Croatian War Crimes
Rivaled Nazi Atrocities
Most people know of the notorious Nazis led by Adolph Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Eichmann and the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald but much less is generally known about the concentration camps of Jasenovac, Danica, Slana and Kruščica and the role of Croatia and the war criminals who were involved in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Roma in Croatia, Yugoslavia.
Many of the criminals were never brought to justice and the atrocities were ignored in light of the Nazi’s greater death toll. Today, as we face the unthinkable and yet possible overthrow of our own government it is important to understand how the unthinkable happened in the past and can happen again and also to understand historical, cultural hatred that could rise again.
Andrija Artukovic, known as the “Butcher of the Balkans,” was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Roma and others in World War II concentration camps that he supervised under the Nazi puppet regime in Croatia, death camps that often surpassed even the brutality and sadism of the Nazi camps.
After the war, Artukovic fled Yugoslavia and eventually settled in Seal Beach, Calif., where he lived and worked for nearly half of his life, avoiding extradition because of the influence of the Croatian émigré community and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization service opposed the extradition because the service deemed the crimes “political” and that Artukovic should not be extradited because he would be subject to “physical persecution” if returned to Yugoslavia. The extradition was finally approved in 1986 and Artukovic was tried and convicted to death but died before the sentence could be carried out.
Artukovic’s story is one of many, forgotten war criminals involved in unspeakable crimes but whose stories have been shrouded and forgotten because of post war politics and the sheer weight of history. Meanwhile, the reality of 6 million murders is something that cannot be comprehended but we must remember that each victim was not a statistic but was a man, a woman, a child.
Artukovic served as a member of the Ustase, the fascist government set up by the Nazis after their invasion of Yugoslavia, similar to the puppet government the Nazis created in Vichy France. The ultra-nationalist Ustase government ruled Croatia and was created in 1929 and led by Ante Pavelic, who, after the war, fled to the protection of Argentine President Juan Peron where he was wounded in an assassination attempt by a Serb and died a few years later in a hospital in Spain at the age of 70.
Artukovic supervised the Jasenovac concentration and extermination camp, created by the Ustase in 1941 and one of the 10 largest in Europe. It expanded quickly into the third largest concentration camp in Europe. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., estimates that the Ustaše regime murdered between 77,000 and 99,000 people in Jasenovac between 1941 and 1945. David M. Crowe wrote in his 2013 book, “Crime of State Past and Present: Government Sponsored Atrocities and International Legal Responses,” that Jasenovac “specialized in one-on-one violence of a particularly brutal kind” where prisoners were primarily murdered manually with the use of blunt objects such as knives, hammers and axes.
The Sisak concentration camp, formed by the Ustase in 1942, was especially heinous in that it was formed specifically for children as part of Jasenovac concentration camp. While imprisoned at the camp, children, as young as a few months old, were poorly fed and had to lie on the floor with only a thin layer of straw without clothes or blankets. When a typhus epidemic broke out, the infected children were transferred to an improvised hospital, only serving to increase the number of deaths. Out of 6,693 children interred, 1,152 died in the camp.
Another high ranking Ustase figure was Eugene Dido Kvaternik, chief of the Internal Security Service who instituted a regime of terror against Croatian Serbs, Jews and Roma. After the war, Kvaternik fled to Argentina where multiple extradition requests were turned down and he died in 1962 in a car crash in Argentina.
Marijan “Giovanni” Mijo Babić was a deputy of Pavelić and the first commander of all concentration camps in Croatia. He helped prepare for the establishment of Danica, Slana and Kruščica concentration camps. Babić had an important role in the Blagaj massacre on May 9, 1941, when he brought trucks filled with Ustases to massacre 520 Serbs in Kordun.
The Glina massacres were killings of 2,000 to 2,400 Serb peasants in the town of Glina between May and August 1941. In 1969, a monument was erected and a memorial museum was built to commemorate the victims of the killings but after Croatia gained independence from Yugoslavia, the monument was removed by Croatian authorities.
Some of the worst massacres were conducted not just by the Ustase and Nazi sympathizers but also by the partisans who fought to overthrow the axis. Here are some of the most deadly massacres by both sides.
Partisans conducted a series of “Leftist error” massacres that took the lives of more than 1,000 suspected enemy collaborators, political opponents, class enemies and “fifth columnists” from July 1941 to early 1942 in areas of Serbia, Montenegro and Eastern Herzegovina.
The Ustase Velika Kladuša massacre of July 29, 1941, claimed the lives of around 4,000 Serbs by Ustaše.
Partisans were responsible for the Kulen Vakuf massacre from Sept. 5–8, 1941, in which 1,000 to 3,000 Muslims and Croats and local peasants were killed.
The Chetniks, a Serbian nationalist movement, captured the Rogatica district and then massacred 2,000 Muslims from October 1941 to January 1942.
Nearly 1,800 civilians in Kraljevo were murdered by German Wehrmacht forces in reprisals for opposing the Nazis from Oct. 15–20, 1941. In further reprisals, more than 2,000 Serb men and boys were murdered by Wehrmacht forces from Oct. 20–21, 1941, in Kragujevac.
Chetniks killed more than 2,000 Muslims in the town of Foca from Dec. 5 1941 to January 1942.
Chetniks massacred from 1,370 to 2,050 mostly Bosniak Muslims and some Croats from Dec. 30, 1941 to Jan. 26, 1942, and left corpses hanging in the town or thrown into the Drina river.
The pro-Nazi Hungarian Army forced 1,264 Jews and Serbs on to the frozen Danube River and then killed them all at Novi Sad.
The Ustase murdered 2,315 Serbs at Drakulic on Feb. 7, 1942.
At Stari Brod and Milosevici, on March 22 through May 1942, the Ustase Black Legion and Ustazse Muslim militia massacred more than 6,000 people.
Chetniks killed from 2,000 to 3,000 Muslims in August 1942 in the Foca region. Chetniks killed another 2,500 Muslims in August 1942 at Ustikolina.
At the Prozor massacre from Oct. 4–15, 1942, 542 to 2,500 Croats and Bosnian Muslims, who were suspected of aiding and harboring partisans, were killed by the Ustasi.
Massacres in Pljevlja, Čajniče and Foča from January to February 1943 resulted in the killing of 9,200 Chetniks and Muslims including 8,000 civilians by the Ustasi and led by Pavle Durisic.
Chetniks massacred 1,000 Croats in April 1943 at a makeshift execution site near Knin.
More than 2,000 Muslim civilians were massacred by Chetniks in Visegrad on oct. 5, 1943.
Partisans killed 12,000 Croat prisoners of war and civilians from May 8–9, 1945.
Partisans murdered another 15,000 Ustasi prisoners and civilians in Tezno.
In Kočevski Rog, in late 1945, partisans executed 10,000 to 12,000 Slovene Home Guard members, Croat, Serb and Montenegrin collaborationists, Italian and German troops.
The Macelj massacre of May to June 1945 saw the execution by partisans of 1,163 Ustasi prisoners and local civilians.
Partisans killed 1,416 Croat and Slovene prisoners and their families in reprisals from May 25 to June 6, 1945.