crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

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
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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
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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.
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