World War II in the Slovene Lands

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World War II in the Slovene Lands started in April 1941 and lasted until May 1945. The

Fascist Italy, and Hungary.[1] The Slovene-settled territory was divided largely between Nazi Germany and the Kingdom of Italy, with smaller territories occupied and annexed by Hungary and the Independent State of Croatia
.

Occupation, resistance, collaboration, civil war, and post-war killings

During World War II, Nazi Germany and Hungary annexed northern areas (brown and dark green areas, respectively), while Fascist Italy annexed the vertically hashed black area (solid black western part being annexed by Italy already with the Treaty of Rapallo). Some villages were incorporated into the Independent State of Croatia. After 1943, Germany took over the Italian occupational area, as well.
Border lines and occupied territories

On 6 April 1941,

occupied the major part of Prekmurje, which prior to WW1 belonged to Hungary. Resistance by the Kingdom of Yugoslavia's army was insignificant. In 2005, Slovene authors first published information about six villages in Lower Carniola that were annexed by the Independent State of Croatia, and a Maribor-based historian first published original research about it in 2011, but it remains unclear why the villages from Drava Banovina were occupied contrary to a known German–Croatian treaty.[2]

Under the Nazi occupation

See also: Maribor prison massacres
Germans executing hundreds of Slovene hostages in Celje, July 22, 1941

The Germans had a plan of the forced location of the Slovene population in the so called Rann Triangle. The area was the border area towards the Italian occupation zone. The German Gottscheers would have been relocated to that area and would form an ethnic barrier to other Slovene lands. The rest of the Slovene population in Lower Styria was seen as

NDH. Because Hitler opposed having the ethnic German Gottscheers in the Italian occupation zone, they were moved out of it. About 46,000 Slovenes were transported to Saxony
in Germany in order to make space for the relocated Gottscheers.

The majority of Slovene victims during the war were from the northern Slovenia, i.e.

Reichsgau Carinthia
".

Nazi persecution of the Church

The Nazi persecution of the Catholic Church in annexed Slovenia was akin to

Diocese of Ljubljana remained free. Clergy were persecuted and sent to concentration camps, and religious orders had their properties seized.[3]

Under Fascist Italy's occupation

See also: Province of Ljubljana
Rumeni karton
Rdeči karton
1) Italian poster forbidding exit from Ljubljana, surrounded by barbed wire 2) an inmate in the Italian Rab concentration camp

Compared to the German policies in the northern Nazi-occupied area of Slovenia and the forced

Lower Styria and Upper Carniola escaped to the Province of Ljubljana until June 1941.[4]

However, after resistance started in

Italian concentration camps, such as Rab concentration camp, in Gonars concentration camp, Monigo (Treviso), Renicci d'Anghiari, Chiesanuova and elsewhere. To suppress the mounting resistance by the Slovene Partisans, Mario Roatta adopted draconian measures of summary executions, hostage-taking, reprisals, internments, and the burning of houses and whole villages. The "3C" pamphlet, tantamount to a declaration of war on civilians, involved him in Italian war crimes. A barbed wire fence—which is now the Trail of Remembrance and Comradeship—was put around Ljubljana in order to prevent communication between the city's underground activists in Ljubljana and the majority of partisans in the surrounding countryside.[6]

Resistance

Prisoners in Begunje na Gorenjskem, 1941

On 26 April 1941, several groups formed the

Liberation Front. Its military arm was the Slovene Partisans. The Slovene Partisans retained their specific organizational structure and Slovene language as their commanding language until the last months of World War II, when their language was removed as the commanding language.[8] In March 1945, the Slovene Partisan Units were officially merged into the Yugoslav Army
.

At the very beginning,

Slovene Partisan forces were relatively small, poorly armed and without any infrastructure, but Spanish Civil War
veterans amongst them had some experience with guerrilla methods of fighting the enemy. The partisan activities in the Slovene Lands were initially independent of Tito's Partisans in the south. In autumn 1942, Tito attempted for the first time to control the Slovene resistance movement. The merger of the Slovene Partisans with Tito's forces happened in 1944.[9][10]

In December 1943, Franja Partisan Hospital was built in difficult and rugged terrain, deep inside German-occupied Europe, only a few hours from Austria and the central parts of the Third Reich. German military activity was frequent in the general region throughout the operation of the hospital. It saw continuous improvements until May 1945.

Civil war and post-war killings

In the summer of 1942, a civil war between Slovenes broke out. The two fighting factions were the

Slovenian Littoral and in Upper Carniola, while they were virtually non-existent in the rest of the country. By 1945, the total number of Slovene anti-Communist militiamen reached 17,500.[11]

Immediately after the war, some 12,000 members of the Slovene Home Guard were killed in the

Kočevski Rog massacres, while thousands of anti-communist civilians were killed in the first year after the war.[12] These massacres were silenced, and remained a taboo topic until an interview with Edvard Kocbek was published by Boris Pahor in his publication Zaliv, causing the 1975 Zaliv Scandal in Tito's
Yugoslavia.

