Genocide of Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia

See also: The Holocaust in Croatia and Porajmos

World War II persecution of Serbs
Part of World War II
Ethnic-Serbs, watched by Ustasha guards, leaving town after being expelled from their homes
Location	Independent State of Croatia, Serbia under German occupation
Date	1941 - 1945
Target	Serbian civilians
Attack type	Mass murder, ethnic cleansing, deportation, etc.
Deaths	between 82,600 to 700,000.

The World War II persecution of Serbs or Serbian Genocide (Serbian: Геноцид над Србима у Другом свјетском рату, Croatian: Genocid nad Srbima u Drugom Svijetskom Ratu) refers to the attempt at extermination made towards ethnic Serbs from 1941-1945 by Croat Fascists, ethnic-Albanian radicals and Axis occupational forces.

During World War II, there was widespread persecution of Serbs, with the Croatian Ustashe murdering 330,000–600,000 people, while 250,000 were expelled, and another 200,000 were forced to convert to Catholicism. The victims were almost entirely Serbs, but also included 37,000 Jews and thousands of Roma (Gypsies). The estimate by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum say that Croat authorities murdered between 330,000 and 390,000 ethnic Serb residents of Croatia and Bosnia during the period of Ustasha rule, out of which around 100,000 were murdered in the Jasenovac concentration camp.

Definition of Genocide

The term genocide was coined by Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959), a Polish-Jewish legal scholar, in 1944. Genocide is defined as, "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group".

Background

Origins of the Serbs

The Serbs, a Slavic people, specifically of the South Slavic subgroup, arrived in the Balkans during the 6th and 7th century A.D. Large Serb communities subsequently developed in Southeastern Europe.

In 768, the Serbs established a nation-state for themselves, calling it the Principality of Serbia.

In 1389, the forces of the Serbian Empire clashed with the Armies of the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Kosovo. The Ottomans Turks were numerically superior. However, the bulk of both armies was wiped out in the battle and both Empire's monarchs lost their lives in it. Although the Ottomans managed to annihilate the Serbian army, they also suffered high casualties which delayed their progress. The Serbs were left with too few men to effectively defend their lands, while the Turks had many more troops in the east. Consequently, the Serbian principalities that were not already Ottoman vassals, one after the other became so in the following years.

Following the Serbian Revolution, Serbia became a de facto independent state and at the conclusion of the First World War, the Kingdom of Serbia united with the previously unrecognised State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs to form a new Pan-Slavic state, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.

The Creation of Yugoslavia

File:Princip arrest.jpg

Gavrilo Princip being arrested by the police after the Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Yugoslav nationalism escalated and cemented in the Balkans following the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip, the subsequent invasion of Serbia and the outbreak of World War I. Yugoslav nationalists called for the independence and unification of the Yugoslav nationalities of Austria-Hungary along with Serbia and Montenegro into a single Yugoslav state. Dalmatian Croat politician Ante Trumbić became a prominent Yugoslav nationalist leader during the war, and led the Yugoslav Committee that lobbied the Allies to support the creation of an independent Yugoslavia. Trumbić faced initial hostility from Serbian Prime Minister Nikola Pašić who preferred an enlarged Serbia over a unified Yugoslav state, however both Pašić and Trumbić agreed to a compromise which was delivered at the Corfu Declaration on 20 July 1917 that advocated the creation of a united state of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes that would be led by the Serbian House of Karađorđević.

Serbian soldiers enter Zagreb, 1918.

As the Habsburg Empire dissolved, a pro-Entente National Council of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs took power in Zagreb on October 6th, 1918. On October 29th, a Yugoslavist Croatian Sabor (parliament) declared independence and vested its sovereignty in the new State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs and two days later it declared its wish to enter into a state of union with Serbia and Montenegro. Soon afterward on November 5th, the National Council in Zagreb asked the Serbian military for help in controlling the anarchy that was erupting in Croatia. Because help did not arrive before the end of November, the National Council again asked the Serbian army for help because: "The population is in revolt. We have total anarchy and only the Serbian army can restore order".

The Yugoslav Committee was given the task of representing the new state abroad. However, quarrels broke out immediately about the terms of the proposed union with Serbia. Svetozar Pribićević, a Croatian Serb, a leader of the Croatian-Serbian Coalition and vice-president of the state, wanted an immediate and unconditional union. Others (non-Serbs), who favoured a federal Yugoslavia, were more hesitant. The leader of the opposition was Stjepan Radić, who demanded the creation of a South Slavic Confederacy in which there would be three heads of state: the Serbian king, the Croatian ban and the president of the Slovenian national council. In his opinion, the confederacy was to have only ministers for foreign affairs, for defense and for the distribution of food. This proposition was rejected by the National Council of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs as an example of separatism. The National Council, whose authority was in fact limited, feared that Serbia would simply annex the former Habsburg territories; on the other hand, the Italians were moving to take more territory than they had been allotted in London Pact.

Political opinion was divided, and Serbian ministers said that if Croats insisted on their own republic or a sort of independence, then Serbia would simply take areas inhabited by the Serbs and already controlled by the Serbian Army. After much debate and after Syrmia, which was under control of the Serbian army, declared secession, the National Council agreed to a unification with Serbia, although its declaration stated that the final organization of the state should be left to the future Constituent Assembly which would make final decisions only with a two-thirds majority.

