Occupation, resistance, collaboration, civil war, and post-war killings On 6 April 1941,
Yugoslavia was invaded by the
Axis powers. On that day, part of the
Slovene-settled territory was occupied by
Nazi Germany. On 11 April 1941, further parts of the territory were occupied by
Fascist Italy and
Hungary. The Germans occupied the
Upper Carniola, the
Lower Styria, the northwestern part of
Prekmurje and the northern part of the
Lower Carniola. The Italians occupied the
Inner Carniola, the majority of the Lower Carniola and
Ljubljana, whereas the Hungarians
occupied the major part of Prekmurje, which prior to World War I belonged to Hungary. Resistance by the
Kingdom of Yugoslavia's army was insignificant. In 2005, Slovene authors first published information about six villages in Lower Carniola that were annexed by the
Independent State of Croatia, and a Maribor-based historian first published original research about it in 2011, but it remains unclear why the villages from
Drava Banovina were occupied contrary to a known German–Croatian treaty.
Under the Nazi occupation , July 22, 1941 The Germans had a plan of the forced location of the Slovene population in the so called
Rann Triangle, around the area of the southeastern Slovenian town Brežice. The area was the border area towards the Italian occupation zone. The German Gottscheers would have been relocated to that area and would form an ethnic barrier to other Slovene lands. The rest of the Slovene population in Lower Styria was seen as
Wends, which should have been assimilated. Nationalist activists and people who moved from other parts of Yugoslavia after 1919 were expelled to the puppet states of
Nedić's Serbia and
NDH. Because Hitler opposed having the ethnic German
Gottscheers in the Italian occupation zone, they were moved out of it. About 46,000 Slovenes were transported to
Saxony in Germany in order to make space for the relocated Gottscheers. The majority of Slovene victims during the war were from northern Slovenia, i.e.
Lower Styria,
Upper Carniola,
Central Sava Valley, and
Slovenian Carinthia. However, their formal annexation to the "German Reich" was postponed because of the installation of the new "Gauleiter" and "Reichsstatthalter" of
Carinthia first, and later the Nazis dropped the plan because of the
Slovene Partisans, with which they wanted to deal first. Only Meža valley initially became part of "
Reichsgau Carinthia".
Nazi persecution of the Church The Nazi
religious persecution of the
Catholic Church in Slovenia was akin to
that which occurred in the annexed regions of Poland. Within six weeks of the Nazi occupation, only 100 of the 831 priests in the
Diocese of Maribor and part of the
Diocese of Ljubljana remained free. Clergy were persecuted and sent to concentration camps, and religious orders had their properties seized.
Under Fascist Italy's occupation Compared to the German policies in the northern Nazi-occupied area of Slovenia and the forced
Fascist italianization in the former
Austrian Littoral annexed after the First World War, the initial Italian policy in the central Slovenia was not as violent. Tens of thousands of
Slovenes from German-occupied
Lower Styria and
Upper Carniola escaped to the Province of Ljubljana until June 1941. However, after resistance started in
Province of Ljubljana, Italian violence against the Slovene civil population easily matched that of the Germans. The province saw the deportation of 25,000 people — which equated to 7.5% of the total population of the province — in one of the most drastic operations in Europe that filled up many
Italian concentration camps, such as
Rab concentration camp, in
Gonars concentration camp, Monigo (Treviso), Renicci d'Anghiari, Chiesanuova and elsewhere. To suppress the mounting resistance by the
Slovene Partisans,
Mario Roatta adopted draconian measures of
summary executions, hostage-taking, reprisals, internments, and the burning of houses and whole villages. The "3C" pamphlet, tantamount to a declaration of war on civilians, involved him in
Italian war crimes. A
barbed wire fence—which is now the
Trail of Remembrance and Comradeship—was put around
Ljubljana in order to prevent communication between the city's underground activists in Ljubljana and the majority of partisans in the surrounding countryside.
Resistance , 1941 On 26 April 1941, several groups formed the
Liberation Front of the Slovene Nation, which was the leading resistance force during the war. The front was initially a democratic platform. With the
Dolomiti Declaration, signed in March 1943, the Communists, however, monopolized it. It emitted its own radio program called
Kričač, the location of which never became known to occupying forces, and they had to confiscate the receivers' antennas from the local population in order to prevent listening to the radio of the Slovene
Liberation Front. Its military arm was the Slovene Partisans. The Slovene Partisans retained their specific organizational structure and
Slovene language as their commanding language until the last months of World War II, when their language was removed as the commanding language. In March 1945, the Slovene Partisan Units were officially merged into the
Yugoslav Army. At the very beginning,
Slovene Partisan forces were relatively small, poorly armed and without any infrastructure, but
Spanish Civil War veterans amongst them had some experience with guerrilla methods of fighting the enemy. The partisan activities in the Slovene Lands were initially independent of Tito's Partisans in the south. In autumn 1942, Tito attempted for the first time to control the Slovene resistance movement. The merger of the Slovene Partisans with Tito's forces happened in 1944. In December 1943,
Franja Partisan Hospital was built in difficult and rugged terrain, deep inside German-occupied Europe, only a few hours from Austria and the central parts of the Third Reich. German military activity was frequent in the general region throughout the operation of the hospital. It saw continuous improvements until May 1945.
Civil war and post-war killings In the summer of 1942, a civil war between Slovenes broke out. The two fighting factions were the
Slovenian Partisans and the
Italian-sponsored anti-communist militia, nicknamed by communists the "White Guard", later re-organized under Nazi command as the
Slovene Home Guard. Small units of Slovenian
Chetniks also existed in
Lower Carniola and
Styria. The Partisans were under the command of the Liberation Front (OF) and
Tito's Yugoslav resistance, while the
Slovenian Covenant served as the political arm of the anti-Communist militia. The civil war was mostly restricted to the
Province of Ljubljana, where more than 80% of the Slovene anti-partisan units were active. Between 1943–1945, smaller anti-Communist militia existed in parts of the
Slovenian Littoral and in
Upper Carniola, while they were virtually non-existent in the rest of the country. By 1945, the total number of Slovene anti-Communist militiamen reached 17,500. Immediately after the war, some 12,000 members of the Slovene Home Guard were killed in the
Kočevski Rog massacres, while thousands of anti-communist civilians were killed in the first year after the war. These massacres were silenced, and remained a taboo topic until an interview with
Edvard Kocbek was published by
Boris Pahor in his publication
Zaliv, causing the
1975 Zaliv Scandal in
Tito's Yugoslavia.
End of war and aftermath World War II in the Slovene Lands lasted until the middle of May 1945. On 3 May, the
National State of Slovenia was proclaimed as part of the
Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The liberation of Ljubljana, the capital city of the now independent
Slovenia, was announced on 9 May 1945. The last battle was the
Battle of Poljana, which took place near
Prevalje on 14 and 15 May 1945, a few days after the
formal surrender of the Nazi Germany. Hundreds of
ethnic Italians from the
Julian March were killed by the Yugoslav Army and partisan forces in the
Foibe massacres; some 27,000
Istrian Italians fled
Slovenian Istria from Communist persecution in the so-called
Istrian–Dalmatian exodus. Members of the ethnic German minority either fled or were expelled from Slovenia. == Croatian occupation of Slovenian territories ==