The Worst Place on Earth

When speaking of the Holocaust in Europe, one tends to think of such monstrosities as Auschwitz, Chelmno, Treblinka and others. Today the names of these appalling places are burned into our collective minds and rightly so. However few have heard of the concentration/extermination camps that existed in Yugoslavia. One in particular, Jasenovac, was the epitome of savage barbarity and cruelty so extreme it’s hard to fathom in this day and age.

Built in August of 1941 by the fascist Ustase regime, Jasenovac became an extermination camp for ethnic Serbs, Jews and Roma. The camp actually consisted of five subcamps spread out over eighty one square miles on both banks of the Sava and Una rivers in what is now the Independent State of Croatia. The actual extermination grounds were located in the village of Donja Gradina.

The exact numbers of people killed is still unknown to this day. The US Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. estimates that between 77,000 and 100,000 people were murdered in the three and a half years the camp was in operation. Some scholars believe that number is actually closer to 700,000.

In April of 1941, the independent state of Croatia was founded and supported by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Croatia adopted similar racial and political policies that the Nazis followed in that their goal was the complete destruction of Jews and Roma, but the main goal of the Ustase regime was the total annihilation of the Serb people.

The conditions for the inmates were perhaps worse at Jasenovac than at other similar camps. There was no potable water so the prisoners were forced to drink from the Sava River. The barracks were filled with decomposing corpses and unimaginable filth which quickly spread diseases like typhus, dysentery and diphtheria.

The Ustase were particularly adept at generating fear and anxiety through extreme acts of cruelty in which the prisoners were forced to witness. Often, they would be kept standing for hours while a small number were selected at random to be tortured and killed in full view. Many times just for sport, the guards would drown prisoners in the open air latrines by either tossing the weakest ones in, or by physically holding them under.

The guards would often make bets with each other as to how many inmates they could slaughter. One guard, Petar Brizica, used a special curved knife blade normally used for cutting wheat to slash the throats of over 1300 newly arrived prisoners.

The Ustase would also cremate prisoners alive who were still conscious and awake. Others were killed by hammers, saws and blunt instruments and others still would be disemboweled and thrown into the river while still alive. All of this being done with the implicit approval of the Nazi overlords. The Ustase even ran a camp for Jewish, Serbian and Roma children. The Sisak children’s concentration camp housed over 6,000 children aged 3 to 16 in deplorable conditions. Over 4,000 of them perished often at the barbaric hands of the guards who took special delight in killing the tiny helpless victims.

The end of Jasenovac came in April of 1945 as Yugoslavian partisans started to approach the camp. The Ustase attempted to speed up the killings which resulted in a camp revolt on April 22^nd.  Over 600 prisoners revolted and 520 were killed with only 80 escaping into the surrounding woods. The Ustase then killed the remaining prisoners and set fire to the camps leaving nothing but ash and bones behind.

After the war, Yugoslavian president Josip Tito sought to erase the memory of the Ustase crimes as a way of uniting his countrymen and this policy continued into recent times. The Jasenovac Memorial Site was officially opened to the public on July 4^th, 1966 and continues to be reinterpreted to this very day. Most of the physical evidence of the camp has been lost, much of it by the Ustase as they attempted to hide all evidence of their crime. Only depressions in the ground and the occasional foundation can be seen today alongside memorials such as the massive Stone Flower, offer any tangible evidence of the massive and sadistic crime that was committed.