The kingdom was formed on 1 December 1918 under the name "Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes" ([Краљевина Срба, Хрвата и Словенаца / Kraljevina Srba, Hrvata i Slovenaca] Error: {{Lang-xx}}: text has italic markup (help), Croatian: Kraljevina Srba, Hrvata i Slovenaca, Slovene: Kraljevina Srbov, Hrvatov in Slovencev) or Kingdom of SHS (Краљевина СХС / Kraljevina SHS) for short. The new Kingdom was made up of the formerly independent kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro (which had unified in the previous month), and of a substantial amount of territory that was formerly part of Austria–Hungary, the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs. The lands previously in Austria–Hungary that formed the new state included:

• Croatia, Slavonia and Vojvodina from the Hungarian part of the Empire,
• Carniola, part of Styria and most of Dalmatia from the Austrian part, and
• the crown province of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The new government tried to integrate the new country politically and economically, a task made difficult because of:

• the diversity of language (chiefly disagreements between Serbian and Croatian speakers over standardising Serbo-Croat);
• ethnicities, and religions in the new state;
• the different history of each region (characterised by centuries of subjugation by different rulers, e.g., Venice, Hungary, Austria, Ottoman Empire); and
• differences in economic development among regions (a more developed north spanning Slovenia, northern Croatia and northern Serbia, than a poorer south which encompassed Dalmatia, Montenegro and southern Serbia).

The creation of the state was supported by pan-Slav nationalists and Serbian nationalists. For the pan-Slavic movement, all of the South Slav (Yugoslav) people had united into a single state and hoped that the peoples would unite as Slavs and abandon past differences. For Serbian nationalists, the desired goal of uniting the majority of the Serb people across the Balkans into one state was also achieved. Furthermore, as Serbia already had a government, military, and police force, it was the logical choice to form the nucleus of the Yugoslav state.

Puniša Račić assasinates Stjepan Radić in the Legislative Assembly.

Yugoslavia participated in the Paris Peace Conference with Trumbić as the country's representative. Trumbić successfully vouched for the inclusion of most Yugoslavs of the former Austria-Hungary to be included within the borders of Yugoslavia but failed to secure the inclusion of 500,000 Slovenes and Croats who were placed under Italian rule with the Treaty of Rapallo of 1920.

Universal Newsreel's film-reel about King Alexander I's assassination.

The formation of the constitution of 1921 sparked tensions between the different Yugoslav nationalities. Trumbić opposed the 1921 constitution and over time grew increasingly hostile towards the Yugoslav government that he saw as being centralized in the favour of Serb hegemony over Yugoslavia.

On June 20th, 1928, in the Legislative Assembly, Puniša Račić, a member of People's Radical Party from Montenegro, got up, drew out a revolver and went on to shoot several people, including Stjepan Radić-- the leader of the Croatian Peasant Party (Hrvatska Seljačka Stranka). Radić was left for dead and indeed had such a serious stomach wound that he died several weeks later at the age of 57.

Not long after that, on January 6th, 1929, using as a pretext the political crisis triggered by the shooting, King Alexander abolished the Constitution, prorogued the Parliament and introduced a personal dictatorship (known as the January 6th Dictatorship, Šestosiječanjska diktatura, Šestojanuarska diktatura). He also changed the name of the country to Kingdom of Yugoslavia and changed the internal divisions from the 33 oblasts (županije) to nine new banovinas on October 8th.

During an official visit to France in 1934, King Alexander I of Yugoslavia was assassinated in Marseille by a member of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization – an extreme nationalist organization in Bulgaria that had ties with the Ustashe movement: a nationalist, terrorist group that hated the Serbs and wanted Croatia to be independent of Yugoslavia.

The Ustashe

Name

The word Ustasha (plural: Ustashe) is a variation of the Croatian word ustanik (plural: ustanici). It is derived from the verb ustati (Croatian for rise up). Their name derives from the intransitive verb ustati which means "to rise up," hence Ustasha would mean an insurgent, or a rebel. This name did not have fascist connotations during their early years in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia as the term "ustat" was itself used in Herzegovina to denote the insurgents from the Herzegovinian rebellion of 1875. "Pučki-ustaša" was a military rank in the Imperial Croatian Home Guard (1868–1918). The full original name of the organization appeared in April 1931 as the Ustaša - Hrvatska revolucionarna organizacija or UHRO (Ustasha - Croatian revolutionary organization), though in 1933 it was renamed the Ustaša - Hrvatski revolucionarni pokret (Ustasha - Croatian revolutionary movement) which it kept until World War II.

The symbol of the Ustasha regime (left) and the modern flag of Croatia (right), showing the similarities between the two.

The Independent State of Croatia's leader, Ante Pavelić.

Ideology

Their ideology of the movement was a blend of Nazism and Croatian nationalism. The Ustashe supported the creation of a Greater Croatia that would span to the River Drina and to the outskirts of Belgrade. The movement emphasized the need for a racially "pure" Croatia and promoted the extermination of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies. One of the major ideological influences of the Croatian nationalism of the Ustashe was 19th century Croatian activist Ante Starčević. Starčević was an advocate of Croatian unity and independence and was both anti-Habsburg and anti-Serb. He envisioned the creation of a Greater Croatia that would include territories inhabited by Bosniaks, Serbs, and Slovenes, considering Bosniaks and Serbs as Croats who had been converted to Islam and Orthodox Christianity while considering the Slovenes to be "mountain Croats". He argued that the large Serb presence in territories claimed by a Greater Croatia was the result of recent settlement, encouraged settlement by Habsburg rulers, and influx of groups like Vlachs who took up Orthodox Christianity and identified themselves as Serbs.

