Bleiburg

For many others, it means execution without trial.

These events will become known as the Bleiburg repatriations, and will cost the lives of tens of thousands of Nazi collaborators from the Balkans.

To understand what happened in Bleiburg, it is necessary to go back to April, 1941, when Germany and Italy invaded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and carved it up.

In the territory of Croatia and occupied Bosnia, they installed the independent state of Croatia, a puppet regime run by the fascist Ustasha movement under Ante Pavelić.

The new state set about the systematic destruction of those it deemed enemies, carrying out the genocide of Serbs, Jews, and the Roma.

Pavelić himself, and most of the Ustasha leadership, did not go with their soldiers, and they slipped away through Austria westward, escaping the channels that would carry many of them, with help from the Catholic Church, to Spain and Latin America.

Heading for Austria were several different columns mixed with civilian refugees, the Croatian Armed Forces, the Slovene Home Guard, the Montenegrin and Serb units, German troops, and a vast tail of civilians fighting through partisan blockades across Slovenia toward Carinthia, the southern Austrian province.

The main Croatian column reached the fields outside the Austrian town of Bleiburg on the 14th and 15th of May.