Pavelic, Ante, born 14-07-1889, the same year as Adolf Hitler (did you know), in the small Herzegovinian village of Bradina on the slopes of Ivan Mountain north of Konjic. Ante Pavelić was a Croatian fascist leader, revolutionary, and politician. He ruled as Poglavnik or head, of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH),
a World War II puppet state of Nazi Germany in Axis-occupied Yugoslavia.
In the 1930s, he was a founding member and leader of the Croatian fascist movement, the Ustaše. Pavelić
was a lawyer and prominent politician in the Kingdom
of Yugoslavia, known for his nationalistic beliefs, particularly about an independent Croatia.
Pavelic here with Mussolini Benito Amilcare Andrea “Il Duce”.



From 1927 until 1929 he was a member of the Yugoslav Parliament where he declared his beliefs about Croatian independence. During this time he called on Croats for armed revolt agains Yugoslavia, and after King Alexander I declared his 6 January Dictatorship he escaped to Italy where he founded the Ustaša – Croatian Revolutionary Movement. At first it was a Croatian nationalist movement with the goal of creating an independent Greater Croatia by means of armed revolt. In October 1934 he planned the assassination of King Alexander I,


It was a clear day in October in Marseille. The Yugoslav King Aleksandar I had just arrived at the port for a state visit. In 1934, Europe experienced fearful times, but in the Mediterranean coastal town, the French people waved to a colorful king. It was reminiscent of a scene from Old Europe, or more precisely, from 1914.Suddenly a man, dressed in black, jumped to his ears. He shouted “Long live the king” and hugged Aleksandar I. The rush of cheers neutralized the blasts from a gun, but all hell broke loose immediately afterwards. The king was struck in the heart. A French agent went down, after which his colleagues started shooting in panic. The crowd fled with screams and screeches. On that day, four bystanders died, a French minister, an agent and therefore also Aleksandar I, King of Yugoslavia.The killer was a Macedonian separatist who wanted to destabilize the multicultural kingdom of Yugoslavia with his act. But police investigations revealed that he was part of a much bigger plot, spearheaded by one Ante Pavelić, a Croatian politician. Pavelić was a dry, marginal lawyer with remarkably large ears, but – as it turned out – also the mastermind of a European terrorist network. Because behind him were other people, branched into governments. Pavelić had been working for years to destroy Yugoslavia, using a network that consisted of Macedonian terrorists, the government of the Hungarian leader Miklós Horthy
and none other than the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini himself.
Horthy was assassinated, age 45, on 09-10-1934 and spent time in prison in Italy until 1936. After the Axis invaded Yugoslavia on 10-04–1941 Slavko Kvaternik, he is executed age 68, on 07-06-1947, declared the Independent State of Croatia in the name of the Poglavnik, Pavelić. As the leader of the Croatian state Pavelić here with Joachim von Ribbentrop
took full control of the country and soon created a political system similar to Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. After the war he escaped to Argentina where he remained politically active.
Whether Pavelić and the Ustaša were helped by the Vatican during their flight to Argentina is still disputed. The partly disappeared state treasure of Croatia also plays an important role in this. According to many, this treasure, which consisted largely of gold and partly came from the victims of the Pavelić regime, was used, among other things, to finance the violent activities of the post-war Ustaša. Pavelić had more than 250 kilograms of gold and precious stones with him when they fled, and an amount of 1,000,000 kuno seems to have been paid for the flight of thousands of Ustaša. In Argentina, Pavelić set up a ‘Croatian Government in Exile’. The provisional government gave its support to the Ustaša rebels who were still active in Croatia (until 1947). A neo-Ustaša movement continued to carry out assassination attempts against Yugoslav targets from time to time into the 1980s.
Death and burial ground of Pavelic, Ante “The Butcher of the Balkan”.




Pavelić was security adviser to Argentine President Juan Perón in Argentina. On 10-04-1957, Serbian Četnik Blagoje Jovović



attempted a failed attempt on his life. The Yugoslav government requested his extradition, and the Argentine government was less keen to protect him after Perón’s fall in 1955. He then decided to leave the hospital early to move to Francoist Spain via Paraguay and Chile.
He was wounded in a 1958 assassination attempt by the Yugoslav Department of State Security, following which he went to Spain where he died from his wounds on 28-12-1959. Pavelic is buried with his wife Maria, on the cemetery San Isido, in Madrid.
In 1999, Serbian Četnik Blagoje Jovović visited Yugoslavia for the first time since he left and visited Ostrog, where he met Metropolitan Amfilohije. It was there that he first publicly confessed that he was the person responsible for the attempted assassination of Ante Pavelić. Jovović died on 02-06-1999, (aged 76–77) in Rosario, Argentina.
Pavelic so died of complications from his gunshot wounds on 28-12-1959 in a Madrid hospital. In Croatia he is still revered as a hero by some. At his death he was holding a rosary that he had personally received from Pope Pius XII, Eugenio Guiseppe Giovanni Pacelli.
The controversial Pope Pius XII was probably informed of the seriousness of the Holocaust at the end of 1942. This is evident from a letter found in the Vatican archives. The find was made public with the approval of Holy See officials.The Vatican’s defense has always been that it was unaware that Jews were being murdered on a large scale during World War II. But the letter that has emerged, dated December 14, 1942, states that up to 6,000 Poles and Jews were killed per day and ended up in the ovens of the Belzec extermination camp in Poland.Critics argue that Pius XII deliberately closed his eyes to the Holocaust by not speaking out openly about it. The author John Cornwell of the book Hitler’s Pope (1999) even posits that Pius XII was an anti-Semite. The Vatican denies these accusations and says the Pope was not sufficiently informed about what was going on in the concentration camps.Thousands of Jews go into hiding. Behind the scenes, Pius XII worked to protect Jews, his supporters say. Recent research supports the view that the Roman Catholic Church has provided help. At least 3,200 Jews were housed in Catholic monasteries in Rome, or with Catholic citizens. This was concluded by researchers about the period between 1943 and June 1944, when Rome was liberated.




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