The expression "Germans" was used for those persons that belonged to the ethnic minority that was recognized in the period between both world wars. "Germans" are those people that used to live in the present territory of the Slovene Styria and Carinthia and partly Ljubljana with its surroundings and the Prekmurje region. Few in number, atomized, mostly non autochthonous and dynamic in terms of migration are the most typical characteristics of persons of Austrian and German origin in Slovenia and those whose mother tongue is German. These characteristics and the fact that over a half of the population that consider themselves German and Austrian moved to Slovenia, confirm that the majority of members of both ethnic groups can not be classified as remains of a German minority that lived here before the WW II nor as their descendents.
Until the middle of the last century, two national communities lived in Slovenia, Slovenes and Germans. The Slovenes, except in German agrarian linguistic pockets - in Kočevje and the Apače basin - which had for the most part been created at the time of medieval colonisation, were the predominant rural, and the Germans the urban population. From the major differences between "objective origins" and "linguistic affiliation" it could be concluded that a large part of the Slovene immigrants to the new urban environment were subjected to German economic and political pressure, and cultural and political propaganda, and was counted as German even in censuses and at elections, where it cast its vote for the German party. While national political attitudes still did not essentially influence the result of the population census of 1880 (of 1,186,393 local inhabitants present in Lower Styria, 67% were German speaking, and 32.7% Slovene) already in the census of 1890 one can observe a conscious attempt by German institutions to influence the final result. The largest reduction of the number of inhabitants with Slovene colloquial speech occurred during the census of 1910, when their share fell to 29.37%. In the latest census in 1991, 546 Germans and 199 Austrians (total 745) were registered. There were 1068 of those who are German - speaking but neither Germans nor Austrians, which makes a total of 1813. Thus the members of the German and Austrian ethnic groups in Slovenia represented 0.04 percent of the population, according to the 1991 census, while the share of those whose mother tongue is German was 0.08 percent. Those Germans and Ausrtrians currently living in Slovenia are mostly non-autochthonous.
The proportion of the German speaking population was not the same as the number of inhabitants with German national identity, but was significantly larger. According to the last Austrian population census of 1910, 103,949 persons lived in Slovenia who spoke German; most in Lower Styria (72,911), in Carniola (27,885), in the Carinthian Mežica valley (3,076) and around 2000 in Prekmurje. The most German speakers lived in Celje, Ptuj, Maribor, Slovenj Gradec, Muta, Sv. Lovrenc, Radlje, Slovenska Bistrica, Šoštanj, Konjice, Vitanje, Rogatec, Laško, Brežice, Ljutomer, Lenart in Slovenski gorice, Gornja Radgona and Ormož. Predominantly German municipalities prevailed only in the Apače basin on the southern edge of German ethnic territory. In Carniola, the largest population with "German colloquial speech" was found in the provincial capital, Ljubljana, and especially in the German agrarian linguistic pockets in Kočevje.
Post war reckoning with local Germans
The fate of the German national minority in Yugoslavia and "Germans" in Slovenia was undoubtedly marked by Nazism and the Second World War. The German national community had already begun to be nazified in Slovenia very early. Certainty about collective German guilt for the expulsion of Slovenes during the Second World War in Slovenia existed not only in the Communist camp, but also in the opposing camp and among the leadership of the Yugoslav resistance movement. During the war, the German national community in Slovenia thus further confirmed its role of national enemy in both camps, which, for historical reasons, it had already brought into the first Yugoslav state. Even during the war, therefore, the political camps in Slovenia were clearly committed to a post-war reckoning with local Germans, not because of their nationality, but because they were convinced that they must pay compensation for Nazi crimes committed, in line with the then allied policy towards the Nazi regime.
