Ante Pavelic

The title of this article is ambiguous. For the politician of the same name, see Ante Pavelić (Politiker, 1869) .

Ante Pavelić (October 1942)

Standard of Poglavnik , the leader of the Independent State of Croatia

Ante Pavelić  [ ˈaːntɛ ˈpavɛliʨ ] (born July 14, 1889 in Bradina near Konjic , Bosnia-Herzegovina , † December 28, 1959 in Madrid ) was a Yugoslav lawyer , politician and war criminal . From 1941 to 1945 he was the fascist dictator of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH).

Pavelić was a member of the Croatian Party of Law and from 1927 to 1929 a member of the Yugoslav Parliament . After the proclamation of the royal dictatorship by Alexander I in 1929, he went into exile, where he founded the fascist Ustasha movement in the same year . During the Second World War and after the fall of the Axis powers on Yugoslavia in 1941 Pavelić was the approval of the German and Italian occupation forces for leaders ( Poglavnik ) of the newly established Ustasha Croatia proclaimed.

Based on the Ustaše militia and secret police , he founded a totalitarian dictatorship that persecuted opponents of the regime, set up concentration camps and committed genocide against hundreds of thousands of Serbs and tens of thousands of Jews and Roma . After the end of the war, Pavelić fled via monastery routes to Argentina , Paraguay and Spain , where he died in 1959.

Life

Youth and education

Due to his father's changing jobs, Pavelić attended elementary schools in Gjulhisar and Jajce as well as high schools in Travnik , Senj, Karlovac and Zagreb . After graduating from the University of Zagreb, he studied law. At the university he became the spokesman for the student organization Mlada Hrvatska (Young Croatia). His role model was the founder of the Croatian national movement Ante Starčević . After obtaining a doctorate in law in 1915, Pavelić opened a law firm in Zagreb.

Political activity

Pavelić became secretary of the “Croatian Constitutional Law Party ” , which sought Croatian independence after the establishment of Yugoslavia and maintained good contacts with Croatian emigrants abroad. In 1922 he was elected to the Zagreb City Council and in 1928 to the Yugoslav Parliament in Belgrade . There he stood up for the independence of Croatia. He reacted to the Yugoslav royal dictatorship by forming an armed group of conspirators that carried out attacks on pro-Yugoslav Croatians.

Exile after the establishment of the royal dictatorship

He left the Kingdom of Yugoslavia on January 17, 1929 to fight the Yugoslav royal dictatorship from abroad. He went into exile in fascist Italy, where he founded the Croatian independence movement Ustasha and led its terrorist liberation struggle in his homeland. In his absence, an “exceptional court for the protection of the state” in Belgrade passed a death sentence on Pavelić . Significantly, the basis for the judgment was not a Yugoslav law, but rather the Serbian penal code.

Ante Pavelić and the Ustasha led by him were also involved in the assassination of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia and the French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou in Marseille during a state visit on October 9, 1934.

In 1936, Pavelić tried in his memorandum The Croatian Question to highlight the affinities between National Socialism and Croatian nationalism. This font was not published, but was printed in a numbered small edition with the note "Printed as handwriting - only for official use" and issued against confirmation of receipt. It should have a positive influence on German government circles for the Ustaša movement. At that time, however, Hitler was more interested in good relations with the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, primarily for economic reasons.

He describes the enemies of the Croatian freedom movement:

• the Serbian state authority
• international freemasonry
• the Judaism
• the communism .

State leader

Ante Pavelić (l.) With Joachim von Ribbentrop in Salzburg (June 1941)

Pavelić in Sabor, Croatia (1942).

Ante Pavelić, supported by Benito Mussolini , returned to Zagreb after Yugoslavia's surrender to the Axis powers (April 17, 1941) as head of state ( Poglavnik ) with dictatorial powers from his long exile. The so-called Independent State of Croatia, now led by him, was organized as a leader state without a separation of powers. In April 1941, Pavelić quickly put anti-Jewish laws based on the German model into force. As early as June 6, 1941, Pavelić was received by Hitler on a state visit to the Berghof . The main pillars of his tyranny were militias, the military and secret police, special courts and more than 20 concentration camps.

Since he had to cede a large part of the Croatian coast ( Istria , Kvarner Bay , Dalmatia ) and the Gorski kotar to Italy, but on the other hand, larger areas with a predominantly Croatian population in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Syrmia were connected to it, more than half were Most of its inhabitants are Roman Catholic Croats , while almost a third are mainly Orthodox Serbs . Another large group were today's Bosniaks , who were then referred to as "Croatian Muslims".

