World War II in the Slovene Lands
In addition to being trisected, a fate which also befell Greece, Drava Banovina (roughly today's Slovenia) was the only region that experienced a further step—absorption and annexation into neighboring Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Hungary.
Nationalist activists and people who moved from other parts of Yugoslavia after 1919 were expelled to the puppet states of Nedić's Serbia and NDH.
The majority of Slovene victims during the war were from the northern Slovenia, i.e. Lower Styria, Upper Carniola, Central Sava Valley, and Slovenian Carinthia.
However, their formal annexation to the "German Reich" was postponed because of the installation of the new "Gauleiter" and "Reichsstatthalter" of Carinthia first, and later the Nazis dropped the plan because of the Slovene Partisans, with which they wanted to deal first.
The Nazi religious persecution of the Catholic Church in Slovenia was akin to that which occurred in the annexed regions of Poland.
Tens of thousands of Slovenes from German-occupied Lower Styria and Upper Carniola escaped to the Province of Ljubljana until June 1941.
[4] However, after resistance started in Province of Ljubljana, Italian violence against the Slovene civil population easily matched that of the Germans.
To suppress the mounting resistance by the Slovene Partisans, Mario Roatta adopted draconian measures of summary executions, hostage-taking, reprisals, internments, and the burning of houses and whole villages.
At the very beginning, Slovene Partisan forces were relatively small, poorly armed and without any infrastructure, but Spanish Civil War veterans amongst them had some experience with guerrilla methods of fighting the enemy.
[9][10] In December 1943, Franja Partisan Hospital was built in difficult and rugged terrain, deep inside German-occupied Europe, only a few hours from Austria and the central parts of the Third Reich.
The Partisans were under the command of the Liberation Front (OF) and Tito's Yugoslav resistance, while the Slovenian Covenant served as the political arm of the anti-Communist militia.
Between 1943–1945, smaller anti-Communist militia existed in parts of the Slovenian Littoral and in Upper Carniola, while they were virtually non-existent in the rest of the country.
Immediately after the start of the partisan resistance in 1942, the Ustaše authorities began to carry out mass arrests among the population.
The number includes about 14,000 people who were killed or died for other war-related reasons immediately after the end of the war,[12][13] and the tiny Jewish community, which was nearly annihilated in the Holocaust.
[12] The overall number of World War II casualties in Slovenia was thus of around 7.2% of the pre-war population, which is above the Yugoslav average, and among the highest percentages in Europe.
The extraditions never took place because the western allies' felt grateful for Marshal Pietro Badoglio's role in the 1943 overthrow of Mussolini and because they saw in his government a guarantee of an anti-Stalinist post-war Italy.
