The Beast Within (Or How Not to Rewild) - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 194

ters of war. Almost a million people died in the Yugoslavian civil strife
triggered by the Nazi invasion. Some of these great crimes were com-
mitted by the Prinz Eugen Division of the SS, among whose members
were Yugoslavian ethnic Germans. They massacred Jews, partisans
and communists and people believed to sympathize with them.
After the Axis forces were routed, Marshall Tito's communist gov-
ernment found it convenient to blame ethnic Germans for many of the
horrors perpetrated by other people. This was, it seems, easier than
facing the truth: that atrocities were committed by Croats, Serbs, Bos-
nians, Albanians, Hungarians, Nazis, communists, monarchists,
Orthodox Christians, Catholics and Muslims. Almost all the Yugo-
slavian Germans who did not flee the country with the Axis armies
were either expelled by Tito's government or interned, often in forced
labour camps. Some were taken by the Soviet Union's Red Army to
camps in the Ukraine. Within a few years of the end of the war in Yugo-
slavia, the German population had dropped by some 98 per cent. 5
Many others who collaborated with the Third Reich were killed. The
six battalions of the Slovenian Home Guard fled with the retreating
German troops to Austria in May 1945. 6 They were forcibly repatri-
ated by the British. Driving with Tomaž through the forests of Ko cevski
Rog, I had seen beside the road great trunks like totem poles carved by
the sculptor Stare Jarm into the tortured figures of Christian martyrs.
They marked the sinkholes beside which some thousands of collabora-
tors were lined up and machine-gunned. The partisans then used
explosives to make the craters collapse, burying the corpses.
The barren lands of Kocevje, whose population had been relocated
and dispersed first by the Nazis then by the socialist government and
the Red Army, were never recolonized. When the farms were aban-
doned and the pastures no longer grazed by sheep and goats, the seed
which rained into them from the neighbouring woods was allowed to
sprout once more. The land has been repopulated by trees.
In the Soca valley, in north-western Slovenia, Jernej Stritih, a clever,
laconic head of department in the Slovenian government, with a thick
beard and splendid moustaches, whom we had befriended in Ljubljana,
took us to a restaurant a friend of his ran in the front room of his
farmhouse. The proprietor owned a small herd of sheep, which were