The Independent State of Croatia, established under German and Italian sponsorship in April 1941 and run by Ante Pavelic's Ustasha movement, adopted racial laws within weeks and set out to remove the roughly two million Serbs in its territory by killing, expulsion and forced conversion to Catholicism, while destroying its Jewish and Roma populations. Massacres in the Kordun, Lika, Herzegovina and Bosnian Krajina in the summer of 1941 drove hundreds of thousands into flight and fed the Chetnik and Partisan insurgencies. The Jasenovac complex, operating from August 1941 to April 1945, was the regime's principal camp; the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that estimates of those killed there range widely, and the Jasenovac Memorial Site maintains a list of 83,145 named victims, of whom about 47,600 were Serbs, 16,200 Roma, 13,100 Jews and 4,300 Croats, including more than 20,000 children. Yugoslav-era figures of 500,000 to 700,000 killed at Jasenovac, and later Croatian revisionist figures of only a few thousand, are both rejected by most current scholarship. The dispute over the numbers remains politically charged in Croatia and Serbia.
The Ustasha regime of the Axis-created Independent State of Croatia killed, expelled and forcibly converted Serbs and killed Jews and Roma
The NDH's roughly 6.3 million inhabitants included about 1.9 million Serbs, some 39,000 Jews and between 25,000 and 40,000 Roma, figures derived from the 1931 Yugoslav census applied to the puppet state's 1941 borders. Victim totals remain disputed: the Jasenovac Memorial Site lists about 83,000 named victims while historians' estimates for the camp system run from roughly 80,000 to over 100,000, and for the regime as a whole substantially higher.
Estimates of Serbs killed by the Ustasha regime across the Independent State of Croatia range from about 300,000 to 500,000, with roughly 30,000 Jews and 25,000 to 30,000 Roma killed. For the Jasenovac complex specifically, the memorial site's individually verified list stands at 83,145 names; the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that scholarly estimates for Jasenovac range from around 77,000 to 100,000, against far higher Yugoslav-era claims and far lower revisionist ones. The disagreement is driven by the destruction of camp records in 1945 and by the political uses of the figures since.
Massacres of Serb villagers, forced conversions and the destruction of Orthodox churches, the camp system at Jasenovac and the separate children's camps are documented in Ustasha decrees, German and Italian occupation reports, and the victim records of the Jasenovac Memorial Site.
Croatia, Serbia