March 6, 1914 - 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.

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.

Content sourced from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vjekoslav Luburić under CC BY-SA 4.0.