This book is dedicated to the two Marias. To my mother Maria Tschinkel who was the rock of our family and to Grandma Maria Ilc who taught me to read and showed me the way.

But it is especially dedicated to my wife Anne. Without her encouragement, patience and never ending support this book would not have been written.



Author’s Note:

Throughout the centuries, the formal names of places described in this book reflected the nationality of their rulers. Under the Romans Ljubljana, the capital of today’s Slovenia, was known by its Latin name Emona. The Germans under Charlemagne changed Emona to Laibach the name used by the governing Hapsburg Empire until 1918 when Laibach became the present day Ljubljana.

During their 645 year rule, the Hapsburg overlords added a German equivalent to all places under their control, including Slovenia, German being the administrative language enforced in all provinces of the Empire. The indigenous population everywhere was, however, free to use the ancient place-names among themselves in their daily lives.

In Slovenia, the duality of formal place-names flipped in 1918 when the administrative language became Slovene. In the ethnic enclave of Gottschee, where German place names had been used for centuries the habit continued. All residents were, however, required to use only Slovene in their dealings with the new State.

In this book, place-names are in Slovene followed by their German equivalent in parenthesis. The prime example is Grčarice (Masern), the village where I was born. During my time there we used only Masern while our Slovene neighbors, only a few kilometers away, called it Grčarice. Such duality was prevalent throughout the enclave.

I use the Slovene place-names in deference to the State and for the benefit of the new generation who are no longer aware of the now anachronistic German equivalent, found only on archaic maps and in buried archives. The German name in parenthesis is however, provided to accommodate those of my generation and their descendants who continue to cling to a period that was ended by the forces of racial nationalism.

John Tschinkel, Vero Beach, June 2012



Nationalism:

“A society united by a common error as to its origins and a common aversion to its neighbors”.

J.S. Huxley & A.C. Haddon.  “We Europeans” Oxford Encyclopedia 1940



Author’s Introduction

My writing is the result of a decade long effort to recount a period before and during WW II that ended in millions becoming homeless refugees in 1945 as the result of Hitler’s ingathering policy of  “Home to the Reich”. A small part of these millions were the descendants of people that had settled an empty forest in Slovenia in the middle of the 14th Century. Among them was the entire population of my village including my family and myself.

The book tells my story in two parts, each with its own beginning and end.

The first part looks back on my first years in a pastoral village into which I was born in 1931. A self-sufficient community for six centuries, it was insignificant in history but not to the inhabitants of this village at the edge of the world. As one of them, I was fortunate to be able, even after six decades, to recollect my first ten years there; to describe the daily and seasonal rhythm as well as the roles and actions of its main characters and protagonists. I write about the two sides of my family that were separated not only by a geographic and linguistic, but eventually also by a national divide. Also be able to describe my father’s house in which were born at least seven generations and in which, as a product of a racially mixed marriage, I lived through the racial tensions of that decade.

I also describe in detail the events that persuaded my village and the entire Kočevje (Gottschee) enclave to leave their homes and their lands and turn their backs on the soil from which they extracted a meager if adequate livelihood for six centuries; move to a place in a near yet foreign land from which all residents had been driven out to make room for us. I describe how the people of this enclave were persuaded to return “Home to the Reich” in 1941 during a war whose successful outcome, even at that time, was no more than an uncertain hope.

The second part describes the four years after the coerced resettlement in 1941 into another part of Slovenia from which the resident Slovene were expelled. It tells of a life of apprehension, unrest and terror and the tragic end of the entire community in the spring of 1945. All traumatic events in which I was destined to participate and only by the grace of providence managed to survive.

