Vjekoslav Luburić

Vjekoslav Luburić
Vjekoslav Luburić in the 1940s
Nickname(s)	Maks, General Drinjanin, El Polaco
Born	6 March 1914 Humac, Ljubuški, Austria-Hungary
Died	20 April 1969 (aged 55) Carcaixent, Spain
Allegiance	Independent State of Croatia
Service/branch	Ustaše militia Croatian Armed Forces
Years of service	1929–1945
Rank	General
Commands held	III Office of the Ustaše Surveillance Service Ustaše Defence Brigades Crusaders
Battles/wars	World War II in Yugoslavia
Awards	Iron Trefoil 1st Class Order of the Crown of King Zvonimir Iron Cross 1st Class

Vjekoslav "Maks" Luburić (6 March 1914 – 20 April 1969) was an Ustaše Militia and Armed Forces general in the Independent State of Croatia, a World War II puppet state of Nazi Germany. He was also the commander of the Jasenovac extermination camp. After the war, he first led the Crusaders fascist paramilitary, and then a radical terrorist and nationalist organization Croatian National Resistance.

Early life

Vjekoslav Luburić was born in the village of Humac, near Ljubuški, on 6 March 1914.^[1] to a Catholic family.^[2] He was a petty criminal in his youth, and was jailed for vagrancy in September 1929.^[3] He attended high school in Mostar, but dropped out in his senior year to work in the Mostar public stock exchange. In 1931, he joined the Ustaše, a Croatian fascist and ultranationalist movement committed to the destruction of Yugoslavia and the establishment of Greater Croatia.^[1] On 5 December 1931, the District Court in Mostar sentenced Luburić to five months in prison for embezzlement of funds belonging to the exchange. Some time after this conviction, he was again arrested for embezzlement.^[3] In 1932, he left Yugoslavia and went to Budapest, where he spent much of the period between 1932 and 1941.^[1]

World War II

Following the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, Luburić travelled to the newly proclaimed Independent State of Croatia (NDH) on his own initiative, in order to join the Ustaše-led government, and became part of Poglavnik (leader) Ante Pavelić's inner circle.^[4] Groups of Ustaše Militia under his direct command were responsible for the first mass atrocities committed against Serbs in the NDH, namely the Gudovac, Veljun and Glina massacres.^[5] Luburić was appointed the commanding general for the area of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) around the Drina river, and consequently was sometimes referred to as General Drinjanin (General of the Drina).^[6] He was the founder and first commander of the concentration camps in the NDH, and from late 1941 also commanded the Ustaša Defence Brigades, which were part of the Ustaša Surveillance Service. The Defence Brigades were involved in operations against the Chetniks and Partisans, and also ran the concentration camps and engaged in mass terror. It was in this role that Luburić acquired a reputation as the most brutal of all Ustaše commanders.^[7]

Luburić with a German officer in the Stara Gradiška concentration camp, June 1942.

Luburić, as the commander-in-chief of all NDH concentration camps, announced the great "efficiency" of his Jasenovac concentration camp at a ceremony on 9 October 1942. He presented gold and silver medals to Pavelić and NDH Minister of the Interior Andrija Artuković because they were the "most efficient soldiers".^[8] Pavelić trusted Luburić and personally gave him instructions for the extermination of Serbs.^[9]

Besides running the camp, Luburić would come to Jasenovac to participate in executions in person.^[10][11] It is estimated that 100,000 people were killed at Jasenovac during World War II.^[12][13]

Those who were without papers were interned without trial at the camp, provided they were able to work and had skills that suited the Ustaše's needs. Those who had permits to remain three years were immediately taken to liquidation, and those who had special permits were dealt with according to what the permits were for. When the coup against Pavelić, known as the Lorković–Vokić plot, was uncovered in 1944, Mladen Lorković and Ante Vokić were arrested and sent to the camp at Lepoglava, where they were tried and sentenced to death on Luburić's orders in May 1945.^[14]

In February 1945, Pavelić sent Luburić to Sarajevo with instructions to destroy the resistance movement. The postwar commission on war crimes identified 323 victims of Luburić's reign of terror in Sarajevo. The results of this brutality were witnessed by Landrum Bolling, an American journalist^[15]

...who arrived in the city on April 7 after its liberation by Partizan forces. He was shown a room containing bodies "stacked like cordwood on top of one another. We were told these Serbs whom the Ustashs had hanged by barbed wire from lampposts in Sarajevo ... Luburic's brief reign of terror constituted the Ustasha's final gruesome legacy in Sarajevo. As his last sadistic acts were being carried out, Sarajevo's destiny was being decided on the field of battle in the hills around the city."

