Former Nazi Camp Commander Says His ‘Conscience Is Clear’

The last known living commander of a Nazi concentration camp pleaded innocent Monday to charges of responsibility for the torture and deaths of thousands of people at what has been described as “the Auschwitz of the Balkans.”

Dinko Sakic, 77, commanded the infamous Jasenovac camp for eight months in 1944. Tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and anti-fascist Croats died there.

“I absolutely do not feel guilty, not for a single charge,” Sakic said after hearing the 35-page indictment in which he is charged in the deaths of about 2,000 people. “My conscience is clear.”

The trial, which is expected to take months, got underway Monday after a 10-day delay ordered by Judge Drazen Tripalo after Sakic fainted in jail the night before proceedings were to begin March 4.

Medical experts had said his life could be threatened if he sat through the proceedings, as is required by Croatian law. On Monday, however, court-appointed physicians said Sakic had recovered and was fit for the trial. Sakic said he felt fine.

The indictment accuses Sakic, deported from Argentina last year, of ordering, committing or condoning “torture, maltreatment and killings” at the camp, run by pro-Nazi Croat fascists during the war.

Sakic, who has consistently denied any wrongdoing, showed almost no emotion during the proceedings. He even managed a slight smile and occasionally nodded as prosecutors cataloged the starvation, beatings, hangings and killings.

Sakic has admitted serving as commandant but says the victims died of typhus or other “natural causes.”