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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 83.139.82.247 (talk) at 21:57, 20 December 2005 (I tried to incorporate reasonably substantieted parts of that controversial paragraph with the rest of the text. Sentence Pavelić's regime being the worst in Europe during WWII is way to arbitrary.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Ante Pavelić (July 14, 1889 - December 28, 1959) was the leader and founding member of the Croatian Ustasha movement in the 1930s and later the leader of the Independent State of Croatia.

Pavelić was born north of Konjic in Bradina, a small village c. 15 kilometres south west of Hadžići in Bosnia and Herzegovina. As an adult, Ante Pavelić decided to move to Zagreb so he could study law. In his youth he became a member of the Croatian Party of Rights, and was part of the splinter, more nationalist faction led by Josip Frank in 1908. In 1919 he was interim secretary of the Pure Party of Rights. In 1921 he was arrested along with several other members of the party but was released; he defended them at the trial and lost.

In 1927 he was elected to the Zagreb city council. He held the position of the party secretary in the Party of Rights until 1929 and the beginning of royal dictatorship in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. He then co-founded the Ustaše and went underground. He drafted the principles of the Ustase Movement the same year. The situation in Yugoslavia improved by 1931, but in 1932 Pavelić relocated to Mussolini-led Italy.

In 1934, when Yugoslav king Aleksandar was assassinated in France, Pavelić and other Ustaše members were arrested in Italy under the charges of conspiring to kill the king, but were never extradited and were later released from prison.

Pavelić remained in Italy until the beginning of World War II. In 1941, Yugoslavia was invaded and he became the leader (poglavnik) of the Independent State of Croatia.

As the leader of the Ustaše, he directly ordered, organised and conducted a campaign of terror against Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, and communist Croats. The extent of this campaign against the Serbs was a real genocide, because they aimed to exterminate a third of them, expel another third, and Catholicize another.There are numerous testimonies that can be found in the Nuremberg Trial archives and the German and Italian WWII military archives, regarding crimes comitted by Ustaše. These bestialities were even recorded in novelistic literature and poetry: Malaparte's Kaputt (Chapter Basket of oysters), Oljača's Kozara, Svetina's Volčiči (The Wolf Puppies).

In May 1945 he fled via Bleiburg to Austria, where he stayed for a few months before transferring to Rome. It is alleged that he was hidden there by members of the Roman Catholic Church. His stay in Rome was known to the American Counterintelligence Corps, but they apparently weren't interested in the arrest of any non-Communists from eastern parts of Europe. Six months later, he fled to South America via the rat lines.

Upon arriving in Argentina, he became security advisor to Juan Peron. Peron issued 34,000 visas to Croatians: both the Nazi collaborators and the anti-communists that fled from Communism imposed by Josip Broz Tito.

In April 1957 he was shot twice in an assassination attempt. It was generally considered that the Yugoslav intelligence agency UDBA had organized this, but one Blagoje Jovović, a Chetnik also exiled to Argentina, later described himself as having done it. Pavelić was subsequently forced to flee Argentina to avoid arrest and extradition, and he found refuge in Spain, where he died in Madrid in late 1959, from complications of his wounds.

See also

• World War II
• Ustasha
• Hermann Neubacher: Sonderauftrag Suedost 1940-1945, Bericht eines fliegendes Diplomaten, 2. durchgesehene Auflage, Goettingen 1956

• Ladislaus Hory and Martin Broszat: Der Kroatische Ustascha-Staat, 1941-1945 Stuttgart, 1964

• Encyclopedia Britannica, 1943 - Book of the year, page 215, Entry: Croatia

• Worldmark Encyclopedia of the Nations, Europe, edition 1995, page 91, entry: Croatia

• Encyclopaedia Britannica, Edition 1991, Macropedia, Vol. 29, page 1111.

• Helen Fein: Accounting for Genocide - Victims and Survivors of the Holocaust, The Free Press, New York, Edition 1979, pages 102, 103.

• Alfio Russo: Revoluzione in Jugoslavia, Roma 1944.

• Ruth Mitchell: The Serbs Choose War, Doubleday, Doran, 1943, page 148

• Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Vol. 2, page 739.

• Avro Manhattan: The Vatican's Holocaust, Ozark Books, 1986, page 48.

External links

• Biography of Pavelić
• Two Bullets for Pavelić
• Miroslav Filipović-Majstorović
• Ivan Goran Kovačić The Pit
• Jasenovac - a prisoner execution
• Independent State of Croatia proclamation
• genocide commited by Ustashi
• unindentified Croatian Ustasha

• 1889 births
• 1959 deaths
• Croatian World War II people
• Fascists
• World War II political leaders