page_title: Gottschee
section_title: Second World War
hierarchical_section_title: Gottschee / History / Second World War
caption_attribution_description: English: The Province of Ljubljana within the borders of present-day Slovenia; showing Slovene territory divided between Nazi Germany, Hungary, and Italy, including the area already annexed by Italy with the Treaty of Rapallo and a silhouette of Gottschee area.
context_page_description: Gottschee refers to a former German-speaking region in Carniola, a crownland of the Habsburg Empire, part of the historical and traditional region of Lower Carniola, now in Slovenia. The region has been a county, duchy, district, and municipality during various parts of its history. The term often also refers to the entire ethnolinguistic enclave regardless of administrative borders. Today Gottschee largely corresponds to the Municipality of Kočevje. The original German settlers of the region are called Gottschee Germans or Gottscheers, and their German dialect is called Gottschee German or Gottscheerish.
context_section_description: After the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Yugoslavia initially remained neutral, but after a coup in 1941 adopted a staunch anti-Axis position. This led to a German and Italian invasion and occupation of the Kingdom. The Gottscheer were in the Italian occupation zone after Yugoslavia's surrender, which Hitler could not abide. Nazi racial policy dictated that these Germans had to be brought back into the Reich. The Nazis established a branch of the Resettlement Administration (Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, or "VoMi") at Maribor for this purpose.
  While some of the Gottscheer community leaders had embraced National Socialism and agitated for "assistance" and "repatriation" to the Reich before the German invasion in 1941, most Gottscheer had no interest in reuniting with Greater Germany or joining the Nazis. They had been integrated into society with their Slovene neighbours, often intermarrying among Slovenes and becoming bilingual while maintaining their Germanic language and customs since their arrival in the region in the late 14th century.
  However, propaganda and Nazi ideology prevailed, and the VoMi began planning the Gottschee "resettlement" (forced expulsion) from Kočevje, which was in the Italian occupation zone, to the "Ranner Dreieck" or Brežice Triangle in Lower Styria, the region now known as the Lower Sava Valley, located between the confluences of the Krka, Sotla, and Sava rivers.
  In November 1941, some 46,000 Slovenians in the Brežice Triangle region were forcibly deported to Eastern Germany for potential Germanization or forced labour in order to make an accommodation for the Gottschee "resettlers". Shortly before that time, a largely transparent propaganda effort was aimed toward both the Gottscheer and the Slovenes, promising the latter equivalent farmland in Germany for the land relinquished. The Gottscheer were given Reich passports and transportation to the Lower Sava Valley just after the forced departure of the Slovenes. Most Gottschee left their homes because of coercion and threats since the VoMi had a deadline of December 31, 1941 for the mass movement of both groups. Though many Gottscheer did receive farmland and households, these were of lesser quality than their own, and many were in disarray from the hasty forced expulsion of the Slovenians. Gottscheers were removed from a total of 167 settlements in 1941 and 1942.
  The eviction was organized as a series of 25 resettlement groups (German: Stürme), numbered Go 1 through Go 25 and named after major settlements:
  
  
   
   
   
   
  Although from the time of their arrival to the end of the war, Gottschee farmers were harassed and killed by Josip Broz Tito's Partisans, 56 of the Gottschee ethnic Germans, who did not want to leave their homes, decided instead to join Slovene Partisans and fight against Italians in Province of Ljubljana, together with their Slovene neighbours.
  The attempt to resettle the Gottscheer was a costly failure for the Nazi regime, since extra manpower was required to protect the farmers from the partisans. The deported Slovenes were taken to several camps in Saxony, where they were forced to work on German farms or in factories run by German industries from 1941 to 1945. The forced labourers were not always kept in formal Nazi concentration camps, but often just vacant buildings where they slept until the next day's labour took them outside these quarters. Toward the end of the war, these camps were liberated by American and Red Army troops, and repatriated refugees later returned to Yugoslavia.
  The fate of the resettled Gottschee was not much better, and in some cases much worse. At the end of the war the Nazi regime in the region evaporated as soldiers and administrators fled.
caption: A map of the Italian-administered Province of Ljubljana, with the Gottchee German ethnic enclave circled on the map.
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