Bleiburg Repatriations - Number of Victims

Number of Victims

The modern-day consensus is that the number of deaths of the forced marches and in death camps rose to tens of thousands, and that it also included civilians. The exact number of those who met their death in Bleiburg is impossible to ascertain accurately. Generally, there are three approaches to the number of victims:

The historiographic investigations of scientists include:

• Croatian-American historian Jozo Tomasevich concluded that about 50,000 Croats and Bosniaks were killed by the Partisans.
• Slovene historian Jerca Vodušek Starič writes about the mass killings following liberation of Slovenia and Croatia in May 1945: "It is impossible to find out the exact number of those liquidated. Today the number reaches 14,531 Slovenes and an estimate 65,000 to 100,000 Croats (mainly the Croat Home-guard, which was the regular army and not ustasha forces). Among them were also civilians."
• Croatian historian Ivo Goldstein, in the chapter Raspad i slom NDH, Bleiburg i križni put of his book Hrvatska 1918. - 2008., says that contemporary documentation supports the existence of up to 116,000 NDH soldiers and up to 60,000 Croatian civilians in the main columns through Slovenia. In addition, on a separate route there were around 17,000 members of the Slovene Home Guard, the Serbian Volunteer Corps, Chetniks and some smaller NDH army units, together with around 10,000 Slovenian civilians. No precise assessment is made about the number of victims out of those totals.
• British political scientist D. B. MacDonald wrote a comprehensive root cause analysis of the inflated numbers:

By contrast with Jasenovac, however, most impartial historians converged on much lower number of dead, suggesting that Bleiburg was by no means as significant as the largest death-camp in Yugoslavia. ... Jasper Ridley attempts a more precise figure, although there is no way of knowing for sure. ... Of these, he noted that the Allies agreed to surrender 23,000 to the Partisans between 24 and 29 May - a mixture of Slovenians, Serbians, and Croatians. Reports from the time according to Ridley, indicate that not all the 23,000 were killed.

Estimates are also made based on archeological evidence from mass graves found in Slovenia. Investigations in potential mass grave locations that the Slovenian Commission on Concealed Mass Graves is investigating is around 581, as of October 2009. In April 2008, the Slovenian Presidency of the Council of the European Union organized the European Public Hearing on Crimes Committed by Totalitarian Regimes, and the resulting document included various research including that of Milko Mikola, indicating that the victims were executed without a trial.

Various authors base their claims on demographic calculations, accumulated eyewitness accounts, etc.:

• Petar Brajović, a Yugoslav general who participated in the battles around Bleiburg, claims in his book Konačno oslobođenje ("Final Liberation") published in 1983, that the Ustaše did not suffer serious casualties during capture, adding that artillery was not used. The work affirms that a grand total of 16 soldiers were buried in the local cemetery. It is also estimated that a figure of 30,000 soldiers (6,000 of them Chetniks) and 20,000 civilians were captured by the Partisan 3rd Army.
• In 1992, Croatian journalist Vladimir Žerjavić estimated the numbers of Croats and Bosniaks who were killed during Bleiburg massacre on the Austrian border and during the so-called Way of the Cross (Death Marches) in 1945 at 45,000 to 55,000.
• British journalist Misha Glenny wrote in his 1999 book: "As German troops streamed out of Yugoslavia the Croat fascist leader Ante Pavelić and 100-200,000 Ustaša troops and civilians set off for the Austrian border on 7 May 1945, with Partisan forces in hot pursuit. They got as far as Bleiburg, a small Austrian border town, before being surrounded by British troops to the north and Partisans to the south. With RAF Spitfires buzzing overhead, about 30-40,000 soldiers, including Pavelić, managed to disappear into the surrounding woods and then deep into Austria. But the remainder were taken prisoner by Partisan forces amid scenes of carnage. Some 30,000 Ustaše were killed on the four-day march towards the Slovene town of Maribor. On 20 May, in the Tezno trench, 50,000 Croat soldiers and about 30,000 refugees, mainly women and children, were executed over a five-day period.
• In his 2002 book, the former Yugoslav diplomat Cvijeto Job wrote how in the 1990s, reports in the independent press in Croatia stated that actual figures of killed at Bleiburg were about 12,000 to 15,000.
• In 2006, the association of Croatian Partisans published the book Bleiburg i Križni put 1945 ("Bleiburg and the Way of the Cross 1945"), edited by Juraj Hrženjak, which says that the majority of the victims in Bleiburg were killed by various means at the hands of Ustaše execution squads from elite formations like the Black Legion, who were treating all soldiers attempting to surrender as traitors and deserters for not fighting to the last. According to this research, a figure of between 12,000 and 14,000 people were shot after returning to Yugoslavia. Additionally, 20 individuals committed suicide and at least 1,500 concentration camp guards were shot near Maribor.