During the Second World War, several distinct yet closely related processes took place in the territory of Slovenia: the uprising against the occupation, collaboration, revolutione and counter-revolution. The area of the Slovenian capital Ljubljana represented the starting point for the wartime resistance and revolutionary activities and the violence associated with them. The term revolutionary violence is understood as violence committed during World War II by military and other armed groups under the leadership of the Communist Party. Their activities often included violence against the civilian population. In Ljubljana and its surroundings revolutionary violence reached its peak in the first half of the year 1942, the victims being either civilians or keepers of public order; the victims lost their lives in this area (either in Ljubljana or its suburbs, or were abducted from their homes and murdered in the woods near Ljubljana). The revolutionary side, where resitance and revolutionary elements were characteristically closely intervebned, accused its victims of collaboration with the occupying forces and "treason", but such allegation were very vague and could rarely be justified. It was mostly a "preventive elimination" to make sure that those people would not compromise the resistance and revolutionary activities of the Communist Party and the units under its command during the war or try to prevent it from taking power after the war ended. Between July 1941 and the end of 1942, the revolutionary side carried out physical attacks on over 220 people, 180 of whom were killed. 11 of these were "their own", i.e. partisan deserters and partisans who were either politically unreliable or who committed a breach of discipline o morality in partisan units. After the formation of village guards in the area of Ljubljana and the Ljubljana Village Guard in the city itself, which were organised by the pre-war bourgeois camp in self-defence and with the permission of the occupying authorities, the status of the victims of revolutionary violence and the place of their death changed. Between 1943 and May 1945, the victims from Ljubljana were mostly armed members of the counter-revolutionary side (village guards, Slovenian chetniks and members of the Slovenian Home Guard) who were killed in combat with the partisans or shot as prisoners. In 1943, 164 inhabitants of Ljubljana were killed, mostly armed members of the chetnik movement and village guard (MVAC - the Anti Communist Volunteer Militia) who lost their lives fighting in Inner and Lower Carniola after the capitulation of Italy in autumn 1943. In 1944, the number of victims of the revolutionary side in Ljubljana was significantly lower, dropping to 79; again, most of the casualties were not civilians but members of the Slovenia Home Guard who dies fighting the partisans in Inner and Lower Carniola. In 1945, mainly due to the post-war mass killings of members of the Slovenian Home Guard (i. e. Teharje, Kočevski rog and Huda jama), a significant increase in the number of victims of revolutionary violence can be seen, including in Ljubljana, with around 934 inhabitants of Ljubljana falling victim to revolutionary (war) violence by the end of June that year; this number does not include the victims of numerous politically-motivated post-war trials engineered by the new Communist authorities between the summer monts of 1945 and the end of the year.
COBISS.SI-ID: 282058240
Fear of communist violence at the end of World War II prompted 275 priests, including Prof. Anton Strle, to leave Slovenia in May 1945. The Yugoslav Army captured Strle at Železna Kapla (Baid Eisenkappel) and interned him at the Concentracion Camp Šentvid, where many of the returnees from Vetrinj (Viktring) were held. He was released before the amnesty of July 1945 without charges due to an order from the Ozna of the City of Ljubljana. However, he was arrested again in July 1947 while serving as Vicar of the cathedral; in August 1947 he was convicted on charges of activity that was socially dangerous and against the people, and sentenced to five years of privation of freedom with forced labor and three years of loss of active and passive voting rights. he served his sentence in Novo Mesto, Ljubljana, Maribor, Žale and Medvode. In October1956 he was condemned by the circuit court in Ljubljana on charges of offending citizens and inciting religious intolerance, and sentenced to six months and fined the cost of the criminal trial. Both trials were later found to have violated the norms of criminal justice and provisions of the criminal code. In the year 2013 the Supreme Court acceded in both cases to the request for protection of legality that had been filed on behalf of Strle by his legal representative, the Archbishop of Ljubljana Anton Stres.
COBISS.SI-ID: 7064410
In May 1945, due to fear of communist repression, 275 Slovenian priests and monks left their homeland and fled abroad, along with many Catholics, representatives and supporters of the traditional pre-war parties and members of the Slovenian Home Guard. Most sought refuge in the British occupation zone in Carinthia. Already in the second half of May, the British handed over Slovenian Home Guards to Tito's army. Most of them were murdered and ended in mass graves throughout Slovenia. From the camp Viktring 14 chaplains were also killed. The Catholic Church in Slovenia had been the enemy number one, and remained as such until the fall of Communism in 1990. About 62 diocesan priests left for Treviso (Italy) a couple of days after their arrival in Carinthia, but most of them remained there for many years. Many of them lived in camps and served spiritually their countrymen until they received long-term visas for certain countries - among them the US, Canada, Argentina. Partly priests were accommodated in various rectories and other church institutions and assisted in parish pastoral care. Some of these remained in Carinthia forever and were incardinated in Klagenfurt diocese, while others got jobs in Europe, in North and South America. Among them was also Bishop of Ljubljana, Dr Gregorij Rožman, who had been guest in the diocese until November 1947, before he emigrated over Salzburg and Switzerland to the United States. The Slovenian Catholic clergy had not been received everywhere with open arms in Carinthia, not even in ecclesiastical circles. Even in chapter of bishop's cathedral some consulters opposed them. Carinthian Slovenians were divided. Many were inclined to help, others who stood on the side of the Liberation Front of Carinthia and were therefore strongly influenced by the Communists, opposed. In addition, envoys from Slovenia visited the camps and tried to persuade the refugees with false promises to return home. In the center of the dispute was the Hermagoras Brotherhood. The longtime director of Hermagoras, Janko Hornböck, wrote in 1985: "It is difficult to live and work on the border." He explained that Mohorjeva fought on three fronts: on German, Communist and sometimes on that of the emigration. The Communists were trying to prevent the work of Hermagoras and to destroy the cooperation and trust between Hermagoras and emigration.
COBISS.SI-ID: 515701900
The paper discusses and provides an insight into how the State Security Administration (UDBA) monitored the Slovene emigration in Austrian refugee camps and linked it with the operation of illegal groups in Slovenia. These illegal groups were labelled by the Communist Party as one of the core opponents of the new political system, where their operations were deemed a large-scale organized political, military and religious movement and were linked to the activities of the Slovene military and political emigrants in Austrian refugee camps, as well as to foreign intelligence services. The Main Intelligence Centre was founded at the St. Johann military refugee camp near Salzburg in October 1945 and its primary task was to establish a network of intelligence centres within the refugee camps in Austria. UDBA was convinced that these intelligence centres had formed illegal groups which were sent into Slovenia to undermine the Communist authorities.
COBISS.SI-ID: 38036781
In the following contribution the author focuses on the methodological questions she dealt with during the recording and analysis of testimonies for the purpose of researching everyday life in socialism. The first part of the contribution is dedicated to questions related to the selection of the research method and the recording of testimonies. The author describes her fieldwork experience, the way of relating to the witnesses, and how different factors impacted the dynamics of the testimonies. In the second part of the contribution she focuses on the issues involved in the content analysis and wonders about the actual image of the past based on testimonies. It is evident that memories and deliberations on the past reflect individual experiences and simultaneously also strongly depend on the momentary involvement of witnesses in the environment and space. The collected testimonies reveal to what degree these narrations were impacted by the original environment of the witnesses, historical experience of their families, the period of the economic crisis and social discontent during which the recordings were made, or integration into the wider social context where different public discourses play an important role as well. The diverse outlooks on the past formed under the influence of these factors represent important material for understanding the social processes in socialism and post-socialism. However, a scientific analysis of these outlooks is required.
COBISS.SI-ID: 3329396