasha called them
>>collection<< or >>work<< camps,
and they were designed for the mass internment and
systematic total destruction of Serbs, Jews, Romanies, and
>>objectionable<< Croats. The so-called >>Ustasha
Secret Service<< (or rather its) >>Department
III<< which was also called the >>Ustash Guard<<
was in charge of the founding, organization and management
of the concentration camps in the NDH. Although they were
actually the same, >>Department III<< took care
of the founding, organization and management of the camps,
while the >>Ustasha Guard<< was assigned to
forming military units which guarded the camps and carried
out the task of transporting the Serb and Jewish people from
the surrounding territories to the camps, and they were also
those who killed the prisoners.
The first camps in the NDH were founded on the island of Pag
at the place called Slano, on Mount Velebit near Gospic at a
place called Jadovno, and in Bosnia at Krusica near Travnik.
Besides Jasenovac, the larger camps were: >>Danicao in
Koprivnica, Kerestinec, Lobograd, Stara Gradiska, Lepoglava,
Jastrebarsko and Sisak. In the beginning there were no legal
regulations about sending people to camps or the length of
sentences. Such things were decided by Pavelic's emissaries,
district prefects, deputy prefects, camp supervisors and
other Ustasha commanders. Such practices remained even later,
and when the regulations were finally passed no one obeyed
them.
The first commander of >>Department III<< (the
>>Ustasha Guard<<) and thus of the camps as
well, was the Ustasha Mijo Babic alias >>Giovani<<,
who was followed by Vjekoslav Luburic alias >>Maks<<.
On the orders of Pavelic and Kvaternik, Luburic spent time
in Germany as a guest of the Gestapo at the beginning of
October, 1941, at which time he visited several German
concentration camps. Upon returning to the NDH, he carried
out a re-organization of the existing camps and founded new
ones modelled after those in Germany, and formed a powerful
military unit of the >>Ustasha Guard<< who
carried out mass crimes directly under his command.
IV THE FOUNDING OF THE JASENOVAC CONCENTRATION CAMP
The Ustasha camp called Jasenovac was founded according to
the model of camps in Nazi Germany, on August 21, 1941. it
was the largest place of torture and execution which ever
existed in Yugoslavia. With its horrors it was the largest
concentration camp, and it was the third in the number of
victims in all of occupied Europe, during the war years
1941-1945. With their sadism and pathological crimes, the
Ustasha outdid even their Nazi German masters.
Unlike the German camps where industrialized genocide was
conducted, in Jasenovac that genocide was done in a way
never recorded in the history of the human race. All which
was negative, pathological and criminal, which characterized
the Ustasha movement as a whole, reached its peak in
Jasenovac.
The Jasenovac camp spread out over 210 square kilometers,
along the Sava River from Stara Gradiska in the east to the
village Krap1je in the west, and from Strug in the north to
the line between Draksenic to Bistrica in the south.
The choice of the wider region of Jasenovac for such a
monstrous camp was made for several reasons. One of them was
certainly the suitable geographic position. The
Zagreb-Belgrade railway was in the vicinity and was
important for the transport of the prisoners. The terrain
was surrounded by the rivers Sava, Una and Velika Struga, in
the middle of the swampy Lonjsko poije area, so that escape
from the camp was almost impossible. On the other side of
the Sava, the Gradina region was hardly accessible and often
flooded by the river, uninhabited and far from all witnesses.
It was the ideal place for hiding mass murders. The other
possible reason for the choice of this place were the
existing factories there; these were workshops for the
making of chains, blacksmith shops, locksmith shops, brick
factories, lumber mills and so on, so the camp was easy to
present in public as a work camp.
V THE JASENOVAC CAMP SYSTEM
The Jasenovac concentration camp encompassed a system of
camps along the Sava River, on the flood plain of the
Lonjsko poije area.
The Ustasha's newspapers announced to the public, on August
23, 1941, that the first barracks for prisoners had been
built near the villages of Brocice and Krapje, and that the
camps would be used for the draining of Lonjsko po1je. In
fact, that was the founding of the Jasenovac camp, or more
precisely, Camp II called Brocice - >>Versajev<<
and Camp 11 called >>Krapje<<, to which the
first prisofters were brought, Jews and Serbs from the
Ustasha camps of Slano and Jadovno. In the beginning the
prisoners actually worked on building the dike, but under
indescribably hard conditions and terror. Those who did not
die from the exhausting work and hunger, being immediately
buried in the dike, were killed when the camp was liquidated.
