A few questions this site doesn`t answer.

How many German speaking people lived in Maribor and its surroundings before 1918 and how many between the wars?

What were the relations between the ethnic Slovenians and the ethnic Germans before WWI and after it?

Were there any Jews in Maribor?

What real harm did the partisans do to the occupying forces?

Was it sensible to tease the Nazis when the reprisals were so terrible?

It is said that many Slovenians from the Maribor area were expelled from Slovenia and many were sent to the concentration camps - do they not know the numbers?

It is said that many Styrian young men were forcibly mobilized into the German army and few thousand were killed - do they not know the numbers?

My history education was really bad. I didn`t learn about 50 air raids and the huge damage they caused in Maribor.Were any people killed during bombardment?

Nothing is said about the Communists starting revolution in such terrible conditions e.g. under the Nazi occupation.

Very little is said about the post war secret massacres around Maribor at the Tezno forest, the Pohorje forest and elswhere. Who organised the killings, who were the victims, how were they executed and by whom, how many people were killed and why.

The revolutionary terror in the years after the war is not described at all.

Andreja

     by Andreja on August 12, 2004 at 1:03 am

*Was it sensible to tease the Nazis when the reprisals were so terrible?

Dear Andreja,

Mr. Hitler personally said: “dieses Land wieder deutsch zu machen”.

People of Styria (or whole Slovenia) were going to be exterminated (or if lucky, relocated to Serbia).

If this is not enough reason to rebel against, what is ? At that point Slovenians as nation were condemned to “death” already…

     by Kranjec on August 12, 2004 at 4:22 pm

For a rather analytical and detached view of the military operations in WWII these two are a great reference:

Link 1

and especially:

Link 2

I think that you will find that it was a good thing to resist, since we were not part of the Warszaw pact that way.

Do not blame the resistance for the inhuman and harsh measures the Germans took to try to put the resistance down. They did not view as as human or equal to them. Their plan was to have the Slavs as slaves forever. If that is not a good reason to resist, I can think of none.

AS for the revolution and manipulation and all that, that is an even longer debate which probably won’t solve anything.

     by crni on August 13, 2004 at 11:32 pm

Also, there is some new research going on (can’t find the link) by 2 historians at University of Ljubljana. I beleive the figures for Slovenia that you are asking about are about: 26.000 partisans killed 10.000 Slovenes killed as victims of the German conscription, 15.000 Slovene collaborators killed during the war and 10.000 after the war. Also about 10.000 hostages shot by the Germans during the war and other horrible numbers. The total is near 90.000.

Just for comparison - the USA lost about 450.000 men during WWII.

     by crni on August 13, 2004 at 11:53 pm

In 1941 the German soldiers were greeted with flowers and greenery in the Styrian towns as “liberators from the Serbian oppression”. Hard to believe? Yet so it was.
Maribor with Styria was annexed to the Third Reich. The Germanisation began. Nationally conscious Slovenians (teachers, priests, lawyers etc) were sent to camps or expelled, mostly to Serbia where they worked on farms. I do not know how many and who got the German citizenship. Young men were conscripted into the German army. Courses of German language were organised for adults and some German teachers came from Germany to teach children in German language. The Germans even built houses, roads, bridges… The Partisan resistance was weak, in that Crni`s links the Partisans in Styria are not mentioned. There were a few attacks on soldiers, some assassinations and sabotages followed by harsh reprisals: shooting of hostages and sending people to camps. The war time was hard for Styrians but to say that the German intention wss to “physically” exterminate Slovenians in Styria is a lie and an insult to the Jews.

The situation in the Ljubljana region which belonged to Italy was completely different. In the Crni`s link it is written: “The policy of the Germans was stern but consistent, compared to that of the Italians”. And “The policy of the Italian occupation authorities was wavering and irresolute.” This is the reason why the Communist Party started Revolution in the Ljubljana region. But this is another story.

The Crni`s numbers don`t mean much. The truth is that the numbers are not known. It`s easy to guess why. The historians specialised in the Slovenian 20th century history were more propagandists than scientists in the Communist times (maybe still…). They were not free in their researches, there were so many taboos and the number of the victims of the war was one of them. Everybody working on this subject would sooner or later have come upon the uncountable mass graves scattered all over Slovenia. This was not permitted.
The Slovenian writer Drago JanÄ?ar was sent to prison in 1970s. His crime? The possession of a book (printed outside Yugoslavia) In Rog we lay slaughtered.

Also: I`ve never read or heard the number of the German (or Italian) casualties caused by the Slovenian Partisans during the war. Either the Slovenian historians don`t know the number or it is so small that they are ashamed to tell (in comparison with the Slovenian losses).

Andreja

     by Andreja on August 16, 2004 at 8:18 am

Andreja, you are wrong. email me if you want to continue the discussion.

