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The 14th Division took many casualties and escaped total destruction several times that winter. Still they fought on. Meanwhile they and the other Slovenian Partisans were betrayed: in early 1945 the Slovenian Partisans were absorbed by their Yugoslav counterparts,1 and Slovenian was abolished as a language of command (in favour of the Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian language), despite Tito promising he would not do this.2 Many Slovenian Partisans became disgusted at their political leaders.3 But a stronger hatred still burned for the enemy. Winter thawed, and both sides prepared for the final showdown.
On 9 April 1945, the Partisans began probing the defences around Ljubljana. In May they began their drives on major cities. Partisan forces seized Trieste, and the 14th Division moved into southern Austria. In Ljubljana, the Germans, the Domobranstvo, its leadership and their families, and what remained of the SLS, fled the city. Before leaving, the Germans and Domobranstvo murdered their last political prisoners, including a Domobranstvo secretary who was in reality a Partisan spy who had reported on Urbančič and other senior collaborators.4 The fleeing German-Domobranstvo column of 20,000 cut a path north, broke through the 14th Division, and surrendered to the British Army in Austria on 8 May.
On 9 May the Partisans liberated Ljubljana. It had been a long and brutal four years for the city: first Italians, then collaborators, then Germans, then more collaborators. In the towns and cities that had changed hands between Italians and Germans and the Partisans, the reaction was muted, but here on this glorious spring day, the city was celebrating. The detested occupiers were gone and almost everyone who hated or feared the Partisans had fled the city. Thousands lined the streets, welcoming the Partisans as liberators and heroes. Families reunited with long-lost relatives. Flowers were gathered, and the city shone with colour. Couples took picnics in the sun, and fireworks sounded through the night.5
That should have been it. The war in Europe was finally over. But something simmered below the surface: a hatred that would not die with the war. When Britain, America, and the Soviet Union agreed on the new German borders, and that all Germans outside these new borders would be deported, across Europe the result was that over ten million ethnic Germans were driven from their homes, including those in Slovenia.6 And what of the collaborators? That would depend on whose hands they fell into. Feeling unable to cope with the influx of refugees, and there still being a shred of goodwill towards their Partisan allies, the British in Austria loaded the Domobranstvo onto trains. The passengers were lied to and told they were going to Italy. Instead, 12,000 people, the bulk of them Domobranstvo, were sent not to Italy but back to Slovenia. There they were taken to the forests of Kočevski Rog – near where resistance headquarters had once been – an area littered with rocky caves and pits. What would become the Yugoslav secret police recruited those Partisans who still wanted vengeance on the Germans and, above all, on the collaborators.7 Specially assembled death squads gunned down all 12,000. The corpses were tossed into the pits, and the entrances dynamited shut.8 Those whose loved ones were murdered at Kočevski Rog never forgot. ‘Their innocent blood, shed two months after the end of the war,’ wrote one woman who had two brothers in the Domobranstvo to the leaders of the Slovenian Communist Party, ‘will one day drown you as well.’9
As for Slovenia, a totalitarian dictatorship descended. Sham elections formalized one-party rule. The monarchy was abolished, new laws and a constitution were introduced. But the country’s infrastructure and finances were in ruins. In Stalinist tradition, show trials persecuted anyone seen as a political threat, even their own comrades.*10 For the first time Slovenia was a country: the People’s Republic of Slovenia, a constituent republic of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. However, Slovenia was not autonomous but ruled by a centralized regime in Belgrade. The 14th Division was even transferred to Serbia. Its members left the army in droves and simply went home.11 Perhaps the only thing holding Slovenia together were its territorial ambitions, which went mostly unrealized, causing widespread public anger among Slovenians. Most of Primorska was now within Slovenia’s borders, but the Partisans had to withdraw from southern Austria in a move ordered by Stalin.12 Neither did Slovenia gain Trieste; it was first an international city and later was given to Italy.
In terms of Slovenia and Yugoslavia’s place in the Communist order, these would have just been bumps in the road, had it not been for Stalin. Tito’s loyalty was such he declared to his generals, ‘If the Red Army needs us to lead its march toward the English Channel, we’ll be there tomorrow!’13 Of the new Communist states in Europe, only Yugoslavia and Albania were not puppet regimes established in the Red Army’s wake. They had taken power largely by their own efforts, and this should have awarded the Yugoslav Communists special prestige. But the fact that he was not directly responsible for creating those regimes seemed to irk Stalin; he delighted at subtle taunts at Yugoslav expense.14 Stalin tried to subjugate Yugoslavia economically, and was infuriated that Tito pursued his own foreign policy in the Balkans without first consulting ‘the Boss’.
Stalin condemned Tito in 1948, and Yugoslavia broke from the USSR. For a time, repression there worsened. Private farms were seized, as if to say to the world, ‘it is Stalin who is soft’.15 Karl ‘Čolo’ Čolnik, the Lackov Odred scout, had his market garden taken by the state. He fled Slovenia with his wife, Anica,16 just two of some 20,000 people who escaped the country during this time.17
Eventually, liberalization and an international turn prevailed. Several leading Communists, foremost from Slovenia, discovered that European social democracies were achieving much of what Communist dogma was aiming for.18 Though by no means embracing democracy, conditions improved. Slovenia was given greater autonomy. Cultural and artistic restrictions eased; the rights of smallholders and small businesses were reinstated; and ‘workers’ self-management’ was introduced. Profitable firms paid dividends to their workforce on top of regular salaries.19 Rapid economic growth funded ambitious social programmes. Travel, too, was liberalized: Yugoslavs could now emigrate and travel freely.20 Finally, a small measure of what so many Partisans fought and died for became a reality.