TEENAGE NAZI HUNTER WHO FINALLY GOT HIS MAN

Despite presiding over the murder of 770,000 Jews and Serbs during the Second World War, the so-called 'Butcher of the Balkans' lived happily under a false name in California. Until 19-year-old David White law tracked him down that is...

STUNNED into silence, a hushed courtroom heard witness after witness describe unfathomable atrocities. Four hundred Jews machinegunned. Whole towns and villages massacred. A house packed with women and children crushed beneath tanks. All under the orders of Andrija Artukovic, notorious as The Butcher of the Balkans. One of the world’s most wanted Nazi war criminals, at the age of 85 he finally sat slumped in his wheelchair behind bulletproof glass while on trial in Croatia. Artukovic was widely believed to have presided over the torture and murder of 770,000 Jews and Serbs in death camps during his reign as Croatia’s Second World War minister of justice and minister of the interior employing savagery that shocked even the Nazis. He ordered crowded synagogues to be set ablaze, slaughtered innocent children, and killed with sadistic zeal. For more than 30 years Artukovic had lived unfettered in America, only to be brought to justice by a campaign led by the unlikeliest Nazi hunter: a Jewish teenager in Los Angeles.

Every Goliath has a David,” says Judy Piercey, author of The Fierce, an engrossing new book that for the first time tells the story, also being made into a film. 

For Artukovic, that was David Whitelaw.” 

A bright, handsome 19-year- old whose family had fled the Holocaust, Whitelaw dedicated his teenage years to awakening the world to Artukovic’s crimes and helping to force his eventual extradition to Yugoslavia.

“This was not your garden variety concentration camp guard,” says Whitelaw.

“He ran Croatia’s Gestapo for the Nazis. He ordered the deaths of up to one million people, but had fled to America where he was protected by the US government and the Roman Catholic Church.

“He lived in a gated community just yards from the ocean, in Seal Beach in sunny Southern California, with his wife and five children, without a care in the world.