595 - 1809

The region of Slovenia now known as the county of Kočevje is reached via the road from Ribnica in a south-easterly direction. The western boundary of the county starts a few kilometers beyond Dolenja Vas, the last village in the fertile valley of the Ribnica plain.

At the end of the plain, the road climbs a hill and after a flat stretch, it descends into a narrow but broadening valley to continue toward Kočevje City, the center of this southeastern part of the country. From there it leads further east toward the border of the State of Croatia.  All along the way, small villages line either side of the road which runs through what was once known as the “Mainland” part of the former linguistic enclave of Kočevje or Gottschee in German.

Before the hill and a short distance beyond Dolenja Vas, the main road toward Kočevje has a branch to the right leading toward the village of Rakitnica.  And just beyond Rakitnica, the road, like the road to the “Mainland”, also climbs a hill which after a flat portion descends to Grčarice (Masern), the start of the “Hinterland” part of the former enclave. The Hinterland, like the Mainland is a series of small, forest enclosed valleys, except each at a higher elevation.
 
The two “Lands” are separated by a mountain range, on top of which are the remains of castle Friedrichstein, the administrative seat of the enclave until the middle of the 17th Century. But in the 1930's, this dividing range of hills was bridged only by a few narrow footpaths, used mainly by goatherds and poachers.

In both instances, the hills beyond Dolenja Vas mark the beginning of the former Kočevje (Gottschee) enclave with its center in the small city having the same name.  And over the centuries, ever since the arrival of the Germanic settlers in the late 13th and early 14th century, the hills were a natural boundary that encouraged a linguistic separation lasting more than 600 years. In this separation, Grčarice was culturally bound to the enclave.

The French, during their presence in Carniola, (1809 to 1813), reorganized the conquered lands into districts, cantons, townships and municipalities.  On 15 April 1811, they made the Gottschee area a canton including, among others, Ribnica, Dolenja Vas and Grčarice. A subsequent modification on 7 January 1812 established Ribnica as a separate canton under which were moved the municipalities of Ribnica, Rakitnica and Dolenja Vas. (Grčarice was placed under Dolenja Vas as a sub-municipality remaining as such until the present day).  With this re-apportionment, Grčarice was, at least administratively if not culturally, moved outside the enclave. 01. From then on, Grčarice and Rakitnica, the Slovene village on the Ribnica side of the divide shared the post office, the roads, the weather and the air of Dolenja Vas. Except that the air in Rakitnica lacked the heavy fragrance of the pines in the vast forest surrounding Grčarice which in springtime, when the sap began to flow, dominated our village.

Life in the villages on either side of the divide was identical, but it was the lack of a common language that kept them apart. On the Ribnica side of the hill, the language was Slovene, whereas on our side, only 4.5 kilometers away, the language was the ancient German dialect the settlers brought with them but no one outside the enclave understood.

The main reason for this linguistic separation was the way this part of Slovenia and the Kočevje forest was settled.

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Records show that the lands of present day Slovenia, the adjacent Carinthia and other surrounding areas were first settled by heathen Slavs who had arrived in the region from the East, where they owed allegiance to the Avar Khans. By the middle of the 6th Century, the area had become a powerful Slavic principality known as “Provincia Sclaborum”. This name is mentioned for the first time by Paulus Diaconus (720 – 799) who writes ca. 783 in his Historica Langobardorum, (Biblioteca Laurenciana, Florence), that in 595 AD, the Bavarian Duke Tassilo I. made an incursion into the “Provincia Sclaborum”.
 
Out of this “Provincia Sclaborum” emerged, in the early part of the 7th Century on the north side of the Karavanke mountains and beyond, the principality known as “Carantania” which included, roughly, the areas now known as Carinthia and Styria. And on the southern side of the Karavanke, in the Sava valley emerged “Carniola” the forerunner of the present Slovenia.  “Carniola was a further Slavic principality in the eastern Alpine area, along side that of Carantania”. 02

Štih, on pg. 39, also writes that it was Paulus Diaconus who first used the term “Carniola” in 740 AD and that another early use is in the Royal Frankish Annals dated 820 AD. Further; “all early medieval sources that actually mention Carniola, clearly distinguish between two separate Slavic communities north and south of the Karavanke Mountains”.

Due to continuing raids by the Avars deep into their territory, the princes of Carantania, in 745, asked their Bavarian neighbors for help. After that, they paid for such continuing assistance with progressively higher dependence with the ultimate result of losing their independence to the Bavarians in the later years of the 8th century. And when Charlemagne campaigned against the Avars in 791 and 799, Carantania was annexed to the Frankish Kingdom and placed under the dukes of Bavaria. According to Štih on page 40; “during the Frankish-Avar wars, Carniola recognized the Frankish overlords perhaps as early as 791”.
 
After 828, the Frankish concept of earldom was introduced into the Slavic lands. With this, foreign counts received land leases from the Frankish kings, thereby replacing the Slavic princes as rulers of the region. And from that time forward until the independence of Slovenia in 1991, the center of administrative authority was always located outside the territory of Carniola.
 
Peter Štih writes further: “In this way there was formed in the Slovene territories, until the end of the 11th century, the basis of an ownership structure which, however, was continuously changing. In this time there have been historical developments within the Slovene area which have been labeled Colonization, Germanization, Assimilation and also Feudalization of the community”. 03

The annexation of Carantania to the Frankish Kingdom effectively started the Christianization of the pagan Slavs. Up to that time ecclesiastic control over Carantania and Carniola was ambiguous, with both the Bishop of Salzburg and the Patriarch (bishop-prince) of Aquileia vying for control of the area. The Patriarchy solidified, gradually, its hold over the pagan Slavs in the later part of the 8th century and Patriarch Paulinus II (787-806), set up parishes and other administrative centers of the church. In the same century, missionaries also came from Ireland via the Bishop of Salzburg (himself Irish) to convert the Slavs and teach them to pray in their native tongue. But Charlemagne, who actively encouraged and supported Christianization of the heathen Slavs, eliminated competition for control by Salzburg and Aquileia by fixing responsibility for the area south of the river Drava to Aquileia and the northern part to the Bishopric of Salzburg in 811.
 
For two centuries after the death of Charlemagne in 814, the ongoing struggles within the Holy Roman Empire slowed the Christianization and less attention was paid to westernize the Slavs. And when in 936 Otto I. became the East Frankish (German) king, he recovered control over northern Italy, Lombardy and Aquileia and Pope John XII crowned him Emperor in 962.

Otto I enhanced the Patriarchy and granted it extensive political privileges and feudal rights.  With the Patriarch of Aquileia as Bishop-Prince, now fully in charge of Carniola (as well as the other parts of the present Slovenia), he established, in AD 1082, Ribnica (Reiffnitz) as a major parish of the Patriarchy in the region.  This made Ribnica responsible for the spiritual well being of all of Lower Carniola including the training of its priests. Ribnica was also the seat of the Counts of Ortenburg, major landowners in Lower Carniola. The ruins of castle Ortenburg still stand. Other local monastic and diocesan centers were established which injected western European culture into the Slovene population.

The settling of German stock among the Slavs started effectively after Otto I. became Emperor in 962. German settlers, mostly aristocratic and clerical lords with their dependent peasants began to arrive and lay claim to large parts of the land as their fiefs, with the resident Slavs becoming their serfs. The settling had, in part, the objective to flesh out the sparsely populated Slavic areas of Carinthia, Carniola and Styria with stock from the north and northwestern parts of the German Empire and thereby increase the tax revenue from the land. The use of German spread through the area and in the northwestern parts of the former Carantania became the prevalent language.
 
The arrival of German settlers continued gradually for centuries after the death of Otto I. in 974. And when the Habsburg prince Rudolf I became Holy Roman Emperor in 1273, all of the area once known as “Sclaborum” was divvied up into a hierarchy of fiefs each ruled by increasingly higher ranking German aristocrats.

In summary, the initial colonization of Lower Carniola was a gradual shift of Germanic stock from the northwest of Carniola and beyond to the end of the Ribnica plain and into the fringes of the Hočevje forest. The shift occurred at the beginning of the 10th.century and started to peak in the last half of the 13th century.

During this process, the already resident Slovene of Lower Carniola absorbed these new arrivals into their communities as they had absorbed the German settlers who had been arriving gradually during the past three centuries. The settlers also adopted the Slovene dialect as they became integrated into the local population.

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When his wars with Ottokar II of Bohemia ended in 1278, Rudolf I was weakened and he began to pressure his estates for additional tax revenues. This included the Counts of Ortenburg, one of the biggest land owners of Lower Carniola.

The pressure for additional taxes in the 13th century started the first wave of a greater settlement process in which German residents of upper Carniola and Carinthia were invited by the Ortenburg counts to move into the forest of Lower Carniola beyond the fertile area of the Ribnica plain. An increase in productivity and improved tax revenue was expected from a more densely populated land.

Limited settling of the area beyond the Ribnica plain had started in the early part of the 13th century, but mostly by Slovene from the Ortenburg domains of Lower Carniola. They cleared parts of the forest and started villages with Slovene names.

One such village was called Hoče, the area surrounding it – Hočevje. 04

To attract more settlers into the forest, an inhospitable place that until now only few had been willing to clear and wrestle a livelihood from its unproductive soil, Count Otto VI of Ortenburg promised personal freedom and ownership of parcels of land in return for an annual tithe. The promise to become free men, free of the bonds of serfdom was a powerful attraction for many near and far away.  And the prospect of becoming landowners enticed the peasants of the Germanic kingdom to travel great distances to reach their promised land.

The resulting first wave of settling of the still mostly empty Hočevje forest started at the end of the 13th century. The colonizers came from Tyrol, Carinthia and other parts of the German kingdom. They came in groups large enough to be linguistically self-sustaining at their destination and as such were able to absorb the thinly settled Slovene already living in the forest. These earlier arrivals had done some of the initial clearing and thereby provided the basic settlement features for the new waves of settlers. In addition the hills, isolating the newly expanded settlements from the Slovene of the Ribnica plain, assisted the separation by providing a natural barrier to being linguistically absorbed into the Slavic (Slovene) language.

The certainty that the settling of the forest started near or at the end of the 13th century comes from the fact that a resident chaplain was appointed to the chapel of Mahovnik (Mooswald) in 1339, just on the inside edge of the forest along the road to the inner “Mainland”. Count Otto VI of Ortenburg had requested permission for this appointment, permission he received in 1339 from Bertram, the then Patriarch of Aquileia.

It appears that in the past few decades preceding the request, the population of Mahovnik and its surroundings had grown to a number where the Ribnica parish could no longer effectively tend to the spiritual needs of the parishioners living there. Even if only thirteen kilometers from Ribnica, Mahovnik was too far away for parish priests to travel to their flock on the marginal roads of those days.

Twenty four years later, in 1363, the count also received permission from Patriarch Ludovicius I, the second successor to Bertram, to elevate five additional villages to parish status. The villages “Gotsche, Pölan, Costel, Ossiwniz et Gotenitz”, were to be under the main parish of Ribnica, the Archdiocese of Lower Carniola since 1082. Permission from the Patriarch came in a letter dated 1 May, 1363 and it is in this letter the name “Gotsche” (the Slovene Hoče) appears for the first time.

