Before the Second World War, Vinkovci was a multiethnic city in which Croats made up roughly half of the population, while the remainder consisted of Germans, Serbs, Hungarians, and Jews. Despite its relatively small size, the city held considerable strategic importance as one of the most significant railway junctions in the region; the main railway line between Zagreb and Belgrade passed through Vinkovci.
The first weeks of 1941 revealed that antisemitism in the city transcended ethnic boundaries, drawing both local ethnic Germans and Ustaša groups into a shared campaign of persecution. On 18 April 1941, members of the German minority imprisoned Jewish men in the local synagogue, where they were severely beaten and humiliated. Ustaša youth burned the Jewish library in front of a high school and destroyed books written in Cyrillic script. Small Ustaša detachments from Vinkovci also sporadically attacked nearby Serbian villages, ransacking homes, beating men, and issuing threats.
Because Vinkovci served as the major railway junction of Slavonia, most early deportations of Serbs from the Independent State of Croatia passed through the city en route to Serbia. At the same time, part of the Jewish population—mainly younger men—was deported in 1941 to Lepoglava prison and then transferred to camps such as Jadovno and Jasenovac where they were killed.
A new phase of persecution began in early May 1942 under the direction of Ivan Tolj who initiated mass arrests of Jews in Vinkovci and its surroundings; nearly 400 were detained in improvised holding sites in the Hrvatski Sokol building. Most were deported to and killed in Jasenovac in the coming weeks. During this period, Tolj also pushed for the deportation of Roma, demonstrating the entangled history of genocide which targeting multiple groups under the Ustaša regime.
Tolj's actions in Vinkovci earned him the confidence of the authorities in Zagreb and expanded his authority to conduct roundups across the wider regions of Slavonia and Syrmia. To facilitate these operations, he established an improvised concentration camp on the field of the "Cibalia" football club in Vinkovci, where up to 1,000 Jews from the broader region were imprisoned prior to deportation. These developments illustrate how the Holocaust in Vinkovci transcended the history of the persecution of local community and how the city became a place of suffering of the Jewish community on a broader, regional level.
- Rajka Bućin. "Transport upućen u Auschwitz iz Vinkovaca u kolovozu 1942. i sudbina srijemskih i bijeljinskih Židova za vrijeme Drugog svjetskog rata" Časopis za suvremenu povijest, Vol. 53, No. 2 (2021): 611-659.
- Lovro Kralj "Biografija terora – Ivan Tolj i masovno političko nasilje u NDH" Nasleđe (2024): 283-305.
- Lovro Kralj "Becoming the Ustaša 'Deportation Expert': Ivan Tolj and the Perpetration of Ethnic Cleansing in the Independent State of Croatia" in Deported: Comparative Perspectives on Path to Annihilation for Jewish Populations Under Nazi German Control, edited by Michaela Raggam-Blesch, Peter Black and Marianne Windsperger (Vienna: New Academic Press, 2024), 161-186.
- Tomo Šalić. Židovi u Vinkovcima i okolici. Osijek: Židovska općina Osijek, Kulturno društvo "Miroslav Šalom Freiberger" Zagreb, 2002.
