The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20030711191159/http://www.ushmm.org:80/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005449

Holocaust Learning Center

CONTENTS PRINT

   
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
  View of the Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia. Jasenovac, Yugoslavia, 1941-1942.
See more photographs
  JASENOVAC  

 

Jasenovac was a series of five detention facilities established between August 1941 and February 1942 by the authorities of the so-called Independent State of Croatia. This Croatian state had been proclaimed under the authority of the separatist Croat terrorist movement, the Ustasa, on April 10, 1941; the proclamation of the new state occurred as members of the Axis alliance (Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Bulgaria) dismembered the interwar Yugoslav state.

In late August 1941, the Croat authorities established the first two camps of the Jasenovac complex--Krapje and Brocica. These two camps were closed four months later. The other three camps in the complex were: Ciglana, established in November 1941 and dismantled in April 1945; Kozara, established in February 1942 and dismantled in April 1945; and Stara Gradiska, which had been an independent holding center for political prisoners since the summer of 1941 and was converted into a concentration camp for women in the winter of 1942.

 

 
Major Nazi and Axis camps in southern Europe
See Maps

The camps were guarded by Croatian political police and personnel of the Ustasa militia, which was the paramilitary organization of the Ustasa regime.

Conditions in the Jasenovac camps were horrendous. Prisoners received minimal food. Shelter and sanitary facilities were totally inadequate. Worse still, the Ustasa guards cruelly tortured, terrorized, and murdered prisoners at will.

 

   
Jovanka was one of six children born to Serbian Orthodox parents in a ...
Personal Stories
 
 

 

Between its establishment in 1941 and its evacuation in April 1945, tens of thousands of people were murdered at Jasenovac. Among the victims were approximately 20,000 Jews, most of whom were murdered before August 1942. The Croat authorities murdered at least 250,000 Serb residents of Croatia and Bosnia during 1941-1943; tens of thousands of these victims were killed or died at Jasenovac. The Croat authorities deported Jews from throughout the state to Jasenovac and shot most of them at the nearby killing sites of Granik and Gradina. Jews who possessed skills or training needed by the Croats were spared. Jewish physicians, electricians, carpenters, and tailors were among those forced to labor in workshops. In the summer of 1942 and March 1943, most of the remaining Croat Jews (about 7,000 in total) were rounded up by Croat authorities and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in German-occupied Poland.

 

 

As partisan units under the command of Communist leader Josip Tito approached Jasenovac in late April 1945, several hundred prisoners rose against the Ustasa guards. Many of the prisoners were killed; a few managed to escape. The Ustasa guards murdered the surviving prisoners before dismantling the last three Jasenovac camps in late April. Yugoslav partisans overran Jasenovac in early May 1945.

 


Related Links



 
USHMM Online Exhibition: The Holocaust Era in Croatia: Jasenovac

 


Copyright © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.