As the new arrivals moved into the thinly settled villages and gradually absorbed its Slovene local population, they also changed the village names to their German equivalents. The Slovene Hoče became Gotsche, as spelled out in German by the Patriarch in 1363. Phonetically the two names are nearly identical.  The area surrounding Gotsche became Gottschee while the Slovene changed Hočevje to Kočevje, a minor change. Other such examples exist. On the other hand, Grčarice became Masern, phonetically different but in their distinctly different language each describing a piece of gnarled wood.

It is of interest to note that the early German settlers did not come to the forest as “Gottscheer”; the name having developed from the Slovene “Hočevje” only after their arrival. The proof of this and the fact that the Gottscheer are of a mixed racial make-up is clearly documented by Erich Petschauer who cites Professor Balduin Saria as his reference. 05

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The main part of the first wave occurred in the middle part of 14th century.  This was when large groups of self-contained settlers started to arrive from the Germanic kingdom further to the west and the north. In his “Glory of the Duchy of Carniola”, Baron Johann Vajkard Valvasor (1641-1693) the historian of the 17th century, a Carniolan nobleman of Italian origin, scholar and member of the Royal Society in London, reports on one such group.

Valvasor writes that a group of settlers, 300 men with their families, passed through Ljubljana in the middle of the 14th century on their way toward Ribnica, Dolenja Vas and the forest of Lower Carniola. Valvasor claims he found this information in the archives of Skofja Loka (Bischoflak) near Ljubljana. The entry into the archives was made by Bishop Thomas Hren in 1590 who stated that he found the information in the diary of Bishop Paul who lived in Ljubljana in the 14th century and had made the entry in 1363.

According to Bishop Paul, this group came from the Franconia/Thuringia part of the German Empire of Charles IV.  Friderick, one of Otto Ortenburg's relatives, who was aware of Otto's difficulty in attracting settlers to the forest, appealed to Emperor Charles IV for help. Charles, who had recently subdued the peasant rebellion led by Günther Schwarzenburg, agreed to make available to Friderick 300 of the vanquished and their families instead of punishing them for their rebellion. Friderick sent the rebels to Lower Carniola where Count Otto VI had promised to make them independent landowners of one full unit of land (Hube) in return for clearing the forest.

They made their way there in oxen drawn wagon columns via Carinthia, Upper Carniola, Ljubljana and Ribnica, the seat of the Ortenburg. The journey was long and arduous particularly since throughout Carniola in 1349 raged a cattle plague which forced the weary travelers to avoid the established and well traveled normal routes. 06

Since the offer of one Hube (Hide in English) per family was available to all, it is reasonable to assume that not all those who settled in the forest came from this group. Others may have come from elsewhere in similar or smaller groups.

The German dialect these waves brought with them thus became the language of the ethnic enclave of Kočevje or Gottschee, which was to remain a linguistic island until the early part of 1942. The inhabitants preserved this dialect while being surrounded by Slavs ever since their ancestors were invited by the Ortenburg to cultivate the forest.
The Gottschee dialect with its Germanic origin has very little in common with the present day German language. In the 19th century, after public schools were established, it even had its own adaptation of an old Germanic alphabet.  A modern German would not understand it and no one but a Gottscheer could read it. Conversely, the average Gottscheer villager did not know German until he learned to read. The dialect has no commonality with the Slovene language which has a Slavic as opposed to a Germanic base. It is, however, the only cultural marker that, over the centuries, differentiated the Gottscheer from the surrounding Slovene; all other cultural characteristics being similar, if not identical.

In Grčarice we spoke only Gottscheer and the Slovene inhabitants of the adjacent Rakitnica, 4.5 km away and other villages west of the hill had, except for a few expressions, little knowledge of what we were saying. Likewise, at least until after WWI, when the Gottscheer had to learn the new official State language, few Gottscheer understood them. Of interest, however, is the fact that more than half of the names of the inhabitants of Rakitnica and many in Dolenja Vas have names which are phonetically equivalent to those within the Enclave including Grčarice.
  
There were later settlement phases.  One labeled as the second wave was from 1547-1618, when the Gottschee leasehold was given to the Croatian Count Blagay. He brought with him Croatian settlers who were absorbed into the Gottscheer German villages, especially in the eastern end of the enclave. Also, some of the Turks who invaded Carniola over the many decades left behind pregnant women. Names abbreviated from the Turkish Skenderbeg hint of this.
 
The 20th century Gottscheer of the enclave resisted the notion of a mixed origin because they wished to preserve the illusion of being of German nationality as opposed to a mixed racial makeup of German, Slovene and Croatians. This illusion began to develop in the 19th century when the Slovene pressed the imperial monarchy ever more strongly for autonomy, self-rule and freedom from the germanization drive of the Austrians. The Gottscheer, in turn, sensed in these Slovene aspirations a threat to their presumed ethnic German identity, an illusion reinforced by the radical nationalism of Hitler’s Germany.

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A personal experience made me aware of the complex origin of the Gottscheer and their dialect.  On a tour of Greece with my wife in 1972 we stopped overnight in Naplion on the Peloponnesian peninsula. At breakfast, with no empty tables available, I sat down at a table already occupied by an elderly couple speaking French. Attempts to communicate with my limited French soon stopped but resumed when my wife joined us shortly thereafter. Since she speaks French fluently, I resigned myself to listen only.

I asked her to inquire where they were from.  When I heard Strasbourg in Alsace, France - in the 13th century part of the Germanic kingdom. I addressed them in German to which they responded fluently and we chatted happily in that language for a while.

I asked how they communicate among themselves at home. Oh, we speak in a very old German dialect, which is now dying out. When I asked them to demonstrate, they started to speak a language virtually identical to that of the Gottscheer and when I replied likewise they were as astonished as were my wife and I. This incident confirmed that my forefathers had come to Grčarice and the enclave from far away indeed.

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While in the existing villages outside the forest the German language or dialect of the new arrivals during the initial settlement phase (10-13th Century) was absorbed into Slovene, the phonetics of the family name of the arrivals remained unchanged. Conversely, the groups settling the forest during the 14th Century were large enough to be linguistically self-sustaining and able to absorb the thinly settled already present Slovene into their German dialect. And since the offer of land was available also to settlers already living in the area outside the forest, residents of other parts of Carniola, of both Germanic and Slovene origin, also took up the offer to resettle into the forest. They too were absorbed.

It is this phonetic commonality of family names that preserves the evidence of the mixed origin of people on both side of the divide since in either language, the pronunciation of the name remained the same. This is evidence that the intermingling of Slovene and German residents and their integration into the respective communities inside and outside the enclave   started already in the 10th century and continued long after the first wave of settling the forest in the 14th century was concluded.

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Austria acquired Carniola in 1335 and it is from this date forward that the long identification of Carniola with the Habsburgs of Austria begins. Carniola became Krain, Upper Carniola Oberkrain and Lower Carniola Unterkrain. Austrian administrators referred to the Slavic inhabitants of Krain as Krainer or Windische. Under the Austrians Gotsche became Gottschee, a market village in 1377 and in 1393 an independent parish but subservient to Ribnica. In 1471 the market town of Gottschee, was granted City status. The spiritual control over the land, however, remained in Aquileia until the establishment of the archbishopric in Ljubljana in 1461.

Throughout the centuries after 1335 until 1918, the “Amtsprache” (administrative language) of Carniola/Slovenia was German, the language of the Austrian empire, the language of the educated and upper classes. However, in the villages in and outside the enclave, all communication was in the local language, be it Gottscheer or Slovene or any other. Spelling did not play a role throughout this time, since most Slovene and Gottscheer learned to read and write only after the establishment of state primary schools in Carniola during the last half of the 19th century, long after the universal education act of Maria Theresa in 1774. “The population as a whole had no education and, prior to the introduction of the mandatory schooling law of 1775, the majority in the land had no knowledge of how to read and write.” 07

All official records were in German until the 19th century and Slovene family names were spelled to fit the German alphabet. It was only after Slovene was formalized that their phonetic names were gradually absorbed into the spelling of the Slovene language at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. German speaking residents living in predominantly Slovene speaking areas kept the German spelling of their names. The phonetic names of the residents within the enclave however, be they of German or Slavic origin, had already been taken into the long established German spelling and remained as such.  On either side of the linguistic divide, the absorption and integration of the phonetics of the names into the spelling of the respective German or Slovene language made the separation complete.

One example among many is that of my Slovene grandmother whose married name was Ilc. I traced this name and lineage to 1615. But her maiden name was Zbašnik, in German spelled as Sbaschnig. It was pronounced Zbashnig on either side of the ethnic divide.
 
But in 1941 there were also four land-owning Gottscheer families called Sbaschnig in Grčarice (Masern). Their names appear for the first time in the Therezijanski Kataster of 1752. But there were Sbaschnigs in Dolenja Vas before then.  Likewise, there are many present-day Slovene and Gottscheer-Germans with my family name, pronounced in all languages as Chinkel. But it is spelled Činkel in Slovene and Tschinkel in German.

And in the Slovene Rakitnica, four kilometers away, more than half of the inhabitants have names which are phonetically equivalent to those within the enclave, including those in Grčarice. Records in the National Archives of Slovenia verify this.

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1809 – 1918.

Cooperation between the people on either side of the ethnic divide was unhindered by nationalistic awareness until the start of 19th century. Until then the Slovene and Gottscheer lived peacefully side by side, each loyal to the Kaiser and the Austrian monarchy. The first disruption to this peaceful coexistence between the evolved and accepted language separateness surfaced with the arrival of the French under Bonaparte in 1809. Already years before, the French revolution in 1789 and the subsequent Napoleonic wars brought unrest and revolts to other parts of Slovene lands. 08  Consequently, the farmers were not hostile to the French when they arrived in 1809.

The Gottscheer of the enclave, however, did not welcome the French. They viewed them as foreign invaders and as loyal supporters of the Vienna monarchy they were duty bound to resist.  Already in 1797, the order came from the Austrian military command that fortifications were to be erected on the boundary to the enclave   between Ribnica and Kočevje. Five strongholds were erected by 4,295 local laborers of which 2,892 were Gottscheer at a total cost of 650 Florin. The entrenchments were  be manned by the Gottscheer militia to prevent the French from entering the enclave. 09

In May 1809 the French occupied Ribnica and Kočevje. The fortifications manned by the Gottscheer militia did little to stop them from occupying the enclave.

