Operating from late June to August 1941, the Jadovno camp served as the terminus for thousands of Jewish and Serb men. It was the primary killing site within the broader Gospić camp complex and one of the most atrocious camps in the Independent State of Croatia. Perched deep inside the remote Velebit mountain range, the camp lay amid a network of ravines and sinkholes. After its establishment, the camp quickly evolved into a mass killing facility, in which thousands of victims were murdered.
The Jadovno camp site was located approximately 22 kilometers northwest of the town of Gospić, about six kilometers from the small village of Jadovno, after which the camp was named. At roughly 1,200 meters above sea level in a forest clearing, the surrounding environment was harsh and heavily wooded, making escape difficult. The site was selected by the commander of the Grand Parish Police District of Gospić, Stjepan Rubinić, on the advice of Jurica Frković, the Grand Prefect for Gacka and Lika, and Juco Rukavina, who at that time had been appointed commander of all combat battalions of the Ustaša Army. Enclosed by a four-meter-high barbed-wire fence, the camp initially covered an area of approximately 90 × 70 m2 but was quickly expanded to around 180 × 90 m2. Oval in shape, the campground was overlooked by a raised platform equipped with machine guns, from which Ustaša guards monitored the compound.
The majority of the inmates in Jadovno were Jews and Serbs, although a small number of Croat political prisoners were also incarcerated. The first prisoners, around thirty Jewish men from Zagreb, arrived on June 24, 1941. Subsequently, the inmate population grew massively, fluctuating between 2500 and 3500. At one point, the number of prisoners may have reached 4000.
Initially, the prisoners were sleeping in the open, without any shelter. This lasted until mid-July, when the prisoners created makeshift dwellings covered with beech branches and ferns. These primitive structures were arranged in a horseshoe formation, with separate sections for Jews, Serbs, and Croats—an ethnic division that formed a typical feature of concentration camps in the Independent State of Croatia.
For a period, the camp was commanded by Dragutin Pudić, a prewar Ustaša who, following the proclamation of the Independent State of Croatia, headed an improvised Ustaša headquarters in the town of Kostajnica. When Eugen Kvaternik, head of the Directorate for Public Order and Security, instructed Stjepan Rubinić in mid-June to establish a camp at Jadovno, Pudić was one of four men selected to accompany him and was subsequently appointed camp commander. Owing to his experience in organizing mass murder, Pudić later became an officer at the Jasenovac camp complex, where he played a key role in the killings.
Pudić oversaw a guard force that consisted of elements of the Ustaša Police Battalion in Gospić, also known as the Lika Battalion. Tasked with preventing prisoner escapes, an external guard detachment was stationed around the camp, while the internal detachment, comprising approximately thirty men, oversaw the compound. One of the internal detachment’s main duties was organizing mass killings. Led by the officers Rudi Ritz and Ante Bešlič, these guards escorted victims to karst sinkholes outside the compound, which they used as dumping grounds for the lifeless bodies. The guard personnel shot most of the victims, although in some cases they murdered them with axes or cudgels. No graves dug, the perpetrators used the landscape itself as a mass grave
The Jadovno camp is frequently referred to in historiography as a death camp. Although not all prisoners were murdered immediately upon arrival, as was the case in extermination camps such as Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, the Ustaša guard force did kill the vast majority of inmates. Most prisoners spent only a brief period inside the compound before being escorted by guards to killing sites. Lacking any infrastructure suitable for long-term incarceration, the camp was conceived as a mass killing facility. Historian Tomislav Dulić estimates a death rate of 96 percent, making Jadovno one of the most lethal camps of the Second World War.
When the leadership of fascist Italy notified the Ustaša regime of its intention to reoccupy Zone II of the Independent State of Croatia, the camp administration rapidly disbanded the Jadovno camp. Whereas some prisoners from the Gospić and Slana camps were sent eastward, and eventually arrived at the Jasenovac or Loborgrad camps, the guard force at Jadovno resorted to wholesale annihilation, murdering the 1200 inmates.
There is still no definitive calculation of the number of victims of the Jadovno camp. Historian Dragan Cvetković estimates a total death toll of 15,300 to 15,900 victims for the Gospić-Jadovno-Pag camp complex as a whole. Yet, how many of these victims, died at Jadovno is difficult to establish with certitude.
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