crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

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Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes “national enemies”, charged with having committed certain criminal acts during the war, were carried out. These courts operated until the end of August 1945, when criminal justice was taken over by the regular courts of civil jurisdiction. The courts of civil jurisdiction continued with political trials, only that national enemies were now replaced by the “class enemies”, who included above all manufacturers, merchants, tradesmen, larger farmers (“kulaki”) and clergy. The majority of these trials were not only political, but also show trials, which means that they were carried out in compliance with a scenario prepared in advance. The courts were only entrusted with the task of implementing such trials. The accused were judged in accordance with special revolutionary laws, among which we should mention above all the Act on Criminal Acts Against the Nation and the State, which was modelled after a similar act from Soviet criminal legislation. All trials in which the accused were judged on the basis of this Act were of a political nature. According to data available to the leadership of the League of Communists of Slovenia, “around 7,000 persons were sentenced for serious political offences during the National Liberation War and during the revolutionary transformation of our society”. 18 The persons sentenced in these trials were political convicts. The authorities of those times used the same expression and kept them filed in special records called the “records of political convicts”. Records for 5,475 political convicts have been preserved; 19 however, the actual number of political convicts was much larger, because the preserved records of political convicts do not include records for the clergy, farmers and merchants who were condemned during the first post-war years in political and show court trials. There were several thousand such political convicts. The most infamous political and show trials were the so-called Christmas Trial, Nagode Trial, Rožman Trial and Dachau Trials. In political and show trials, courts issued extremely severe sentences to the condemned persons: deprivation of liberty with forced labour, confiscation of property and even death. Reliable statistical data on the number of these and other sentences issued in Slovenia are available only for the period after 1947, when criminal statistics started to be kept. Since that year and until 1951, when these sentences were abolished, the courts in Slovenia issued the following number of sentences: 20 Number of sentences issued Type of sentence issued: 1947 1948 1949 1950 951 Total Death penalty 42 52 30 19 - 143 Life imprisonment ? 19 9 7 2 37 Deprivation of citizenship 3 2 1 3 - 9 Deprivation of liberty with forced labour 1,802 2,836 1,778 1,622 - 8,038 Deprivation of liberty 4,505 4,988 2,920 2,479 3,984 18,876 Forced labour without deprivation of liberty 2,822 - - - - 2,822 Correctional labour - 3,275 2,988 2,693 529 9,485 Loss of political and individual citizenship rights 859 995 786 750 163 3,553 Loss of state or other public job 17 / / / / 17 Prohibition of performing a certain job and occupation 62 331 66 17 3 479 Confiscation of property 290 496 730 351 90 1,957 Financial penalty 3,646 2,827 1,596 1,627 2,026 11,722 Deportation - 163 142 27 6 338 18 Information from 14 th session of the Presidency of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Slovenia from 29 January 1979 on security situation and 1. operation of opposition forces in Slovenia, published in a publication by Božo Repe, Sources on democratisation and independence of Slovenia (Part I: Opposition and the Power), Sources 17, Ljubljana 2002, Document no. 1, p. 11. 19 The records of political convicts were discovered in 2007 in the archive of the Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Slovenia that handed them over to the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia. 20 ARS, Ministry of Justice of the People’s Republic of Slovenia, Judicial Statistics for 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950 and 1951. 168
Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes How severe the criminal justice in Slovenia was during that period is indicated by the fact that in 1984 only 51 convicted persons were “justified”. 21 Mass implementation of political and show trials ceased in Slovenia after 1951, because they were no longer needed, since the Communist authorities had for the most part already gotten rid of the “class enemies” by then. The only exception was trials against Catholic priests, which continued until the mid-‘50s. The reasons for this are to be found in the fact that the Communist rule did not succeed in subjugating the Catholic clergy and still considered them the most dangerous representatives of the “reactionary forces”. 7. Deportations of inhabitants from the state and place of residence In Slovenia and certain other Yugoslav republics (Croatia and Serbia), the Communist regime immediately after the war ended in 1945 started with mass deportation of members of the German national minority from the state. 22 Yugoslavia took this road although the allied forces at the Potsdam Conference had not given explicit permission to do that as they had done in the case of Poland and Czechoslovakia. It is estimated that around 9,000 members of the German national minority were deported from Slovenia after the war and approximately 16,000 retreated to Austria even before the end of the war. Their deportation was carried out in several stages that followed one another from May 1945 until March 1946. First they were expelled directly to Austria, but when the British occupying forces in Austrian Carinthia and Styria refused to accept them, they were expelled to Hungary and from there the Soviets transferred them to their occupied zone in Austria. The majority of members of the German national minority were gathered in special camps before they were deported. The central gathering camp for members of the German national minority from all over Slovenia was in Strnišče (now Kidričevo). Because of the suffering to which the internees in this camp were subjected - and the same applied also to all other “gathering” camps in Slovenia – this camp was in fact a concentration camp. 23 The camp in Strnišče was also officially called “Concentration Camp Strnišče”. Post-war criminal legislation also allowed the expulsion of inhabitants from their places of residence, which was foreseen as “a security measure” against those persons who were “obviously a threat to the public peace and order”. They were issued by both the courts and the administrative authorities for internal affairs. The victims of this measure were not only individuals but also whole families and in particular cases even all inhabitants of a village. Most people were expelled from the areas bordering on Austria and Italy. The authorities expelled the population from these areas because they wanted to close down these two borders hermetically and in this manner prevent illegal crossings. In order to at least formally justify this repressive measure, which is strongly reminiscent of the expulsions of Slovenians carried out by the occupying forces during the war, the usual practice of the authorities was to accuse such persons of having contacts with emigrants or even acting for the benefit of the intelligence services of Western countries. The reasons for the expulsion of families in some cases could be quite banal. For example, in 1949 a family from Bled was expelled to Kočevsko only in order to enable the authorities to seize their house because it was located too close to Tito’s Vila Bled. 24 The majority of expelled families were deported to Kočevsko, where after the deportation of Germans in winter 1941–42, vast areas remained totally deserted. In September 1947, several families from Zgornjesavinska Dolina (Rateče, Podkoren, Srednji Vrh, Mojstrana) 25 were expelled there. In July 1949, several families from Kranjska Gora were also moved to Kočevsko. Deported 21 Archives of the Republic of Slovenia, AS 1267, sign. of the archive unit 13/619, Annual Report of the Department for Implementation of Sentences for 1948. 22 The issue of deportation of members of the German national minority from Slovenia is dealt with by the papers of the Slovenian historians published in the Collection: Dušan Nećak (ed.), “Germans” in Slovenia 1941–1955, Scientific Institute of the Faculty of Arts, Ljubljana 1998. 23 The living conditions and treatment of internees in Strnišče and other similar camps in Slovenia is described by some former internees in their accounts published in Milko Mikola (ed.), Documents and testimonies on post-war concentration camps in Slovenia, Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Slovenia, Ljubljana 2007. 24 Archives of the Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Slovenia, Commission for Implementation of the Redressing of Injustices Act, file no. 714-01-2932/98. 25 Fric Razinger, “Deported to Kočevje”, Borec, Magazine for History, Literature and Anthropology (Revija za zgodovino, literaturo in antropologijo), 47 (1995). 169
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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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