Guards sought prisoners upon arrival.
[music] Serbs get blue markings.
Communists, anyone considered a political opponent, regardless of actual [music] affiliation, get red markings.
Roma and Jews get registered, [music] at least initially.
But the US quickly realized that keeping records creates evidence.
[snorts] Documentation [music] becomes sporadic.
Thousands arrive without their names ever being written down.
They simply [music] vanish into the system.
The camp has workshops, a tannery, metal working facilities, [music] agricultural sections.
Inmates work 11-hour days under constant [music] supervision.
Hinko Dominic Pichuli and Tihomia Cordich manage labor assignments, dividing prisoners [music] into 16 groups, construction workers, brick makers, metal workers, farmers.
Pitchily [music] personally whips inmates to increase productivity, even minor infractions.
working too [music] slowly, showing exhaustion result in execution for [music] sabotage.
But labor isn’t the primary purpose.
Yasenovak isn’t primarily a forced labor [music] camp.
It’s a killing center.
The workshops are cover.
The labor keeps some prisoners alive temporarily.
[music] Those with skills like physicians, electricians, carpenters, tailor.
Everyone [music] else exists on borrowed time.
Between the camps lie the killing [music] grounds.
Granic, a dock on the Sava River where Lubber devises a system using industrial cranes as gallows.
Victims are [music] hung, weights attached to their arms, throats slashed, intestines opened.
Then they’re pushed into the river with blows to the skull.
The current carries the [music] bodies away.
Gradina directly across the Saba from the main camp becomes the primary execution site.
[music] Tens of thousands will die there.
A separate facility designated [music] specifically for Roma families.
The system is complete by mid 1942.
Arrival, [music] classification, labor or immediate execution.
For those sent to labor, slow death through starvation, disease, [music] and random violence.
For those sent to killing grounds, swift elimination.
The infrastructure is crude compared to German death [music] camps.
[clears throat] No cyclon B pipelines.
No industrial crematoriums at first, but it’s effective and it’s entirely [music] Croatian.
Who designed this? The US leadership.
Who funded it? The independent state of Croatia’s [music] treasury supported by Axis Resources.
Who staffed it? Croatian fascists.
Zealots [music] who volunteered for the work.
What was its capacity? Unlimited.
[music] According to Ostacha headquarters documents, the concentration camp in Jasanovak, they claimed can receive an [music] unlimited number of internees.
Now the pipeline begins.
Imagine you’re a Serbian villager in Bosnia.
It’s summer 1942.
The Ustasha and German forces are fighting Yugoslav partisans in your region, the Kazara mountains.
Your village is caught in the middle.
One morning, soldiers arrive.
Everyone is rounded up, men, [music] women, children, elderly.
You’re forced into freight cars, packed so [music] tightly that people stand for the entire journey.
Some slash their wrists during transport rather than face what’s coming.
The train stops at Jasenovak.
[music] You step off onto a platform.
Guards are shouting, dogs [music] are barking.
You’re separated immediately.
Men to one side, [music] women and children to another.
You squeeze your child’s hand, but a guard [music] tears you apart.
The men are assessed.
Younger, stronger men might be sent to the brick [music] works for labor.
Older men, anyone considered weak, anyone who looks defiant, they’re marched directly [music] to Donja Gradina, the killing ground across the river.
You don’t see them again.
Women and children face different [music] sorting.
Some are crammed into Star Gradishka, where conditions are medieval, no proper sanitation, minimal food, disease [music] spreads rapidly.
Others are sent to when the main camps [music] overflow.
Children are especially vulnerable.
At Star [music] Gradka, special methods are developed for killing them.
Camp commander Ante Verban will later confess at [music] trial that he killed children by slamming their bodies against walls until they died.
Testimony [music] describes a child caught in a doorway, its leg crushed by Verban as he forced the [music] door shut.
He then picked the child up and repeatedly smashed it against the wall.
At the Jasinovac complex, there’s a clinic and [music] hospital, barrack buildings where sick prisoners are isolated, not for treatment, for death.
These aren’t [music] medical facilities.
They’re holding areas where the dying are concentrated until guards decide to [music] finish them off.
Prisoners work 11-hour days, receive minimal rations, watery soup, [music] occasional bread, and sleep on hard floors in overcrowded barracks, six [music] buildings for sleeping, hundreds crammed into each.
But the labor assignments are [music] just interludes between horrors.
Guards conduct selections, public performances [music] where inmates are lined up and individuals randomly chosen for execution [music] in front of everyone else.
The guards make this theatrical.
They walk [music] back and forth.
They ask questions.
They look prisoners up and down.
They point at one person, then change their [music] minds and select another.
The psychological torture stretches for hours.
Then the chosen are taken away.
Sometimes to Granic, [music] sometimes to Gradina, always to death.
For Jewish prisoners, the timeline is compressed.
Between 1941 and 1943, Jews throughout the independent state of Croatia [music] are deported to Jasanovak.
