occupying authorities, the Allied Military Government of the Zone A and the Italian authorities organized numerous trials against the actions, executed during the fascist period, the war and in the after war period. The punishment of the real or supposed fascists, Italians, Slovenes and Croats, was radically accomplished by the Yugoslav authorities. Many of the condemned were guilty, but some were innocent. On the other hand the Italian authorities, which let almost unpunished the crimes of fascism and war crimes, especially in the fiftieth hold several and lasting trials against the members of the Italian and Yugoslav resistance. In the paper the author is dealing with the less known trial against the fifty partisans of the so called “Beneška četa” (The company of Benečija), accused of the high treason against the State. The trial finished only in July 1959, when on the basis of the amnesty, adopted by the Italian parliament in July 11 1959, Crown Court in Firenze stopped the criminal proceedings.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 2080211On the international conference, held on November 7 and 8, 2012, twenty researchers from Slovenia, Austria, Italy, Croatia and Serbia treated the different views of the inter-war and post-war repression.
B.01 Organiser of a scientific meeting
COBISS.SI-ID: 263875584With the Allied victory against the Nazi camp, in May 1945 a new age of peace and restoration of democratic order supposedly began. However, as a consequence of tragic or criminal incidents during the war, at the end of the war retaliation against or punishment of those responsible for the aforementioned incidents began. As in these extraordinary circumstances disunity, collaboration or even civil wars took place during the years of occupation, the post war efforts for fair arbitration gained additional dimensions. Consequently at that time the state of emergency and suffering had not yet ended for a significant percentage of the population. Almost eleven million of German and other soldiers found themselves in the Allied captivity at the end of the war, two thirds of them at the Western Front. Most of these soldiers may have returned home soon, but this was not true of those imprisoned in the Soviet camps, where almost a million of them died due to exhaustion and mistreatment. However, even in the Western prisoner of war camps tens of thousands of prisoners died because of the same reasons. Soviet citizens who, at the end of the war, ended up in the West, were even worse off: in accordance with the Yalta Agreement they were returned to their homeland, where their fate was usually sealed. The Allied decision about the deportation of the German population from the Central and Eastern Europe to Germany, which was a consequence of the fact that sometimes these minorities collaborated with the Germans, had similarly tragic consequences. This extradition was especially violent in Czechoslovakia and resulted in tens of thousands of deaths. The Soviet authorities used the principle of collective responsibility, during and even before the war, in the case of smaller national communities, for example the Crimean Tatars and Chechens, deported to Siberia due to the accusations of collaborating with the Nazis. At that time the retaliation against collaboration was characteristic of the whole European space. As individual segments of the population collaborated with the occupation authorities in various ways, also in the context of the civil wars that broke out at the time, the related post war developments – especially in the Central and Eastern Europe under the Soviet influence – often exceeded the legal context of pursuing just penalties and transformed into vengeance against actual or potential opponents of the new regimes, supporting the takeover of power and the changes of the social system. In Western Europe, especially in Italy and France, mass "uncontrolled" revenge against the collaborators also took place. The post war authorities strived to put a stop to such developments and carry out the punishment of the collaborators in the context of the newly established judicial system. At the time similar processes also took place in Yugoslavia or Slovenia, although in this space the way of how the score was settled with the members of the collaborating units, extradited from Austria by the Allied authorities after the end of the war, was quite specific.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 3041908We usually understand repression carried out within or by a state or its authorities as violence against the political opponents of the authorities. However, these were not the only criminal offences persecuted through the judicial system by the state authorities after World War II. Namely, perpetrators of non political crimes did not rest. As far as "crimes" unrelated to political offences were concerned, life in Yugoslavia went on despite the changes of the authorities and political system. Completely ordinary crimes took place as well: from crimes against property, either state or private, to those against life and physical integrity, meaning theft, assault, manslaughter or murder. The authorities – just like any others – persecuted such crimes with the primary goal of protecting the citizens. As it was, the number of crimes not described as "political" far exceeded the number of crimes against the people and the state. After World War II the new Yugoslav authorities developed their own legal system and justice administration. Criminal law, especially with regard to criminal offences not directly related to politics and the introduction of the new political and economic system, was relatively slow to change or adapt to the new regime. However, the criminal code was adopted by the Yugoslav Assembly in the end of 1947. In the end of February 1951 the Yugoslav assembly adopted a new criminal code. It also set out penalties for criminal offences, which had until then been defined in the pre war criminal code. Thus the Yugoslav criminal law was approximated to the level of criminal laws of European countries with different political systems. As the criminal law and other sciences related to criminality developed, the need for changes and amendments became evident. In the end of June 1959 the Yugoslav Assembly adopted an act amending the criminal code of 1951. In fact this was a new criminal code, which later saw further changes and amendments.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 3043444The notion of totalitarianism began to be used after 1923 to mark a fascist movement in Italy, and it later spread to related phenomena in other countries. Totality was to be represented by authority which is not satisfied only by controlling the political life in the country, but it tries to spread its web to every pore of life, all social subsystems, from the economy, media, culture, sport, and it also reaches into the private sphere and tries to influence a person’s way of thinking, making decisions and acting. The notion of totalitarianism started being used scientifically after the 2nd World War. Hannah Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, a basis work in which she compared German Nazism and Soviet Stalinism. She placed the rise of such regimes in the circle of longer historical development and explained the principles according to which the authority in some countries could be marked as totalitarian. The question of which regimes can be marked as totalitarian continued for decades and it received more attention in professional discussions again after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War in the 1990s.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 3041652