Following the Footprints of Stalin: The Yugoslav ''Dachau Trials'' 1948

Thomas Porena

In October 1946 news circulated in Slovenia that a man named Janko Pufler, charged with burning the glass factory he managed, had been sentenced to death as a saboteur. This in itself was not unusual as press reports about sentences against saboteurs, fifth-columnists and class-enemies were a frequent occurrence during that period. What stood out about Pufler was his past: Born as Hans Puffler into a Slovenian family in Graz, he had been an active communist and unionist before the war, had volunteered for the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, joined the Slovenian leftist Liberation Front (Osvobodilna Fronta) upon the outbreak of the war, and had after his subsequent arrest spent the years 1943 to 1945 imprisoned in the Dachau Concentration Camp. In short, it was very unusual to accuse someone like him as a saboteur.

Already in 1946, Pufler’s execution was put on hold and in mid-1947 the supreme court of the People’s republic of Slovenia revisited his case. In August of that year, the court engineered a connection between Pufler and a “subversive group” of so-called former Gestapo agents. This group allegedly consisted of Yugoslav communists imprisoned in Dachau during the war, who had served there as Kapos and prisoner functionaries and who supposedly had been trained by Gestapo to work undercover against the Yugoslav Liberation Movement.¹ This connection between old guard communist structures in Dachau and the Gestapo was the first step of what Oto Luthar termed as the purge “project” which will lead in April 1948 to eleven death sentences and in the next years to several other trials.² In the predominantly locally centered Slovene historiography, this and a number of subsequent trials are known as the “Dachau trials”, a term coined by historian Valdimir Dedijer in the ‘60s. In this paper we will focus only on the first and most spectacular trial that occurred in Ljubljana between April 20 and April 26, 1948.

The most notorious of the Dachau Trials is also commonly referred to as the “Diehl-Oswald trial”, named after the first two defendants, Branko Diehl and Stane Oswald. This paper will not focus on the question of guilt of the defendants.³ Dušan Nećak, Ljubo Bavcon and Peter Kobe have already settled this question in the anthology Dachauski procesi. Raziskovalno poročilo z dokumenti [The Dachau Trials: a Research Report with documents], where they demonstrate that the defendants were charged without proof and were tortured to confess, removing all doubt about the set-up behind the trials.⁴ Unsurprisingly, all defendants had been rehabilitated by 1987.

Instead, this paper is interested in the political function of the trial – that in several ways resembles a purge –as a show trial for the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) and its political agenda at that moment in time. For this, it is necessary to focus on the charges in the trial as an “amalgam” – a cobbled together mixture of a whole range of accusations intended to lump in and accuse several groups together –,⁵ created ad hoc in order to demonize the defendants and intended as a script⁶ for the show trial. As the German historian Manfred Zeidler pointed out in his study of the Minsk trials against war criminals in 1946, a show trial is first and foremost a show in which it is fundamental to demonize the defendants in order to legitimize the judicial process against them and conduct further purges.⁷ We consider a show trial successful when the publicity of its proceedings and the demonization of its defendants succeeds in spreading fear and instilling obedience among those people who become afraid to fit into the amalgam of the charges it laid out.⁸ In order to understand the amalgam behind the Diehl-Oswald trial and its script, it is, therefore, necessary to consider the particular political atmosphere in which it played out and the internal and international context of the spring of 1948.

In the presentation of his book “The Battle Stalin lost”, given in Ljubljana in 1969, the historian Vladimir Dedijer coined the expression “Dachau trials” as a reference to the better-known Dachau Trials held in the fall 1945 by the U.S. Military in Germany. He described the sequel of Yugoslav trials in 1948 as the only example of Stalinist show trials “ruled in Yugoslavia until that moment”⁹ This term was intended as a provocation, highlighting the problem of a Yugoslav military court indicting former concentration camp inmates. Referring back to this provocation of Dedijer, this paper intends to show how the Dachau Trials “script” presented the accused as perpetrators akin to those of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.

Dušan Nećak describes the “Dachau Trials” explicitly as political trials against a group of defendants similar in their politics and charged with invented accusations. He, however, draws an important distinction between this Yugoslav show trial and the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s, especially in that the defendants of the Oswald-Diehl trial were not direct political rivals of the Yugoslav Communist leadership.¹⁰ This view is further supported by Georg Hermann Hodos who describes the “Great Terror” of the Thirties in the Soviet Union, as a sequence of trials which served to centralize the power in the only Stalin hands (Alleinherrschaft),¹¹ and this was indeed not the case of the “Dachau Trials”. Ljubo Bavcon on the other hand emphasizes the Stalinist character of the Diehl-Oswald trial by arguing that it was an attack against old communist structures and intended as a warning against their criticism – just before the official split between Tito and Stalin.¹²

Just a week before the trial Tito’s entourage expressed in a letter to Stalin and Molotov of April 13, 1948 the aim to follow the steps of the Russian revolution, particularly those of the Stalin era, but to adapt the revolutionary theory to the Yugoslav context.¹³ This quite confrontational statement shows that there was a political calculation behind the decision to hold the Diehl-Oswald trial in a particular sensitive moment and to sway the public opinion through it.

