page_title: Vjekoslav Luburić
section_title: Jasenovac, IV–V
hierarchical_section_title: Vjekoslav Luburić / World War II / Ustaše Surveillance Service, Bureau III / Jasenovac, IV–V
caption_attribution_description: English: Vjekoslav Luburic sits at a table with a German officer in the Stara Gradiska concentration camp.
context_page_description: Vjekoslav "Maks" Luburić was a Croatian Ustaše official who headed the system of concentration camps in the Independent State of Croatia during much of World War II. Luburić also personally oversaw and spearheaded the contemporaneous genocides of Serbs, Jews and Roma in the NDH.
  Luburić joined Ante Pavelić's Ustaše movement in 1931, left Yugoslavia the following year and relocated to Hungary. Following the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia and the establishment of the NDH with Pavelić at its head, Luburić returned to the Balkans. 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, most notably Jasenovac, where approximately 100,000 people were killed over the course of the war. In late 1942, Luburić was appointed commander of the Croatian Home Guard's 9th Infantry Regiment, but was stripped of his command after shooting and killing one of his subordinates.
context_section_description: Armed with the information he had gathered in Germany, Luburić was able to organize the Brickyard more efficiently than Krapje and Bročice had been. In January 1942, Bureau III ordered the establishment of Jasenovac IV, a sub-camp dedicated to leather production, which became known as the Tannery (Croatian: Kožara). A fifth and final sub-camp, Jasenovac V, was established around the same time. Known as Stara Gradiška, after the village in which it was located, it was overseen by both male and female guards. Among them were Luburić's half-sisters, Nada and Zora. The former participated extensively in the tortures and executions that took place at Stara Gradiška. She went on to marry Dinko Šakić. During the war, Šakić served as the deputy commander of Stara Gradiška, and later, as the commander of the Brickyard. Luburić also recruited his cousin Ljubo Miloš. Miloš served as the labour service commandant at the Brickyard. 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. Šakić was 20 in 1941 and Miloš was 22.
  The Jasenovac camp system was guarded by more than 1,500 Ustaše. The Brickyard, the Tannery and Stara Gradiška were capable of holding 7,000 inmates, although the number of inmates never exceeded 4,000 at any given time. Luburić visited the Jasenovac camp system two or three times per month. He insisted on personally killing at least one inmate on each of his visits. Luburić enjoyed taunting prisoners as to the date and method of their execution. He would "amuse himself by placing his revolver up against the heads of the prisoners," the Tito biographer Jasper Godwin Ridley writes. "Sometimes he pulled the trigger; sometimes he did not." Luburić's cruelty also extended to the other Ustaše camps. In one instance, he deliberately dispatched hundreds of typhus-ridden inmates from Stara Gradiška to Đakovo so as to expedite the spread of the disease among its prisoners. "Luburić created such an atmosphere," Miloš recalled, "that every Ustaša actually felt himself called upon to kill a prisoner, believing that this would be an act of patriotism." After unsuccessfully experimenting with gas vans, Luburić ordered that a gas chamber be constructed at Stara Gradiška, which used a combination of sulphur dioxide and Zyklon B. The gas chamber was poorly constructed and this method of killing was abandoned after three months. Over the course of the war, unlike in the German camps, most inmates were killed with knives or blunt objects. 
  In early 1942, conditions at Jasenovac improved somewhat in anticipation of a visit by a Red Cross delegation. Healthier inmates, who were provided with new beds and bedclothes, were allowed to speak to the delegation, while sick and emaciated ones were killed. After the delegation left, camp conditions reverted to their prior state. Whenever he was pressed for information by the families of those detained at Jasenovac, Luburić remained equivocal. 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. Luburić also proved impervious to bribes, as exemplified by the case of Julius Schmidlin, a Red Cross representative, who attempted to bribe Luburić into treating the inmates at Jasenovac more humanely, but was angrily rebuffed. In addition, Luburić did not tolerate the mishandling of goods seized from camp inmates, as exemplified by his response to the so-called Gold Affair, in which camp guards were caught attempting to smuggle confiscated jewellery out of Jasenovac. Luburić ordered that the culprits be killed. Among those killed was the brother of Luburić's deputy Ivica Matković, who was beaten to death.
caption: Luburić sitting with a German officer at Stara Gradiška, June 1942
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