The Ustashe used Starčević's theories to promote the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina to Croatia and recognized Croatia as having two major ethnocultural components: Catholic Croats and "Muslim Croats".

Armed struggle, genocide and terrorism were glorified by the Ustashe.

Prelude

Gathering of Ustasha members in Zagreb, showing how the Croatian Fascist organization was quick to adopt the Nazi salute.

Prior to and during the extermination campaign against the Serb people during World War II, mass propaganda was initiated by the Germans and their Croatian and Albanian collaborators as to dehumanize the Serbs and to justify their extermination just as had been done to the Jews previously.

Prior to the Axis Invasion of Yugoslavia, the Nazi propaganda-machine revived the First World War jingle "Alle Serben müssen sterben" (All Serbs Must Die), which was popular in Vienna in 1914 (also occurring as: Serbien muß sterbien). The jingle was commonly chanted by Ustasha-supporters during the Second World War.

Another popular slogan used by the Ustashe was, Srbe na vrbe!, meaning "Hang Serbs from the willow trees". It is hate speech calling for the extermination of Serbs. The slogan originates from an xenophobic and racist poem by the Slovene politician Marko Natlačen published in 1914, at the beginning of the First World War.

It was popularized before World War II by Mile Budak, the chief architect of the Ustashe ideology against Serbs, and during World War II there were mass hangings of Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia, as part of the Holocaust and the Ustashe's persecution of the Serbs.

Invasion of Yugoslavia

Main article: Invasion of Yugoslavia

Occupation and partition of Yugoslavia in World War II.

Fearing an invasion by the Axis Powers, Regent Prince Paul signed the Tripartite Pact on 25 March 1941, pledging cooperation with the Axis. Because of Paul's enormously unpopular decision, massive anti-Fascist and anti-German demonstrations took place in Belgrade.

On 27 March, the regime of Prince Paul was overthrown by a military coup d'état with British support. The 17-year-old Peter II was declared to be of age and placed in power. General Dušan Simović became his Prime Minister. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia withdrew its support for the Axis de facto without formally renouncing the Tripartite Pact.

Hitler became furious at what he interpreted to be "Yugoslavia's Betrayal". The country was invaded on April 6th, 1941 and was conquered only 11 days later. The Kingdom was divided into several occupation zones. A rump Serbia remained, following the country's dismemberment. The territory was divided among the occupiers as follows:

• Third Reich - Slovenia was included in the Reich and Banat was occupied and separated from Serbia.
• Hungary occupied the Bačka, Baranja, Međimurje and Prekmurje.
• Bulgaria occupied the south (including the territory of today's Republic of Macedonia).
• Italy occupied Montenegro (which included much of today's southern Serbia) and also territory including the province of Kosovo in which Albanians formed a majority, and which was governed as an entity together with the reoccupied Albania.
• The small rump of Serbia itself was under German military occupation and Serbian quisling soldiers-politicians.
• A Nazi puppet state was established, under Ustasha rule, which embraced most of the territory of present-day Croatia and the whole of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This Axis satellite was known as the NDH (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska) or Independent State of Croatia.

Ustashe Persecution in the Independent State of Croatia

The Order for Serbs and Jews to move out of their homes in Zagreb, Croatia and a warning of forcible expulsions of both Serbs and Jews who failed to comply.

On April 10th, the most senior home-based Ustasha, Slavko Kvaternik, took control of the police in Zagreb and in a radio broadcast that day proclaimed the formation of the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH). Meanwhile, Ante Pavelić and several hundred Ustashe left their camps in Italy and travelled to Zagreb, where Pavelić declared a new government on April 16th, 1941. He accorded himself the title of "Poglavnik" — a Croatian approximation to "Führer" and translating to something like "Headman" in English. The Independent State of Croatia was declared to be on Croatian "ethnic and historical territory"

Under Ante Pavelić's leadership and command, the Ustashe subjected ethnic Serbs, together with much smaller minorities of Jews and Roma, to a campaign of genocidal persecution. Between 197,000– 390,000 Serbs were killed in the Independent State of Croatia by the Ustashe and their Axis allies.

Jasenovac concentration camp

The Ustashe slaughtered their victims with a merciless tenacity which appalled and disgusted both friends and foes alike. A large portion of the attrocities occured in the notorious Jasenovac concentration camp. It was the largest extermination camp in the Balkans and among the largest in Europe. The camp alone accounted for approximately 10% of the total number of persons killed in wartime Yugoslavia.

The Ustashe interned, tortured and brutally executed men, women and children in the camp. Serbs constituted the majority of inmates. Upon arrival at the camp, the prisoners were marked with colors, similar to the use of Nazi concentration camp badges: blue for Serbs, and red for communists (non-Serbian resistance members), while Roma had no marks. In several instances, inmates with blue badges were killed immediately upon arrival because of their Serbian ethnicity and most Serb inmates considered it to be the only reason for their imprisonment.

The Serbs were predominantly brought from the Kožara region, where the Ustashe captured areas that were held by Partisan guerrillas. These were brought to the camp without sentence, almost destined for immediate execution, accelerated via the use of machine-guns. Besides sporadic and random killings and deaths due to the poor living conditions, many inmates arriving at Jasenovac were scheduled for systematic extermination. An important criterion for selection was the duration of a prisoner's anticipated detention. Strong men capable of labor and sentenced to less than three years of incarceration were allowed to live. All inmates with indeterminate sentences or sentences of three years or more were immediately scheduled for execution, regardless of their fitness.

