Dragutin Kamber
born 1901; died 1969
Dragutin Kamber (9 December 1901 – 20 June 1969) was a Croatian Jesuit priest and Ustaše functionary who served as the Grand Prefect of Doboj and later as the chaplain of the Croatian Armed Forces in the Axis puppet state known as the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) during World War II. In 1941, he oversaw the mass arrests and internment of Serbs in Doboj, many of whom were interrogated in his house before being killed in its basement. According to the historian Robert B. McCormick, Kamber was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Serbs during this period.
As the NDH collapsed in May 1945, Kamber fled to Austria and then to Italy, where he recruited for the priest Krunoslav Draganović's ratline, which was used to smuggle former Axis officials out of post-war Europe. In 1947, the Yugoslav government issued a warrant for Kamber's arrest. He later immigrated to the United States under the name Charles Kamber, serving as a parish priest in Gary, Indiana, and Lynch, Nebraska, and became a naturalized American citizen. In 1958, he testified as a defense witness at the deportation hearings of the NDH's former Minister of Internal Affairs, Andrija Artuković, who in the post-war years had settled in Los Angeles. In 1961, Kamber was appointed as the parish priest of Our Lady Queen of Croatia Church in Toronto, and oversaw its reconstruction after it was destroyed in a fire the following year. He lived in Toronto until his death in 1969. He is the namesake of Father Kamber Park located on the grounds of the Church of the Croatian Martyrs in Mississauga, Ontario.
Early life
Dragutin Kamber was born in the village of Ruda, near Sinj, on 9 December 1901.
“Dragutin Kamber” enters the record as born 1901; died 1969. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Dragutin, Kamber and born can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q103814152. VIAF identifies the subject as 9096709. The Library of Congress control number is n95078971. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1901, 1969, 1941 and 1945.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dragutin Kamber” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.