In November of 1941, Camp III >>Ciglana<< (which
means >>brickyard<<) was opened - the so-called
III which quickly became the camp with the central
management function for all collection and concentration
camps in the NDH. The center of the camp lay beneath the
village Jasenovac in the area of the industrial complex
where the brickyard actually was, and that is how it got its
name. Three-fourths of Camp III were surrounded by a wall 3
to 5 meters high, into which seven concrete bunkers were
built and which had several guard towers. In front of the
wall were three lines of tangled barbed wire, and in some
places they were electrified. The fourth side of the camp
faced the River Sava. As an integral part of Camp 111-C
there was a special Ustasha Secret Service prison for
specially selected prisoners.
Camp IV >>Kozhara<< (which means >>tannery<<
was found in the village of Jasenovac, and prisoners worked
in the tannery there under the most difficult of conditions.
Camp V - Stara Gradiska belonged organizationally to the
Jasenovac camp system. In the overall area of the Jasenovac
camp three other special camps were organized. In the
village Ustica, on the delta of the Una and Sava, an
improvised >>Gypsy camp<< was located, where
mainly Romanies were brought and killed, and the villages
Mlaka and Jablanac were turned into collection camps for
women and children.
VI THE PLACES OF EXECUTION IN JASENOVAC
The system of mass murder in Jasenovac was already in place
in the fall of 1941, as soon as the larger transports of
people began to arrive. The men, women and children arrived
here by rail, truck, horse-drawn cart, or simply running at
the insistence of the Ustasha with rifles. Places of mass
execution were found all over the Jasenovac camp. Most of
them were located on the right bank of the Sava from the
Dubicki limepits downriver, and especially in the village
Gradina. According to forensic science research, over
360,000 people were killed here. Murder of the prisoners was
also carried out in the forest near the Krapje Camp, near
the >>Versaj<< Camp and >>Ustica<<
Camp on the whole left bank of the Sava, downriver from
Jasenovac to Jablanac and Mlaka. Furthermore, within the
complex of Camp III there was also a crematorium which was
actually an oven for baking bricks; the Ustasha converted it
according to the plans of Hinko Picili so that they could
bum the prisoners in it. Within this circle, besides
>>Picili's Furnaceo, there were also other places
where people were tortured and killed and they were called
>>Lancara<<, >>Tunel<<, >>Granik<<.
>>Zvonara<<, >>Sablasno jezero<<,
and so on.
In the Camp of Stara Gradiska, torture and murder were done
in the cellars of the old Austrian Fortress, in the tower of
the fortress and on the banks of the Sava.
The extent to which the system of killing was developed is
witnessed to by a memorandum from the Headquarters Chief on
April 27, 1942, directed to all Ustasha units and
institutions, stating >>the collection and work camp
at Jasenovac can receive an unlimited number of prisoners<<.
VII METHODS AND MEANS OF THE MASS EXTERMINATION OF PEOPLE IN
JASENOVAC
From the summer of 1941 to the spring of 1945, death in
Jasenovac took numerous forms. The prisoners and all those
who ended up in Jasenovac had their throats cut by the
Ustasha with specially designed knives, or they were killed
with axes, mallets and hammers; they were also shot, or they
were hung from trees or light poles. Some were burned alive
in hot furnaces, boiled in cauldrons, or drowned in the
River Sava.
Here the most varied forms of torture were usedfinger and
toe nails were pulled out with metal instruments, eyes were
dug out with specially constructed hooks, people were
blinded by having needles stuck in their eyes, flesh was cut
and then salted. People were also flayed, had their noses,
ears and tongues cut off with wire cutters, and had awls
stuck in their hearts. Daughters were raped in front of
their mothers, sons were tortured in front of their fathers.
Said plainly, in the concentration camps at Jasenovac and
Stara Gradiska, the Ustasha surpassed all that even the
sickest mind could imagine and do in terms of the brutal way
people were murdered.
People in Jasenovac were no longer human beings, but rather
objects which were available for the every whim of the
Ustasha.
Even the Nazi generals were amazed at the horrors of
Jasenovac. Thus, General von Horstenau, Hitler's
representative in Zagreb, wrote in his personal diary for
1942 that the Ustasha camps in the NDH were >>the
epitome of horror<<, and Arthur Hefner, a German
transport officer for work forces in the Reich, wrote on
November 11, 1942 of Jasenovac: >>The concept of the
Jasenovac camp should actually be understood as several
camps which are several kilometers apart, grouped around
Jasenovac. Regardless of the propaganda, this is one of the
most horrible of camps, which can only be compared to
Dante's Inferno<<.
