Andrija Artukovià(19 November 1899 â 16 January 1988) was a Croatian lawyer, politician, and senior member of the fascist Ustaà ¡e movement, who served as the Minister of Internal Affairs and Minister of Justice in the Government of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) during World War II in Yugoslavia. He signed into law several racial laws against Serbs, Jews, and Roma, and was responsible for a string of concentration camps where civilians were tortured and murdered. He escaped to the United States after the war, where he lived until he was extradited to Yugoslavia in 1986. He was tried and found guilty of several mass killings in the NDH and was sentenced to death, but the sentence was not carried out due to his age and health. He died in custody in 1988.
Andrija Artukoviàwas born on 19 November 1899, in Klobuk, near Ljubuà ¡ki in Austro-Hungarian to Marijan and Ruà ¾a (née Raà ¡iÃÂ) ArtukoviÃÂ. He was one of 14 siblings raised on a farm. He studied at a Franciscan gymnasium (high school) run by the friary in nearby à  iroki Brijeg, and obtained a doctorate in law from the University of Zagreb in 1924. From 1926 he was practising law in Gospiàin the Lika region of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.
Artukoviàjoined the Croatian nationalist and terrorist Ustaà ¡e organisation which had been formed in 1929 and 1932, he was one of the organisers of their small Velebit uprising in Lika, which involved an attack on a Yugoslav gendarmerie station by a group of Ustaà ¡e. Artukoviàfled Yugoslavia before the uprising commenced, escaping via Rijeka to Venice on 31 August. On arrival in Italy, the poglavnik (supreme leader) of the Ustaà ¡e, Ante PaveliÃÂ, appointed Artukoviàas an adjutant to Main Ustaà ¡a Headquarters and commander of all Ustaà ¡e in Italy, and Artukoviàadopted the pseudonym "Hadà ¾ija" (pilgrim). The uprising he helped organise was quickly and brutally suppressed by the Yugoslav authorities, which brought the Ustaà ¡e some public attention and prestige.
In Italy, Artukoviàcame into conflict with a group of supporters of fellow Ustaà ¡a Mijo Babià(known as "Giovanni"). In late 1933, Artukoviàleft the country. After that, he went to Budapest and then Vienna, where he was arrested and briefly detained in March 1934 before being expelled from Austria. He returned to Budapest, then after meeting Paveliàin Milan in early October, he travelled to London. He was arrested there after the Ustaà ¡e assassination of the Yugoslav King Alexander I in Marseille, France.
After his arrest, he was handed over to French authorities and spent three months in a Paris prison. In January 1935, he was extradited to Yugoslavia, and after 16 months spent in prison in Belgrade, he was acquitted by the Court for the Protection of the State. He was released on 16 April 1936 and briefly returned to Gospiàbefore travelling to Austria in May. He later went to Germany, where he spread Ustaà ¡e propaganda. In early 1937, he was living in Berlin when he was interrogated by the Gestapo, and under threat of arrest, he fled to France. This was followed by a stint in Budapest, after which he returned to Berlin. By the late 1930s, the Ustaà ¡e had adopted the fascist principles of their financial backer and protector, Italy.
In late March 1941, Yugoslavia joined the Axis. Still, two days later, a pro-Allied coup d'état overthrew the government that had signed the treaty. In response, Adolf Hitler decided to invade and dismember Yugoslavia. The German-led Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in early April comprehensively defeated the Yugoslav military, and the country was divided up between the Axis powers. Before the Yugoslav government had capitulated, the Germans engineered the creation of the Independent State of Croatia, and placed Paveliàand the Ustaà ¡e in charge.
Slavko Kvaternik, the most senior Ustaà ¡e still in Yugoslavia, proclaimed the Independent State of Croatia on 10 April 1941, and Artukoviàand the other émigré Ustaà ¡e returned to Zagreb. On 12 April, Kvaternik formed an interim government, which included ArtukoviÃÂ. Paveliàarrived in Zagreb on 15 April, and on the following day, Artukoviàbecame the Interior Minister in the first Croatian government. As a member of PaveliÃÂ's trusted inner circle, Artukoviàcarried out the orders he was given.
On 17 April, to provide authority for Ustaà ¡e policies targeting Serbs, Jews, Roma, and anti-Ustaà ¡e Croats within the NDH, Paveliàproclaimed the Law Decree on the Defence of the People and the State. It prohibited any person from acting against the Croatian people and their interests, for which the penalty was death. Such alleged offences were to be dealt with in a summary manner by a panel similar to a court martial. On 22 April, Artukoviàannounced that the NDH government would solve the "Jewish question" in the same way as the German government, and a week later, he issued further racial laws, and advocated a policy of terror. These first and subsequent racial laws were vaguely worded, permitting broad interpretation. The organisation charged with enforcing these laws was the Directorate of Public Order and Security, which was subordinated to ArtukoviÃÂ's Interior Ministry. The Directorate was established in May and was headed by Eugen "Dido" Kvaternik, the son of Slavko Kvaternik.
