Memorial to the Victims of the Sajmište Concentration Camp

Споменик жртвама логора Сајмиште

A memorial in Novi Beograd, a municipality of Belgrade on the left bank of the river Sava, honours the approximately 8,000 Jewish women and children who were held at the Sajmište concentration camp (German: »Judenlager Semlin«) in 1941/42 and murdered in gas vans in the spring of 1942. The camp was established on trade fair grounds located near the municipality of Zemun (German: Semlin), hence the name. Novi Beograd was founded only after the war.

History

In 1931, about 7,900 Jews lived in Belgrade. In April 1941, the German Wehrmacht and its allies conquered Yugoslavia. The country was divided among the invaders, and German units occupied the Serbian heartland. Immediately, they began taking measures against the Jewish population: Jews were registered, expropriated and drafted for forced labour. In the summer of 1941, Serbian partisans revolted against the Germans, who in turn carried out »retributive measures« directed primarily against Serbian Jews. They shot 100 Jews for every killed Wehrmacht soldier; 50 for every wounded soldier. By the end of October 1941, the Wehrmacht had shot almost all Jewish men in Serbia. The remaining Jewish men, women and children were incarcerated in a camp, which the SS and the Wehrmacht established near Belgrade on trade fair grounds (Serbian: Sajmište) in December 1941. On December 8, 1941, the first prisoners arrived at the »Judenlager Semlin«, which was formally part of the Independent State of Croatia. Jewish women and children, but also Sinti and Roma were forced to live on the fair grounds in unheated buildings which had been severely damaged in air raids.
The Reich Main Security Office refused to deport the Jews from Sajmište, so the Belgrade SS, under the command of Harald Turner, ordered a gas van in February 1942. Every day except Sundays, the gas van drove through Belgrade carrying Jewish women and children. After a stop, a pipe was brought on which directed the exhaust fumes into the interior of the truck, asphyxiating the people inside. After another twenty-minute drive, the van held at a firing range about ten kilometres outside of Belgrade. There, the victims were buried in previously prepared pits. Later, the Sajmište camp served as a so-called detention camp for prisoners from all over Yugoslavia, who were held there prior to being deported to other regions and deployed in forced labour.

Belgrade, before 1941, The Sajmište fair grounds near Belgrade, Jevrejski istorijski muzej Beograd

Victims

Wehrmacht execution commandos shot about 4,200 Jewish men in the course of »retributive actions« in Serbia. Nearly 6,800 people were held at the Sajmište concentration camp at one time, mostly Jewish women and children, but also about 600 Sinti and Roma as well as several Jewish men. The SS murdered about 7,500 Jews in Sajmište by asphyxiation in gas vans.
Between May 1942 and May 1944, up to 32,000 prisoners passed through the »detention camp« which was located on the premises. The prisoners - most of them men from all over Yugoslavia - were deported from Sajmište to forced labour details in other regions. At least 10,000 of them died due to the living conditions at the Sajmište camp.

After the First World War, the Kingdom of Serbia became part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. In 1929, King Alexander I (1888–1934) from the Serbian Karađorđević dynasty established a dictatorship with the overall support of Serbian officers. The state was now known as Yugoslavia. In April 1941, it 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. The Bačka region of Serbia was occupied by Hungary and southern Serbia by Bulgaria, with the remaining Serbian territory falling under German occupation. The resistance was led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (partisans) and the royalist Serbian militia (Chetniks) led by General Dragoljub Mihailović (1893–1946); there was also fighting between these two groups. From autumn 1941, the German military administration extended its campaign against these underground groups by launching a full-scale war against the civilian population. A hundred Serbs were to be killed for every murdered German soldier and fifty for every wounded German soldier. Within a few weeks, Wehrmacht soldiers had killed nearly all of the Jewish men and thousands of male Roma in these »reprisal measures«. The communist resistance in Serbia was also destroyed or driven out, with the result that the Chetniks now fought alone against the enemy regime. The Red Army entered Serbia in October 1944, closely followed by units of the »People’s Liberation Army« led by Marshal Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980). Serbia became one of the six states in the new Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. As the communist leader of Yugoslavia, Tito had tens of thousands of former opponents and civilians – including Chetniks – persecuted and murdered. State commemoration of the Second World War focused on the partisan campaign. Monuments to the partisans were put up all over the country, also at the sites of mass shootings of civilians such as Kragujevac. At the same time, Tito used national commemoration to bridge the differences between the various ethnic groups in Yugoslavia as well as between different forms of resistance, terror and collaboration. The memorialization of the victims of the Holocaust and the mass murder of Roma is still incomplete. After the death of Tito, and especially under the regime of President Slobodan Milošević (1941–2006) between 1989 and 2000, the »Croat« Tito fell out of favour in Serbian memory. Monuments dedicated to Tito and his communist partisans were removed and streets were renamed. Instead, there was a strong revival of support for the royalist Chetniks and their leader Mihailović, who had been shunned since 1944-45. In summer 1991, whilst the break-up of Yugoslavia was still underway, the Serb-dominated Yugoslavian People’s Army launched a war against Croatia, which was to last until th e end of 1995. During this war, the Croatian memorial site at Jasenovac was occupied and badly damaged by Serbian troops and the museum was looted. January 2009 saw the first Serb-organised seminar on the history of the Holocaust. This event was held in conjunction with a commemoration at which Christians and Jews remembered the massacre of at least 3,775 Jews, Roma and Serbs by Hungarian units in Novi Sad at the end of January 1942. The most important historical site of the Holocaust in Serbia is the former fairgrounds Sajmište in Belgrade, where up to 7,500 Jews had been murdered in 1942 and later the »Anhaltelager Semlin« had its premises. In 2020, Serbian parliament voted to create an adequate memorial site on the decrepit compound.

Remembrance

In May 1944, the prisoners of the Sajmište camp were transferred to other camps and the »detention camp« was dissolved. Three years after the end of the war, labour details deployed in the construction of Novi Beograd, a new district of Belgrade, were accommodated in the empty buildings on the former camp premises. From 1952 on, artists moved to the area, having been allocated studios on-site by the Belgrade Academy of Arts. In the following years, the premises became increasingly run-down; in 2002, there were 2,250 people living there.
In 1974 and 1984, two memorial plaques were dedicated in Zemun, and in 1987, the premises were granted cultural heritage landmark status by the Yugoslav state. A further, 10-metre high memorial by the artist Miodrag Popović was erected on the bank of the river Save in 1995. It bears no inscription, and the other existing memorials also fail to mention Jews as the primary victims of the camp. Since 2007, the private television channel B92 has advocated the creation of a central Serbian Holocaust memorial site at Zemun as well as the establishment of a »Museum of Tolerance«.

Belgrad, about 1942, A group of prisoners in the forced labour camp, Yad Vashem

Belgrade, 2012, Memorial stone from 1984, Stiftung Denkmal

Open

The memorial is accessible at all times.

Contact

http://www.starosajmiste.info/

starosajmiste.info@gmail.com

Belgrade, 2012, The central tower of the trade fair grounds housed the camp administration, Stiftung Denkmal

Belgrade, 2012, Former Italian Pavilion now used by artists, Stiftung Denkmal

Belgrade, 2012, Former Czechoslovakian Pavilion in which the clothes and shoes of the murdered were sorted, Stiftung Denkmal

Belgrade, 2012, Many inmates were executed or beaten to death in the Hungarian Pavilion, Stiftung Denkmal

Belgrad, 2008, Memorial to the victims of the Sajmište camp, public domain

Belgrade, 2009, Memorial to the victims of the camp on the bank of the river Sava, Danny Rimpl

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