Editing Jasenovac concentration camp (section)

===Start of mass terror===
Actions against Jews began immediately after the [[Independent State of Croatia]] was founded. On 10–11 April 1941, [[Ustaše]] arrested a group of prominent Zagreb Jews and held them for ransom. On 13 April the same was done in Osijek, where Ustaše and Volksdeutscher mobs also destroyed the synagogue and Jewish graveyard.<ref>{{cite web|title=Jewish Virtual Library|url=https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0015_0_15241.html|access-date=2020-03-07|archive-date=2016-03-05|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160305042342/http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0015_0_15241.html|url-status=live}}</ref> This process was repeated multiple times in 1941 with groups of Jews. Simultaneously, the Ustaše initiated extensive antisemitic propaganda, with Ustaše papers writing that Croatians must "be more alert than any other ethnic group to protect their racial purity, ... We need to keep our blood clean of the Jews". They also wrote that Jews are synonymous with "treachery, cheating, greed, immorality and foreigness", and therefore "wide swaths of the Croatian people always despised the Jews and felt towards them natural revulsion".{{sfn|Zuckerman|2010}}

The first mass killing of Serbs was carried out on April 30, when the Ustaše rounded up and killed 196 Serbs at [[Gudovac massacre|Gudovac]]. Many other mass killings soon followed. Here is how the Croatian Catholic Bishop of Mostar, [[Alojzije Mišić]], described the mass killings of Serbs just in one small area of [[Herzegovina]], just during the first 6 months of the war:{{sfn|Vukušić|2006}}
<blockquote>People were captured like beasts. Slaughtered, killed, thrown live into the abyss. Women, mothers with children, young women, girls and boys were thrown into pits. The vice-mayor of Mostar, Mr. Baljić, a Mohammedan, publicly states, although as an official he should be silent and not talk, that in Ljubinje alone 700 schismatics [i.e. Serb Orthodox Christians] were thrown into one pit. Six full train carriages of women, mothers and girls, children under age 10, were taken from Mostar and Čapljina to the Šurmanci station, where they were unloaded and taken into the hills, with live mothers and their children tossed down the cliffs. Everyone was tossed and killed. In the Klepci parish, from the surrounding villages, 3,700 schismatics were killed. Poor souls, they were calm. I will not enumerate further. I would go too far. In the city of Mostar, hundreds were tied up, taken outside the city and killed like animals.
</blockquote>

====First concentration camps====

On April 15, only 5 days after the creation of the NDH, the Ustaše established the first concentration camp, [[Danica concentration camp|Danica]], at Koprivnica.{{sfn|Despot|2012}} In May 1941, they rounded up 165 Jewish youth in Zagreb, members of the Jewish sports club Makabi, and sent them to Danica (all but 3 were later killed by the Ustaše). The Croatian historian, Zdravko Dizdar, estimates that some 5,600 inmates passed through the Danica camp, mostly Serbs but also Jews and Croat Communists. Of the 3,358 Danica inmates Dizdar was able to trace by name, he found that 2,862, i.e. 85%, were later killed by the Ustaše at the Jadovno and Jasenovac concentration camps, the vast majority Serbs, but also hundreds of Jews and some Croats.{{sfn|Despot|2012}}

In June 1941, the Ustaše established a new system of concentration camps, stretching from Gospič to the Velebit mountains, to the island of Pag. Ustaše sources state that they sent 28,700 people to these camps in the summer of 1941.{{sfn|Goldstein|Goldstein|2016|p=265}} Of these, Ustaše records show only 4,000 returned, after the Ustaše were forced by the Italians to shut down the camps and withdraw from the area, because of the strong resistance their mass killings had sparked. Thus the likely death toll for these camps is around 24,000, although some sources put it as high as 40,000.{{sfn|Goldstein|Goldstein|2016|p=265}} After residents reported the contamination of drinking water due to large numbers of corpses rotting across Velebit, the Italians sent medical officers to investigate. They found multiple death pits and mass graves, in which they estimated some 12,000 victims were killed. At [[Slana concentration camp|Slana Concentration Camp]] on the island of Pag they dug up one mass grave, with nearly 800 corpses, of whom half were women and children, the youngest being 5 months old.{{sfn|Goldstein|2013|p=280}}

The majority of these victims were Serbs, but among them were also 2,000–3,000 Jews. Thus the Ustaše initiated the mass killing of Jews at approximately the same time as Nazi [[Einsatzgruppen]] in Eastern Europe, and months before the Nazis started the mass killings of German Jews.{{citation needed|date=April 2022}}