On 12 February, a mourning ceremony for the 77th anniversary of the uprising at the Crveni Krst Nazi labor camp took place in a Serbian city of Nis. Following the uprising, a large group of inmates managed to escape the camp and join the partisan forces.
The name of the concentration camp in Serbia's Nis should not fool you: Crveni Krst (“Red Cross”) was named after a nearby railroad station, and it has nothing to do with charity.
Initially, the Nazis set up a POW camp in warehouses and barracks located in the industrial quarter of Nis in 1941. However, the influx of POWs ceased shortly, partially thanks to mass shootings. According to data from Venceslav Glisic's 1970 book “Terror and Crimes of Nazi Germany in Serbia, 1941-1944,” the Germans would shoot 100 Serbian prisoners of war for every Wehrmacht soldier killed, and 50 for every soldier injured.
In June 1941, after the German attack on the Soviet Union, the camp was first turned into a prison, and later that year, by September, it had been turned into a concentration camp for Jews, gypsies and various “enemies of the Reich.” Curiously, the Nazis kept both monarchist (chetniks) and communist (partisans) Serbian militia fighters there.
In October 1944, shortly before the camp was liberated, the Germans destroyed the archives and most of the camp documents, so the exact number of the victims varies among accounts. Some 10,000 out of…
