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Totalitarianism as a concept has come into use after 1923. At first it denoted the fascist movement in Italy, but later its meaning was extended to similar phenomena in other countries. Totality is supposed to describe the authorities not satisfied merely with controlling the political life in a country, but trying to penetrate all aspects of life and social subsystems, from economy to media, culture and sports, as well as interfering with the private realm, aiming to influence the way people think, make decisions, and act. The concept of totalitarianism came into scientific use after World War II, when Hannah Arendt published her work The Origins of Totalitarianism. In the following decades research under the influence of the Cold War took place, often focusing on comparing the Soviet Union under Stalin and after his death, in the time of de-Stalinisation. The question of which regimes could be described as totalitarian has been asked throughout the decades, and it once again became the subject of more attention in the expert discussions after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War in the 1990s.
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The repression of the occupation authorities, aimed against the Slovenian population, was built into the very foundations of the occupation policy, especially German, since its goal was to ensure denationalisation and force population's loyalty to the occupying states. An even rougher and more severe form of repression was also used as the basic method in the anti-resistance activities of all three occupiers. Similar forms of repression (mass imprisonment, internment, violence against the population during cleansing operations, executions of resistance members without judicial proceedings, use of extreme and swift judicial proceedings) did not only affect those who took part in the resistance movement: they had many characteristics of an all-out punishment of the Slovenian population. The dimensions and effects of repression intensified by involving a part of the population in the fight against the resistance movement.
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The article focuses on the Nazi repression against the autochthonous Slovenian-speaking population in the Austrian Styria living near the Yugoslav border as well as against Slovenian immigrants in Graz and in other parts of Austrian Styria. On one hand this repression is described as a complex of criminal activities building on the proven German national tradition of national struggles dating back to the time before World War I. On the other hand the Nazi repression involved a new dimension of negative intensity, leading directly to an extensive denationalisation policy in Slovenia after 6 April 1941. Besides people living near the border, in the territory of Austrian Styria this repression was also aimed against persons who had contacts with Yugoslavia, officials of the Slovenian society Čitalnica in Graz, and every person of Slovenian origin taking part in the political resistance or cooperating with partisans.
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The author looks at a range of executions in the territory inhabited by Slovenians in the time of totalitarian regimes and especially during World War II. The executioners and victims could be found on both of the opposing sides we can, with some simplification, refer to as anti-fascists and fascists, partisans and occupiers (collaborators), communists and anti-communists. Then the author focuses on the memory of the victims of these executions. On one hand this memory is still very alive – for example, the memory of the four anti-fascists convicted at the 1st Trieste Trial of September 1930 and shot at Basovizza, who became the symbol of the anti-fascist resistance of the Slovenians from Primorska; and the memory of those who went missing after having been arrested by the Yugoslav authorities in Venezia Giulia in May 1945 and who are symbolised by the monument at the so-called Basovizza foiba. At the same time the post-war extrajudicial executions, ignored for a number of years, are now in the centre of attention, while the hostages who were killed or died in the fascist and Nazi concentration camps are disappearing from memory. Here the author underlines especially the culmination of violence caused by the German occupiers in the so-called Lower Styria in 1942.
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The following contribution focuses on the peculiarities of the post-war retaliation of the Yugoslav/Slovenian authorities against those members of the German national minority in Slovenia who remained in Slovenia after the war. It is written on the basis of German and Austrian archive materials. These sources define the three peculiarities of the retaliation: swift executions, deportation of the German-speaking population across the »green border« to Austria, and the alleged deportation to other parts of Yugoslavia and Soviet Union.
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On the basis of archive materials, press and historiographic as well as other literature, the author describes the incidence and extent of repression against the German minority in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Vojvodina at the end of World War II and in the first years after the war. In the end of 1944 and in the beginning of 1945 the partisan movement and the newly established people’s authorities of Yugoslavia started persecuting the so-called Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans). The act of the Presidency of AVNOJ (Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia), adopted on 21 November 1944, also contributed to this, as it declared the members of the German minority as collectively guilty. Subsequently most Volksdeutshe lost their citizen rights, their property was confiscated, while they themselves were interned in the camps and sentenced to years of forced labour. The authorities used the war crimes perpetrated by certain members of the German minority and their disloyalty during the occupation as a reason and excuse for the inhumane treatment of the Volksdeutsche towards the end of the war and immediately after it.
