Ivo Herenčić

Ivan "Ivo" Herenčić (28 February 1910 – 8 December 1978) was a general in the armed forces of the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH), a fascist puppet state. In 1941, he commanded a battalion of Ustaše Militia that committed many war crimes and atrocities on civilians during the Genocide of Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia. Born in Bjelovar in Austria-Hungary, he completed his secondary and tertiary education in Zagreb and Sarajevo in what was by then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In 1933, he left Yugoslavia to join the fascist and ultranationalist Croatian Ustaše movement in Italy. Late that year, Herenčić participated in an unsuccessful assassination attempt on the King of Yugoslavia, Alexander.

Herenčić returned to his homeland when the NDH was established following the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941. He was sent to the Herzegovina region where he formed and commanded the Mostar Battalion which committed war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Herenčić also served in the surveillance departments of the NDH, and committed atrocities that made him much feared. After being involved in an assassination attempt on Home Guard general Ivan Prpić in 1943, Herenčić had to emigrate to Hungary. Several months later he was brought back to Croatia to help uncover the Lorković–Vokić plot against the NDH government.

In March 1945 he was appointed commander of 5th Ustaše Corps of the Croatian Armed Forces (Croatian: Hrvatske oružane snage, HOS) and in the same month Herenčić was one of the leaders of the withdrawal of the HOS towards Austria. He participated in negotiations with the British, who decided that members of the NDH armed forces and accompanying civilians would not be allowed to proceed further and would have to surrender their arms to the Yugoslav Partisans. Herenčić evaded the Yugoslav pursuit of Nazi collaborators and was able to escape to Italy and later to Argentina where he died in 1978.