Most of the women that were not killed were sent to rape-camps and the children that weren't killed were taken from their mothers and were dispersed to Catholic orphanages.

Systematic extermination varied both as to place and form. Some of the executions were mechanical, following Nazi methodology, while others were manual. The mechanical means of extermination included:

• Cremation: The Ustashe cremated living inmates, who were sometimes drugged and sometimes fully awake, as well as corpses. The first cremations took place in the brick factory ovens in January, 1942. Engineer Hinko Dominik Picilli perfected this method by converting seven of the kiln's furnace chambers into more sophisticated crematories. Some bodies were buried rather than cremated, however, as was discovered by exhumations of bodies after the war.

• Gassing and poisoning: The Ustashe, in following the Nazi example, as set in Auschwitz and Sajmište, tried to employ poisonous gas to kill inmates that arrived in Stara-Gradiška. They first tried to gas the women and children that arrived from camp Djakovo with gas vans that Simo Klaić called "green Thomas". The method was later replaced with stationary gas-chambers with Zyklon B and sulfur dioxide.

File:Ustasaguard.jpg

Ustasha guard in a mass grave at Jasenovac concentration camp.

The so-called "manual-means-of-execution", the Ustashe's favorites, were executions that took part in utilizing sharp or blunt craftsmen tools: knives, saws, hammers, etc. The prefered manual-weapon of many Ustasha guards was the Srbosjek (or Serbcutter). This knife was originally a type of agricultural knife manufactured for wheat sheaf cutting.

The upper part of the knife was made of leather, as a sort of a glove, designed to be worn with the thumb going through the hole, so that only the blade protruded from the hand. It was a curved, 12 cm long knife with the edge on its concave side. The knife was fastened to a bowed oval copper plate, while the plate was fastened to a thick leather bangle. Its agricultural purpose was to make it easier for the field workers to cut wheat sheaves open before threshing them. The knife was fixed on the glove plate in order to prevent injuries and to prevent taking care of a separate knife in order to improve the work speed.

The living conditions in the camp evidenced the severity typical of Nazi death camps: a meager diet, deplorable accommodations, and the cruel treatment of the Ustashe guards.

• Food: Again, typical of Fascist death camps, the diet of inmates at Jasenovac was insufficient to sustain life: The sorts of food they consumed changed during the camp's existence. In camp Bročice, inmates were given a "soup" made of hot water with starch for breakfast, and beans for lunch and dinner (served at 6:00, 12:00 and 21:00). Food in Camp No. III was initially better, consisting of potatoes instead of beans; however, in January the diet was changed to a single daily serving of thin "turnip soup". By the end of the year, the diet had been changed again, this time to three daily portions of thin gruel made of water and starch. Food changed repeatedly thereafter.
• Water: Jasenovac was even more severe than most death camps in one respect: a general lack of potable drinking-water. Prisoners were forced to drink water from the Sava river, which was deliberately contaminated with horseradish.

A knife nicknamed "Srbosjek" or "Serbcutter", strapped to the hand, which was used by the Croatian Ustashe for the speedy killing of inmates in Jasenovac.

• Accommodations: In the first camps, Bročice and Krapje, inmates slept in standard concentration-camp barracks, with three tiers of bunks. In Camp No. III, which housed some 3,000 people, inmates initially slept in the attics of the workshops, in an open depot designated as a railway "tunnel", or simply in the open. A short time later, eight barracks were erected. Inmates slept in six of these barracks, while the other two were used as a "clinic" and a "hospital", where ill inmates were sent to die or be executed.
• Forced labor: As in all concentration camps, Jasenovac inmates were forced daily to perform some 11 hours of hard labor, under the eye of their Ustasha captors, who would execute any inmate for the most trivial reasons. The labor section was overseen by Ustasha's Hinko Dominik Picilli and Tihomir Kordić. Picillii would personally lash inmates in order to force them to work harder. He divided the "Jasenovac labor force" into 16 groups, including groups of construction, brickworks, metal-works, agriculture, etc. The inmates would perish from the hard work. Work in the brickworks was hard. Blacksmith work was also done, as the inmates forged knives and other weapons for the Ustasha. Dike construction work was the most feared.
• Sanitation: Inside the camp, squalor and lack of sanitation reigned: clutter, blood, vomit and decomposing-bodies filled the barracks, which were also full of pests and of the foul scent of the often overflowing latrine bucket. Due to exposure to the elements, inmates suffered from impaired health leading to epidemics of typhus, typhoid, malaria, pleuritis, influenza, dysentery and diphtheria. During pauses in labor (5:00-6:00; 12:00-13:00, 17:00-20:00) inmates had to relieve themselves at open latrines, which consisted of big pits dug in open fields, covered in planks. Inmates would tend to fall inside, and often died. The Ustashe encouraged this by either having internees separate the planks, or by physically drowning inmates inside. The pit would overflow during floods and rains, and was also deliberately drained into the lake, from which inmate drinking water was taken. The inmate's rags and blankets were too thin to prevent exposure to frost, as was the shelter of the barracks. The clothes and blankets were rarely and poorly cleansed, as inmates were only allowed to wash them briefly in the lake's waters once a month save during winter time, when the lake froze. Then, a sanitation device was erected in a warehouse, where a few clothes were insufficiently boiled.
• Lack of personal possessions: The inmates were stripped of their belongings and personal attire. As inmates, only ragged prison-issue clothing was given to them. In winter, inmates were given thin "rain-coats" and they were allowed to make light sandals. Inmates were given a personal food bowl, designated to contain 0.4ltrs of "soup" they were fed with. Inmates whose bowl was missing (stolen by another inmate to defecate in) would receive no food.

