Vjekoslav Luburić, Croatian war criminal and Porajmos perpetrator (b. 1911)
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. 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 spat resulted in great mutual 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.