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The article focuses on the individual attitudes of the British and Americans towards certain forms of violence in Yugoslavia during World War II, caused by the occupiers and »local« opponents. On the basis of the analysis of primary sources from the British and American archives it explores how their intelligence services managed to follow the developments and why the Western Allies were interested in the violence and all its perpetrators. The author hypothesises that the British and Americans were interested in registering as many violent incidents as possible, while they focused mostly on the cases directly involving their soldiers or mission members.
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Immediately after the liberation Carinthian Slovenians – especially those in favour of the annexation of the Carinthian territory inhabited by Slovenians or with mixed population to the homeland – faced various forms of repression carried out by the British military government and Austrian security bodies, subordinate to the British. They mostly suffered due to the general ban on public meetings, prohibition of their own press, and systematic protraction of the restoration of pre-war political, cultural and economic organisations and societies. The authorities delayed the restoration of the Union of Carinthian Cooperatives until as late as February 1949, causing extensive material damage to the Carinthian Slovenians. The number of cooperative members fell to 10% of pre-war membership. Due to activities in the interest of the Slovenian nation, the officials and activists of the Provincial Committee of the Liberation Front for Slovenian Carinthia, its subcommittees and other organisations established during anti-fascist resistance were tried at military courts. A large number of youth activists received many months of prison sentences, the gatherings were subject to physical attacks, and even individual Slovenian priests were not safe from repression. The authorities refused to issue passports to certain individuals, thus preventing Slovenian officials from stating their demands at international conferences. Security bodies often sought Slovenian periodicals and literature and searched intensively for the collection of texts entitled Koroški zbornik, published in Ljubljana in 1946. All criticism of the measures taken by the occupying forces was forbidden. Of the British officers only Gerald Sharp exhibited a more positive attitude towards Carinthian Slovenians, while many of them have bad memories of the military judge lieutenant colonel Cohen. After the decision reached in Paris on 20 June 1949 that the Austrian-Yugoslav border is to remain unchanged, the repression gradually subsided.
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The article focuses on the exodus from Zone B of the Free Trieste Territory in the context of the wider phenomenon of the exodus of the population of Venezia Giulia and Dalmatia and describes its essential characteristics. The author begins with the evolution of the term »exodus« itself. At first this was a militant expression, but gradually it turned into a general interpretative category, used to refer to a special type of forced relocation taking place in Europe, different from deportation and exile. Then the author analyses the main incentives resulting in the exodus, paying special attention to the policy of the »Slavic-Italian brotherhood« as a strategy of selective integration, as well as to the operations undertaken by the »people’s authorities«. Similar processes also took place in Zone B of the Free Territory of Trieste, even though there these processes lasted until as late as 1954 due to the uncertainty with regard to which state this territory would belong to. The author focuses mostly on the relations between the Italian population and the new authorities and touches upon certain topics of the most recent research. He also brings the attention to the still unfinished research with regard to the National Liberation Committee for Istria and radio station Radio Venezia Giulia. Finally he also focuses on the final stage of the Trieste question, concluded with the signature of the London Memorandum and followed by the emigration of almost all of the Italian population from Zone B of the Free Territory of Trieste and settlement of exiles in the Trieste territory.
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The article based on archive sources, literature and testimonies of internees describes the policy of the Hungarian authorities during World War II towards the colonists, settled near Dolnja Lendava by the Yugoslav-Hungarian border in the context of the Yugoslav agrarian reform. After the Prekmurje region had been annexed to Hungary in April of 1941, the authorities confiscated all of the agrarian land expropriated in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the context of the agrarian reform, so it became the property of the state. Thus the colonists lost their means of survival. After the negotiations between Hungary and Italy, where the colonists had originated from, with regard to the extradition of the colonists failed, in June 1942 the Hungarian authorities interned 587 colonists from the surroundings of Dolnja Lendava in the Sárvár internment camp. Soon after their arrival to the camp, the children younger than 16 were taken to Bačka, where they remained until the end of the war, while more than 50 colonists decided to leave to the Independent State of Croatia. During the internment, 35 of the colonists from the surroundings of Dolnja Lendava died.
