Yugoslav communist retribution upon the “enemy of the people” in Gorski Kotar – the example of priest Stjepan Horžić

Abstract

In historiography and even more so in the public sphere, the Gorski Kotar region has been portrayed as an area where the population during the World War II almost unreservedly supported the People's Liberation Movement led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. On the other hand, both during the war and in the post-war period, numerous people lost their lives due to the repression of the Yugoslav communists. Based on archival sources, the published and unpublished testimonies of contemporaries, the newspaper reports, and journalistic and scientific literature, this paper refutes the indictment and the death sentence from December 31, 1944 against Stjepan Horžić, the priest who served as a chaplain in the municipality of Mrkopalj and temporarily led the parishes in Ravna Gora and Vrbovsko. The Yugoslav communist court condemned Horžić as the "enemy of the people" who spread the "Ustasha ideology" and the belief in the victory of Nazi Germany and undermined the authority of the People's Liberation Movement in the Gorski Kotar region. However, numerous and diverse sources undoubtedly indicate that Horžić's work did not go beyond the scope of the activities of a Catholic priest, and that he was executed because he was very successful in preventing the influence of the Yugoslav communists among the population of the municipality of Mrkopalj, especially children, youth and women. In other words, it was an ideological contest between Yugoslav communists and members of the clergy of the Catholic Church over the inhabitants of the municipality of Mrkopalj, especially the youth, in which the former side resorted to the use of violence in the most radical form - murder. Chaplain Stjepan Horžić was executed not because he was a "servant of the occupiers" and a "quisling", but because his work as a priest made him an obstacle to the establishment of the totalitarian rule of the Yugoslav communists in Gorski Kotar.