Mapping the Holocaust in Croatia

The Guard Force

Slana was guarded by elements of the 13th Ustaša Battalion, a unit of the Ustaša Army (Ustaška vojnica), which had been formed in Zagreb the month prior. The battalion was commanded by Ivan Devčić, a seasoned Ustaša, who had participated in the 1932 attack on a gendarme outpost in the Velebit mountain range, an incident self-congratulatory gasconaded in Ustaša propaganda as the "Velebit uprising." Apart from leading the 13th Ustaša Battalion, Devčić also served as commander of the Slana camp, with Josip Matijević acting as his adjutant. Together with Antun Remenar, who was in charge of maintaining to supplies to Slana, Matijević would later serve at the Jasenovac camp complex.

The Prisoners

The first group of prisoners arrived at Slana on June 25, 1941, comprising Jews arrested in Zagreb. In the following weeks, these prisoners were joined by thousands of Jews and Serbs and a smaller contingent of Croat political prisoners. As a rule, the police forces in the Independent State of Croatia did not deport prisoners directly to Slana, but via the transit camp located in the former penitentiary of the court in Gospić. The Ustaša guards separated the prisoners by ethnicity. Crammed into poorly constructed barracks, the Jewish prisoners were incarcerated in an enclosure surrounded by barbed wire fences while Serbs and Croats prisoners were confined to the remaining barracks in a separate, barbed-wired-enclosed enclosed compound. The two camp sections were separated by small height, speckled with guard watchtowers. The reason for the camp leadership's decision to separate Serb and Jewish prisoners is not elucidated in the historiography of the camp but likely aimed at preventing solidarity across ethnic lines and sowing divisions.

Classifying the Slana Camp

In historiography, the Slana camp is frequently referred to as a death camp, though its operation differed from extermination camps such as Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, where all victims were murdered upon arrival, with the exception of those few the perpetrators selected for maintenance work and disposal of the lifeless bodies. Conditions in the Slana compound were nevertheless marked by wholly inadequate food, water and sanitation, causing widespread death from malnutrition and disease. Furthermore, from early July 1941, the guard force regularly carried out mass killings of prisoners, both on the rocky plateau Furnaža southeast of the compound and in the Velebit mountain range on the mainland. Such killings occurred whenever the influx of new prisoners exceeded the camp's limited capacity. Equally significant, apart from some road construction, there was no organized forced labor for manufacturing purposes or resource extraction, suggesting that the Ustaša leadership never envisaged Slana as a sustainable production facility, and consequently had little incentives, from their cynical perspective, to keep skilled laborers alive. Whether Mijo Babić and other senior Ustašas envisaged Slana as a site of mass annihilation from the very beginning cannot be proven indisputably, but everything suggests that deportation to Slana was intended as a one-way street: a terminus from which there was no way back.

End of the Camp

The Ustaša camp personnel disbanded the Slana camp on August 23, 1941, as a consequence of the Italian reoccupation of Zone II of the Independent State of Croatia. The guards deported a small number of inmates to Gospić, from where they were later sent to the Jasenovac camp complex. Most prisoners, however, were murdered in the course of the camp's closure.

Number of Victims

There is still no definitive calculation of the number of victims at the Slana 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. But determining how many of these were murdered in or near Slana is difficult to gauge. The Lika County Commission for Investigating the Crimes of the Occupiers and their Helpers estimated that 6000 prisoners were deported to the Slana camp, of whom only 400 were alive when the camp was disbanded. But how this data was gathered is unclear. In any event, searching for the exact number of victims may in fact miss the mark, as the Gospić-Jadovno-Pag complex operated less as a set of clearly demarked and discrete camps than as an interconnected system of compounds and killing sites.