Gottschee
The first settlement in the territory attested in written sources was Mooswald (Slovene: Mahovnik), which appeared in a letter from Patriarch Bertram on 1 September 1339.
[16][17] A 1363 letter mentioned the settlements of Gottschee (Kočevje), Pölland (Kočevske Poljane), Kostel, Ossilnitz (Osilnica), and Göttenitz (Gotenica).
[21] It was partly in response to the devastation of the Ottoman raids that Emperor Frederick III granted the people of Gottschee the right to sell goods outside the territory in 1492.
[23] In 1574, Gottschee extended from Mount Snežnik in the extreme west to Blatnik pri Črmošnjicah in the east, and from Seč and Gornja Topla Reber in the north to just below Bosljiva Loka and Osilnica in the south.
In 1641 Wolf Engelbert von Auersperg purchased Gottschee County from Count Georg Zwickl-Khisl for 84,000 florins.
[14]: 281 [25] Because he died without an heir in 1673, the county passed to his brother Johann Weikhard of Auersperg, who had become a prince of the Holy Roman Empire in 1653.
The district had an area of approximately 860 km2 (330 sq mi) and contained a total of 177 settlements (including ethnically Slovene ones and some abandoned before 1941).
[14]: 276 In 1906 the ethnic Romanian Austro-Hungarian lawyer and politician Aurel Popovici unsuccessfully proposed the reorganization of Austria-Hungary as the United States of Greater Austria.
Gottschee was incorporated into royal Yugoslavia (known as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes until 1929) as part of the prewar territory of Carniola.
[38] Under the 1921 constitution, the traditional regions were abolished and Gottschee was made part of the Ljubljana Province (Slovene: Ljubljanska oblast) from 1922 to 1929.
[43] After the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Yugoslavia initially remained neutral, but after a coup in 1941 adopted a staunch anti-Axis position.
However, propaganda and Nazi ideology prevailed, and the VoMi began planning the Gottschee "resettlement" (forced expulsion) from Kočevje, which was in the Italian occupation zone, to the "Ranner Dreieck" or Brežice Triangle in Lower Styria, the region now known as the Lower Sava Valley, located between the confluences of the Krka, Sotla, and Sava rivers.
In November 1941, some 46,000 Slovenians in the Brežice Triangle region were forcibly deported to Eastern Germany for potential Germanization or forced labour in order to make an accommodation for the Gottschee "resettlers".
Shortly before that time, a largely transparent propaganda effort was aimed toward both the Gottscheers and the Slovenes, promising the latter equivalent farmland in Germany for the land relinquished.
Although from the time of their arrival to the end of the war, Gottschee farmers were harassed and killed by Josip Broz Tito's Partisans[citation needed], 56 of the Gottschee ethnic Germans, who did not want to leave their homes, decided instead to join Slovene Partisans and fight against Italians in Province of Ljubljana, together with their Slovene neighbours.
[47][48] The attempt to resettle the Gottscheers was a costly failure for the Nazi regime, since extra manpower was required to protect the farmers from the partisans.
Toward the end of the war, these camps were liberated by American and Red Army troops, and repatriated refugees later returned to Yugoslavia.