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Some Slovene intellectuals, among them a handful of Slovene nationalists, however, welcomed the French as liberators from the Austrian effort to Germanize the Slavs of Carniola. To this writes Joachim Hösler: “So kursierte bei vielen Intellektuellen zu Begin de 19. Jahrhunderts die diffuse Idee einer illyrisch-sudslawischen Einheit und Autochtonie. Diesem Geschichtsbild suchten die Franzosen entgegenzukommen” (There circulated among the many intellectuals at the beginning of the 19th century the diffuse idea of an illyrian-southslavic autonomous union. This perspective the French attempted to accommodate.) 10

Consequently, Napoleon Bonaparte in 1809 caused the formation of the “Illyrian Provinces” which the French had deliberately designed to make into a Slovene national state. (These “Provinces” encompassed part of Carinthia and Tyrol, Carniola, Gorizia and Gradisca, Krain, Istria including Trieste, Croatia south of the river Sava, Dalmatia and Ragusa).
 
C. A. Macartney in The Habsburg Empire comments on this:

“... they [the French] had drawn up blue-prints for an advanced system of general education with an elementary school for boys in every commune and one for girls in every Canton, twenty five gymnasia and a lycée and a High School of university standing in Ljubljana. Instruction was to be in the ‘local language’ in the elementary schools; in the secondary and higher schools, partly in that language, partly in French and Italian.” 11

Macartney continues:

“There had been, as we said before, no instruction at all in Slovene, and very little in any other language (when they [the French] took over Carniola and Istria, where they found that only 3,000 of the 419,000 inhabitants of the two lands had attended, or were attending, school) and hardly any printed literature in Slovene existed except one or two devotional books including a Bible, which had been printed in Germany in the sixteenth century.”

Macartney continues by writing that after the French left:  “.... the Austrians in 1817 restored the status quo in almost every respect, including instruction in German in the schools. However, the French had left behind them a new interest and pride in their nationality among the younger Slovenes, and, incidentally, had settled what had until then been an undecided question, what the Slovene language was to be. They [the French] had at first thought of making the language of instruction and public life the Što dialect of the Southern Slavs spoken in Ragusa [Dubrovnik]. But a Slovene philologist named Jernej Kopitar, the Keeper of Slavonic Books at the Court Library in Vienna, who was generally regarded as the leading authority on the subject, persuaded them to adopt the ‘local language’. [Kopitar had published the first grammar of the Slovene language in 1809 which contributed to the ongoing development of the Slovene language.]  Later intellectuals thought of reversing the decision, but were never able to do so and Slovene remained thereafter a separate language; it may even be true to say that the decision settled the question whether the Slovenes were to remain a distinct people”.

The French encouraged the use of the still evolving but not yet fully formalized Slovene as the official language.  Maréchal Marmont, the Governor General of the Illyrian Republic told a Slovene deputation that: “the Slovene do not know how to defend and love their language and because of the German colonizer, they learn his language and neglect their own.  It is therefore not surprising that they are an awkward, subservient nation, which the colonizer does not respect”. 12

But some Slovene were not discouraged either by the above remark or the Austrian restoration of the status quo. “In spite of all this, the establishment of the ‘Illyrian Provinces’ awakened great hopes in some members of the Slovene “Rebirth” movement in Krain.” 13

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The Gottscheer in the enclave, however sensed that their ethnic independence was, for the first time in centuries, actively threatened by a Slovene state based on the projected French reforms. Such a state would grant them only a dubious minority status, their autonomy no longer assured by the protective power of the Austrian nobility.  They decided to resist.

This resistance was brought into the open by the oppressive economic and political policies of the occupier which rapidly alienated the Slovene aristocratic and bourgeois upper classes as well as the rural population.  “The French especially disappointed the farmers whose lot had with certain measures, actually been improved.” writes Peter Vodopivec on page 228. However, on July 7, 1809 the French imposed an annual tax of 15,260,000 Florin on the Illyrian Provinces which included Lower Carniola. Part of this levy fell on the Gottschee enclave. On 10 September 1809, six hundred landowners, mostly Gottscheer who refused payment, assembled in the square of Gottschee town to protest. However, when faced by a battalion of heavily armed French soldiers commanded by General Souchy, the protesters dispersed. The Gottscheer persisted with their rebellion and started an enclave-wide general uprising. In this process, they killed many of the French. They also killed Venceslav Gaspari, the French district commissioner of Novo Mesto and threw his dismembered body into a crevasse.

The French reacted severely by killing many of the rebels, burning a number of villages and parts of the city. They captured the organizers of the rebellion and executed five of the main leaders in the town square on October 18, 1809. After that, the hopeless resistance to an overwhelming opponent crumbled and a systematic mop-up campaign by the French brought the ill fated uprising to its inevitable end. 14

But with their rebellion in 1809, the Gottscheer announced for the first time, that their aspirations were different from those of the Slovene.
 
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After Austria regained control of Slovenia, German was reestablished as the “Amtssprache” of Slovenia. While, as before 1809, basic primary schooling could be conducted in Slovene, knowledge of German was essential and required for communicating with provincial or municipal officials. All higher education was again exclusively in German and taught by mostly Austrian professors as it was before the arrival of the French. All civil, administrative and governmental functions were again conducted in German and all official and formal documents had to be in that language. The Austrian administration was staffed mainly by Austrians or Germanized Slovene who made sure the rules of the Habsburg Monarchy were adhered to and enforced.

Before and after Napoleon, all villages and towns everywhere in Slovenia had dual names, the German being the official administration version. The original Slovene names had, over the centuries, been given a German equivalent which was used in all “official” documents and communications. The German version for Grčarice was Masern, Kočevje was Gottschee, Gotenica was Göttenitz, Dolenja Vas was Niederdorf, Ribnica was Reifnitz, Ljubljana was Laibach, etc. as it had been before 1809. Among themselves, the locals used their own version, be it either Slovene or German.  However, mail addressed for delivery to Grčarice, or any other place identified by its Slovene name, was recognized only at the discretion of the post master.

Before and again after Napoleon, the germanization of the Slovene was according to the Imperial politics of Austria.  In this, the dominating position of the German language in the governing institutions and academia promoted the desirability of a German identity. Such identity automatically indicated a higher education including the cultivation of cultural values and liberal thought. All Slovene could attain a level of Germanness through proficiency in the German language. Fluency in German was vital for financial and social achievement and a crucial prerequisite for any upwardly-mobile Slovene seeking higher social status in government service or in commercial and academic circles. Austrian as well as Slovene liberals all accepted the notion that the better educated Slovene identify themselves as Germans and thereby become more successful. Language was no longer only a means for communication but it had become a status symbol and proof of being part of the elite. However, even in the middle of the 19th century, it was mostly the elite Slovene, educated in German secondary or higher schools that knew how to read and write even though more and more of the country population was becoming literate. Aggressive germanization, however, evolved into the politics of the Austrian ruling parties only in the second half of the 19th century.

Despite their frequent opposition to enforced policies, the Slovene Liberals had never questioned the legitimacy of the Monarchy. They viewed the central state as an instrument which might help them transform Slovene society into one equaling that of the German, albeit as Slovene nationals.
 
The exposure to national independence introduced by the French, however, caused progressively more of the educated Slovene to forgo their being accepted by the Austrian dominated elite and turn instead to the emerging national awareness and politics at home. Germanization, for centuries a path to class status and financial achievement, gave way to increasing political mobilization. The Slovene activists, defining national identity as more significant than class position and acceptance by the Austrian administration, argued that occupational, business or bourgeois interests had to be secondary to the emergence of the Slovene nation. And these nationalists worked hard to prevent the Slovene from continuing to serve Austrian political and class interest.

After the French left and Slovenia was restored to Austria, the Austrians hardened their opposition to the emerging nationalism, not only in Slovenia but throughout its multiethnic empire, leading to the revolutions throughout their lands in 1848.  In Slovenia, the special relationship between state institutions and the now suspect German-speaking Slovene bourgeoisie started to deteriorate and even some Slovene who had graduated from Austrian universities were excluded from civil service jobs. One example is France Prešeren, a university trained lawyer, who in the years 1832-1845 was denied a license to practice five times for this very reason.  Prešeren, (1800-1848) who became Slovenia’s greatest poet, had expressed his country’s desire for national and political independence while advocating equality and friendly coexistence among nations. He complained bitterly that German was privileged in contrast to Slovene, but, nevertheless, he had no aversion against the Germans.

The position of the Slovene nationalists was in opposition to the liberal elite who, like their liberal counterparts in Austria championed a more gradual evolution of a Slovene state, albeit within the structure of a united Germany. 15 Such a Germany was contemplated in Frankfurt in 1848 as a result of the uprisings throughout Europe mainly due to the suppression of liberal thinking that was sparked by the French revolution. This united Germany was to include the states of the Austrian empire severely shaken by the uprisings that forced Emperor Franz Ferdinand to abdicate on December 2, 1848 in favor of his eighteen year old nephew who became Franz Josef I, and caused Prince Metternich to flee to England.  Metternich, as the foreign minister of the empire, had been the architect of the post Napoleonic policy which was attempting to restore the old order and suppress the emerging nationalism now spreading throughout Europe.

The Gottscheer appeared to see in this spirit of equality and friendly coexistence, as advocated jointly by the Slovene and Austrian Liberals, a continuation of their comfortable status quo. They found their champion in Count Anton von Auersperg, a respected poet known as Anastasius Grün who represented the Slovene at the Frankfurt meeting. Grün, like his friend Prešeren, believed that the Slovene would be able to develop better and fully within the framework of united Germany, a position rejected by the Slovene nationalists advocating independence.

The Frankfurt attempt to produce a unified Germany failed mainly due to the reluctance of Austria to surrender its centuries-old dominant position as an empire.  Greatly strengthened, the Slovene nationalists saw in this Austrian stance an affirmation of their politics and were, therefore, driven to pursue even more vigorously their quest for independence. And in the decades following 1848, these nationalists made huge inroads into the Austrian controlled civil service and commercial interests, especially in the larger Slovene cities where the German nationals dominated. This effort was made easier by an imperial government now severely weakened by uprisings and the push from the many non-German parts of its multiethnic empire for self rule and independence. Assisting this weakening was the struggle of the Austrians to prevent the unification of Italy, the independence drive of Hungary and the war with the unified Germany of Bismarck in 1866.

The enclave, however, saw in the erosion of power of the dominating Germanic bourgeoisie in the large cities of Slovenia a danger to their own regional control.  After the failure of Frankfurt and until WWI, the Gottscheer made every effort to strengthen their ties to the monarchy. Much help in this came from the Auerspergs who were close to the center of imperial control in Vienna and who, as the largest landowner in the region, had their own private reasons for preserving the enclave. They were the recipients of all the taxes collected there. The Gottscheer became progressively ever more aware of their increasing vulnerability as a weak minority within a strengthening Slovene majority, itself a subordinate minority within Austria. Already in 1854, the Slovene provincial administration succeeded in re-assigning two linguistically mixed border areas of the Gottschee district to the fully Slovene districts of Novo Mesto and Črnomelj.
 
The efforts of the Auerspergs in Vienna on behalf of the Gottscheer did not, however, go unnoticed by the emerging Slovene nationalists and the divisions, planted as seeds by the French during their tenure in Slovenia, began to grow into a progressively increasing polarization throughout the 19th century. This not only between locals at the linguistic boundaries of the enclave, but more importantly, also at the municipal and higher state levels where more and more of the Germanic administrators were being replaced by Slovene under whom the Gottscheer were beginning to receive less and less of the formerly preferential treatment.
 
