[1][2][3] At the start of his career, Pavelić was a lawyer and a politician of the Croatian Party of Rights in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia known for his nationalist beliefs and support for an independent Croatia.

In the meantime, Pavelić had moved to Fascist Italy where he founded the Ustaše, a Croatian nationalist movement with the goal of creating an independent Croatia by any means, including the use of terror.

His parents had moved to Bosnia and Herzegovina from the village of Krivi Put in the central part of the Velebit plain, in southern Lika (in today's Croatia),[14][15] to work on the Sarajevo-Metković railway line.

Pavelić's sense of Croat nationalism grew from a visit to Lika with his parents, where he heard townspeople speaking Croatian, and realised it was not just the language of peasants.

Early in his high school days, he joined the Pure Party of Rights[17] as well as the Frankovci students' organization, founded by Josip Frank, the father-in-law of Slavko Kvaternik, an Austro-Hungarian colonel.

Ivica Peršić, a Croatian politician from the competing Milinovci faction, wrote in his memoir how Pavelić's 1921 election significantly raised the standing of his law office in Zagreb – a number of rich Jewish clients paid him to obtain Yugoslav citizenship, and Pavelić subsequently started to make frequent visits to Belgrade, where he would procure those documents through his increasing number of connections to the members of the ruling People's Radical Party.

When he was returning from Paris, he visited Rome and submitted a memorandum in the name of HSP to the Italian ministry of foreign affairs in which he offered to cooperate with Italy in dismembering Yugoslavia.

[47] That the security was lax even though one attempt had already been made on Alexander's life testified to Pavelić's organizational abilities; he had apparently been able to bribe a high official in the Sûreté General.

Disappointed with relations between the Italians and the Ustaše organization, Pavelić became closer to Nazi Germany, who promised to change the map of Europe fixed under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles.

[57][better source needed] In 1940 Pavelić negotiated with the Italians for military assistance in creating a separate Croatian state which would have had strong ties to Italy, but this plan was postponed by the invasion of France, and subsequently derailed by Adolf Hitler.

The Nazis wanted any Croatian puppet government to have popular support, so that they could control their zone of occupation with minimal forces and exploit the available resources peacefully.

[75] He arrived at Karlovac on 13 April with about 250—400 Ustaše where was greeted by Veesenmayer who was appointed by German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop to supervise the state's creation.

However, the King's powers were purely ceremonial, to the point that he never even visited Croatia during his reign, but preferred to deal with his royal duties from an office in Rome.

[85] He signed the Law-Decree on Protection of the Nation and the State on 17 April 1941,[86] which came into effect immediately, was retrospective, and imposed the death penalty for any actions causing harm to the honour or vital interests of the NDH.

[95] The regime also attempted to re-write history by falsely claiming the legacy of the founder of the HSS Stjepan Radić, and that of Croatian nationalist Ante Starčević.

[citation needed] In July 1941, the German Plenipotentiary General in the NDH, Edmund Glaise von Horstenau met with Pavelić to express his "grave concern over the excesses of the Ustaše".

[100] These efforts included the imposition of a Nazi-style salute, emphasising that he had been sentenced to death in absentia by a Yugoslav court, and repeatedly claiming that he had undergone great hardship to achieve the independence of the NDH.

By March Hitler had decided to give the task of pacifying the NDH to the Reichsführer-SS (Field Marshal) Heinrich Himmler, who appointed his own plenipotentiary, Generalleutnant der Polizei (Major General of Police) Konstantin Kammerhofer.

As a direct result, the 170,000-strong armed forces of the NDH were reorganised under German control into smaller units with greater mobility and the size of the Ustaše militia was also increased to 45,000.

With the King officially gone, Pavelić assumed functions as Head of State of the NDH under the title of Poglavnik and appointed Nikola Mandić as new prime minister.

Minister Mladen Lorković and army officer Ante Vokić suggested a plan whereby Croatia would change sides in the war and Pavelić would no longer be head of state in accordance with British demands.

[citation needed] At first, Pavelić supported their ideas but changed his mind following a visit from a local Gestapo officer who told him that Germany would win the war with new weapons under development.

[citation needed] As leader of the Independent State of Croatia, Pavelić was the main instigator of the genocidal crimes committed in the NDH,[118] and was responsible for a campaign of terror against Serbs, Jews, Roma and anti-Axis Croats and Bosniaks which included a network of concentration camps.

[32] Numerous testimonies from the Nuremberg Trials along with records in German, Italian and Austrian war archives bear witness to atrocities perpetrated against the civilian population.

[119] The NDH's racial policies greatly contributed to their rapid loss of control over Croatia as they fed the ranks of both the Chetniks and Partisans and caused even the Nazis to attempt to restrain Pavelić and his genocidal campaign.

[121] As the main instigator of the genocide, Pavelić was supported by his closest associate Eugen Dido Kvaternik and Minister of Interior Andrija Artuković, who were responsible for planning and organization, and Vjekoslav Luburić, who executed the orders.

The group made it into the American occupation zone and by 18 May arrived at the village of Leingreith near Radstadt where Pavelić's wife Mara and their two daughters had been living after leaving the NDH in December 1944.

[citation needed] In the autumn of 1948 he met Krunoslav Draganović, a Roman Catholic priest, who helped him obtain a Red Cross passport in the Hungarian name of Pál Aranyos.

[143] Pavelić arrived in Buenos Aires on 6 November 1948 on the Italian merchant ship Sestriere,[citation needed] where he initially lived with the former Ustaša and writer Vinko Nikolić.

[151] On 10 April 1957, the 16th anniversary of the founding of the Independent State of Croatia, Pavelić was grievously wounded in an assassination attempt by the Serbian Blagoje Jovović, a hotel owner and former Royal Yugoslav officer who had been in the Montenegrin Chetniks during the war.