WWII Death Camp Boss Says ‘No Harm Was Done’

Declaring that his conscience is clear, the last known living World War II concentration camp commander claimed Thursday that “no harm was done” to the inmates of Croatia’s notorious Jasenovac camp.

Dinko Sakic is charged with carrying out or allowing torture, random killings and mass executions while running the camp in 1944. He maintained that he intervened to save several Jewish detainees at Jasenovac, one of more than 20 concentration camps run by the Nazi puppet state of Croatia.

“No one came to Jasenovac because of religion, race or political attitudes--only those who actively worked against the Croatian state,” Sakic said during his first day of testimony.

Independent historians say about 85,000 people--including Jews, Serbs, Gypsies and anti-fascist Croats--were killed in Jasenovac by the Nazi-allied Ustasha puppet regime that enforced racial laws between 1941 and 1945.

Postwar documents also revealed names and photographs of children and elderly people slain in the camp. Survivors testifying in the trial have emphasized that they were imprisoned only because of their nationality or their opposition to the fascists.

Sakic, 77, is charged with crimes against humanity in the deaths of about 2,000 inmates. If convicted, he could face up to 20 years in prison.

But he said the charges against him were based on files “falsified” by postwar Yugoslav authorities. He stood by his claim that Jasenovac was a “collective labor camp.”

In previous testimony, camp survivors recalled starvation, forced labor and mass killings, some of them trembling as they described details of torture and hangings.

Sakic claimed that he released “many Jews” from the camp at the request of a Croatian Jew, Ivan Heinrich, who, he said, “knew that we respected the inmates and that no harm was done to them.”

Sakic added that Heinrich later helped him settle in Argentina.