The political decision on what would happen to the German minority after the Second World War was adopted on the Yugoslav level either at the time of the second meeting of the Anti-fascist Council of the National Liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ) on 29 November 1943, or sometime between the end of the meeting and the beginning of 1944. At the start of 1944, in fact, the secretary of AVNOJ, Rodoljub Čolaković, visited the Scientific Institute of the Liberation Front and forecast the expulsion of Germans from the whole of Yugoslavia. The leadership of the national liberation movement considered it an act of justice, a retaliatory measure against a minority which wanted to destroy the Slav nations in Yugoslavia, despite having had a very good position in the country. In Slovenia, a proposal for the treatment of the Germans was already produced during the war in the Scientific Institute of the Liberation Front. They started from the premise that a historical opportunity would be provided to the Slovene nation at the end of the war "to get rid of its German minority on the northern border, which had caused so much misery before and during the war." The German minority was supposed to be punished because it had collectively followed Hitler's principle that every member of the German nationality, even if a foreign citizen, was bound to loyalty to the Reich and not the state in which it lived.
Avnoj Resolutions
The legal basis for the reckoning with the Germans was provided by resolutions adopted by AVNOJ during the war. After the war, these resolutions were given statutory basis and were also supplemented with additional instructions and explanations. The most important measure was the Decree on the transfer of enemy assets to state ownership, on state administration of the assets of absent persons and on the seizure of assets which the occupying authorities had forcibly estranged. The Decree was adopted on 21 November 1944 and provided the basis for economic measures against Yugoslav Germans. Much the same applies to the Agrarian Reform and Colonisation Act, which determined that cultivated land owned by the German Reich and members of the German national community, seized by AVNOJ decree of 21 November 1944, should be transferred to the land fund for agrarian reform and colonisation. According to the reasoning of this Decree "those citizens of Yugoslavia of German nationality who under the occupation declared themselves to be or were considered Germans, irrespective of whether prior to the war they appeared as Germans or were considered to be assimilated Croats, Slovenes or Serbs.
According to the instructions of the authorities, as members of the German nationality were to be considered Yugoslav citizens who, even in the pre-war Yugoslavia, were defined at the time of population censuses as members of the German nationality; members of the Kulturbund, everyone who voluntarily served in the German army, police or SS units, and citizens who co-operated with Germany during the war. Such a wide definition made it possible to include pro-German Slovenes among the Germans, i.e., those who were members of the Kulturbund and those in voluntary German service.
The other statutory regulation which the authorities used in the reckoning with the Germans was the Act on types of sentence passed by civilian and military courts. The wealthiest and most influential Slovene Germans, in particular, were sentenced by the courts to various high prison sentences, and almost all also to deprivation of civil rights and seizure of property. The amnesty adopted by AVNOJ on 5 August 1945, in addition to other exceptions, did not cover members of the Kulturbund, which meant that the amnesty did not cover the majority of those convicted who were of German nationality and their real or alleged Slovene adherents.
The most important law by which Germans were tried, especially those who had Yugoslav citizenship, was the Criminal Offences against the Nation and State Act. It was adopted by a temporary national assembly of the Democratic Federal Yugoslavia (DFY) on 25 August 1945 and applied until the adoption of the Penal Code of the DFY. It was aligned with the new Constitution in July 1946. Together with other provisions, this act gave a broad enough basis for the trial of Yugoslav Germans. In January 1951, the presidium of the People's Assembly of the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia (FLRY) issued an ordinance on the end of the state of war with Austria, and on 11 July, the presidium of the People's Assembly FLRY, on the government's proposal also adopted an ordinance ending the state of war with Germany. On the basis of this, they no longer used in connection with Germany and German citizens, legal regulations of the FLRY which "resulted from the state of war with Germany or were issued for the case of a state of war of the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia with a foreign force".
The Electoral Rolls Act took voting rights away from the German minority, and the Citizenship of the Democratic Federative Yugoslavia Act of August 1945 took other citizens rights from practically all Yugoslav Germans. This also applied to the "Volksdeutscher", of whom it was believed that "almost every last one was in the service of the occupier". The majority (between 15,000 and 16,000 Germans) fled even before the end of the war. How many "Volksdeutscher" lost their life during or after the war or experienced a different fate cannot be ascertained in total.
