11
Ralph was now at camp Stalag XVIIID in Slovenia (before the German invasion, part of Yugoslavia). The Slovenians were a Slavic people settled in the south-east corner of the Alps; for centuries they had been under Habsburg rule as part of the Holy Roman and Austrian Empires. Following the First World War most had found themselves assigned by the Treaty of Versailles to a new country, the Kingdom of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, known from 1929 as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The Slovenians bordered Austria (annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938), Italy, Hungary, and what is today Croatia. There were also other ethnic groups in Slovenia: Germans, Italians, Hungarians, and Roma. Many Slovenians in the west found themselves in Italy, under fascism. The multi-ethnic city of Trieste, and the surrounding Primorska region – dominated by Slovenians – were annexed by Italy as its reward for switching sides in the First World War. There were also Slovenians living alongside Austrians over the northern border. By early 1941 the situation for Yugoslavia was also grim, surrounded by the Axis powers, Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Bulgaria, who all coveted Yugoslav territory. The Prince Regent Pavle, the Yugoslav leader, was no admirer of Hitler but he needed a way to keep his people safe. He brokered a compromise with Hitler: Yugoslavia would join the Axis but not go to war nor assist in other wars; it would be a neutrality pact in all but name. On 25 March 1941, Yugoslavia signed the Tripartite Pact and joined the Axis.1
A map of regions of Slovenia and the mountains in the northern part of the country. Maribor is located in the Štajerska region in the north east, on the Drava River.
Map 5. Slovenia regions and mountains
Prince Pavle had underestimated his people. In the First World War, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Bulgaria had waged war against Serbia, and one in five of all Serbs had been killed by the enemy, starvation, or disease.2 To ally with the Axis, even in name only, was treachery.3 In the early hours of 27 March, Belgrade rose in rebellion, and Prince Pavle’s government was overthrown in a coup. He was replaced by a military junta, and his seventeen-year-old nephew was declared of age as King Petar II. For a moment, all was calm. But Hitler did not let the slight go unpunished, and ordered Yugoslavia be invaded at the same time as Greece. It began with a Luftwaffe bombardment of Belgrade on 6 April. The city’s population had swollen in the lead-up to Palm Sunday. Thousands perished, and Axis forces poured over almost every border. King Petar and the government fled to Britain, Belgrade fell without a fight, and in a week almost the entire Yugoslav Army had disintegrated. Yugoslavia’s unconditional surrender was signed on 17 April 1941, eleven days after its war began.4 360,000 soldiers, mostly Serbs, were now prisoners of war. The rest of the million-strong army were either allowed to return home or evaded capture.5
Leaders in Slovenia were not idle at this time. After the coup against Pavle, Slovenia’s largest political party, the conservative Slovenian People’s Party (SLS), attempted to defect, offering to rule a Slovenian puppet state on Hitler’s behalf.6 The offer was ignored, and Slovenia was dismembered: everything from the river Sava northwards went to Germany; the south, including Ljubljana, went to Italy.*7 Now 800,000 more people, mostly Slovenians, were under Hitler’s thrall. Hitler’s directive, issued from a Maribor balcony on 26 April 1941, was, ‘Make this land German for me again.’8
What this meant was theft and violence. The provinces of Gorenjska and Štajerska were absorbed into their neighbouring Reich regions. The SS established itself, going from house to house, business to business, looting. They stole money, furniture, carpets, clothing, cars, radios, and all weapons and ammunition.9
The violence appeared to be driven by greed, but other motives were in play. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler was writing plans for the future of Europe. Generalplan Ost (‘The Master Plan for the East’) laid down that the non-Germanic peoples east of Germany, foremost the Jewish, Roma, Slavic, and Baltic peoples, should be murdered or worked to death as slaves. When they had perished, German settlers would begin colonization.10
Slovenians were declared by the Nazis as not Slavic after all.* They would be Germans, a complete fantasy.11 Until the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, Slovenia had been ruled by the Austrian Habsburgs for centuries, but now there were only a few thousand ethnic Germans in the north, concentrated in the town of Maribor. The entire population of German-occupied Slovenia had to join Nazi Party affiliates. There was almost no Jewish community, but 357 patients at a psychiatric hospital were shipped to the Hartheim Euthanasia Centre, where they were murdered with poison gas.12
Towns and streets had their signs stripped and were given new names. Town squares became Adolf Hitler Platz, as in most other German towns. Libraries, bookshops, and homes were raided for books written in Slovenian; over two million were burnt.13 The Bishop of Maribor was ordered to cease all sermons in Slovenian. He refused and almost the entire clergy was arrested for his defiance, cloistered not far from Ralph.14 Himmler then ordered the deportation of one-third of the whole population, to rid himself of ‘hostile’ elements and to make way for German colonists. First, the jailed priests and all Slovenian teachers would be deported. Then, anyone who had fled Italian Fascism after the last war. Finally, the entire population along the new southern border would go.15
Deportations began in June 1941. Within two months, 10,000 had been packed onto trains and sent to the new fascist puppet state in Croatia, or to occupied Serbia. Thousands more fled with their loved ones. Most would not stay in the place to which they had been sent; instead, they escaped to Ljubljana, which was under Italian control.
The de facto Slovenian capital and the rest of southern Slovenia had become the ‘Ljubljana Province’ of Italy, and Italian occupation was initially charitable. The province was bilingual, everyone kept their jobs, men were not conscripted, and a blind eye was turned to refugees fleeing the Nazis. The SLS were even invited to form a consultative body to the Italian governors. It was not that the Fascists had discovered kindness; Mussolini was annoyed that Hitler had spread his influence through the Balkans, and Il Duce planned to upstage the Führer by showing benevolence.16 Few bought this charade: Italian Fascists had been inflicting similar horrors on Slovenians since the 1920s.
A map of Slovenia of the regions occupied by Italy, Germany, and Hungary. The west was annexed by Italy in 1920, the south by Italy in 1941, and a small area in the north east by Hungary in 1941. The rest of the country, including the area containing Maribor, was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1941.
Map 6. Occupied Slovenia
Underground resistance groups formed immediately in Slovenia. The two most prominent were the SLS, which gathered its able-bodied (male) membership into the Slovenska legija (Slovenian Legion), and what would become known as the Osvobodilna fronta, or the OF (Liberation Front).17 Founded by the outlawed Communist Party of Slovenia, this was a coalition of trade unionists, nationalists, left-wing Catholics, and women’s rights activists. Both groups gathered weapons, and bided their time.
Passive resistance to the occupation ended on 22 June 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. If Moscow fell, what hope was there that Nazi rule would end in tiny Slovenia? America was neutral, and the British had proved incapable of beating the Germans on land. In the view of the OF, the only way Slovenia would survive was if it fought the occupiers and won. The OF rebel army was known as the Slovenian Partisans.* An underground newspaper announced their formation:
The establishment of [the Slovenian Partisans] means a new step towards freedom, a new step towards liberation and the unification of all Slovenians, and a new step in the era when the Slovenian nation will be the lord of its own land. The rage of the occupiers against the struggling Slovenian nation is intensifying . . . It is clear to Slovenians today that a relentless reckoning is needed with both German and Italian oppressors . . . Death to fascism, freedom to the people!18
These Partisans would decide the fate of not only their own country, but many hundreds of Allied POWs. A number of POWs would even fight, and die, as Partisans.