Rare photograph in which the Ustasha soldiers are seen next to the Nazi SS soldiers looking at the bodies of the dead they murdered in the massacre of the town of Brod near Vakuber (then Yugoslavia, now Croatia) – 1941.
The Ustasha was a Croatian nationalist movement founded in 1929. From the very beginning, the organization was involved in many acts of violence. During World War II, the organization actually controlled the Croatian state, aiming to eliminate as many Serbs, Jews and Gypsies as possible. They even built several concentration camps, the most famous and notorious of which was Jasnovac. The Nazi army’s invasion of Yugoslavia began on April 6, 1941 and ended with the occupation and surrender of Yugoslavia on April 18, 1941. In the photograph before us, Nazi soldiers can be seen next to the Ustasha men looking at the victims they murdered in Brod. The victims were executed in groups without trial on bridges and then thrown into the river.
According to estimates, around 32,000 Jews were murdered during World War II in their own territory either by the Nazis or by the Ustasha. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: “Due to different sources and opinions and a severe lack of documentation, the estimate of the number of Serb victims in Croatia ranges wildly, from 25,000 to over a million. The estimated number of Serbs murdered in Jasnovac ranges from 25,000 to 700,000. The most reliable estimates of the number of victims The Serbs under the Ustasha regime range between 330,000 and 390,000, and between 45,000 and 52,000 Serbs murdered in the Jasnovac camp.”
During the Eichmann trial in 1961, Alexander Arnon, secretary of the Jewish community of Zagreb, testified about the treatment of the Jews of Yugoslavia during the war, and said that in one camp the Ustasha killed tens of thousands of Serbs, from the beginning of 1941 until the end of the war.
For more details about this photograph, see the book “The Vatican’s Holocaust” by Avro Manhattan, p. 35. (The photograph before us appears there in a lower quality).
11×9 cm. Very Good Condition.