On the night of 29 August 1942, the prison guards made bets among themselves as to who could slaughter the largest number of inmates. One of the guards, Petar Brzica, boasted that he had cut the throats of about 1,360 new arrivals. A gold watch, a silver service, a roasted suckling pig, and a bottle of Italian wine were among his rewards.Others who confessed to participating in the bet included Ante Zrinušić, who killed some 600 inmates, and Mile Friganović, who gave a detailed and consistent report of the incident. Friganović admitted to having killed some 1,100 inmates. He specifically recounted his torture of an old man named Vukasin; he attempted to compel the man to bless Ante Pavelić, which the old man refused to do, even after Friganović had cut off his ears, nose and tongue after each refusal. Ultimately, he cut out the old man's eyes, tore out his heart, and slashed his throat.

In April 1945, as Partisan units approached the camp, the camp's Croatian Fascist supervisors attempted to erase traces of the atrocities by working the death camp at full capacity. On 22 April, 600 prisoners revolted; 520 were killed and 80 escaped. Before abandoning the camp shortly after the prisoner revolt, the Ustashe killed the remaining prisoners and torched the buildings, guardhouses, torture rooms, the "Picili Furnace", and all the other structures in the camp. Upon entering the camp, the Partisans found only ruins, soot, smoke, and the skeletal remains of thousands of victims.

Stara Gradiška concentration camp

The Stara Gradiška camp was built near the village of Stara Gradiška. The camp was specially constructed for women and children and it became notorious for the crimes committed against them. Examples included the torture that took place in cellar 3, in the "Gagro Hotel", where inmates were starved, tortured and then strangled to death using piano-wire.

The camp was guarded by the Ustashe and several female Croatian nurses. Inmates were killed using different means, including firearms, mallets, machetes and knives. At the "K", or "Kula" unit, Jewish and Serbian women, with weak or little children, were starved and tortured at the "Gagro Hotel", a cellar in which Ustasha Nikola Gagro used as a place of torture. Other inmates were killed using poisonous gas.

View of the Stara Gradiška concentration camp which was formerly an Austro-Hungarian fortress.

Gas experiments were conducted initially at veterinary stables near the "Economy" unit, where horses and then humans were killed using sulphur dioxide and later Zyklon B. Gassing was also tested on children in the yard, where the camp commandant, Ustasha sergeant Ante Vrban, viewed its effects. Most gassing deaths occurred in the attics of "the infamous tower", where several thousand children from the Kožara region were killed in May and 2,000 more in June 1942. Subsequently, smaller groups of 400-600 children, and a few men and women, were gassed. At his trial, Vrban stated:

"Q. And what did you do with the children

A. The weaker ones we poisoned

Q. How?

A. We led them into a yard... and into it we threw gas

Q. What gas?

A. Zyklon."

Witness Cijordana Friedlender testified:

At that time fresh women and children came daily to the Camp at Stara Gradiška. About fourteen days later, Vrban [Commandant of the Camp] ordered all the children to be separated from their mothers and put in one room. Ten of us were told to carry them there in blankets. The children crawled about the room, and one child put an arm and leg through the doorway, so that the door could not be closed. Vrban shouted: 'Push it!' When I did not do that, he banged the door and crushed the child's leg. Then he took the child by its whole-leg, and banged it on the wall till it was dead. After that we continued carrying the children in. When the room was full, Vrban brought poison gas and killed them all.

According to witness Milka Zabičić, the gassing stopped due to a scheduled visit by a Red Cross delegation in 1943, which did not arrive until June 1944.

Sisak children's concentration camp

In the town of Sisak, situated near Jasenovac, the Ustashe's presence was vigilant. Early in 1942, the local synagogue was vandalized and robbed utterly by Croat extremists, and the building was later transformed to house a worker's hall. The inhabitants of Sisak were quickly brought to the Ustashe's attention, and those of them that were of Serbian and other, non-Croat kinship were tormented.

A large camp was later erected and it held more than 6,600 Serbian and Roma children throughout World War II. The children, aged between 3and 16, were housed in abandoned stables, ridden with filth and pests. Malnutrition and dysentery seriously impaired their health. They were fed daily with a portion of thin gruel and treated horribly by their captors.

Jastrebarsko concentration camp

The camp housed Serbian children between the ages of one month to fourteen yearsand was operational for two months in 1942. The camp was set up specifically for Serb children from the Kožara region of Croatia. During its two months of operation, 1,018 children died in the camp. Ilovara Francis, a gravedigger who was paid "per piece", claimed to have buried 768 children in a six week period. Meanwhile, another 1,300 children were transported to Jasenovac. On August 26, 1942, the Yugoslav Partisans liberated the camp, freeing approximately 700 children.

Jadovno concentration camp

The Jadovno concentration camp was located in а valley near Mount Velebit. It occupied an area of 1250 square meters and was fenced with barbed wire 4 meters high. The guards were posted 1 km all around the concentration camp's barbed wire. Prisoners, mostly Serbs, arrived from the town of Gospić where the Ustashe selected their victims.

