Kočevje
Encyclopedia : K : KO : KOE : Kočevje
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| Area: | 563.7 km² | |
| Population - males - females | 16,292 7,965 8,327 | |
| Mayor: | ||
| Average age: | 41.55 years | |
| Residential areas: - households: - families: | 28.45 m²/person 5,729 4,624 | |
| Working active: - unemployed: | 8,109 1,529 | |
| Average monthly salary (August 2003): - gross: - net: | 201,019 SIT 130,850 SIT | |
| College/university students: | 480 | |
| Source: Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia, census of 2002. | ||
Kočevje (German: Gottschee) is a municipality and town in Slovenia, the largest by area, located between the rivers Krka and Kolpa. It is well known for its ancient forest and wild animals, including brown bears. From the middle of the 13th to the middle of the 20th century, Kočevje was a German linguistic enclave. Their language was a dialect of Bavarian called Gottscheerish or Granish. The German speakers were known for their folk songs. The Gottscheerish dialect is now considered to be critically endangered, with few remaining native speakers.
History
Gottschee was settled in the late 1300s by the Carinthian Counts of Ortenburg initially with colonists from the Ortenburg estates in Carinthia and Tyrol, and by other settlers who came from Austrian and German Dioceses of Salzburg, Brixen and Freising. The settlers cleared the vacant and heavily forested land, and established towns and rural villages. The area of Carniola that was to become Gottschee had been a strategic part of the Holy Roman Empire since the year 800. As a result, there were a number of important fortifications in and around Gottschee. Gottschee received its municipal charter and city seal in 1471. The Gottschee ethnic and linguistic area consisted of more than 180 villages organized into 31 townships and parishes.Gottscheer began to emigrate from their homeland around 1870, with most coming to the United States. The largest wave of immigrants came after World War II.
The Resettlement of the Germans from Gottschee
The Gottscheer were living under Italian rule after Yugoslavia's surrender, which Hitler could not abide. Nazi racial policy dictated that these Germans had to be brought back into the Reich and the Slovenian "Untermenschen" had to be removed. The Nazis established a branch of the Resettlement Administration (Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, or "VoMi") at Maribor (German, Marburg) for this purpose.
While some of the Gottscheer community leaders had embraced National Socialism and agitated for "assistance" and "repatriation" to the Reich before the German invasion in 1941, most Gotschee had no interest in reuniting with Greater Germany or joining the Nazis. They had been integrated into society with their Slovenian neighbors, often intermarrying among Slovenians and becoming bilingual while maintaining their Germanic language and customs since their arrival in the region in the late 1300s. However, propaganda and Nazi ideology prevailed, and The VoMi began planning the Gottschee "resettlement" (forced expulsion) from Kočevje which was in the Italian occupation zone to the "Ranner Dreieck" or Rann Triangle, a region between the confluences of the Krka, Kolpa, and Sava Rivers.
To achieve that goal, accommodation had to be made for the Gottschee "settlers" and some 46,000 Slovenians in the Rann Triangle region were forcibly deported to eastern Germany for potential Germanization or forced labor beginning in November 1941. Shortly before that time, a largely transparent propaganda effort was aimed toward both the Gottscheer and the Slovenians, promising the latter equivalent farmland in Germany for the land relinquished in Lower Styria. The Gottscheer were given Reich passports and transportation to the Rann area just after the forced departure of the Slovenians. Most Gottschee left their homes because of coercion and threats since the VoMi had a deadline of December 31, 1941 for the mass movement of both groups . Though many Gotschee did receive farmland and households, these were of lesser quality as their own, and many were in disarray from the hasty forced expulsion of the Slovenians.
From the time of their arrival to the end of the war, Gottschee farmers were harassed and sometimes killed by Tito's partisans. The attempt to resettle the Gottscheer was a costly failure for the Nazi regime, since extra manpower was required to protect the farmers from the partisans. Most Gottschee were as much victims as the Slovenians deported to the Reich, though the former were not used for forced labor as the latter.
The deported Slovenians were taken to several camps in Saxony, where they were forced to work on German farms or in factories run by German industries from 1941-1945. The forced laborers were not always kept in formal concentration camps, but often just vacant buildings where they slept until the next day's labor took them outside these quarters. Toward the close of the war, these camps were liberated by American and Soviet Army troops, and later repatriated refugees returned to Yugoslavia to find their homes in shambles.
The fate of the resettled Gottschee was not much better, and in many cases much worse. At the end of the war the Nazi regime in the region evaporated as soldiers and administrators fled. Many Gottschee were killed by partisans in their attempts to escape northward. In one of the last tragedies of the war, a large group of these refugees who had crossed the border into Austria were forcibly returned to Yugoslavia by British occupation troops and later executed by Yugoslav partisans as traitors. Both the Slovenians in the Rann Triangle region and the Gottschee of Kočevje suffered greatly as a result of Nazi racial and "resettlement" policies.
See related article at Slovenians for source materials.
Notable Inhabitants
- Zofka Kveder (1878-1926), writer, worked in Kočevje
- Viktor Parma (1858-1924), composer, worked in Kočevje
- Roman Erich Petsche (1907-?), teacher, painter and 'Gerechter unter den Völkern', was born in Kočevje
Bibliography
- Karl-Markus Gauß: Die sterbenden Europäer. Unterwegs zu den Sepharden von Sarajevo, Gottscheer Deutschen, Arbëreshe, Sorben und Aromunen. Zsolnay, Wien 2001, ISBN 3-552-05158-9 (Taschenbuchausgabe: dtv, München, ISBN 3-423-30854-0)
External links
- [Kočevje Official Site]
- [Pokrajinski Muzej Kočevje] - Local Museum with a permanent exhibit on the History of the German Population around Gottschee.
- [www.gottschee.at] Website der Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Gottscheer Landsmannschaften
- [www.gottschee.de] Umfangreiche Website über das Thema KoĿevje / Gottschee - viele Hintergrundinformationen über die tragische Umsiedlung der Gottscheer und die Absiedlung / Deportation der Slowenen aus ihrer angestammten Heimat in der Untersteiermark.
- [www.gottschee.com] Website with audio folklore samples from Gottscheers in the United States.
- [Endangered languages in Europe and adjacent areas]
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| Urban municipalities: Celje | Koper | Kranj | Ljubljana | Maribor | Murska Sobota | |
| Nova Gorica | Novo Mesto | Ptuj | Slovenj Gradec | Velenje | |
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