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So, the first thing is that it was the so-called "Bleiburg repatriations" (not "reparations") since the British authorities responsible for occupying Southern Austria repatriated several thousand Yugoslav nationals who had fought on the Axis side in WWII to the socialist Yugoslav government. Subsequently, many of these repatriated individuals as well as other collaborators and people who had fought for the Axis were killed by the Partisan units guarding them, put on trial for their collaboration and often killed afterwards, forced on long marches throughout Yugoslavia or imprisoned in internment camps where also a significant number of people died due to abuse and conditions.

Tu fully grasp these events, it is necessary to explore their context but in terms of WWII Yugoslav history as well as their current historiography and commemoration.

Yugoslavia and WWII

First, to give a primer on Yugoslavia in WWII: Yugoslavia under Axis occupation underwent what best can be described a civil war within the larger war against the occupation. Slovenia was annexed by the Third Reich, in Croatia a fascist regime in form of the Ustasha was established by the Axis powers occupying the country, various territories were handed over to minor Axis powers and Serbia and Montenegro were occupied by the Germans and Italians respectively. I have written more in-depth about this before here but what occurred was that besides fighting for liberation from Axis occupation, various factions were also at war with each other. The Ustasha in Croatia instituted their own program of genocidal and ethnic violence – more on the here – against Serbs, Jews and others, while various factions of Chetniks, most prominent among them those of Draža Mihalović – fought against the occupiers, the Partisans and the Ustasha, the Partisans fighting the occupiers, the Ustasha, and the Chetniks, Slovenes being drafted into German collaborationist units, Bosnian Muslims pursuing their own interests against all others and so forth.

In short, the occupation of Yugoslavia in WWII is heavily linked to internal conflicts developing into a civil war and all the violence and enmity that entails. With the Partisans by virtue of representing the only resistance movement with an all-Yugoslav ideology and welcoming attitude emerging as the victors of both the civil war and as the liberators from Axis occupation, this legacy of a brutal civil war is the first crucial factor in understanding the events that unfolded during and after the Bleiburg repatriations. What is commonly summarized under the moniker Bleiburg and meaning the violence exacted by the victorious Partisans and the socialist regime in Yugoslavia can be understand as the last acts of this civil war that – as civil wars are wont to do – had radicalized internal violence. For many of its perpetrators on the Partizan-side, the violence and massacres following the Bleiburg repatriations represented retribution against persons who had supported occupiers and regimes that had only shortly before exacted systematic and sometimes even genocidal violence against them. And for the Tito regime itself, it represented a political viable way to solidify their rule for co-existence with the people who only had shortly before worked for either the occupier or the Croatian fascist regime was impossible.

The second crucial reason for understanding these events has to do with why the socialist Yugoslav regime saw mass violence and imprisonment as a viable way to resolve the political conflicts of the civil war once and for all. Between 1945 and 1948, the socialist Yugoslav regime closely emulated the Stalinist regime of the Soviet Union. While Yugoslavia and Albania were arguably the only countries in Europe that had liberated themselves without the major assistance of Allied troops, Tito who had spent the 1920s and 30s as an activist for the Comintern had modeled the KPJ closely along Stalinist lines and with the Soviet victory in WWII began modeling his regime along Stalinist lines too. This included mass violence as a viable strategy to solve political problems and in the history of socialist Yugoslavia, the years from 1945 to 1948, when the Tito-Stalin split occurred, were the most repressive and violent in the whole history of socialist Yugoslavia save for the Partisan war. The violent events following the Bleiburg repatriation received the blessing of the regime because according to Stalinist ideological logic, massacring political opponents was justified. After the Tito-Stalin split, the Yugoslav regime noticeably turned away from such means of mass violence and while the socialist Yugosalv regime can still be not described as open or free, it did not exact the same brutal repressions tactics as other regimes in Eastern Europe but relied more heavily on exiling politically unwanted individuals or, in some cases, incarcerating them.

Still, the events following the Bleiburg repatriation remained a censored and taboo topic in socialist Yugoslavia for virtually its entire existence and its ideological legitimization build heavily upon the image of the Partisans as heroic saviors from fascist brutality with the less savory aspects of that history forcibly swept under the rug.

Commemoration and historiography

Which, in turn, brings us to the second piece of important context for Bleiburg and what followed: its historiography and commemoration. This is crucial because of what information we have available to us in the first place and how they are presented to us today in secondary literature and state narratives.

While, as mentioned, discussion of Bleiburg and its aftermath had been censored and taboo in socialist Yugoslavia, with the violent disintegration of the state beginning in the mid-80s and resulting in the wars of the early 90s, Bleiburg gained new significance in re-emerging nationalist, ultra-nationalist, and fascist narratives in various successor states, especially Croatia. The heroic image of the Partisan had been a central ideological building bloc of socialist Yugoslavia and while some nationalist in the successor states of the country tried to incorporate it in their new emerging nationalist myths and narratives, others decidedly turned away from it to embrace the people against whom the Partisans had fought, most notably the Ustasha (in the Serbian case the Chetniks), into central parts of their new nationalist narratives during the war.

The events that occurred during the wave of mass violence and repression in 1945, which were summarized under the term "Bleiburg" whether they were directly related to the events of the repatriation or not, took on a new meaning as the ultimate symbol of socialist – and often Serb – cruelty and crime. A sort of anti-image to the symbol of Jasenovac so often invoked by the Serbs against the Croatians during the war. Commemorations of Bleiburg, rife with fascist imagery and uniforms and with massive presence of the Catholic Church, which had a very close relationship with the Ustasha, take place every years up until this day and both the event itself viewed through a mythical nationalist prism and the commemoration play still a large role in political discourse in Slovenia and Croatia.

The reason I am mentioning all this is because this has left massive traces in the historiography of Bleiburg and subsequent events where it is due to the ideological importance extremely difficult to get accurate and unbiased information about the events, especially on the number of victims of socialist mass violence after the war. While Slovenia has instituted a commission to examine the mass graves on their soil and evaluate the number of victims (the results of which I'll discuss below), Croatia e.g. has discontinued its counter-part of said commission in the year 2002 without any report ever released, most likely due to findings that did not well fit with their political narrative of events.

With these caveats and contextualization out of the way however, let's get to what we can accurately say about the Bleiburg repatriations and subsequent events.