Jasenovac Memorial and Museum

The Jasenovac concentration camp was an extermination camp established in Slavonia by the authorities of the Independent State of Croatia during World War II. The camp was established and operated solely by the governing Ustaše regime rather than by Nazi Germany as in the rest of occupied Europe. It was one of the largest concentration camps in Europe and the camp has been referred to as the Auschwitz of the Balkans and the Yugoslav Auschwitz.It was established in August 1941 in marshland at the confluence of the Sava and Una rivers near the village of Jasenovac, and was dismantled in April 1945. It was notorious for its barbaric practices and the large number of victims.In Jasenovac the majority of victims were ethnic Serbs; others were Jews, Roma, and some political dissidents. Jasenovac was a complex of five subcamps spread over 210 km2 on both banks of the Sava and Una rivers. The largest camp was the Brickworks camp at Jasenovac, about 100 km southeast of Zagreb. The overall complex included the Stara Gradiška sub-camp, the killing grounds across the Sava river at Donja Gradina, five work farms, and the Uštica Roma camp.During and since World War II, there has been much debate and controversy regarding the number of victims killed at the Jasenovac concentration camp complex during its more than three-and-a-half years of operation. After the war, a figure of 700,000 reflected the conventional wisdom, although estimates have gone as high as 1.4 million.The authorities of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia conducted a population survey in 1964 that reportedly showed a figure of 59,188 killed, but the findings were not published until 1989.Croatian academic Vladimir Žerjavić published books in 1989 and 1992 in which he meticulously analysed the available data and concluded that some 83,000 people had been killed at Jasenovac. His findings were criticized by the director of the Museum of Victims of Genocide in Belgrade, Milan Bulajić, who defended his figure of 1.1 million, although his rebuttal was later dismissed as having no scholarly value. Since Bulajić's retirement from his post in 2002, the Museum has no longer defended the figure of 700,000 to 1 million victims of the camp. In 2005, Dragan Cvetković, a researcher from the Museum, and a Croatian co-author published a book on wartime losses in the NDH which gave a figure of approximately 100,000 victims of Jasenovac.The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. presently estimates that the Ustaša regime murdered between 77,000 and 99,000 people in Jasenovac between 1941 and 1945, comprising; between 45,000 and 52,000 Serbs; between 12,000 and 20,000 Jews; between 15,000 and 20,000 Roma ; and between 5,000 and 12,000 ethnic Croats and Muslims, political and religious opponents of the regime. The Jasenovac Memorial Site quotes a similar figure of between 80,000 and 100,000 victims.
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