The crimes of Croatian Pérez, Nazi poultry farmer

Vjekoslav Luburić lied slightly in 1963, when he told the Spanish police that he was a poultry farmer. He was totally sincere when underlining his “adherence to the National Cause”, a euphemism for “Franco dictatorship”. In his declaration to renew his residence in Spain under the name Vicente Pérez García, he forgot to mention other biographical details, such as his massacres in Croatia during World War II. Tomorrow, April 20, marks 55 years since Luburić's murder in Carcaixent.

After the world war, Spain welcomed numerous Nazi criminals of different nationalities. Like so many others, Francoism offered Vjekoslav Luburić protection, a false identity and the opportunity to rebuild his life. The fact that he had murdered thousands of innocent people in concentration camps, when Croatia was a faithful ally of Nazi Germany, was no obstacle to providing him with the papers.

In the first years of his exile, the former military man promoted a duck farm in Benigànim, in the Vall d'Albaida region. But in 1963, when he declared again before the police to renew his residence permit, poultry farming was no longer his main activity. In the sixties he lived in Carcaixent, where he managed a printing press that published anti-communist propaganda in Serbo-Croatian, Spanish and other languages. His priority occupation was not the ducks, but the fight from exile against the communist dictatorship of Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia.

In a police document dated January 4, 1963, officials noted that Luburić/Pérez's “undoubted adherence to the National Cause” was “fully guaranteed by personnel of moral and political solvency.” That is, by Franco fanatics. One of these guarantors was Father Miguel Oltra, director of the school that the Franciscan order owned – and still manages – on Santa Ana Street in Carcaixent. Luburić's printing press was located on the same street, and it was there where, in 1969, and despite the protection of the authorities, the Croatian refugee received a blow to the back of the head that ended his life.

Until then, Luburić's life in Spain was going smoothly. In 1953 he married a Basque woman with Catholic convictions, had two daughters and two sons, was able to manage his own businesses and was even named honorary president of a Falla de Carcaixent, an anecdote that exemplifies his adaptation to the host country. But his abrupt end began to take shape in the spring of 1968 with the arrival of a 22-year-old young man named Ilija Stanić into his inner circle. An emigrant born near Sarajevo, with no connection to the world war, except that his father, Jozo, continued fighting in the maquis until 1951. That year he died during a skirmish against Tito's army.

Vjekoslav Luburić always feared for his life. He repeated it to his Spanish friends, almost all of them former combatants of the Blue Division. “I know that one day they will come for me. “Open your eyes wide.” He also conveyed this to Stanić, who gradually gained his trust and who acted as Luburić's personal secretary. Ilija never raised suspicions in the former general's private environment, even though the press of the time did not hesitate to affirm, after the crime, that the young emigrant was, in reality, a spy sent by Tito.

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There are conclusive data in favor of the espionage thesis: upon his return to Yugoslavia, Stanić enjoyed privileges. Furthermore, the day chosen for the crime could not have been coincidental. April 20 is the anniversary of Hitler's birth, which Nazis from all over the planet take advantage of for their covens. The Yugoslav communists would have decided to join the party. In its own way, of course.

However, for a crime organized by the secret services of a well-established State, the technique of murder and the escape of the executor leave too many questions. Ilija used an unsophisticated weapon, an iron bar, unusual in telefilms of the genre, where semi-automatic pistols with silencers are preferred; He wrapped the body in a blanket and hid it under the bed; He fled in two taxis: first to Valencia and then to Barcelona; he arrived at the border, which he crossed illegally on foot through mountain paths, where he suffered a fall; and his trace was lost for a month, until he appeared at the Yugoslav border, where no one was expecting him and where he was detained. A spy fleeing in a taxi doesn't seem like much of a spy.

Neither the Francoist police nor Interpol ever arrested the perpetrator of the murder. Only an investigation by this journalist managed to locate him in Sarajevo in 2003. Ilija then assured that the crime was a consequence of disputes between opposing groups of Croatian exiles. Without any participation of the Yugoslav secret services. But his version incurred suspicious contradictions.

The Yugoslavian clue behind the crime is reasonable. The dirty war between Croatian exiles in the West and Yugoslav secret agents was constant and bloody. Only in the territory of the then Federal Germany, between 1960 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, 22 Croatians were murdered by spies arriving from Yugoslavia or by criminals hired by them. Just the year before the Carcaixent crime, three Croatian exiles were murdered in the same operation in Munich. For their part, Croatian gunmen liquidated Yugoslav diplomats, such as the ambassador in Stockholm (1972), placed bombs on commercial planes or kidnapped them (one of those planes arrived in Barajas).

A report from the Francoist police from 1969, now rescued by José Luis Rodríguez, professor of History at the Rey Juan Carlos University, author of the book

Bajo el manto del Caudillo

, indicated: “The event [the murder of Luburić] may be similar to the occurred in Munich (Germany) in which three Croatian enemies of the prevailing regime in Yugoslavia were also eliminated. It is suspected that one of those in charge of directing the actions of these communist commandos is the vice-consul of Yugoslavia in Marseille, a communist fanatic, former guerrilla, who obtained a university degree through night courses.

In 2016, a German court sentenced two former spies from the former Yugoslavia to life in prison for murdering a Croatian exile in 1983, Stjepan Đureković. In the sentencing of Josip Perković, 71, and Zdravko Mustac, 74, the former spies that Croatia had finally agreed to extradite, the judges offered the figure of 22 victims caused by the Yugoslav secret services in West Germany in the years of the war dirty.

The file preserved in the police archives of the former Yugoslavia states that Stanić worked for Tito. But Ilija's statement before the communist police, made upon returning to his country after the murder of Carcaixent, seems more like a confession made to dictation, equally full of inconsistencies. As an example, Stanić assured the police of his country, in May 1969, that he hit Luburić several times on the head and that he also stabbed him. On the contrary, forensic expert Gabriel Soler recalled, in statements from 2006, that there was only one impact to the skull. Of course, a single brutal blow.

The case has accumulated many different and contradictory versions, even though they are incorporated as official in the documents of each era. But almost all the protagonists lied: to obtain money and privileges, to disassociate themselves from terrible crimes or, simply, to renew residence permits. It is not easy to believe in Luburić's absolute sincerity when he expressed such a long-standing vocation for the demanding profession of poultry farming.

Francesc Bayarri

is the author of the book Appointment in Sarajevo (Montesinos).

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