November 15, 1984 - "Croatian Himmler".
On this day, November 15, 1984, in Los Angeles (although it was still November 14), the notorious Croatian Andrija Artuković, who served as the Minister of Interior and Minister of Justice of the Independent State of Croatia (ISC) during World War II, was arrested.
This event put an end to the decades-long cover-up of one of the central ideologues of the extermination system directed against Serbs, Jews and Gypsies.
As the right-hand man of Ante Pavlić and the head of the repression apparatus of the Croatian state, Artuković already in the spring of 1941 put his signature on racial laws and decrees that effectively deprived the Serbian population of the Independent State of Croatia (ISH) of legal protection.
He was directly responsible for the creation of a system of concentration camps - among which the Jasnovac camp stood out for its monstrous cruelty - as well as for the mass extermination of hundreds of thousands of innocent Serbs who declared Orthodoxy.
1 9 4 8 After the collapse of the state created by the Nazis in May 1945, Artukovich managed to escape justice. After visiting Austria, Switzerland and Ireland, he arrived in the United States in 1948 under the assumed name Alois Anich; There he lived freely and in total security in the state of California for decades.
Although the first extradition request was submitted back in 1951, the American authorities and judicial authorities stubbornly refused to extradite Artukovich for more than three decades. It was only after years of public pressure and a retrial that Artukovich was finally arrested on November 14, 1984. After exhausting all avenues of appeal, he was extradited to Yugoslavia on February 12, 1986.
However, the trial in the District Court in Zagreb - at the behest of the Yugoslav and Croatian communist leadership at the time - turned into a legal and political farce.