- - - -

The “Home to the Reich” program was part of the plan to enlarge the Third Reich, a plan in which German nationals living outside the boundaries of WW I played an important role. Most of these Germans, including the Gottscheer, lived in the lands that had been awarded to other Nations by the Versailles Peace Conference; Germans who, even in the 1930’s still resented their new subservient status and actively resisted the requirements of their new sovereign State. This resistance was mainly due to the mandated learning and use of another language; one that replaced German as the formal language of the State. This, above all else, was seen as the loss of the cultural marker that identified them as Germans, as part of a superior race.  Now no longer part of the ruling class, all were therefore hoping for an eventual return home. To reach its objective of enlargement, the Reich actively exploited this resentment and with an ever more radical interventionist agenda, the Reich worked actively to inflame their resistance into confrontation thereby getting the reason it needed to intervene.

On October 6, 1939 Hitler gave a speech at the Reichstag justifying his occupation of Poland as an effort to free the German nationals there from oppression. In this speech he also announced his intention to bring “Home to the Reich” all ethnic Germans still living outside the now expanded borders of the Reich. And on the following day he gave Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler the directive to perform the task. In 1940 the order was formulated into a set of ideological guidelines which specified that the non-German population in the recently annexed lands be removed and the land resettled with German nationals brought back “Home” from other parts of Europe. The guidelines also ordered that after their return, the former ethnic concepts of the ingathered be, “in the shortest time”, wiped out and that the new citizens submit fully to all requirements of the Reich.

The brunt of this “Ingathering” was to fall on the roughly ten million Poles in the annexed Poland, the main part of the grand plan to gain the “Lebensraum” for the Germans of the Third Reich. Nearly one million Poles were expelled, while 600,000 Germans from Eastern Europe and 400,000 from the Reich were settled in their place.

The “Home to the Reich” program was enthusiastically received by all those who wished to again become part of the German nation.  This was the case also with the Gottschee Germans. Here, the Reich counted on a group of Gottscheer leaders, young men who had been converted into fanatical adherents of National Socialism and who in 1938, with the full weight of the Third Reich behind them, took over the leadership of the enclave.

The Gottscheer of the 1920’s had, however, begun to accept their role as an ethnic minority subservient to the Slavic Yugoslavia. Cooperation with the new State, after an initial period of conflict and resistance, began to take hold. The State was, if gradually, again allowing the Gottscheer to function as a German enclave in their land. But the re-emergence of the new Germany under National Socialism soon brought this cooperation to an end and renewed confrontation, so essential to the plan of the Reich, was actively encouraged and financially supported after 1933.
 
On April 6, 1941, the Reich and its Axis allies invaded Yugoslavia which surrendered after sixteen days. This nation had emerged as a sovereign State from parts of the Austrian Empire and its creation had been sanctioned at Versailles. The conquered country was now divided among the Axis partners, except that Croatia became a Puppet State and Serbia a protectorate administered by the Reich. Slovenia, a former Crown land of the Austrian Empire and after 1918 a part of Yugoslavia, was split into two.  The northern half was annexed by the Reich. The southern part that also contained the Gottschee enclave, (until 1918 under the protective umbrella of Austrian aristocrats) was, for strategic reasons occupied by Italy.

This was a great disappointment to the youthful Gottscheer who had actively lobbied that the Enclave be attached to the Reich in the event of a takeover of Yugoslavia. Since this was not to be, these leaders were informed by Hitler personally of their “Return to the Reich” while simultaneously he also promised that the entire Gottschee population would be resettled as the closed ethnic group it had been for centuries. That the latter was false and entirely contrary to his policy was to become clear to them only after they accomplished their assigned mission. What was true, however, was that their destination in the “Reich” was not to be the annexed Poland but a part of the annexed Slovenia, only a short 70 kilometers away, a place from which the resident Slovene were to be expelled.

The assignment to the unknowingly betrayed Gottscheer was to now persuade their own people to resettle. Both the SS and their Gottscheer surrogates knew that coercive persuasion was required to get the population to agree.  They certainly would not agree to leave for a place from which the Slovene population had been expelled to make room for them. To succeed in their mission, the young Gottscheer fanatics, now fully committed to the objectives of the Reich, decided to keep the resettlement destination a top secret from the population.  At least until the deed was done.  With this decision the betrayed became the betrayers. They managed to keep the secret and with their effective tactics of persuasion during the remainder of 1941 the mission was successfully completed in February 1942. But soon after that, in line with ingathering guidelines, they were relieved of their former leadership role by their SS masters and sent off to the various fronts.

