Slovenians in waffen-ss

[Peter93929]

Interesting stuff. I live in Istria, the Northern part of which is in Slovenia and I'm very conscious of the shifting of boundaries around here. It is something which is alien to most Brits but obviously relevant to many parts of the rest of Europe.
The Croats and Slovenes, having been part of the losing side in WW1 had been compelled to join in the initially Kingdom of Serbs, Croats & Slovenes that later became Jugoslavia. Whilst Croatia had been an independant kingdom for part of its history, I don't think the Slovenes ever were and had effectively been part of Austria proper rather than a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I suspect the towns of much of modern Slovenia were probably fairly Germanic in character then and that German would have been the language most townspeople spoke. There would also have been much intermarrying and not all that many pure Slovenians, so the possibility of German units, post Anschluss, being recruited in the area would seem quite likely. It's necessary to get in to the character of what life was like at the time and sometimes it gets distorted with time.
I think there is sometimes a tendency to assume much clearer divisions between national groups than actually happens on the ground. My wife's grandfather for instance, came from Lvov, in the days when it was in Austro-Hungary. There are very few of his family name in the Croatian phonebook but lots in the modern Lvov one. My wife's mother is Volksdeutsche. Her mother married, secondly, a Serb. Both my in-laws were active in Jugoslav and Croatian politics. My wife's first husband's father was born Italian, in Trieste, although he has lived in, first Jugoslavia, then Croatia, for most of his life. The family origins would not be regarded as unusual around here.(A significant number of people in the last census described themselves as Istrians, rather than Croatians or Italians) Now we are all Croatians, yes, even me! I have dual British-Croatian nationality. I know a lot of people with mixed Croatian-Serbian backgrounds and mixed Croatian-Slovenians, as well as those with mixed German-Croatian backgrounds, many Croats having worked in Germany for a generation and married local Germans.
We talk of Slovenian SS, but I'm not sure that they would have been so obviously Slovenian at the time, other than in the modern location of the towns they were recruited in. The more rural recruits may have been more specifically Slovenian.

[seewolf]

I know that Slovenians have served in Wehrmacht as soldiers of Croatian 369th Reinforced Inf. Reg. as well as in Luftwaffe as part of the Croatian legion on the Eastern front.One of the most succesful fighter pilots in that unit was a Slovenian Albin Starc.