After World War II

Following the defeat of the Independent State of Croatia at the end of the war, Luburić led the fascist Crusaders (Križari) paramilitary in Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia. He first escaped to Hungary and then to Francoist Spain.^[16] He settled in Carcaixent, Spain, where he went under the name of Vicente García Pérez, although the locals referred to him as "El Polaco" ("The Pole").^[17]

In 1957, he founded the Croatian National Resistance (Hrvatski narodni odpor, HNO), a radical nationalist and terrorist organization, and led it for two decades, until his death.

Luburić was clubbed and stabbed to death^[18] by his godson Ilija Stanić on 20 April 1969 in Carcaixent.^[19]

Stanić had infiltrated Luburić's organisation on behalf of Yugoslav State Security Administration and fled back to Yugoslavia after the deed. Over the decades following the event, he offered differing accounts of the event, ranging from him being the direct executor to just being an accomplice to two other Yugoslav agents.^[20]

Nada (later Esperanza) Luburić, Luburić's half-sister, was married to Dinko Šakić, who succeeded Luburić as commander at Jasenovac.

See also

• Miroslav Filipović
• Ivica Matković
• Srbosjek

Notes

1. Dizdar 1997, p. 240.
2. Greble 2011, p. 221.
3. Yugoslav State Commission 2000, p. 59.
4. Tomasevich (2001), p. 336
5. Goldstein (2007), pp. 22–24
6. Hudelist, Darko (2004). "Pact with Norval". Tuđman-biografija (in Croatian). Zagreb: Profil. p. 604. ISBN 953-12-0038-6.
7. Tomasevich (2001), p. 422
8. Dr. Edmund Paris, "Genocide in Satellite Croatia, p. 132
9. THE MASSACRE IN HISTORY (edited by Mark Levene and Penny Roberts), Berghahn Books (July 1999); ISBN 978-1-57181-934-5, p. 264; Camp personnel members believed, as they testified later, that Luburić had had instructions for extermination of the Serbs from Pavelić himself. Faced with German complaints about Luburić's methods, Pavelić appears to have commented that he was worth more to him than a hundred university professors.
10. for a single example, see: State-commission, p. 26
11. ג'ורו שוואץ, "במחנות המוות של יאסנובאץ", קובץ מחקרים כ"ה, יד ושם (Djuro Schwartz, "In the Jasenovac camp of death" in Yad Vashem Studies 25 (1996) pages 383–430). p. 322, 328
12. Official website of the Jasenovac Memorial Site
13. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
14. Lord of the Dance Macabre, by Cali Ruchala, Diacritica Press Chicago, Illinois, 2002, p. 75
15. Sarajevo: A Biography, by Robert J. Donia, University of Michigan Press (16 May 2006); ISBN 978-0-472-11557-0 Pages 196–7
16. Ruchala, p. 76
17. "Agent Udbe: Luburića sam ubio jer je uvrijedio mog ćaću". Retrieved 11 September 2016.
18. "Pet najpoznatijih ubistava Udbe" (in Serbian). 2015-11-27. Retrieved 2016-09-11.
19. Guldescu, Stanko, Prcela, John: "Operation Slaughterhouse", p. 71. Dorrance & Co. (1970).
20. "Agent Udbe: Luburića sam ubio jer je uvrijedio mog ćaću". Retrieved 11 September 2016.

References

Books

• Yugoslav State Commission (2000) [1947]. Zemaljska komisija za utvrđivanje zločina okupatora i njihovih pomagača [National Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes Committed by the Occupiers and Their Helpers] (in Serbo-Croatian). Banja Luka: Besjeda.
• Dizdar, Zdravko (1997). "Luburić, Vjekoslav". In Dizdar, Zdravko; Grčić, Marko; Ravlić, Slaven; et al. Tko je tko u NDH (in Serbo-Croatian). Zagreb: Minerva. ISBN 978-953-6377-03-9.
• Donia, Robert J. (2006). Sarajevo: A Biography. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0-472-11557-0.
• Greble, Emily (2011). Sarajevo, 1941–1945: Muslims, Christians and Jews in Hitler's Europe. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-6121-7.
• Goldstein, Ivo (2007). "The Independent State of Croatia in 1941: On the Road to Catastrophe". In Ramet, Sabrina P. The Independent State of Croatia 1941–45. New York: Routledge. pp. 19–29. ISBN 0-415-44055-6.
• Tomasevich, Jozo (2001). War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-3615-2.

Websites

• "Official Website of the Jasenovac Memorial Site". Retrieved 8 March 2015.
• "Holocaust Encyclopedia: Jasenovac". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 8 March 2015.