crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes
revisionist demands towards Slovenians and towards their settlement area by statements that Lower
Styria as well as Carniola were, if not ethnically clean German lands, at least part of the German
national and cultural space. This led to the logical conclusion that this territory should be annexed to the
Austrian lands of Styria and Carinthia, and thus integrated into Austria and as such into the great German
Reich. But these were not just efforts of isolated or overbearing individuals; participating in them were
also different national, party and civil establishments, the most prominent being the Südostdeutsches
Institut (South-Eastern German Institute) located in Graz. 7 After the “Anschluss”, these organisations
in Graz and Klangenfurt drew up and addressed to the Nazi government several memoranda which
required, without embellishment, the integration of parts of the Slovenian territory into the German
Reich. Especially active in such efforts were Helmut Carstanjen from Graz and the aforementioned
Maier-Kaibitsch from Klagenfurt. 8
Synchronised and hand-in-hand with this was the process of Nazification of the German minority
in Slovenia, which was especially apparent in the operation of its umbrella organisation the Schwäbischdeutscher
Kulturbund (Swabian-German Cultural Union). The members of the minority attended
courses which educated them in the Nazi spirit; at the same time they performed intelligence tasks for
Nazi organisations and authorities in Styria and Carinthia. These tasks did not only concern military
information but also information on Slovenian civil establishments and lists of nationally conscious or
anti-German Slovenians. Both in objective and in subjective terms, these activities constituted effective
and planned preparation for the later occupation of Lower Styria and Upper Carniola. 9
After the undeclared war on 6 April 1941, the forces of the fascist Axis occupied the small territory of
Dravska Banovina in a few days. In the territory occupied by the German army, members of the Kulturbund
played the role of the fifth column by helping in the occupation, their armed groups often having taken
over even before the arrival of the German army and arrested prominent Slovenians. In the west and
northwest, the invading German units were helped by Italian units, for Mussolini wanted to take part in the
division of Yugoslavia. In the beginning, Germans occupied Prekmurje as well, but left it to the Hungarian
occupying forces with the exception of some municipalities in the west. A precise plan for the division of
the Slovenian territory, and thus its further fate, was laid out by Hitler himself on 14 April 1941. Germans
occupied Upper Carniola and Lower Styria, Italians the so-called Ljubljana Province in the southern part
of Slovenia, while Prekmurje in the extreme east fell under Hungary. All three occupiers set it as their goal
to destroy the Slovenian nation as an ethnic and political entity, each selecting slightly different tactics to
achieve this. Although the Italians and to a certain extent the Hungarians counted on the disappearance
of Slovenians in the long run, they immediately opted for formal annexation of the occupied territories to
their countries, naturally in contravention to international law.
The Nazis were more thorough in this respect, setting it as their goal to erase all traces of the
Slovenian nation in their occupied territory within but a few years. Such explicit instructions on
Germanisation were also declared by Hitler on a visit to Maribor on 27 April 1941. They wanted to
begin by getting rid of all undesirable people in the territory, unifying the local administration with
that of the neighbouring lands of Styria and Carinthia, where the occupied territories were supposed
to be annexed, and to formally as well as practically resolve the issue of citizenship of the present
population. 10 Similarly as in the occupied territories of Alsace, Lorraine and Luxembourg, the Nazis
appointed a “Gauleiter” of the neighbouring Austrian lands as head of the presumably temporary civil
administration. In Lower Styria it was the Styrian Gauleiter Sigfried Uiberreither, while in Upper
Carniola it was Franz Kutschera, who was replaced by Friedrich Rainer at the end of 1941. According to
Himmler’s instructions, the heads of the civil administration were to implement appropriate measures
and prepare both regions for formal and legal annexation to the Reich. After the first wave of intense
denationalisation measures the annexation ceremony was planned for 1 October 1941; then the date was
postponed to 1 January 1942 and later by another six months, also due to increasingly strong resistance.
However, at a certain point this was no longer discussed, and the formal annexation never happened.
7
Christian Promitzer, “Täterwissenschaft: das Südostdeutsche Institut in Graz” (“Perpetrator Studies: The South-Eastern German Institute
in Graz”), in: Südostforschung im Schatten des Dritten Reiches (Southeast Research in the Shadow of the Third Reich), München 2004,
pp. 93–113.
8
Tone Ferenc, “Spomenice o nemških ozemeljskih zahtevah v Sloveniji leta 1940” (“Memoranda on German territorial requests in
Slovenia in 1940”), Zgodovinski časopis (Historical Gazette), 29/3–4 (1975), pp. 219–246.
9
Dušan Biber, Nacizem in Nemci v Jugoslaviji 1933–1941 (Nazism and Germans in Yugoslavia 1933–1941), Ljubljana 1966, pp. 229–251.
10
Tone Ferenc, “Položaj slovenskega naroda ob okupaciji leta 1941” (“The Situation of the Slovenian Nation Upon Occupation in 1941”),
in: Narodu in državi sovražni, pp. 26.
119