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The Gottscheer in the enclave reacted to the growing power of Slovene nationalism, the increased settling of Slovene within the enclave and the resulting erosion of their privileged minority status by actively seeking funds to build private schools in the enclave. These schools were to teach the German language, and thereby help to maintain their linguistic identity, the only marker that separated them from their Slovene neighbors. While very limited elementary education was available through the church since 1690, the first German private district school was opened in 1818 and by 1856 another eleven such private schools had opened in private houses. But attendance at these village schools was extremely low, the reasons being the lack of teachers and the tuition charged the parents to cover salaries and supplies.

This changed when the Educational Reform Act, decreed by Empress Maria Theresa in 1774, became effective as the Universal Education Law in 1867. This law required school attendance of all youths starting at age six for six years (6-12) throughout the multi ethnic lands of her Empire. The costs were to be borne by the local community.

The Imperial Primary Education Act of 1869, created a uniform basis for the entire system and compulsory school attendance was increased from six years to eight years. (6-14). The control of the schools until then in the hands of the Church was taken over by each land or province of the multi-ethnic monarchy and every local community had to erect and maintain public elementary schools and attendance was required. Privately funded schools were accorded the validity of public primary schools and certified, providing they fulfilled the legal requirements.

But the Act of 1869 brought with it further polarization in ethnically mixed areas throughout the Austrian monarchy including Slovenia. Since the language of instruction was required to be that of the nationality prevalent in the school district and since private schools meeting the legal requirements were allowed, private organizations with a nationalistic agenda, interested in preserving or absorbing ethnic minorities became quickly established. These organizations collected funds for building private schools in what they considered critical areas to promote their nationalistic ideology.  In the past the Church had no such nationalistic objectives.
 
One such organization was the “Deutscher Schulverein” (German School Association). This private association was established in Vienna in May 1880 to assist ethnically mixed areas with starting and operating German education and thereby prevent further erosion or loss of the “German character” of communities, such as Gottschee, by assimilation into the surrounding, non-German majority.  This highly nationalistic agenda was in reaction to the dwindling control of the Germanic Austrian monarchy over its many multiethnic parts, Slovenia included.

According to “Mittheilungen des Deutschen Schulvereins, # 5, November 1882”, pg. 1, the motto of the Schulverein in soliciting funds for its objective was: “we will never accomplish our mission until all social strata of the people take an active part, until those who inhabit the German palaces, as well as those who inhabit German peasant huts, make a claim to their Germanness”. 16

The drive of the Schulverein to collect funds for this objective was highly successful.
The appropriate behavior for prevent assimilation and maintaining Germanness was embodied in the “Ten Commandments of the German Farmer”:
 
01.  Thou shall honor thy mother tongue and believe that all Germans are thy brothers.
02.  Thou shall read only newspapers sympathetic to the German cause.
03.  Thou shall honor Emperor Franz Joseph as your liberator and hang his picture in your living room.
04.  Thou shall sign no promissory note.
05.  Thou shall marry thy daughter only to a German.
06.  Thou shall not go to court over every small issue.
07.  Thou shall make certain that thy children diligently attend school.
08.  Thou shall not complain about bad times but shall bravely persevere.
09.  Thou shall be a good Christian, but never fall into excessive piety.
10.  Thou shall join the German School Association.

The Schulverein enabled the establishment of German private schools throughout ethnically mixed areas of the Austrian Monarchy, including Slovenia.  In this manner it tried to prevent the German minorities from being absorbed by the non-German population. Conversely, since instruction in these schools was required to be exclusively in German as the condition for continued funding, the “Germanic character” would be maintained and the encroaching non-German minority attending these schools absorbed.

The Slavic minorities throughout the monarchy reacted to the “Deutscher Schulverein” by forming similar organizations of their own. One of them named “Družba sv. Cirila in Metoda” was formed on July 3, 1885. 17  This organization built schools in villages where the ethnic-German population was a minority. Since Austrian Imperial law, via the Provincial School Council, determined that the teaching language in primary education was to be in the majority language of the community, absorption of the minority in such a community was a foregone conclusion. Similar organizations were set up in other ethnically mixed parts of the Monarchy, including Slovenia. But already in the 1840’s a member of the circle of Janez Bleiweiss, revered as “the father of the [Slovene] nation”, actually writes: “From now on, let no Slovene maiden give her name to a German husband, unless to draw him over to her nationality”.  18

A wealthy Gottscheer merchant living in Prague donated a large sum to the Gottschee branch of the “Deutscher Schulverein” to prevent such “erosion” in the Enclave. These funds made possible the erection of nine such schools in the villages of the enclave   between 1881 and 1888, including the one in Masern in 1884. (Since Masern was on the very edge of the ethnic enclave and as such considered as an endangered village, it qualified for financial support from the Verein). By 1918, this number of village schools had increased to thirty three. Reporting on this, “Das Jubiläums Festbuch der Gottscheer 600-Jahresfeier 1930” (The book of the 600 yearjubilee in 1930) states: “So war der Deutsche Schulverein der größte Wohltäter des Gottscheer Landes”. (Therefore, the German School Association was the largest benefactor for the Gottscheerland). 19

The primary target of the Schulverein (and of the already germanized Gottscheer living in the city of Gottschee) was the population of the villages, the place of residence of the bulk of the Gottscheer living in the enclave. Here were virgin people of “German character” who needed help in bringing their “Germanness” in line with the motto of the Schulverein. These were people whose everyday language was the centuries old dialect which, in spite of its German origin, was not understood by a person speaking German.  A place where few if any of the villagers spoke German (in Masern more likely Slovene, the language of our neighbors) and where German teachers could not communicate with their pupils.

This led to the establishment, in 1872, of a private secondary school (Untergymnasium) in a private home in Gottschee city, to produce teachers knowing the Gottschee dialect necessary for communicating with their pupils in the village schools. The Austrian Government provided books and funds. To allow these homegrown teachers to teach the first few grades, special permission was obtained from the Ministry of Education in Vienna. 20  In spite of this, teaching German was difficult since the pupils reverted to the dialect as soon as they left the classroom and their parents were of no help since they had little, if any understanding of German themselves. And even in the 1930’s, the dialect was used exclusively throughout the villages of the enclave, Masern included.

But not in Gottschee city, a place consisting mainly of shopkeepers and small time merchants who, driven by higher ambition had, over the years, escaped the limitations of village life. German only was spoken here, a status symbol and the sign of achievement that signified their achieved elevated status. Though all understood the Gottschee dialect, it was used only to accommodate county folk in town for business or relatives from the farms, but then only when absolutely necessary. And in this, the town population aided the objectives of the Schulverein in educating the villagers and force them to “claim their Germanness” by learning the language superior to the dialect now disdained by the Germanic “elite” of the City.
 
An even greater disdain by this “elite” was directed toward the Slovene, labeled by the Gottscheer leader Dr. Arko in his “Gedächnisschrift” of 1942 as a people “intellectually inferior” to the “German” folks in the Gottscheer villages. For centuries, all being on neighborly terms with those across the ethnic divide, folks who were, in all respects no different, except that they spoke a different tongue.

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1918 - 1933

The seeds of alienation between the residents of the enclave and the Slovene, which started to germinate with the rebellion of the Gottscheer against the French in 1809, were helped to grow throughout the 19th century by the rising nationalism of the Slovene. This nationalism reached yet another plateau when the Austrian multi-ethnic monarchy ceased to exist with the signing of the armistice in the Villa Gusti near Padua on November 3, 1918. (The armistice with Germany was signed on November 18 ending WWI.) In anticipation of this, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovene (SHS in short) was agreed upon on October 29, 1918 at the National Council of Habsburg South Slavs meeting in Zagreb during October of 1918.  And on December 1, 1918, this new Kingdom came into existence.

The Slovene, who had increasingly resented their “colonial” status under the Austrians (see Peter Štih, pg 62) and particularly after the departure of the French in 1813, asserted their new-found independence in no uncertain ways. They acted by transferring on to the Gottscheer the “minority” status the Austrian monarchy had for so long imposed on them. With this turning, the submissiveness required of the Slovene by the Austrians was now demanded by the Slovene of the Gottscheer in the enclave in spite of much futile protest.

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The tide had turned. To the “elite” Gottscheer of the city and in the villagers, only recently awakened to their German roots, this new role as a subservient minority was an unacceptably bitter pill. And the Gottscheer Bote, the bi-weekly newspaper of the enclave, lamented on November 11. 1918:

“The humbling of the German people brought painful tears. It is hard to be burdened with such a destiny, but we must not despair over the terrible ruin which has befallen the German nation. This will, however, not take away our hope that after the present Golgotha, there will emerge a new day”.

The Gottscheer, until now unblinkingly believing in an Austrian victory had, in spite of their outward optimism, started to prepare for an unspeakable outcome of WWI. Already in 1917 they formed the “Deutscher Volksrat” (German Council), tasked to protect the nationalistic interests of the enclave in case Austria lost the war. Toward this, the Council developed various strategies to be pursued, including annexation by Austria, autonomy as an independent state similar to Monaco or Andorra or an autonomous Republic under the protection of the USA. Nothing came of this and in March of 1919, the new state of the SHS dissolved the Volksrat and nationalized its property.

Nearly a year before the armistice was signed, the Gottscheer had started to lobby for an autonomous state. Already on February 2, 1918, the Gottscheer Bote (renamed to Gottscheer Zeitung in 1919) published a Resolution, signed by ten priests and the director of a school district, in which they proclaimed:

1. their love for and faith in the beloved Austria,
2. as utopian and unattainable the goal of statehood to which the Slovene aspire,
3. their rejection to be included into a possible Yugoslav state,
4. their fear that the districts and parishes of Gottschee would lose their German identity,
5. their right for self-determination and autonomy for the 24,000 inhabitants of Gottschee.

A second Resolution was published in the Gottscheer Bote on October 19, 1918, responding to Anton Korošec the head of the National Council of Habsburg South Slavs meeting in Zagreb during October of 1918. Korošec had guaranteed all foreign language minorities in Slovenia, all rights to national, cultural, economic and social-development.

The Gottscheer labeled these promises as “honorable and sincere but it is not possible to build a solid future on such promises”. The only reliable assurance to maintain such rights would be “annexation to the Germanic-Austrian state, even if this would result in geographically cumbersome and difficult obstacles”. 21

On November 11, 1918, the Gottscheer Bote wrote: “Gottschee has, in number of inhabitants and geographic size, the undeniable right to self-determination and autonomy. This is fact and we hope that our question will be resolved at the peace conference. It is right and proper that in the interim there exists in Gottschee the status quo”. The signers concluded with a reminder that the Gottschee enclave being larger than Monaco, San Marino and Lichtenstein is self sufficient and therefore entitled to full autonomy.

