Between the star and the swastika
Subtitle: Slovene collaboration and national identity, 1941--1945
By: by Gregor Joseph Kranjc.
Published: 2006
Language: eng
Number of pages: 423
ISBN-13: 9780494158234
Description: Post-war Communist historians generally viewed collaboration in Slovenia during World War II as being limited to a relatively small number of treasonous and opportunistic bourgeois politicians and Catholic officials. According to this view, the vast majority of Slovenes firmly supported the Communist resistance. A rival interpretation was promoted by the thousands of anti-Communist Slovenes who fled the country after their defeat in the civil war that raged concurrently with the occupation. For them, the "collaborator" was in fact a martyr of the nation, who was forced unwillingly into cooperation with the occupiers in order to resist an undemocratic Communist revolution.  Between the Star and the Swastika challenges these two persistent historical interpretations of collaboration in Slovenia during World War II, which molded the events of the war years to fit a priori ideological positions. Collaboration in Slovenia was a much more complex and varied social and political phenomena than either the politicized left or right cared to admit. A detailed exploration of the actions, motives and ideology of collaborators, their attempts at resistance, as well as the popular acceptance of accommodation, reveals the complicated nature of collaboration. Acquiescence to the overwhelming power of the occupiers was not only the reaction of a narrow political clique. Many ordinary Slovenes accommodated themselves to the new rulers by serving within the military, administrative and economic machinery of the occupation. The motives behind collaboration ranged from selfish calculation, to the benign need to provide for one's family. Slovene collaborators promoted themselves and their policies of acquiescence as consistent with Slovene national and cultural values. In response, a fluctuating but nonetheless significant number of Slovenes believed that passivity rather than resistance was the best strategy in surviving the difficult years from 1941 to 1945. Collaboration was also not absolute. Some Slovenes resisted at the same time that they collaborated, or eventually abandoned collaboration outright at the opportune moment.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-06, Section: A, page: 2285.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2006.

Electronic version licensed for access by U. of T. users.