Editing Jasenovac concentration camp (section)

===War-time sources===
[[File:Voz Jasenovac.JPG|thumb|Train that carried prisoners to Jasenovac.]]
The documentation from the time of Jasenovac originates from the different sides in the battle for Yugoslavia: The Germans and Italians on the one hand, and the Partisans and the Allies on the other. There are also sources originating from the documentation of the Ustaše themselves and of the Vatican.

High-ranking German military officers estimated that the Ustaše killed between 250,000 (as of March 1943){{Sfn|Tomasevich|2001|pp=721–722}} and 700,000 Serbs in the entire NDH.{{sfn|Tomasevich|2001|pp=721–722}}{{sfn|Goldstein|2018|p=772}} Specifically regarding Jasenovac, the Nazi intelligence service, [[Sicherheitsdienst]], in a report on [[Vjekoslav Luburić]], the head of all Ustaše concentration camps, stated that the Ustaše had killed 120,000 people in Jasenovac, 80,000 in Stara Gradiška, and 20,000 in other Ustaše concentration camps.{{sfn|Tomasevich|2001|pp=721–722}} General von Horstenau described his eyewitness account of children dying at the camp, the aftermath of the slaughter perpetrated by Jasenovac guards, when they herded Serb residents of nearby Crkveni Bok to the camp:<ref name=":4">{{cite book|last1=Horstenau|first1=Edmund Glaise von|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=4Yp6ApNCHj0C&q=Ein+General+im+Zwielicht:+die+Erinnerungen+Edmund+Glaises+von+Horstenau%22,+B%C3%B6hlau+Verlag,+Wien,+Austria,+1988,+str:+167.|title=Ein General im Zwielicht: die Erinnerungen Edmund Glaises von Horstenau|last2=Broucek|first2=Peter|date=1988|publisher=Böhlau Verlag Wien|isbn=978-3-205-08749-6|pages=166–167|language=de}}</ref>{{sfn|Škiljan|2005|p=335}}

:In Crkveni Bok, an unfortunate place, over which about five hundred 15- to 20-year-old thugs descended under the leadership of an Ustasha lieutenant colonel, people were killed everywhere, women were raped and then tortured to death, children were killed. I saw in the Sava River the corpse of a young woman with her eyes dug out and a stake driven into her sexual parts. This woman was at most twenty years old when she fell into the hands of these monsters. All around, pigs devoured unburied human beings. "Fortunate” residents were shipped in terrifying freight cars; many of these involuntary "travelers" cut their veins during transport to the camp [Jasenovac]"

The Ustaše themselves gave more exaggerated estimates of the number of people they killed. [[Maks Luburić|Vjekoslav "Maks" Luburić]], the commander-in-chief of all the Croatian camps, announced the great "efficiency" of the Jasenovac camp at a ceremony on 9 October 1942. During a banquet that followed, he reported:<blockquote>We have slaughtered here at Jasenovac more people than the [[Ottoman Empire]] was able to do during its occupation of Europe.{{sfn|Paris|1961|p=132}}</blockquote>

A circular from the Ustaše general headquarters reads: "the concentration and labor camp in Jasenovac can receive an unlimited number of internees." In the same spirit, [[Miroslav Filipović|Filipović-Majstorović]], once captured by Yugoslav forces, admitted that during his three months of administration, 20,000 to 30,000 people died.<ref>[[#State-Commission|State Commission, 1946]], p. 62</ref>{{primary source inline|date=June 2022}} As it became clear that his confession was an attempt to somewhat minimize the rate of crimes committed in Jasenovac, his claim to have personally killed 100 people being extremely understated, Filipović-Majstorović's figures are reevaluated so that in some sources they appear as 30,000–40,000.{{citation needed|date=March 2016}} [[Miroslav Filipović|Filipović]] was Commandant of Jasenovac in Summer-early Fall of 1942, when the scholarly consensus is that the Ustaše exterminated 25,000–27,000 Roma,{{sfn|Biondich|2002|pp=38–39}} nearly all at Jasenovac, while the mass murder of other ethnic groups was also underway.

