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The Gottscheers (Gottscheerish: Göttscheabar, plural Göttscheabarə, Slovene: Kočevarji, kočevski Nemci) are the former inhabitants of Gottschee County in the Duchy of Carniola, today mostly encompassed by the Municipality of Kočevje in Slovenia. The Gottschee was a German-speaking language island of ca. 860 km² and 177 villages, centered on the town of Gottschee, today known as Kočevje. The Gottscheers settled in the area in 1330, and mostly lived as subsistence farmers, supplementing their income with imperially sanctioned peddling from 1492 onwards. As a result of their isolation in the Gottschee region, they retained their archaic South Bavarian dialect, Gottscheerish, until their dispersal during the Second World War.

Today, the Gottscheers live principally in the United States, although significant groups immigrated to Austria, Germany, and Canada. Very few still live in the former settlement area in Slovenia.

History

Duchy of Carniola

In 1247, Berthold, Patriarch of Aquileia, conferred the fiefdom of Ribnica and its Lower Carniolan environs onto the Counts of Ortenburg, a Carinthian noble family. This area included the primeval forest area that would eventually become known as the Gottschee. In 1336, Patriarch Bertrand of Saint-Geniès reaffirmed and expanded the rights and responsibilities of Otto V of Ortenburg and his successors as rulers of the area. Starting in 1330 and continuing until circa 1400, the Counts of Ortenburg settled German peasants from East Tyrol and Carinthia within their fiefdom.

The first settlement in the territory attested in written sources was Mooswald (Slovene: Mahovnik), which appeared in a letter from Patriarch Bertram on 1 September 1339. A 1363 letter mentioned the settlements of Gottschee (Kočevje), Pölland (Kočevske Poljane), Kostel, Ossilnitz (Osilnica), and Göttenitz (Gotenica). In 1377, the town of Gottschee, the foremost among the German towns in the region, received market rights, and in 1406 Count Frederick III of Ortenburg granted the growing German population the right to collect estovers from the region's forests.

With the extinction of the House of Ortenburg in 1418, the region came under the control of the Counts of Celje; following the assassination of Ulrich II of Celje in 1456, the House of Habsburg gained the region for itself.

The 15th century was a time of unrest in the Gottschee. Owing to its position on the outer edge of the Habsburg domains, the area of Gottschee was frequently threatened by Ottoman incursions, and the Gottscheers were regularly forced into military service to protect the area. During one of these many raids, the town of Gottschee itself was sacked in 1469, but following its speedy rebuilding, Emperor Frederick III bestowed town privileges onto it. Importantly, Frederick III also granted Gottscheer men the right to peddle their wares tax-free (known as the Hausiererpatent) throughout the empire on 23 October 1492.

Peddling would thereafter become a crucial source of supplemental income for the Gottscheers, who remained isolated subsistence farmers from their settlement up until their resettlement during the Second World War. Gottscheer peddlers sold homespun linens, dormouse pelts, and wooden toys, among other wares, throughout the Holy Roman and later Austro-Hungarian and German Empires. In the 18th century, their right to peddle was expanded to produce from the southern reaches of the empire, and by the time that Gottschee was incorporated into Yugoslavia, they also sold exotic fruits, oils and sweets. The Gottscheers peddled on foot through the winter, and returned in the springtime to tend to the family's plot, staying at home until the end of harvest season in November.

In 1507 Maximilian I mortgaged the Dominion of Gottschee (German: Herrschaft Gottschee, Slovene: Kočevsko gospostvo) to Count Jörg von Thurn, who became hated by his subjects for introducing heavy-handed tax farming and interest collection. Gottscheer peasants eventually killed von Thurn, sparking the Slovene peasant revolt, which would continue to rage throughout what is now Slovenia and parts of Austria until it was put down in 1515.

The territory was purchased by Hans Ungnad in 1524, and then mortgaged to the Croatian Counts of Blagay in 1547.. Croatian rule lasted less than a century, but during that time, many Gottscheers added the ending -itsch to their surnames, derived from the common Croatian -ić suffix.

In 1574, Gottschee extended from Mount Snežnik in the extreme west to Blatnik pri Črmošnjicah in the east, and from Seč and Gornja Topla Reber in the north to just below Bosljiva Loka and Osilnica in the south.

In 1618, the Gottschee was sold to Freiherr Johann Jakob Khisl. The dominion was elevated to a County in 1623, thereafter Khisl styled himself “Count of Gottschee”. His adoptive son promptly sold the county to Wolf Engelbrecht of Auersperg in 1641. Auersperg abandoned the deteriorating castle at Friedrichstein as the seat of the County and built a new castle in the town of Gottschee itself, which survived until the Second World War. In 1677, Johann Weikhard of Auersperg made the county a fideicommissum of the House of Auersperg, securing its ownership by the family until the abolition of Austria-Hungary. In 1791 Emperor Leopold II elevated the territory to the Duchy of Gottschee (German: Herzogtum Gottschee, Slovene: Kočevska Vojvodina) and Karl Josef Anton von Auersperg to the Duke of Gottschee.^: 281

From 1809 to 1814, the Gottschee was occupied by the forces of Emperor Napoleon and incorporated into the Illyrian Provinces. However, the Napoleonic takeover was not without incident, as the Gottscheers rose up against the French in 1809, scoring some minor victories before being crushed. After the French left the area, control of the Duchy reverted to the House of Auersperg, becoming part of the Kingdom of Illyria. In 1835, the first industrial venture in the region, a small Ranzingen Bros. glassworks, was founded, although it was unprofitable and closed down in 1888. In 1848, serfdom was abolished.

