Sarajevo 1941

Abstract

When German army units occupied Sarajevo on April 15, 1941, an immediate terror took place on Jewish population, including the looting and the destruction of their religious buildings and property. Ten days later, the authority of the Independent State of Croatia was established in Sarajevo, the process in which the Roman Catholic clergy and some Muslim intellectuals played a particularly important role. The new Croatian authorities immediately extended their genocidal law establishment to the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina, according to which Serbs, Jews and Roma were outlawed, and their property was brutally looted and destroyed. The Ustashas’ blade of hatred was aimed at the Serbian population in Sarajevo and its surroundings. As early as the beginning of May 1941, the Ustashas began with the arrests and the imprisonment, followed by the first killings and deportations to the concentration camps. The clergy of the Serbian Orthodox Church was the first to be attacked. They were not only being arrested, persecuted and taken to concentration camps but also brutally killed. Serbs and Jews were being executed at several locations in Sarajevo, mostly in Vraca. The terror soon spread to the entire district of Sarajevo, where Ustasha units brutally exterminated the Serbian population from dozens of villages around Sarajevo, in several campaigns during the summer and the autumn of 1941. The pogroms and mass killings of Sarajevo Serbs continued in the following years. Simultaneously with these mass executions, the premeditated deportation of the Serbian and Jewish population to the camps, mostly to Jasenovac, took place. In that way, the Jews from Sarajevo were almost completely exterminated. According to the historical sources, the number of Sarajevo Jews killed during the Second World War was between 8,000 and 9,000, while the number of Serbs killed in the Sarajevo district, according to the documents of the State Commission for Determining the Crimes of the Occupiers and Their Supporters, is estimated at around 7,000.