The first wave of massacres in the town began on 11 or 12 May 1941, when a band of Ustaše led by Mirko Puk murdered a group of Serb men and boys in a Serbian Orthodox church before setting it on fire.

Further killings in Glina occurred between 30 July and 3 August of that same year, when 700–2,000 Serbs were massacred by a group of Ustaše led by Vjekoslav Luburić.

Luburić escaped Yugoslavia after the war and moved to Francoist Spain, where he was killed by a person generally assumed to be an agent of the Yugoslav State Security Service.

[3][4] NDH authorities, led by the Ustaše militia,[5] subsequently implemented genocidal policies against the Serb, Jewish and Romani population living within the borders of the new state.

[7] Racist and antisemitic laws were passed,[8] and ethnic Serbs, representing about thirty percent of the NDH's population of 6.3 million,[9] became targets of large-scale massacres perpetrated by the Ustaše.

[10][11] The Cyrillic script was subsequently banned by Croatian authorities, Orthodox Christian church schools were closed, and Serbs were ordered to wear identifying armbands.

[19] On 10 May local Ustaše leadership met in Glina where they drew up a list of names of all the Serbs between sixteen and sixty years of age to be arrested.

Some sources state that the Ustaše then herded the group into an Orthodox Church and demanded that they be given documents proving the Serbs had all converted to Catholicism.

[26] The bodies were then left to burn as the Ustaše set the church on fire[16] and waited outside to shoot any survivors attempting to escape the flames.

[30] The crime was a precursor to an even crueler one that would occur three months later in the Glina Orthodox Church, where according to Slavko Goldstein 100 Serbs were killed.

[16] The next day, Pavelić visited Rome and was granted a private audience with Pope Pius XII, who offered de facto recognition of the NDH on behalf of the Holy See.

Many Serbs responded positively, and one group turned up at a Serbian Orthodox church in Glina where a conversion ceremony was to take place.

[38] The Serbs who had gathered, thinking they were to undergo a conversion ceremony, were greeted by six members of the Ustaše[38] under the direct command of Vjekoslav Luburić.

[22] Only one of the victims, Ljubo Jednak, survived after playing dead and later described what had happened: They started with one huge husky peasant who began singing an old historical heroic song of the Serbs.

[49] Puk, the organizer of the first massacre, was captured by British forces while attempting to flee to Austria in May 1945 and was extradited to Yugoslavia several months later, where he committed suicide by slitting his wrists with a razor blade.

[50] Luburić, the organizer of the second massacre, escaped Yugoslavia after the war and moved to Spain,[51] where he was assassinated by a person generally assumed to have been an agent of the Yugoslav State Security Service (UDBA).

[53] Stepinac, who failed to publicly condemn the atrocities in Glina, was accused of collaborating with the Ustaše by Yugoslavia's new Communist government and was tried in 1946,[54] where Jednak testified against him.

"[8] The poem Requiem (Serbian: Rekvijem, Реквијем) by poet Ivan V. Lalić is dedicated to the victims of the massacres in Glina.

[32][48] Following the independence of Croatia from Yugoslavia, the monument, a marble tablet bearing the names of Serbs killed in the massacres, was removed by Croatian authorities in the town.

The move was met with indignation by the Serbian community, who complained to the local authorities, to the Ministry of Culture, and to the Prime Minister of Croatia.

The commemoration, which is jointly organised by the Serb National Council and the Antifascist League of Croatia, takes place both in front of the Memorial Home and at the Orthodox cemetery.