The Tragedy of Bleiburg and Viktring, 1945

The atrocities and mass murders committed by Josip Broz Tito's partisan units of the Yugoslav army immediately after World War II had no place in the conscience of socialist Yugoslavia. The official history was aligned with a firm paradigm that called for a glorification of the antifascist "people's [...]
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The atrocities and mass murders committed by Josip Broz Tito's partisan units of the Yugoslav army immediately after World War II had no place in the conscience of socialist Yugoslavia. The official history was aligned with a firm paradigm that called for a glorification of the antifascist "people's liberation resistance." With the breakup of Yugoslavia and its socialist regime in 1991, the accounts of contemporary witnesses, which had mainly been known in exile circles abroad, increasingly reached public awareness in Croatia and Slovenia. Florian Thomas Rulitz's meticulously researched book - now published for the first time in English - presents a detailed reconstruction of those days in May 1945, providing a corrective to the historical memory that had been previously accepted as truth. He furthermore considers the question of the murders on Austrian territory, which were hushed up in partisan literature and presented as casualties of the final military operations. This groundbreaking study will interest scholars and students of modern European history.