AVNOJ resolutions

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As AVNOJ resolutions (correct decisions of AVNOJ Bureau ) is referred to a number of orders, decrees and modesty which the future state organization of Yugoslavia after the end of the occupation by the German Reich and its allies ( Italy , Hungary and Bulgaria ) in World War II affect. They were named after the Anti-Fascist Council of the National Liberation of Yugoslavia ( Serbo-Croatian Antifašističko v (ij) eće narodnog oslobođenja Jugoslavije , abbreviated AVNOJ ). In memory of its second meeting in Jajce at the end of November 1943 , November 29 was later celebrated as a national holiday.

development

After German and Italian troops had conquered the Kingdom of Yugoslavia , which had existed since 1929, in the course of the Balkan War in 1940–1941 , the country was divided up among the conquerors: Serbia was occupied by German troops and placed under military administration. Slovenia was divided between Italy, the German Empire and Hungary. Croatia was united with a large part of Bosnia-Herzegovina to form the " Independent State of Croatia " (Croatian Nezavisna Država Hrvatska ), a fascist vassal state . Montenegro has been called " Independent State of Montenegro " to an Italian vassal state. Macedonia was divided between Bulgaria and the Italian puppet state of Albania .

The AVNOJ was founded on November 26th, 1942 in Bihać as a management body for those involved in the liberation struggle against the occupiers (such as the Yugoslav partisans and the National Liberation Army). As AVNOJ decisions are usually referred to several successively by this council or its Bureau decisions taken and derived laws.

Resolutions of November 1943

From November 21 to 29, 1943, the AVNOJ met for its second conference in the Bosnian city ​​of Jajce . Participants were delegates from all regions of Yugoslavia.

Decision of the second meeting of the anti-fascist Council of the People's Liberation of Yugoslavia on the establishment of Yugoslavia according to the federal principle, November 29, 1943

First and foremost, the communist-dominated council made a number of decisions about the future of Yugoslavia after a possible liberation. The recognition of the Yugoslav government in exile , which met in London , was withdrawn and King Peter II was forbidden to return. The country should be rebuilt as a federal state. To this end, the delegates decreed in the resolution “On the construction of Yugoslavia on the federation principle” in the preamble and five further articles:

  • “On the basis of the right of every people to self-determination, including the right to separation from or association with other peoples, and in accordance with the true will of all the peoples of Yugoslavia, reaffirms the unshakable fraternity of the peoples of Yugoslavia over the course of three years of common people's liberation struggle forged, the Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia decides:
  • First: The peoples of Yugoslavia have never recognized and do not recognize the fragmentation of Yugoslavia on the part of the fascist imperialists and have shown in joint armed struggle their firm will to remain united in Yugoslavia in the future.
  • Second: In order to implement the principle of the sovereignty of the peoples of Yugoslavia, so that Yugoslavia may embody the true homeland of all its peoples and so that it can never again become the domain of any hegemonic clique of any kind, Yugoslavia will be created and structured on a federal basis, which the full equality of Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians and Montenegrins or the peoples of Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina guaranteed. "

A National Committee chaired by Josip Broz Tito was set up as a provisional government .

The Kingdom of Yugoslavia before the Second World War was shaped by Greater Serbian centralism, but so weakened by nationality conflicts that Prince Regent Paul was no longer able to maintain centralism. Consequences were drawn from this in the Jajce decisions. It was decided not to declare the different peoples as a "people of Yugoslavs", and a federalist state concept was used.

In addition, it was decided to set up the State Commission for the Establishment of the Crimes of the Occupiers and their Aides .

Resolutions of November 1944

On November 21, 1944, the AVNOJ Presidium passed a "resolution on the transfer of enemy property into the property of the state, on state management of the property of absent persons and the sequestration of property that was forcibly sold by the occupation authorities" .

The so-called "Jajce Decree"

The meaning of a so-called “Jajce Decree” (also: “Jajce Decree” or “The Little Jajce Decree”) is scientifically controversial. This text, also described as a "secret decree", was supposedly passed by the AVNOJ on November 21, 1943 under the title "On the deprivation of civil rights" . It has the following content:

  • All persons of German nationality living in Yugoslavia automatically lose their Yugoslav citizenship and all civil and civic rights.
  • The entire movable and immovable property of all persons of German nationality is deemed to be confiscated by the state and automatically becomes its property.
  • Persons of German ethnicity may neither claim nor exercise any rights nor appeal to courts and institutions for their personal or legal protection.

