Jadovno: The First Death Camp of WWII

John Bosnitch at Jadovno camp in Croatia

By John Bosnitch

On June 24, I was in Western Croatia, with a police escort to protect us from the local Croats. We visited the first death camp of WWII, called Jadovno. This is a photo of some of the more than a hundred pilgrims who climbed the mountain to the execution site.

Yes, I was having a serious moment.

We were praying at the mouth of the deep 100 meter+ pit into which tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies were thrown alive by Croat Catholic fanatical Nazis (called Ustasha) in World War II in independent Croatia.




My great uncle Jovan Bosnic, whose name I bear in his memory, is at the bottom of this pit, where he was taken with no arrest warrant in 1941, immediately after the Croat Nazis declared an independent Croatia. Despite being highly decorated as a hero in WWI for defending Croat territory from Italy, Jovan was rounded up among the very first victims, because he openly opposed ethnic discrimination against Jews, Gypsies and Serbs.

The victims were bound 20 in a row by wire at the wrists and marched onto a platform in the forest without knowing that there was the equivalent of a bottomless pit at the end of the platform. The first 5 people in the chain were stabbed and shoved into the pit at gun- or knife-point and their downward fall would pull in the rest of the chain of men, women and children. Because their smaller bodies were lighter and more flexible, the children would sometimes survive among the corpses of the others, dying slowly of thirst or hunger at the bottom of the pit over days. When the Ustasha Croats or their Catholic priests heard such cries, they would drop in hand grenades.

One of the pits where people were pushed and left to die/ Source

This is where the Holocaust started in WWII, in western Croatia, near the Adriatic seacoast. The Croatian death camps, often run by Catholic-Nazi priests, devoured more than a half million innocent victims. They were opened before Hitler did anything similar, and they existed until late April 1945, after Hitler’s camps had been liberated, so this is also where the Holocaust also ended.

No Croat has ever paid a cent in compensation. And today they have an independent state again and they have purposely renamed their main streets and public squares for the Nazi Croat butchers who committed the most brutal and bestial genocide in European history.

Let’s all remember this when we see the advertising for summer holidays in “beautiful” Croatia… on the clean, Jew-free, Serb-free and Gypsy-free beaches…

John


If you want to know more about Jadovno camp, here is a 1st of 6 parts of documentary about this death camp:

This documentary film by Milorad Bajic deals with one of the most horrific killing facilities of World War II, located in the Independent State of Croatia. It was operational for only several months in 1941 and in it tens of thousands of people, almost entirely Serbs and Jews, were murdered by being thrown into karstic 
sinkholes ("jama") on Mt. Velebit.

Read more at the official site devoted to the the truth about Jadovno: http://www.jadovno.com/intervjui-reportaze-2/articles/exclusive-news-location-of-jadovno-camp-discovered-on-velebit.html