Jasenovac System Of Croatian Concentration Camps For Extermination Of Serbs, Jews And Roma – 1941-1945

been published on Jasenovac camps, but nearly all of them were taken
out of libraries and destroyed.
Suffering of victims could never be described and published. It
is possible just to imagine the physical and mental torture that they
have suffered before and at the time of their execution and final
passing away. roman-catholic Croats and Muslim murderers made the
victims to suffer as much as possible, because they actually enjoyed to
torture them. They used various methods to kill the victims. forensic
investigation in Donja gradina and Jasenovac established more than 40
ways they used to kill the victims. let me mention please some of these
terrible methods.
1. Killing by starvation of victims or by total deprivation of food
and water. unbearable suffering of the victims was described
by survivors who witnessed mass death of tens of thousand of
prisoners, many of them children. Some of them managed to stay
alive for days and weeks, but died eventually.
2. Death of infection or infestation. Survivors described how
prisoners died suffering infection and infestation, after starvation
and lack of any sanitary facilities, drugs or treatment.
3. a special, very severe method of killing of some of the victims
was by nailing them alive, using long masonry nails, to trees, leaving
them to die slowly, sometimes for days. During our investigation
we found a number of trees, with nails still hammered in.
4. Stabbing by sharp, pointed object, usually knife. Many survivors
described how murderers used to stab victims, usually in the chest,
or as a method of torture, anywhere in the body or in the limbs.
They used knifes to extract eyeballs from eye sockets of the victims.
There were many cases of pregnant women who have been stabbed
in the womb, or when the womb was opened, the foetus was
removed and stabbed. In some cases breasts were cut and hands
pushed inside the wounds.
5. There was a huge furnace – Pacilli furnace in Jasenovac. Victims
were thrown alive and burned to death.We couldonly find some
remains of cremated bones, and it will never be possible toestimate
the number of victims who were killed in this furnace.
6. Killing by hard labor and torture. Many survivors described
how prisoners were forced to work hard without food or water, and
those who fell existed were buried on the spot, still alive.
7. Survivors also describe thousands of victims being thrown
into the Sava river still alive, and drowned. Some of them have
been slaughtered before their bodies were thrown into the river.
It was impossible to descover traces of various methods of killing,
on examining remains of skeletons, and we had to rely on vitness
reports, photographs made by murderers and their statements in
the court of justice at the end of the war.
8. Croatia was the only country in the world that has established
a special concentration camp to exterminate children. Children
were tortured in various ways. The most sever murderers were
roman-catholic nuns in charge of the children camp. nuns used
to kill those children who have cried or who could not control their
bowels over night. They would take them by legs and smash their
little heads on the wall, killing them ih such way.
9. Hanging. a relatively small number of victims were executed by
hanging. There is a number of photographs taken by the murderers
showing the hanging.
10. Killing by firearms. Croatian murderers tried to save ammunition
and seldom used shooting to kill victims. We managed during our
investigation to find some mass graves where victims were shot and
buried.
11. Slaughter. a common way of killing by Croatian murderers.
They have used ordinary knifes or specially devised knifes called
“srbosek” (or knifes tom kill Serbs), which was crescentshaped and
tied to the wrist of the killer to enable him to cut the throat of
the victim without much movement of his hand. Very often this
method was not efficient. Murderers who were used to kill animals
in this way, were not skilled enough in using these methods to kill
human beings. It was quite easy to kill children, because their neck
was not very resistant, but it was more difficult to slaughter an adult.
In many instances, the murderer would cut the skin, subcutaneous
tissue and open the trachea without much damage to the major
arteries. There would be a huge bleeding from the superficial veins,
but the victim would not die instantly. Very often, the victim, still
alive, would be thrown into the mass grave. He would not be able
to survive.
12. Head injuries and skull fracture caused by hitting victims on
the head by a bar or a mallet. Croatian murderers used to beat
victims using any kind of wooden or metal bar. If the impact on the
head was strong enough, it would break the skull and cause instant
death.. Very often, the bar would slid aside, causing injuries to the
soft tissues, without causing the skull to fracture. The victim could
be unconscious and fall into the pit, but after a period of time, he
would wake up, to find himself under a pile of dead bodies, unable to
move. There were cases when the victims were not pushed very deep
inside the pit, and later on, they managed to pull themselves out and
escape. The most common weapon used by Croatian murderers was
a mallet. only occasionally they used a hammer. Examining skulls
found in mass graves, we found out that in a majority of cases, the
injury was on the left, or on the right side of the skull, in the temporal
or parieto-temporal region or in the parieto-occipital or occipital
area.We have seen fractures in the frontal region only occasionally.
We know from the testimonies of survived victims that Croats
would take victims two by two, tied together. at the edge of the pit,
one murderer would hit one victim with the mallet, on one side of
the head, and the other murderer would hit the other victim in the
same way, on the other side of the head.In most cases there were
complete fractures of the skull involving lamina externa, spongy