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| “ | A good Ustashi is he who can use his knife to cut a child from the womb of his mother. | „ |
| ~ Ante Pavelić |
Ante Pavelić ( 14 July 1889 – 28 December 1959) was a Croatian general and military dictator who founded and headed the fascist ultranationalist organization known as the Ustaše in 1929 and governed the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), a fascist Nazi puppet state built out of Yugoslavia by the authorities of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, from 1941 to 1945. Pavelić and the Ustaše persecuted many racial minorities and political opponents in the NDH during the war, including Serbs, Jews, Romani, and anti-fascist Croats. Under his rule, hundreds of thousand of Serbs, Jews, Roma, anti-fascist Croats and others were killed. His death total was 2 million.
Biography edit
Ante Pavelić was born in the Herzegovinian village of Bradina on the slopes of Ivan Mountain north of Konjic, roughly 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) southwest of Hadžići, then part of the Ottoman Empire occupied by Austrian-Hungarian Empire. His parents had moved to Bosnia and Herzegovina from the village of Krivi Put in the central part of the Velebit plain, in southern Lika (in today's Croatia),to work on the Sarajevo-Metković railway line.
Searching for work, his family moved to the village of Jezero outside Jajce, where Pavelić attended primary school, or maktab. Here Pavelić learned Muslim traditions and lessons that influenced his attitude towards Bosnia and its Muslims. Pavelić also attended a Jesuit primary school in Travnik, growing up in a Muslim-majority city. Bosnian Muslim culture later became a major influence on his political views. Pavelić's sense of Croat nationalism grew from a visit to Lika with his parents, where he heard townspeople speaking Croatian, and realised it was not just the language of peasants. While attending school in Travnik he became an adherent of the nationalist ideologies of Ante Starčević and his successor as the leader of the Party of Rights, Josip Frank.
Health problems briefly interrupted his education in 1905. In summer he found work on the railway in Sarajevo and Višegrad. He continued his education in Zagreb, the home city of his elder brother Josip. In Zagreb, Pavelić attended high school. His failure to complete his fourth-year classes meant he had to retake the exam. Early in his high school days, he joined the Pure Party of Rights as well as the Frankovci students' organization, founded by Josip Frank, the father-in-law of Slavko Kvaternik, an Austro-Hungarian colonel. Later he attended high school in Senj at the classical gymnasium, where he completed his fifth-year classes. Health problems again interrupted his education, and he took a job on the road in Istria, near Buzet. In 1909 he finished his sixth-year classes in Karlovac. His seventh-year classes were completed in Senj. Pavelić graduated in Zagreb in 1910 and entered the Law Faculty of the University of Zagreb.
At the start of his career, Pavelić was a lawyer and a politician of the Croatian Party of Rights in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia known for his nationalist beliefs and support for an independent Croatia. By the end of the 1920s, his political activity became more radical as he called on Croats to revolt against Yugoslavia, and schemed an Italian protectorate of Croatia separate from Yugoslavia. After King Alexander I declared his 6 January Dictatorship in 1929 and banned all political parties, Pavelić went abroad and plotted with the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) to undermine the Yugoslav state, which prompted the Yugoslav authorities to try him in absentia and sentence him to death. In the meantime, Pavelić had moved to fascist Italy where he founded the Ustaše, a Croatian nationalist movement with the goal of creating an independent Croatia by any means, including the use of terror. Pavelić incorporated terrorist actions in the Ustaše program, such as train bombings and assassinations, staged a small uprising in Lika in 1932, culminating in the assassination of King Alexander in 1934 in conjunction with the IMRO. Pavelić was once again sentenced to death after being tried in France in absentia and, under international pressure, the Italians imprisoned him for 18 months, and largely obstructed the Ustaše in the following period.
At the behest of the Germans and Italians, senior Ustaša Slavko Kvaternik declared the NDH's establishment in the name of Pavelić, the Poglavnik. Pavelić returned and took control of the puppet government, creating a political system similar to that of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The NDH, though constituting a Greater Croatia, was forced by the Italians to relinquish several territorial concessions to the latter. After taking control, Pavelić imposed largely anti-Serbian and antisemitic policies that resulted in the deaths of over 100,000 Serbs and Jews in concentration and extermination camps in the NDH, murdering and torturing several hundred thousand Serbs, along with tens of thousands of Jews and Roma. These persecutions and killings have been described as the "single most disastrous episode in Yugoslav history". The racial policies of the NDH greatly contributed to their rapid loss of control over the occupied territory, as they fed the ranks of both the Chetniks and Partisans and caused even the German authorities to attempt to restrain Pavelić and his genocidal campaign.
In 1945, he ordered the executions of prominent NDH politicians Mladen Lorković and Ante Vokić on charges of treason when they were arrested for plotting to oust him and align the NDH with the Allies. Following the surrender of Germany in May 1945, Pavelić ordered his troops to keep fighting even after the surrender. The remainder of the NDH government decided to flee to Austria on 3 May 1945, but Pavelić instead ordered them to retreat to Austria over the former border of the Third Reich and have the Croatian Armed Forces surrender to the British Army. The British refused to accept the surrender and directed them to surrender to the Partisans. The Partisans began carrying out massacres against the Ustaše when the latter attacked their position, killing them in a series of repatriations later known as the Bleiburg repatriations. Pavelić himself fled to Austria, and later Argentina, whose president Juan Perón provided sanctuary for German war criminals and several Ustaše. On 10 April 1957, the anniversary of the founding of the fascist Croatian state, he was shot several times in El Polemar, Buenos Aires in a failed assassination attempt by Serbian hotel owner and Chetnik military officer Blagoje Jovović, who wanted to avenge the Serbian victims murdered under Pavelić’s regime. Pavelić survived the attempt and soon left Argentina after the Argentine government reached an agreement with the Yugoslav government for his extradition. He escaped to Chile and then Spain where he was granted asylum. He died two and a half years later, on 28 December 1959, aged 70, from the injuries he sustained in the attempted assassination and is buried in Madrid.