Other authors assign this text to a "second resolution" at the meeting of the AVNOJ Presidium on November 21, 1944 in Belgrade, which is said to have been taken on that day a little earlier than the published "Resolution on the transfer of enemy assets (...)" . The title of this secret, or at least not published in the official gazette, the alleged decision is “On the deprivation of civil rights” and thus exactly as, according to Karner, the “Jajce Order ” of November 21, 1943 is headed. The Austrian historian Arnold Suppan reproduces the text apostrophized by Karner exactly and, like Nećak, describes it as the “second, unpublished resolution of the AVNOJ Presidium of November 21, 1944”. According to Portmann, Jajce's “phantom decree” of November 21, 1943 (or the second AVNOJ decree of November 21, 1944, so-called by Nećak and Suppan) never became legally binding. This view is also represented by the Slovenian historians Damijan Guštin and Vladimir Prebilić in a more recent publication. Portmann justifies his suspicion why Karner and Suppan assume such a resolution with an incorrect interpretation of the "interpretation" of the known resolution of the AVNOJ Presidium of November 21, 1944, which was published in the Official Journal on June 8, 1945.

Laws from 1945

On February 3, 1945, a resolution of the AVNOJ Presidium suspended all ordinances and laws enacted during the occupation period and invoked the pre-war laws, provided they did not conflict with the achievements of the people's liberation movement. If in doubt, this was decided by the public prosecutors. The military penal laws and the penal code of 1929 thus formed the first legal basis for settling accounts with collaborators and traitors. In the areas liberated from the occupiers, jurisdiction took place during or shortly after the war by members of the people's liberation committees, later of the people's committees, who only had insufficient legal knowledge. The British representative in Belgrade, William Deakin, reported on November 7, 1945 that there was little reference to pre-war laws. The pre-war legislation, insofar as it did not counteract the goals of the liberation struggle, remained subsidiary until all AVNOJ resolutions were confirmed by the first elected post-war parliament on December 1, 1945.

On February 6, 1945, the decree of November 21, 1944 was incorporated into the legislation of the Republic of Yugoslavia. It also found its way into the Confiscation Act of June 9, 1945 and the Agrarian Reform Act of August 23, 1945.

The law on the electoral lists of August 10, 1945 stipulated that "members of the military formations of the occupiers and their local accomplices who fought continuously and actively against the People's Liberation Army of Yugoslavia or against the Yugoslav army or against the armies of the allies of Yugoslavia" , the right to vote is denied.

In the founding statute of the autonomous province of Vojvodina , which was created by a decree of the Presidium of the Serbian People's Representation ( Sluzbeni Glasnik Srbije of September 9, 1945), Article 4 guarantees all nationalities full equality as citizens of Serbia with the exception of German nationality. After an authentic interpretation was drawn up on June 8, 1945, the AVNOJ presidium decision of November 21, 1944 lost all civil rights (drzavljanska prava) .

AVNOJ resolutions regarding the German minority

The AVNOJ decree of November 21, 1944 on the expropriation and subsequent confiscation of all German state and private assets, which in the later legal version also referred to the deprivation of civil rights of persons of German descent through which on the day of entry into force in the Transfer of property to the state:

  • 1. All assets of the German Reich and its citizens that are on the territory of Yugoslavia.
  • 2. All assets of persons of German ethnicity except for those Germans who fought in the ranks of the National Liberation Army and the partisan units of Yugoslavia or are citizens of neutral states and did not behave hostile during the occupation.
  • 3. All property of war criminals and their accomplices regardless of their citizenship and the property of any person who has been sentenced to loss of property in favor of the state by judgment of civil and military courts.

This was then interpreted by the AVNOJ by law of June 8, 1945 as follows:

  • 1. The decision of the Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia of November 21, 1944 affects those Yugoslav citizens of German ethnicity who declared themselves or were considered German during the occupation, regardless of whether they appeared as such before the war are or have been considered assimilated Croats, Slovenes or Serbs.
  • 2. The civil rights and property of those Yugoslav citizens of German ethnicity, German descent or with a German family name are not withdrawn:
    • a. who had participated as partisans and soldiers in the national liberation struggle or were active in the national liberation movement;
    • b. who were assimilated as Croats, Slovenes and Serbs before the war and neither joined the Kulturbund nor appeared as members of the German ethnic group during the war;
    • c. who refused during the occupation to declare themselves members of the German ethnic group at the request of the occupation or quisling authorities;
    • d. who (be it man or woman), despite their German ethnicity, have entered into a mixed marriage with persons of one of the Yugoslav nationalities or with persons of Jewish, Slovak, Ukrainian, Magyar, Romanian or other recognized nationality.
  • 3. The protection of the previous article, points a), b), c) and d), do not enjoy those persons who during the occupation through their behavior against the liberation struggle of the Yugoslav peoples and were helpers of the occupant.

In the Batschka and the Serbian Banat , the AVNOJ decision of November 21, 1944 was not made known to the Germans and caught them unprepared. Such notices have been served in numerous cases in Croatia.

