Vjekoslav Luburić

Vjekoslav Luburić (6 March 1914 – 20 April 1969) was a Croatian Ustaše official who headed the system of concentration camps in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) during much of World War II.

Luburić also personally oversaw and spearheaded the contemporaneous genocides of Serbs, Jews and Roma in the NDH.

Vjekoslav Luburić was born into a Herzegovinian Croat family in the village of Humac, near Ljubuški, on 6 March 1914.

He was the third child of Ljubomir Luburić, a bank clerk, and Marija Soldo, a homemaker.

The couple had another son, Dragutin, and two daughters, Mira and Olga.

Luburić was a devout and practicing Roman Catholic.

In December 1918, his father was shot by a police officer while smuggling tobacco and died of blood loss.

Following his father's death, Luburić came to "detest and resent Serbs and the Serbian monarchy", the historian Cathie Carmichael writes.

Shortly thereafter, Luburić's sister Olga committed suicide by jumping into the Trebižat River after their mother forbade her from marrying a Muslim.

Following the deaths of Luburić's father and sister, his mother found work in a tobacco factory to provide for her remaining children.

She soon married a man named Jozo Tambić, with whom she had three more children.

Luburić's half-siblings, born of his mother's second marriage, were named Zora, Nada and Tomislav.

Luburić completed his primary education in Ljubuški, before relocating to Mostar to attend secondary school.

There, he began associating with Croatian nationalist youths.

He became increasingly aggressive towards his teachers and peers, and often truanted.

Luburić’s first encounter with law enforcement occurred on 7 September 1929, when he was arrested for vagrancy and sentenced to two days’ imprisonment by a Mostar court.

In his senior year, Luburić dropped out of high school to work in the Mostar public stock exchange.

Luburić joined Ante Pavelić's Ustaše movement in 1931, left Yugoslavia the following year and relocated to Hungary.

Following the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia and the establishment of the NDH with Pavelić at its head, Luburić returned to the Balkans.

In 1931, he joined the Ustaše, a Croatian fascist and ultra-nationalist movement committed to the destruction of Yugoslavia and the establishment of Greater Croatia.

The same year, he was arrested for the embezzlement of funds belonging to the exchange.

On 5 December, Luburić was sentenced to five months in prison for embezzlement.

Shortly thereafter, he escaped captivity and made it as far as the Albanian–Yugoslav border before being recaptured.

Upon release, Luburić relocated to northern Croatia, and then to Subotica, where he surreptitiously crossed the Hungarian–Yugoslav border.

Luburić first rendezvoused with the Croatian émigré community in Budapest before relocating to an Ustaše training camp called Janka-Puszta.

Situated close to the Yugoslav frontier, Janka-Puszta was one of several Ustaše training camps established in Hungary and Italy, whose governments were sympathetic to the Ustaše cause and had territorial aspirations in Yugoslavia.

In late June 1941, Luburić was dispatched to the Lika region, where he oversaw a series of massacres of Serbs, which served as the casus belli for the Srb uprising.

Around this time, he was appointed head of Bureau III, a department of the Ustaše Surveillance Service tasked with overseeing the NDH's sprawling network of concentration camps.

The largest of these was Jasenovac, where approximately 100,000 people were killed over the course of the war.

In late 1942, Luburić was appointed commander of the Croatian Home Guard's 9th Infantry Regiment, but was stripped of his command after shooting and killing one of his subordinates.

Under German pressure, he was placed under house arrest, but retained de facto control of the Ustaše concentration camps.

In August 1944, he played a leading role in the disruption of the Lorković–Vokić plot, which sought to overthrow Pavelić and replace him with a pro-Allied government.

In February 1945, Pavelić dispatched Luburić to Sarajevo, where over the next two months, he oversaw the torture and killing of hundreds of known and suspected communists.

Luburić flew back to Zagreb in early April and was promoted to the rank of general.

The NDH collapsed in May 1945 and its territory was reintegrated into Yugoslavia.

Luburić stayed behind to conduct a guerrilla warfare campaign against the communists, during which he was seriously wounded.

In 1949, he emigrated to Spain and became active in Ustaše émigré circles.

In 1955, Luburić broke with Pavelić over the latter's professed support for a future division of Bosnia and Herzegovina between Greater Croatia and Greater Serbia, and formed a rival Croatian nationalist organization known as the Croatian National Resistance.

The disagreement resulted in great acrimony between the two men and, when Pavelić died in 1959, Luburić was forbidden from attending his funeral.

In April 1969, Luburić was found murdered in his home, a victim of either the Yugoslav secret police or rivals in the Croatian émigré community.