Bleiburg repatriations

The Bleiburg massacre occurred shortly before the end of World War II, during May 1945 (though at a time when local hostilities had been declared over). It is named after the Carinthian town Bleiburg on the Austrian-Slovenian border, near where the massacre began. It involved mass executions of soldiers and civilians who were fleeing from the defeated Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH), a puppet state of the Nazi regime in Germany controlled by the Ustaše party.

The majority of the Croats were members or collaborators of the fascist regime, although there were many frightened innocent people, however, these two were inextricably mixed and the pursuing partisans appear to have unfortunately labeled them all as traitors since they were fleeing with the fascist units that were attempting to surrender to British forces in Austria. Apart from Croats, present in the fleeing military columns were remaining units of the Serbian Chetniks and the Slovenian Domobranci, the vast majority of both were killed as well. The British forces refused to accept the Ustaša's surrender (as per the Allied agreement) and they were prevented from entering the British occupied areas. It is not known whether the high command of the Partisans was aware of the killings and it's widely disputed whether Marshall Josip Broz Tito was aware of them. The Ustaša and others, however, continued to fight several days after the cessation of hostilities, which created a spirit of grim determination among the victorious Partisans.

Although a large, still undefined number of Ustaša and Chetnik soldiers died during a series of battles and skirmishes after the end of the war, it is generally accepted that the majority of violent deaths were the result of executions that lasted at least two weeks after the cessation of hostilities. The victims were executed without trial as an act of vengeance for the horrendous crimes committed by the Ustaše regime in NDH-controlled territories during World War II. Killings continued in nearby Slovenia, and it is hard to estimate the number of victims on Bleiburg field, compared to those later found in the trenches in the Maribor area and other numerous pits in Slovenia.

Croatian political émigrés, as well as other sources related to the Cossacks who fought for the Nazi regimes, had published numerous testimonies on the atrocities and British involvement in the affair (interestingly enough, British archives on the Operation Keelhaul tragedy are still sealed), but their publications have received little attention, supposedly since communist Yugoslavia was the West's protégé and the buffer zone to the Soviets in the post-war period.

Mass graves in Slovenia

A large number of mass graves in Slovenia, now estimated at 540, is still being examined. The first excavations in a trench in Tezno Woods uncovered 1,179 skeletons of Croatians. In 2007, Joze Dezman, head of the Slovenian Commission on Concealed Mass Graves, said that the mass grave in Tezno could be the largest in Europe, surpassing even that of Srebrenica. It is now estimated the Tezno mass grave contains 15,000 bodies of the Croatian Domobran and Ustasha military forces. The trench is 1 kilometer long, 4 to 6 meters wide and the layer of human remains measures 1.5 to 2 meters deep.

Number of victims

The exact number of those who met their death in Bleiburg is almost impossible to ascertain. Generally, there are essentialy three schools that have tried to do this:

1. school

The first school whose estimates are based mainly on the historiographic and demographic investigations of scientists:

Scientists made estimates, based mainly on the historiographic and demographic investigations:

• The Croatian statistician Vladimir Žerjavić has estimated based on demographic records that ca. 55,000 people were killed in the Bleiburg area and in Slovenia.
• British journalist Misha Glenny and other investigators or publicists have come up with the figure of 50,000 executed disarmed soldiers and 30,000 civilians.
• First Croatian president (and doctor of history) Dr. Franjo Tuđman has come with figure between 35,000 and 40,000 victims.

2. school

The second school operated with small numbers. Petar S. Brajović, a Yugoslav general who participated in the battles around Bleiburg and is, along with other senior Yugoslav officers like Kosta Nađ and Milan Basta, frequently accused as having organized the Bleiburg massacre, claims in his book Konačno oslobođenje ("Final liberation") published in 1983, that Ustaše had no big victims in Bleiburg and that artillery was not used. In the local cemetery there were only 16 their soldiers buried. In the same book is written that Third Army of Jugoslav Army captured 30,000 soldiers (6,000 of them were Chetniks) and 20,000 refugees.
The book of Juraj Hrženjak Bleiburg i Križni put 1945. ("Bleiburg and The way of the cross 1945") states that 20 people committed suicide in Bleiburg while some others, among them soldiers of Yugoslav army, were shot by ustashe which did not want to surrender. All the others were shot in Yugoslavia and Bleiburg has been marked merely as a symbol mostly for those who were shot later. The book also claims that beetwen 12 and 14 thousand persons were shot after returning in liberated Yugoslavia; among those 12 to 14 thousands, chetniks were shot in Macelj, members of the Slovenian white guard near Kočevski rog and ustashe and others (ethnic Croats) near Maribor. At least 1500 guards of former Nazi concentration camps in Yugoslavia were shot near Maribor.

3. school

This school bases its estimates on a number of mass graves in Slovenia, that are, however, not yet excavated and therefore cannot with certainty be linked with these incidents. A number of these graves in Slovenia, now estimated at 540, is still being examined. The first excavations in a trench in Tezno Woods uncovered 1,179 skeletons of Croatians. In 2007, Joze Dezman, head of the Slovenian Commission on Concealed Mass Graves, said that the mass grave in Tezno could be the largest in Europe, surpassing even that of Srebrenica. It is now estimated the Tezno mass grave contains 15,000 bodies of the Croatian Domobran and Ustasha military forces. The trench is 1 kilometer long, 4 to 6 meters wide and the layer of human remains measures 1.5 to 2 meters deep.

See also

• Allied war crimes during World War II
• Yugoslav People's Liberation War
• Partisans (Yugoslavia)
• Ustaše
• Chetniks

External links

• Yalta and the Bleiburg tragedy
• The Bleiburg Massacres - by Count Nikolai Tolstoy
• The Bleiburg Tragedy on Croatian World Network