VIII WOMEN AND CHILDREN IN THE JASENOVAC CAMP
Many women, often with their children, were brought to
Jasenovac. The whole village of Mlaka was turned into a
women's work camp. Women were forced to do exhausting
agricultural work in the vicinity. Executions were performed
in the very close proximity of the villages of Mlaka and
Jablanac.
Children at Jasenovac
In the process of >>purifying the Croatian nation<<,
Serbian children were the first to be executed, together
with the adults, even if they were still on their mothers's
breasts. During the four years between April, 1941 to May
1945, more than 74.316 children were killed in the Ustasha's
NDH. The youngest were still in the cradle, while the oldest
were about 14 years of age. During the Second World War, the
only place where there were special camps for children was
Croatia.
From December, 1941, to April, 1945, in Jasenovac, the
Ustasha killed 19.544 boys and girls of Serbian nationality,
and their identities were later established. They were
executed in atrocious ways and also died, more than the
adults, from illnesses, famine, thirst, and frost. The
Ustasha would drown small children in the Sava by tying up
several of them in a sack and throwing them into the river.
Many children (about 400 of them) were slaughtered in
Jasenovac in mid-September, 1942. The children taken in 15
horse-drawn carts to the brickyard and burnt. A very similar
fate befell the 300 kids who executed in Gradina on the
afternoon of October -N. 1942.
IX PUBLIC PRESENTATION OF THE JASENOVAC CAMP
To the outside world, Jasenovac was presented as a work
camp. The Ustasha's propaganda tried to present the
concentration camps both to their own people and to the
world as places of useful work and reformation.
The wider area of the camp was strictly guarded. Only the
confirmed Ustasha with specific tasks were allowed in. Even
the Germans, as >>allies<< and friends, were not
Allowed to enter the camp freely. However, under pressure
from abroad, especially from the Germans, on February 6,
1942, an >>International Committee<< visited the
Camp to see the way of living and working in it. In that
delegation, the Pope's emissary was also included, Monsignor
G. Massuci.
Three days before that, Ljubo Milos, the commandant of the
Jasenovac camps, had summoned all the prisoners and ordered
them to clean the camp, tidy the dining room, kitchen, and
hospital. The prisoners were given the sort of food that
they had never had, or would have. After this visit the
photographs of >>the workers at their machines<<
in well-equipped workshops, and of the camp clinics with the
staff in immaculately clean white uniforms, were sent to the
world from Jasenovac. The camp was presented in such a way
that it seemed desirable to be in Jasenovac in that war time
of general uncertainty, death, and poverty, without the
slightest premonition of what was, actually hidden behind
those photographs.
X THE BREAKOUT OF THE PRISONERS AND THE LIBERATION OF THE
CAMP
At the beginning of April 1945, the Ustasha were preparing
the liquidation of the Jasenovac camp in order to remove the
traces of their crimes before escaping. The ultimate
liquidation of the Camp was begun on April 20, when the last
large group of women and children was executed. On April 22,
1945, under the leadership of Ante Vukotic, about 600 people
armed with bricks, poles, hammers and other things, broke
down the doors, shattered windows and ran out of the
building. About 470 people were sick and unable to fight
barehanded with the armed Ustasha, so they did not take part
in the rebellion. The 150 meter long path to the east gate
of the camp was covered by the crossfire of the Ustasha
mashine-guns, and many prisoners were killed there. A large
number of them was killed on the wires of the camp. A
hundred prisoners managed to break through the broken gate
of the camp. Only 80 prisoners survived while 520 of them
died in the first assault. The remaining 470 within the camp
were later killed by the Ustasha.
The captives, 167 of them, from the so-called >>Kozhara<<
part of the Jasenovac camp, about 8 p.m. on April 22 also
began mortal combat under the leadership of Stanko Gacesa
and Zahid Bukurevic. 150 of them managed to break through,
but they were surrounded and fired at so heavily that only
11 prisoners survived.
The Jasenovac camp was not liquidated until the very last
battles were being fought. The Yugoslav Army forces entered
the Stara Gradiska camp on April 23, and Jasenovac on May 2,
1945. Before leaving the camp, the Ustasha 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
liberators found only ruins, soot, smoke, and dead bodies.