The aim of the article is to analyze the political message of the show trial and to analyze how the CPY used this message at a crucial historical moment to create legitimacy for its aims. The article starts with a brief description of the trial followed by the official position the Communist Party of Slovenia shared through the official party newspaper Borba wherein the Slovene Minister of Interior, Boris Kraigher, celebrated the victory of the CPY over the so called war criminals of Dachau and their agenda of sabotaging socialist Yugoslavia. This first part will have the function of statement in which Kraigher by evoking the evil connection between Gestapo affiliates, old communists, technical experts who sabotaged the new socialist Yugoslavia, aim to put under suspect any hypothetical dissident of the CPY leadership. The next parts of the article will go deeper into the analysis trying to define the group of dissidents. By using a trial proceed almost identical of the Shakhty trials of the late 1920ies in the Soviet Union, the trial functioned as a multiple warning against any criticism inside the middle-high cadres of the CPY about the development of the first five-year-plan. The Yugoslav technical experts had to collaborate with the industrialization plan of the new State in order to emancipate Yugoslavia from the economical control of the Soviet Union. With the centralistic reform of the people’s councils (narodni odbori in Serbo-Croatian) which during the Liberation war became to have a leading political and administrative function in each village, region or city of Yugoslavia the central committee of the CPY was afraid that the local leaders of the narodni odbori would have too much power and would potentially boycott the leadership of the Party. The trial served to sow suspicions just before the official split between Tito and Stalin. In particular the CPY members who didn‘t participate on the liberation war because of their imprisonment during World War Two were considered as a hotbed of dissidence. Finally, the trial is analyzed as one of the very few explicit trials against “red Kapos structures” both in the Western and the Eastern bloc.

The sources analyzed for the paper consist primarily of the newspaper coverage of the Diehl-Oswald trial, the correspondence between Tito and Stalin before and after the trail, and the until now never evaluated dossiers of the control statutory commission of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia as well as the memories of former inmates.¹⁴

The Trial

On April 20, 1948 the streets of Ljubljana bustled with noise. Speakers directly on the streets transmitted the live coverage of Radio Ljubljana of the trial held in the big hall of the Tabor castle, the historical fortress and symbolic building of the town. It was a trial against alleged Gestapo agents, murders, spies and saboteurs.

In the crowded big hall of the Tabor, for six days fifteen defendants had to face the charge of high treason in front of the martial court without any possibility to prove their innocence.¹⁵ In a what could only be called a farce of an interrogation, the defendants had to admit to being collaborators of the Gestapo during their detention in the concentration camp of Dacha, primarily due to their role as prisoner functionaries in the camp. They had been part of the “provocative” antifascist committee of inmates; a structure allegedly created by the Gestapo.¹⁶ As part of their position in the prisoner administration, the defendants had had the power to decide who would be sent to a easier or heavier work camp, or to send inmates to the medical barracks, where they were subjected to medical experiments.¹⁷ Furthermore, they had to admit to continuing their so-called criminal activity after the war by collaborating with the secret services of an unspecified Western nation in order to sabotage the security and the industrial development of socialist Yugoslavia. The two people accused of representing the connection with the Gestapo were the Austrians Martin Presterl and Paul Gassler, both former volunteers on republican side in the Spanish war and inmates in Dachau. After the war Martin Presterl was traveling with his friend Hildegard Hahn in Yugoslavia as journalist and visited his surviving friends from the Spanish Civil War. Both were arrested charged of being spies. Hildegarde Hahn, the only woman of the group, wasn’t in Dachau. She was accused of being a Gestapo agent during the war and of having participated in denunciations of 70.000 Jews in Vienna who were then deported and murdered.¹⁸ On April 26, 1948 the court issued death sentences against Branko Diehl – graduated engineer and inspector for the economy at the Control Commission of the Slovenian Republic –, Stane Oswald – graduated engineer, and assistant of the Ministry of Industry in Belgrade –, Karel Barle – graduated engineer, secretary for economic questions at the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Slovenia –, Janko Puffler – director of a glass factory –, Boris Krajnc – graduated chemist and professor at the Ljubljana University –, Milan Stepišnik – graduated was? and director of a factory of metal products –, Vladimir Ličen – professor of chemistry and director of a chemist factory –, the Croat Oskar Juranić – lawyer and general secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Belgrade –, the Austrians Martin Presterl – teacher and journalist – with his friend Hildegarde Hahn and Paul Gasser, worker.

