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The guards competed to kill more prisoners. Won “King of Throat Cutters”

The so-called Independent State of Croatia or “Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska” (NDH) was established in April 1941 after the German invasion as a puppet state of the German Third Reich and fascist Italy. His leading force became the ultranational Croatian fascist Ustasha movement. It existed until May 1945 and covered the area of ​​today’s Federal Republic of Croatia and the Federal Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Zagreb became its capital.

The ethnically diverse country was ruled by nationalists

The original population of the country of almost seven million was historically very diverse: the Croats themselves made up about half (3.3 million inhabitants), there were also about two million Serbs, about 750 thousand Bosnian Muslims, 40 thousand Jews and 30 thousand Roma. The religious composition was similarly varied, reflecting the geographical position of the state on the border of Central and Southern Europe, where the influence of the Middle East is also evident: Croats were predominantly Catholics, Orthodox predominated among Serbs, but Protestants also lived here.

The fact that the state was controlled under German and Italian patronage by the extremist movement of the Ustashas, ​​which sought to create a single “Aryan nation” after the German model, became the catalyst for tragedy.

“We will rid our new Croatia of all Serbs in its midst so that it can become 100% Catholic within ten years,” the then Croatian Minister of Education Mile Budak explained the goals of the Ustashas.

As early as April 17, 1941, the first laws were passed to “protect” the Croatian nation. Laws against Serbs and Jews were also passed. Jews who failed to escape in time or join the Yugoslav guerrillas began being transported to concentration camps. Either those in Germany – or those that began to emerge on the territory of Croatia itself.

German-style concentration camp

One of the largest such camps in Croatia was the Jasenovac camp, located near the current Croatian-Bosnian border in the villages of Jasenovac and Stara Gradiška. It was actually a network of five gradually built separate camps, the largest of which was Camp III, operating from mid-September 1941 to April 23, 1945.

The camp was built on the model of similar concentration camps in Germany, and according to their examples, it functioned both as a source of extremely cheap labor and as a huge killing machine. It included a labor camp with a power plant and a brickyard, whose Croatian designation (ciglana) is sometimes used as the name of the camp. However, not only bricks were burned in it, but also living people. In addition, the camp had its own crematorium.

The whole of Jasenovac operated purely under the Ustasha administration, its administrator was the Croatian Ustasha Vjekoslav Luburić and its aide another Croatian Dinko Šakić throughout its existence. German troops did not operate here, Luburić himself was terrified of his cruelty and brutality even by the Germans. According to testimonies published some time ago by Czech Radio, for example, they called him a neurotic and pathological personality. Prisoners who survived the camp rampage and were able to testify called him a bloodthirsty lunatic and the most brutal sadist they had ever encountered.

The extermination system created in Jasenovac led to the network of concentration camps being nicknamed “Auschwitz in the Balkans”.

The terrible competition was won by an unfinished Franciscan

Luburic’s approach, which directly encouraged the guards of the individual camps under his command to mass-kill prisoners and called it a “patriotic act,” probably also led to the horrific “competition” that took place in Jasenovac on the night of August 29-30, 1942. The guards competed here on who could kill more prisoners.

Mass executions in this concentration camp were often carried out with cold weapons to prevent gunshots. And so it was that August day. The main murderous tool became a specially modified, crescent-shaped knife called srbosjek. It was normally used to cut the sheaves of sheaves of grain before being put into the thresher. However, he used the guards in Jasenovac to cut the throats of victims (women and men) with it.

The “winner” of this crazy race was allegedly the Croatian Petar “Pero” Brzica, a law student and a member of the Catholic organization of the Crusaders (Krizari). Before the war, he also attended the Franciscan College in Široký Brjeg in Herzegovina, in 1942 he was 25 years old. He allegedly killed up to 1,360 prisoners that night, but had tough competition.

“František Pero Brzica, Ante Zrinušić, Sipka and I bet on who will kill more prisoners that night. The killing started and after an hour I killed much more than they did. It seemed to me like I was in seventh heaven. Never in In a few hours, I beat 1,100 people, while the others managed to kill only 300 to 400, “said Ustasha warden Mile Friganović in January 1943 in an interview with psychiatrist Neđo Zec, another prisoner in Jasenovac. The record of the interview is cited by the English Wikipedia.

Friganović then also recalled how soon after the “greatest ecstasy” it shook him, when he noticed a farmer standing nearby, who allegedly “watched everything” peacefully.

“He watched me calmly, killing my victims and dying in the greatest pain. I froze completely, unable to move for a while. He spoke with such incredible calm that it shook me much more than all the terrible cries around us. Suddenly I wanted to break his composure, to lead him out of him with the worst torture, so that despite his suffering, ecstasy would return to me and I could continue to enjoy it, “Friganović described the frightening night.

According to him, he actually tortured the man to death, gradually cutting off his ears and nose and cutting out his heart. However, he failed to relieve him of his inner peace. “Do your job,” the battered villager said before finally killing him. He later learned that before he got to Jasenovice, the farmer lost his whole family during the murder of his village.

Historians are still debating how many prisoners died that night and how many were killed by the grim “winner” Brzica with his srbosjek. In a number of sources, we come across the already mentioned information that he undercut 1360 prisoners, but newer researchers question such a large number. The lowest estimates range from 670 to 1100 prisoners.

Either way, Brzica was declared the winner and “king of throat cutters”. His reward was said to be a gold watch. Silver service, roast pigs and wine were other prizes.

At the end of the war, he fell into American captivity, through which he got to the United States, where he also lived. He was allegedly never tried for his crimes and died according to unconfirmed sources sometime around 2010.

The camp ended in blood, so did his commander

In April 1945, the Ustasha guards began to liquidate the camp. They murdered old and sick prisoners and threw their corpses into the Sava River. From the others, they compiled a death march, for which the name of the Way of the Cross (Križni put) was later adopted. Just before the arrival of the Yugoslav People’s Army, made up of Tito’s guerrilla units, fleeing Ustasha troops set fire to the camp.

After the war, the investigation of war crimes committed in the camp began, but it was never completed. Not only Brzica escaped justice, but also Commander-in-Chief Luburić, who fled into exile, lived in Spain for some time and also lived in Rome and Hamburg.

Unlike Brzica, however, he did not live to a quiet age. In April 1969, someone attacked him at night in his house in Carcaixent, Spain, and beat him with a hammer, while Luburić suffocated with his own blood. The assassination was apparently carried out by the Yugoslav secret police UDBA, which persecuted and liquidated Ustasha emigrants.

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