Museum of Hostages

In April 1941 the German Wehrmacht occupied the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which was dissolved and partitioned between the Third Reich and the neighbouring countries. Slovenia in the north came under Italian, German and Hungarian administration. It was occupied by German troops and designated for »Germanisation«. The aim was to expropriate some 220,000 to 260,000 Slovenes and then force them out of their homes. The central transit camp for the »resettlement« of the Slovenian civilian population was set up in May 1941 in Reichenburg castle in the east of the country. Around 80,000 people were affected by the deportations. Just a few days after the occupation of Slovenia by Germany and its allies, the »Osvobodilna Fronta« (Liberation Front) was founded by communists, left-wing Catholics and bourgeois intellectuals and began to build up a partisan army. The German occupying forces controlling the Italian part of Slovenia from 1943 and also the Hungarian part from 1944 carried out horrific reprisal measures, going as far as to destroy entire villages. Italian and Hungarian occupation forces initially shielded Slovenian Jews from the German deportations to the extermination camps. However, Italy deported part of the Jewish population to the island of Rab on the Adrian peninsula in August 1943. Around 300 of these deportees fell into the hands of the SS a few weeks later when Rab was occupied by the Wehrmacht and they were deported to Auschwitz in March 1944. The SS subsequently deported the Slovenian Jews in the Hungarian zone from spring 1944 onwards. The German occupation of Slovenia continued until May 1945. As soon as the German occupation had come to an end communist partisan groups led by Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980) began to arrest and shoot tens of thousands of the members of units allied with the Germans (the so-called Home Guard) as well as ethnic Germans and ideological opponents. It remains unclear how many died as a result; 590 mass graves have been discovered up to present. Slovenia now became part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Monuments honouring the communist partisans were built throughout the country. A number of museums also remembered the expulsion of the Slovenes, the persecution of political prisoners and the terror during the German occupation. Survivors and the Jewish communities built a number of Holocaust memorials in the former Hungarian zone of occupation. Slovenia gained independence in 1991. There was no move to destroy the symbols of the communist culture of remembrance. The memorial site at the former partisan hospital »Franja« in Cerkno is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In 1991 the synagogue in Maribor, one of the best-preserved in the eastern Alps, became a regional museum and in 2011 it became the Center of Jewish Cultural Heritage Synagogue Maribor. At the entrance to the synagogue, there is a memorial to the murdered and expelled Jews of Maribor. Shortly after Slovenia gained independence, a parliamentary commission started to investigate the mass murders after the end of the war. A second commission began its work in 2004.