The Geneva Conventions and the Slovenian Tragedy of 1945
By Maria Velikonja
As the daughter of Slovenian parents who were displaced at the end of WWII, I grew up in the United States, rather than in Slovenia or Trieste. My father Joze Velikonja served in the Primorski Domobranci during the war. Although he was not principally involved in combat operations, his membership in the Home Guard marked him for the rest of his life in an era that often failed to distinguish between individual guilt and collective guilt. Yet the British repatriation of thousands of Slovenians from Austria to Yugoslavia in May 1945 – fully aware that many would face execution at the hands of the communist authorities – left generations of Slovenians believing that the British accepted, or at least tolerated, Tito’s system of “justice.”
The issue is particularly troubling because the Kingdom of Yugoslavia had itself signed the 1929 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War in 1929 and ratified it in 1931. The Convention established the principle that prisoners of war were to be treated humanely and protected from murder, torture, reprisals, and execution without proper judicial proceedings. Although the Convention required the repatriation of prisoners of war after the end of hostilities, it also implied that such repatriation had to occur lawfully and humanely. Today we call these post-war executions a crime against humanity.
The events surrounding the Slovenian repatriations therefore raise serious legal and moral questions regarding the conduct of the Allied powers at the end of the war.
During my professional career, I worked extensively in the field of human rights and criminal justice, first as a prosecutor and later as an FBI agent. I also worked with the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia during the1990s. That experience reinforced my belief in some of the central principles underlying modern international humanitarian law: criminal guilt is individual, not collective. Soldiers may be prosecuted for crimes they personally commit, but entire groups cannot lawfully be condemned without evidence or trial. It is not a crime to fight in an army.
These principles are especially relevant when examining the fate of Slovenian anti-communists in 1945. Many members of the Slovenian Home Guard viewed themselves not as collaborators, but as anti-communists resisting the revolutionary violence of Tito’s Partisan movement. Some assisted the Western Allies by providing intelligence regarding German and Italian military activities, and by rescuing fallen Allied pilots from the Germans. Yet in the chaotic final weeks of the war, distinctions between collaboration, anti-communism, and political opposition were often ignored.
In May 1945, thousands of Slovenians — including members of the Home Guard, civilians, women, and children — fled northward into Austria in the hope of surrendering to British forces rather than to Tito’s army. They believed that British custody would provide protection under international law. Instead, many were forcibly returned to Yugoslavia.
I had a straightforward question: Did the United States and the United Kingdom truly take the Geneva Conventions seriously in 1945? And if they did, why were approximately 10,000 Slovenians sent back to Yugoslavia in late May 1945, knowing that many would be executed?
In order to better understand how and why this occurred, I recently spent a week conducting research at the National Archives of the United Kingdom in London. The archival material reveals that British authorities were already grappling with enormous refugee and prisoner crises in Austria and Italy long before Slovenians fled to Austria in May 1945. British military and political officials debated extensively how the Geneva Convention should apply not only to prisoners of war, but also to civilian refugees who feared persecution if returned to their home countries.
A number of archival documents demonstrate that many British officials initially opposed compulsory repatriation. Refugees were to be treated humanely, placed in camps, and returned only voluntarily. Documents dated as late as May 23, 1945 stated explicitly that refugees would not be repatriated against their will.
The archival record also demonstrates that the British were initially willing to help Slovenian Home Guards and civilians escape to safety in Italy, often using returning aid convoys. One British document states that “the principal methods of evacuation at present are by backloading ration trucks going back to Germany and France.” According to the research of Ivo Jevnikar, Slovenian soldiers and refugees were transported to safety in Italy on at least five occasions. On May 1, members of the Primorski Domobranci crossed into Italy and later encountered British forces. Several days later they were transferred to displaced persons camps. On May 12, between 900 and 1,200 civilians, including Home Guards, were transported by British convoys from Klagenfurt to Treviso in Italy. In mid-May, Slovenian Chetniks were moved from Carinthia to Forlì, while others were later transported from Rožek to Verona.
The evidence strongly suggests that these evacuations ceased not because of a deliberate policy rejecting Slovenian refugees, but because the displaced persons camps in Italy had become overwhelmed. In other words, the British did not initially abandon Slovenians because they endorsed forced repatriation; they halted transports because the logistical system was collapsing under the weight of hundreds of thousands of displaced persons across Europe.
The documents also reveal a profound legal and moral struggle within the British government and military. On one hand, the 1929 Geneva Convention required that prisoners of war be repatriated “without delay” after hostilities ended. On the other hand, the Convention also required humane treatment and implicitly prohibited repatriation into conditions where prisoners faced murder, torture, or reprisals. This contradiction became especially acute in cases involving forced return to communist Yugoslavia, where credible reports already indicated that repatriated individuals faced execution without trial.
For this reason, many British officers and officials repeatedly declared that Yugoslavs would not be returned against their will. Plus, the United States was firmly opposed to forcibly returning any Yugoslavs back to Yugoslavia. Yet despite these declarations, the policy changed abruptly.
After reviewing the archival evidence, I believe that Count Nikolai Tolstoy was substantially correct in describing these events as the “Klagenfurt conspiracy” in his 1986 work The Minister and the Massacres. Tolstoy conducted extensive archival research and interviewed numerous witnesses, including British soldiers who later described their shock at suddenly receiving orders to place Slovenian Home Guards onto trains bound for Yugoslavia.
According to Tolstoy, the existing non-repatriation policy was secretly reversed at a high political level. He further argued that certain documents were altered or removed in order to conceal responsibility for the decision. During a recent discussion in Oxford, Tolstoy reiterated his belief that Soviet political pressure played a decisive role in the reversal, including possible blackmail. Even today, important documents connected to the repatriations remain missing from the archives.
Historians may continue to debate the precise motivations behind the British decision-making process in May 1945. What is not disputed, however, is the outcome. Hundreds of thousands of Slovenians and other Yugoslav anti-communists were forcibly returned to Yugoslavia, and many were subsequently executed without trial.
The postwar killings carried out by Tito’s regime constituted a clear violation of the legal and humanitarian principles embodied in the Geneva Convention. Whatever political pressures confronted Allied governments in 1945, the forced return of prisoners and refugees to almost certain death remains one of the darkest moral failures of the immediate postwar period.
For many Slovenians, the tragedy of the repatriations is not merely a historical controversy. It is a personal and national trauma whose consequences extend across generations. A full historical reckoning requires acknowledging not only the crimes committed by communist authorities after the war, but also the responsibility of those Allied officials who permitted the repatriations to occur.
Maria Velikonja is currently a writer and the tour director for Slovenian Historical Tours, a professional tour that visits mass graves, former concentration camps and other sites from World War II Slovenia. Velikonja is a former prosecutor, former FBI agent, and worked as an investigator at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. See http://slovenianhistoricaltours.com for tour information, and http://planincapress.com to read her Legal Concept Papers about WWII.
