page_title: Slovene Home Guard
section_title: Home Guard Police Corps
hierarchical_section_title: Slovene Home Guard / Establishment and operations / Home Guard Police Corps
caption_attribution_description: English: Sestri Šusterič Antonija in Frančiška, ustreljeni 9.8.1944 v Spodnji Hrušici od Črne roke
context_page_description: The Slovene Home Guard was a Slovene anti-Partisan military organization that was active during the 1943–1945 German occupation of the formerly Italian-occupied Province of Ljubljana. It consisted of former Village Sentries, part of Italian-sponsored Anti-Communist Volunteer Militia, re-organized under Nazi command after the Italian Armistice.
  It was closely linked to Slovenian right wing anti-Communist political parties and organizations, which provided most of the membership, taking assistance of Germans rather than the opposite. In the Slovenian Littoral, a similar but much smaller unit, called Slovenian National Defense Corps, more commonly known as the Littoral Home Guard was ideologically and organizationally linked to the SD. An even smaller Upper Carniolan Self-Defense, also known as the Upper Carniolan Home Guard was active in Upper Carniola between 1944 and 1945. All three "home guard" units were formed almost exclusively of ethnic Slovenes. At their peak, they had a combined membership of around 21,000 men, of whom there were 15,000 in the Province of Ljubljana, 3,500 in the Julian March and 2,500 in Upper Carniola. Its officers and language of command were Slovene.
context_section_description: The Nazis also established a Slovene Home Guard Police Corps, commanded by Lovro Hacin, the police chief in pre-war Ljubljana. The Corps had a secret branch, whose main task was to identify members of the Liberation Front and their sympathizers, as well as create lists of hostages to be shot in revenge for partisan actions. Beyond that, they spied on all members of the Provincial Administration, as well as on health care workers, teachers, university professors, industrial workers, bank employees, etc. in what became “a Slovene-administered police state."
  Working with the Home Guard Army and the Gestapo, the Police Corps jailed some 6,000 political prisoners in Ljubljana Province, one-third of them women, and many more female Partisan supporters were jailed as “prostitutes”. The police created lists of Slovene political prisoners to be sent to Nazi concentration camps, and assisted in their deportations. A separate, secret Police-associated organization, the Black Hand, was created to arrest, torture and kill suspected members of the Liberation Front, and they are estimated to have killed between 129 and one thousand Slovenes. As a result, in 1944, the anti-Partisan, Slovene intelligence officer, Colonel Vladimir Vahunik, who helped organize spy networks for the British in Slovenia and Croatia, wrote that the Police and Slovene Home Guard “have mopped up everything that could be suspected of leftist sympathies."
  In 1944, the Home Guard Police Corps rounded up the few remaining Jews in Ljubljana, and sent them to Auschwitz.
caption: Sisters Šusterič, murdered by the Police-affiliated Black Hand organization, near Ljubljana, on 9.8.1944
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