Several fallen partisans and victims of Nazi violence are buried in the central cemetery in Trnja vas / Annabichl, in the centre of Celovec / Klagenfurt. However, only two partisans are listed in the official death register of this cemetery. It is known that the Nazis buried victims whose lives were extinguished in the dungeons secretly and without marking the graves. This was an attempt to cover up the traces of their crimes.
The associations of the Carinthian fighting organisations erected a dignified memorial to the victims of the Austrian freedom struggle from 1938 to 1945 in this cemetery; the Memorial Kärnten-Koroška initiative has modernised it with the artistic assistance of the academic painter Valentin Oman and others, and is supplementing it, among other things, by listing the victims of Nazism, as well as the names of the Soviet prisoners of war who died by the thousands in the German concentration camps on Carinthian soil.
The river Drava / Drau as the main obstacle to partisan penetration
Carinthia is a geographically very structured region. On the southern side, the Karavanke / Karawanken Mountains were a major obstacle to the fight against the enemy. Its mountain massif was cut by well-travelled roads that divided the landscape into several parts. The wide Drava / Drau River runs through the flat part, which is very narrow in operational terms. This river proved to be an obstacle far greater than the Karavanks during the whole struggle in Carinthia. But for the struggle in Carinthia it was necessary to penetrate politically and militarily also to the north side of the Drava / Drau, so that this great natural obstacle became a legend for all the Carinthian partisans already in 1943. Matija Verdnik-Tomaž is counted among the pioneers of the liberation movement in the western part of Carinthia and of the breakthrough towards Celovec / Klagenfurt.
Close contacts between OF and KPA (communist party of austria)
In his wide-ranging activities, Tomaž Verdnik also established close contacts with Austrian anti-fascists in Beljak / Villach, Celovec / Klagenfurt, Gradec / Graz and elsewhere. Already in mid-January 1944, thanks to Tomaž, a meeting took place between the representatives of the communist party of Austria, Andreas and Emil, and the representatives of the Liberation Front OF, Matej Verdnik-Tomaž and Dušan Pirjevec-Ahac. The participants agreed on all the essential issues: on a common armed struggle against the same enemy, on the need for the Austrians to organise a mass organisation similar to the Slovenian OF, namely the "Österreichische Freiheitsfront" (Austrian liberation front), and on the establishment of a contact or co-ordination committee.
Due to the death of Tomaž at the beginning of February, the next meeting in Celovec / Klagenfurt was attended by Ahac and Stanislav Runko-Mišo. They spent several weeks with the ardent anti-fascists in Celovec / Klagenfurt and made contacts with the Austrian anti-fascist movement.
In mid-March 1944, a partisan company of 15 men crossed the Drava / Drau River and the very next day attacked the armoury station in Bilčovs / Ludmannsdorf. They confiscated about 30 rifles, a machine gun, several pistols and bombs, a lot of ammunition, and also a lot of food, goods, clothes, shoes and bureau supplies. The village guard was immediately disarmed and some Germans fell.
The Germans responded to the partisan actions with an offensive on the territory between the Drava / Drau and Lake Vrbsko jezero / Wörthersee. They brought in 1,500 SS-men and soldiers to hunt down the partisans, who numbered barely 20 at the time. Despite the fact that the raid lasted almost a month, the partisans were not destroyed. After the offensive was over, the partisans continued their political and military work. By autumn, the company had grown to over 100 men and had become a battalion. At the beginning of June 1944, the political alliances woven by the political workers began to spread further and further to Ribnica / Reifnitz and Vrba / Velden to the north-west and Celovec / Klagenfurt to the north. Celovec / Klagenfurt was, after all, the main target of the political plans.
Majda Vrhovik-Lojzka
Together with Ivica Pirjevčeva, Majda Vrhovnik-Lojzka was sent to the north side of the Drava / Drau, to Gure / Sattnitzgebirge and Celovec / Klagenfurt in October 1944. There they were to organise or revitalise the national liberation movement. Lojzka accepted this task with enthusiasm and was ready to carry it out even under the most difficult conditions. As she had the addresses of some conscious and reliable families in Celovec / Klagenfurt, she quickly managed to establish the first links with other families, organise OF committees, spread the partisan press and set up an intelligence service. But the Germans in Celovec / Klagenfurt quickly sensed her presence and activity and wanted to arrest her by any means necessary. As traitors were also among the OF activists, they arrested several people working for the national liberation movement. This was a severe blow to the already established political organisation in the capital. Lojzka was barely able to evade the police with her constant relocation. When the risk of being discovered was too great, she returned to her group near Celovec / Klagenfurt. She renewed her contacts from the outside and also went to the city herself. On 28 February 1945, she was discovered by the Gestapo in a house under Križna gora / Kreuzbergl in Klagenfurt.
