Ivan Vidnjević

Ivan Vidnjević (1907 – 7 June 1945) was a Croatian judge who presided over the Travelling Summary Court for the district of Zagreb in the Axis puppet state known as the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) during World War II. He oversaw show trials of Serbs, Jews and other "enemies of the state" which invariably resulted in summary execution. By December 1942, he had reportedly "celebrated his 1,500th death sentence". Shortly after the war, he was found guilty of treason and war crimes by a Yugoslav military tribunal and sentenced to death by hanging.

Biography Early life Ivan Vidnjević was born in the village of Zavalje, near the town of Bihać in modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina. At the time of his birth, the village was located in Croatia-Slavonia, a nominally autonomous kingdom within Austria-Hungary. In some sources, his surname is spelled Vignjević, but according to the scholar Tomislav Jonjić, this is incorrect. Vidnjević received his law degree from the University of Zagreb's Faculty of Law. He was directly subordinated to Dido Kvaternik, and his salary and travel expenses were covered by the Ustaše Surveillance Service (; UNS). "Under his administration, the courts implemented arbitrary justice against Serbs and other "enemies" of the state," the historian Rory Yeomans writes. "This invariably meant a show trial followed by summary execution." Yeomans further characterizes Vidnjević as "fanatical" and describes the one over which he presided as the "most notorious" of the mobile Ustaše courts.

From 23 July to 7 August, Vidnjević presided over a session of the Travelling Summary Court in the town of Karlovac, southwest of Zagreb. On 4 August, he sentenced four named defendants and 98 unnamed Jews and communists to death for allegedly attacking a unit of the Ustaše University Battalion. The latter were described as "co-participants and the intellectual instigators" of the attack. The following day, another 87 Jews and communists were sentenced to death as "additional co-participants and intellectual instigators". Holocaust survivor and researcher Slavko Goldstein observed, "Of course, in two days Vidnjević and his mobile summary court, even with the expedited procedures, could not have questioned, let alone sentenced, a total of 189 suspects, so it is obvious that the procedure involved randomly selected hostages whom the court never saw." Following a prisoners' revolt at the Jasenovac concentration camp in late October or early November 1941 which had been sparked by a reduction in food rations, Vidnjević presided over a session of the Travelling Summary Court in which around 100 inmates from the Krapje (Jasenovac I) sub-camp were sentenced to death. After the sentences were handed down, the prisoners were shot by the Ustaše official Vjekoslav Luburić. In his post-war interrogation, camp commander Ljubo Miloš characterized this incident as "the only liquidation where some attempt was made to provide legal grounds. All other liquidations were carried out without any preceding investigation, trial, or anything of the kind. I think that there were several more trials, but these were only individual cases."

On 28 September 1942, canon Augustin Juretić wrote to Juraj Krnjević, a representative of the Yugoslav government-in-exile in London, that: "Judge Vignjević [sic] of the court-martial has by now sentenced 1,200 people to death." On 3 December, he reported to Krnjević that the judge had "recently celebrated his 1,500th death sentence." Vidnjević and his co-defendants were tried before a military tribunal of the Yugoslav Second Army in Zagreb.