- - - -

After the resettlement, the book recounts life in the annexed Slovenia, in a village emptied of its rightful owners, a place full of ghosts. The former ethnic group was no more; the former Gottscheer, as citizens of the Third Reich, were now forbidden to speak their ancient dialect. Its small bourgeoisie was dispersed; its youthful ideological leaders stripped of their former role. All in line with the strict guidelines of Hitler’s “Home to the Reich” objective as was formulated by the SS staff of Heinrich Himmler.

Here we lived a life of diminishing hope, of terror and increasing fear. Of terror that came to us in the form of ever more frequent nightly raids from safe places by former residents or the partisans as had been promised us before we left the enclave. Then the dawning knowledge that the Reich that betrayed us was soon to collapse and with it our once hopeful future. And above all the realization that in only a short while we would become homeless refugees, providing we were to survive what was sure to come.

Survive we did, if just.  And homeless refugees we did become after seventeen terror-filled days and nights in May of 1945 on the way to our Exile in Austria and beyond. At first, amid the collapsing army of the Reich and its allies, all feverishly trying to outrun Tito’s Partisans. And after that in the terror caused by the non-too-gentle liberators who identified us as part of the former occupier and treated us accordingly.  But in spite of what at times seemed hopeless and seemingly insurmountable hardships, we did reach our exile after we crossed the border into Austria on May 25, 1945.

Ours was a destiny no different from that of millions of German nationals who became victims of a nationalism that evolved into the lethal version of the Third Reich. We all paid bitterly for succumbing to the siren song of “Home to the Reich”. And after its collapse, we were tarred as a willing part of the occupier and became targets and recipients of the rage of victors. As part of this rage, between 10 and 14 million Germans were expelled from countries of Eastern Europe, including 2.5 million from Czechoslovakia, 3 million from Poland and 500,000 from Yugoslavia. The expulsion had been authorized under the terms of Article XIII of the Protocol of the Potsdam Conference, which however, stipulated that the expulsions were to be conducted in a humane fashion which, particularly in the early phases, was far from being the case.

Other millions had fled in time to escape a similar treatment.  We, the former Gottscheer tried to do this, but our attempt was futile and far too late. 

* * * *

The Bells Ring No More, first published in Slovenia in  2010 under the title “Zvonovi so umolknili ”.  This English edition was printed in the United States by CreateSpace, an Amazon Inc. subsidiary.

Foreword: Peter Foulkes
Editors: Marko Vidic,  Anne P. Wall
Layout: Brigitte Tiszauer
Cover illustrations: Vesna Vidmar
Maps: Mateja Rihtaršič
Photographs: Norbert Černe, Tone Ferenc, Mitja Ferenc, Mirko   Oražem.  Archives of the Republic of Slovenia, Museum of Contemporary History of Slovenia, Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Germany, Archives Modrijan Založba d.o.o., Family Archives.

On the cover are the bells of the parish church of St. Primus and Felician in Grčarice (Masern)  in Slovenia. They fell to the ground when the church was destroyed by fire during the battle of September 1943.  Photo: Slavko Felicijan, 1943, Museum of Contemporary History of Slovenia)

Copyright © 2010 by John Tschinkel. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form whatsoever.

ISBN  978-1478274742

* * * *

The original English manuscript was translated into Slovene and published by Modrijan založba, d.o.o., Ljubljana, Slovenia. 

Editor: Marko Vidic
Translation by: Maja Kraigher, (English text), Nataša Peternel, (German quotes)

Copyright © 2010 Modrijan Založba, d.o.o. and John Tschinkel

CIP - The book is listed in the catalog of the Slovene National University Library in Ljubljana.



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