They’re shot at nearby killing sites, particularly Granic and Gradina.
[music] A few with essential skills are spared temporarily to work, but by August 1942, [music] the Ustasha begin handing over Jews to the Germans for deportation to Avitz.
About [music] 7,000 Croatian Jews are transferred this way.
Most who remain at Jasanovac [music] don’t survive.
Current estimates place Jewish deaths at Jasanovak between 8,000 and 20,000.
Roma face [music] systematic elimination.
The first mass arrests begin in July 1941.
By May [music] 20th, 1942, coordinated operations sweep Roma across the entire [music] territory.
Families are deported to Jasovak and Star Gradeska.
Upon arrival, their valuables are confiscated.
In early [music] days, lists are kept.
Then recordkeeping stops.
When the number of incoming Roma peaks in June 1942, they’re divided.
[music] Older men, women, and children are immediately dispatched [music] to Donja Gradina for extermination.
Younger men go to the brick works where they die from hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and daily [music] executions.
Only a small number are assigned to the most demanding labor.
Between 8,000 and 15,000, Roma will perish [music] at Jasen Novak.
Another 16,000 will die elsewhere in the independent state of Croatia.
The methods [music] of killing are intimate, personal.
Unlike the gas chambers [music] of Avitz, designed to distance perpetrator from victim, Yasanovak specializes [music] in face-to-face violence.
Guards beat prisoners to death with clubs and hammers.
They slash throats.
They hang [music] victims from makeshift gallows.
They dismember living people with saws and axes.
And then there’s the Sarosek, [music] the Serb cutter.
A special tool developed specifically for Jasanovac.
An agricultural knife [music] curved and sharp attached to a leather glove.
It fits over the hand.
With one motion, a guard can slash a throat.
The design [music] maximizes efficiency, minimizes hand fatigue.
Guards can kill [music] victim after victim without pausing to grip a separate blade.
Its murder adapted for industrial application.
[music] The Sarosjek becomes so associated with Yenovak that survivors remember it decades later.
It’s displayed in museums [music] now.
A relic of genocide, a reminder that human beings engineered tools specifically to make [music] killing faster.
But mass murder at Joenovac goes beyond hand tools.
In January [music] 1942, the first cremations begin.
Croatian engineer Dominic [music] Hinko Picilei converts seven brick factory ovens into specialized [music] crematories.
Bodies, some dead, some drugged, some fully alive, are fed into the furnaces.
Witnesses [music] testify that living inmates are cremated.
The smell of burning flesh hangs over the camp constantly.
Later, [music] additional crematories are built at Gradina.
Survivors report they become operational, too.
At Star Gradeska, experimentation [music] with poison gas begins.
The Ustache try gas vans first using cyclone B and sulfur dioxide in makeshift chambers.
These methods [music] are inconsistent, but they are used on women and children arriving from Jakovo.
The main Jasanovac [music] camp doesn’t develop functional gas chambers like German facilities.
[music] The Ustache prefer their manual methods.
By 1943, the machinery is humming.
Prisoners [music] arrive.
They’re sorted.
They labor briefly or die immediately.
Their bodies are burned or dumped in the Sava.
Evidence vanishes [music] downstream.
And the process repeats day after day for years.
Then comes a night that reveals [music] just how far the ustache will go.
A night that becomes legend.
A night [music] when murder turns into sport.
August 29th, 1942.
Guards at Jasan Novak are drunk and bored.
Someone suggests a wager.
Who can kill the most prisoners [music] in a single night? Money is pulled.
Bets are placed.
Inmates are gathered.
One guard [music] steps forward.
Petar Brazika, a Franciscan frier.
Yes, a frier.
Many including some who commit the worst atrocities [music] at Jasenovak are Catholic religious figures.
Brazika carries his Serbosik.
[music] He’s confident and he’s fast.
His surname Brazika contains burrs, which means fast in Croatian and Serbian.
An ironic [music] coincidence that becomes horrifically fitting.
The contest begins.
Guards move through the prisoners systematically.
They use their knives, [music] their hands.
Their efficiency improves with practice.
Braza finds a rhythm.
One throat after another.
The ground becomes slick with blood.
Prisoners scream.
[music] Some beg.
Others are too terrified to make sound.
The guards don’t pause.
This is entertainment.
[clears throat] By dawn, the numbers are tallied.
[music] Braza has killed 1,360 people.
Another participant, Auntie [music] Zinushic, admits to killing about 600.
Mile Frianovich [music] confesses to 1,100.
Frianovich later [music] provides detailed testimony about the night, including how he tortured an old man named Vauasin.
He ordered [music] the man to bless Ante Pavalich, the ustache leader.
The man refused.
Frianovich [music] cut off his ears.
Refused again.
Fanovich cut off his nose.
[music] refused again.
Fraggonovich cut out his tongue.
Then he killed him.
The prizes for winning are revealing.
Bzika [music] receives a gold watch from the chaplain of the camp.