On November 18, 1918, Gottscheer municipalities sent to the Paris Peace Conference and the government of the SHS a request for independence in which they outlined their historical role, the administration, number and distribution of inhabitants of the enclave and repeated the comparison to the smallest principalities in Europe. They claimed that the enclave was a - “…vollkommen geschlossene Siedlung…“ – (a totally enclosed settlement) of 20,161 inhabitants in spite of the fact that the census of October 1918 showed that 5,502 (27%of the total) of them were Slovene. 22 And they concluded with certainty that an independent Gottschee was capable of being self-sufficient. 23 The SHS government rejected the request partly because it was submitted in the no longer official German language.

Yet another Gottscheer proposal for autonomy foresaw an independent republic under the patronage of the USA. The proposal was presented to the Paris Peace Conference on behalf of the Gottscheer by the Italian delegation. It was also submitted to the American commission in Vienna. Here also, the Gottscheer requested a status quo ante until the question was resolved.

Within the enclave, however, the long wait for autonomy and self-determination to be granted by either the Paris Peace Conference or the American Government, produced the illusion of a status quo, never agreed to by the state of SHS. In line with this, the newspaper Slovenec on February 8, 1919 reported the following:

“And in January 1919, the city of Gottschee elected a new City Council composed of former Austrian soldiers, a large number of young people as well as members of the German Council. In this ‘younger’ council, the dominant role had an attorney [Dr. Hans Arko] destined to be the future Minister President of the Gottschee Republic. At the meetings, the new SHS state was severely criticized. The highlight was the attendance of Prince Auersperg [January 25 & 26] who, with aristocratic gesture, stated that all will be as they wished. As a result, there was jubilation throughout the enclave; if the prince promised, so shall it be. And the Slovene will soon be gone.

“Older and wiser moderates advocated a less confrontational approach, however, the impulsive and immature youth and former Austrian officers continued to malign, threaten and instigate against the new rule. But never mind; soon we will have our own State, our own currency, etc. and all will be well.”

Other newspapers also reported extensively on this, with the result that the Slovene population turned even more against the Gottscheer. The weekly Naprej, on June 10, 1919 defined as:

“.. absurd the writing in the Gottscheer Bote predicting an independent autonomous state. The Slovenes are not alone in characterizing the Gottscheer requests, demands and resolutions as not only unrealistic, but also utopian”.

Sure enough, events did not develop according to the expectations of the Gottscheer and the promise of the Prince. Their request for annexation by Austria was ignored in Vienna; it had its own problems to deal with and the American commission there, to which the request for an independent Gottschee republic had been sent, did not respond.

At the peace conference in St. Germain where the Austrian issue was debated, the Gottscheer question did not even appear on the agenda. The conference that started on January 12, 1919, ended one year later on January 20, 1920 without the results promised by Prince Auersperg. The enclave of Gottschee now formally re-named Kočevje, irrevocably became part of the Kingdom of SHS, a state now increasingly more un-accommodating to this troublesome minority. And by struggling against the new reality, the Gottscheer became increasingly more deeply immersed in the rising tide of radical German nationalism which, in the not so distant future, was to use them as pawns and make them its victim.

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While guaranteeing all minorities ethnic, cultural, economic and social-development rights, the State decreed that Slovene was now the official language to be used in official documents, records, the mails, and in all interactions with officials of the new administration. Those who did not speak Slovene, and this meant most of the inhabitants of the enclave, required a translator in all their dealings with municipalities, the provincial government and the State. Government functionaries who could not speak the language were discharged and replaced with Slovene candidates. Some of those discharged were promised re-employment providing that within one year they had learned Slovene. The Gottscheer branch of the Schulverein was dissolved; its property nationalized.

On November 16, 1918, Slovene was mandated to be the language of instruction in elementary schools. Teachers in the enclave had to submit to a qualifying State examination which showed that the majority did not know Slovene and were therefore replaced or pensioned off.

This had little effect throughout Slovenia where (as before under the Imperial Act of 1869) elementary instruction in grades one to three now continued in the language of the ethnic majority in the school district. And if there was a sufficient number of pupils of German nationality in the district, separate departments were required to teach the minority language in separate classrooms. In Kočevje city, such minority departments teaching German were established in 1919 reflecting the decreasing number of Gottscheer students in that district.
This changed with the School Decree of 25 November 1927. The Decree, Zl. 79.413, issued by the Minister of Education Dr. Kumanudi, ordered the following:

1. The German school child will, in the first four years, be instructed in German. However, in the third year and beyond, Slovene will be taught for four hours per week as a subject.

2. When the child reaches the higher levels (five to eight years), all subjects must be taught in Slovene.

3.  All German schools whose pupils have completed the fifth or sixth grades in German must have, without exception, recovery instructions in Slovene for the two missed years. Three hours per week must be set aside for this purpose. Recovery instructions should be in half hour increments alternating between Slovene and German.

And in January 1935 the Decree issued by the Ministry of Education dictated that all education be conducted in the applicable language, in our case the language of the Slovene.

With this ended German secondary education in the enclave which started in 1872. By contrast, the first Slovene (private) secondary school in Ljubljana (long demanded from the monarchy) was allowed by Austrian authorities only in 1905.  And the first Slovene university was established there only after Slovenia became part of the SHS Kingdom in 1919.
 
This severely distressed the Gottschee “elite” that clung to the belief that higher education and proficiency in German would continue to provide for them an elevated status and assure their survival as Germans stranded in a sea of Slovene.  They therefore challenged the new requirements and continued to operate private schools teaching German. The new state reacted by closing or nationalizing all private Gottscheer institutions believed to be circumventing the policies of the new administration.

Dr. Hans Arko, the former Gottscheer leader, reports on this in his memoirs written in 1942.  “All children whose family name had a Slovene sounding name were forced into purely Slovene classes. [The Slovene believed these were Slovenes who had been Germanized.] The number of children in German classes became progressively smaller and ultimately shrank to zero.  The children entered school as calves and left it as oxen.  A child could no longer read or write in German”. 24

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Arko, a Gottscheer attorney living in Gottschee city, provides much insight into the politics of Gottscheer-German nationalism after WWI. Instead of moving to Austria after 1918 like so many non-Slovene speaking teachers, municipal employees and other professionals, he opted to stay and learn the Slovene language claiming to be the only one remaining who could represent the nationalistic aspirations of the Gottscheer of the enclave in their contacts with the new government. (According to H. Grothe: “The only academically educated that remained were two lawyers and two physicians”).

In his memoir, Arko states his belief that: “The Gottscheer have always been conscious of their Germanness, being intellectually far superior to the Slovene”. (A rather dubious claim in view of the fact that the Gottscheer, in contrast to the Slovene, throughout the centuries produced no significant writers, poets, scientists or other similar intellectuals). But the remark indicates that the racial superiority concepts, the leitmotiv of Adolf Hitler, had taken root in the enclave.
 
Arko reflects on the activities of the Schulverein and Südmark before and during WWI, all committed to promoting their nationalistic objectives via various “cultural” associations to prevent the “erosion” or loss of the “German character” of the [Gottscheer] communities.

After WWI, the various Gottscheer “cultural” associations, supported before and during WWI by the Schulverein, continued with their established objectives to maintain the “German character” of the Gottscheer. But the now independent Slovene state, mindful that the basic mission of these associations was to promote German nationalistic agenda, dissolved the Schulverein and nationalized its properties in 1919. And according to Arko, such activities were allowed to resume only after 1924 since until then, the Gottscheer-Germans had no representation in Parliament.

All efforts toward obtaining independence from the Slovene having failed and receiving no further support from the outside, the Gottscheer (again according to Arko) realized that they should now pay attention to their new state.  And to have a united front in representing the Gottscheer of the enclave, Arko and other leaders formed, in 1919, the “Gottscheer Bauernpartei”. (Gottscheer Farmer Party).  This party adopted a less confrontational approach by proclaiming, at least officially:  “Just as we were loyal subjects of the Habsburg monarchy, we wish to be faithful citizens of Yugoslavia”. (Slovenec, 3/2/1919). This led to the often used, but for the Slovene unconvincing slogan of the Gottscheer:  “Staatstreu und Volkstreu”. (Loyal to the State and true to our [German] nationality.).

The first enclave-wide elections were held in 1924 with the objective of gaining a seat in the Yugoslav parliament. This failed since only 5,000 of the 6,000 required votes were cast for this objective.
 
In the village districts, the leadership was captured by the Gottscheer; in the city however, the “Bauernpartei” captured only ten of the 24 seats on the City Council.  According to Arko, this defeat was due to the heavy influx of Slovene in the six years since 1918. He also stated that work on this Council: “was for the German representatives a “martyrdom” since their proposals, being written in the German language, were never included in an agenda”. (The administrative language of the City Council now being Slovene). Arko was a member of this Council until 1938, except for the period between 1931-1933.

Further according to Arko: “the Gottscheer could never muster a sufficient number of votes to elect their own representative to the Parliament. However, in elections after 1924, the Gottscheer prevailed with many of their wishes but only because they compromised and cooperated with one of the local Slovene parties.  And when, in 1929, the dictatorship of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia replaced the federal Kingdom of the SHS and all political parties based on narrow nationalistic objectives were dissolved (including the “Bauernpartei”), the Gottscheer joined the newly formed Yugoslav State Party. Local branches of this party were formed also in the enclave in which the Gottscheer were fairly represented”.
 
In 1928, the Reverend Josef Eppich, the publisher of the Gottscheer Zeitung which replaced the Gottscheer Bote in 1919, was elected as the representative for the Gottschee district and Arko his deputy. The two remained the leaders of the enclave until the start of 1939. The Gottscheer population, mainly via Eppich and his deputy, had sufficient weight to negotiate with other candidates favorably on matters related to their mutual interests. And when in 1930, the Slovene Minister Ivan Pucelj was appointed Chairman of the Commission for District Affairs, Arko became his deputy. Pucelj was born in the enclave, spoke the Gottscheer dialect and effectively supported the cultural rights of the Gottscheer.

It was clear that the Gottscheer were adjusting to their lot as a minority in the new state and that the increasing cooperation and compromise produced a relatively stable and improving environment between the two sides. As a result, the Slovene allowed the re-emergence of many of the cultural associations dissolved in 1919 and in 1935 there were again fourteen elementary schools teaching German.

In his memoir, Dr. Arko states that the authorities allowed, after 1924, the re-establishment of the: “Turnverein, Gesangverein, Leserverein, Theaterverein, Kindergartenverein, u.s.w.”  Arko takes pride in having participated as a leader in all of them and being elected as their “Honored Member”. He particularly singles out the Gesangverein (singing association) of which he had become the Choir Master in 1923 and writes: “This association had more of a political than cultural importance”. The Gesangverein traveled extensively through the villages and thereby “the sung word was also the carrier for our propaganda and as a singing group, it was a good cover vis-à-vis the authorities”. And after each performance, Arko urged the assembled villagers to remain faithful to their German roots.
 
