The author discusses recent Slovenian historiography on the Second World War, establishing that numerous high quality works were written before 1990, and before the breakup of Yugoslavia. These ...works, however, put the history of the liberation struggle into the foreground. In the 1980s, historians started to research several topics that had previously gone unstudied. This decade saw a process of democratization in Slovenia, and new archival materials became accessible. Scholars researching the war after 1990 can be roughly divided into three camps: those with a continued interest in the liberation movement and the partisan war; those who take an apologetic stance towards the issue of collaboration, maintaining that the war in the Slovenian lands was first of all a civil war that had been initiated by the communists; and, finally, those who have asked new questions and explored them in such a way that have put them at eye-level with European standards of scholarship.
The following article focuses on the cooperation between the Slovenian and Italian liberation movements in the area of eastern Friuli from the Italian capitulation to the autumn of 1944. At that ...time, cooperation was crucial for the liberation efforts due to the still overwhelming strength of the occupiers. However, as of the autumn of 1944 – in anticipation of the imminent end of the war and the consolidated position of the Yugoslav liberation movement – the Slovenian liberation movement sought to establish complete control of the areas populated by Slovenians and thus strengthen the Yugoslav position in the post-war negotiations on the new border with Italy
After the war, the Communist Party of Slovenia (KPS) in the then People’s Republic of Slovenia was the only proper political force that controlled all levers of power. Those who held key positions in ...the Party also held the most important positions in the leadership in the so-called mass organisations, and also in authorities, the economy and other key segments of the society.
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.
The following article focuses on the activities of the Department for the Protection of People (hereinafter Ozna), the security and intelligence service of the Yugoslav liberation movement and ...subsequently the Yugoslav state, and its successor State Security Administration (hereinafter UDV) in the territory of Zones A of Venezia Giulia and Free Territory of Trieste. It is a fact that Ozna played one of the key roles during the forty-day Yugoslav occupation of the whole Venezia Giulia (1 May – 12 June 1945), when it was often more important than even the authorities and political bodies. After the Yugoslav Army retreated, a significant part of its system, adapted to the new circumstances, naturally, was preserved in Zone A, where the administration was taken over by the Anglo-American Allied military administration. If we believe the information that during the almost ten-year post-war period (until the reinstatement of the Italian authorities after the signing of the London Memorandum in October 1954) a couple thousand informants of various states were active in Trieste, the agents of the Yugoslav Ozna/UDV were undoubtedly among the most numerous and active.
On the basis of archive materials the author analyses the relations between the Communist Party of Slovenia and the Liberation Front of Slovenia in the period between 1945 and 1953. In 1953 the name ...of the Liberation Front was changed to Socialist Alliance of Working People. Under the conditions of the one–party system we cannot refer to the cohabitation of individual political choices, since only one – supposedly all–encompassing and generally valid – choice existed. The majority of efforts of the political and state leadership, which was identical to the leadership of the Communist Party of Slovenia (Communist Party of Yugoslavia) between 1945 and 1953, when the so–called people's revolution transformed into the socialist revolution, was aimed at unity in all segments of the social life. The Liberation Front of Slovenia (People's Front of Yugoslavia) was used in the pursuit of this goal as an intermediary between the leadership and the people.
The following discussion focuses on the investigation and judicial process against 50 Partisans of the so-called Company of Benečija in front of the Italian court. 32 of them were, among other ...things, accused of high treason against their homeland, that is, Italy. The investigation started in August 1945, and the process was concluded on 14 July 1959, when the Jury Court in Florence pronounced the verdict. Some of the accused were acquitted of certain allegations, and thè criminal proceeding against ali of the accused was stopped on the basis of the Amnesty of 11 July 1959.