Yes, the chaplain, a religious official who not only knew about the killing [music] contest, but participated in rewarding it.
The camp administration gives Berzika a silver service set.
His fellow guards present him with a roasted pig and wine for celebration.
They feast.
>> [music] >> They toast.
They celebrate industrialized slaughter.
One participant [music] later seeks psychiatric help.
The psychological toll of what he’s done becomes unbearable.
But most [music] never express remorse.
Braza himself, if captured alive after the war, would likely have [music] shown no regret.
He disappears into history, his ultimate fate unknown.
But his [music] night of killing becomes one of the most infamous events in Jasanovac’s history.
This isn’t an isolated incident.
It’s emblematic.
Jasanovac [music] is a place where cruelty becomes routine.
Where gods compete to see who can devise the most [music] sadistic torture.
where Franciscan friars like Miroslav Filipovich Mtorovich nicknamed [music] Fraona, brother Satan, personally participate in massacres and are promoted for their zealousness.
Philippovich [music] Metovich’s reputation is particularly dark.
Before running Jasenovak, he participated in massacres of Serbian [music] villages, Shargovak, Motik, Draulich near Banjaluca in Bosnia.
At the camp, inmates testified [music] that he personally killed numerous prisoners, including children.
His method, [music] he’d throw children into the air and try to impale them on a dagger.
Survivors [music] describe him failing three times, then succeeding on the fourth attempt, laughing throughout.
Mothers who witnessed [music] this would collapse, screaming, pulling their hair.
The guards would take them away [music] and execute them.
Even German officers who visit Jasanovak are shocked.
Edmund Glaze von Hostenau, Hitler’s planetary [music] representative in Croatia tours the camp and documents what he sees.
He describes it as comparable to Dante’s inferno.
In his [music] reports to Berlin, he writes that the Ustache have gone raging mad.
He witnesses the aftermath of a massacre [music] at Kveni Bok where Asha killed hundreds of villagers.
He describes [music] seeing a woman’s corpse in the Sava River, eyes gouged out, a stake driven through her genitals.
He estimates she was no more than 20 years old.
[music] Everywhere pigs devour unburied bodies.
Another German general, Herman Nobaka, later writes about Asha, [music] claims that they killed a million Serbs.
He calls this boastful exaggeration, but estimates 3/4 of a million deaths.
The fact that German officials, architects of the Holocaust, find Croatian methods [music] excessive tells you everything about Jasanovax’s brutality.
Catholic church officials also become aware.
Archbishop Eloiseius Steppen receives reports.
Priest Jur Paritch visits [music] Jasanovac and later tells Steenac in detail what he discovered.
Steenac reportedly sheds a tear.
In February 1943, after [music] seven Slovenian Catholic priests are killed at Yasanovak, Steenac writes [music] to Antip Pavilich, calling it a shameful stain and a crime that [music] cries out for revenge, just as the whole of Yasanovac is a shameful stain on the independent state of Croatia.
Monscior Austinine Uretic, a well-connected [music] Catholic theologian, writes in June 1942, “The concentration [music] camp at Yasenovac is a real slaughter house.
You have not read anywhere, not even under the GPU or Gestapo, of such horrible things as the Ustashi [music] commit.
” The story of Jasenovak is the blackest page of the Ustashi regime because thousands of men have been killed [music] there.
Religious condemnation doesn’t stop the killing.
If anything, Jasenovac accelerates.
By 1943, it’s operating at full [music] capacity.
New prisoners arrive constantly.
The Sava River carries away the evidence, and the Ustache, emboldened by their impunity, [music] continue, but the war is turning.
1943.
The Axis powers are losing ground.
Italy collapses and switches sides.
In Yugoslavia, the partisan resistance under [music] Yosip Bro Tito grow stronger daily.
Towns that were once securely under control [music] become contested.
Supply lines fracture.
The independent state of Croatia, always a puppet, feels its strings being cut.
At Jasanovac, [music] the authorities sense the endgame approaching.
In early 1943, they begin [music] burning records, registration files, execution orders, camp administrative documents.
[music] Anything that could document their crimes goes into the flames.
They’ve kept evidence [music] for years, meticulously cataloging some of their atrocities.
Now they’re [music] destroying it all.
If they can’t control the narrative, they’ll eliminate it.
The burning of [music] documents creates a problem that persists to this day.
How many people died at Jasan [music] Novak? Without complete records, historians are left with estimates [music] based on census data, testimony, and fragmentaryary documentation.
The Ustache [music] ensured that no precise count would ever be possible.
But the killing doesn’t stop.
If anything, [music] the pace intensifies.
The Ustache know their time is [music] limited.
They double down.
More prisoners arrive from regions the regime is losing.
More executions at Gradina.
More bodies in the river.
The Sarosek stays busy.
Inside the [music] camp, resistance stirs.
Some inmates, realizing death is certain whether they resist or not, begin forming networks.
They steal [music] food.
They sabotage equipment subtly.