The Jadovno victims association states that in 132 days in the camp 40,123 victims were killed. Among them 38,010 were Serbs, 1,998 were Jews, 88 Croats, 11 Slovenes, 9 Muslims, 2 Hungarians, 2 Czechs, 1 Russian, 1 Roma and 1 Montenegrin.

Nazi persecution in occupied Serbia

Kragujevac

Thousands of men and boys were slaughtered in Kragujevac, Serbia, by Nazi German soldiers between October 20th and 21st, 1941. All males from the town between the ages of sixteen and sixty were assembled, including high school students, and the victims were selected from amongst them. Between 2,500 to 5,000 people were killed.

Germans escorting people from Kragujevac and its surrounding area to be executed.

Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel had issued an order on 16 September 1941, applicable to all of occupied Europe, to kill 50 communists for every wounded German soldier and 100 for each German soldier killed. German soldiers were attacked in early October by the Communist Partisans and by Chetniks under Draža Mihajlović near Gornji Milanovac, and the massacre was a direct reprisal for the German losses in that battle. In addition, the German High Command was furious because the bodies of the German soldiers had reportedly been mutilated by the guerrillas, so it was decided that the punishment must be particularly harsh.

A German report stated that: "The executions in Kragujevac occurred although there had been no attacks on members of the Wehrmacht in this city, for the reason that not enough hostages could be found elsewhere.

Vojvodina

Main article: Occupation of Vojvodina, 1941-1944

During the four years of occupation, Axis forces committed numerous war crimes against the civilian population in Vojvodina where about 50,000 people were murdered and about 280,000 arrested, violated or tortured. The victims were mostly Serbs but also included Jews and Roma.

Albanian role and Kosovo

In 1939, Count Ciano spoke of Albanian irredentist claims to Kosovo as valuable to Italy's objectives, saying:

The Kosovars [are] 850,000 Albanians, strong of body, firm in spirit, and enthusiastic about the idea of a Union with their Homeland. Apparently, the Serbians are terrified of them. Today one must…chloroform the Yugoslavians. But later on one must adopt a politics of deep interest in Kosovo. This will help to keep alive in the Balkans an irredentist problem which will polarize the attention of the Albanians themselves and be a knife at the back of Yugoslavia.

— Galleazo Ciano, 1939

During World War II, with the fall of Yugoslavia in 1941, Italians placed the land inhabited by ethnic Albanians under the jurisdiction of an Albanian quisling government. That included Kosovo.

Kosovo's inclusion into a geo-political Albanian entity was followed by extensive persecution of non-Albanians (mostly Serbs) by Albanian fascists. Most of the war crimes were perpetrated by the Skenderbeg SS Division and the Balli Kombëtar.

Mustafa Kruja, the then Prime Minister of Albania, was in Kosovo in June 1942, and at a meeting with the Albanian leaders of Kosovo, he said:

We should endeavor to ensure that the Serb population of Kosovo be –- the area should be cleansed of them and all Serbs who have been living here for centuries should be termed colonialists and sent to concentration camps in Albania. The Serb settlers should be killed...

— Mustafa Kruja, June 1942

In April 1943, Heinrich Himmler created the 21st Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Skanderbeg manned by Albanian and Kosovar Albanian volunteers. From August 1944, the division participated in operations against the Yugoslav Partisans and in massacring the local Serb inhabitants. SS-Brigadeführer August Schmidthuber, one of the commanders of the division, was captured in 1945 and turned over to Yugoslav authorities. He was put on trial in February 1947 by a Yugoslav military tribunal in Belgrade, on charges of participating in massacres, deportations and atrocities against civilians. The tribunal sentenced him to death by hanging. He was executed on February 27th, 1947.

Thousands of ethnic-Serbs had their surnames Albanized (e.g. from Popović to Popovichi, Tačić to Thaqi).

Overall, it is estimated that some 40,000 to 60,000 Serbs were killed and another 200,000 driven out of Kosovo in a mass-exodus during the Second World War.

After the war, pro-Albanian Yugoslav policies allowed the Kosovo-Albanian population to increase from 70% to well over 90%. In contrast, the Serbian population waned to just 8% of the pre war population.

Marshall Tito further de-Serbianized the Kosovo region when the Yugoslav League of Communists invited 300,000 Albanians from Albania to settle in Kosovo. The communists also prevented the Serbs that fled during World War II from returning to their homes in Kosovo.

Cultural Destruction

The Ustashe rejected the concept that Croats were primarily a Slavic people and claimed that Croats were primarily the descendents of the Goths and thus had stronger Germanic roots than Slavic roots.

The Ustashe recognized both Roman Catholicism and Islam as the national religions of the Croatian people, but rejected Orthodox Christianity as being incompatible with their objectives. The Ustashe in power banned the use of the expression "Serbian Orthodox faith" and mandated the use of the expression "Greek-Eastern faith" in its place. Hundreds of Serbian Orthodox Christian churches were closed, destroyed, or plundered during Ustasha rule. On July 2nd, 1942 the Croatian Orthodox Church was founded to replace the institutions of the Serbian Orthodox Church.

Controversy

Attitudes in Modern-day Croatia

Today, many notable Croats and Croatian politicians have expressed the intent to minimise the seriousness of the crimes committed against ethnic-Serbs in the name of the Croatian people. This is mostly because Croatia has no laws against historical revisionism or Holocaust denial.