With the exception of Hildegarde Hahn, the defendants were communists of the old guard who had been active before World War Two, some of them even fighting in the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. They had been persecuted for their activities by the police of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, then by the Italian Fascists, by the Nazi Gestapo and imprisoned in the concentration camp of Dachau. In Dachau they had been employed in the administration of the camp as adjutants or kapos. After their liberation at the end of the war they were recognized as valid communists by the Yugoslav Communist Party and put in important managing and supervising roles in the new Yugoslav State. All, except Hildegarde Hahn, were executed.¹⁹

After the Diehl-Oswald Trial of April 1948, other ten trials followed.²⁰ In these eleven “Dachau Trials” 7.380 Slovenes and 2.144 of other nationalities were involved.²¹ In sum, 37 people were sentenced, of whom 31 were Slovenes, three Austrians, one German, one Croat and one Serb. Eleven people were executed.²² The rest of the convicted were condemned to forced labor and released in the first half of the 1950s.

The Official Comment of the Party

The day after the convictions of the Diehl-Oswald trial Boris Kraigher, minister of Interior Affairs of the People’s Republic of Slovenia, published an editorial in the official party newspaper “Borba” openly demonizing the defendants. Kraigher was the architect of the trials and the mass imprisonments of the second half of 1947.²³ By summarizing the charges, the article provides a political profile of the defendants and provides important context for understanding the trials.²⁴

Firstly, Kraigher alleges that a not specified imperialist country pursued a strategy²⁵ of using former Gestapo networks to damage the Five-Year Plan of Yugoslavia.²⁶ Through clandestine sabotage of the Yugoslav industry, the group of agents supposedly tried to convince Belgrade that it was necessary to employ foreign advisers in order to modernize the economy of Yugoslavia. According to Kraigher, these advisors would then collect vital information about the development of the country.

Secondly, Kraigher painted the defendants as longtime dissidents of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY). He alleged that they had been opposed to the decision to send volunteers to Spain – despite the fact that many of them had in fact been volunteers in Spain. He further accused them of vilifying the Soviet Union following the outbreak of hostilities between the USSR and Finland in 1939. He continued by leveling charges that during their imprisonment in Dachau, they were vital in sending 30 communists to certain death and topped it all off by trying to drive a wedge between the Yugoslav and Austria communist party after the war by way of defending bourgeois positions. Ultimately, according to Kraigher, they were bourgeois agents and spies.²⁷

To bolster this accusation, Kraigher quoted from a 1940 speech of Tito when he was nominated as secretary general of the CPY, after the old leadership was almost completely killed during the big purges by Stalin two years before: “in the last period they were carriers of bourgeois means in the Party and now they became agents and spies of the bourgeoisie in our Party. They became a foreign body inside the Party, who could not hide who was finally discovered. That was their development; the root of their actions lies in the time before the war. They always tried to impose their line against the line of the Party. Yet, this is no more a political process, but they are a common criminal band. This doesn’t matter who they work for, but only that they play the role of the class enemy inside the working class and that they attack.”²⁸ The Slovene minister finally concluded with a positive evaluation of the Yugoslav Communist Party which would be strengthened by the discover of this spay network.

Via the charges brought against the alleged dissidents, Kraigher summarizes the position of the CPY in April of 1948: The Western countries were enemies of Yugoslavia who wanted to sabotage the Five-Year-Plan. Loyalty towards the Soviet Union had been the priority of the party before the war (the Winter War and the Spanish Civil War) and would be after the war (friendship with the Austrian Communist Party). Furthermore, the CPY was politically successful by suppressing its internal enemies.

The First Aim of the Trials: To Make Sure the Technicians Implemented the Five-Year-Plan

Regarding Kraigher’s article: Did Yugoslavia really need foreign experts in order to implement industrialization? The scarcity of advisers and instructors had been already underlined by Stalin to Hebrang²⁹ in January 1945.³⁰ On that occasion, Stalin argued that in order to undertake the necessary transformation of the Yugoslav Liberation Army into a regular army, experts were needed. The army’s reformation was crucial for the new Yugoslav Republic - military cadres, weapons, the navy and air force needed to be renewed. In May 1946, the Soviet Union offered to send advisers to help to organize officer improvement schools, to extract oil and to create an efficient aviation-engine industry.³¹ The renewal of the army’s weapon arsenal had to develop in parallel with the extraction of raw materials and their transformation. At the beginning of 1947, Belgrade announced the first Five-Year Plan.³² Following the Soviet example, the CPY decided that industrialization, electrification and the general development of the infrastructure was necessary to realize Socialism.³³ The plan stressed the necessity to employ qualified workers, technical cadres and graduates in order to reach the target of the industrial production.³⁴ On 26 April 1948, the same day of the death sentences, the Vice President of Yugoslavia, Edvard Kardelj, pointed out the lack of money for experts and professionals and decried the complete absence of technicians in the Republic’s South compared to the North. Furthermore, he stressed that the experts of the northern cities wouldn’t agree with the goals of the Five-Year Plan. Thirdly, the members of the CPY on the Republican level wouldn’t agree with the rationalization of production.³⁵

