Ante Pavelic

Born July 14, 1889, in Bradina; died Dec. 28, 1959, in Madrid. Leader of the Ustaše, the Croatian fascist terrorist organization; war criminal.

Pavelić, a lawyer, was secretary of the nationalist Croatian Party of Rights from 1915 to 1929. He founded the Ustaše organization in Italy in 1929. As head of the puppet “Independent Croatian State,” which was set up in April 1941 by the fascist German and Italian occupation forces, Pavelić organized the killing of hundreds of thousands of Yugoslavs between 1941 and 1945. After he fled from Yugoslavia at the war’s end, he lived in hiding in Austria, Italy, Argentina, and Spain. In 1945 a Yugoslav people’s court sentenced him to death in absentia.