The eliminations of people in the camp, whether individually or mass, were happening every day. Individual killings often occurred within the camp. Detainees were killed because they looked at someone in a wrong way, or because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The reason for the murder of camp detainees was often also a bad mood of Ustasha. By the end of 1941, the mass killings of the prisoners were carried out near the camp itself, on a field near the road, towards the village of Kosutarica. Initially, liquidations were most often by shooting, and later by an ax, or a knife. When the camp extended to the right bank of the Sava River, liquidations were transferred to that area.
According to crimes, brutality, violence and the number of victims, the Jasenovac concentration camp is one of the largest concentration camps in World War II Europe. Only Auschwitz and Treblinka are ahead of Jasenovac. However, Jasenovac is unrivalled in barbarity of methods of torture and killing.
Ustashas murdered with knives, daggers, axes, blades, hammers, wooden mallets, iron bars, hoes, stakes, straps, or by hanging, burning, beating, drowning, starvation, thirst, exposure to high and low temperatures, and exposure to hard physical work. Specially designed knife for the mass slaughter of detainees, came from the German company “Solingen”. The twelve centimetres long knife, slightly bent, with a blade located on the concave side, is attached to a bent oval copper plate. The plate is attached to a thick leather bracelet that fits on a hand and wrist, with the hole to put the thumb through. Other fingers are free. At the bottom of the blade it was engraved “Grafrath gebr.Solingen”, and on the leather bracelet was the name of the German company “Gravis”.
During one period of the camp, the brickworks building served as a scaffold i.e. a place where victims’ remains were cremated. Prisoners called this crematorium the Pićili Furnace after its author Dominik Hinko Piccili, a pre-war construction engineer who became the commander of the camp labour service at the beginning of 1942. It was inside the very brickworks building, in the chamber used for placing and baking of crude bricks that Ustasha then constructed a furnace for disposing of bodies of murdered prisoners. Killings and burning would take place mostly at night. This furnace was used during the period from March until April 1942. The furnace was then pulled down for Ustashas were not able to get rid of a large number of those murdered due to its small capacity.
In the spring of 1942, the North-Eastern part of the camp was fenced with barbed wire and was thus physically separated from the rest of the camp. Its first prisoners were Roma who were brought to Jasenovac in large numbers, and after them also Serbs from Kozara. Towards the end of November 1942, around 160 people remained in that space. The Commander of this “camp”, Ivica Matković, ordered that they be deprived of food. He put up a sign “Typhus” at its entrance. After several days those who were weak and infirm died. Several weeks afterwards, only some 40 prisoners were still alive who, in frantic hunger, ate the meat of those who had died. The agony of these people ended at the beginning of January 1943, when they were transferred on a ferry to Gradina, on the other bank of the Sava River. There they were confined in a village house that is today known as the Vukić House. Its windows and doors were sealed with thick boards. The same day, at around 16:00 hrs, prisoners, led by a former Home Guard officer Radivoje Munjin, broke out of the house and attacked Ustashas. The fight lasted around five minutes. They were all killed. After that the Camp III was dissolved and its area was ploughed up.
One of the places were liquidations took place was the platform above the Sava River. River ships and barges would be loaded and unloaded there at the dock equipped with a hoist. At the end of 1944 and beginning of 1945, this platform, named Granik, served as a place for killing for Ustashas. Ustashas would strip a victim naked at night and tie his hands behind his back. In most of the cases they would tie the victim to a heavy object at Granik and hit him in the head with a hard object or cut his throat. The victim would fall straight into the Sava River.