Ante Pavelić had a planned genocide of Serbs, Jews, Roma, Orthodox Christians as well as Croatian and Muslim opponents of the system (often communists) carried out. The largest Croatian concentration camp was in Jasenovac , where, according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, 85,000 and according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, a total of 56,000 to 97,000 Serbs, Jews, Roma and Croatian oppositionists were killed. There were several death transports from here to Auschwitz .

Exile after the end of the war

Photo of Pavelić from his forged passport, made out in the name of Pablo Aranjos.

In 1945 Pavelić left the fleeing Croatian troops and fled to Argentina via Austria and Italy . With the support of the Vatican, especially the priest and Ustasha functionary Krunoslav Draganović , he spent two years in Rome before he managed to travel on to Argentina via the so-called " rat line " organized by Draganović . He is said to have carried part of the state treasure with him when he escaped. In Argentina he founded a government in exile . In Yugoslavia he was sentenced to death in absentia . Pavelić was under the protection of Juan Domingo Perón and, after his fall, under the protection of Franco .

attack

Pavelić in the hospital after the unsuccessful assassination attempt (1957)

On April 10, 1957, the anniversary of the founding of the Independent State of Croatia, Pavelić was seriously wounded in the back of an assassination attempt in Lomas del Palomar, Argentina . The attack could have been initiated by the Yugoslav secret service UDBA . It was probably carried out by the exiled Montenegrin of Serbian origin Blagoje Jovović . At the beginning of the 1990s he hired a Serbian journalist to put his biography on paper.

death

Pavelić's tomb in the Cementerio de San Isidro cemetery in Madrid .

Pavelić died on December 28, 1959 at 3:55 a.m. in the German Hospital in Madrid , possibly from the long-term effects of his injuries. The first message about the death of Ante Pavelić was sent to Buenos Aires on the day of his death at 4:00 a.m. by urgent telegram so that all organizations of the Croatian Liberation Movement could be informed. Radio Madrid first broadcast the death news on December 30th on its midnight news. Until then, no one had officially known Pavelić's whereabouts.

On December 28, 1959 at 4:30 p.m., after the blessing, his body was brought to the church of the Cementerio de San Isidro cemetery in Madrid and laid out there until December 31, 1959. On December 31st, Rev. Branko Marić read the holy mass “dies obitus presente cadavre”. After the Holy Mass the coffin was opened and those present could say goodbye one last time. After that, the burial took place in the same cemetery.

Pavelić's family, Croatian, Spanish, Romanian friends and politicians attended the funeral. So z. B. Horia Sima , who was also in exile in Spain at the time.

Pavelić's crypt is a place of pilgrimage for Croatian nationalists, sympathizers and the curious. So published z. For example, the Croatian news website Index shows the photos of Croatian soccer star Davor Šuker visiting the grave while he was active in Spain.

In addition to Pavelić, his wife Maria, his son Velimir and his daughter Višnja are buried in the family grave.

family

Pavelić was the son of Mile Pavelić (1862-1946) and his wife Marija, called Mara (born Šojat; 1866-1945). He was the second child of the two after his brother Josip (1884–1945). The parents were Bunjewatzen and lived in the hamlet of Serdari , which belongs to the place Krivi Put near Senj . His father came from nearby Mrzli Dol and his mother from Francikovac . Pavelić's father was briefly employed as a supervisor of state construction works on the railway.

On August 12, 1922, Pavelić married Maria Lovrenčević (1897–1984) in the Church of St. Mark (Zagreb ). His wife Maria (called Mara) was the youngest of six children of Martin Lovrenčević and his wife Ivana (née Herzfeld; 1859–1942). The father was a leading member of the Croatian Party of Law as well as a well-known author and publicist . He was of Roman Catholic faith. The mother was a Jewish woman born in Vienna .

Pavelić had three children with his wife; the daughters Višnja (May 31, 1923– December 25, 2015) and Mirjana (November 8, 1926; † around 2012) and their son Velimir (May 24, 1925–1998). Višnja and Velimir remained childless. Višnja Pavelić died on December 25, 2015 in her apartment in the Spanish capital, Madrid . She was buried in the family grave in Madrid at her own request.

