Life and death of a Croatian Nazi war criminal
Published on Thursday, 26 April 2012 16:27 Written by Sonia Gable
We were interested to read of a particularly nasty specimen of British National Party organiser called Shaun Grimsley, who demonstrated his hardline Nazi sympathies by posting his admiration for General Vjekoslav Luburić on his Facebook page recently.
Luburić was an Croatian Ustaše general, and Simon Cressy revealed the full horrors of his career on the Hope Note Hate website, including his role as commander of Jasenovac concentration camp, the largest extermination camp in occupied Yugoslavia during the Second World war, where 300,000 to 700,000 men women and children were murdered.
After the war Luburić escaped to Hungary and later to Spain where he founded the underground terrorist organisation called the Croatian National Resistance, which took part in racketeering, attempted murder, extortion, hijacking, terrorist bombing and other violent crimes.
Cressy stops at this point, but Luburić’s story has an interesting twist in the tail. Luburić, who fled Yugoslavia with a large quantity of war loot, kept a very low profile, knowing that President Tito’s agents were looking for him. He was right to be worried.
In 1969 he surfaced semi-publicly for the first time at a rally of the New European Order in Barcelona, attended by Nazis from all over the world. This was the conference addressed by François Genoud, one of the most significant, mysterious and influential figures in postwar Nazism, about whom we wrote in our coverage of Jacques Vergès in our December 2011 issue. Searchlight published a picture from inside the conference in one of its very early issues and re-ran it in December 2011.
Another character at this conference, which was hosted by the Spanish Nazi group CEDADE (Círculo Español de Amigos de Europa), was Count Potocki, an exiled pretender to the Polish throne who lived in France and Dorset. Potocki was close to Savitri Devi, a Nazi writer who saw Hitler as a sort of avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu, and Françoise Dior, the Nazi perfume heiress who married Britain’s Nazi godfather Colin Jordan. He complained to the Barcelona conference that ‘Jewish terrorists’ from the 62 Group had attacked his Dorset home.
We don’t know whether or not the 62 Group drove Potocki out of England, but the 62 Group did have a ‘source’ inside the Barcelona conference. Luburić lived to regret his appearance there, though only for two days. On 20 April 1969, the anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s birth, Luburić was killed in a joint operation by the Israeli intelligence service Mossad and the Yugoslav state security service UDBA (Uprava državne bezbednosti). A man called Ilija Stanich did the deed, in Carcaixent in the Spanish province of Valencia.
Grimsley claims to be friends with Luburić’s grandson Maxim, who says his grandfather has been demonised. No, not demonised, this man actually was a demon if ever there was one.