They communicate with partisans [music] outside the camp when possible.
A small group operating in the tener gets help from an ustache named Dr.
Marinf and [music] his wife who provide information and assistance.
For this act [music] of conscience, both are later discovered and hanged on orders of camp.
Commander Dinko [music] Shakich, any guard suspected of showing kindness to inmates faces execution.
Other small acts of humanity occur.
An ustae named Vladimir Kupich [music] rescues an inmate named Borislav Sava.
Some civilians who encounter prisoners on work details [music] outside the camp are kind.
Offering food, water, small words of encouragement, but these are exceptions.
[music] The system remains brutal.
By late [music] 1944, the situation grows desperate for thee.
Allied [music] forces are pushing across Europe.
Soviet armies are advancing from the east.
Tito’s partisans [music] control large sections of Yugoslavia.
The independent [music] state of Croatia is collapsing.
But at Jasenovac, the machinery continues.
The camp becomes a warehouse for prisoners [music] captured in retreating territories.
In some cases, they’re not even processed.
They’re marched directly [music] to Gradina and shot.
In early 1945, as partisan units close in, the camp enters its final [music] most horrific phase.
The Ustasha decide to erase all evidence, [music] not just documents, everything.
They work the camp at maximum capacity, killing as many remaining prisoners as possible.
Women and children who’ve survived years in Star [music] Gradeska are marched to death.
Men are shot.
The crematories [music] work around the clock.
By midappril 1945, only about,00 male prisoners remain alive at the main [music] Jasenovak camp.
7 to 900 women are still at Star Gradishka.
On April 21st, the Asha [music] kill all the women.
The massacre takes hours.
When it’s finished, the guards return to the main camp.
The remaining male prisoners understand what’s [music] coming.
They face a choice.
Die passive or die fighting.
Either way, [music] death is certain.
But at least fighting offers a chance, however slim, at escape.
On the night of April [music] the 21st into April the 22nd, they decide they’ll revolt.
April 22nd, 1945.
Dawn [music] is hours away.
At Jasan Novak, approximately 1,000 prisoners prepare for [music] the impossible.
They have no weapons.
They’re starved and weak.
The guards [music] have guns, dogs, search lights, but staying means certain execution.
[music] Revolt means a chance.
The decision isn’t unanimous.
[music] 600 prisoners join the uprising.
473 choose to remain.
Perhaps hoping the [music] partisans will arrive in time.
Perhaps too exhausted to try.
It’s a calculation made in hell.
Which death is preferable? The 600 rush the guards.
Chaos erupts.
[music] Search lights flood the grounds.
Guards open fire.
Dogs are released.
Prisoners scatter in all directions.
[music] Desperate to reach the perimeter.
Breach the wall.
escape into the marsh land beyond.
Some [music] make it to the wire, some clear it, most don’t.
Their [music] hunt them systematically.
Those caught are shot on site.
Some are dragged back for more theatrical executions.
The killing continues through the night and into the morning.
By the time [music] the sun rises, 520 of the 600 rebels are dead.
Only 80 managed to escape into the surrounding countryside.
Some of these 80 will survive the war.
[music] Some will be hunted down in the following days.
For the 473 who chose not [music] to revolt, there’s no mercy.
The guards kill them all that day.
Then they set [music] to work destroying the camp itself.
Explosives are planted.
The guard houses, [music] torture rooms, barracks, the pissy furnace.
Everything [music] is rigged for demolition.
The Ustache torch documents they haven’t already burned.
They smash equipment.
They topple [music] structures.
The goal is total obliteration.
If the partisans [music] find nothing, they can prove nothing.
The demolition takes days.
Fires rage.
Walls collapse.
[music] The smell of smoke and death hangs over the marsh.
The [music] flee westward, hoping to reach Austria or Italy before capture.
Many will make it.
Some will spend [music] decades in hiding.
Others will escape to South America, Argentina primarily, where they’ll live under assumed names.
[music] A few will eventually face justice.
Most won’t.
On May 2nd, 1945, partisan forces reach Jasovak.
[music] They find ruins, skeletal remains scattered across the grounds, soot [music] and ash, smoldering wreckage.
The Sava River still carries bodies downstream.
The air reeks [music] of rot and burning.
The partisans begin documenting what they can.
They photograph the destruction.
[music] They collect testimony from the few survivors who emerge from hiding in nearby [music] villages.
They start excavating.
In one mass grave, they find 189 [music] corpses, most with smashed skulls.
Among them, 51 children under age 14.
But comprehensive forensic examination [music] is impossible.
The camp’s destruction is too complete.
The Ustach have done their work well.
Over the following months, partisan authorities use the ruined campsite for [music] labor, bringing in German, Croatian, Sloven, and Cetnik [music] prisoners of war to extract building materials.
They dismantle the 2 km long, 4 m high brick wall that surrounded [music] the facility.
The site is further degraded.
Evidence is further compromised.
By the end of 1945, Yasanovak [music] is largely obliterated.