Daughter Mirjana married Srećko Pšeničnik (1921–1999), a lawyer, former NDH functionary and from 1981 president of the exile organization Hrvatski oslobodilački pokret (HOP), which was founded in 1956 by Pavelic in Argentina , in post-war Argentine exile . From this marriage came Pavelić's grandchildren Zvjezdana (* 1951), Aiša (* 1954), Ivana (* 1957 as Antica) and Jelena (* 1968). Aiša, Ivana and Jelena live in Canada . Zvjezdana lives in the UK . All are married or partly widowed to ethnic non-Croatians. Several great-grandchildren of Pavelić emerged from some of these marriages .

Others

Hitler Receives Pavelić on a State Visit to the Berghof (June 9, 1941)

On the occasion of a state visit to Germany, Pavelić presented his patron Adolf Hitler on Obersalzberg with a Prussian flag from the Seven Years' War and a chess game by Frederick the Great .

On March 3, 1942, Hitler awarded Pavelić the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the German Eagle . The German envoy Siegfried Kasche presented it to him in Zagreb.

German authorities made unsuccessful requests to remove Pavelić, but Adolf Hitler refused.

Fonts

• Uzpostava hrvatske države: trajni mir na balkanu . [Establishment of the Croatian State: Lasting Peace in the Balkans]. Hrvatski List i Danica Hrvatska, New York 1929 (2nd edition in Domovina, Madrid, 1998).
• From the struggle for the independent state of Croatia: Some documents and pictures . Croatian correspondence "Grič", Vienna 1931.
• La restauration économique des pays danubiens: Le désarmement: Belgrade et la Croatie [Economic rehabilitation of the Danube countries: Disarmament: Belgrade and Croatia]. Edition de la correspondence croate “Grič”, Geneva 1932.
• Lijepa plavojka: Roman iz borbe hrvatskog naroda za slobodu i samostalnost [The beautiful blonde: a novel from the struggle of the Croatian people for freedom and independence]. Hrvatski Domobran, Buenos Aires 1936. Later published under: Liepa plavka: Roman iz borbe hrvatskoga naroda za slobodu i nezavisnost .
• AS Mrzlogdolski [pseud. for: Ante Serdar from Mrzlogdol]: Errori e orrori: Comunismo e bolscevismo in Russia e nel mondo . [Fallacies and Horrors: Communism and Bolshevism in Russia and the World]. Editrice Ex Cobattenti, Siena 1938 (Croatian and under real names : Strahote zabluda: Komunizam i boljševizam u Rusiji iu svietu . St. Kugli, Zagreb 1941).
• The Croatian question . Private print by the Institute for Border and Foreign Studies, Berlin 1941 (Croatian: Dr. Ante Pavelić riešio je hrvatsko pitanje , Europa Verlag, Zagreb, 1942).
• Ustaša . Ured za promičbu glavnog ustaškog stana, Zagreb 1941.
• Poglavnik govori [the guide speaks]. Ured za promičbu glavnog ustaškog stana, Zagreb 1941.
• Riešio je hrvatsko pitanje [The Croatian question has been resolved]. Naklada Europa, Zagreb 1942.
• Ustaška misao: poglavnikovi govori od 12.X.1941 do. 12.IV.1942 [Thoughts of the Ustaše : Führer speeches from October 12, 1941 to April 12, 1942]. Naklada Glavnog Ustaškog Stana, Zagreb 1942.
• Doživljaji . [Memoirs]. Domovina, Madrid 1968 (2nd edition by Starčević, Zagreb, 1996; 3rd edition by Domovina, Madrid, 2003).
• Putem hrvatskog državnog prava: članci, govori, izjave: 1918-1929 [by Croatian constitutional law: articles, speeches, statements: 1918-1929]. Publishing house Domovina, Madrid 1977.
• Hrvatska pravoslavna crkva [The Croatian Orthodox Church ]. Publisher Domovina, Madrid 1984.
• Doživljaji II [Memoirs II]. Domovina Publishing House, Madrid 1998.
• Pojam Bosne kroz stoljeća . [The term Bosnia through the centuries]. Serdar, Madrid 2000.
• Doživljaji III . [Memoirs III]. Naklada Bošković, Split 2008.

See also

• Declaration of Sofia (1929)
• Croatian Legion

literature

• Marie-Janine Calic : History of Yugoslavia in the 20th Century . CH Beck, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-406-60646-5 .
• Ante Pavelić: 100 godina . [German: Ante Pavelić: 100 years ]. Naklada Starčević & Libar, Zagreb 1995, ISBN 953-96369-1-4 (edited by Višnja Pavelić).
• Ladislaus Hory, Martin Broszat : The Croatian Ustasha State 1941–1945 . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1965.
• The life path of Poglavnik: From the working-class child to the founder of the Independent State of Croatia . In: Croatia builds on: Second annual harvest in words and pictures from the weekly "New Order" . Europa Verlag, Zagreb 1943, p. 37-40 .

