Moderator: George Lepre
weren't these mostly Volksdeutche who inhabited these areas as opposed to ethnic slovenes?It's however true that after the victory over Yugoslavia Germany de facto annexed the northern part of Slovenia and began drafting men into Wermacht, part of whom were from late 1942/ early 1943 onwards being procured by the Waffen-SS, when the latter abandoned its exclusively volunteer concept
According to statistics of the Deutsche Kulturbund, prepared for internal purposes, roughly 28,000 Volksdeutsche lived in the entire Slovenia in January 1941 and according to the Yugoslav census from 1931 - cca. 25,000. About half of these belonged to the so-called Gotschee enclave (in the Italian part), which were in 1941/42 forced by the German authorities to resettle in the German part of Slovenia vacated by forced deportations of Slovenes. The entire population of the German part numbered about 800,000.pzrmeyer2 wrote:weren't these mostly Volksdeutche who inhabited these areas as opposed to ethnic slovenes?It's however true that after the victory over Yugoslavia Germany de facto annexed the northern part of Slovenia and began drafting men into Wermacht, part of whom were from late 1942/ early 1943 onwards being procured by the Waffen-SS, when the latter abandoned its exclusively volunteer concept