During World War II, a concentration camp complex in the former Yugoslavia became infamous for its extreme brutality. A Holocaust survivor and historian reportedly described it as worse than Auschwitz in terms of the savagery of its daily routine. The camp was so publicly violent that even the Nazis pressured the camp’s leadership to change its practices or shut it down.
The Germans, however, did not run this camp. It was the third-largest concentration camp system in Europe by area during the war. This was the Jasenovac camp complex, built and operated by the Croatian fascist Ustasha movement.
To understand Jasenovac, one must first understand the history of Yugoslavia. After World War I, a new nation was created from parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This country, Yugoslavia, brought together Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Montenegrins, North Macedonians, Albanians, and Bosnian Muslims, along with smaller communities of Jews and Roma.
For centuries, the various ethnic groups of the region had been in conflict. The two largest groups, Croats and Serbs, had a particularly fraught relationship. For hundreds of years, the region was dominated by foreign powers, most notably the Ottoman Turks and later the Austro-Hungarians.
These empires often used a divide-and-conquer strategy to keep the local populations weak and focused on each other rather than on their rulers. This policy helped maintain foreign control for centuries. It also deepened existing feuds and vendettas in the rugged, isolated terrain of the Balkans.
Religion added another layer of division. In Croatia, the dominant Christian faith was Catholicism. In Serbia, the dominant faith was Eastern Orthodoxy. Caught between these groups were Bosnian Muslims and Jews. Even the alphabets used by Croats and Serbs differed, with Croats using the Latin script and Serbs using Cyrillic, further marking their separate cultural and political ties.
In 1929, a Croatian nationalist lawyer named Ante Pavelić formed the Ustasha, a revolutionary organization. The name means "Rebel" or "Rise up" in Croatian. The group adopted many policies and symbols from Mussolini’s fascist Italy.
The Ustasha platform was built on extreme nationalism. It held that Croatia should be for Croats only, that Catholicism should be the sole religion, and that Serbs, Jews, and Roma were inferior and should be expelled or killed. The movement also sought to create an independent Croatian state that included Bosnia and parts of Serbia and Slovenia.
In 1934, Ustasha-supported assassins killed King Alexander I of Yugoslavia while he was visiting France. The assassination was the first in history to be captured on film. Throughout the 1930s, the Ustasha continued a campaign of terror within Croatia and Bosnia to create instability.
In March 1941, Yugoslavia’s ruler, Prince Paul, was deposed by his teenage cousin, King Peter II, who refused Hitler’s demand to allow German troops to pass through the country. In response, Hitler ordered the invasion of Yugoslavia. The German invasion and the brutal guerrilla war that followed were among the most savage of the entire war.
Even before the first German extermination camp was built, extermination camps were already operating in the territory of the newly declared Independent State of Croatia, known as the NDH. The first camp, Jadovno, was built in May 1941 and operated for just over three months. In that short time, thousands of Serbs and Croatian Jews were killed, with estimates ranging from 10,000 to nearly 70,000.
At Jadovno, victims were often thrown into deep pits, sometimes hundreds of feet deep. Children and babies were thrown in as well. Many women were sexually assaulted before being killed. Others were shot where they were found or tied together and tossed into rivers. Some groups were tied together and had grenades thrown at them.
Two of the most infamous figures at Jadovno were Miroslav Filipović-Majstorović, a monk known to inmates as "Brother Satan," and Vjekoslav Luburić, who later became a powerful and feared figure in the Ustasha government. Brother Satan was known for cutting throats with a curved farming knife worn on the wrist. He bragged of killing thousands of people this way. He also reportedly stomped children to death each morning and forced new guards to do the same.
Brother Satan was captured and hanged after the war. Luburić escaped to fascist Spain along with Pavelić. He was killed in 1969 by agents of the Yugoslav secret police, who used hammers.
Jasenovac was not a single camp but a complex with a main camp and dozens of satellite camps, most designed for one purpose: killing. At one point, the Ustasha used a small gas chamber that ran on truck exhaust fumes, but it was slow and unreliable. Most killings at Jasenovac were done by throat cutting, disembowelment, hammer blows to the head, and systematic torture.
Conditions at the camps were so horrific that even visiting Nazis found them disturbing. Barracks were ankle-deep in water and sewage. Rats and vermin roamed freely among the dead. Latrines were boards over deep pits of waste, and guards used poles to push victims into them to drown.
Reliable estimates of the dead at Jasenovac run to 15,000 or more. All told, mainstream historians estimate the Ustasha killed between 350,000 and 400,000 people, possibly more. Pavelić, who was rumored to have received a basket of Serbian eyeballs from a massacre, escaped to Spain and died there in 1959, never facing justice.
At the end of the war, the Communist partisans came to power in Yugoslavia. They established an authoritarian state that used force to suppress ethnic hatred and revenge. But when Yugoslavia collapsed in the late 1980s, the old ethnic divisions and cycles of revenge resurfaced, leading once again to widespread crimes against humanity in the region.