Bandits or freedom fighters? Traitors or true patriots? Who were these partisans in the mountains of the Styrian-Carinthian-Slovenian border region, who fought with gun in hand against Hitler’s fascism and for a free Austria in 1944 and 1945? Where do the unflattering words the south-western Styrian vernacular still finds for these fighters today come from?
This work traces the trails of these partisans on the basis of historical sources, gives them names and faces and approaches the question of where the dissonance between self-perception and external perception of their actions originates from. To this end, it tells the history of this group chronologically and portraits some of the fighters in short biographies. It concludes with an attempt to explain how state-imposed anticommunism after the end of World War II, the burgeoning Cold War and falsifying intergenerational narrative chains contributed decisively to turning freedom fighters into criminals in the collective memory.
