crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes
issue and enforce the confiscation, the sole statement that a person was of German nationality or a citizen
of the Third Reich was sufficient. Because the guilt of such a person did not need to be established,
such confiscations were not ordered by the courts but by the administrative authorities, i.e. confiscation
commissions. These commissions issued 20,293 decisions on the confiscation of “German” property
from August until the end of December 1945. These confiscations affected members of the German
minority in Slovenia, as they lost all their property and were expelled from Slovenia.
During the period from 1945 to 1946, the property of those who were killed during the war by
the partisan resistance movement was also confiscated as the property of “national enemies”. The
administrative authorities confiscated their property on the basis of Article 28 of the Act on Confiscation
of Property and Implementation of Confiscation of 9 June 1945. 11 The actual guilt of the person whose
property was confiscated was not ascertained at all. The following principle applied: a person who was
killed by the partisans was guilty, and proof of his/her guilt was his/her liquidation. There were 3,600
confiscations ordered in Slovenia. 12
Likewise, the administrative authorities confiscated the property of those whom they deprived of
citizenship. These were almost exclusively people who had lost their citizenship because they did not
want to return to Yugoslavia after the war or who had emigrated from Yugoslavia. In the second case these
were mostly economic emigrants. The administrative authorities for internal affairs began to implement
confiscations of property on the grounds of deprivation of citizenship in 1949, and implemented them
into the sixties. By 1952, the property of 545 persons had been confiscated in this manner. 13
In the period from July to August 1945, military courts and the Court of the Slovenian National
Honour issued numerous confiscations of property as a side sentence on convicted “national enemies”.
During that time, the above courts sentenced more than 1,500 persons 14 to confiscation of property. An
important share in issuing confiscations was also held by the courts of civil jurisdiction (district and
local), which in the period from 1947 to 1951 issued the following number of confiscations: 15
Year 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951
Number of confiscations 290 496 730 351 90
6. Implementation of political and show trials
The Communist authorities also abused the judiciary in order to settle accounts with their actual
and potential opponents (“interior enemies”). By implementing the revolutionary principle of the “unity
of powers”, the judiciary in Slovenia lost the status of an independent branch of power and as a result
lost its independence as well. It became an instrument in the hands of the Communist Party and its
means for implementation of repression. 16 The concept of the role of courts as understood in those
times is demonstrated by the report of the President of the District Court in Celje from 1948, where he
wrote, among other things: “/…/ Beyond doubt the court is a fighting body that has to combat the class
enemies. It should be particularly attentive to the remains of capitalism that may emerge in any form, it
should take care of covered up enemies who act in a refined manner against the interests of the people
and who in a covert way, either directly or indirectly, serve and support international reactionary forces
via different channels. The court must be a sharp weapon in the hands of the working people, by which
they fight against the enemies and for the victory of socialism /…/” 17
Immediately after the war, criminal justice in Slovenia was carried out by military courts and the
Court of the Slovenian National Honour. Before that, in July and August 1945, mass trials against the
11
Official Gazette of Democratic Federative Yugoslavia, No. 40/1945.
12
ARS, KUNI, archive box 2, general matters, paper by Milan Lemež on the issues of national property.
13
ARS, Republic Secretariat for Internal Affairs, A-13-0, Reports for the years 1949, 1950, 1951 and 1952.
14
Lists of persons sentenced to confiscation of property. The lists were issued by the Commission for administration of national property in
1945.
15
ARS, Ministry of Justice of the People’s Republic of Slovenia, Judicial Statistics for 1947, 1948, 1949 and 1950.
16
The work by Roman Ferjančič and Lovro Šturm examines the post-war revolutionary criminal justice in Slovenia. Lawless state,
Slovenian justice after 1945, Nova revija, Ljubljana 1998.
17
Historical Archives of Celje, MLO Celje, box 197, sign. of the archive unit: 1293, Reports of the District and Local Courts of Celje.
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