Slovenes and their Liberty Struggle During Occupation 1945 Annotated by Maria Velikonja. Available on Amazon.
Slovenes and their Liberty Struggle During Occupation 1945 (original document, in the public domain) by Marko Bitenc et al. Not easy to read this original document. Available on Amazon.
Alternatively, you can purchase either book directly from Maria Velikonja by email: planincapress@gmail.com
Summary of the books:
In 2023 the author (Maria Velikonja) found a document, long hidden in her father’s papers, that completely changes the narrative that has split Slovenian society in half over the aftermath of World War Two between the Slovene Home Guard and the communist Partisans. The document, written during WWII by the National Committee for Slovenia and their intelligence operatives, sheds light on how the Home Guard supported the Allies throughout the war and prepared to fight the Nazis alongside the Allies. The document also details how the communist Partisans brutally murdered hundreds of American and British airmen who parachuted into Slovenia during WWII. Although the Slovene Home Guards reported the murders to the British intelligence service via their secret communications network, it is unclear whether this information was ever passed on to the United States.
The end of WWII brought liberation to western Europe, but only continued terror in the form of communism to the east. Because communists ran Slovenia for 45 years from 1945 to 1990, they were able to secretly murder their opponents, hide their bodies, destroy their documents, and continue to create a false narrative of communist heroic acts and accomplishments, while simultaneously painting their opponents as collaborators with the occupier. With the passage of time, more and more hidden documents have emerged to help portray the actual story, and more survivors of the communist’s 1945 post-war mass murders have come forward to share their first-hand witness experiences. This report, likely the only copy to have survived the war and communist purges, clearly sets out the case that Slovenia’s anti-communists were not collaborators of the occupiers. From the outset of the war, the pro-Allies groups that became the National Committee, set up a system of collecting intelligence on the occupier for the Allies and carried it out this system throughout the war. Dozens of intelligence agents, embedded in the Village Guards and Slovene Home Guard units, regularly sent information on German military movements to the Yugoslav government in London, via British military intelligence. They used radios, telegrams, and letters. No actual collaborative army in Europe would report Germany’s military activities to the Allies.
Many people paid the ultimate price for helping to produce this document, which was written secretly during WWII. Anti-communist intelligence agents, including the author’s father, gathered information about both the German occupier and the communist Partisans, and passed it on to the Slovene Home Guard and the underground Yugoslav Army radio operators, who then sent the information to British intelligence in London. Other agents took information about German movements and attempted to deliver it in person to the Allies. A number of these agents were uncovered by the Germans and either sent to German concentration camps where they died or were executed by the Yugoslav communist Partisans. As the war continued, the reports included information about the communist Partisans. The writers could not believe that the Allies would arm and support the communists in Slovenia, who even brazenly killed American military servicemen who parachuted into Slovenia. The cruelty and criminality of the Partisans was an inconvenient truth for the Allies, who had already determined they would support their ally the Soviet Union.
While the Allies’ decision to support the Soviet Union to defeat Nazi Germany in WWII is understood, the long-term effects of this decision are disproportionately felt in eastern Europe even today and especially in Slovenia. The Slovene Home Guards, who only took weapons from the Germans to form a police force in self-defense from the Partisans during Slovenia’s civil war, a legal and permitted defense in international law, have for too long been cast as the bad guys who “collaborated” with the occupier. At the same time, the Partisans were actively collaborating with the Germans, which is documented in this report and in the annexes which contain German documents ordering their military to work with the Partisans. The National Committee for Slovenia and all who worked to support it, fully believed up until the end of the war that the Allies would come take control of Slovenia and help them start a new democratic process in Slovenia. When the Allies did not do this, most of the Home Guards paid the ultimate price at the end of the war when Tito turned on them. They fled to Austria to escape Tito, only to be repatriated by the British back to Yugoslavia and then to their mass execution without trials.