Banner from a Toronto-area concert, showing support for the ultra-nationalist, pro-Fascist band Thompson.

Notably, the lead-singer of Thompson, a Croatian rock band known for its ultra-nationalist, Fascist and Serbophobic lyrics, Marko Perković, has on numerous occasions expressed feelings of sympathy towards the Ustasha movement.

File:Thompson Maksimir 17.6.2007 3.jpg

A young couple wearing Ustasha insignia before a Thompson concert in Zagreb, Croatia on June 17th, 2007.

Thompson's lyrics include:

Oj Ustaše braćo mila, duboka je voda Drina.

Drinu treba pregaziti, i Srbiju zapaliti.

Which roughly translates to:

Hey, Ustashe, my dear brothers, the Drina river is deep.

We should cross it, and burn Serbia!

Perković has also expressed support for late-Croatian leader Franjo Tuđman, who was once quoted as saying, "Thank God that my wife is neither a Serb, or a Jew..."

In June 2007, the Simon Wiesenthal Center posted a letter to then-President of Croatia, Stipe Mesić, in which it expressed "its sense of outrage and disgust in the wake of a massive show of fascist salutes, symbols and uniforms at a rock concert by popular ultra-nationalist Croatian singer "Thompson" attended by 60,000 people in Zagreb."

It is also not uncommon to hear ultra-nationalist Croats chant, "Ubi Srbina", or "Kill the Serb" during football/soccer matches.

Denial

In 1989, the future President of Croatia, Franjo Tuđman, published his most famous work, Horrors of War: Historical Reality and Philosophy (Croatian: Bespuća povijesne zbiljnosti; literal translation Wastelands of Historical Reality) in which he questioned the official numbers of victims killed by the Ustashe during the Second World War. In the book, Tuđman claims without providing evidence that less than thirty-thousand people were killed in Jasenovac. Tuđman is the same person who estimated that a mere 900,000 Jews (instead of six million) had perished in the Holocaust.

Position of the Roman Catholic Church

For the duration of the war, the Vatican kept up full diplomatic relations with the genocidal Independent State of Croatia and even granted Pavelić an audience with its papal nuncio in the capital Zagreb. The nuncio was briefed on the efforts of the Ustashe to convert ethnic-Serbs to Roman Catholicism.

The Ustashe held the position that Eastern Orthodoxy, as a symbol of Serbian identity, was their greatest foe. The Ustashe never recognized the existence of the Serb people on the territories of Croatia or anywhere else in the world, for that matter– they referred to them only as "Croats of the Eastern faith." They also called Bosnian-Muslims "Croats of the Islamic faith," but they had a much stronger dislike of ethnic-Serbs.

Some former priests, mostly Franciscans, particularly in, but not limited to, Herzegovina and Bosnia, took part in the atrocities themselves. Miroslav Filipović was a Franciscan friar (from the Petrićevac monastery) who allegedly joined the Ustashe on February 7th, 1942 in a brutal massacre of 2,730 Serbs of the nearby villages, including 500 children. He was allegedly subsequently dismissed from his order and defrocked. Filipović later became the Chief Guard of the Jasenovac concentration camp where he was nicknamed "Fra Sotona", and he was given this nickname by the Croats themselves. It should be noted, however, that when he was hanged for his war crimes, he wore his Franciscan robes.

Ustasha Gold

The Ustashe had sent large amounts of gold that it had plundered from Serbian and Jewish property owners during World War II into Swiss bank accounts. Of a total of 350 million Swiss Francs, about 150 million was seized by British troops; however, the remaining 200 million (ca. 47 million dollars) reached the Vatican. In October 1946, the American intelligence agency SSU alleged that these funds are still held in the Vatican Bank. This issue is the theme of a recent class action suit against the Vatican Bank and others.

Commemoration

File:Kragujevac - V3.jpg

"Broken Wing" - a monument to those who were killed in the Kragujevac massacre.

The Jasenovac monument by Bogdan Bogdanović.

The Jasenovac Memorial Museum reopened in November 2006 with a new exhibition designed by the Croatian architect, Helena Paver Njirić, and an Educational Center designed by the firm Produkcija. The Memorial Museum features an interior of rubber-clad steel modules, video and projection screens, and glass cases displaying artifacts from the camp. Above the exhibition space, which is quite dark, is a field of glass panels inscribed with the names of the victims.

The New York City Parks Department, the Holocaust Park Committee and the Jasenovac Research Institute, with the help of US Congressman Anthony Weiner, established a public monument to the victims of Jasenovac in April 2005 (the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the camps.) The dedication ceremony was attended by ten Yugoslavian Holocaust survivors, as well as diplomats from Serbia, Bosnia and Israel. It remains the only public monument to Jasenovac victims outside of the Balkans.

To commemorate the victims of the Kragujevac massacre, the whole of Šumarice, where the killings took place, was turned into a memorial park. There are several monuments there: the monument to killed schoolchildren and their teachers, the "Broken Wing" monument, the monument of pain and defiance and the monument "One Hundred for One", the monument of resistance and freedom.

Desanka Maksimović wrote a poem about the massacre titled Krvava Bajka ("A Bloody fairy tale").