What remains is testimony, memory, and the ghosts [music] of tens of thousands who died there.
The number hovers like smoke.
How many [music] died at Jasanovak? In November 1945, the Yugoslav government’s national [music] committee of Croatia investigates.
They estimate 500,000 to 600,000 victims.
This figure becomes [music] official for decades.
The Simon Venthal Center cites it.
Israeli scholars [music] use it through 1990.
It enters textbooks, memorials, collective memory.
But the number [music] is contested.
In the 1980s, Serbian researchers claim even higher figures, [music] 700,000 to 1 million.
The director of the Bgrade Museum of Genocide [music] Victims, Dr.
Milan Bulajic, asserts between 700,000 and 1 million at Jasenovac alone.
Anton Milletic, director of Belgrade [music] Military Archives, claims 1.
1 million.
Then after the breakup of Yugoslavia, the pendulum [music] swings violently.
Croatian nationalists minimize the death toll.
In 1991, the new Croatian government’s commission for the determination of war and postwar victims lists only 2,238 victims at Jenovac.
Only 293 Jewish victims [music] in all of Croatia.
The commission’s head, Vice Voyovich, later claims the Jasovat camp was run by Jews.
This isn’t [music] historical revision.
It’s denial.
Holocaust denial applied to the Balkans.
The truth, as modern scholarship establishes, [music] lies between the extremes.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates the Ustache murdered between [music] 77,000 and 99,000 people at Jasanovax.
The Jasovac [music] memorial site using documentation collected through March 2013 has compiled names of 83,145 [music] victims, 47,627 Serbs, 16,173 [music] Roma, 13,116 Jews, 4, the 255 Croats, [music] 1,128 Bosnian Muslims, and 266 Sloven among others.
Of these, 20,1 are children under 14.
[music] 23,474 are women.
These aren’t abstract numbers.
[music] They’re individuals, families, communities.
A father holding [music] his child’s hand before they’re separated forever.
A mother watching [music] guards smash her baby against a wall.
A young woman with her eyes gouged out, violated with a [music] stake, thrown into a river.
An old man tortured for refusing to praise his murderer.
Thousands of Roma families arriving [music] together, dying together.
Jewish communities that had lived in Croatia [music] for centuries, erased within months.
The controversy over numbers serves several political purposes [music] in post Yugoslav states.
For Serbian nationalists, higher figures justify victimhood narratives and anti-Croatian sentiment.
For Croatian nationalists, [music] lower figures minimize crimes and allow rehabilitation of fascist symbols.
Both positions distort [music] truth for ideology.
But regardless of whether 80,000 or 100,000 people [music] died at Jasenovac, the fundamental reality remains unchanged.
This was [music] genocide.
Systematic, deliberate, engineered by the Ustach regime with enthusiasm that [music] shocked even Nazis.
The independent state of Croatia murdered between 320,000 and 340,000 [music] ethnic Serbs during its existence.
It killed approximately 32,000 [music] Jews.
It eliminated about 26,000 Roma.
These [music] deaths occurred in camps, in villages, in massacres, in forced marches.
Jasenovac [music] was the largest single killing site, but it was part of a broader campaign of ethnic cleansing.
After the war, most perpetrators [music] escape.
Ante Pavilich flees to Austria, then Italy, then Argentina.
He lives there under Vatican protection [music] until his death in 1959.
Vosslav Max Lubberich, commander of all Ustachi concentration [music] camps, escapes to Spain.
He lives openly until 1969 when a Yugoslav agent [music] assassinates him.
Dingo Shakich, one of Yasenovich’s last commanders, flees to Argentina, where he lives for decades.
But in 1998, [music] Shakich is located by Nazi hunter Ephraim Zurov and [music] journalist Jorge Kamarasa.
They expose him on Argentine television.
He’s extradited [music] to Croatia and tried.
During his trial, he shows no remorse.
I’m proud of what [music] I did and would do it again, he declares.
I regret that we hadn’t done all that is imputed to us.
For had we [music] done that then, today, Croatia would not have had problems.
There wouldn’t have been people to write these lies.
He’s convicted and [music] sentenced to 20 years.
He dies in prison in 2008.
The last living concentration camp commander [music] to face trial.
Miroslav Filipovich Mtorovich, brother Satan, [music] is captured by Yuguslav communist forces.
He’s tried and executed [music] in 1946.
At his trial, he tries to shift blame to Lubber, [music] claiming he was merely following orders.
Serbs must be ruthlessly exterminated, [music] he says.
Lubber told him the tribunal isn’t persuaded.
[music] He hangs.
Most guards never face justice.
They blend into post-war societies.
They change names, relocate, start families.
[music] Some live to old age with their secrets.
Their victims remain in mass graves or scattered as ash.
In the 1960s, [music] Yugoslavia constructs a memorial complex at Yasanovak, a concrete flower [music] sculpture, a museum, commemorative grounds.
But the site is politicized [music] from the beginning.
