Nazi Concentration Camp Museum

Introduction

The Red Cross camp, Crveni Krst, is the only fully preserved Nazi concentration camp site in Serbia and one of the best-preserved fascist detention camps in Europe. The German Gestapo converted former military barracks here in 1941, making it one of the earliest camps in occupied Yugoslavia, and it operated until 1944. Prisoners included Serbs, Roma, Jews, communists and supporters of the liberation movement. More than 35,000 people were held, and about 10,000 were killed at Bubanj Hill on the southwest outskirts — the camp was not the end, inmates were regularly taken out there for execution. Its best-known event is the escape of 12 February 1942, the first successful mass breakout from a Nazi concentration camp on European soil. Organised by Branko Bjegovic, a captured Partisan soldier, 147 inmates attempted the flight, 105 got out and 82 died along the way. The Nazis responded with indiscriminate executions as collective punishment, and from then on the camp became a place of death in earnest. A memorial museum opened on the site in 1967, the grounds were declared a cultural monument of exceptional importance in 1979, and it now belongs to the National Museum of Nis under the formal name Museum 12 February. Only the main building, No 12, is open. Three storeys: the first and second hold collective detention rooms that once crammed hundreds of people into a few square metres, with names and dates carved into the walls by inmates still legible; the third floor holds solitary and punishment cells floored entirely with barbed wire, designed to deny any space to sit or lie and to produce total sleep deprivation. The administrative block is currently closed. There are no official tours and very few staff, so visitors walk the route on their own; most panels have English translations. The air is damp and uninsulated, and the interior is markedly cold in winter, a physical condition that is itself part of the display. If you have the stamina, Bubanj Memorial Park is about forty minutes on foot, and its Three Fists concrete monoliths close the narrative that starts in the camp.

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