Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
After Italy capitulated in 1943, the anti-OF
Slovenian Domobranci (Home Guards) were
active in Primorska and, in a bid to prevent the
communists from gaining political control in
liberated areas, began supporting the Germans.
Despite this assistance and the support of the
fascist groups in Croatia and Serbia, the Ger-
mans were forced to evacuate Belgrade in
1944. Slovenia was not totally liberated until May 1945.
The following month, as many as 12,000 Domobranci and anti- communist civilians
were sent back to Slovenia from refugee camps in Austria by the British. Most of them
were executed by the communists over the next two months.
Slovenia 1945: Memories of Death and Survival
after World War II
, by John Corsellis & Marcus
Ferrar, is the harrowing story of the forced return to
Slovenia and execution of thousands of members of
the anti-Communist Domobranci after WWII.
Postwar Division & Socialist Yugoslavia
The status of the liberated areas along the Adriatic, especially Trieste, was Slovenia's
greatest postwar concern. A peace treaty signed in Paris in 1947 put Trieste and its sur-
rounds under Anglo-American administration (the so-called Zone A) and the Koper and
Buje (Istria) areas under Yugoslav control in Zone B. In 1954 Zone A (with both its Italian
and ethnic Slovenian populations) became the Italian province of Trieste. Koper and a
47km-long stretch of coast later went to Slovenia while the bulk of Istria went to Croatia.
The Belvedere Treaty (1955) guaranteed Austria its 1938 borders, including most of
Koroška.
Tito had been elected head of the assembly,
providing for a federal republic in November
1943. He moved quickly after the war to con-
solidate his power under the communist ban-
ner. Serbian domination from Belgrade would
continue, though, and in some respects be even
more centralist than under the Kingdom of
France Štiglic's 1955 film
Dolina Miru
(
Valley of
Peace
) is the bittersweet story of two children, an
ethnic German boy and a Slovenian girl, trying to
find a haven during the tumult of WWII.
Yugoslavia.
Tito distanced himself from the Soviet Union as early as 1948, but isolation from the
markets of the Soviet bloc forced him to court the West. Yugoslavia introduced features of
a market economy, including workers' self-management. Economic reforms in the
mid-1960s as well as relaxed police control and border controls brought greater prosperity
and freedom of movement, but the Communist Party saw such democratisation as a threat
to its power. What were to become known as the 'leaden years' in Yugoslavia lasted
throughout the 1970s until Tito's death in 1980.