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A new horizon had opened for the Gottscheer in 1920 when the Schwäbisch-German Kulturbund was formed in Novo Mesto and Arko was elected to represent the Gottscheer in the enclave. The Kulturbund claimed it was a cultural umbrella organization for ethnic Germans in the Yugoslav Kingdom, but in reality it was a replacement for the former Schulverein to again promote German nationalism. In 1922, a local branch of the Kulturbund was established in Gottschee city and Arko was elected Chairman. At the first membership meeting there was great enthusiasm because “the Kulturbund was seen as the liberator”. 25 But the Gottschee branch was dissolved by the Slovene authorities after only eight days since at this meeting “there surfaced political tendencies forbidden by the statutes”. 26 In 1928, the ban on the Kulturbund was removed and Arko again became the Chairman of the Gottschee branch. And in 1929, sub-branches were formed in eighteen villages, each with its own youth group under the coordinating youth leader in Gottschee city.  To demonstrate results, Arko further writes:
 
“At a meeting of the Sport Association in 1932 in Gottschee city, 800 youths assembled to demonstrate their training and discipline. ... and in the villages, information meetings were held on evenings and weekends in which German nationalism and the superiority of the German race was explained. News from the new Germany was heard live on radios, obtained by Arko as gifts from the Reich”.  The radio in the Jaklitsch tavern in Grčarice/Masern was one of them.

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1933 - 1941

In 1933, Hitler became Chancellor of the Third Reich. The prediction in the Gottscheer Bote, of November 11, 1918 that:  “…. after the present Golgotha, there will emerge a new day”, had come to pass.
 
To the Gottscheer as well as millions of ethnic Germans throughout Europe, this re-“emergence” brought great pride.  It also produced admiration for its initial accomplishments from non-Germans everywhere. The admirers did not know that this aggressive and radical nationalism, based on racial supremacy was, in only a few short years, going to bring great tragedy to the world, disaster to most ethnic Germans in Europe and the end of the Gottscheer as an ethnic group in the winter of 1941/42.

In his memoirs, Arko states that the Gottscheer were early supporters of National-Socialism. He admits that he became a National-Socialist in 1927 and that he persuaded many a Gottscheer to adopt this new “Weltanschauung”. He also explains that he personally made it possible for Gottscheer to again peddle wares in the Reich after 1933, a place where they learned this new form of German nationalism and on returning home spread it throughout the enclave. While the peddling was officially done to earn much needed monies, Arko states that the primary benefit was the importing of National-Socialism into Gottschee. (Such peddling was first initiated by Emperor Frederick III in 1492 to allow all residents of the enclave, Gottscheer as well as Slovene, to recover from the damages inflicted by the Turks).

Arko continues: “Under the cover of peddling, 25 to 30 young farmers were sent annually to the Reich where they gathered in a camp during the winter months for training in Nazi ideology.  The first such peddlers were sent to the Reich in 1933 and continued in the years 1934, 1935 and 1936”. After 1936, passports to allow peddling were no longer issued by the Slovene authorities after they realized that more than just money was being brought back to the enclave.

In spite of the growing allegiance to the Reich, the Gottscheer under Dr. Hans Arko and the Reverend Josef Eppich claimed to remain loyal to the Yugoslav State and loyal to their German nationality.  “Staatstreu und Volkstreu”.  All the while passively rejoicing in the new German nationalism which, according to the Gottscheer Bote of 1918 had been humbled and reduced to “painful tears” but now had reappeared in a “new day”, if however in another and new form.

With this often repeated slogan, “Staatstreu und Volkstreu”, the Gottscheer merely paid lip service to the Slovene and the State in which they lived. A State which they claimed had been attempting to destroy their nationality through assimilation. Arko and Eppich had been resisting this perceived attempt within all the legal means available to them by using parliamentary methods. They had been quite successful in this with the help of Ivan Pucelj, the Chairman for District Affairs who actively supported the cultural rights of the Gottscheer.
 
But it was this passive nationalism of Arko and Eppich, tolerated to some extent by the Slovene authorities, which ultimately brought about their end as leaders of the Gottscheer. The passive approach to accomplish their objectives within the legal system of the State did not suit a “secret student group” of young Gottscheer, who responded to the courting from the Reich in a much more radical way.

This group, which grew up in the confrontational environment after WWI and came of age in the late 1920’s, became radical supporters of National-Socialism, the new “Weltanschauung” so aptly introduced into the enclave by Arko. They interpreted the “Staatstreu” part of the slogan “Staatstreu und Volkstreu” as loyalty to the Third Reich and not loyalty to the nation they lived in. This challenge to the State and their actions after 1933 put them on a divergent course with the leadership of Arko and Eppich who were pursuing their objectives in a moderate manner within parliamentary rules. In this Arko and Eppich had overwhelming support from the clerics, the only other intelligentsia that had remained in the enclave.
  
The charismatic leader of this secret group was Wilhelm Lampeter, born on January 22, 1916. In his “Die Gottscheer Volksgruppe 1930-1942” written in 1942, he states that:

“In National-Socialism, which reached the remote Gottschee only after its ascendance to power in 1933, the youth discovered its true life’s purpose, the recognized signpost to their aspirations and willingness to act.” 27

Lampeter dismisses the contribution of Dr Arko, as being the one who brought this new “Weltanschauung” into the enclave even before 1933. And by 1938, years before Lampeter wrote these lines, Arko and his supporters had become his determined adversaries in his struggle for control over the enclave.
 
The fervor of the youth group was aptly exploited after 1934, when the first wave of students from the Reich appeared in the enclave. The visitors from the Reich sponsored and conducted work and training camps in which they introduced to the Gottscheer youth a “self-help” plan while simultaneously propagating Nazi ideology. The “self help plan” appealed to the youth because it promised to lift the enclave out of its then current economic depression. The plan was developed specifically for the Gottscheer by the VDA, an organization that existed in Germany before 1933 as “Verein für das Deutschtum im Ausland”.  (Association for German nationals abroad). After 1933, it continued in the Reich as “Volksbund für das Deutschtum im Ausland” (Union for German nationals outside the boundaries of the Reich).  This organization dealt with all matters related to ethnic Germans abroad.  Such economic guidance could effortlessly be integrated into the existing youth movements that had been developed and promoted by Dr. Arko without, at least initially, exposing the underlying broader objectives of the VDA to the Slovene authorities. (The VDA was absorbed in October 1939 by the VoMi, Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, an SS organization headquartered in Berlin. It was founded in 1937 and, under SS-Obergruppenführer Werner Lorenz, was to be in charge of all ethnic Germans living outside Germany.)

In 1935, the VDA sent in another student group to conduct further training.  The concept of “self-help” promoted via the underlying ideology of National-Socialism was enthusiastically accepted and the result of this training brought most of the Gottscheer youth into the orbit of the Reich.

The relatively passive indoctrination under the cover of the “self-help” program, however, did not satisfy the more aggressive leadership in the new Germany bent on direct confrontation. The effort of the VDA was outdone by the active intervention of Hitler Youth groups sent into the enclave by the Reich. Fritz Berthold, the VDA official responsible for “Volksdeutsche Süd” who was in the enclave in August 1935, writes in his report:

“The Gottschee area this season was flooded with approximately 300 youthful hikers dressed in military clothing who passed through the region with their flying banners constantly singing political fighting songs. This produced great agitation in Slovene circles and can only lead to a worsening for the Gottscheer Germans”. 28

H.H.Frensing writes:  “The Gottscheer youth, now firmly behind Lampeter, actively participated in all these events. The Slovene public and nationalistic organizations took notice of these activities and had begun to react. The boiling point was reached when the Gottscheer opened its first youth and culture club in Sredna Vas (Mitterdorf). Slovene students and other youths arrived from as far as Ljubljana to disrupt the celebration and it came to a wild brawl. However, this was only a telling symptom of an increasingly more poisoned climate between the Gottscheer and the Slovene”. 29

The Slovene authorities reacted by resorting to increasingly more repressive measures which ultimately resulted in the dissolution of the village chapters of the Kulturbund in 1937. The given reason was that the chapters “held political seminars and sang irredentist songs such as the Horst Wessel song, Heiliges Deutschland and other similar songs imported from the Reich”.
 
Frensing on page 18 quotes a Slovene intellectual:   “The organizations of the Kulturbund were prosecuted because they were identified by the authorities as agitation cells. No self-assured state could continue to tolerate such activity…. The two emissaries of the Reich…[Dick and Neunteufel]…. have, for many months, conducted an activity which no self-respecting state could tolerate for any duration.”

In the following years until 1938, the Gottscheer youth, under the leadership of Lampeter, solidified its relationship with the Reich. This was done through extensive indoctrination and training in the Reich and clandestinely in special training camps at home.  Arko and Lampeter each report on this in their memoirs written in 1942, albeit each with their own perspective. Arko viewed these activities in the context of “Staatstreu und Volkstreu”, whereas to Lampeter and his adherents, the loyalty part in both terms of this slogan meant loyalty to the Third Reich.  Their relationship to the Slovene was fully in line with the objectives of the purposefully confrontational politics demanded by National-Socialism of ethnic Germans living in Slavic lands.
 
The ‘old leadership’ tried, in desperate attempts, including direct appeals to the prime minister of Yugoslavia and Austrian government officials, to cool down the inflamed nationalistic passions of the Slovene and Gottscheer and bring about a compromise. And when in March 1938 the “Anschluss” of the republic of Austria to the Third Reich took the national passions of the Slovene and their ethnic Germans to new heights, all chances toward a compromise came to an end.
 
Frensing, in his chapter “The failed attempts of the old leadership..” describes their efforts in detail and encapsulates the primary points:
 
“The Reverend Josef Eppich, a Christian-Socialist and Dr. H. Arko who embodied the national-liberal tradition of the Gottscheer, no longer satisfied the demands of National-Socialism regarding ethnic Germans. In their attempts for moderation, they lost the confidence of the now radicalized youth.  To them, the slogan “Staatstreu und Volkstreu” had become obsolete. And since this was obvious to the Slovene, they were not inclined to grant further concessions”.

Against this background, the now twenty two year old Wilhelm Lampeter and his inner circle, who called themselves the “Renewers” convinced the authorities of the Reich to force Arko and Eppich to resign. In November 1938 Arko was notified by the VoMi in Berlin, that he was relieved of his leadership role.  Arko publicly resigned and so did Eppich on 1. January 1939.  He handed the editorship of the Gottscheer Zeitung (GZ) to Herbert Erker, an intimate and inner circle member of Lampeter’s VolksGruppenLeitung, the VGL.

Frensing states that: “in spite of the change of leaders in the enclave, it did not come to a public split between the ‘young’ and the ‘old’ in the enclave”. This is borne out by Arko in his reflections of 1942, when he states that he continued to support the various organizations that he developed and nurtured over the years, and claims that as a result: “the Gesangverein accomplished its objectives fully and had it not been in existence, no Gottscheer would have agreed to resettle” in 1941.