When Kraigher one day later in his comment on the trials emphasized the strategy of the defendants to force Yugoslavia to call foreign advisers by acting as saboteurs against the Yugoslav industry, he alluded to the disagreement within the CPY when it came to the Five-Year Plan. The defendants were professors and students of chemistry, chemical engineers and workers as well as middle cadres of the Communist Party and journalists. Last but no least they were from Slovenia, the most developed republic of the Yugoslav federation. In other words, they were the perfect example of what Kardelj criticized.

Here, the purpose of the show trial becomes clear: To force the technical intelligentsia and the local middle cadres to tow the party line regarding the Five-Year-Plan and the industrialization of Yugoslavia by creating a potential thread and send the message that no regional objections were going to be tolerated by the leadership in regard to this subject. In order to further illustrate this argument, I will compare these trials with another show trial, conducted in Moscow exactly 20 years before, when the prosecution of the first Soviet Five-Year Plan began (1928-1932).

The "Shakhty Trial" was the first big show trial in the Stalin era.³⁶ It was conducted in 1928 against a group of engineers arrested in the town of Shakhty in the Donbas area. The defendants were accused of conspiring with the German, French and Polish intelligence services and of sabotage against the Soviet Union, especially of the coal industry. Fifty Russians and three Germans were prosecuted. Eleven defendants were sentenced to death, of whom five were executed, while in the "Dachau Trials" eleven have been executed. Forty-four defendants were sent to prison. Two of the three Germans had been released, while in the "Dachau Trials" two of the three Austrians had been executed.

In 1930 in the middle of the Five-Year-Plan another show trial was organized whit the same target. The so called trail against the Industrial Party is often considered as a refinement of the Shakhty Trials in which several Soviet scientists and economists were accused and convicted of plotting a coup against the government of the Soviet Union. They stood accused of having formed an anti-Soviet "Union of Engineers’ Organisations" or Prompartiya ("Industrial Party") and of having tried to wreck the Soviet industry and transport in 1926-1930.

In 1931, Stalin noted three "lessons" from the "Shakhty Trial". Firstly, after their military defeat, the strategy of the capitalist powers together with their class allies would have been to sabotage the industrialization within the Soviet Union. Therefore, the Soviet Union needed to be constantly vigilant against internal and external enemies. Secondly, the Shakhty affair would have demonstrated the weakness of the Communist industrial managers. They would have needed more authority and more knowledge. Lastly, it would have been necessary to train a large number of new specialists which was not only an industrial but also a political imperative: “the working class must create its own productive-technical intelligentsia”. The State Engineer Institute would have failed in the preparation of the students. The Soviet industry needed engineers, who had both theoretical and practical experience.³⁷

According to Fitzpatrick, with the "Shakhty Trial" all members of the „bourgeois intelligentsia“ became suspicious and, at the same time, the leadership of the party formed itself by connecting internal and external enemies.³⁸ Among historians the opinion is widespread that the "Shakhty Trial" inspired Stalin to led an attack against Bukharin, who was prosecuted eight to ten years later.
Bukharin had expressed his disagreement to the Five-Year Plan, considering it unrealistic and too radical for the people. He warned that the plan would fail if the political and social framework of the NEP was destroyed.³⁹ While Bukharin pledged the utilization of the old establishment’s engineers, Stalin had the plan to build a new generation of experts under his obedience. Stalin and his entourage used the "Shakhty Trial" to discredit not only Bukharins policy of social appeasement, but also Aleksei Rykov’s presidency whose administration had engaged non-Bolshevik and non-Soviet specialists, and Mikhail Tomsky’s supervision of the labor unions.⁴⁰

The Second Aim of the Trials: A Warning Against the Old Communist Structures Before the Incoming Split with Stalin

Political circumstances in 1948 Yugoslavia at least presented themselves as similar to the actors in charge as those surrounding the Shakhty Trial: On one hand the old Communists and the intelligentsia threatened to boycott the plan, on the other hand the lack of specialists was one of the most urgent problems the new State had to faced up.⁴¹ According to Haug, the CPY followed the same stages of development prescribed by the Marxist-Leninist doctrine formulated by Stalin, but at the same time was conscious of its unique historical experience, starting with the foundation of the people’s Committees (Narodni Odbori) during the war and ending with the declaration of a Federal People’s Republic on November 29, 1945.⁴² Thus, in January 1946 Yugoslavia adopted a constitution largely inspired by the Soviet constitution of 1936. To Tito’s entourage this presented the logical development of the rapprochement process alongside the Soviet Union.⁴³ But, at this point the USSR’s and Yugoslavia’s goals began to diverge.

