Donja Gradina Memorial Site

There are few areas of Europe so clearly scarred by the events of the 20th century as Bosnia-Herzegovina in the south-east of the continent. After the First World War the country was part of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. In 1929 the Kingdom became Yugoslavia, a dictatorship established by King Alexander I (1888–1934) with the overall support of Serbian officers. In April 1941, Yugoslavia was occupied by German troops and their Italian, Hungarian and Bulgarian allies and split into a number of annexed and occupied territories serving as puppet states of the Nazi regime. Between 1941 and 1944, Bosnia-Herzegovina was part of the »Independent State of Croatia«, a puppet state of Nazi Germany ruled by the regime of terror of the Ustasha and their »Poglavnik« (leader) Ante Pavelić (1889–1959). The Ustasha was an insurgent nationalist movement, which had been fighting Serb-dominated Yugoslavia from abroad since 1929. After 1941, its policy of extermination was directed in particular against the large Serbian minority in Croatia, which was expelled, imprisoned and murdered, and also against Jews, Roma and religious or ideological opponents of the regime. It is estimated that almost 12,000 of the approximately 14,000 Bosnian Jews suffered a violent death under the regime. The Ustasha were also involved in fierce combat with various opposition movements – which, however, were also fighting each other – with a large number of casualties on all sides. There was no public discussion of these ethnic conflicts either after the end of the war in 1944-45 or during the communist dictatorship led by the former partisan leader Marshal Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980). Following the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991-92, these conflicts were, however, to lead to the most devastating war in Europe after 1945. Today’s federal state of Bosnia-Herzegovina is divided into two parts: the Republika Srpska (Bosnian Serb Republic), founded shortly before the Bosnian War (1992–1995), and the Bosniak-Croat Federation. In July 1995, members of the army of the Republika Srpska, the police and Serbian forces murdered up to 8,000 mainly Bosnian men and boys over several days in Srebrenica. During the Tito regime and up until the break-up of Yugoslavia, the culture of remembrance in Bosnia-Herzegovina was dominated by a large number of resistance monuments, memorial parks and synagogues used as museums. The most important of these were the »Il Kal Grandi« synagogue in Sarajevo, the Donja Gradina memorial site in the Republika Srpska - a former satellite camp of the largest Croatian concentration camp in Jasenovac - and the Vraca memorial park, inaugurated in 1981 as the central memorial site in Sarajevo for the »Victims of the Second World War and the Partisan War-Dead«. All of these sites were damaged, destroyed, looted or closed during the Bosnian War in particular and they have only slowly been reinstated. The events of the Bosnian War overshadow the remembrance of the victims of the years 1941 to 1944-45.