The ouster of Arko and Eppich as leaders of the Gottscheer at the beginning of 1939 is in line with Hitler’s comments to an intimate circle of representatives of ethnic Germans in 1934. Frensing in Die Umsiedlung, on page 21, quotes H. Rauschning, who reports on this in “Conversations with Hitler”:

“Their obedience [ethnic German leaders abroad] is the fruit of their confidence in me.  Due to this, I can not tolerate in our circles any representatives of the old parliamentarian ways.  These gentlemen should resign. Should they not voluntarily clear their place, you must remove them by any possible means. The politics concerning the German groups abroad will no longer be debated and considered, but will be defined by myself, and in my absence by my party colleague Hess.”

After the assumption of control of the Gottscheer by the ‘young’ leadership, the term “Staatstreu” toward Yugoslavia, was replaced by “loyalty to the Third Reich”. And, according to Frensing, “from this point on the relationship toward the Slovene people was no longer one of compromise but one of confrontation”.

The parliamentarian ways of Arko and Eppich, honorable men who pursued the interests of their constituents within the laws of the State with much success, were now replaced by the totalitarian rule of the “young”, marching to the drumbeat of the dictatorship of the Reich. The ways of Arko and Eppich had produced, especially during the mid and later 20’s, a constant stream of improving relations with the new state. A state which was well underway to accommodate the wishes of the minority in the enclave by allowing the reestablishment of cultural associations, cultural activities and the renewed teaching of German, albeit as a secondary language.

This was now no longer likely.

- - - -

After assumption of power, the “renewers” called themselves the Volks Gruppen Leitung, (Ethnic Group Leadership),  or VGL for short. And during 1939, ‘40 and ‘41, the VGL, consisting of seven inner circle members, each of them extensively trained in the Reich, converted the political structure of the enclave from an elective body to a clandestine mini-state. It was formalized on May 1, 1941 and based on the totalitarian leadership concept of the Reich. Until then, the legitimate state received lip service only when and where absolutely unavoidable.

Each of the seven had a unique ministerial type function, but their ideological leader was Wilhelm Lampeter, in 1939 all of twenty three years old. Josef Schober, an unknown older man, was given the title of Group Leader because Lampeter wanted a “much older man as a front”. 30 The thirty three year old Herbert Erker, (b. 17/11/1908) one of the inner members became the editor of their main propaganda organ, the weekly Gottscheer Zeitung, until now under the Reverend Josef Eppich. Erker’s assistant was Ludwig Kren, born 12/12/1920.

After the dismissal of Arko and Eppich, Josef Schober became also the head of the Gottschee branch of the Kulturbund which was re-established in 1939 after having been dissolved, together with the local groups of the villages, in 1937.  (When Milan Stojadinovič was replaced as Prime Minister of Yugoslavia by Dragiša Cvetkovič on February 5, 1939, the Kulturbund was again allowed in Yugoslavia).
 
Lampeter, as Mannschaft-Führer, (militia leader) took personal charge of the twenty five village groups of the Kulturbund that were formed in the villages after 1928 and which after being outlawed in 1937, had continued under the cover of the village fire brigades. In September 1939 the VGL formed the “Mannschaft”; disciplined militia units, dressed and trained in line with the SA organization in the Reich. All members of the Kulturbund between twenty one and fifty were required to be part of such a unit called a Sturm under their local Sturmführer trained by Lampeter and his group in a special school. There were twenty five such Sturms in the enclave, each identified by a number. Masern was Sturm 13 and its Führer was Franz Jaklitsch, the keeper of the tavern on the square.

The Gottscheer Zeitung, in its July 24, 1941 issue, solidified the obligation of the Sturm trooper:

“For each comrade, starting with the Mannschaft-Führer to the last Sturm man there exist three examples. The soldier as expression of the defense capability of the nation, the comrade in the SA or SS formation as the expression of a political self-consciousness and combat willingness of the nation and the worker who with brow and fist stands behind plow and desk, anvil and lathe as the expression of the social justice of the nation”.

A sub-unit of each Sturm was the youth of the village. The boys unit was divided into two age groups, 7-13 and 14-21, each dressed in a uniform based on that of the Hitler Youth in the Reich and each age group having its own leader.  Rigorous training prepared them for entering a Sturm as a fully trained Sturm trooper on reaching 21 years of age. The girls were organized in a similar manner. Their training in military support functions was under Maria Röthel, herself trained in the Reich. All four youth groups were under the Jugendführer Richard Lackner, (b. 8/24/1919) a member of the inner leadership circle and in 1939 twenty years old.
 
Training included all common military exercises used to train recruits.  Clandestinely, each Sturm trooper was also instructed in the use of a rifle.  The few that were available were passed on to the next Sturm after all men in a Sturm were trained. And during evenings, informational meetings, initiated originally by Arko but now reinvigorated with greater enthusiasm by the VGL, dealt with indoctrinating the mind in Nazi ideology.

Formation exercises were conducted on the village square and marching through the villages while singing the songs of the Reich. These exercises, held mostly on Sundays, were scheduled to coincide with the timing of religious services. This was the initial challenge to the clergy that still had some control over their parishioners and who let it be known that they saw in this new form of German nationalism a danger to the enclave and its culture. These were the same priests who after the end of WW I, had lobbied for an independent enclave state.

It was also an open challenge to the Slovene authorities who tried, if not very successfully, to stop these illegal activities. But the VGL would not be deterred from publicly confronting the Slovene, all of which led to a progressively increasing hostility and hatred between the two sides. Totally committed to the Nazi cause, their actions now were backed up by the full power of the Third Reich, a state that encouraged, promoted and supported confrontation for its own political purposes not only in Slovenia but also in other states throughout Eastern Europe that contained pockets of ethnic Germans.

The youth, which since 1933 had been brought fully into the orbit of National-Socialism and after 1938 organized as the cadre of a clandestine mini-state, were, at the beginning of 1941, in total control of the Germans in the enclave. The openly confrontational attitude toward their legitimate state had been increasingly emboldened by the string of successes of the Reich which included:
 
1. the re-occupation of the Rhineland in July 1936,
2. the “Anschluss” of Austria in March 1938,
2. the takeover of the Sudetenland in October 1938,
4. the occupation of the remainder of Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939,
5. the rapid takeover of Poland starting on September 1, 1939, all resistance ending on October 6, 1939,
6. the invasion of Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg and France, on May 10, 1940.

The conquest of all of Western Europe (except England) was completed on June 25, 1940. This impressive list was complemented by other facts that even further emboldened the VGL.

a. the Reich and the USSR sign a non aggression pact on August 23, 1939,
b. Norway, Portugal and Sweden proclaim their neutrality on September 1, 1939
c. Spain, Ireland and the USA proclaim their neutrality on September 3, 1939,
d. The Reich invades Denmark and Norway on April 8, 1940.
e. Greece concludes armistice with the Reich on April 23, 1940.
f. The Axis, the Tripartite Pact – Germany, Italy and Japan formed on September 27, 1940,
g. Hungary and Romania join Axis on November 20, 1940,
h. Bulgaria joins Axis on March 1, 1941
 
Of particular significance to the VGL were the actions against Czechoslovakia and Poland which were, according to then prevalent Nazi propaganda, occupied to free the ethnic Germans living there from oppression by the Slavic population. From October 1939 forward the VGL had, therefore, few restraints on its confrontational activities against the Slovene population and their state, and hoped that the resulting repressive action would produce an intervention by the Reich. In line with this Martin Sturm, a member of the VGL, sent on April 13, 1939, a telegram directly to Hitler requesting that the enclave be annexed to the Reich in the event Yugoslavia ceased to exist. 31

In addition to the VGL, all the ethnic Germans of Yugoslavia began to clamor for annexation, now only a short distance away from the annexed Austria, an independent nation since 1273, but one that ceased to exist in March 1938 with its “Anschluss” to the Reich. (In 1941, the ethnic German population throughout Yugoslavia was approximately 700,000, according to Projekat Rastko by Carl Kosta Savich, 2001.  This in contrast to a total population of 15.4 million.)

The actions of the Reich against Czechoslovakia and Poland and their consequences did also not go unnoticed by the Yugoslav government, itself being accused by the Reich of mistreating its German minority. Aware that the Nazis had used the excuse of ethnic suppression to invade Czechoslovakia, the new government of Prime Minister Cvetkovič, in power since February 5, 1939, tried to avoid open confrontation with ethnic Germans of which the Germans of the Gottschee enclave were only a small but vocal and aggressive part. Finding itself vulnerable, his government removed the ban of the Kulturbund in the fall of 1939, after the German invasion of Poland, lest Yugoslavia be accused of oppressing and harassing its ethnic German population and invite similar reaction from the Reich.

- - - -

In a speech to the Reichstag on Oct. 6, 1939 to celebrate the victory in occupying Poland, Hitler gives the reasons for the invasion and division of Poland between the Reich and the USRR. Among his reasons, the following stand out and are quoted below:

“…. minorities living in that country had to suffer what amounted to a reign of terror. I do not consider it my task to speak for of the fate of the Ukrainians, or White Russian population, whose interests now lie in the hands of Russia. However, I do feel it my duty to speak of the fate of those helpless thousands of Germans who carried on the tradition of those who first brought culture to that country centuries ago and whom the Poles now began to oppress and drive out. Since March 1939, they had been victims of truly satanic terrorization. How many of them had been abducted and where they are cannot be stated even today.

“Villages with hundreds of German inhabitants are now left without men because they all have been killed. In others, women were violated and murdered, girls and children outraged and killed. Already in 1598 an Englishman - Sir George Carew - wrote in his diplomatic reports to the English Government that the outstanding features of Polish character were cruelty and lack of moral restraint. Since that time this cruelty has not changed. Just as tens of thousands of Germans were slaughtered and sadistically tormented to death, so German soldiers captured in fighting were tortured and massacred.

“The warning to suspend or at least to take steps against the unceasing cases of murder, ill treatment and torture of German nationals in Poland had the effect of increasing these atrocities and of calling for more bloodthirsty harangues and provocative speeches from the Polish local administrative officials and military authorities”.

In the same speech he also announces his intention to “ingather” the ethnic Germans of Europe.

“The aims and tasks which emerge from the collapse of the Polish State, insofar as the German sphere of interest is concerned, are roughly as follows:

“1.  Demarcation of the boundary for the Reich, which will do justice to historical, ethnographical and economic facts.

“2.  Pacification of the whole territory by restoring a tolerable measure of peace and order.

“3.  Absolute guarantees of security not only as far as Reich territory is concerned but for the entire sphere of interest.

“4. Re-establishment and reorganization of economic life and of trade and transport, involving development of culture and civilization.

“5. The most important task, however, is to establish a new order of ethnographic conditions, that is to say, resettlement of nationalities in such a manner that the process ultimately results in the obtaining of better dividing lines than is the case at present.

“In this sense, however, it is not a case of the problem being restricted to this particular sphere, but of a task with far wider implications for the east and south of Europe which are to a large extent filled with splinters of the German nationality, whose existence they cannot maintain. “In their very existence lie the reason and cause for continual international disturbances. In this age of the principle of nationalities and of racial ideals, it is utopian to believe that members of a highly developed people can be assimilated without trouble”.

