Gottscheers

Gottscheers are the German settlers of the Kočevje region (a.k.a. Gottschee) of Slovenia, formerly Gottschee County. Until the Second World War, their main language of communication was Gottscheerish, a Bavarian dialect.

They first settled in Carniola around 1330 from the German lands of Tyrol and Carinthia and maintained their German identity and language during their 600 years of isolation. They cleared the vast forests of the region and established villages and towns. In 1809, they resisted French occupation in the 1809 Gottscheer Rebellion. With the end of the Habsburg Monarchy in 1918, Gottschee became a part of the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The Gottscheer thus went from being part of the ruling ethnicity of Austria-Hungary (and the ruling group in the estates of the province of Carniola itself) to an ethnic minority in a large Slavic state. With the onset of the Second World War and the Invasion of Yugoslavia their situation was worsened further.

While some of the Gottscheer community leaders had embraced Nazism and agitated for "assistance" and "repatriation" to the Reich even before the German invasion in 1941, most Gottscheer had no interest in reuniting with Greater Germany or in joining the Nazis. They had been integrated into society with their Slovene neighbors, often intermarrying and becoming bilingual while maintaining their Germanic language and customs. Propaganda and Nazi ideology prevailed, however, and the Main Welfare Office for Ethnic Germans (VoMi) began planning the Gottschee "resettlement" (forced expulsion) from the Italian occupation zone to the Rann Triangle (German: Ranner Dreieck), the region in Lower Styria between the confluences of the Krka, Sotla, and Sava rivers, covering most of Gottschee.

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