During Tito’s era, the emphasis is on victims of fascism [music] without specifying ethnicities, downplaying the specifically anti-Serb nature of [music] much of the killing to maintain Yugoslav unity.
After Yugoslavia’s breakup [music] and Croatia’s independence, the site becomes contested.
Nationalists [music] vandalize it.
Annual commemorations become political battlegrounds.
In recent years, Croatia has taken [music] steps toward confronting this history.
The government recognizes Jasenovaku’s crimes.
[music] The memorial site hosts educational programs.
School groups visit.
historians [music] research.
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The liberation of Jasenovac should have brought clarity.
Instead, it opened another chapter of silence, politics, and grief.
The camp was gone, dynamited and burned by the Ustaše before they fled, but the trauma remained buried across the marshlands of the Sava River.
Villages throughout Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia were filled with people searching for fathers who never returned, mothers who vanished on transports, children whose names disappeared from church records forever.
For survivors, the nightmare did not end in April 1945.
Many emerged from forests and ruined villages carrying scars no doctor could heal.
Some weighed less than 40 kilograms.
Some had forgotten how to speak after months of witnessing executions.
Others carried memories so horrific they refused to discuss them for decades, even with family members.
In the years immediately after the war, Yugoslavia was rebuilding itself from ashes, and the new communist government under Josip Broz Tito feared ethnic tensions more than historical transparency.
The official narrative became “victims of fascism.
” Broad.
Generalized.
Safer.
To openly emphasize that the majority of Jasenovac’s victims were Serbs murdered by the Croatian fascist Ustaše risked reigniting the ethnic hatred that had already destroyed Yugoslavia once.
So public discussion was controlled carefully.
The atrocities were acknowledged, but often stripped of ethnic specificity.
Survivors were encouraged to focus on unity, resistance, and antifascist brotherhood.
But memory cannot be managed forever.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, survivors quietly recorded testimonies.
Teachers wrote down stories from children who had escaped Stara Gradiška.
Priests kept hidden burial lists.
Jewish organizations documented vanished communities town by town.
Roma families passed oral histories from generation to generation because almost no written records remained.
Entire bloodlines had been erased before anyone could register their names.
One survivor recalled arriving at Gradina as a child and seeing piles of shoes stacked beside open pits.
Another described the sound of mallets striking skulls during night executions because gunfire wasted ammunition and attracted attention.
Others remembered the silence after killings ended, broken only by the movement of the Sava River carrying bodies downstream toward Belgrade.
Some testimonies were so graphic investigators initially doubted them.
A witness claimed guards forced prisoners to dig their own graves before cutting their throats one by one with the Serbosek knife.
Another described competitions where inmates were tied together with wire before being thrown into the river.
Multiple survivors independently described guards laughing while betting on whether wounded prisoners could crawl out of pits before dying.
The consistency of these accounts over decades eventually convinced historians that the sadism at Jasenovac was not exaggerated folklore.
It was institutional culture.
Unlike Auschwitz, where killing was mechanized and bureaucratic, Jasenovac operated through direct physical violence.
That distinction matters.
Nazi Germany increasingly sought industrial distance between killer and victim.
Gas chambers hid the act behind walls and sealed doors.
Jasenovac often eliminated that distance entirely.
Guards looked directly into victims’ faces while murdering them.
They heard screams.
They felt resistance.
Many appeared to enjoy it.
German officers repeatedly documented their disgust toward Ustaše methods.
That fact remains one of the most chilling elements of the camp’s history.
The architects of the Holocaust — men responsible for extermination across Europe — considered Jasenovac excessively brutal.
German diplomat Edmund Glaise-Horstenau reported that Ustaše atrocities were fueling Serbian resistance and destabilizing the region.
Wehrmacht commanders complained the massacres were so savage they pushed civilians into joining Tito’s partisans.
Even within the Axis alliance, Croatia’s fascist regime gained a reputation for uncontrollable fanaticism.
And yet Berlin tolerated it.
Why?
Because the Independent State of Croatia served a strategic purpose.
It guarded supply lines in the Balkans.
It fought anti-Axis resistance.
As long as the Ustaše remained useful, their crimes were largely ignored.
The Third Reich objected not to genocide itself, but to genocide carried out so chaotically it damaged military stability.
By the late 1940s, many perpetrators had escaped through what became known as the “ratlines,” underground networks helping fascists flee Europe.
Some routes passed through monasteries and sympathetic clergy in Italy before continuing to Argentina, Paraguay, or Spain.
Among the fugitives was Ante Pavelić himself.
For years, Pavelić lived comfortably in Argentina under the protection of Juan Perón, whose government welcomed numerous European fascists after the war.
Pavelić even operated publicly within Croatian exile circles.
Survivors of Jasenovac learned that the man responsible for their suffering was living freely thousands of miles away while mass graves in the Balkans remained unmarked.
In 1957, Pavelić survived an assassination attempt believed to be carried out by a Yugoslav agent.
Two bullets struck him.
