Stara Gradiška concentration camp

Stara Gradiška was a concentration and extermination camp in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) during World War II. The camp was specially constructed for women and children of Serb, Jewish and Romani ethnicity. Victims also included communist and anti-fascist Croats and Bosniaks. It was established by the Ustaše regime in 1941 at the Stara Gradiška prison near the eponymous village as the fifth subcamp of the Jasenovac concentration camp.

According to the list of victims by name of KCL Jasenovac, the Jasenovac memorial site, which includes research as of 2007, the names and data for 12,790 victims of the camp have been established.

Systematic killing of inmates

The camp was guarded by the Croatian Ustaše, including some female troops. Inmates were killed using different means, including firearms, mallets and knives. At the "K" or "Kula" unit, Serbian and Jewish women, with weak or little children, were starved and/or tortured at the "Gagro Hotel", a cellar which Ustaša Nikola Gagro used as a place of torture. Other inmates in the Kula unit were poisoned with gas.

Gas experiments were conducted initially at veterinary stables near the "Economy" unit, where horses and then humans were poisoned using sulphur dioxide and later Zyklon B. Gassing was also tested on children in the yard, where the camp commandant, Ustaša sergeant Ante Vrban, viewed its effects. Most gassing deaths occurred in the attics of "the infamous tower", where several thousand children from the Kozara region were killed in May, and 2000 more in June 1942.