In the early 1950s, Džamonja began to be commissioned to create large-scale public spomenik complexes commemorating the events of the People's Liberation Struggle (WWII) across Yugoslavia and in Italy, for which he was recognized with numerous awards and accolades. In the beginning, these memorial works were all figurative in nature, however, in 1959, Džamonja gifted to the city of Zagreb a memorial sculpture created to commemorate the victims who killed during massacres there during WWII -- this small monument he created (unveiled in 1960) is often credit as being one of, if not the, first fully abstract WWII monument created in Yugoslavia. As such, Džamonja is often looked to as the father of this uniquely Yugoslavian commemorative sculptural movement. He went on to create additional monuments in the same style, notably at Podgarić and Kozara, which still to this day stand as being among the most well-known and significant of all the monuments in all the former-Yugoslavia. Džamonja truly saw himself as a creator of monuments and sacred spaces... and in this distinct style of sculptural composition, he fashioned "autonomous structures" that were exalted works of interactive art, an exploration of not only the external but of the internal as well.