Vjekoslav Luburić
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Vjekoslav "Max" Luburić (6 March 1914 - 20 April 1969) was a Croatian Ustaše official who served as head of Bureau III of the Ustaše Surveillance Service, the department with responsibility for overseeing the Croatian concentration camps. He personally oversaw and spearheaded the genocides of Serbs, Jews and Roma in the Independent State of Croatia. He managed to escape prosecution after the war and remained at large until he was murdered by an unknown perpetrator in 1969.
Biography edit
Luburić was born in Humac, Bosnia-Herzegovina, in 1914. His father was shot by a Serbian police officer in 1918 after being caught smuggling, causing Luburić to develop a deep hatred for Serbs and the Serbian monarchy. He began to associate with Croatian nationalists while in secondary school and joined the Ustaše movement in 1931. That same year he was convicted of embezzling from the Croatian stock exchange and sentenced to five months in prison. After his release he relocated to an Ustaše training camp in Hungary and swore loyalty to Ustaše leader Ante Pavelić. He and most other Ustaše residing in Hungary were expelled from the country after Alexander I of Yugoslavia was assassinated by the Ustaše.
Following the outbreak of World War II, the Axis Powers invaded Yugoslavia in 1941 and allowed the Ustaše to establish the Independent State of Croatia. The Ustaše almost immediately passed laws allowing the establishment of concentration camps and the massacre of prisoners; while these did target Jews and Roma, they were mostly aimed at eradicating the Serb population of Croatia, with the Ustaše openly declaring their intent to exterminate one-third of Serbs, expel one-third and force one-third to assimilate into Catholicism. Luburić entered Croatia soon after and was appointed as adjutant to Vjekoslav Servatzy. His first task was to conduct reprisals for the murder of a Croat family in the village of Blagaj. Luburić ordered the round-up of 400 Serbs in the neighbouring village of Veljun on the evening of 9 May and had them brought to Blagaj, where they were taken behind the schoolhouse and killed with knives and blunt objects, a massacre in which Luburić personally participated.
In June Luburić was ordered to carry out cleansing actions in the Lika region after Ustashas in the villages of Gornja Suvaja and Donja Suvaja reported being shot at. On 1 July Luburić lead a group of 300 into the villages but found that the male population had fled into the wilderness, leaving behind the women, children and elderly. In a massacre lasting two hours, Luburić and his men shot 173 civilians and subjected the women to rape and sexual mutilation. On 2 July the Ustaše attacked the nearby village of Osredci, but found that only the elderly and infirm remained, as the rest of the villages had heard they were coming and fled. 30 of the remaining inhabitants were killed before Luburić and his men went on to attack nearby Bubanj, where 152 - 270 villagers were killed and twenty homes were burned down. On 3 July Luburić's unit detained 53 inhabitants of the village of Nebljusi, including ten children, and pushed them to their deaths in a sinkhole; two survived. By the end of the month Luburić's reprisals had killed approximately 1800 people. The atrocities in Lika led to an increased membership of the Croatian partisans and Chetniks and provoked the Srb uprising against the Ustaše.
Following his campaign in Lika, Luburić was appointed head of Bureau III of the Ustaše Surveillance Service, the department with responsibility for the death camps in which Serbs, Jews and Roma were killed. Under the orders of Dido Kvaternik, leader of the Surveillance Service, Luburić oversaw the construction of the Jasenovac concentration camp, the largest camp in Croatia and one of the largest in Europe. He was dispatched to Nazi Germany to learn about how their camps operated and modelled the operation of later camps off the German camps. Jasenovac initially consisted of two sub-camps which Luburić ordered the demolition of nearby towns to make room for; Luburić later ordered the two sub-camps destroyed and forced the prisoners at the camp to build three more, leaving those who were not able-bodied to die in the abandoned campgrounds. Most victims at the camp were murdered not at Jasenovac but at nearby killing sites through beating and stabbing; Luburić had experimented with gas chambers at one point but this had gone nowhere. Luburić's brother-in-law Dinko Šakić and cousin Ljubo Miloš both served as commandant of Jasenovac at various times.
Luburić visited the Jasenovac camp at various times, and every time insisted on personally shooting at least one inmate. He briefly ordered conditions at Jasenovac improved for a Red Cross visit, ordering the deaths of all sick or emaciated inmates and allowing healthier-looking ones to speak to the Red Cross delegation. Conditions reverted to their prior state after the visit. Luburić consistently resisted attempts to improve the conditions at the camp, ignoring bribes and being very reluctant to allow shipments of clothes and food into Jasenovac. In the so-called Gold Affair, when guards were accused of smuggling inmate's jewellery out of Jasenovac, Luburić ordered the culprits beaten to death without trial. Luburić's cruelty extended to other camps as well; following a typhus outbreak at Jasenovac he dispatched hundreds of infected inmates to other camps in order to spread the disease further.
On 21 December 1941, Ustaše forces under Luburić's command marched into Prkosi and marched 400 Serb civilians into the forest, where they were shot. Following this incident the Croatian media were banned from reporting on Luburić's activities, Bureau III or the camp system in order to avoid fostering dissent. Shortly afterwards Luburić lead an offensive in the Kozara mountain area aimed at dislodging the partisan foothold in the area. The offensive succeeded in driving out the partisans, but the civilian population bore the brunt. Luburić announced that Kozara was to be depopulated "to the last man, woman and child". 60, 000 civilians living in the vicinity were arrested and sent to camps. Luburić then initiated a program in which Serb children were detained, forced to convert to Christianity and renounce their nationality and inducted into the Ustaše. The experiment was a failure; almost all of the 450 children taken by Luburić refused to cooperate and were abandoned to die from malnutrition.
In August 1942 Luburić was placed in charge of the 9th Infantry Regiment of the Home Guard. He was almost immediately stripped of his command for shooting dead one of his men and was placed under house arrest. However he remained de facto in command of the camps until it was officially restored and he was released when Luburić ordered the arrest of of ministers Mladen Lorković and Ante Vokić for allegedly plotting to overthrow Pavelić. He was later placed in charge of rooting out suspected communists in Sarajevo in response to increased partisan activity. Luburić presided over a tribunal known as the Criminal War Court of Commander Luburić where suspected communists were brought. Luburić's men held "interrogation" sessions where detainees were hung upside down and beaten until they confessed before Luburić pronounced sentence, either death or deportation to a concentration camp. Halid Nazečić, a defendant accused of conspiring to assassinate Luburić, was sentenced to death by Luburić's court and had his eyes gouged out and his genitals burned with boiling water before being hacked to death. Luburić's court executed 323 people and sent hundreds more to camps.
With the overthrow of the Ustaše government, Luburić fled Croatia after leaving his papers next to a dead body to fake his death. He lived out his post-war years in exile in Spain. Luburić and Pavelić initially remained in contact, but a rift grew between them after Pavelić expressed support for the creation of a Greater Serbia, which Luburić opposed. Luburić denounced Pavelić, who retaliated by sending Luburić's wife a letter detailing Luburić's wartime atrocities, leading to the breakup of their marriage.
On 21 April 1969, Luburić's son found him dead in a pool of blood in his house. An autopsy concluded that Luburić had been beaten over the head, but had survived the blows and choked to death on the blood. He is suspected to have been killed by the Yugoslav secret police as revenge for his wartime atrocities, but nothing was ever proven.