ZAGREB, Aug 21 – The daughter of the pro-Nazi Croatian leader whose regime committed massacres of Serbs and Jews during World War II said her father «never liked Nazism», a local newspaper reported Sunday.
«My father never liked fascism and certainly not Nazism, but at that time, the two countries (Germany and Italy) were the strongest in Europe and it was seen as a chance for Croats to have their state,» said the octogenarian Visnja Pavelic in an interview with with the newspaper Jutarnji List.
Ante Pavelic led Croatia from 1941 to 1945 and his regime exterminated hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and gypsies in concentration camps.
«My father had to accept certain things that he didn’t like … he thought that it was better than to let the Germans and Italians divide up the country,» said Ante Pavelic’s youngest daughter who now lives in Madrid. (….
Ante Pavelic died in Madrid in 1959 from wounds suffered when he was shot twice in an assassination attempt two years earlier in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he had initially fled in 1945. (afp)