The brutality with which the Gestapo handeled Lojzka, who heroically remained silent, was widely spoken of among the inmates of the prisons in celovec / Klagenfurt. Some of the women detainees at the time testified to this; the most shocking statement is the one of Danica Mrak-Bem, who was imprisoned in Celovec / Klagenfurt in the same prison as Lojzka in the spring of 1945. She said, that Lojzka did not utter a word despite the beastly torture. They beat her with sticks and batons, broke her fingers and pulled her toenails, tied her up and tossed her across tables. If she became unconscious, they poured water on her until she came to her senses, and then tortured her again. This was repeated for days. Her body became a single wound. By the end, she was so exhausted that she lay unconscious almost continuously for days.
Her fellow prisoners feared that she would die any moment. They gave her food by the spoonful and nursed her like a child. In vain they begged the Gestapo to send her to hospital. When she recovered, she sang partisan and Slovene folk songs and boosted the morale of the other prisoners.
Between 5 and 6 May 1945, all the prisoners (about 600) were released, but Lojzka was no longer among them. She had to put on the clothes in which she was caught, and then, according to the testimony of a farmer from Radiše / Radsberg who knew Lojzka, two Gestapo men (their names are known) took her away and killed and buried her in a forest near Celovec / Klagenfurt.
After the war, they searched in vain for her grave. On 12 May 2012, the Intercultural Centre Volkshaus/Ljudski dom (IKUC) held a "Concert for Majda" with the Partisan Choir of Trieste in Fair Hall 5 in Celovec / Klagenfurt, and in 2018 forwarded information about Majda to the representatives of the Cultural Council of Remembrance of Celovec / Klagenfurt, with the suggestion that they take her into consideration for the next "Stolpersteine" (Stumbling Stones) campaign in the capital of Carinthia.
Only two names in the death register
The death register of the central cemetery of Trnja vas / Annabichl in Celovec / Klagenfurt only records two partisans who were first buried in the cemetery in the same row number 26, area I, graves 2 and 8. In the first grave were the remains of the fallen partisan Jurij Ravnik from Bled. Till 1965, the cross was inscribed with:
Georg Ravnik 27. 10. 1943
Only later did it become known that the fallen fighter had the partisan name of Saša and that he had fallen in podgorjanske Rute / Greuth ober Maria Elend. Jurij Ravnik was born on 21 October 1922. He came to the area of Mače / Matschach with Ludvik Primožič-Milan, who was later also killed.
A beautiful stone monument with an inscription in both regional languages was erected on Ravnik's grave:
To the fallen partisan
Jurij Ravnik-Sašo 22. 10 .1922 - 26. 10. 1943
In the second grave (number 8) rested the first-founder Ivan Županc-Johan, native of Obirsko / Ebriach. On the original tombstone it said:
Glory!
Janez Županc, first partisan of Koroška / Kärnten
4.1915 - 14. 10.1943
He died for the freedom of his homeland in Šmarjeta v Rožu / St. Margarethen im Rosental.
After the partial redevelopment of the Cemetery of Celovec / Klagenfurt in 1980, both graves were dug up, so that the tombstones of the two fallen fighters now stand side by side in Field XII in the centre. Zorko Zdovc, born 22 February 1918 in Podgorje near Slovenj Gradec, was severely wounded and captured on 8 December 1943 while fighting the Germans. He succumbed to his wounds in a hospital in Celovec / Klagenfurt and was buried in the town cemetery. In 1980, his grave was reinterred by his relatives in Kotlje, Slovenia.
Location:
The Celovec-Trnja vas / Klagenfurt-Annabichl cemetery is located slightly outside the city centre, on the right-hand side of the road to Šentvid ob Glini / St. Veit an der Glan, at the same level as the turn-off for Airport Celovec / Klagenfurt.