How Croatia’s Jasenovac Camp Turned Men into Brutal Killers

Seventy-eight years ago, on April 22, 1945, brothers Mate and Stjepan Zukolo were among around 600 prisoners who took part in a major breakout from the main part of the Jasenovac concentration camp and death camp complex.

As the prisoners stormed the gate, attacking the guards with bricks and planks, the Zukolo brothers were immediately separated in the commotion.

Mate Zukolo was among the survivors of the breakout. After the war, he worked as a barber in the town of Pozega. While he knew his brother Stjepan had died during the breakout, for a long time he was unaware of the exact circumstances surrounding his death.

It was in 1953 that he learned the bitter truth. A woman who lived close to the main Jasenovac camp recounted how a prisoner who perfectly fit the description of his brother had been caught by Ustasas during the breakout. After forcing him to sing a Yugoslav Partisan song, they slit his throat and threw his body into the nearby River Sava.

The men who murdered Stjepan Zukolo belonged to the Jasenovac guard force. The guards not only committed crimes behind the barbed wire of the camp complex or at secluded killing sites in their immediate vicinity, but also perpetrated numerous atrocities against the Serb population in the broader environs outside the camp complex.

Their preferred murder weapons were not rifles or gas, but knives, hammers and mallets.

A disturbing reality

A special knife used by the Ustasa to kill prisoners at Jasenovac and other camps. Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Though largely unknown outside the countries of the former Yugoslavia, Jasenovac was the largest concentration camp complex during World War Two not operated by the Nazi...