crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

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Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes three tiers of bunks, with a 60 cm. wide space per prisoner. In most camps, the prisoners slept on wooden boards, but in some places, straw bags served as mattresses. In contrast to transit camps, barracks could usually be deloused, but cockroaches still plagued the prisoners. Inmates worked 10–14 hour days. In theory, on Sundays, they were exempt from work, but the commanding officers would find work for them on these days too. There were places where prisoners got unsubstantial wages, but it was not a general practice. The prisoners who had the best chances for survival were those able to work as skilled labourers in some factory or farm. However, the majority of prisoners worked in mines, cleared forests, or did road and railway construction. The worst conditions were in the Gulag camps, where condemned prisoners were held. The three most notorious camp districts (Vorkuta, Norilsk, and Kolyma) were located north of the Arctic Circle. Survivors remember winter temperatures often reaching -60° C, and even worse was the constant wind. In the Far East, the Taiset camp deserves mention, where the prisoners began to build the Baikal-Amur railway (BAM), hailed as the construction project of the century. As a result of the poor living and working conditions and the insufficient provisions in the Soviet camps, many of the prisoners became sick, and close to a third of the prisoners perished. It emerges from the prisoners’ accounts that the mass mortality was not only caused by the general post-war destitution. Multitudes died as a consequence of the typically Soviet-style disorganization, corruption, and disregard for human life. Through the contacts with local residents in the workplaces, prisoners got acquainted with the everyday life in the Soviet Union. The memoirs demonstrate authentically and in detail how theft became an organic part of Soviet life. Formerly high-ranking Soviet party functionaries reiterated this quite openly in Kolima: “... they told us that the whole system here is unadulterated cheating, stealing, and lies. /.../ anyone who doesn’t understand this, is bound to fail and die. One cannot live any differently in this country. /.../ It is almost compulsory, because whoever doesn’t do it is doing it the wrong way ...” 12 The movement, exchange, and circulation of objects and assets were not ensured by selling and buying, or by simple barter, but by theft. The guards stole from the prisoners and vice versa; the prisoners stole from one another and from their workplace. The Hungarian officer brigade-leader stole from his subordinates; the Soviet higher authority stole from the prisoners when he sold the quilted jackets that were meant for them. The “free” workmates stole in the same way, as did the gate-keepers and the overseers. The survivors could not talk about their experiences in the Soviet Union. On their return to Hungary, they were threatened with being recaptured and taken back to the camps if they talked. The prisoners, the majority of whom returned in 1947 and 1948, would soon find out for themselves that, in contrast to what they had hoped for, it was not freedom that awaited them at home; the system that was being built in Hungary was one they had already experienced in Soviet captivity. 12 Interview with Gulag survivor . Kálmán Bálintfi, manuscript in the possession of the author, pp. 49–50. 116
Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes Boris Mlakar Repression over the Slovenian people by the German Nazism 1. With its position on the supremacy and dominance of the Germanic race, and especially with its attitude about the historical mission of the great German nation, the National Socialist ideology would leave little opportunity for Slavic nations in the event of full dominance in Europe, or the establishment of the so-called Nazi New Order. The theory of the German “Lebensraum”, which in Hitler’s vision was only possible to ensure in the territory of Central and particularly Eastern Europe, small Slavic nations in Central Europe were predestined for Germanisation or expulsion to the East, while the territory they inhabited was to become subject to German colonisation. In accordance with the “Generalplan Ost”, the Slavic populations living in the eastern part of Europe would be pushed towards the Urals or even beyond, turning into a source of cheap labour, or even a slave labour force, in the future Nazi New Order. The Nazi authorities thus wanted to push the racial and political division between the Slavs and Germans as far to the Eurasian east as possible, thus securing permanent security and the future of the Germanic race. 1 In the light of its settlement area, especially hard blows in this context were dealt to the Slovenian nation, which had been forced ever since the second half of the 19 th century to face fierce German imperialism as well as the concrete pressure of Germanisation, although initially especially by the German national forces within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Ambitious nationalistic German ideologues thought it humiliating that the small Slovenian nation should block German access to the Adriatic or Mediterranean in general. Accordingly, then, Slovenians should be Germanised or at least gradually assimilated into the German political society. Nazism adopted and utterly radicalised all these ideas and plans, setting it as a short-term goal to politically and ethnically erase the Slovenian nation from the face of the earth during the Second World War. Immediately after the occupation of a great part of the Slovenian territory, the new Nazi administration thus launched the strictest denationalisation measures. But since events in general did not fully follow the Nazi plan, it was no coincidence that Heinrich Himmler ordered, in the spring of 1942, that the treatment of the Slovenian occupied territory be included in the “Generalplan Ost”, according to which massive deportations of the Slavic population and the final colonisation of Germans were to take place only after the end of the victorious war. 2 2. . German nationalists made special efforts to germanise the Slovenian population in the southern parts of Carinthia and Styria in order to achieve an “indisputable” German character, invoking in the process the so-called unity or indivisibility of the land. This became especially prominent in the events immediately following the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, when Lower Styria was attached to the newly established country of Southern Slavs, while the plebiscite kept Southern Carinthia within the territory of Carinthia and thus a part of the First Austrian Republic. Regardless of the promises about national equality made by the plebiscite, German national pressure toward Carinthian Slovenians did not stop in the period between the two world wars. German nationalists tried to diminish the Slovenian national resistance by inventing the so-called “Windischers”, an ethnic and cultural category set between Slovenians and Germans. Their position did not improve in the years 1 Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire. Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe, London 2008, pp. 556–558; Norman Rich, Hitler’s War Aims. The Establishment of the New Order, II, New York 1974, p. 421. 2 Slovenska novejša zgodovina. Od programa Zedinjena Slovenija do mednarodnega priznanja Republike Slovenije 1848–1992 (Recent Slovenian History. From the United Slovenia Programme to the International Recognition of the Republic of Slovenia 1848–1992), 1, Ljubljana 2005, p. 588. 117
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CRIMES COMMITTED BY TOTALITARIAN RE
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TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE Lovro Št
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IV. REMEMBRANCE, RECOGNITION AND PU
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crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

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