Years of service 1929–1945 Rank General officer | ||
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Nickname(s) Maks, General Drinjanin, El Polaco Service/branch Ustaše militiaCroatian Armed Forces Commands held III Office of the Ustaše Surveillance ServiceUstaše Defence BrigadesCrusaders Other name Maks, General Drinjanin, El Polaco Similar Ante Pavelić, Dinko Šakić, Jure Francetić, Ljubo Miloš, Miroslav Filipović Died 20 April 1969 (aged 55) Carcaixent, Francoist Spain | ||
meeting in sarajevo book about vjekoslav luburi s murder
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.
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Early life
Vjekoslav Luburić was born in the village of Humac, near Ljubuški, on 6 March 1914. to a Catholic family. He was a petty criminal in his youth, and was jailed for vagrancy in September 1929. 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. 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. In 1932, he left Yugoslavia and went to Budapest, where he spent much of the period between 1932 and 1941.
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. 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. 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). 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.
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". Pavelić trusted Luburić and personally gave him instructions for the extermination of Serbs.
Besides running the camp, Luburić would come to Jasenovac to participate in executions in person. It is estimated that 100,000 people were killed at Jasenovac during World War II.
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.
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
...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. 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").
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 by Ilija Stanić on 20 April 1969 in Carcaixent.
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.
Nada (later Esperanza) Luburić, Luburić's half-sister, was married to Dinko Šakić, who succeeded Luburić as commander at Jasenovac.