Jasenovac camp commanders, [[Miroslav Filipović]] and [[Ljubo Miloš]] both testified that just before the end of the war the Ustaše gave the command to completely destroy all evidence of mass graves at Jasenovac, by forcing remaining inmates to dig up and burn the corpses.{{sfn|Goldstein|2018|p=601}}<ref name="Hutinec" /> This is similar to [[Sonderaktion 1005|what the Nazis did]], including at [[Sajmište concentration camp]], on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia. The mass burning of corpses at Jasenovac was separately attested to by many surviving Jasenovac inmates,{{sfn|Goldstein|2018|p=601}}<ref name="Hutinec" />{{sfn|Motl|Mihovilović|2015|pp=349, 461, 465}} as well as postwar excavations which in many places found only ashes and burnt remains of bones.<ref name=":5" /><ref name=":6" />

Jure Paršić was appointed Catholic priest in the town of Jasenovac, by [[Alojzije Stepinac]], in November, 1942. Although Paršić sympathized with the Ustaše cause, and arrived in Jasenovac after the great majority of the victims were killed, he still estimated that the Ustaše killed 30,000 to 40,000 people at Jasenovac.{{sfn|Pavliša|2018}} Writing in Germany in 1985, he says the whole town knew what went on in the camp, “even the children knew more than they should know.” From the Ustaše guards he confessed, Paršić learned of things “far more terrible than he had supposed”, adding that he doubted there were any guards who had not “bloodied their hands”. But since he heard this in confession, Paršić stated he would "take this information with him to the grave".{{sfn|Pavliša|2018}}

Jure Paršić also wrote that he told [[Aloysius Stepinac|Archbishop Stepinac]] in detail what he discovered at Jasenovac, to which he says Stepinac "shed a tear".{{sfn|Pavliša|2018}} After the Ustaše killed seven Slovenian Catholic priests in Jasenovac,{{sfn|Tomasevich|2002|p=571}} Stepinac on February 24, 1943, wrote [[Ante Pavelić]] that this represented a “shameful stain and a crime that cries out for revenge, just as the whole of Jasenovac is a shameful stain on the Independent State of Croatia."

In June 1942, the well-connected Catholic theologian, Monsignor Augustin Juretić, wrote: “The concentration camp at Jasenovac is a real slaughterhouse. You have not read anywhere – not even under the [[State Political Directorate|GPU]] or Gestapo – of such horrible things as the “Ustashi” commit....the story of Jasenovac is the blackest page of the Ustashi regime, because thousands of men have been killed there."{{sfn|Tomasevich|2001|p=400}}

Jasenovac inmates Milko Riffer and Egon Berger wrote of “hundreds of thousands” victims.{{sfn|Riffer|1946|p=145}}{{sfn|Goldstein|2013|p=280}} Đorđe Miliša also published a first-hand testimony in 1945.{{sfn|Biondich|2002|pp=45–46}} The Roma were all hauled in at the same time, kept in an open, barbed-wired area where other inmates could see them, and all murdered within a couple of months. The primary-source estimates of Roma victims appear to have been exaggerated – from up to 20,000 (Riffer, p.&nbsp;155) to 40,000 (Miliša 1945 pp.&nbsp;59–61, 139–142) to 45,000 (Berger 1966, p.&nbsp;67).{{sfn|Biondich|2002|pp=38–39}}{{sfn|Biondich|2002|pp=45–46}} Riffer also mentions why other estimates were more difficult – many victims were killed before even entering the camp and thus were never registered, plus to hide their crimes, the Ustaše burned the camp records.{{citation needed|date=June 2022}}

The anti-Communist, anti-Yugoslav political exile, and former Jasenovac inmate, [[Ante Ciliga]] described Jasenovac as a "huge machine" with the sole purpose, that "some be killed as soon as they enter – others, over time”.{{sfn|Goldstein|2018|p=97}} He identified Gradina as the main killing-ground, “[[Styx|our Styx]] – whoever crossed the river and stepped onto Gradina, there was no return among the living”.{{sfn|Goldstein|2018|p=292}} He also stated that the life expectancy of inmates in the Jasenovac III C sub-camp was 2 weeks,{{sfn|Goldstein|2018|p=468}} and described witnessing the mass execution of Roma who attempted to escape the sub-camp. He and other inmates noted that the occupancy of Jasenovac was kept at 3,000 to 5,000 men, and all those brought into the camp in excess of that number were continuously killed.{{sfn|Goldstein|2018|p=409}} Ciliga and others described cannibalism in the camp, i.e. inmates eating their dead comrades, due to extreme starvation.{{sfn|Goldstein|2018|pp=470–471}}