And on the following day, October 7, 1939, Hitler solidifies paragraph 5 of his speech in a decree and appoints Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler to be in charge of an organization dealing with the reordering of the ethnographic conditions. Himmler becomes “Reichskommissar fűr die Festigung des Deutschen Volkstums”, (Reich’s Commissioner for the Solidification of the German Nation), RKFDV for short. Subsequently in mid October 1939, there emerges Himmler’s “Dienststelle”, a multi-branched organization whose function it was to deal with all of the many facets of Hitler’s directive.

“In the ethnic German groups of Eastern Europe, especially among the large German minorities in Yugoslavia, Hitler’s speech of October 6, 1939 produced great unease. The German embassy in Belgrade found it necessary to calm the Volksdeutsche in Yugoslavia via the ‘Deutsches Volksblatt’, the publication serving the ethnic Germans, saying that the resettlement action for Yugoslavia is not a topic”. 32

The Gottscheer VGL however, took the topic to the German consul in Ljubljana on November 6, 1939.  Frensing, on page 25 reports: “To start with, they announced their subordination. Even with regard to a re-settlement, the interest of the ethnic group must stand behind the interest of the entire German nation”.

With total self-confidence, they do this on their own, without having in any way a mandate from the people they were representing and whom they had not consulted.

- - - -

On April 6, 1941, the armies of the Third Reich and those of Mussolini’s Italy invade Yugoslavia and 12 days later, on April 18, Yugoslavia ceased to exist as a nation.

After the destruction of Yugoslavia, Hitler ordered the country to be reduced down to “old Serbia” and allocated the adjacent parts to neighboring countries according to their demands. Furthermore, at the Vienna conference on April 18-20, 1941, in the presence of Count Ciano, the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hitler set the border between Germany and Italy. Germany relinquished part of Slovenia to Italy including the Gottschee enclave, to great disillusionment of its inhabitants.
 
The Germans of the enclave were, however, happy to be freed from a state which, as they claimed had during its twenty three years of existence, denied them their nationality and tried to assimilate them.
 
The decision to resettle the Gottscheer was communicated to Lampeter by Himmler on April 20, 1941 and verified to him personally by Adolf Hitler at the Maribor meeting on April 26, 1941. Lampeter was also told that the Gottscheer would be settled on the German side of the annexed Slovenia. A place from which 37,000 Slovene were to be removed to make room for the “ingathered”; the new citizens of the Third Reich.

The destiny of the Gottscheer as an ethnic group had been decreed.

- - - -

The events leading up to invasion were in line with Hitler’s objectives for total control of Europe.  His initial attempt was to neutralize Yugoslavia by bringing it into the Tripartite Pact. On March 4-5, Prince Paul the Regent of Yugoslavia was summoned in great secrecy to the Berghof by the Fűhrer, to discuss the pact. And on March 25, the Prime Minister Dragiša Cvetkovič and Foreign Minister Aleksander Cincer-Markovic arrived in Vienna, where in the presence of Hitler and Ribbentrop they signed up Yugoslavia to the Tripartite Pact. The Yugoslav leaders were given letters from Ribbentrop confirming Germany's "determination to respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Yugoslavia at all times" .. and promising that the Axis would not demand transit rights for its troops across Yugoslavia .. "during this war".

As soon as the Yugoslav ministers returned to Belgrade, they, their government and the Prince Regent were overthrown by a popular uprising on the night of March 26-27.

According to William L. Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”:

“The coup threw Hitler into one of the wildest rages of his entire life. He took it as a personal affront and in his fury made sudden decisions which would prove utterly disastrous to the fortunes of the Third Reich.

“He hurriedly summoned his military chieftains to the Chancellery in Berlin on March 27 and raged about the revenge he would take on the Yugoslavs. He was therefore determined “… to destroy Yugoslavia militarily and as a nation.  No diplomatic inquiries will be made," he ordered, "and no ultimatums presented." Yugoslavia, he added, would be crushed with "unmerciful harshness." He ordered Goering then and there to "destroy Belgrade in attacks by waves," of bombers operating from Hungarian air bases. He issued Directive No. 25 for the immediate invasion of Yugoslavia and told [Generals] Keitel and Jodl to work out the military plans that very evening. He instructed Ribbentrop to advise Hungary, Rumania and Italy [German allies] that they would all get a slice of Yugoslavia, which would be divided up among them, except for a Croatian state.

“And then, according to an underlined passage in the top-secret OKW (German Army High Command) notes of the meeting, Hitler announced the most fateful decision of all.

"The beginning of operation Barbarossa”, [code for attack on Russia]," he told his generals, "will have to be postponed up to four weeks”.  It had originally been set for May 15 in the directive of December 18, 1940. 33

Shirer continues:

“This postponement of the attack on Russia in order that the Nazi warlord might vent his personal spite against a small Balkan country which had dared to defy him was probably the most catastrophic single decision in Hitler's career. It is hardly too much to say that by making it that March afternoon in the Chancellery in Berlin during a moment of convulsive rage, he tossed away his last golden opportunity to win the war and to make of the Third Reich, which he had created with such stunning if barbarous genius, the greatest empire in German history and himself the master of Europe.

“Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, the Commander in Chief of the German Army, and General Halder, the gifted Chief of the General Staff, were to recall it with deep bitterness but also with more understanding of its consequences than they showed at the moment of its making, when later the deep snow and subzero temperatures of Russia hit them three of four weeks short of what they thought they needed for final victory. For ever afterward they and their fellow generals would blame that hasty, ill-advised decision of a vain and infuriated man for all the disasters that ensued.

“...At dawn on April 6, [Hitler's] armies in overwhelming strength fell on Yugoslavia and Greece, smashing across the frontiers of Bulgaria, Hungary and Germany itself with all their armor and advancing rapidly against poorly armed defenders dazed by the usual preliminary bombing from the Luftwaffe.

“Belgrade itself, as Hitler ordered, was razed to the ground.  For three days and nights Goering's bombers ranged over the little capital at rooftop level - for the city had no antiaircraft guns - killing 17,000 civilians, wounding many more and reducing the place to a mass of smoldering rubble. "Operation Punishment," Hitler called it, and he obviously was satisfied that his commands had been so effectively carried out”.

On April 17 the hostilities were over and on April 18, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia ceased to exist.

- - - -

In June 1940 the leadership staff of the “Dienststelle” of the RKFVD was integrated into the “Staatshauptamt”, the headquarters of the SS organization. Frensing comments on this in Die Umsiedlung on page 28:

“In the spring of 1940, the following program was sketched out:  From the lands annexed to the Reich, the non-German population was to be removed and taken to the “Altreich” as foreign labor or sent to the Generalgouvernment [a catch-all area in occupied Poland]. Volksdeutsche [ethnic Germans] whose cultural autonomy could not be secured are to be resettled from their homeland into the annexed lands”.
 
And in mid 1940, one of the branches of the “Dienststelle” issues a compendium of ideological guidelines to be used in the “Ingathering” of ethnic Germans. The head of the branch designated “Menscheneinsatz”, SS-Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) Dr. Fähndrich writes an eight point introduction of which paragraphs 1, 2 and 5 are of special significance:  34

“1. Those Germans living outside the sphere of interest of the Großdeutsche Reich are, according to urgency and necessity, to be re-settled”.

“2. The call of the Führer represents a complete revolutionizing of any prior German nationalistic policy now restructured to fit the axiom of ingathering valued German blood to strengthen the Reich”.

“5. This obligates the returned Germans to subordinate themselves organically to the discipline, stock and order of the greater German Reich.  Specific demands are:

 a. With the ingathering of an ethnic group into the Reich, the prior organization of the group ceases to exist, for over this group stands the Reich.

 b. The concepts of the Baltic-Germans, the Wolhynian and Bessarabian-German [Gottscheer], etc., must in the shortest period, be wiped out”.

All eight points are listed by Frensing on page 145.  Paragraph 5 in effect spells out the destiny of the Gottscheer as an ethnic group.
 
It is likely that the principles of paragraph 5 were unknown to the VGL. This may be deduced from a directive of the SS-Gruppenfűhrer (Major General) Greifeld, Chief of the RKFDV in Berlin to SS-Sturmbannführer (Major) Laforce, the officer in charge of the Gottscheer re-settlement authority in Marburg/Maribor, in the now de-facto annexed Slovenia.

In a letter marked “Secret” dated October 31, 1941, Greifeld directed Laforce that:

“The existing VolksGruppenLeitung [the VGL] is to be kept intact during the re-settlement since only through a tight leadership can a frictionless re-settlement be accomplished and that

“After completion of the settlement of the Gottscheer in Lower Styria [the Untersteiermark], I ask that you make certain that the concept of the Gottscheer as an ethnic group ceases to exist and that they integrate themselves, unconditionally, into Styria and into the overall German nation”. 35

Having obtained the assurance of the highest levels of the Reich that the Gottscheer would be re-settled as a group, the VGL was convinced that they would remain the leaders of this closed ethnic group and as border-farmers defend the boundaries of the Reich. Lampeter personally challenged Gauleiter (State Governor) Sigfried Uiberreither, the head of the Civil Authority of Styria, under whose jurisdiction the new settlers were to belong, on the acreage allocated to the settlers. Lampeter believed that the farm sizes were not large enough to allow for a healthy development in the future.

Lampeter also resisted the requirement that the ethnic group be included in the “Steirische Heimatbund”, a civilian political organization set up by the Reich in the Styrian part of Slovenia after its occupation. Its main purpose was to re-integrate into the German nation those Styrians who had been Slovene-ized during the 20th Century and particularly after 1918. The VGL and Lampeter in particular, resisted such inclusion since, as pure blooded Germans they did not wish the Gottscheer be placed on an equal level with the Slovenes who had been their adversaries during the past twenty years.
 
This, and other challenges, led to serious tensions between the Gauleiter and Lampeter.  Frensing states in Die Umsiedlung, pg.102, that: “..the blatant, nearly arrogant ways of Lampeter produced a less than favorable climate for the plans of the VGL which could only be realized with the approval and support of the Gauleiter.  In the course of 1941, the resentment of the Gauleiter became ever more obvious. In a conversation Uiberreither made it apparent that he valued the national substance of the Gottscheer no higher than that of the Slovene who for the benefit of the Gottscheer needed to be resettled”. Similar observations were made by the RKFVD in Berlin, where according to Frensing: …”the willfulness of the VGL was recognized immediately”.

Nevertheless, the Gauleiter promised Lampeter the position of a Kreisfűhrer (District Leader) in the “Steirischer Heimatbund”.

All this points to the fact that the now 25 year old Lampeter and his equally young VGL were totally oblivious of the hierarchical and organizational demands of the dictatorship of the Third Reich. After having run a virtual, if clandestine mini-state during the past few years, they had become overconfident and arrogant and had been setting themselves up for bitter disillusionment when ultimately, and very soon, they were to come up against the unalterable - “ingathering principles” - of Hitler as spelled out by SS-Officer Dr. Fähndrich in his Paragraph 5.

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