page_title: Stara Gradiška concentration camp
section_title: Systematic killing of inmates
hierarchical_section_title: Stara Gradiška concentration camp / Systematic killing of inmates
caption_attribution_description: English: Prisoners seated in a field in the Stara Gradiska concentration camp.
context_page_description: Stara Gradiška was a concentration and extermination camp in Croatia during World War II. The camp was specially constructed for women and children of Serb, Jewish, Romani, Croat and Bosniak ethnicity. It was established by the Ustaše regime of the Independent State of Croatia in 1941 at the Stara Gradiška prison near the village of Stara Gradiška. 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.
context_section_description: 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. Subsequently, smaller groups of 400-600 children, and a few men and women, were gassed. At this trial, Vrban stated:
  Q. And what did you do with the children
   
  A. The weaker ones we poisoned
  
  Q. How?
  
  A. We led them into a yard... and into it we threw gas
  
  Q. What gas?
  
  A. Zyklon.
  
  Witness Cijordana Friedlender (aka Jordana Fritlander) testified:
  At that time fresh women and children came daily to the Camp at Stara Gradiška. About fourteen days later, Vrban [the Commandant of the Camp] ordered all children to be separated from their mothers and put into one room. Ten of us were told to carry them there in blankets. The children crawled about the room, and one child put an arm and leg through the doorway, so that the door could not be closed. Vrban shouted: 'Push it!' When I did not do that, he banged the door and crushed the child's leg. Then he took the child by its whole-leg, and banged it on the wall until it was dead. After that we continued carrying the children in. When the room was full, Vrban brought poison gas and killed them all.
  
  According to witness Milka Zabičić, the gassing stopped due to a scheduled visit by a Red Cross delegation in 1943, which did not arrive until June 1944. Gas-vans were constructed to kill Serb and Jewish women and children who came to Stara Gradiška from the Đakovo camp in June–July 1942. A witness, Dr Dragutin Skgratić confirmed:
  He (Šakić) directed his guards to pack women and children into the vans, fitted a rubber hose from the exhaust to the interior and drove around and around the camp until the passengers were dead, 'They killed at least half the group like this as soon as they arrived'.
caption: Prisoners seated in a field in the camp.
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