Mapping the Holocaust in
Croatia

In the Stara Gradiška Camp and later also in Jasenovac III, there were not only men but also women among the guards. Several of these women acted just as cruel and brutal towards the prisoners as their male counterparts. The commander of the women’s section of the Stara Gradiška Camp was Maja Buždon. Immediately after the collapse of the Independent State of Croatia, Buždon was captured by the Communist authorities and sentenced to death by a military court. In this excerpt from her interrogation, she candidly talked about her crimes, which included murder of prisoners and participation in selections for extermination.

When examining interrogation records from the immediate postwar period in Socialist Yugoslavia, such as Maja Buždon’s, it is important to keep in mind that investigators often used coercion to elicit confessions from suspects. Although torture during interrogations was officially prohibited, it was a common practice in 1945 and 1946. Nevertheless, Buždon’s culpability is confirmed by numerous survivor testimonies.

Most of the guards stationed at the Jasenovac camp complex were extremely brutal, beating or killing prisoners for the most trivial infractions or simply out of boredom. Yet, before they were recruited, most of the rank-and-file guards were not devoted Ustašas. In the Independent State of Croatia, young Croat and Bosniak men generally faced the choice of joining an Ustaša unit or serving in the Home Guard [The regular Military in the Independent State of Croatia]. To dissuade youngsters from joining the Home Guard, Ustaša recruiters promised higher salaries and better food besides various other benefits. The extract from the memoirs of the survivor Cadik Danon Braco offers an illustrative description of a young man who appears to have volunteered due to rather mundane considerations.

The memoirs of Ilija Jakovljević is one of the most important sources for understanding perpetrators in Stara Gradiška camp. As an acclaimed novelist from Herzegovina who the Ustaša regime unsuccessful had tried to win over to their side, Jakovljević was treated relatively tolerable during his incarceration in the camp, which lasted from October 1941 to December 1942. His special status gave him opportunity to converse with some of the men who administrated the camp and routinely participated in violence.

Among these figures was the Ustaša Nikola Gagro, who oversaw a prison in the camp where numerous political prisoners starved to death. The following extracts contain some of Jakovljević's conversations with Gagro, revealing both the extreme ruthlessness of the man but also a more complex dimension to his character.

To make room for incoming prisoners, the Ustaša camp leadership routinely organized selections among the existing prisoner population in the main camp, Jasenovac III. Those chosen were sent to Gradina, a destination synonymous with death. In principle, the selections aimed to maintain the efficiency of the work force by eliminating “excess” prisoners perceived as too weak for forced labor. The camp leadership cynically called the process “rejuvenation,” a grotesque distortion of its true nature. However, in practice, the criteria for selection were often arbitrary, influenced by personal predilections and animosities of the perpetrators. This extract from the memoirs of survivor Đorđe Miliša vividly captures the intricate psychological interplay and attempts at impression management as prisoners sought to evade the grim fate of selection.

Before Gradina became the main killing site, the camp personnel perpetrated most of the mass killings inside Jasenovac III or just east of the camp. However, as the ground froze in January 1942, making it difficult to dig mass graves, a crematorium was created inside the brickyard. Engineer Hinko Pičili designed the crematorium and supervised its construction. In survivor testimonies and memoirs, the crematorium is sometimes referred to as “Pičili’s oven.”

While the exact dates are unknown, the crematorium was in operation from February to May 1942. During this period, camp personnel murdered prisoners within the brickyard and incinerated their bodies in the crematorium.

In the historiography, it is disputed if some prisoners were burned alive. Another contested point is to what extent the crematorium was inspired by SS concentration and death camps. At this temporal stage, there were crematoria in most of the concentration camps inside Nazi Germany as well as in Auschwitz-Birkenau, but not yet in the “Operation Reinhard” death camps (Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka). It is also contested if the crematorium was demolished because the smell disturbed Croat civilians residing near the camp or because its capacity was inadequate.

This extract from a postwar testimony by Jewish survivor Egon Berger gives insights into the establishment and operation of the crematorium.

Officers in the Jasenovac Camp Complex were not “desk murderers” who ordered killings of prisoners from afar, but hands-on perpetrators. Through their own heinous comportment, they set an example which the rank-and-file guards modelled their own behaviour after. As this excerpt from the postwar testimony of Jasenovac officer Ljubomir Miloš indicates, the commander of the Ustaša Defense, Vjekoslav Luburić, played a key role in fomenting the violent climate that came to pervade the camp.

This source was written by Ivan Tolj, the chief of police in Sarajevo and one of the key organizers of the Holocaust in Sarajevo. Tolj deported the overwhelming majority of Sarajevan Jews in the period from the end of October to the end of December 1941. In this source, probably written in December 1941, he is explaining his actions to the officials of the Office of the Poglavnik.

The testimony of Zlatko Mesić, personal secretary of Ante Vokić, who was one of the most influential Sarajevan Ustašas, represents a source of outstanding importance for the analysis of the Holocaust in Sarajevo. While Mesić’s testimony has to be analyzed critically, since it represents the perpetrator perspective, it sheds important light on the functioning of the repressive apparatus in Sarajevo during the Second World War. It shows the process of decision-making, center and periphery, as well as the tensions on the local level during the Holocaust.

The District of Šid was located in the very east of the Independent State of Croatia, demographically dominated by the Serb ethnicity, today part of the Republic of Serbia. Historically, it is located in the region of Syrmia, today divided between Croatia and Serbia. A small town of some 6,000 inhabitants, Šid was home to smaller Jewish and Roma communities. The text below is a perpetrator testimony of Ivan Daražac, who served as Šid’s District Clerk under the Ustaša regime, relating a rough timeline of various campaigns of persecution that Daražac witnessed and perpetrated during his tenure as District Clerk.

Many local officials of the Ustaša regime were appointed from the ranks of local activists, considered more trustworthy if they joined the movement during the interwar period, when it was illegal. Ivan Kostenac was one such official, serving the regime as Adjutant Commander of the Ustaša District of Vuka, headquartered in Vukovar. Kostenac gave this testimony about two months after the Independent State of Croatia had been defeated and reintegrated into a reestablished Yugoslav state, led by Kostenac’s wartime enemies, the communist Partisans. Given to a war crimes commission established by the Partisan authorities, Kostenac’s testimony is colored with fear of repercussions for his participation in Ustaša structures. Speaking as prisoner of Yugoslavia’s Military Tribunal in Vukovar, Kostenac minimized his strong prewar connections to the Ustaša movement, the significance of his official positions in the Independent State of Croatia, as well as his role in and knowledge of Ustaša decision-making during the war. Consider, for example, the testimony of Rosa Oberson regarding Kostenac’s engagement with Jewish “contribution” payments, which Vukovarian Jews had been forced to collect in May 1941; his mere presence at the “contribution” meetings ranks him among top Ustašas in Vukovar. Kostenac also neglected to mention the ways in which he benefitted from systematic dispossession that the Ustaša regime carried out against Jews, Serbs, and Roma; in 1941, for example, Kostenac took possession of one of several pianos expropriated from local Jews and Serbs, but his testimony blames the regime for expropriations and remains silent on local beneficiaries, including himself.