Bleiburg Repatriations - Coverage and Aftermath in Yugoslavia

Coverage and Aftermath in Yugoslavia

The Yugoslav Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief, Marshal Josip Broz Tito, repeatedly issued calls for surrender to the retreating columns. Following the surrender on 8 May of all German forces and their subordinate commands (which legally included all military formations of the NDH), Tito issued an address via Radio Belgrade on 9 May calling upon all armed collaborators to surrender, threatening "merciless response" from the people and the army should they refuse to do so. On 14 May Tito dispatched a telegram to the supreme headquarters Slovene Partisan Army prohibiting "in the sternest language" the execution of prisoners of war and commanding the transfer of the possible suspects to a military court.

You are to undertake the most energetic measures to prevent at all costs any killing of prisoners of war and of those arrested by military units, state organs or individuals. If there are persons among the prisoners and arrestees who should answer for war crimes, they are to be handed over immediately to military courts pending due process. —Marshal Josip Broz Tito, Chief of the Yugoslav General Staff and Prime Minister of Yugoslavia, telegram of 14 May 1945 to the Partisan command in Slovenia

Tito's actual intentions and responsibility for the actions of the Partisans at the end of the war are brought in question by his detractors, pointing to the fact that his direct subordinates included Kosta Nađ, the commander of the Yugoslav 3rd Army that spearheaded the liberation of the Yugoslav northwest, as well as Aleksandar Ranković who led OZNA, the Yugoslav secret police that organized mass executions of enemy combatants and internment as well as forced labor camps. In 1944, Tito had also founded an army unit called KNOJ, Korpus narodne odbrane Jugoslavije (People's Defence Force of Yugoslavia), whose explicit assignment was to "liquidate Chetnik, Ustasha, White Guard and other anti-people gangs".

Unlike many other operations of the Yugoslav Partisans, which have been described in the minutest detail, very little has been written on operations in Slovenia near the Austrian border during the week of 7–15 May 1945.

The events of the Bleiburg tragedy, much like a lot of other information about the Independent State of Croatia, were censored in Yugoslavia. The location of Bleiburg (outside of Yugoslav borders) became the main location where the victims of the entire process could commemorate their losses. The first Croats to return to the fields of Bleiburg came in secret in 1952, while regular annual visits began in the early 1960s.

The first Croatian religious leader to come to the site was Cardinal Franjo Šeper, then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, who paid a visit in 1977.

The leftovers of the Ustashe in the Croatian diaspora used Bleiburg as their central myth and the focus of collective resentment. Victim numbers were artificially inflated, just like those at Jasenovac in Yugoslavia, both of which contributed to an extreme polarization and promotion of hateful rhetoric devoid of historiographic value. Bleiburg was used as a tool for historical revisionism. David Bruce MacDonald wrote:

Inflating the numbers of dead at Bleiburg had several layers of significance. Firstly, it gave the Croats their own massacre at the hands of Serbs and/or Communists, which allowed them to counter the Serbs' Jasenovac genocide with one of their own. Secondly, it allowed Croats to distance themselves from the Serbs and the Communist regime that had carried out the massacres. They could portray Croatia as an unwilling participant in the SFRY, more a prisoner than a constituent nation. Thirdly, by suffering such a massacre, the Croats underwent their own 'way of Cross', as it was frequently dubbed in Croatian writings.

The 1986 book The Minister and the Massacres by Nikolai Tolstoy further publicized the issue, but it made various dubious claims about the repatriations that were roundly criticized by various historians and authors, although it also brought more attention to the more general matters of the persistent distortion of the story, and to the issue of historians trusting contemporary records and purported eyewitness.