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.

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 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.

[11] 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.

[14] 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.

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.

[24] On 17 April, the Ustaše instituted the Legal Provision for the Defence of the People and State, a law legitimizing the establishment of concentration camps and the mass shooting of hostages across the NDH.

By mid-April, he arrived in Zagreb and was appointed to the Economic Bureau of the Main Ustaša Headquarters (Croatian: Glavni ustaški stan; GUS), the Ustaše ruling body, serving as an adjutant to Vjekoslav Servatzy.

[41] "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.

[57] The same day, faced with the Italian military occupation of Zone II, Bureau III ordered the dissolution of all concentration camps situated in the NDH's coastal areas.

[58] Ante Moškov, a leading Ustaše official, remarked: "He was more fond of the Poglavnik than he was even of his own mother and brothers, and loyalty and obedience to him was the meaning of his life.

[67] Like Luburić, who was in his late twenties when he was appointed head of Bureau III, most of the Ustaše tasked with administering the Jasenovac camp system were extremely young.

When a Croatian Jewish civil servant named Dragutin Rosenberg attempted to persuade him to allow food and clothing to be delivered to Jasenovac on a name-by-name basis, Luburić only agreed to bulk consignments, so as not to reveal which detainees were still alive.

[96] Hundreds of other children abducted by the Ustaše in the aftermath of the Kozara Offensive were saved by a group of Red Cross volunteers from Zagreb, led by Diana Budisavljević.

He blamed the former for the Home Guard and Ustaše Militia's inability to bring the Partisans and Chetniks to heel, and the latter for the massacres of Serbs, even though the atrocities had been committed with Pavelić's knowledge.

[107] On 21 January 1943, the UNS was dissolved and amalgamated into the Main Directorate for Security and Public Order (Croatian: Glavno ravnateljstvo za javni red i sigurnost; GRAVSIGUR), which had been established to replace the RAVSIGUR earlier that month.

[114] On 7 December, Luburić forced more than thirty members of the collaborationist Serbian Volunteer Corps off a train passing through Zagreb's main railway station and ordered that they be shot.

[124] On 16 March, Luburić convened a meeting of over 1,000 Ustaše political and military figures, and in the presence of senior German officials, issued a declaration denouncing Bolshevism, the Yalta Conference, and the new communist government in Belgrade.

[142] Among these was a small group of fighters led by Luburić, which remained in the forests of southern Slovenia and northern Slavonia, skirmishing with the newly formed Yugoslav People's Army (Serbo-Croatian: Jugoslovenska narodna armija; JNA).

The second version holds that Luburić was wounded in a gunfight with the JNA, and carried across the Drava River to Hungary by General Rafael Boban, who subsequently returned to Yugoslavia and was never heard from again.

Faced with open rebellion, in July 1950, Pavelić dispatched Luburić to Rome as a warning to anyone wishing to challenge his authority in Western Europe's Croatian émigré communities.

While Luburić is not thought to have killed any of Pavelić's political opponents in the post-war period, the mere invocation of his name drastically reduced the size of the anti-Pavelić faction among the émigrés.

[154] In his writings, Luburić argued that Croatia, much like the NDH, should extend as far as the Drina River, but also include areas of Serbia, such as Sandžak, which had never been part of the wartime puppet state.

[155] On 10 April 1957, while returning from a celebratory gathering marking the anniversary of the NDH's establishment in Buenos Aires, Pavelić was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt by the State Security Administration (Serbo-Croatian: Uprava državne bezbednosti; UDBA), the Yugoslav secret service.

[148] Following Pavelić's death, Luburić unsuccessfully attempted to take control of the HOP, citing his role as the last commander of the Croatian Armed Forces.

After the HOP's senior leadership rebuffed him, Luburić went down an increasingly militarist path, establishing neo-Ustaše training camps in several European countries and publishing articles relating to military tactics and guerrilla techniques.

[182] The historian Ivo Goldstein concurs with Hudelist's hypothesis and surmises that Luburić in turn was influenced by Francisco Franco's calls for reconciliation between Republicans and Nationalists in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War.

It was speculated that if the law was passed, the Spanish authorities would be able to usurp Pavelić and Luburić's tombs, under the pretext that they had become places of pilgrimage for neo-fascists, and move them to less prominent locations or transfer them to Bosnia.