Sajmište concentration camp

The Sajmište concentration camp was a Nazi German concentration camp, located on the outskirts of Belgrade. It was formed in December 1941 and shut down in September 1944. In the beginning, it was almost exclusively meant for Serbian Jews, and subsequently for Serbian Roma and political prisoners. The majority of Serbian Jews were killed in the Sajmište camp.

The Camp
The camp was formed on the left bank of the Sava, near the railway bridge at the entrance into Belgrade where the pre-war trade fairground (sajmište) was located. This territory which was, at that time, deserted, uninhabited and marshy, was several kilometers from Zemun and formed a part of NDH (Independent State of Croatia) territory, so the Germans asked for it to be given to them.

Most of the inmates were Serbian opponents of the ocupation, as well as Serbian Romani people. The number of inmates is estimated at 100 000. At least 40 000 Serbian and 7–8 000 Jewish victims perished in it.

The concentration camp administration had approximately 500 Jewish men who were exempted from shooting. They administered the camp in so-called "self-administration" and were responsible for distributing food, dividing up labor, and organizing a Jewish guard force which patrolled along the barbed wire fence inside the camp. The camp commandant since January 1942 was SS Untersturmführer Herbert Androfer. The camp's exterior was guarded by 25 men of German Reserve Police Batalion 64.

Supplies were provided by the "Department of Social Care and Social Institutions of Belgrade’s Municipal Authorities". At the beginning of December 1941, German authorities called upon Jews in Belgrade to report to the Sicherheitspolizei and to hand over their house keys. From December 8th until 12th, Germans took them to Sajmište. Conditions in the camp were extremely difficult - the damp and the cold, hunger and epidemics. As camp inmates starved and froze to death, Jewish men (the number is unknown) were led away to be shot by German firing squads in Belgrade. They were killed in the same manner, in the same place and by the same people as were the Banjica camp prisoners. After all men were shot, 6,280 women and children were killed in a special gas truck on their way to Belgrade and buried in Jajinci.

The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust states: ''Mass murders of Jews took place in Jajinci, Jabuka, Zasavica (near Šabac), and Bubanj (near Niš). By December, most of the Jewish men had been killed; the rest - a group from Niš, and several hundred men had been put to work in the Sajmište camp, near Belgrade, were murdered in February and March 1942, respectively.''

''December 1941 to May 1942. A meeting was held in Belgrade on October 20, 1941, attended by Turner, security police chief Wilhelm Fuchs, Frantz Rademacher of the German Foreign Ministry (where he was in charge of Jewish affairs), and Frantz Stuschke and SS-Obersturmbannführer Friedrich Suhr, two of Adolf Eichmann's men. At the meeting it was decided that for the time being the Jews were to be concentrated in one camp, since it was not possible to deport them to the east before the summer of 1942. Accordingly, between December 1941 and February 1942, all the Jewish women and children in Serbia - seventy-five hundred to eight thousand persons - were taken to the Sajmište camp. Conditions in the camp were very bad: the living accommodations did not shelter the inmates from the weather, sanitation was nonexistent (there was a single shower for all the prisoners, and very few toilets), and the food was bad. As a result, the mortality rate soared.''

The same source says further: ''In the early spring of 1942 the German authorities in Serbia realized that they would not be able to deport the Jews as quickly as they had thought, and they asked Berlin to provide another solution. In late February a gas van (see gas vans) arrived in Belgrade, sent from Berlin, of the kind that had by then been tried out in Poland and in the Soviet Union. This gas van was used from March to May 1942 to kill all the Jews imprisoned in Sajmište.''

''After that only a few Jews were left in Serbia. Most of them had been given refuge by Serbian friends or had escaped to the partisans. In November 1943 SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel, the officer in charge of Aktion 1005, came to Belgrade in order to set up a unit that would disinter the bodies of the murder victims and burn them. The unit, consisting of fifty Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police) men and German military police, as well as 100 Jewish and Serbian prisoners, was engaged in the gruesome task of obliterating the traces of the murders up to the fall of 1944.''

Approximately 14,500 Serbian Jews - 90 percent of Serbia's Jewish population of 16,000 - were murdered in World War II.

Aftermath
In 1944, Sajmište was hit by U.S. bombers in raids, which killed 80 people at the camp and injured 170. The bombers' intended target was the nearby railway station.

As of 2006, Sajmište is still not a memorial center. On February 11, 1993, the European parliament adopted the Resolution on European and International Protection of Concentration Camps as Historical Monuments. However, it seems this does not pertain to camp Sajmište, which is not listed among the names of the 22 largest camps for Jews in Europe in the Memorial Center Yad Vashem in the Hall of Memoirs in Jerusalem. Of all the camps in the former Yugoslavia, Jasenovac is the only name listed. The location is proclaimed a "Cultural Heritage of city of Belgrade" in 1987, and the monument was elected on April 21 1995. Initiative to create a memorial center was initiated in April 2006.