Aftermath

Yugoslav President Marshal Josip Broz Tito never visited the sites where massacres of Serbs took place, particularly Jasenovac, as he sought to make the people of Yugoslavia forget the Ustashe's crimes in the name of "brotherhood and unity". This policy has continued to modern times, as is evidenced by the insufficient amount of media-attention that Fascist war-crimes in the former-Yugoslavia have achieved.

Israeli President Shimon Peres visited Jasenovac on July 25th, 2010. He dubbed the Ustashe's crimes to be a "demonstration of sheer sadism".

Notable War-Criminals and their Fate

• Ante Pavelić, leader of Croatia during the Second World War, shot by Blagoje Jovović, a Montenegrin Serb working for the Yugoslavian secret service, near Buenos Aires, Argentina on April 9th, 1957. Pavelić later died of his injuries in a hospital in Madrid, Spain.
• Dido Kvaternik, was considered the second most important person in Croatia, after Ante Pavelić. Died in a car accident along with his two daughters in 1962, in Argentina.
• Miroslav Majstorović, an Ustasha infamous for his command periods in Jasenovac and Stara-Gradiška, named "Fra Satana" (Father Satan) for his cruelty and Christian upbringing, was captured by the Yugoslav communist forces, tried and executed in 1946.
• Maks Luburić was the commandant of the Ustaška Odbrana, or Ustasha defense, thus being held responsible for all crimes committed under his supervision in Jasenovac, which he visited two-three times a month or so, fled to Spain, but was assassinated by a Yugoslav agent in 1969.
• Mile Budak, Croatian politician, executed for war crimes and crimes against humanity on June 7th, 1945.
• Dinko Šakić fled to Argentina, but was eventually extradited, tried and sentenced, in 1999, by Croatian authorities to 20 years in prison, dying in prison in 2008.
• Petar Brzica was an Ustasha officer who, on the night of 29 August 1942, allegedly slaughtered over 1,360 people. Brzica's fellow Ustashe also took part in that crime, as part of a competition of throat cutting. Brzica is also known for having killed an inmate by beating him, on the departure of administrator Ivica Matković, in March 1943. Brzica's post-war fate is unknown.

Images

• 
  The decomposing bodies of Jasenovac victims
• 
  Ustashe executing ethnic-Serb prisoners
• 
  The Ustashe's butchered victims in the Sava River
• 
  An entire Serb family lies slaughtered in their home following a raid by the Croatian Ustashe
• Croatian Fascists saw off the head of ethnic-Serb Branko Jungić
  Croatian Fascists saw off the head of ethnic-Serb Branko Jungić
• 
  Ustashe militamen arrest ethnic-Serb farmers
• 
  Ustasha guards in the Jasenovac concentration camp strip newly arrived prisoners of their personal possessions
• 
  Serbian men and boys sitting in a field in the Stara Gradiška concentration camp, awaiting execution
• 
  Nazi German soldiers, aided by Ustasha collaborators, lead a column of Serb civilians outside the Serbian town of Šabac
• Serbian women and girls being escorted to a rape-camp
  Serbian women and girls being escorted to a rape-camp
• 
  Women, children and the elderly being forced out of their homes
• 
  Children and mothers under confinement at the Stara Gradiška concentration camp
• 
  Ethnic-Serb civilians just before the Glina Church massacre
• 
  Ethnic-Serb prisoners in the Jasenovac Concentration Camp
• 
  A German soldier points his rifle at a Serb lying on the ground in the village of Jajinci, which served as an execution site for inmates from the Banjica concentration camp
• 
  Civilians executed by the Nazis in Subotica, Serbia
• 
  Germans rounding up Serb civilians in Kragujevac on October 21st, 1941

External links

• Video about the Ustashe's crimes.
• Video video showing mass-graves of Serb and Jewish civilians who were butchered by the Croatian Ustashe.

See also

• Serbophobia
• Jasenovac concentration camp
• Glina, Croatia
• Occupation of Vojvodina, 1941-1944
• Kragujevac massacre
• Prebilovci massacre
• The Holocaust

References

Bibliography

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• Fischer, Bernd J. (2007). Balkan Strongmen: Dictators and Authoritarian Rulers of South-Eastern Europe. Purdue University Press. ISBN 1557534551.
• Goldstein, Ivo (2001). Croatia: A History. Hurst & Co. ISBN 0-7735-2017-1.
• Hermann Neubacher: Sonderauftrag Suedost 1940–1945, Bericht eines fliegendes Diplomaten, 2. durchgesehene Auflage, Goettingen, 1956.
• Ladislaus Hory and Martin Broszat. Der Kroatische Ustascha-Staat, 1941–1945. Stuttgart, 1964.
• Thomas, N., K. Mikulan, and C. Pavelic. Axis Forces in Yugoslavia 1941–45. London: Osprey, 1995. ISBN 1-85532-473-3.
• Lituchy, Barry M. Jasenovac and the Holocaust in Yugoslavia. New York: Jasenovac Research Institute, 2006. ISBN 0975343203.
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• Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Israel Gutman editor-in-chief, Vol. 4, Ustase entry. Macmillan, 1990.
• Sabrina P. Ramet. The three Yugoslavias: state-building and legitimation, 1918–2005. Bloomington, Indiana, USA: Indiana University Press, 2006.
• Aleksa Djilas. The contested country: Yugoslav unity and communist revolution, 1919–1953. Harvard University Press, 1991.
• Tomasevich, Jozo (1975). War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945: The Chetniks. Vol. 1. San Francisco: Stanford University Press. ISBN 0804708576.