The Last Ban of the Danube Banovina Who Died in Novi Bečej
He was born on May 26, 1890, in Međa, into a priestly family. He finished his high school education in Novi Sad in 1907 and law studies in Budapest in 1911. During World War I, he served in Timișoara as a senior clerk at the Eparchial Consistory. After the war in 1918, he became the general inspector of the Ministry of the Interior, responsible for the Banat, Bačka, and Baranja regions.
As an already distinguished lawyer, he participated in the state commission for demarcation with Hungary and Romania. On October 1, 1919, his son Aleksandar was born in Vranjevo. After World War II, Aleksandar also became a Doctor of Law, specializing in maritime law. In 1927, Dr. Milorad wrote the Ministry of the Interior's Regulation on municipal and city elections in the Banat, Bačka, and Baranja with a 96-page commentary.
In the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, during the greatest persecution of communists and members of the League of Communist Youth (SKOJ), he served as assistant minister of the interior, under Anton Korošac, starting in 1939.
After the March 27th events in 1941, the government of Milan Stojadinović appointed him as the Ban of the Danube Banovina on April 1. His tenure lasted only a few days, until the Hungarian army entered Novi Sad on April 14, 1941. He is recorded as the last of the eleven bans of the Danube Banovina, with only the first, Daka Popović, and he being from Vojvodina. He was briefly placed under house arrest and then transferred to Belgrade, to the Nedić Serbia, where he was immediately interned in the Banjica concentration camp as a suspected British agent.
After the war, he lived as a pensioner in Belgrade. He spent his final days in his house in the center of Novi Bečej. Every pleasant day, especially when the linden trees were in bloom, he would sit on the same bench at 10:30 and read the newspapers. On that bench, I had the pleasure of having long conversations with him as a young historian.
On a beautiful September day in 1976, I asked him: "How is it possible that the communists didn't kill you in 1944 as the assistant minister of the interior and as a ban?" He replied that Dr. Ivan Ribar personally intervened on his behalf and saved him from certain death, as a gesture of gratitude for rescuing Ivo Lola Ribar from the Bileća camp in 1940 as a member of SKOJ.
He passed away in Novi Bečej on December 27, 1984.
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