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The article focuses on various phenomena and forms of repression carried out by the authorities of the communist Rákosi regime (especially State Security Service) in the triangle of borders in the Rába Valley, especially after the Cominform Resolution, when it was declared that Yugoslavia was an enemy. This resulted in »war hysteria« aimed against Tito, and the war preparations also involved a preventive »cleansing« of the area bordering on Yugoslavia. South Slavs (also Slovenians) became the potential enemies of the regime. One of the most efficient methods for the removal of persons unwanted by the government was deportation to closed work camps in the provinces of Hortobágy, Nagykunság and Hajdúság in the east of Hungary, operating between 1950 and 1953. The coercive measures taken by the authorities against the people include forced labour in the camps, police supervision, physical and psychological maltreatment of the internees, inhuman living conditions and so on. The author bases her presentation of the developments at the time on the relevant archive documents and testimonies of the internees who are still alive.
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In the eternal struggles for power, political judicial processes represent one of the main manifestations of political violence or repression. We can discover various shapes and forms of such processes in almost all historical periods and socio-political systems. We can detect political judicial trials in Slovenia since the beginnings of organised political activities, that is since the second half of the 19th century. In his contribution the author refers to certain important political judicial trials in Slovenia. On the basis of archive sources he thoroughly analyses two of the more characteristic political judicial trials in two distinctively authoritarian periods of the 20th-century Slovenian history. The first example — the trials against Pavel Tepina and 28 co-defendants — belongs into the context of the most severe persecution of communists after the introduction of King Alexanders’ Dictatorship on 6th of January 1929, while the second one — the trials against Mirko Bitenc and 11 co-defendants — took place during the post-war purge, when judicial trials represented one of the main tools for the consolidation of the communist authorities and retaliation against their actual or potential opponents as well as for punishing the Nazi leaders and those who collaborated with the occupiers.
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The repression originated and stemmed from the following essential elements: victory in the war, restoration of Yugoslavia, solving the national question and carrying out the revolution. This means that the casualties suffered during the war by the victorious side resulted in vengeance and retaliatory measures. However, revolutionary goals were most important for the formation of the repression system – in order to achieve these goals, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia retaliated against class-related, ideological and political opponents and rivals.
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In the first five years after World War II, a process of a state-legal transition or unification with Slovenia and Croatia in the context of Yugoslavia took place in Istria. During this very sensitive period of the division of its territory, uncertainty, socio-political transformation and establishment of the new authorities, numerous illegalities, repression and crimes were committed against everyone who tried to hinder or prevent these processes. The repression was aimed against the former wartime enemies, war criminals, collaborators, fascists, ideological, political and national enemies, and often also against the former allies and fellow fighters – in short, against anyone preventing or hindering the political agenda of the Communist Party. The Department for the Protection of People (OZNA) and, since March 1946, State Security Administration (UDV) represented the pillar of the repression policy of the new authorities and a characteristic example of secret political police, which was formed during the establishment and in the first years of the new state and entrusted with the task of “defending” the state from external and internal enemies. The second pillar of repression consisted of administrative departments of people’s committees, while the third one was made up of municipal, district and administrative unit courts.
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The author analyses the post-war repression and social integration as two mutually opposing forces in the strategy of the main actor – the revolutionary authorities of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia – towards the Serbian intelligentsia in the first years after the war. Special attention is paid to factors co-shaping the attitude of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia towards the intellectuals and influencing its actions. In the context of each aforementioned orientation the author explores the internal dynamics, adopted measures, methods, and so on. She also focuses on the responses of the members of the intelligentsia to the orientations of the Party and the authorities. The discussion is written on the basis of unpublished archive sources, press and relevant literature.
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We usually understand repression carried out within or by a state or its authorities as violence against the political opponents of the authorities. Regardless of the political system in Slovenia and Yugoslavia after World War II, where the power was taken over by the communists, who persecuted political crimes (according to the criminal code, crimes against »the people and the state«) very resolutely especially in the first years after the war in order to strengthen and affirm their authority (which is usually deemed as repression), the majority of the crimes (criminal offences) committed consisted of »ordinary« crimes – murder, manslaughter, theft, falsifications, etc. The state authorities punished these crimes through the judicial system. Crime is usually followed by punishment. Non-political criminal offences far outnumbered political crimes. On the basis of the legislation and statistical information, the author describes the extent of »crime and punishment«.
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