Though he escaped immediate death, complications from the wounds eventually killed him in Spain in 1959.
He never stood trial.
Others vanished more completely.
Petar Brzica, the guard associated with the infamous throat-cutting contest, disappeared after the war.
Some reports claim he escaped to the United States under a false identity.
Others suggest he died during the chaotic retreat from Yugoslavia.
No definitive evidence has ever confirmed his fate.
For decades, rumors circulated that former Ustaše guards lived quietly in immigrant communities overseas, attending church, raising children, and never revealing what they had done at Jasenovac.
Meanwhile, survivors struggled simply to continue living.
Many suffered permanent physical injuries from torture and starvation.
Psychological trauma haunted nearly all of them.
Nightmares, panic attacks, survivor’s guilt, and silence became common patterns.
Some refused to discuss the camp even with spouses.
Others spoke obsessively because they feared the dead would otherwise vanish from history.
A recurring theme appears in survivor testimony: the unbearable guilt of survival itself.
One former inmate remembered being spared because he was a skilled metalworker.
Another survived because a guard temporarily needed laborers to repair equipment.
A child lived because she hid beneath corpses during an execution.
These accidents of survival tormented people for the rest of their lives.
Why them?
Why not their families?
At memorial gatherings years later, survivors often carried photographs of missing relatives with no graves to visit.
Jasenovac left behind countless dead without identifiable remains.
Many bodies were burned.
Others were dumped into rivers or buried in hastily dug pits across Gradina’s fields.
In the 1960s, Yugoslavia finally began constructing a major memorial at the site.
Architect Bogdan Bogdanović designed the enormous concrete Flower Monument, completed in 1966.
Rising from the flat landscape like a bloom emerging from death, the structure became one of the most recognizable Holocaust memorials in Eastern Europe.
The monument’s symbolism was deliberate.
Rather than depicting explicit violence, Bogdanović created something abstract and mournful.
Petals opened toward the sky above former killing grounds.
Beneath the monument, visitors walked through dark interior chambers representing descent into memory and death.
But even memorialization became political.
Croatian nationalists accused communist Yugoslavia of exaggerating victim numbers to demonize Croats collectively.
Serbian nationalists accused Croatia of minimizing genocide.
Historians found themselves trapped between competing narratives, each side weaponizing the dead for modern political identity.
Then Yugoslavia collapsed in the 1990s.
The old ethnic hatreds returned with terrifying speed.
As Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia descended into war, Jasenovac reentered political discourse not as distant history, but as living memory.
Serbian propaganda invoked Ustaše crimes to justify fears of renewed persecution.
Croatian extremists revived fascist symbols and slogans associated with the wartime regime.
Some football stadiums echoed chants dating back to the 1940s.
Murals appeared glorifying Ustaše figures.
The past was no longer past.
In some villages, elderly survivors watched armed militias march through streets carrying insignia they had last seen during World War II.
For them, history felt cyclical, not historical.
During the Yugoslav wars, memorial sites were vandalized.
Historical interpretation became polarized.
Revisionists attempted to portray Jasenovac as merely a labor camp.
Others inflated numbers beyond credible scholarship to strengthen nationalist narratives.
Lost in the political warfare were the victims themselves.
Modern historians now rely on demographic analysis, archival fragments, forensic investigations, wartime documents, and named victim databases to reconstruct what happened as accurately as possible.
While exact totals remain debated, the broad scholarly consensus is clear: Jasenovac was one of Europe’s largest extermination sites outside direct German administration and the central instrument of genocidal policy within the Independent State of Croatia.
Its victims included:
- Serbs targeted for ethnic extermination
- Jews persecuted under racial laws aligned with Nazi ideology
- Roma families systematically annihilated
- Croatian and Bosnian political dissidents
- Anti-fascists, communists, and resistance supporters
- Orthodox clergy and intellectuals
- Women and children caught in mass deportations
Entire communities disappeared.
Before the war, Jewish life flourished in cities like Zagreb, Osijek, and Sarajevo.
Synagogues, schools, newspapers, and businesses formed vibrant networks across the region.
After the war, much of that world was gone forever.
Roma communities suffered similarly catastrophic destruction.
Because many Roma deaths were never formally documented, historians believe their true losses may never be fully known.
And among Serbian populations in parts of Croatia and Bosnia, the demographic impact remained visible for generations.
Villages emptied.
Family names vanished.
Church cemeteries stopped receiving burials because entire bloodlines had been murdered.
Today, visitors to Jasenovac often describe the silence first.
The camp itself is largely gone.
The Ustaše destroyed most physical structures during retreat.
Grass covers former barracks.
Marshland stretches across old execution zones.
Birds move through areas where mass graves remain beneath the soil.
But absence can become its own form of horror.
At Auschwitz, visitors see preserved barracks, fences, rail tracks.
Jasenovac offers emptiness.
A landscape stripped nearly clean, forcing imagination to reconstruct what occurred there.
