Andrija Artuković (November 29, 1899 - January 16, 1988), was a Croatian ultra-right-wing politician and a person convicted of war crimes and genocide committed against minorities in the WWII 'Independent State of Croatia' (NDH).

Artuković was born in Ljubuški (in Bosnia and Herzegovina, then a colony of Austria-Hungary), and studied at a Franciscan monastery at Široki Brijeg in Herzegovina. In the 1930s, he became part of the revolutionary group the Ustaše, and led a failed uprising in Lika after which he fled to Italy.

During World War II, in 1941 Artuković was named the Minister of the Interior in the newly-formed NDH. He was nicknamed the Yugoslav Himmler as he was closely involved in the genocide of Serbs, Jews, Roma, and other minorities, and the opening of concentration camps such as Jasenovac.

After the war he escaped via Bleiburg and Switzerland to Ireland and then finally California where he lived until the mid-1980s. His extradition was requested by the Yugoslav authorities to be put on the trial for war crimes, causing deaths of several thousand persons. It was first stayed by an immigration judge and shelved for two decades, but then reactivated and after a long court battle he was eventually expelled from the USA to Yugoslavia.

The court in Zagreb convicted him to death on May 14, 1986, but a year later the authorities ruled he was too ill to be executed, so he died a natural death in a prison hospital in Zagreb.

nl:Andrija Artukovic