Nationalisation of German property
The new authority justified the need for nationalisation of "German" property on material, ethical-moral, national defence, ideological and economic-strategic grounds. In first place was compensation for damage caused on Slovene territory between 1941 and 1945. The Slovene Commission for War Damages, at the end of September 1946 ascribed to the German occupier 66.3% of all damage done, which amounted in total to 31.4 billion din or around 650 million dollars. In second place was retribution for the crimes committed and the human victims. Of 4433 persons who were charged with war crimes on our territory, 2062 had Austrian citizenship, while the German occupation authorities and police units were guilty of 41,699 deaths or missing persons. The third important circumstance was the economic power which the "local" Germans had and the danger that they would continue to dominate economic life and continue the "ruthless exploitation" of the Slovene population. Some ten thousand members of the German minority, together with the private companies they owned, had the largest and best farm and forest estates, large apartment and commercial buildings, financial institutions, shops, construction, wood processing and other factories and the majority share in the largest and most capital intensive industrial companies. The fourth important reason was the internal and external political circumstances because of which the new authority had to stop short of general nationalisation and gradually and circumspectly extend state ownership by confiscation and agrarian reform. In circumstances in which premature nationalisation would cause internal dissatisfaction and external problems, the seizure of "German" property did not carry the risks, and it also allowed the new authority to obtain resources which they needed for economic revitalisation even before international institutions began discussing war damages. By agrarian reform, it gained the farmers who represented the major part of the population.
The process of nationalisation of "German" property consisted of two periods. The first lasting for two or three months after the end of the Second World War, the Slovenes called the "period of protection" or "actual seizure of German property". For a host of reasons, there was no regulated and uniform confiscation of this property but the "self-initiative" of the civil, police and military authorities. A second period followed, which was called the "period of legal seizure of German assets" and its transformation into general people's property. Most "German" property had already been seized in Slovenia by the end of 1945. They began to arrange property relations between Yugoslavia and Austria and the Federal Republic of Germany by international agreements in 1951. It was most complicated in relation to Austria. The second agrarian reform of 1953, in fact, also embraced land of Austrian citizens, mainly in the border zone, so that the issue of ownership between Yugoslavia and Austria was only resolved in 1955 with the Austrian State Treaty. By it, Austria gave Yugoslavia "the right to confiscate, restrain or liquidate Austrian assets, rights and interests which it has in FLRY" and further undertook to pay compensation to its citizens for such assets. Two years later, the Federal Executive Council by decree "finally restrained and liquidated to the benefit of FLRY, Austrian goods, rights and benefits" which had become the property of FLRY on the basis of Yugoslav measures prior to 28 November 1943. In the instruction for implementing this decree which the State Secretariat for Finance issued in January of the following year, it was stressed in particular what should be considered Austrian assets. These were the assets of persons who were Yugoslav citizens on "6 April 1941 or when individual measures were issued" in which it was not important "whether at the same time they also held Austrian citizenship or obtained it later". Under the third point of this decree, "assets of persons who from 13 March 1938 (Anschluss day) to 28 April 1945 obtained citizenship of any third country" did not count as Austrian assets.
The largest share of seized "German" assets represented industrial companies, of which there were around 160 altogether, including the largest companies, but agricultural estates formed an almost equal share. German property was never assessed as a whole. According to calculations made in 1948, the approximate value of "purely German assets" in the country amounted to 202,5 million pre-war din.
Beneš Decrees
Similar decisions on the Germans to that which the presidency of AVNOJ adopted was also reached at approximately the same time in Czechoslovakia (CSR). They were called the "Beneš" decrees after the then president. The first is from 1944 and is known as the "Beneš ten-point plan", in which instructions were given for the emigration of the German population from 'reconstructed' Czechoslovakia. It found in the first point that in view of the legislation of the German Reich, all Germans in CSR were German citizens, so the Czechoslovak government retained the right to decide which Germans would obtain Czechoslovak citizenship and which not. The second point relates to the confiscation of property. It was decided that Germans of whom it was so decided must leave Czechoslovak territory within five years. It was also determined what they could take with them, for all other assets they would obtain only confirmation of the Czechoslovak government, since their assets would be used for reparation payments for compensation of damages. Germany was bound in the further provisions of this point to compensate Czechoslavak citizens for such damage. The third point determined among other things that no municipality in CSR could have less than 67% of inhabitants of Czech, Slovak or Ukrainian nationality. The fourth point determined that CSR was a national state in which members of minorities were assured all individual democratic citizen rights but were not treated as national or political collectives.