End of war and aftermath

WW2 poster from Slovenia: "Donate for the Winter Aid!"

World War II in the Slovene Lands lasted until the middle of May 1945. On 3 May, the

Slovenian Istria from Communist persecution in the so-called Istrian–Dalmatian exodus
. Members of the ethnic German minority either fled or were expelled from Slovenia.

Croatian occupation of Slovenian territories

After the Invasion of Yugoslavia Slovene lands were divided between Nazi Germany, Italy and Hungary. Some smaller parts were also occupied by Independent State of Croatia. In 1941, five Slovenian settlements came under Croatian rule:

Jesenice na Dolenjskem, Obrežje and Čedem. It was a territory of approximately 20 square kilometers in which around 800 inhabitants lived at the time. Slovenian children from the occupied villages had to go to the Croatian school in Lug pri Bregani. Immediately after the start of the partisan resistance in 1942, the Ustaše authorities began to carry out mass arrests among the population. In doing so, they had a particularly rough time with the Slovenian population. On September 14, 1942, the Croatian Ustaše killed all the men from the Slovenian Planina in revenge, and burned the village. The Croats mobilized Slovene boys and men into the Croatian Home Guard
", among the Ustaše, or sent them to the German army. In order to avoid conscription into the Ustasha army, men and boys were forced to hide or join the partisans. Towards the end of the second world war, the Croatian occupied territories were occupied by the Partisans and were immediately rejoined to Slovenia.

Number of victims

The overall number of World War II casualties in Slovenia is estimated at 97,000. The number includes about 14,000 people who were killed or died for other war-related reasons immediately after the end of the war,

Holocaust.[14][13] In addition, tens of thousands of Slovenes left their homeland soon after the end of the war. Most of them settled in Argentina, Canada
, Australia and in the United States.

The overall number of World War Two casualties in Slovenia is estimated to 89,000, while 14,000 people were killed immediately after the end of the war.[12] The overall number of World War II casualties in Slovenia was thus of around 7.2% of the pre-war population, which is above the Yugoslav average, and among the highest percentages in Europe.

Non-extradition of the Italian war criminals

Main article: Italian war crimes

The documents found in British archives by the British historian

anti-communist post-war Italy.[16]

See also

References

  1. ^ Gregor Joseph Kranjc (2013).To Walk with the Devil, University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division, p. introduction 5
  2. ^ "Bo Slovenija od Hrvaške zahtevala poplačilo vojne škode?". Delo (in Slovenian). 2011-04-12. Retrieved 2013-02-14.
  3. ^ Vincent A. Lapomarda; The Jesuits and the Third Reich; 2nd Edn, Edwin Mellen Press; 2005; pp. 232, 233
  4. ^ Initial relationship between Italians and Slovenians in 1941
  5. ^ James H. Burgwyn (2004). General Roatta's war against the partisans in Yugoslavia: 1942, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, Volume 9, Number 3, pp. 314-329(16)
  6. ^ Vurnik, Blaž (22 April 2016). "Kabinet čudes: Ljubljana v žičnem obroču" [Cabinet of Curiosities: Ljubljana in the Barbed Wire Ring]. Delo.si (in Slovenian).
  7. ISBN 978-1-85065-944-0
    .
  8. ISBN 978-1-84176-675-1
    .
  9. ISBN 978-1-86011-336-9
    .
  10. ISBN 9781576072943
    . The former Yugoslavia's diverse peoples: a reference sourcebook.
  11. ^ Slovenski zgodovinski atlas (Ljubljana: Nova revija, 2011), 186.
  12. ^ a b c Godeša B., Mlakar B., Šorn M., Tominšek Rihtar T. (2002): "Žrtve druge svetovne vojne v Sloveniji". In: Prispevki za novejšo zgodovino, str. 125–130.
  13. ^ a b "Prvi pravi popis - v vojnem in povojnem nasilju je umrlo 6,5 % Slovencev :: Prvi interaktivni multimedijski portal, MMC RTV Slovenija". Rtvslo.si. 2011-01-13. Retrieved 2014-06-18.
  14. ^ The figure includes the Carinthian Slovene victims.
  15. ^ Conti, Davide (2011). "Criminali di guerra Italiani". Odradek Edizioni. Retrieved 2012-10-14.
  16. ^
    Effie G. H. Pedaliu (2004) Britain and the 'Hand-over' of Italian War Criminals to Yugoslavia, 1945-48.
    Journal of Contemporary History. Vol. 39, No. 4, Special Issue: Collective Memory, pp. 503-529 (JStor.org preview)

External links


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