Few Surviving Written Traces of the Post-War Extrajudicial Killings

SLOVENIA, June 30 - The term »post-war killings« is used to denote a series of extrajudicial executions, which represented the final act of settling score with wartime military and ideological opponents, and, simultaneously, of taking one of the initial steps in establishing a monopolistic authority of the Slovenian communist party. This series of crimes resulted in the death of a percentage of the entire Slovenian population. According to the data collected by the Institute for Contemporary History, almost 15,000 people were killed after the war because of these acts of violence, which were committed without any due judicial process. For decades to come, this massive purge placed a heavy burden on society as a whole and left a lasting impact on the lives of many individuals – both the relatives of the victims and the perpetrators themselves.

This deep individual and collective impact of post-war events stood in sharp contrast to the total lack of any public remembrance of the events. When asked for the explanation as to the fate of those executed, the new authorities initially stayed silent or provided misleading information, and soon pushed the victims and the executions themselves into the realm of the enforced “memory erasure”. Such erasure demanded not only the prohibition of ever mentioning the names of any of the victims or revealing the locations of graves or execution sites, but also meant the elimination of any written documents that bore witness to the crimes ever being committed.

This is why in the preserved written heritage of the Department for the Protection of the People (OZNA for Slovenia) – the body that was charged to direct the measures of post-war mass repression in the Slovenian territory – references to the post-war killings appear only “in traces”. For a number of years, this has made it harder for us to get a clear picture of the details of post-war mass killings and to locate the sites of the individual executions. Documents in which OZNA officials would make direct and exact reports to their leaders about the carrying out of individual executions simply do not exist; nor is there an abundance of records written in connection with the executions based on to the testimonies of those who had survived the bloodbath. Records preserved that provide some information in these matters are entry registers of post-war transit and concentration camps managed by OZNA, from where most of the Home Guard soldiers and civilians, forcibly returned from Carinthia, were taken to their execution sites. In addition to transit camps in Radovljica and Kranj, there were also the camps in Šentvid in Ljubljana, Škofja Loka and Teharje. Interrogation forms that were completed separately for each returned Home Guard soldier during the process of classifying that soldier and making decisions about his fate, have not been preserved either.  

In the preserved materials of OZNA, the few surviving written traces of the post-war mass killings can primarily be found among the records in the series “Prison books” that are included in the archival fonds SI AS 1931. Most of this series are post-war registers of detained individuals, prisoners and camp inmates, who were imprisoned between the end of the war and the early 1950s due to various reasons. The series is incomplete, missing registers from some of the most important post-war camps (in addition to the before mentioned camps, there were also central concentration camps for members of the German national minority in Strnišče and in Hrastovec). The preserved registers, however, remain a valuable source for those researching the fates of the victims of post-war killings. They contain many entries for individuals who, after being recorded into the registers of detainees and camp inmates, disappeared without leaving any trace – not even a written one. In relation to “Slovenian” Germans, such records can be found particularly in the entry registers of the penal forced labour camps in Studenci and Bresternica near Maribor (technical unit 1074, both labour camps operated between the autumn of 1945 and the autumn of 1946). From there the last large group of civilian victims of extrajudicial killings was taken to their deaths in January 1946. The last entries of people of German nationality in official registers can also be found in the detention book of the Maribor branch of OZNA (technical unit 3187). These entries are usually accompanied by the word “transport”, which was a term used in 1945 and 1946 by OZNA to denote a decision for extrajudicial execution of an individual.

A considerably higher number of the names of the victims of post-war killings can be found in three other groups of detention books; in the five volumes of the Register of detainees (technical unit 1071-1073), the three volumes of the List of detainees from the Ljubljana court base sent to the Central prisons in Šentvid (technical unit 1069), and the three volumes of the List of detainees in the Central prisons of the State Security Administration for Slovenia (technical unit 1069, 1070). What all three groups of registers have in common is the fact that among the names of the victims of extrajudicial killings (who are, of course, rare among the very extensive list of all the people detained), one cannot find the names of those in the largest category of the victims of post-war killings, i. e. the names of the Home Guard members, repatriated to Slovenia from Carinthia. Instead, the registers mostly state the names of those Home Guard soldiers and members of Village Guards who chose not to flee to Carinthia but turned themselves in when called to do so by the new authorities in May 1945. 

Especially interesting in this regard is volume four of the List of detainees in the Central prisons of the State Security Administration for Slovenia. It lists detainees from number 1 to 2640, detained between May 17 to October 20, 1945. It records 268 people, taken in two separate groups (one on June 2, 1945 at 10 pm and the other on July 24, 1945 at 1 am) from the central prisons of OZNA (which from March 1946 was called State Security Administration) located on Poljanski nasip in Ljubljana. The second, smaller group, consisting of 88 persons, is of particular interest. It was this group of victims that was discovered during the work of a research team that was set up between 1998 and 2000 to investigate the post-war fate of the wounded, disabled and sick members of the Home Guard and was headed by Dr. Lovro Šturm. By comparing written documents and personal testimonies, the research team managed to identify a chasm near Konfin I. above Grčarice as the most probable site of the execution of 88 people, which was later also confirmed by further anthropological analysis of the excavated bones. This grave site is now the only post-war execution site in Slovenia, where the identities of the victims are known. And it is this fact that was crucial in selecting this document as this month’s archivalia.

Tadej Cankar