> LAST NAZI-ERA DEATH
> CAMP COMMANDER
> IS SENTENCED TO 20
> YEARS FOR CROATIA
> ATROCITIES
> DINKO SAKIC, the last known living
> commander of a Nazi-era death camp,
> was yesterday sentenced in a Zagreb
> court to a maximum 20 years in prison
> after being found guilty of crimes against
> humanity.
> Sakic, 78, had been the commander of
> the Jasenovac camp in wartime Croatia
> and was convicted of personally shooting
> four inmates dead and ordering numerous
> other executions. He bore responsibility
> for the killings of about 2,000 people
> while he ran the camp in 1944.
> Chief Judge Drazen Tripalo said the
> seven-member court panel found Sakic
> guilty of all charges, saying he
> "maltreated, tortured and killed inmates
> and did nothing to prevent his
> subordinates from doing the same".
> During the trial, Sakic laughed and jeered
> at surviving inmates as more than 30
> testified to having witnessed scenes of
> appalling brutality. His lawyers used the
> same defence as many Nazis at the
> post-war Nuremberg trials - that he had
> merely obeyed his superiors' orders.
> Sakic himself never expressed remorse
> for what occurred at Jasenovac. He
> rejected witnesses' testimonies as
> "fantasies" and "anti-Croat" propaganda.
> He claimed that everything he had done
> was for the good of Croatia, and that "no
> harm" had been inflicted upon the
> inmates.
> Jasenovac, unlike Auschwitz or Dachau,
> is not a well-known name outside the
> former Yugoslavia. A Tito-era museum
> at Jasenovac was destroyed during the
> Croatian war of independence in 1991,
> although a memorial still stands there.
> The camp survivors, however, recalled a
> place of atrocities. They told of
> witnessing mass executions, random
> killings,***s and the *** of
> inmates who were unfit for work. Four
> witnesses testified to seeing Sakic empty
> his gun into the head of a camp inmate,
> Milo Boskovic.
> Sakic has the right to appeal to the
> supreme court in Croatia. He was
> extradited from Argentina in June 1998 to
> stand trial after he gave an interview to
> Argentinian television. He had been living
> in South America since 1947 with his
> wife Nada, a former guard at the Stara
> Gradiska camp near Jasenovac.
> The six-month trial forced Croatia to
> confront its past as an ally of the Nazis.
> The state has long been accused of
> drawing inspiration from its wartime
> predecessor, the Ustashe regime, known
> as the NDH.
> The current Croatian national symbol, a
> block of red and white squares which
> forms a "U", is almost identical to the
> NDH's symbol, and can be seen sprayed
> on walls. Both the NDH and today's
> Croatian regime have the same unit of
> currency, the kuna. For Serbs and Jews
> such symbols have a macabre resonance,
> in a region where emblems wield much
> power.
> During the Bosnian war of independence,
> Bosnian Croat fighters - armed, financed
> and organised under the aegis of Zagreb -
> would give the Nazi- style Ustashe salute
> and often wore the "U" emblem on their
> uniforms. The Croatian President, Franjo
> Tudjman, himself a former anti-Nazi
> partisan, played down the Holocaust and
> the number of Jews killed, in his book,
> The Wastelands of History. Israel
> refused to establish full diplomatic
> relations with Croatia until he apologised
> for his writings.
> The Sakic trial is the first of a Ustashe
> official since Croatia gained
> independence and it has been closely
> monitored by Jewish and human-rights
> groups. The Croatian government,
> already under considerable diplomatic
> pressure over its human-rights record and
> poor treatment of a tiny Serb minority,
> has co-operated with both the United
> States' State Department and Jewish
> organisations.
> The Sakic verdict could prove
> embarrassing for the Vatican, already
> embroiled in controversy over alleged
> pro-Hitler sympathies of the wartime
> Pope Pius XII, detailed in a new
> biography.
