Ivan Šubašić

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Ivan Šubašić in the late 1920s

Ivan Šubašić (born May 7, 1892 in Vukova Gorica , Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia , Austria-Hungary ; † March 22, 1955 in Zagreb , SFR Yugoslavia ) was a Croatian and Yugoslav politician and from August 24, 1939 to June 13, 1943 the last ban from Croatia . He then briefly appeared as the Yugoslav Prime Minister , Yugoslav Foreign Minister and Minister of the Army, Navy and Air Force of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in exile .

Live and act

Ivan Šubašić (right) with Peter II on June 21, 1944 in Italy shortly after a conversation with Tito

Ivan Šubašić was born on May 7, 1892 in the village of Vukova Gorica in the then Austro-Hungarian Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia, and completed his school education in the capital Zagreb. Subsequently, he enrolled in the theological faculty of the University of Zagreb . During the First World War he was drafted into the armed forces of Austria-Hungary and was involved in the fighting on the Serbian front on the Drina . He was later sent to the Eastern Front, where he took the opportunity to defer to the Russian Empire . Here he joined the Yugoslav volunteers and fought within the Serbian army on the Salonika Front . As a recognition and award of acquired for king and country merits in war and in peace he received from Prince Regent Alexander I to the Order of the Karađorđe star awarded. After the end of the war, Šubašić attended the University of Zagreb again, where he studied law and, after successfully completing his degree, founded a law firm in the northern Croatian city of Vrbovsko . In Vrbovsko he also met Vladko Maček from the Croatian Peasant Party , which he then joined. In 1938, the then 46-year-old was elected to the Yugoslav National Assembly.

In August 1939, Maček and the Yugoslav Prime Minister Dragiša Cvetković reached an agreement in the so-called Sporazum on the constitutional reconstruction of Yugoslavia and the restoration of Croatian statehood in the form of the Banovina Hrvatska , which consists of the Croatian- majority areas, including the majority of the royal Yugoslavian territories of Croatians in Bosnia and Herzegovina . In doing so, they pushed the federalization of Yugoslavia forward. Šubašić was then appointed the first ban and held this office until the invasion of the Axis powers ( Balkan campaign ) in April 1941, which resulted in the dissolution of the Banovina. Maček's preferred candidate for this office would actually have been August Košutić . After the unconditional surrender of Yugoslavia on April 17, 1941, Šubašić remained nominally in office as part of the Yugoslav government in exile until 1944 (according to other sources only until June 13, 1943). He was also the last ban from Croatia.

Before joining Dušan Simović and his Yugoslav government-in-exile in London , Šubašić remained in Yugoslavia for a short time and refused to release large numbers of imprisoned Croatian communists and leftists and kept the prisons and detention centers under his supervision for a period. After the establishment of the Independent State of Croatia , the prisons were taken over by it and the majority of the prisoners were executed by the Ustaše . At first Šubašić represented the Yugoslav royal government in London before he stayed in the United States until the beginning of 1944 . The widening gap between the royal government and the main Yugoslav resistance movement, which consisted of Tito and his communist partisans , forced British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to mediate. As a non-communist Croat, Šubašić was then appointed Prime Minister of the Yugoslav government-in-exile as a compromise on June 1, 1944 - according to other sources, not until July 8, 1944. At this point he had already been in exile in London for several months. In parallel to this office he was also appointed Yugoslav Foreign Minister with immediate effect . After the office of Minister of the Army, Navy and Air Force of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in exile after the recall of Draža Mihailović had become vacant, Šubašić took over this briefly and held it from July 1, 1944 to September 11, 1944 for a period of 72 days before he was replaced by General Borisav Ristić .

Ivan Šubašić, who acted as a kind of reconciliation politician between Tito, who represented the de facto government in the already liberated areas with his forces, and the monarchy preferred by Draža Mihailović and his Chetniks , spoke out against Mihailović in public early on. He then met Tito on June 16, 1944 on the Dalmatian island of Vis , where the two of them signed the Tito-Šubašić Agreement . This agreement, which recognized the partisans as the legitimate armed forces of Yugoslavia in exchange for the formal recognition and participation of the partisans in the new government, came into force immediately. The actual formation of a new government was postponed to November 1, 1944, when Tito and Šubašić signed a second treaty at another meeting in Belgrade . Šubašić held office until March 7, 1945, when Tito formally became Prime Minister of Yugoslavia. Since January 26, 1945 Šubašić denied his second interim term as Minister of the Army, the Navy and the Air Force of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in exile and handed over this office to Tito after he came to power. He retained his position as foreign minister in Tito's cabinet until October 17, 1945, when he also handed it over to Tito. The reason for his resignation was his opposition to the communist policy of the new government, which ended in a dictatorship that lasted for decades .

Thereafter, Šubašić, who was born on the same day as Tito, lived outside the general public and at times under surveillance by the OZNA in Zagreb, where he died on March 22, 1955 at the age of 62. Around 10,000 people attended his funeral at the Mirogoj cemetery . Ivan Šubašić received several awards throughout his life, including the Order of the White Eagle .

Web links and sources

Commons : Ivan Šubašić  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Ivan Šubašić in the Mirogoj Cemetery (Croatian), accessed on July 9, 2018