Stalin was interested in a more democratic and inclusive form of government that would allow him to negotiate with England and the USA about the division of Europe drafted already in Yalta.⁴⁴ The CPY on the other hand saw itself as similar to the Bolsheviks after their revolution and therefore considered it unnecessary to share power with non-communist movements. In this sense the Yugoslav leadership saw itself to be on the same level as the Soviet Union but still used Moscow for political legitimacy.⁴⁵ For Tito’s partisans the liberation of Belgrade in cooperation with the Red Army represented more than just the conquest of the „Winter Palace“. It was an opportunity to show to the Soviet Union their achievements of the National Liberation War. The friendship treaty with the Soviet Union in April 1945 and the decision to create Soviet-Yugoslav mixed companies in 1946 was perceived by Tito’s entourage as the affirmation that Yugoslavia was sincere enough in its pursuit of socialism to be in a partnership with Moscow.

Stalin instead considered Yugoslavia as just another country which agricultural products and raw materials to be exploited.⁴⁶ He had no interest in the regional networking of Yugoslavia, nor to create a regional trade area for Yugoslav products.⁴⁷ For Stalin, the mixed companies served to exploit the Yugoslav territory. Moscow sent advisers and experts to Belgrade in order to control the Yugoslav territory, to prevent any autonomous military development on a regional level and any industrial development.

Yugoslavia on the other hand, used mixed companies as an incentive for the development of a national industry. To promote the trade of national products, Yugoslavia wanted to find a market in Eastern Europe without Western concurrency. Belgrade’s regional strategy consisted of finding new partners for the import of raw materials and for the export of finished products. Stalin decided to call back all Soviet military advisers and instructors as well as all the civilian advisers and specialists from Yugoslavia on March 18, 1948: the official motivation adduced was that they were „surrounded by hostility“. For the Central Committee of the CPY it was clear that from this moment on Yugoslavia had to walk alone.⁴⁸ In order to do so, the CPY thought it necessary to purge the party, unify the party line and turn on the screws on academics and experts.

In a letter to the Central Committee of the CPY from March 27, 1948 Stalin stated that the CPY’s political program was lacking policies towards the class struggle. The leadership would not have taken any measures to push back the capitalistic elements among the peasantry and the urban society by which the CPY would have used an opportunistic stance already known from Bukharin. Stalin then criticized the political line of the CPY who would have tried to dissolve the party into the mass organization of the People’s Front (Narodni Front) as well known as Social council of the working people of Yugoslavia (Socijalistički Savez Radnog Naroda Jugoslavije or SSRNJ). This would have been – so Stalin - like the attempt of the Menshevik group forty years ago.⁴⁹

In the final report of the fifth council of the CPY in 1948 the Communist leadership of Belgrade counteracted that the CPY never gave up his leading function in relation to the People’s Front, although a couple of months before, in September 1947, during the second Congress of the SSRNJ Tito defined the People’s Front like “a new type of democracy, an instinctive people’s democracy.”⁵⁰ In reality the constitution of 1946 transformed Yugoslavia in a socialist land on the model of the Soviet Union. The local assemblies, or people’s councils (narodni odbori), who had been the most important revolutionary subject during the war and enjoyed a large political autonomy on a territorial level even during 1945, were transformed with the general law about people’s councils in 1946 (opći zakon o narodnim odborima) in primarily executive and administrations entities.⁵¹ The same People’s front, the mass organization of the working people of Yugoslavia, started to be subordinated to the targets of the Five-Year Plan and became, according to Branko Petranović, the transmission belt of the political decisions of the CPY.⁵²

Although the Diehl-Oswald trials were ostensibly directed against the infiltration of Western powers within the party, they instead prepared the attack against Stalin. Looking to the correspondence between Stalin and Tito, which started in March 1948 and ended with the Soviet-Yugoslav split of May 1948, it is possible to assume that the trial has been an indirect answer to Stalin criticism of the CPY’s policy. In fact, in the Diehl-Oswald trial, Tito’s leadership concentrated its attacks against the most autonomous part of the People’s Front, the Slovenian Liberation Front („Osvobodilna Fronta“) in order to avoid any trouble during the split.⁵³

The reform of the narodni odbori was highly significant for the new Yugoslav society. In every Republic, region, town, neighbour and village of the country the narodni odbori had been created around the leaders who established their power during the Liberation war. The narodni odbori had a double function: To serve as both basic administrative unit and as local government assembly with significant political power. After the reform of 1946 they still represented a problem for the centralistic policies of Belgrade because of their clientelistic structures around the local leaders.

