crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

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Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes managed to cross the Austrian border, were returned to Yugoslavia by British authorities between 18–24 May 1945, where any trace of many returnees was lost. The Croatians were followed by members of the Serbian Volunteers Corps and the Montenegrin Chetniks. Last in line were the Slovenes: between 28 and 31 May, about 10,000 Slovene Home guards and a few hundred civilians were returned. 45 The captives were driven to camps in Slovenia, the largest of them being Šentvid nad Ljubljano and Teharje pri Celju. After short hearings, captives of Slovene nationality were divided into groups A, B, and C. Captives from group C – they represented the majority – were soon murdered. 5 6 For the most part, captives from Šentvid were transported by train to Kočevje, and from there on, with trucks to the abysses of Kočevski Rog; the captives from Teharje were mostly transported to mine crevasses of Stari Hrastnik. Captives of other nationalities were mostly separated according to the districts of their residence, so that knowledgeable people siding with the Partisans were better able to identify them and seal their fate. Those who served in the German army, or armed forces under its command, or cooperated with it, and had stayed in Slovenia, were in mid-May summoned by the new authorities to report. 6 7 They were put in camps and the closest municipal or local OZNA prisons. 78 The same procedure with a milder regime awaited them. The OZNA locked away a large part of the German minority, Slovenes suspected to have cooperated with the occupying power, relatives of Home guard members, Slovene civilians who voluntarily accepted German citizenship during German occupation and others. Austrian civilians of Slovene nationality were also illegally transported over from the Austrian part of Koroška. 89 From the camps and regional prisons, the captives were taken to nearby killing fields. Most of the mass killings were carried out from May to July 1945; among the victims were mostly the “returned” (or “home-captured”) Home guards and prisoners from other Yugoslav provinces. In the following months, up to January 1946 when the Constitution of the Federative People’s Republic of Yugoslavia was passed and OZNA had to hand the camps over to the organs of the Ministry of the Interior, those killings were followed by mass killing of Germans, Italians and Slovenes suspected of collaborationism and anti-communism. Individual secret killings were carried out at later dates as well. The decision to “annihilate” opponents must had been adopted in the closest circles of Yugoslav state leadership, and the order was certainly issued by the Supreme Commander of the Yugoslav Army Josip Broz - Tito, although it is not known when or in what form. Executions of Slovenes were mostly carried out by selected units and individuals of Slovene OZNA and KNOJ (Corps of People’s Defence of Yugoslavia); on the other hand, the executions of Croats, Serbs and Montenegrins were mostly carried out by members of the Yugoslav Army from other parts of Yugoslavia, who also participated in the killings of Slovenes. At the time, the killings of some thousands of people in only a few days would have been impossible to organise without the support of the highest politicians and military commanders. The brutal and severe treatment of prisoners of war was, without a doubt, influenced by events that happened during the war: occupation, collaboration, resistance and civil war, as well as the tendency of the victors, after but also already during the war, to settle scores with opponents of the 4 Compare the number of returned in: Anthony Cowgill, Thomas Brimelow, Christoper Booker, The Repatriations from Austria in 1945. The Report of an Inquiry, London 1990 and the supplementary material Cowgill Inquiry, The Documentary Evidence, London 1990, KP 309, p. 299 (according to this report 12,196 Croatians, 8,263 Slovenes, 5,480 Serbs and 400 Montenegrins were handed over to Yugoslav authorities between 18-31 May); John Ivan Prcela, Dražen Živić, Hrvatski holokaust, Zagreb 2001, (hereinafter Hrvatski holokaust), pp. 67–80 (a total of 24,600 Croats returned from camps). 5 More about the handing over of Home guards can be found in: Boris Mlakar, Slovene Home Guards: 1943–1945. The Founding, Organization, Ideological Background, Ljubljana 2003; Tamara Griesser Pečar, Divided Nation, Ljubljana 2004; also in sources referenced in the annotations, as well as: Tone Ferenc, “Post-War Mass Killings 1945–46”, in: Encyclopaedia of Slovenia, 16, Appendix, Ljubljana 2002, pp. 166–167. 6 Archive of the Republic of Slovenia II, f. 18/I part., Proclamation of the YA, GS of Slovenia, Command for Municipality of Ljubljana. “1. All members of the German Army and all former German units in service of the occupier have to report to the nearest municipal Command or other organs of our army with all their weaponry, at the latest one week after the posting of this proclamation. All who shall not report by the stated date are as of that day considered outside the scope of the law ... 3. All hiding of members of the former German Army and non-German units in German service and all concealment of data about those members will be punished according to military law in military courts ...” 7 OZNA (Division for the Protection of the People); the Yugoslav service fighting the so-called interior enemy of new Yugoslavia, established in 1944 and subordinate to the Supreme Commandant of the Partisan Army Josip Broz- Tito or his deputy Aleksander Rankovič and the Leaderships of individual federal units. The executive armed body of the OZNA was the Army of State Security (VDV) and afterwards the units of the Corps of National Defence of Yugoslavia (KNOJ). After the end of the war, OZNA and KNOJ have, by order of the Yugoslav Centre, carried out the so-called purification: out-of-court killings of the arrested or returned (by the English authorities from Austria) members of anti-Partisan formations, and other opponents of the new Yugoslav authorities. 8 Police Administration Slovenj Gradec, criminal indictment, 30. 5. 2002; Othmar Mory, Liescha/Leše – 1945. Stätte des Grauens und des Gedenkens. Der Versuch einer Zusammenfassung des Geschehens um die Verschleppung von Kärntner Zivilpersonen im Mai 1945, Bleiburg 2002. 156
Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes revolution, resulting in a radical removal of actual and potential opponents. Psychological factors, e.g. a desire for revenge, also played a major role. In all wars, there are victors and defeated, and in many wars, different forms of post-war vengeance takes place. The revenge taken by the victors over the defeated in Slovenia was in many ways unique. First, it was unique by the extremely high number of victims who were killed “after the war had ended”. The exact number of victims lying in secret graves will probably never be known. The Republic of Slovenia has in the past few years succeeded in preparing a name-list of all residents of Slovenia who died a violent death in the Second World War and immediately afterwards. Judging by the available data, of about 84,000 people who died by January 1946, around 15 % or about 13,960, were individuals killed after the war ended. Among those 13,960 people were 12,587 Home guards, 160 Slovene Chetniks, and 1,127 civilians – all killed after the war had ended. Trying to answer the question of how 910 many Croats and people of other nationalities were killed in Slovenia, and where their remains could be found, is even more difficult. As there is almost no primary archive material about the killings, the mass graves, or the number of victims, and due to very rare excavations of posthumous remains, to estimate or even to determine such a number could all too soon become a subject to manipulation, reaching unprecedented levels. A second particularity that must be understood is that even after 60 years, the defeated still do not have marked graves. For most of them, it is not even known where they lie, and they never received a burial worthy of a human being. Crimes were exacerbated by forced silence and suppression of the right to a grave. Mass graves, individual graves and their victims simply “did not exist”. Mass graves were razed to the ground, covered, destroyed. The graves of German and other occupiers and their helpers had to be destroyed and any trace of them removed under an order accepted on 18 May 1945 by a directive of the Federal Ministry of Domestic Affairs, and dispatched, in its entirety or adapted, to lower authorities by individual federal ministers. The directive was applied even in later years because it was repeated on federal- and republic-levels in August 1946, and to a certain extent it was also upheld by the Law on Funeral and Burial Services. 1011 History proves that concealment of crime cannot remain hidden forever. The fate of the victims did not remain a public secret. Prisoners who escaped from camps and prisons, and foremost people who were saved from the killing fields, have reported about events to their relatives and friends; their fate was much written about in the literature of emigrant politicians. In Slovenia and Yugoslavia, it was forbidden to talk about this subject, and therefore, earlier generations did not settle the question of wartime and post-war killings and the secret mass graves of the victims, as would be proper in a democratic country that would show equal piety to all its citizens. The broader Slovene public was reminded of the question of wartime and post-war killings at the conciliation solemnity in Kočevski Rog in July 1990; the question of a public and revered memory of secret victims was already addressed by Spomenka Hribar in 1984. 1112 The “discovery” of mass graves already started in the beginning of 1990’s but was soon stopped. The problem was dealt with by people and associations outside competent state authorities. At the time, different municipal commissions were established in individual municipalities and applied various methods to tackle the problem. Generally, they soon stopped functioning and they mostly worked on determining the circumstances of the executions and less on searching and marking the locations in the field or checking reliability. Much was accomplished in the area of researching the backgrounds of post-war killings by the commission of inquiry of the National Assembly of the Republic of Slovenia, which collected the statements of many participants. An important step in bringing this 1213 subject back into public awareness and memory have been the so-called parish-plaques with engraved 9 Slovene recent history. From the program of Unified Slovenia to the international recognition of the Republic of Slovenia. 1848–1992, 1, Ljubljana 2005, pp. 790–795. 10 Off. gaz. SRS, no. 34/1984; Article 35 of the Law on Burial and Funeral Services, abolished a few days in advance of the conciliation solemnity in Kočevski Rog in 1990, stated: “It is forbidden to erect signs, inscriptions, pictures and symbols denoting affiliation of the deceased to hostile movements directed against the National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia or their hostile activities against the social organisation of the SFYR, on cemeteries.” 11 Spomenka Hribar, “Guilt and sin”, in: Kocbek’s Collection, Ljubljana 1987, pp. 11–68. 12 Refer to material of the Investigative Committee for Research of Post-War Killings, Legally Doubtful Proceedings, and Other Similar Irregularities (the so-called Polajnar Committee, established on 30. 7. 1990, and the so-called Pučnik Committee, established on 5. 7. 1993) and to Jože Pučnik, “Mass Post-War Killings”, in: Drago Jančar (ed.), The Dark Side of the Moon. A Short History of Totalitarianism in Slovenia 1945–1990, Ljubljana 1998, pp. 39–52. 157
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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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