The ‘Croatian Himmler’: What Happened to Luburić 20 Years after WWII JJ
April 1941, Zagreb. As the Axis powers carve up Yugoslavia, a new fascist state rises under the banner of the fanatical Ustaša organization, pledging loyalty to Adolf Hitler and promising a purified Croatia. In the months that follow, Jasenovac – a complex of 5 subcamps emerges along the Sava River, a place that will earn the nickname “the Balkan Auschwitz.” In the years to follow, even German Nazis, accustomed to organized mass murder, reportedly recoil at the savagery unfolding inside Jasenovac.
Prisoners are butchered with knives, beaten to death, and burned alive, while guards compete in acts of cruelty that blur the line between ideology and madness. At the centre of this system stands a man who transforms killing into ritual and terror into policy. He cultivates an atmosphere in which slaughter is praised as patriotism and every guard feels summoned to prove loyalty through bloodshed. German officials quietly describe him as unstable and pathological, while survivors remember him as the most ruthless sadist they ever
encountered. After the war, he escapes to Spain and lives in exile for decades. But in the end, he will pay for his crimes with his own life. His name is Vjekoslav Luburić. Vjekoslav Luburić was born on 6 March 1914 in the village of Humac in Herzegovina, then part of Austria-Hungary, in a region marked by ethnic tension and political unrest. In December 1918, his father was shot – according to some accounts by a Serbian police officer – while smuggling tobacco and he died of blood loss. Following his father’s death, Luburić came to detest
and resent Serbs, feelings that hardened as he grew older. Shortly thereafter, his sister Olga committed suicide by jumping into a river after their mother forbade her from marrying a Muslim. In the turbulent years after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the village of Humac became part of the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, a state dominated by The House of Karađorđević – the Serbian royal family. In 1929, King Alexander I formally renamed it the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, further centralizing power in Belgrade—developments that fuelled
resentment among many Croatian nationalists. Luburić grew increasingly hostile during his school years, frequently clashing with teachers and spending time with Croatian nationalist youths who openly rejected the Serbian-led monarchy. In 1931 he joined the Ustaše, a radical Croatian fascist movement committed to building an independent state through violence, and soon went into exile in Hungary, where he remained for the next ten years. The Second World War began on 1 September 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. When
Germany’s ally Italy failed to conquer Greece in the late autumn and winter of 1940–1941, Germany became more concerned about securing its southeastern flank in the Balkans. Greece’s success in repulsing Italian forces allowed its ally, Great Britain, to establish a foothold on the European continent. To subdue Greece and move the British off the European mainland, Nazi Germany sought to bring Yugoslavia and Bulgaria into Axis alliance, which was a military coalition led by Germany, Italy and Japan.
On 25 March 1941, Yugoslavia joined the Axis and agreed to permit transit through its territory to German troops headed for Greece. The announcement of the agreement was extremely unpopular in many parts of the country, particularly in Serbia and Montenegro and the Yugoslav government announced that it would not honour its obligations under the agreement. Hitler was furious and although the prime minister, General Dušan Simović, sought within days to retract this statement, Hitler ordered the invasion of Yugoslavia on the evening of 27 March.
The invasion, involving German, Italian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian military units, commenced on 6 April 1941. Later that same month, on 17 April, the Yugoslav army surrendered, and the country was then occupied and partitioned by the Axis powers. In the spring of 1941, as the Independent State of Croatia was proclaimed, its leaders made clear what they intended to do with the country’s Serb population, which numbered nearly two million people and made up about thirty percent of the state. Senior Ustaše officials openly stated that
one third would be killed, one third expelled, and one third forced to convert to Roman Catholicism. In early April 1941, Luburić illegally crossed the Yugoslav border and entered the newly created state. On 6 May, he was sent to the village of Veljun near the town of Slunj with about fifty Ustaše under his command, many of them longtime militants who had lived in exile in Italy. Their task was to round up roughly four hundred Serb men in retaliation for the murder of a Croat family in the town of Blagaj the night before. The actual perpetrators were never identified,
but the men of Veljun were declared responsible. On the evening of 9 May, the prisoners were taken to Blagaj and brought into the yard of a local elementary school. There, over the course of the night, they were killed with knives and blunt objects. At dawn, Luburić was seen walking out of the schoolyard covered in blood, washing his hands and sleeves at a nearby well. By the end of July 1941, at least 1,800 Serbs had been killed across the Lika region, and entire villages had fallen silent.
Around this time, Luburić was appointed head of concentration camps in the Independent State of Croatia in which he would play a role similar to Heinrich Himmler in Nazi Germany — overseeing the camp system and transforming ideological hatred into organized mass murder. In May 1941, one month after they came into power, Ustaše authorities began constructing the Jasenovac concentration camp complex, the largest camp in the state and a central site of imprisonment and mass murder targeting Serbs, Jews, Roma people, and political opponents.