In post war Yugoslavia to get a job in a private enterprise or in a public office, to be assigned a house, to receive economical aid from the State, the people had to demonstrate that during the war they didn‘t act against the partisan movement by way of going through the process of being politically profiled (called in Serbian-Croatian Karakteristika). The Karakteristike were often compiled by the members of the local narodni odbor.⁵⁴ In the report of October 10, 1945 the Headquarter for the Repatriation for prisoners of war sent to the Ministry for People’s Defense, the question of the „Karakteristike“ became to be very important for the reintegration of former prisoners of war. There were a plenty of people without any Karakteristika or with Karakteristika not written by a member of the Ministry of People’s Defense. With the reform of the narodni odbori the Yugoslav Ministry of Interior started to evaluate every single Karakteristika ex novo.

During the war narodni odbori had been created by among the antifascist Yugoslav emigration as well in France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria. In the German concentration camps similar structures developed during the detention and established after the liberation of the camps. Notorious are the Committees of Buchenwald and Dachau, led by former partisans, which at the end of the war fusioned with the international committees. These international connections paired with the importance of the narodni odbori in serving as local administration and politically profiling large swaths of the population established them and the networks running them – such as former fighters of the Spanish Civil War – as potential centres of destabilization in the eyes of the party leadership. However, in order to fully execute the politically split with the USSR, the Yugoslav party leadership needed to be sure that they were in absolute control of the party and its apparatus.

Juranić was the only Croat who was convicted during the trials. In his youth he was a member of the CPY and followed the line of the Croatian communists who were trying to find a political union between the communists and the left wing of the Croat Peasant Party (Hrvatska Seljačka Stranka, HSS).⁵⁵ For this activity he was imprisoned twice. He joined the International Brigades in Spain where he became Captain of Battalion. After the Spanish war he could not go back to Yugoslavia because of his former conviction. Imprisoned as former Spanish volunteer in the camp of Vernet in France he was forced by the Nazis to move to Germany in order to work, where he was arrested in 1943 by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Dachau. After the liberation of Dachau and its transformation into a Displaced Persons Camp he was responsible for justice affairs in the International Dachau Committee.⁵⁶ Juranić was one of eleven former Spanish volunteers convicted during the "Dachau Trials". It can not be ruled out that the trial was also an attempt to undermine the political clout of the Association of the former Spanish volunteers – a network of old and prominent political activists who had gained recognition in Yugoslavia and abroad as well as among the members of the CPY.

In his editorial, Kraigher painted the defendants as longtime dissidents of the CPY who opposed the decision to send volunteers to Spain, and moved to Spain acting a political sabotage inside the lines and lastly at the⁵⁷ beginning of the World War II, they vilified the Soviet Union during the war with Finland.⁵⁸ Kraigher tracing a guideline through the most important milestones of the opposition of the CPY, reconstructed de facto the related successes of the actual leadership, giving legitimacy to the Great Purge of the whole CPY leadership acted by Stalin, in particular of the former leader of the CPY, Milan Gorkić (a protege of Bukharin), who was called to move to Moscow from Paris 1937 were he was organizing a Party conference in order to decide the role of the Slovenes and Croats in the participation in the Spanish war. With the death of Milan Gorkić Tito became the secretary of the CPY.⁵⁹

The Effect of the Trial Beyond the Split Between Tito and Stalin: To Cast Suspicion on Former Deportees

After the defeat of Germany the Yugoslav survivors of Nazi concentration camps, together with former Prisoners of War and forced laborers were free to go back to their homeland, the Democratic Federation of Yugoslavia. The Yugoslavian Repatriation Commission, founded in April 1945 and dependent on the Ministry of Social Policy of the Democratic Federal Yugoslavia, was organized in different “Staffs of Repatriation”. The tasks assigned to the Staffs of Repatriation were to organize the border crossings, to care about the health of the returnees, to register them and - most importantly - to check their activity abroad, since some of the returnees were suspected to be former collaborationist of the Axis powers.⁶⁰

With the foundation of the "Federative People’s Republic of Yugoslavia" on November 29, 1945 the Interior Ministry started a new revision of the testimonies of the returnees in preparation to the sequel of big show trials against former collaborators of the Axis and against political antagonists of the CPY token place in 1946.⁶¹ The majority of the political inmates of the German concentration camps were not involved in these trials.⁶² Nevertheless their position in the Yugoslav society was until 1947 at least ambiguous.⁶³ Officially, they were considered as part, although a minor one, of the National Liberation war and would get official recognition like the „medal 1941“.⁶⁴ On the other hand, the former combatant of the Liberation Army, who actually ruled the country considered them as people, who preferred to sit in the concentration camps instead to fight the enemy.⁶⁵

