Initially the camp was intended for Serb Jews, and later for others such as Roma, Communists, Partisans and Chetniks.

During the occupation about 8,000 Jews and 32,000 others were strangled, shot in the ovary or died in the camp itself. The camp was active from October 1941 to July 1944

The first Jewish camps in Belgrade between December 8 and 13, 1941, were 5,281. With the passing of the Jews from Banjica, Sabac, Nis, Kosovska Mitrovica, Novi Pazar, Raska, refugees from Belgrade and Central Europe, the number of camps between December 8, 1941 and the end of April 1942 reached 7,000, of which 6400 were Jews and 600 Roma.

Otherwise the winter of 1941/1942 was one of the coldest. Between December and March, 5,000 prisoners died of cold, disease and hunger.

Pavilion No. 4 was the kitchen where the food was being prepared. The daily diet consisted of water, weak tea, stale cabbage or potato stew and a little wheat bread.
The execution of prisoners was carried out in the open space between pavilions no. 3 and 4.

The Roma in the camp were brought in December 1941 when a group of about 500 Roma women with children. They were housed in Pavilion No. 2. About 60 of them died during the winter due to cold and illness.

The rest were released in January - March 1942, because through their friends and relatives they managed to obtain documents for permanent residence, that is, they did not belong to Roma nomads, The Last Roma Group was released in April 1942.

Between 1936 and 1945 the Nazis wiped out over 50% of Europe’s Romani people.
Whether they were choked to death in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau, “exterminated through labour” climbing the stairs of death at Mauthausen, or shot in a mass grave dug by their own hands in Romania – the extermination of the Gypsies of Europe was carried out with deadly efficiency.

The result in countries like Croatia, Estonia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and what is now the Czech Republic, was a kill rate of over 90% of the pre-war Romani population. Many massacres of Roma in the East by the Nazis’ roving death squads, the Einsatzgruppen, went unreported or under-documented, meaning the total loss of Romani life will probably never be fully exposed or accounted for.

Europe’s collective memory of the Romani genocide is short compared to the Holocaust of the Jews. Germany paid war reparations to Jewish survivors but never to Romani, and the racial character of the Romani genocide was denied for decades in favour of the argument that Roma were targeted for being asocials and criminals. West Germany only recognised the genocide of Roma officially in 1982.