In the meantime, ArtukoviÃÂ participated in the Croatian-Italian border negotiations that took place between PaveliÃÂ and the Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano in Italian-annexed Ljubljana on 25 April 1941. The Italians claimed the entire eastern shore of the Adriatic. Still, PaveliÃÂ made a counter-offer of that part of Dalmatia that had been offered to Italy in the secret Treaty of London of 1915. The earlier PaveliÃÂ-Ciano agreement became the basis for the Treaties of Rome, which ceded these areas to Italy, and ArtukoviÃÂ also accompanied PaveliÃÂ to the signing of those treaties in mid-May.
On 6 June, ArtukoviÃÂ accompanied PaveliÃÂ during his visit to Adolf Hitler. On 24 February 1942, at the opening of the Croatian Parliament (), ArtukoviÃÂ announced the creation of the Croatian Orthodox Church, which was intended to replace the Serbian Orthodox Church for Serbs living within the NDH. During the same speech, he promised that the NDH would take more radical action against Jews than Nazi Germany, referring to the Jewish people of the NDH as "insatiable and poisonous parasites" who would be destroyed, and stating that Croats had been forced to serve the Jews in pursuit of their "filthy" profits and "materialistic and grasping" ambitions. This speech preceded a systematic campaign against Croatian Jews which included mass deportations to NDH concentration camps and German extermination camps. After the government reshuffle on 10 October 1942, ArtukoviÃÂ became Minister of Justice and Religion, then from 29 April 1943 until 1 October 1943 he was again the Minister of Interior. He was Secretary of State from 11 October 1943 until the collapse of the Independent State of Croatia on 8 May 1945.
With other members of the Government, he left Zagreb on 6 May 1945 in the Independent State of Croatia evacuation to Austria. He was detained in an Allied camp in Spittal an der Drau. On 18 May 1945, the British extradited some Croatian ministers and Prime Minister Nikola Mandiàto the Yugoslav authorities. Artukoviàwas not extradited, but he was released soon with the remaining ministers. He left the British occupational zone and then went via the American to the French occupational zone, where his family was. In November 1946, he crossed the AustriaâÂÂSwitzerland border. He declared a false name, Alois Anich, and a false visa in Switzerland. In February 1947, he asked Swiss authorities for a Nansen passport. Some months later, they found out his real identity. Switzerland offered him the chance to keep his Nansen passport, provided that he and his family would leave Switzerland until 15 July 1947. Exactly at that date, they took a plane to Ireland. About one year later, they entered the United States on a tourist visa and settled in Seal Beach, California. He worked at a company owned by his brother. As an accused war criminal, Romani Holocaust perpetrator and Ustaà ¡e official, he did not qualify for legal status in the United States. He remained in the country after overstaying his visa.
In July 1945, the Yugoslav State Commission for Investigation of Crimes of Occupiers and Their Allies declared Artukoviàa war criminal. The Government of the FPR Yugoslavia requested his extradition on 29 August 1951. Their request met with a seven-year-long bureaucratic delay in Los Angeles, California due to the influence of the Croatian émigré community and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, to whom Artukoviàand his family had appealed. On 15 January 1959, U.S. Commissioner Theodore Hocke rejected Yugoslavia's extradition request; the INS's grounds for refusing extradition was "...since the crimes for which extradition was requested were deemed 'political' by the court, if Artukovic were deported to Yugoslavia, he would be "subject to physical persecution". When the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) raised the question of the legal basis of the stay in the US of a large number of associates of and/or collaborationists with Nazi Germany, the Yugoslav authorities, under the initiative of the Special Investigation Court of the U.S. Department of Justice, renewed their request for ArtukoviÃÂ's extradition. He was arrested on 14 November 1984, and a court process began in New York. Artukoviàremained in custody until his deportation. In 1985, he was transferred to the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri due to his health problems.
ArtukoviÃÂ was prosecuted by the Office of Special Investigations of the U.S. Department of Justice as the "Butcher of the Balkans". He was ordered extradited to Yugoslavia on 11 November 1986, where he was tried in the Zagreb District Court. He was found guilty of:
The court held that ArtukoviÃÂ's intent had originated with "his Ustaà ¡a orientation, by which persecutions, concentration camps and mass killings of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, as well as Croats who did not accept the ideology, were part of the implementation of a program of creating a 'pure' Croatia". In sentencing him to death, the court described him as one of the "ruthless murderers, who under the cover of 'protecting purity of race and faith' and to realise their Nazi-Fascist ideology, [... ] killed, slaughtered, tortured, crippled, exposed to great suffering, and persecuted thousands and thousands of people, among whom were women and children." He was sentenced to death, but the sentence was not carried out due to his age and poor health.
Artukoviàdied of natural causes in the prison hospital in Zagreb on 16 January 1988. His son, Radoslav (a California native), requested information about his father's burial from the Yugoslav authorities. A special law was passed in Yugoslavia that the remains of those convicted and sentenced to death but who escaped execution, were to be disposed of as those of executed persons. It is unclear what happened to his remains. In 2010âÂÂalso at Radoslav's requestâÂÂthe president of the Croatian Helsinki Committee, Ivan Zvonimir ÃÂiÃÂak, called for authorities to investigate what happened to the remains.