Vjekoslav Luburić (6 March 1914 – 20 April 1969) was a Croatian Ustaša 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.

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 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.

Early life 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 practising 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. 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. It housed several hundred Croat émigrés, mostly manual labourers returning from Western Europe and North America. The recruits swore an oath of loyalty to the leader of the Ustaše, Ante Pavelić, took part in pseudo-military exercises, and produced anti-Serb propaganda material. It was at Janka-Puszta that Luburić earned the nickname Maks, which he was to use for the remainder of his life.

In October 1934, King Alexander of Yugoslavia was assassinated while on a diplomatic visit to Marseille, in a joint conspiracy between the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization and the Ustaše. Following the assassination, most of the Ustaše residing in Hungary were evicted by the country's government, with the exception of Luburić and several others. For a short time, Luburić resided in Nagykanizsa, where, after a brief love affair, a local woman bore him a son.

World War II

Creation of the NDH

Following the 1938 Anschluss between Germany and Austria, Yugoslavia came to share its northwestern border with the Third Reich and fell under increasing pressure as its neighbours aligned themselves with the Axis powers. In April 1939, Italy opened a second frontier with Yugoslavia when it invaded and occupied neighbouring Albania. Following the outbreak of World War II, the Yugoslav government declared its neutrality. Between September and November 1940, Hungary and Romania joined the Tripartite Pact, aligning themselves with the Axis, and Italy invaded Greece. Yugoslavia was by then almost completely surrounded by the Axis powers and their satellites, and its neutral stance toward the war became strained. In late February 1941, Bulgaria joined the Pact. The following day, German troops entered Bulgaria from Romania, closing the ring around Yugoslavia. Intending to secure his southern flank for the impending attack on the Soviet Union, German dictator Adolf Hitler began placing heavy pressure on Yugoslavia to join the Axis. On 25 March 1941, after some delay, the Yugoslav government conditionally signed the Pact. Two days later, a group of pro-Western, Serbian nationalist Royal Yugoslav Air Force officers deposed the country's regent, Prince Paul, in a bloodless coup d'état. They placed his teenage nephew Peter on the throne and brought to power a "government of national unity" led by the head of the Royal Yugoslav Air Force, General Dušan Simović. The coup enraged Hitler, who immediately ordered the country's invasion, which commenced on 6 April 1941.

On 10 April, the creation of the Independent State of Croatia (; NDH) was announced over the radio by Slavko Kvaternik, a former Austro-Hungarian Army officer who had been in contact with Croatian nationalists abroad. Pavelić arrived in Zagreb on 15 April and proclaimed himself leader () of the NDH, having assured the Germans that the NDH would be loyal to the Axis cause. Disenchanted with more than twenty years of Serb hegemony, the majority of Croats enthusiastically welcomed the NDH's creation. The Axis invasion of Yugoslavia had transformed the Ustaše from a small and relatively obscure Croatian nationalist organization into a popular movement almost overnight. The Germans initially wanted to install Croatian Peasant Party leader Vladko Maček as the head of the Croatian puppet state, but Maček refused, citing his democratic convictions and his firm belief that the Axis powers would not win the war. The NDH was divided into German and Italian areas of influence. The Italian area of influence was divided into three operational zones. Zone I, which consisted of the coastal and island area surrounding the cities of Zadar, Šibenik, Trogir and Split, was directly annexed by Italy. Zone II was consigned to the NDH. It encompassed much of Dalmatia and the Dalmatian Hinterland. Zone III, also allotted to the NDH, extended as far as western and central Bosnia, a sliver of eastern Bosnia, and all of Herzegovina.

On 17 April, the Ustaše instituted the Legal Provision for the Defence of the People and State, a law legitimizing the establishment of concentration camps and the mass shooting of hostages across the NDH. The Jewish Question was only of secondary concern to the Ustaše. Their foremost goal was to rid the NDH of its 1.9 million Serbs, who made up about 30% of the fledgling puppet state's total population. Senior Ustaše officials openly stated that they sought to kill one-third of Serbs living in the NDH, expel one-third and convert one-third to Roman Catholicism. The Ustaše movement's grievances centred around the perceived injustices inflicted upon the Croats in Serb-dominated Yugoslavia during the interwar period. Senior Ustaše officials cited the shooting of five Croatian parliamentary deputies in June 1928, the murder of the Croatian nationalist anthropologist and historian Milan Šufflay in 1931, the suppression of the Velebit uprising in 1932, the murder of the Croatian Peasant Party vice-president Josip Predavec in 1933, and the arrest and incarceration of dozens of other Croatian political figures.

Initial cleansing operations

In early April 1941, Luburić had illegally crossed the Yugoslav border near the town of Gola. By mid-April, he arrived in Zagreb and was appointed to the Economic Bureau of the Main Ustaša Headquarters (; GUS), the Ustaše ruling body, serving as an adjutant to Vjekoslav Servatzy. On 6 May, Luburić was dispatched to the village of Veljun, near Slunj, to lead the round-up of 400 Serb men from the village in retaliation for the murder of a Croat family in neighbouring Blagaj the night before. Although the identity of the perpetrators remained a mystery, the Ustaše announced that the Serbs of Veljun were responsible and decided that the village's male inhabitants were to be collectively punished. Luburić had a total of fifty men at his disposal, many of them longtime Ustaše who had lived in exile in Italy in the 1930s. On the evening of 9 May, the Serb men and boys of Veljun were brought to Blagaj, and killed with knives and blunt objects in the backyard of a local elementary school. The murders lasted all night. The following morning, Luburić was seen emerging from the school covered in blood, washing his hands and sleeves by a water well.