Petar Brzica

Petar "Pero" Brzica (born ca. 1917) was a Croatian Franciscan of the "Order of Friars Minor" who became a mass murderer during the Ustaše regime. He committed his atrocities at the Jasenovac concentration camp during World War II. Before the war, Brzica was a scholarship student at the Franciscan college of Široki Brijeg in Herzegovina and a member of The Great Brotherhood of Crusaders, an organization part of the Croatian Catholic movement. He spent some time studying law in Zagreb where he became a Ustaše Youth member, later becoming a member of the fascist Ustaša government (1941–45) and one of the guards in the Jasenovac concentration camp. As a member of Ustaša, he held the rank of Lieutenant. He won a contest in which he used a curve-bladed knife, also called a srbosjek ("Serb-cutter"), to kill newly arrived concentration camp prisoners. Brzica boasted of winning the contest by killing the largest number of prisoners – 1,360 people. Other sources set Brzica's "record" at a lower number, between 670 and 1,100.