In late September 1941, Luburić was sent to Germany for ten days to study methods used in German concentration camps. After visiting camps such as Sachsenhausen, he returned with practical knowledge that shaped the organization of Jasenovac, which was guarded by more than 1500 Ustaše. Luburić visited Jasenovac regularly, often two or three times each month, and insisted on personally killing at least one prisoner during his inspections. He taunted inmates about the manner and timing of their execution and would press his revolver against a prisoner’s head, sometimes firing,
sometimes lowering the weapon and walking away. Attempts to introduce gas vans failed, and a gas chamber constructed at the Jasenovac subcamp of Stara Gradiška was abandoned after several months. Most prisoners were instead killed with knives or blunt instruments, methods that required direct participation and left little distance between guard and victim. By early 1945, the military position of the Independent State of Croatia had deteriorated rapidly as Partisan forces under Josip Broz Tito advanced across the region. With front lines
collapsing and German authority weakening, Luburić was reassigned from the camp system and given a new task inside the country. In mid-February 1945, he arrived in the city of Sarajevo – today’s capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina – with orders to destroy the communist underground operating there. Luburić established his headquarters in a villa in the city centre, a building that residents soon began calling the “house of terror.” From this residence, he appointed a group of Ustaše officers to conduct arrests and executions and created
what he called the Criminal War Court of Commander Luburić. The court handled accusations of treason but also minor charges, and sentences were frequently carried out within hours of arrest. Arrests were widespread and often arbitrary. Suspected communists, refugees, and ordinary civilians were taken to the villa for interrogation. Luburić fostered an atmosphere of intimidation and encouraged methods designed to break prisoners physically and psychologically. Prisoners’ hands were tied behind their backs, pulled between their legs, and secured with a rod
placed beneath their knees before being suspended upside down and beaten. He reportedly summoned relatives of detainees and described in detail how their loved ones had been tortured and killed. In late March 1945, fifty-five residents were hanged from trees and streetlamps in central Sarajevo, with signs placed around their necks reading “Long live the Leader,” referring to Ante Pavelić, head of the Ustaše state. Their bodies were left suspended in public view as a warning, and those attempting to retrieve them were fired upon.
Towards the end of the war, Luburić was promoted to the rank of General. In the final weeks of the regime, he ordered that the remaining prisoners at Jasenovac be killed, that camp documentation be destroyed, and that bodies from nearby mass graves be exhumed and burned in an attempt to eliminate evidence. Tito’s partisan forces entered Sarajevo on 6 April 1945 and proclaimed the city liberated. In the backyard of Luburić’s villa, investigators uncovered numerous bodies, including those of children. An American journalist later described a room filled
with corpses stacked one upon another. Among the victims was Halid Nazečić, whose body bore signs of extreme mutilation—his eyes gouged out and his intimate parts burned with boiling water. The Second World War in Europe ended on 8 May 1945. Luburić fled and eventually settled in Spain, making his home in the town of Carcaixent, near Valencia. In November 1953, he married a Spanish woman named Isabela Hernaiz and the marriage produced four children, two sons and two daughters. During his earlier exile in Hungary, Luburić also fathered a son.
During his years in Spain, Luburić remained active in Croatian nationalist émigré circles. In the end, however, he faced justice for the atrocities he had committed during the Second World War. On the morning of 21 April 1969, Luburić’s teenage son discovered the bloodied body of his 55-year-old father in a bedroom of their home in Carcaixent. He had been killed the previous day, on 20 April. Blood stains on the floor indicated that he had been dragged by his feet from the kitchen and pushed beneath a bed. Declassified Yugoslav intelligence records later
identified his godson, Ilija Stanić, as an agent of the Yugoslav secret service. According to the minutes of Stanić’s May 1969 debriefing, he first poisoned Luburić’s coffee, which had been supplied by another agent and when the poison failed to take effect, Stanić went to his room and retrieved a hammer. As Luburić complained that he felt unwell and leaned over the sink to vomit, Stanić struck him several times on the head, causing him to collapse. He briefly left the kitchen to secure the front door, then returned and delivered another blow that fractured his skull.
Stanić wrapped the body in blankets, dragged it into a nearby bedroom, and hid it under the bed before leaving the house and fleeing to France. An autopsy determined that Luburić did not die from the head wounds but suffocated in his own blood. In those final moments, as he struggled for breath, one can only wonder whether he regretted the deaths of tens of thousands of Serbs, Roma people, and Jews murdered under his authority during the Second World War. Thanks for watching the World History Channel. Be sure to like and subscribe
and click the bell notification icon so you don’t miss our next episodes. We thank you and we’ll see you next time on the channel.