AS for the insult to the Jews, you are wrong again. I never wrote that the slavs were to be exterminated like the Jews. The grand plan, outlined in the book “Mein Kampf” was to have Slavs as slaves forever. You know what a slave is? A shell of a human being with no rights. I would personally rather be dead.

Therefore I still think the resistance was worthwhile. The number of German casualties was truly minute compared to the number of partisan casualties. But guess what, the same thing happened in Vietnam. The number of dead Vietnamese is huge comparred to the number of Americans. But they won their freedom and so did we. Even if it was the freedom to make some bad choices.

     by crni on August 16, 2004 at 10:53 pm

Crni, when I wrote “extermination” I didn`t mean you. In the article Hitler`s Visit to Slovenia it is written: By the Nazi occupation of Spring 1941, Slovenes in Maribor and Slovene Styria were condemned to physical extermination i.e. complete Germanization.(What does it mean?)

I didn`t know through what hell Maribor went during the war. I`ve found the site describing it only today.
www.muzejno-mb.si/bombniang.htm
Here the numbers of dead, injured and the damage on buildings are very precisely listed; probably because the Germans did it.

Andreja

     by Anonymous on August 18, 2004 at 4:11 pm

How about we say that the smaller numbers on a smaller area and for one particular type of incident are much easier to collect than the numbers for the whole Slovenia and leave the German superiority out of it?

     by crni on August 18, 2004 at 8:58 pm

I can add a few insights to the questions raised by Andreja. ALthough I live in the UK, both my parents in law were born in Slovenia and I have knowledge of the situation from them. I have also visited the Museum of National Liberation in Maribor and one at Raienberg/Reichenberg (not the correct spelling) which, despite my limted Slovene and German, give fascinating accounts of the war years.

Although Maribor had an ethnic German minority up to 1941, some of whom identified with Nazi Germany and acted treacherously at the time of the occupation, there were also a significant number of ethnic Slovenes up to that time that mainly spoke German. German had been the principal language of the towns in the Austrian era and its usage, especially in the higher levels of society and the older generation, continued up to and through World War 2, without making these people “ethnic Germans” or necessarily pro-German/Austrian politically. Of course, post 1945 these people basically faced the choice of assimiliation or expulsion.

Secondly, the position of “collaborators” is not necessarily a simple one, which means that the statistics have to be viewed with caution. Taking that part of Slovenia that was annexed by Germany, the opposition to the annexation came from Tito’s partisans on the one hand and the Royalists (black hand) on the other. These groups committed atrocities on each other as well as the Nazis, and the Nazis took reprisals against innocent civilians in return. “Collaboration” in these circumstances was in part by people facing extreme hardship and cuaght between (and not necessarily supporting) these various groups. It remains a taboo subject with my mother in law (born 1941) whose family certainly suffered along with everyone else.

In the Primorska region of Slovenia that was annexed by Italy between the wars, life for the discontented Slovene majority was easier, despite the hardships of being a minority in a fascist state, until the fall of Mussolini. Thereafter life became very difficult, due to the Nazi invasion on the one hand and the activities of the partisans on the other. My father in law, who was 15, was conscripted by the Germans, who surrounded the church and forced the men into a civil militia, then was rescued and re-conscripted by the partisans, from whose forces he fled when their atheistic socialist agenda became evident. As at the end of the war he found himself in Italy, he escaped the repatriation and certain death that many other so-called “collaborators” suffered. The Slovene community in the Uk still feels that the post-1991 government and society has not done enough to acknowledge the mass executions that took place at the end of the war.

     by Anonymous on September 6, 2004 at 5:32 pm

The book is In Rog We Lie Slaughtered

     by Anonymous on September 26, 2004 at 6:21 pm

The case of the Jews was very different from that of Slovenians.

Citizens of Maribor were explicitly told they were actual Germans and would regain their “father tongue” quickly because of it. Slovenians born during this time in Maribor were given Nazi German birth certificates and forced to have German first names. Only Slovenian leaders, outspoken nationals, and resistance fighters were systematically murdered. Basically, if you could pass for a German (i.e. you just needed a name change) and didn’t look suspicious, Hitler’s plan was that you would become German.

     by blank on November 17, 2004 at 1:30 am

It is interesting how our leftists who hate US so much have been sending their children to study to the American Universities for decades.

David

     by David on December 1, 2004 at 10:14 pm

It is clear that, unlike Croatia who participated in the exermination process, the ethnic Slovenian nationalists put up a clear opposition to the Nazi Party and suffered greatly for it.  It was a suffering worthy of the cause; freedom and justice. I’m proud to say as the grandson of Slovenes and a convert to Judiasm, the majority of the ethinic Slovenes fought the evil tyranny of Nazism with what little resource they had  and on many fronts.  My grandfathers older brothers were both captured and relocated to work camps by the SS.  Slavs, Gypsys and Jews share a common history that we will never forget.  

     by Brekan on October 19, 2005 at 3:02 am