XI THE INVESTIGATION OF THE USTASHA CRIMES IN JASENOVAC IN
1945
It is difficult to establish the number of victims killed in
the Jasenovac concentration camp, since many documents were
destroyed. The prisoners' files were destroyed twice (at the
beginning of 1943 and in April, 1945) and even if they had
been preserved, they would have been of little help
discerning the truth, because the Ustasha often killed the
newly arrived prisoners immediately, without, putting their
names into the files. This is particularly true of those who
arrived from Slavonia, Srem and Kozara, because it was only
noted down that 9,83, or 155 wagons had arrived. For
instance, a very small number of Gypsies was filed, only a
few hundred, while it is known that all 25,000-35,000 of
them from the NDH were killed in Jasenovac. The Jewish
community in Yugoslavia has established the number of 20,000
Jews that %%err killed, in Jasenovac. The numbers of killed
Serbs are truly varied. The sources from abroad mention
numbers from 300,000 to 700,000. Be that as it may, most of
the people killed in Jasenovac were Serbs. exact number
being still unknown, but it surely amounts to several
hundreds of thousands.
The National Committee of Croatia for the investigation of
the crimes of the occupation forces and their collaborators
stated in its report of November 15, 1945 that
500,000-600,000 people were killed at Jasenovac.
XII THE JASENOVAC MEMORIAL AREA
After the end of the war, the burial of the victims and
cleaning up of the camp area were begun. The inhabitants of
Jasenovac and the nearby villages used the bricks and other
building material in the reconstruction and building of
their houses. In that way, almost all material evidence
disappeared from the place of the biggest crime in the
former Yugoslavia, as if there had not been any camp in that
place. It seems that the state and the authorities of that
time, especially certain individuals in Zagreb, wanted it to
be like that in Jasenovac. Under the >>Brotherhood and
Unity<< motto, with the aim of creating tolerance
between the nations, the crime had to be forgotten as soon
as possible.
It was only 20 years later, in 1965, under pressure of the
victims' families and relatives, that the building of a
monument was begun - a stone flower of which its author,
engineer Bogdan Bogdanovic, said that >>it suggests
the idea of overcoming suffering and insanity<<. A few
years later, the Open Memorial Museum was built, the
graveyards were put in order, and the labor organization
named Jasenovac Memorial Park was formed, which functioned
until the beginning of the next war in 1991.
No matter how hard the authors of the memorial Park tried,
often stating that the memorial complex would not resemble a
>>city park<< or an >>artificial structure<<,
that is exactly what happened to it.
Looking at it from the outside, Jasenovac Memorial Park,
with its modern Museum building and its stylized stone
flower really resembled a nice park more than a former
concentration camp of the worst possible kind. If it had not
been for the obvious museum material and films, the visitor
would have hardly understood what had really happened there,
or grasped all the horrors. The authentic buildings were not
preserved or renewed. The monuments and the memorial plates
were only inconspicuous marks of the biggest execution
places and the places of other camps which constituted the
Jasenovac complex of concentration camps, while some of them,
Brocice and Jablanac, were not even marked. In spite of that,
the site of the crime in Jasenovac was visited after the war
by countless numbers of relatives and friends, and since the
memorial area has been opened, hundreds of thousands of
visitors have come who wished to pay homage to the innocent
victims.
XIII THE DESECRATION OF THE MEMORIAL AREA
Jasenovac Memorial Park is the largest graveyard in the
Balkans. It has been believed for a long time that the
Ustasha's crimes committed in Jasenovac presented an eternal
warning to the people from these areas. However, that was
not true. >>The young Croatian democracy<<, as
the new nationalistic Croation authorities called themselves,
under the leadership of Franjo Tudjman, immediately after
coming to the scene took the Ustasha symbols, and took a
series of concrete further steps (seceeding from Yugoslavia,
adopting laws with racist characteristics very similar to
those of 1941, organizing state terror against the Serbs and
so on), thus showing clearly that it accepted the politics
of the Ustasha's Independent State of Croatia.
Even before the beginning of the new war in 1991, the
Croatian authorities reduced the financing of the Jasenovac
Memorial Park and declared >>Lonjsko polje<< a
natural protected area, probably in order to turn the
attention from the victims to the flora and fauna of the
region. Croatian propaganda and Franjo Tudjman himself tried
to minimize the crime with numerous articles, >>studies<<
and statements, asserting that there were >>not more
than<< 20,000-50,000 victims in Jasenovac.
At the end of September 1991, the Croatian Army entered the
Jasenovac memorial park by force. According to the Hague
Convention on the protection of historical and cultural
monuments, the Croatian Army severely broke the agreement by
entering the protected area. Although the international
public informed about desecration of the memorial park.
there was not much of a response.
The Serbian forces liberated Jasenovac Memorial Park on
October 8, 1991. During the withdrawal the Croatian Army
placed explosives blew up the bridge on the Sava River which
connected the two parts of the Memorial Park; they also blew
up the graves, destroyed the Museum artifacts and stole the
Museum equipment. Due to the courage and enthusiasm of
individuals who worked at the Memorial Park, some historical
materials and objects were saved.
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