> Sakic was one of many senior Ustashe
> officials who fled to South America along
> the notorious post-war "ratlines". These
> were underground escape routes for
> senior leaders of the devoutly Catholic
> Ustashe regime. Croatian fascists were
> provided with funds and fake Red Cross
> passports by Catholic priests as they
> passed through Italy before fleeing to
> South America. With the aid of Vatican
> officials, a network of priests helped
> some of the worst mass killers of the
> Second World War flee to freedom, a
> decision that could yet return to haunt the
> Vatican.
> GUARDS WHOSE PLEASURE IN
> KILLING EVEN SHOCKED THE SS
> JASENOVAC extermination camp is the
> subject of a gruesome dispute over
> numbers between Serb and Croat
> historians.
> The camp operated on the banks of the
> Sava river between 1941 and 1945, and
> was the site of mass *** of Serbs,
> Jews and Roma. Jasenovac was the
> largest extermination camp in the wartime
> Croatian Nazi-puppet state, known as the
> Ustashe regime (NDH), which ruled
> Croatia under Ante Pavelic's leadership.
> Serb historians claim that 600,000 people
> were killed at Jasenovac, a figure also
> quoted by the authoritative Encyclopedia
> of the Holocaust. Croat historians, keen
> to downplay the numbers killed for
> political reasons, claim that 35,000 were
> killed. The compromise figure is that up
> to 85,000 were killed.
> What is not in question is the appalling
> brutality of the camp guards and
> commanders such as Dinko Sakic. There
> were no gas chambers at Jasenovac,
> because the Croat guards killed their
> inmates by hand, often favouring knives
> and hammers as well as bullets. The
> waters of the River Sava ran red with
> *** when one night guards held a
> competition to see who could cut the
> throats of the most victims. The winner
> claimed 2,000 victims.
> Even the SS troops were disgusted at the
> pleasure that the Ustashe guards took in
> their ***y work and wrote protesting
> memos to Berlin.
> http://SportToday.org/
>"DINAMO" Zagreb
>Dynamo Moscow was not founded in 1923, it took its present name that
>year.
>The club was started by workers at the Morozov cotton mills in 1887.
>The
>owners of the mill came from Blackburn, so the team's colors were (and
>remain) Blackburn blue and white.
>After the Revolution, Cheka chief Felix Dzerzhinsky changed the name to
>Dynamo and established them as the secret police team, which was
>replicated across
>eastern Europe.
>--
>Thlayli
>Felix EdmundovichDzerzhinsky (b. Sept. 11, 1877, Vilna province, Russia,
>in modern Lithuania - d. July 20, 1926, Moscow), Bolshevik leader who
>was head of the first secret police organization in Soviet Russia.
>Son of a Polish nobelman, Dzerzhinsky joined the Kaunas (Kovno)
>organization in the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party in 1895. He
>became a party organizer, and, although arrested by the Russian Imperial
>Police for his revolutionary activities five times between 1897 and
>1908, he became a leader of the Polish-Lithuanian Social Democratic
>Party and was influential in convincing his colleagues to unite with the
>Russian Social Democrats in 1906. Afterward, as a close follower of
>Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Sicial Democratic
>Party, Dzerzhinsky pursued his revolutionary activities within the
>Russian Empire and in western Europe. Arrested for the sixth time in
>1912, he remained in captivity until after the February Revolution of
>1917.
>Elected to the Bolshevik Party's Central Committee in July 1917,
>Dzerzhinsky played an active role in the October Revolution (1917) and
>on Dec. 20 *Dec. 7, old style) 1917, wa named head of the new
>All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and
>Sabotage (Cheka; after 1922 called OGPU), which became Soviet Russia's
>security police agency. For the next several years Cheka spread terror,
>contributing to the general chaos in Russia by arbitrarily executing
>real and alledged enemies of the Soviet state. Dzerzhinsky personally
>acquired a reputation for being a ruthless and fanatical Communist.
>During the Russo-Polish War (1919-20), when the Red Army was driving the
>anti-Bolshevik Polish forces westward, Dzerzhinsky became a member of
>the Polish revolutionary committee that was intended to become the
>Bolshevik government of Poland. But after the Soviet Army was forced to
>retreat, he again concentrated on Russian affairs, and, remaininf head
>of the Cheka and commissar for internal affairs (after 1919), he became
>commissar for transport (1921). As such, he greatly
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