ARGENTINA: Another Nazi Officer Tears off his Mask and Flees

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Apr 8 1998 (IPS) - Former Nazi commander Dinko Sakic fled the home he made in Argentina 50 years ago, after admitting he had managed a death camp in Croatia, where half a million Serbs, Jews and Gypsies were murdered during World War II.

The Canal 13 television station broadcast an interview with Sakic Monday, where he stated he had run the Jasenovac concentration camp for more than a year.

Survivors of the holocaust consulted by the programme identified him the “throat cutter” of the Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia, a country run by the German allied fascist regime at the time.

The interview was filmed in his house in Santa Teresita, Buenos Aires, where he lived under a false name, and when Sakic became aware of the implications of the broadcast he disappeared from his home.

His wife, Esperanza Duburic, said Sakic was in Buenos Aires asking the Croatian embassy for advice, but this entity said it had not taken him in, Wednesday.

President Carlos Menem told the Interior Ministry to call for the arrest of the former Croat commander, and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Vienna, which persues Nazi war criminals, called on Croatia to file an extradition order.

Sakic directed Jasenovac, identified by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre as “the Auschwitz of Croatia,” between 1942 and 1944. The alleged war criminal had lived in Argentina since the end of the war under the name Ljubomir Sakic Bilanovic, according to his identification document, emitted by the Federal Police.

Survivors of the Nazi genocide said between 500,000 and 700,000 people had died in Jasenovac, although current Croat president Franjo Tudjman said there were no more than 60,000 victims.

Sakic told the Canal 13 news programme “Telenoche” there had been no killings in Jasenovac while he was in charge, and that his subordinates had been ordered not to touch anyone.

In conversation with IPS, Jorge Burman, from the Jewish organisation B’Nai Brith, said Sakic had been known to be living in Argentina for some time, as he often wrote reports for the Croat media.

But Burman said the home nations themselves must intervene if they want the extradition and trial of a war criminal.

Around 150 Nazi war criminals are believed to have lived, or be living in Argentina. An investigation carried out a year ago by the Delegation of Argentine Israelite Associations said there could be far more, and that the authorities of the post-war period had encouraged them into the country.

Along with this investigation, documents were found in the US archives stating Argentina had received nearly 1.5 billion dollars of gold taken from Nazi victims in Europe.

Historian Beatriz Gurevich, heading the investigation into war criminals in Argentina, said during Juan Peron’s first term in office, a Commission of Confidential Advidors was set up which sought out war criminals to invite them to settle in this country.

Thus, as the United States and the Soviet Union scooped up German scientists and technicians, Argentina took in Nazi criminals, collaborators and sympathisers.

For instance, Josef Mengele lived here openly for a few years, despite accusations of having executed some 400,000 Jews in Germany and of carrying out atrocious experiments on live human beings in the concentration camps.

Also, Adolf Eichmann, the Third Reich’s “Jewish affairs” man, was living in Argentina until he was kidnapped by a group of Israeli commandoes in 1960, and executed in Israel.

Argentina also took in Edward Roschmann, the Croat Ante Pavelic – whose extradition was turned down, Walter Kuschmann, Joseph Schwammberger, Heinrich Muller and Eric Priebke. Only Schwammberger and Priebke were extradited.

Scwammberger died after being sentenced to imprisonment in Germany and Priebke is currently under house arrest in Italy, after having admitted his part in the massacre of 355 Italians in the Ardeatine Caves in 1944, in a newspaper interview.

The Menem government created a Commission for the Clarification of Nazi Activities in Argentina, presided over by a sociologist with no experience in this type of research, and three foreign historians: Ronald Newton, Ignacio Klich and Robert Potash.

But before embarking on the investigation, Newton made relative the truth of the data which indicate Argentina was one of the main refuges of war criminals.

Newton is author of “the Fourth Side of the Triangle. The Nazi ‘Threat’ in Argentina,” where he argues there is more myth than reality in tales of Nazi war criminal presence in this country.

“I don’t think so many war criminals came to this country, (although) I do think between 30 and 60 did so,” said the historian, today member of the commission which will be making a declaration on the truth of the matter in the next few months.