Jasenovac (pronounced [jasěnovats]) was a concentration and extermination camp established in the village of the same name by the authorities of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) in occupied Yugoslavia during World War II. The concentration camp, one of the ten largest in Europe, was established and operated by the governing Ustaše regime, Europe's only Nazi collaborationist regime that operated its own extermination camps, for Serbs, Romani, Jews, and political dissidents. It quickly grew into the third largest concentration camp in Europe.
The camp was established in August 1941, in marshland at the confluence of the Sava and Una rivers near the village of Jasenovac, and was dismantled in April 1945. It was "notorious for its barbaric practices and the large number of victims". Unlike German Nazi-run camps, Jasenovac lacked the infrastructure for mass murder on an industrial scale, such as gas chambers. Instead, it "specialized in one-on-one violence of a particularly brutal kind", and prisoners were primarily murdered with the use of knives, hammers, and axes, or shot.
In Jasenovac, the majority of victims were Serbs (as part of the genocide of the Serbs); others were Romani (the Porajmos), Jews (The Holocaust), and socialists. Jasenovac was a complex of five subcamps spread over 210 km2 (81 sq mi) on both banks of the Sava and Una rivers. The largest camp was the "Brickworks" camp at Jasenovac, about 100 km (62 mi) southeast of Zagreb. The overall complex included the Stara Gradiška sub-camp, the killing grounds across the Sava river at Gradina Donja, five work farms, and the Uštica Roma camp.
There has been much debate and controversy regarding the number of victims killed at the Jasenovac concentration camp complex during its more than three-and-a-half years of operation. Over the last few decades, a consensus has formed in support of estimates of the Ustaše regime having murdered somewhere near 100,000 people in Jasenovac between 1941 and 1945.
The Independent State of Croatia (NDH) was founded on 10 April 1941, after the invasion of Yugoslavia by the Axis powers. The NDH consisted of the present-day Republic of Croatia and modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina together with Syrmia in modern-day Serbia. It was essentially an Italo–German quasi-protectorate, as it owed its existence to the Axis powers, who maintained occupation forces within the puppet state throughout its existence. However, its day-to-day administration was composed almost exclusively of Croatians, including monks and nuns, under the leadership of the Ustaše.
Before the war, the Ustaše were an ultranationalist, fascist, racist, and terrorist organization, fighting for an independent Croatia. In 1932, Ustaše leader Ante Pavelić proclaimed: "The knife, revolver, machine gun and time bomb; these are the idols, these are bells that will announce the dawning and the resurrection of the independent state of Croatia". Ustaše terrorists set off bombs on international trains bound for the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and Pavelić and other Ustaše leaders were sentenced to death in absentia by French courts, for organising the assassination of Alexander I of Yugoslavia and French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou in 1934 in Marseilles. The Ustaše were virulently anti-Serb and antisemitic. In their 17 Principles, they proclaimed that those who were not "of Croat blood" (i.e. Serbs and Jews) would not have any political role in the future Croat state. In 1936, in The Croat Question, Pavelić called Jews "the enemy of the Croat people".
Some of the first decrees issued by the leader of the NDH Ante Pavelić reflected the Ustaše adoption of the racist ideology of Nazi Germany. The regime rapidly issued a decree restricting the activities of Jews and seizing their property. These laws were followed by a decree for "the Protection of the Nation and the State" of 17 April 1941, which mandated the death penalty for the offence of high treason if a person did or had done "harm to the honor and vital interests of the Croatian nation or endangered the existence of the Independent State of Croatia". This was a retroactive law, and arrests and trials started immediately. It was soon followed by a decree prohibiting the use of the Cyrillic script, which was an integral part of the rites of the Serbian Orthodox Church.
On April 30, 1941, the Ustaše proclaimed the main race laws, patterned after Nazi race laws – the "Legal Decree on Racial Origins", the "Legal Decree on the Protection of Aryan Blood and the Honor of the Croatian People", and the "Legal Provision on Citizenship". These decrees defined who was a Jew, and took away the citizenship rights of all non-Aryans, i.e. Jews and Roma. By the end of April 1941, months before the Nazis implemented similar measures in Germany, the Ustaše required all Jews to wear insignia, typically a yellow Star of David. The Ustaše declared the "Legal Provision on the Nationalization of the Property of Jews and Jewish Companies", on 10 October 1941, and with it they confiscated all Jewish property.
The Ustaše enacted many other decrees against Jews, Roma and Serbs, which became the basis for Ustaše policies of genocide against Jews and Roma, while against Serbs – as proclaimed by an Ustaše leader, Mile Budak – the policy was to kill a third, expel a third, and forcefully convert to Catholicism a third, which many historians also describe as genocide. The decrees were enforced not only through the regular court system, but also through new special courts and mobile courts-martial with extended jurisdiction. Almost immediately the first concentration camps were set up, and in July 1941 the Ustaše government began clearing ground for what would become the Jasenovac concentration camp.
Actions against Jews began immediately after the Independent State of Croatia was founded. On 10–11 April 1941, Ustaše arrested a group of prominent Zagreb Jews and held them for ransom. On 13 April the same was done in Osijek, where Ustaše and Volksdeutscher mobs also destroyed the synagogue and Jewish graveyard. This process was repeated multiple times in 1941 with groups of Jews. Simultaneously, the Ustaše initiated extensive antisemitic propaganda, with Ustaše papers writing that Croatians must "be more alert than any other ethnic group to protect their racial purity, ... We need to keep our blood clean of the Jews". They also wrote that Jews are synonymous with "treachery, cheating, greed, immorality and foreigness", and therefore "wide swaths of the Croatian people always despised the Jews and felt towards them natural revulsion".
The first mass killing of Serbs was carried out on April 30, when the Ustaše rounded up and killed 196 Serbs at Gudovac. Many other mass killings soon followed. Here is how the Croatian Catholic Bishop of Mostar, Alojzije Mišić, described the mass killings of Serbs just in one small area of Herzegovina, just during the first 6 months of the war:
People were captured like beasts. Slaughtered, killed, thrown live into the abyss. Women, mothers with children, young women, girls and boys were thrown into pits. The vice-mayor of Mostar, Mr. Baljić, a Mohammedan, publicly states, although as an official he should be silent and not talk, that in Ljubinje alone 700 schismatics [i.e. Serb Orthodox Christians] were thrown into one pit. Six full train carriages of women, mothers and girls, children under age 10, were taken from Mostar and Čapljina to the Šurmanci station, where they were unloaded and taken into the hills, with live mothers and their children tossed down the cliffs. Everyone was tossed and killed. In the Klepci parish, from the surrounding villages, 3,700 schismatics were killed. Poor souls, they were calm. I will not enumerate further. I would go too far. In the city of Mostar, hundreds were tied up, taken outside the city and killed like animals.
On April 15, only 5 days after the creation of the NDH, the Ustaše established the first concentration camp, Danica, at Koprivnica. In May 1941, they rounded up 165 Jewish youth in Zagreb, members of the Jewish sports club Makabi, and sent them to Danica (all but 3 were later killed by the Ustaše). The Croatian historian, Zdravko Dizdar, estimates that some 5,600 inmates passed through the Danica camp, mostly Serbs but also Jews and Croat Communists. Of the 3,358 Danica inmates Dizdar was able to trace by name, he found that 2,862, i.e. 85%, were later killed by the Ustaše at the Jadovno and Jasenovac concentration camps, the vast majority Serbs, but also hundreds of Jews and some Croats.