In Jaselovac Concentration and Extermination Camp
According to the US Holocaust Memorial Musuem "the Jasenovac camp complex consisted of five detention facilities established between August 1941 and February 1942 by the authorities of the so-called Independent State of Croatia. As Germany and its Axis allies invaded and dismembered Yugoslavia in April 1941, the Germans and the Italians endorsed the proclamation of the so-called Independent State of Croatia by the fanatically nationalist, fascist, separatist, and terrorist Ustaša organization on April 10, 1941.
After seizing power, the Ustaša authorities erected numerous concentration camps in Croatia between 1941 and 1945. These camps were used to isolate and murder Jews, Serbs, Roma (also known as Gypsies), and other non-Catholic minorities, as well as Croatian political and religious opponents of the regime. The largest of these centers was the Jasenovac complex, a string of five camps on the bank of the Sava River, about 60 miles south of Zagreb. It is presently estimated that the Ustaša regime murdered between 77,000 and 99,000 people in Jasenovac between 1941 and 1945."
According to the Jasenovac Memorial website "Jasenovac Memorial Site is in the immediate vicinity of the former Jasenovac concentration camp, Camp III (Brickworks). In the Memorial Site the original sites of buildings and execution sites within the camp itself are marked by earth mounds and hollows. The path to the Flower Memorial is paved with railway sleepers. They denote symbolically part of the preserved railway track used to transport prisoners to the camp."
The Stone Flower was designed by Bogdan Bogdanovic and unveiled in 1966, it serves as a reminder of the atrocities perpetrated in the Jasenovac concentration camp.
Vjekoslav "Maks" Luburić ( 1914 –1969), an Ustaše Militia and Armed Forces general in the Independent State of Croatia, was the commander of the Jasenovac extermination camp. Besides running the camp, Luburić would come to Jasenovac to participate in executions in person.
After the defeat of the Independent State of Croatia at the end of the war, Luburić escaped to Francoist Spain.He settled in Carcaixent, Spain, where he went under the name of Vicente García Pérez.
He was believed to have been clubbed and stabbed to death by Ilija Stanić on 20 April 1969 in Carcaixent. However, acccording to Stanić, he had not been his murderer as he himself states in the documentary Refugios nazis en el Mediterráneo Operación Kobra 28 años después directed by Carles Palau in 2008 and based in the journalist Francesc Bayarri’s investigation and his book Meeting in Sarajevo (2006).
Luburić was buried in Carcaixent cemetery where his tomb can be visited today.
These photos were taken in August 2017.