Archaeologists and forensic teams continue research even now.
Mass grave sites are still being mapped.
Victim identities are still being confirmed.
Historians continue comparing census records, wartime transport lists, church archives, and survivor accounts.
The work remains unfinished because the perpetrators tried so hard to erase evidence.
That effort at erasure may be one of Jasenovac’s defining characteristics.
The camp was not only a machine for killing people.
It was also a machine for destroying proof.
Documents burned.
Buildings demolished.
Bodies cremated.
Rivers used as disposal systems.
The Ustaše understood history mattered.
They understood evidence mattered.
Even as their regime collapsed, they tried to control what future generations would know.
And in some ways, they succeeded.
Outside the Balkans, Jasenovac remains far less known than Auschwitz, Treblinka, or Sobibor.
Many people encounter its name for the first time only when studying regional Balkan history.
Yet the scale and brutality place it among the most horrific concentration camp systems in Europe during World War II.
Part of that obscurity comes from geopolitics.
Cold War Yugoslavia existed outside both Soviet and Western blocs, receiving less attention in mainstream Holocaust narratives centered on Nazi Germany.
Part comes from the destruction of evidence.
Part comes from the uncomfortable complexity of the Balkans themselves, where ethnic memory and political identity remain deeply contested.
But another reason is simpler.
Jasenovac forces confrontation with something many people prefer not to examine too closely: genocide does not always require advanced industrial systems or centralized German control.
The Ustaše proved that ordinary men armed with ideology, fanaticism, and permission could create horrors rivaling anything in Nazi-occupied Europe.
Teachers.
Farmers.
Priests.
Policemen.
Students.
Not monsters descending from another world.
Human beings.
That reality unsettles every generation because it destroys comforting assumptions.
Jasenovac was not built by some uniquely alien evil beyond comprehension.
It emerged from nationalism radicalized into dehumanization.
Propaganda transformed neighbors into enemies.
Political rhetoric normalized extermination.
Religion, in some cases, became distorted into justification rather than restraint.
And once violence became normalized, cruelty escalated rapidly.
The camp demonstrates how quickly civilization can collapse when hatred becomes state policy.
Laws were passed first.
Definitions changed.
Entire groups were labeled threats.
Rights disappeared.
Arrests followed.
Camps expanded.
Killing intensified.
Eventually, guards competed over murder totals while clergy rewarded them with gold watches.
No society believes it is capable of such descent beforehand.
That is why Jasenovac matters now, not only historically.
It stands as warning evidence of what happens when identity becomes weaponized and human beings are reduced to categories unworthy of empathy.
The victims at Jasenovac were not killed because of anything they had done individually.
Most were targeted because of birth, religion, ethnicity, or political suspicion.
Children died because adults classified them as undesirable.
The youngest victims at Jasenovac were infants.
Modern visitors sometimes leave small toys or flowers at memorial areas dedicated to murdered children.
Tiny shoes have been placed near monuments by families who cannot comprehend how anyone could deliberately slaughter the young.
Yet the historical record leaves little doubt.
Children were starved, beaten, shot, poisoned, and murdered manually at the camp complex.
Some died alongside parents.
Others were separated permanently.
A small number were rescued by humanitarian efforts led by figures such as Diana Budisavljević, an Austrian woman who organized one of the largest child rescue operations in occupied Yugoslavia.
Budisavljević and her network managed to save thousands of Serbian children from camps including Jasenovac and Stara Gradiška.
She kept detailed records hoping families could someday reunite after the war.
Many never did.
After 1945, communist authorities confiscated portions of her documentation, and her role remained relatively unknown for decades.
Only later did historians fully recognize the scale of what she accomplished.
Her story exists as rare light within overwhelming darkness.
Because even at Jasenovac, there were moments when individuals chose humanity instead of cruelty.
Prisoners shared scraps of bread.
Some guards secretly spared lives.
Civilians smuggled food.
Doctors falsified records.
Resistance networks formed under impossible conditions.
These acts did not stop the machinery of death, but they mattered deeply to those who survived.
And survivors carried those memories forward.
Today, annual commemorations continue at Jasenovac Memorial Site.
Jewish organizations, Serbian groups, Roma representatives, antifascist associations, and Croatian officials gather to honor the dead.
Sometimes separately due to political disagreements, sometimes together.
The divisions themselves reveal how unresolved the legacy remains.
Yet beyond politics lies something more enduring.
The names.
Over 83,000 identified victims currently appear in the memorial database, and researchers continue adding more.
Each recovered name restores individuality against the perpetrators’ attempt at erasure.
Not statistics.
People.
A carpenter from Kozara.
A Jewish schoolteacher from Zagreb.
A Roma child from Slavonia.
An Orthodox priest from Bosnia.
A mother carrying an infant onto a transport train.
A teenage boy who tried to escape across the Sava at night.
A little girl whose identity survives only through one surviving photograph.
Jasenovac tried to erase them completely.
History’s responsibility is to refuse that erasure.
