This book focuses on the events that took place in late 1944 and 1945 in Croatia and Slovenia when the intensity of violence was strongest. At that time, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ), assisted by the People’s Liberation Army of Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav Army, the Department for the Protection of the People (OZNA) and the Corps of People’s Defence of Yugoslavia (KNOJ) conducted organized terror not only by intimidation, persecution, torture and imprisonment, but also by the execution of a large number of citizens perceived by the KPJ as disloyal, passive, ideological enemies or class enemies. However, investigating war and post-war crimes committed by communist regime was not possible until 1990, after the democratic changes in Yugoslavia. This book is based on documents kept in the archives of Croatia, Slovenia, the UK, and Serbia. Many of them, especially those in Croatia, recently became available to the public, which makes them extremely valuable source of data to the academics and students in this field and which shed new light on these historical events. The Communist Party in the former Yugoslavia was an organization which used all available means to seize and keep power, including terror and mass murder, especially between autumn 1944 and summer 1945 when mass killings occurred across the country. However, in the Soviet sphere of influence, investigating war and post-war crimes committed by communist regimes was not possible until 1990. This project not only covers new ground in the research into communist war crimes at the end of and after the Second World War, but also contributes to coming to terms with the past in the successor states of Yugoslavia by studying one of the most controversial episodes in the contemporary history of the Balkans. Since the October Revolution, when for the first time in history a Marxist party seized state power, communist regimes have influenced the lives of more than a billion people, caused millions of deaths and violated the human rights of countless people. However, in the Soviet sphere of influence and in Yugoslavia, investigating war and post-war crimes committed by communist regimes was not possible until 1990, after the democratic changes in Eastern Europe. Resolution 1481/2006 of the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly strongly condemned human rights violations committed by totalitarian communist regimes and the 2008 Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism stated that these crimes were comparable with Nazi crimes but, very few people have been tried for committing such crimes. Nevertheless, 25 years later, in former Yugoslav republics this topic is still a matter of political and scientific debates.

Fortitude is the real-life story of Boris Rus, a young native of Fiume, Italy (now Rijeka, Croatia). This chronicle recalls the experiences of his experiences of unorthodox & revolutionary warfare against German and Axis Powers. The story takes a dramatic U-turn from resistance and offence to one of survival in the concentration camp that fathered them all, Dachau. What comes next, nobody could have foresaw.

What is fascism? By focusing on the concrete: what the fascists did, rather than what they said, the esteemed historian Robert O. Paxton answers this question. From the first violent uniformed bands beating up “enemies of the state,” through Mussolini’s rise to power, to Germany’s fascist radicalization in World War II, Paxton shows clearly why fascists came to power in some countries and not others, and explores whether fascism could exist outside the early-twentieth-century European setting in which it emerged. "A deeply intelligent and very readable book. . . . Historical analysis at its best." –The Economist The Anatomy of Fascism will have a lasting impact on our understanding of modern European history, just as Paxton’s classic Vichy France redefined our vision of World War II. Based on a lifetime of research, this compelling and important book transforms our knowledge of fascism–“the major political innovation of the twentieth century, and the source of much of its pain.”

In regard to antisemitism, relates to atrocities committed after the Commune of 1919. Special units of the victorious White army killed hundreds of Jews in pogroms throughout the country. Right-wing racist organizations terrorized Jewish students at the universities and perpetrated acts of terror even in 1922-23. The Hungarian government introduced a Numerus Clausus (1920) in higher education, which remained in effect until 1928. A decade later, the anti-Jewish laws restricted Jewish participation in the public sphere; the Second Anti-Jewish Law (1939) restricted Jewish converts to Christianity as well. Dwells on the texts of those laws and describes the murderous attack near the Dohany synagogue in 1939. The second part of the book presents 17 documents: memoranda, letters by foreign diplomats, reports, and memoirs.

The atrocities and mass murders committed by Josip Broz Tito's Partisan units of the Yugoslav Army immediately after the Second World War had no place in the conscience of Socialist Yugoslavia. More than once, the annual Croatian commemoration of the Bleiburg victims was subject to attacks carried out by the socialist Yugoslav state. Abroad in the West, on Austrian soil, the Yugoslav secret service (UDBA) did not shy away from murdering the protagonist of the Croatian memory culture, Nicola Martinovic, as late as 1975. The official history was aligned with a firm interpretational paradigm that called for a glorification of the anti-fascist "people's liberation resistance." With the breakup of Yugoslavia and its socialist regime in 1991, the identity-establishing accounts of contemporary witnesses, which had mainly been cherished in exile circles abroad, increasingly reached public awareness in Croatia and Slovenia. In the 1990s Croatia witnessed the emergence of a memory that had been suppressed by the socialist-Yugoslav regime—namely the Bleiburg tragedy. The situation in Slovenia was similar in terms of identity and remembrance culture. Among the Slovenes, the communist crimes committed during the turmoil are known as the drama of Viktring or the Viktring tragedy, named after the largest refugee camp of the Slovenes. Reports on the communist postwar crimes and on the countless discoveries of mass gravesites have also begun circulating in the media of the German-speaking world in the last few years. Florian Rulitz's meticulously researched book, now available for the first time in English, provides a corrective to the historical memory that had been previously accepted as truth. Rulitz focuses on two essential questions. First, did the so-called "final encirclement battles" indeed occur in Carinthia in the Ferlach/Hollenburg/Viktring and Dravograd/Poljana/Bleiburg areas, resulting in military victories for the Yugoslav Army? Second, were the battles after the capitulation fought by the refugees with the aim of reaching the British-controlled areas in Carinthia? To answer these questions, Rulitz presents a detailed reconstruction of those days in May 1945. He furthermore considers the question of the murders on Austrian territory, which were hushed up in Partisan literature and presented as casualties of the final military operations. This groundbreaking study will interest scholars and students of modern European history.

S. is a woman of many faces: a loving wife and caring mother, a daughter, sister, and granddaughter, a friend to some and an adversary , even an enemy, to others. The aggressors who hold her captive for months in occupied Vukovar consider her only a receptacle in which to satisfy their lust and "raise their morale" until the final, bloody capitulation of the city. Who is S., really? "Busic has written a beautifully crafted novel about the neglected Croatian "comfort women" of Vukovar and transformed their suffering into a tale of strength and redemption." Janine Bertram Kemp, former Special Assistant to the Chairman, EEOC. "In "Living Cells", Busic examines the issue of power, force, and rape, truth and lies, the parallel presence of several realities: war, post-war, and peace, but above all, the moral decline of our own civilization." Sanja Knezevic, University of Zadar, Croatia

This mindset kept them apart and isolated from the Jewries of the Western world until overtaken by the tragedy of the Holocaust in the closing months of World War II.