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.

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.

Murder of prisoners in the Jasenovac camp complex occurred in a multitude of situations, running the gamut from killings by individual guards to large-scale organized mass killings inside or near the camp complex. One form was executions by shooting inside the camp complex. Prisoners caught trying to escape or suspected of planning to escape were frequently the victims. Executions served as a warning and were public in the sense that all prisoners had to attend and watch. Whereas the guards murdered most of the victims at Gradina and other killings sites with mallets, axes, or hammers, the use of firearms at public executions sought to convey an impression of regulated “justice.” The names of the prisoners and the purported reason for their executions were recorded, which this document sent by the camp administration to the Ustaša Surveillance Service in Zagreb is testament to.

After Nazi Germany’s attack against the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, communists joined Jews, Roma, and Serbs as one of Ustaša Croatia’s chief enemy groups. Those whose state-imposed, allegedly “inferior” racial or ethno-confessional identity intersected with Ustaša suspicions of communism stood in special danger. Jews and Serbs especially were therefore the first victims of Ustaša anti-communist campaign. In this document, the town of Gospić signified the nearby death camp complex Jadovno-Pag. The great majority of people deported to Gospić under suspicion of communism were never heard from again.