See also

literature

  • Thomas Casagrande: The Volksdeutsche SS division "Prinz Eugen". Campus Verlag, Frankfurt 2003, ISBN 3-593-37234-7 .
  • Klaus Schmider: Partisan War in Yugoslavia 1941–1944. Mittler Verlag, Hamburg 2002, ISBN 3-8132-0794-3 .
  • Zoran Janjetović: The Danube Swabians in Vojvodina and National Socialism. In: Mariana Hausleitner , Harald Roth: The Influence of National Socialism on Minorities in Eastern Central and Southern Europe. IKS Verlag, Munich 2006. (online version on a private website)
  • Mirko Messner : On the history of the AVNOJ resolutions.
  • Božo Repe: AVNOJ: Historical fact and current political question. In: East-West counter information. Issue 2, 2002, special supplement, pp. XII – XVII.
  • Milan D. Ristović: Nemački novi poredak i jugoistočna evropa. Službeni glasnik, Beograd 2005, ISBN 86-7549-397-5 .

Remarks

  1. ↑ According to Stefan Karner , who keeps a copy in his private archive, the “Jajce decision” was only signed by the Politburo member Moša Pijade . You have given a guideline for later legal measures against the German-speaking population group. Karner thinks that the brevity of the text could also suggest a leaflet. Michael Portmann replies that in this case it was hardly a secret document, since it does not make much sense to distribute secret edicts by leaflet.
  2. ↑ For more details, see Portmann: The communist revolution in Vojvodina 1944–1952: Politics, society, economy, culture. Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2008, ISBN 978-3-7001-6503-3 , section The “AVNOJ Resolutions”: Errors and misunderstandings.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Prvo i drugo Zasjedanje AVNOJa, Belgrad 1963, cited above. according to Ernstgert Kalbe: Nation-building and national conflicts in southern Slavia. In: UTOPIE Kreativ. Issue 95, September 1998, pp. 48-64. (PDF; 117 kB)
  2. ↑ Dunja Melcic: settlements with political opponents and the communist post-war crimes. In: The war in Yugoslavia. Handbook on the history, course and consequences. 2nd Edition. Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2007, ISBN 978-3-531-33219-2 .
  3. ^ A b Stefan Karner: The German-speaking ethnic group in Slovenia. Aspects of their development 1939–1997. Klagenfurt / Ljubljana / Vienna 1998, p. 125 ff.
  4. ↑ Michael Portmann : Communist accounting with war criminals, collaborators, 'enemies of the people' and 'betrayers' in Yugoslavia during the Second World War and immediately afterwards (1943–1950) . GRIN Verlag, 2007, ISBN 978-3-638-70864-7 , p. 62 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  5. ^ Michael Portmann: The Communist Revolution in Vojvodina 1944–1952: Politics, Society, Economy, Culture. Publishing house of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2008, ISBN 978-3-7001-6503-3 , section: The “AVNOJ resolutions”: errors and misunderstandings.
  6. ^ So the Slovenian historian Dušan Nećak: The Germans in Slovenia 1938–1948. Pp. 387-388.
  7. ^ Arnold Suppan: German history in Eastern Europe. Between the Adriatic and the Karawanken. Vienna 1989, p. 416.
  8. ^ Službeni List Demokratske Federativne Jugoslavije. February 13, 1945, No. 4/51.
  9. ^ Ekkehard Völkl: Settlement furor in Croatia. In: Klaus-Dietmar Henke, Hans Woller (ed.): Political cleansing in Europe. The reckoning with fascism and collaboration after World War II. Munich 1991, ISBN 3-423-04561-2 , p. 373.
  10. ^ Moša S. Pijade, Slobodan Nešović: Prvo i drugo Zasedanje Antifašističkog veća narodnog oslobođenja Jugoslavije. 1983, p. 374 ff.
  11. ^ A b Robert Jarman: Yugoslavia - Political Diaries. 1997, p. 576.
  12. ↑ Leon Geršković: Historija narodne vlasti (History of People's Power). Belgrade 1957, p. 133 ff .; Overall, the AVNOJ resolutions were declared to be laws on December 1, 1945, E. Zellweger: State structure and legislation of the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia 1945-1948. In: Eastern Europe Handbook: Yugoslavia. P. 122 ff., Cf. the quote from B. Kidrić, p. 129, u. ibid, p. 133, as well as the Belgrade Politika of November 24, 1944.
  13. ^ Michael Portmann: The Communist Revolution in Vojvodina 1944–1952: Politics, Society, Economy, Culture. Publishing house of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2008, ISBN 978-3-7001-6503-3 , p. 336.
  14. ^ Službeni List Demokratske Federativne Jugoslavije. I / 1945, No. 39, Item 347.
  15. ↑ Document 103E: expropriation and deprivation of civil rights. In: Federal Ministry for Displaced Persons (Ed.): The fate of the Germans in Yugoslavia. Bonn 1961.