Since the investigations around the Pufler affair and particularly after the discovery of the Dachau network (1947) the Control Commission of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (the former CPY) began a global re-examination of all active party members who had been members of the Yugoslav antifascist Committees, the illegal networks of solidarity and support between inmates inside the concentration camps and labor camps on German soil.⁶⁶ The report of 1953 about the political activities of the Yugoslav communist militants in the work camps of Vienna laid out the reason of this re-examination: “The fact that they [the Yugoslavs] had been forced to stay in Germany is not enough to measure their moral and political attitude, whereas several former partisans who showed their bravery in the forest suffered since they were in Germany and their political and moral valor ebbed away, the majority of [Yugoslav] workers instead, since they came to Germany, felt deceived and betrayed, and started consequently to think safer and cleaner".⁶⁷ In the final report about the work of the Control Commission from 1958 it is stated: “after the trial against the spies Diehl, Juranić and the others in Ljubljana, it was decided that the Central Committee of Slovenia had to examine the conditions inside the camps of Dachau, Mauthausen and Buchenwald and the moral of the people inside."⁶⁸ This was decided because the majority of Yugoslav inmates were from Slovenia and because the Central Committee had already collected all the material for the trials.

The examination ended in 1954 and their report was sent to the Commission and to every Central Committee of each Republic. The final report stated that the Gestapo had infiltrated the camps with several person, particularly in the lines of the administration. The Commission concluded that former inmates who worked in the camp’s administration and members of the camp’s Yugoslav antifascist Committees could not become members of the League of Communists because their political morals could not be trusted. In contrast, all inmates who had not been involved which such organizations and demonstrated a positive political attitude might be recognized as CPY members since 1945.⁶⁹ Instead the reality was even worse. Several members of the Yugoslav antifascist Committees were sentenced to forced labor, mostly on the Yugoslav island Goli Otok and have been released (like the Dachau group) between 1953 and 1955. It is not possible to know how many former inmates have been involved in the investigation. But, if we consider that only for the „Dachau Trials” complex, have been interrogated 9524 persons, what is more then the 10% of the entire group of returned internees, we can suppose that the whole investigations involved most of them.

The political discrimination of former inmates of German concentration camps started with the trial of April 1948 and affected the whole of Yugoslavia.⁷⁰ The Dachau trials provoked a massive and widespread panic among the former inmates that profoundly reshaped their relationships in every institution and workplace.⁷¹ A former inmate of Buchenwald, Milivoj Lalin, remembered in an interview conducted by Christian Schölzel in 2006, that during a meeting of the Yugoslav press agency’s (Tanjug) correspondents in Belgrade in 1949 he found the courage to discuss the Dachau Trials with Tito. “I said ’Comrade Marshal, I was in the concentration camp, in prison in Italy, we fought against the Italians, we fought with SS soldiers, against them... against the army together, and when we came back, we had to face the Dachau trials. We were punished, suspected. I ask you, comrade Marshal, why?’. ’But I know, I know, I know all about that,’ he said, ’but be patient, the comrades in this area will decide on this.’ Nothing [laughs] was ever decided.”⁷²

An Attempt to Polarize the Fronts in the Cold War

This article started with the assumption that the Diehl-Oswald have been Stalinist show trials what would exclude a priori that they have been demonstrative proceeding against war criminals, although the expression of public domain „Dachau Trials” might or will be misleading. But absurdly, if we decide to look at the Dachau Trials of Ljubljana as a trial against Nazi crimes, they would have been not only the trial where the convicts were only Kapos but the only Trial where so many not German Kapos have been sentenced to death.⁷³ The only exception is the proceedings of the American Military Tribunal at Dachau against five Spanish Kapos at Mauthausen in 1947. This trial is particular for a second reason as well: the defendants, one of them sentenced to death, were „red Spaniards“ former republican fighters of the Spanish civil war, who after the German invasion of France, had been arrested and deported to Mauthausen.⁷⁴

Since the publication of the Dachau Report and the Buchenwald Report, both written a couple of days after the liberation of the camps by the OSS Section of the US Seventh Army⁷⁵ the worldwide opinion had knowledge about the “red triangle” networks in the administration of the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps.⁷⁶ With the escalation of the Cold War began a demonization of the communist Kapos. When 1946 the anticommunist pamphlet of Donald Robinson „Communist atrocities at Buchenwald“⁷⁷ appeared on the American Mercury insisting on the guiltiness of German Communist Kapos, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Germany (CPG) was compelled to start a secret evaluation of culpability of their members who had been in Buchenwald. Because most of them covered important position inside the Party, the investigation was concluded undercover and no one was handed over to the US authorities.⁷⁸