Web links

Commons : Ante Pavelić  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Ante Pavelić in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Ante Pavelić in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• Kill, evict, forcibly convert . WDR record date, July 14, 2004
• Report from the US Office of Strategic Services , United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hans-Joachim Seeler: The citizenship law of Yugoslavia . Ed .: Research Center for International Law and Foreign Public Law of the University of Hamburg (=  collection of valid citizenship laws . Volume 17 ). Alfred Metzler Verlag, Frankfurt / Berlin 1956, p. 15th f. and 19 : “December 1, 1918 is generally considered to be the founding day of the State of Yugoslavia. On that day, the former Serbian and Montenegrin nationals, as well as the inhabitants of the areas that had separated from Austria-Hungary, became members of the Yugoslav state. […] Hungary lost Croatia, Slavonia and parts of the Banat to Yugoslavia through the Treaty of Trianon . According to the provisions of the Treaty of St. Germain , all persons who had the right of home in these areas acquired Yugoslav citizenship (Art. 61 of the Treaty of Trianon). "
2. ^ Franz W. Seidler: The collaboration 1939-1945 . FA Herbig Verlagsbuchhandlung, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-7766-2139-7 , p. 409.
3. ↑ The life path of Poglavnik: From the working-class child to the founder of the independent state of Croatia . In: Croatia builds on: Second annual reading in words and pictures from the weekly "New Order" , Europa Verlag, Zagreb 1943, p. 37 ff.
4. ↑ Dr. Pavelić and Gustav Perčec sentenced to death. In: Deutsche Zeitung: Organ for the German minority in Slovenia. No. 57. Celje, July 21, 1929. p. 1. Retrieved June 9, 2014 . 
5. ^ Judgment printed in: From the struggle for the independent state of Croatia: some documents and pictures . Croatian correspondence "Grič", Vienna 1931, p. 94.
6. ↑ The Croatian Question . Private print by the Institute for Border and Foreign Studies, Berlin 1941, p. 26 ff.
7. ^ Marie-Janine Calic: History of Yugoslavia in the 20th century. CH Beck, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-406-60645-8 , p. 138.
8. ↑ Gerald Posner: God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican . Simon & Schuster, 2015, ISBN 978-1-4165-7657-0 .
9. ↑ Vladimir Dedijer : Jasenovac - the Yugoslav Auschwitz and the Vatican . 2nd Edition. Ahriman-Verlag, Freiburg 1989, ISBN 3-922774-06-7 , pp. 254-255.
10. ↑ http://www.index.hr/vijesti/clanak/ekskluzivne-fotografije-davor-suker-u-drustvu-krojfa-na-grobu-ante-pavelica/529046.aspx
11. ^ Ante Pavelić in the Find a Grave database . Retrieved August 1, 2015.
12. ↑ Ante Pavelić: Putem hrvatskog državnog prava: poglavnikovi govori, izjave i članci prije odlaska u tuđinu . Zagreb 1942 (2nd edition, Putem hrvatskog državnog prava (članci - govori - izjave 1918. - 1929.) , Buenos Aires-Madrid, 1977, p. 537).
13. ↑ Višnja Pavelić (ed.): Ante Pavelić: 100 godina . Naklada Starčević, Zagreb 1995, ISBN 953-96369-1-4 , p. 112 ff .
14. ↑ KOSMO editors: deceased Ante Pavelic daughter - KOSMO . In: KOSMO . December 28, 2015 ( kosmo.at [accessed July 31, 2017]). Ante Pavelić's daughter dies - KOSMO ( Memento from August 1, 2017 in the Internet Archive )
15. ↑ Ovo su posljednje fotografije iz života Višnje Pavelić (PHOTO) . In: Sloboda.hr - Nezavisni medijski portal . December 27, 2015 ( sloboda.hr [accessed July 31, 2017]).
16. ↑ NorgesLexi: Norsk politisk dokumentasjon på Internett. URL: Archive link ( Memento from July 17, 2012 in the archive.today web archive ) (Accessed December 12, 2011)
17. ↑ Pavelić, Ante. Retrieved July 31, 2017 . 
18. ↑ Mario Jareb: Ustaško-domobranski pokret: od nastanka do travnja 1941. godine , Hrvatski institut za povijest, Zagreb 2006, p. 321, footnote 1026.