crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes
in an authoritarian country; moreover, after the “Anschluss” of Austria to the German Reich in 1938
they were the first Slovenians to face the totalitarian Nazi regime. Nationalistic German publishers
and ideologues, earlier undercover Nazis, could now make public and official the justifications and
announcements that there would be no room for Slovenians in Carinthia in the future. The principal
figure of this group was Alois Maier-Kaibitsch, who as the leader of the “Kärtner Heimatbund” and the
National Office in Klagenfurt, openly threatened the representatives of the Slovenian community with
extermination. Several prominent individuals were imprisoned or exiled. The new Nazi authorities
thwarted the operation of Slovenian economic and cultural organisations, although they were formally
abolished only after the attack on Yugoslavia, when their assets were confiscated. All Slovenian public
events were prohibited as well. The remaining bilingual schools were abolished, and for some time
priests could only teach religion in Slovene outside schools. The Bishop of Klagenfurt then succumbed
to Nazi pressure and prohibited religious services in Slovene, transferring most Slovenian priests to the
German territory. In order to speed up Germanisation, the authorities in the bilingual territory established
a dense network of German kindergartens. Immediately upon the “Anschluss”, Nazis arrested priest and
former politician Vinko Poljanec, who then died due to maltreatment in prison, thus becoming the first
victim of the Nazi violence toward Carinthian Slovenians. 3 It should be mentioned that of all lands in
the new German Reich it was Carinthia that supported the Nazi regime most strongly. Regardless of
the negligible support of the home country, Yugoslavia, which was itself under Nazi pressure, some
Carinthian Slovenians took up different forms of passive and active resistance; among others, about 200
young men fled to Yugoslavia from mobilisation to the Wehrmacht.
In August 1941, Himmler announced the expatriation of nationally conscious Carinthian
Slovenians, 200 families, which was related to an earlier agreement between Italy and Germany on the
emigration of the German population from Italy, according to which the Germans from Val Canale were
to settle in the territory of the exiled Carinthian Slovenians. This exile was supposedly demanded by
the Carinthian German public as an urgent measure. 4 In the spring of 1942, the Gestapo, in cooperation
with the Gaugrenzlandamt (District border land office), composed a list of 1,220 nationally conscious
Slovenians. In April of the same year, 917 of these people, from 178 families, were displaced via the
assembly camp in Žrelec (Ebenthal) to camps in Brandenburg and Franken. 5 After the occupation of
Slovenia the emerging resistance movement spread slowly but steadily among Carinthian Slovenians.
Nazi authorities tackled it with great determination and cruelty. After having discovered the network of
supporters, as well as deserters from the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War, a special
senate of the so-called People’s Court from Berlin sentenced 35 people in April 1943 in Klagenfurt;
13 were sentenced to death and decapitated on 29 April 1943 in Vienna. One of the major crimes was
committed by SS unit members just before the end of the war, when they burnt the Peršman mountain
farm on 25 April 1945 and killed 11 family members aged from 8 months to 77 years. 6
3.
As regards the Slovenian ethnic territory, which was part of Yugoslavia between the two world wars
and constituted the territory of Dravska Banovina before the Second World War, German nationalistic
aspirations were not suspended either. The relevant revisionist activity flourished, especially in the
towns of Graz and Klagenfurt, close to the border. The patriotic, ethnological, linguistic or statistical
articles of individual publishers, as well as scientists, consistently maintained and even enhanced the
3
Avguštin Malle, “Vloga koroških katoličanov v tretjem rajhu” (“The Role of Carinthian Catholics in the Third Reich”), in: Koledar
Mohorjeve družbe v Celovcu (Calendar of Mohorjeva Society in Klagenfurt), 2006, pp. 113–118; Teodor Domej, “O ponemčevanju južne
Koroške za časa nacizma in odmevi nanj (1938–1942)” (“On Germanisation of Southern Carinthia During Nazism, and the Responses To
It (1938–1942)”), in: Narodu in državi sovražni. Pregon koroških Slovencev 1942 (Adversaries to the Nation and to the State. Prosecution
of Carinthian Slovenians 1942), Celovec/Klagenfurt 1992, pp. 210–229.
4
Archives of Slovenia, AS 1827, Committee for the identification of the crimes of the occupying armies and their helpers, t.e. 75, Excerpt
from the hearing of Friedrich Rainer, pp. 3–5; Tone Ferenc, Quellen zur nationalsozialistischen Etnationalisierungspolitik in Slowenien
1941–1945 (Sources on Nazi Denationalisation Policy in Slovenia 1941–1945), Maribor 1980, pp. 232–233; Meldungen aus dem Reich
1938–1945 (Reports from the Reich 1938–1945), Bundesarchiv Koblenz 1983, No. 250, p. 3157.
5
Valentin Sima, “Die Vertreibung von Kärtner Slowenen 1942”, in: Narodu in državi sovražni, pp. 133–209.
6
Karl Stuhlpfarrer et al., Ne pozabimo/Gegen des Vergessen (Let us not forget), Klagenfurt/Celovec 2008; Tone Zorn, “Tridesetletnica
krvavega procesa v Celovcu” (“Thirty Years from the Bloody Klagenfurt Process”), Vestnik koroških partizanov (Carinthian Partisan
News), 6/2–3 (1973), pp. 77–84.
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