In order to understand instead why the CPY openly sentenced to death ten former Communist function inmates of Dachau we have to keep in mind primarily the spirit of justice that animate the CPY in the post-war period. On the wave of the victorious Liberation war against the Fascism the CPY felt to be called to play a major role in the Defascistization of Europe.⁷⁹ Yugoslavia was on the first line concerning the collaboration with the international justice, showing from the beginning the will to be considered world wide as a major power. At the meantime Belgrade tried not only to share a message of freedom through Antifascism but had concrete geopolitical plans in regards the Balkan, Italy, Austria, Eastern Europe and the postwar Germany.⁸⁰ The crisis of Trieste and the consequent refuse from American and British side to hand over the Italian fascist criminals to the Yugoslav authorities froze the Yugoslav participation to the international justice.⁸¹ From that point the Yugoslav politics began to be oriented exclusively towards Moscow. At the moment when the political divergences with Stalin became stronger, the CPY tried through the Diehl-Oswald trial, or more specifically through the first part of the conviction of the trials (that communists have been Gestapo agents who committed all kind of atrocities in the camps) to strike a blow to all the anticommunist political forces of the West. On the other hand, this statement might have put the eastern block under pressure because, how the example of the CPG shows, they were not prepared to make self-criticism on this point.

Conclusions

This paper analyzed the so-called “Dachau Trials”, a sequel of show trials held in Yugoslavia in spring 1948. The focus was put primarily on the most important one, the Diehl-Oswald show trial of April 1948. It targeted a group of former Concentration Camp inmates who had risen to prominent positions in the mid-cadres of the party after the war. Its defendants belonged to the technical intelligentsia as engineers, chemists and directors of factories. The trial portrayed and found them guilty as saboteurs of the Yugoslav Five-Year-Plan. The “amalgam” of charges against them combined accusations of political dissention from before the war, supposed collaboration with the Gestapo during their imprisonment in the camps, and accusations that they continued to work as spies for Western powers after the war. As result, eleven people were executed.

That the trials took place throughout 1948 was no coincidence. They served essentially as a preparation for the Tito-Stalin split, intended to strengthen the central leadership of the CPY by condemning structures and networks. These networks were viewed as potential centers of dissention during the split and so by painting them as Gestapo spies, a warning against any dissidence of especially the mid-cadres was issued. In his formal structure and in his targets the trial can be viewed as inspired by the Shakhty trial of the late Twenties arranged by the Soviet leadership during the development of the Five-Year Plan in the Soviet Union. In both cases, the aim of the trial has been an exemplary warning against the old communist structures and the industrial elites of the two most productive regions (Slovenia in Yugoslavia and Donbass in the Soviet Union) who boycott the harsh restrictions of the Plan in particular the complete nationalization of the industry and the state control over the production. Secondly, the article focused on the domino effect the Diehl-Oswald trial had on the whole group of survivors of the concentration camps. The connection, the shaped amalgam between the “Gestapo affiliation” past and their sabotage actions emerged in the Diehl-Oswald trial served as matrix to conduct more investigations around the whole group of former inmates of Dachau and brighter of several other concentration camps, labor camps and camps for prisoners of war.⁸²

Finally, the paper analyzed the effects of the show trial in the frame of the Cold War. The conviction against a group of former communists inmates of a German concentration camp provided more suitable arguments to the anticommunist forces, who tried to find an equivalence between Stalin and Hitler also through the questionable role of the communist Kapos in the concentration camps.

To conclude the Diehl-Oswald trial ruled in Ljubljana in April 1948 for being the first purge inside the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) since the end of World War II, can be considered as a specific of the Yugoslav way to socialism in the post revolutionary phase and a nerdy application of Stalin’s theory of „socialism in one land“ of 1925.⁸³ The trial has been an important turning point of the policy of the CPY. The political message shared through the media was that everybody who acted against the Five-year industrialization plan had to be considered as a public enemy: actually, a clear warning for the whole middle cadres of the CPY to accept the centralist decisions of the CPY. With the trial the leadership shown that the parameters of affiliation to the party were changed. Having been arrested during the war and put in a German concentration camps, having fought in the Spanish war or having been a veteran communist were no more significant parameters to determine the legitimacy of the Party members. Rather, exclusively the loyalty regarding the decisions of Tito’s leadership determined this status. Pretty soon a second and huge wave of discrimination would have come down: to be a Stalinist will be a major and a more common guiltiness.

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