Lubric, Vjekoslav “Maks”.

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Lubric, Vjekoslav “Maks”, born 21-06-1914 in Humac, Condominium of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Austria-Hungary the third child of Ljubomir Luburić, a bank clerk, and Marija, born Soldo, a homemaker. The couple had another son, Dragutin, and two daughters, Mira and Olga. Luburić was a devout and practicing 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 07-09-1929, 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, IMRO 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.

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 25-03-1941, 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 01-04-1941.

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, 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 males 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 males 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.

In late June, Ustaše officials driving through the villages of Gornja Suvaja and Donja Suvaja, in the Lika region, reported being shot at, prompting the regional authorities to order a “cleansing” action against the villages. On the morning of 1 July, Luburić led a group of Ustaše into the two villages. The historian Max Bergholz writes that up to 300 Ustaše took part in the operation. According to the journalist and Holocaust survivor Slavko Goldstein, Luburić had about 150 members of the Ustaše Auxiliary Force at his disposal, in addition to 250 members of the Croatian Home Guard. Many of Gornja Suvaja and Donja Suvaja’s male inhabitants had fled into the wilderness before the Ustaše arrived. Their female relatives stayed behind and were subjected to rape and sexual mutilation The massacre lasted about two hours; the Ustaše relied primarily on knives and clubs to kill their victims.  At least 173 villagers were killed, mostly women, children and the elderly.

On 2 July, 130–150 Ustaše attacked the nearby village of Osredci. Most of the village’s inhabitants had fled in anticipation of a massacre, having heard of what happened in Gornja Suvaja and Donja Suvaja the day before. Over the course of the following two days, the Ustaše massacred about thirty of the village’s inhabitants, mostly the elderly and infirm, who had been unable to flee along with the others. Concurrently, Luburić and his followers massacred the inhabitants of the nearby village of Bubanj. According to their own internal documents, the Ustaše killed 152 Serb civilians in Bubanj, and burned down twenty homes. In some households, not a single person was left alive. Survivor accounts suggest that the number of fatalities was about 270. On 3 July, one of Luburić’s units detained 53 inhabitants of the village of Nebljusi, including ten children under the age of 12. They were transported by horse-drawn cart to the nearby village of Boričevac, which contained a barracks and a karst pit. The residents of Nebljusi were detained inside the barracks until nightfall, alongside twelve adult males who had been arrested earlier. That evening, they were marched to the karst pit in groups of eight and pushed inside to their deaths. Two of the victims managed to survive the ordeal. By the end of July, the Ustaše had killed at least 1,800 Serbs in and around Lika.

The Ustaše atrocities against the NDH’s Serb population prompted thousands of Serbs to join Josip Broz Tito‘s Partisans and Draža Mihailović’s Chetniks. The Lika massacres in particular served as the casus belli for the Srb uprising, which commenced on 27 July. The revolt led to the Italian military occupations of Zone II and Zone III. “Luburić and his superiors had wrongly calculated that the brutal killings of an innocent population would quash any embryonic resistance to their plan for the creation of an ‘ethnically pure area’,” Goldstein remarked. “Their actions … provoked the completely opposite effect.”[40] In mid-July 1941, Luburić was tasked with recapturing dozens of inmates who had escaped from the Kerestinec camp. Almost all the fugitives were captured or killed, and several Ustaše also lost their lives.

Death and burial ground of Lubric, Vjekoslav “Maks”.

On the morning of 21-04-1969, Luburić’s teenage son discovered his father’s bloody corpse in one of the bedrooms in his home. Luburić had been killed the day before. Blood stains on the floor indicated that he had been dragged by his feet from the kitchen and crudely stuffed under a bed. He had been bludgeoned over the head multiple times with a blunt instrument. An autopsy determined that the blows to his head were not fatal; Luburić had choked on his own blood. Luburić was buried in Carcaixent. His funeral was attended by hundreds of Croatian nationalists in Ustaše uniform, who chanted Ustaše slogans and delivered fascist salutes.Luburić’s death spelt the end of Drina and Obrana.

Luburić’s murder came at a time when the UDBA was carrying out assassinations of leading Croatian nationalist figures across Europe and suspicion inevitably fell on them. In 1967, Luburić had employed his godson, Ilija Stanić,  to work at his publishing firm. Stanić’s father, Vinko, had served alongside Luburić during the war. He was captured by the Yugoslav authorities while fighting with the Crusaders and died in captivity. Stanić, who lived and worked in Luburić’s home, returned to Yugoslavia in the immediate aftermath of Luburić’s death. Declassified Yugoslav intelligence documents show that Stanić was an UDBA agent, codenamed Mongoose. According to the minutes of his May 1969 debriefing, Stanić told his handlers that he first placed poison in Luburić’s coffee, which had been given to him by another UDBA agent. After the poison failed to kill Luburić, Stanić began to panic, and went to his room to retrieve a hammer. When he returned to the kitchen, Luburić complained that he was not feeling well. As Luburić went to vomit in the sink, Stanić struck him over the head several times. Luburić fell to the floor, motionless. Stanić then left the kitchen to make sure the front door was locked. When he returned, he saw Luburić standing over the sink and wincing in pain. Stanić struck him over the head once again, fracturing his skull. He then wrapped Luburić’s body in blankets and dragged it to a nearby bedroom. Stanić claimed that he initially wanted to hide the body in the print shop, but that Luburić was too heavy. Upon entering the bedroom, Stanić hid the body under the bed and calmly left the house.

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