The trial of Dinko Sakic, commander of the World War Two Ustashi concentration camp of Jasenovac, continued before the Zagreb County Court on Tuesday with the testimony of Ivo Goldstein, 41, a history professor at the Zagreb Faculty of Philosophy.

Goldstein said that while studying the history of Croatian Jews, mainly those from Zagreb, he also studied the documentation about the Jasenovac camp where, according to his estimates, about 18,000 Jews were killed...

"The authorities of the NDH carefully planned and organized the system of terror", Goldstein said, adding this was visible from numerous provisions adopted by those authorities.

The system of terror began immediately after the Ustashi arrived in Zagreb, on April 17, 1941. "The fundamental act for the terror campaign" Goldstein said, was a law on the defense of the people and the state, which stated that all who sullied the honor of the Croatian people and of the NDH would face the death penalty.

Two months after the law was adopted, numerous racial provisions against Jews and Serbs were also adopted. "The provision on sending undesirable ones into camps was adopted in late November 1941 and it officially legalized the camps system", Goldstein said.

He said Croatia's 26 camps were one of the basic links in the Ustashi terror chain. The main purpose of the camps was to eliminate as many people as possible, to which one of statements by then Interior Minister Andrija Artukovic bears witness.

In late April 1941, Artukovic told the German press the NDH would solve the "Jewish issue" in the same way Germany was doing it, adding the NDH would strictly abide by the racial laws which had been adopted on the German model.

"Although a Jewish background is determined by one's mother, the NDH faithfully interpreted a German law according to which every person whose grandfather or grandmother were Jews was a Jew himself", Goldstein said, adding in the NDH, the Jewish issue was treated as a racial issue.

"So when Jews would convert to Catholicism, it meant nothing, unlike with the Serbs, who saved themselves by undergoing baptism," he explained.

Goldstein said the location for the Jasenovac camp had not been chosen randomly; it had good traffic connections, was protected by two rivers, and was at approximately the same distance from the areas populated by Jews...