The largest concentration camp in the Balkans, opening in September 1941 and functioning up until its liberation in the Spring of 1945, when the remaining inmates were slaughtered and the buildings demolished by the retreating Ustase. Plans for the camp were drafted by
Maks Luburic while the Ustase were still in exile. Worked in tandem with the Sisak camp, specializing in killing children, and Stara Gradiska, the women's camp supervised by Nada Luburic-Sakic, Maks Luburic's sister and wife of Jasenovac commandant Dinko Sakic. Linked to railways which brought Jews, Serbs, Roma and political prisoners from across the NDH. Among the first detainees at Jasenovac was Croat Peasant Party leader Vladko Macek, who described in his memoirs how the "screams and wails of despair, broken by intermittent shooting, accompanied all my waking hours and followed me into sleep at night."
From concentration camps run by Germans in the occupied territories, two things distinguished Jasenovac: the brutal methods of execution preferred by the Ustase and the participation of dressed Catholic clergy in the atrocities committed. Strangulation and killing their victims by knives, axes, ropes, chains or live burning or burial were preferred to Zyklon-B. Several Franciscan priests, such as Fra Miroslav Filipovic-Majstorovic, were among Jasenovac's executioners.
Franjo Tudjman in Wastelands of Historical Reality argued that only 60-70,000 non-combatants were killed across the NDH, including in Jasenovac. Journalist Sam Vaknin: "The very use of the word 'only' in this context ought to send a frisson of repulsion down the spines of civilized men." The Jewish death toll up until August 1942, after which most Croatian Jews were sent instead to Auschwitz, was 18,000, according to historian Ivo Goldstein. The standard number given today for Jasenovac's death toll is "at least 200,000," though the truth will never be known. Tudjman later expressed a desire to disinter the remains of Ustase and place them in Jasenovac, thus forcing a "reconciliation" between the victims and their executioners unparalleled at any Holocaust memorial in Europe.
Documents below include those having to do directly with the operation of the Jasenovac camp, as well as the victims who never made it that far: the ones who died in anonymous pits, in ravines or were murdered in their beds. For more accounts of the terror in the NDH, see also Ante Pavelic, Andrija Artukovic and the NDH Archive.
