“The history of the National Liberation Movement does not know of any official establishment of the Liberation Front (Osvobodilna fronta – referred to as the OF). The anti-fascist front was not established either because it already existed before the disintegration of Yugoslavia. This date was chosen with manipulative intentions, Kidrič needed a date of its establishment, and so a certain debate meeting at Vidmar’s was declared the historic date of the founding of the OF. I was not present at that debate meeting because I was justifiably suspicious of the communists at the time of Hitler’s pact with Stalin,” Slovenian writer Edvard Kocbek wrote decades ago. Yesterday, RTV Slovenia was once again misleading with the Party mythology regarding the day of establishment of the “Liberation Front,” which supposedly happened at the time of the Nazi Germany attack on Yugoslavia.
“On the 6th of April 1941, so 80 years ago, with the German air attack on Belgrade, World War II also began in the former Yugoslavia. A few days earlier, Yugoslavia had joined the Tripartite Pact of the Third Reich, Italy and Japan, but withdrew from it shortly after the coup. Four years of war horrors followed. The occupier stayed on the Slovenian soil until the 9th of May 1945. Slovenia established the Liberation Front on the 27th of April 1941, which was also called the Anti-Imperialist Front,” the show Dnevnik on RTV Slovenia reported yesterday. But the truth is that on the 27th of April, nothing important happened when it comes to the “fight against the occupier.” However, the Anti-Imperialist Front was formed on the 26th of April because the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were still military allies at the time.
The first to resist the attack was the Yugoslav Royal Army, which was not even mentioned in the article. They did, however, continue spreading historical lies that the communists, who at the time had a proven pact with the Soviets, the former allies of the Nazis, resisted. In reality, the Slovenian communists only turned against Nazi Germany when they attacked the fraternal Soviet Union, and they were not at was to defend themselves from Nazism, but with the intention of carrying out a communist revolution, as the partisans knew how to cooperate with the Nazis even during the war, in order to achieve their political goals.
The holiday of the Day of the founding of the Liberation Front was adopted in post-war socialist Slovenia in 1948 and was celebrated as the holiest of the holidays until 1951. At that time, Slovenian MPs decided to abandon the celebration on the 27th of April and designated the 22nd of July as the main holiday, which was called the Day of Uprising and symbolised the day when the first partisan rifles were shot in occupied Slovenia. In fact, the day of the uprising was also a party myth that was more or less made up. It was created on the basis of a rather insignificant event – the attack of the three communists who shot and wounded a Slovenian gunman Franc Žnidaršič. The celebration of the OF was forgotten until 1968 when Josip Vidmar pointed out that it should once again be celebrated on the 27th of April. And Vidmar was also there when the law was first adopted in 1948, and he also signed its repeal in 1951, and in 1968, once again proposed that it enters into force.
The history of the National Liberation Movement does not know of any official establishment of the Liberation Front. The anti-fascist front was not established either,because it already existed before the disintegration of Yugoslavia.
The famous writer Edvard Kocbek, also a partisan himself, once wrote about the day of founding the “Liberation Front” in one of his diary entries: “Firstly, the history of the National Liberation Movement does not know of any official establishment of the Liberation Front. The anti-fascist front was not established either because it already existed before the disintegration of Yugoslavia. This date was chosen with manipulative intentions, Kidrič needed a date of its establishment, and so a certain debate meeting at Vidmar’s was declared the historic date of the founding of the OF. And secondly, I was not present at that debate meeting because I was justifiably suspicious of the communists at the time of Hitler’s pact with Stalin.” Namely, Kocbek refused to talk to them ever since Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union, and according to him, the real OF only began to take shape in the summer of 1941, when the Christian Socialists also began to take an active part in its formation.
Domen Mezeg
