The Beast Within (Or How Not to Rewild) - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 193

and Croatia drew up an official declaration of friendship with the
bear, signed and stamped with their great seals, in which they agreed
to sustain its numbers so that they could continue to pursue it. The
role the bears played in this negotiation is unrecorded.
The revolutions of 1848 brought feudalism to an end in central Eur-
ope. Local farmers lost their rights to graze common land, but acquired
their own private plots. At around the same time, imports of cheap wool
from New Zealand began undermining the European industry. By the
end of the nineteenth century, many peasant farmers had sold their land
and either moved to the cities or emigrated to America. The Depression
of the 1930s further extended the woods - to around 50 per cent of
Ko cevje - as more people departed. But the greatest expansion of the
forest took place as a result of what happened in the following decade.
Most of the population of south-western Slovenia - around
33,000 people - was ethnic German. They kept sheep and goats in the
hills and ran much of the trade in the towns. Under King Alexsander's
autocracy in the ten years before the Second World War, the Germans
of Yugoslavia, around half a million in total, suffered discrimination
and exclusion. In response, many of them joined German nationalist
movements, some of which soon allied themselves to the Nazis. By
1941, when Hitler's army suddenly invaded Yugoslavia, over 60 per
cent of its ethnic Germans had joined an organization, the Kultur-
bund, which became absorbed into Himmler's euphemistically titled
Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, or Ethnic Germans' Welfare Office.*
Hitler ceded south-western Slovenia to Italy and the Nazis forcibly
relocated many of the Yugoslav Germans to the Third Reich, to pre-
serve their 'ethnic purity' and protect them from attacks by partisans.
Some of the Germans of Kocevje were transferred to eastern Slovenia,
some removed to other lands under German rule.
The horrors of the 1990s in Yugoslavia were a faint echo of what
happened there during the Second World War. Many ethnic and reli-
gious groups committed atrocities, conducting expulsions, massacres
and genocidal cleansing which stand out even among the other disas-
* I have expanded on the account provided by Tomaž and other Slovenians I spoke
to, drawing in particular on materials published by the Institute for Research of
Expelled Germans. 4