In 1849, Gottschee was made a district of the reconstituted Duchy of Carniola. The district had an area of approximately 860 km² (330 sq mi) and contained a total of 177 settlements (including ethnically Slovene ones and some abandoned before 1941). The Gottschee District was bordered (clockwise) by the districts of Ribnica (Reifnitz), Žužemberk (Seisenberg), Novo Mesto (Rudolfswerth), Metlika (Mötling), and Črnomelj (Tschernembl). Fully German or ethnically mixed Slovene-German territory extended into all of the neighboring districts.^{: Table 16} On 31 December 1869 the entire Kočevje District had 3,473 houses and a population of 18,432. Subtracting the ethnically Slovene communities of Osilnica (Osiunitz) and Kostel left a total of 2,966 houses and a population of 15,520 in ethnically German or German-majority territory in the district itself. Adding in ethnically German houses and population from communities adjacent to the district resulted in a total of 4,161 houses and a population of 21,301 in the culturally German Gottschee area.^: 275 Czörnig estimated the total Gottschee German population in 1878, accounting for population growth and men working away from home, to be about 26,000.^: 276

In 1871, the region’s first Gymnasium was built in the town of Gottschee, a decade later, a trade school of woodwork was founded in the same town. In 1892, brown coal mining began in Schalkendorf, resulting in the immigration of some Slovenian miners. In 1893, Gottschee gained its first rail connection with a line running from the town of Gottschee to Ljubljana, and one year later, the House of Auersperg erected a sawmill.

Between 1869 and 1878, the German population of Gottschee reached its zenith at a population of around 26,000. However, despite modernization, the region remained desperately poor and its population chiefly dependent on subsistence farming. From 1880, the Gottschee would begin losing population to emigration to the United States and Canada. Combined with the effects of anti-German discrimination in the newly formed Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Gottschee German population had been reduced to 12,500 by the German invasion of 1941.

Kingdom of Yugoslavia

The Gottschee Germans accepted the post-World War I arrangement, incorporating the region into the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia, with some reluctance: in February 1918 Gottschee's German priests characterized the proposed new state as "treacherous" and sent a letter to Bishop Anton Bonaventura Jeglič in Ljubljana denouncing the plan. In October 1918 a proposal was prepared for the Paris Peace Conference for Gottschee to become an independent republic (German: Republik Gottschee) under American protection, based on the large Gottscheer population in the United States, and a Gottscheer demonstration demanding autonomy was held in New York in January 1919. There were also unsuccessful proposals to establish a Gottschee Republic with Italian backing. In 1920, the Slovene press characterized the proposal for a Gottschee Republic as communist agitation. Regardless of the efforts of the Gottschee German population to preserve autonomy or independence, the enclave's small size and even smaller population meant that it was incorporated into Yugoslavia without incident.

Despite claims that the Kingdom of Yugoslavia would constitutionally protect minority rights, on January 1, 1919, all German teachers and civil servants in the state were dismissed. Under the 1921 constitution, the traditional regions were abolished and Gottschee was made part of the Ljubljana Province (Slovene: Ljubljanska oblast) from 1922 to 1929. After the provinces were abolished, Gottschee was part of the larger Drava Banovina (Dravska banovina) from 1929 to 1941. Within the very large Kočevje District (Slovene: Srez Kočevje), 22 local communities or small municipalities (občina) largely encompassed Gottschee territory until 1933, continuing its 19th-century organization. Many Gottschee settlements were outside the Kočevje District. In 1933 a Yugoslav administrative reform created large municipalities (občina) organized within the districts (srez). The Kočevje District was the largest district in the Drava Banovina, extending from Veliki Ločnik in the north to the Croatian border in the south. Gottschee territory was encompassed by 11 large municipalities, not all of which were in the Kočevje District.

In 1925, the majority of German business, cultural, and athletics societies were dissolved, and there was forced Slovenization of the names of villages and people. By 1939, only five German classes were offered in the entire region's elementary schools. Attempts to form German cultural organizations were continuously squashed, due to the Yugoslav government's increasing fear of German nationalist sentiment emanating from Germany and Austria. Despite these hardships, in 1930, a 600-year celebration of Gottschee was held.

In 1939, the ban on the German Cultural Organization (Kulturbund) was lifted, in return for alleged better treatment for Carinthian Slovenes by the Third Reich. National Socialist activist Wilhelm Lampeter was easily able to found a paramilitary organization, the Mannschaft, from the reconstituted Cultural Organization, and serious agitation for "repatriation" to Germany began.

Second World War

Following the swift German invasion of 6 April 1941, the Mannschaft's paramilitaries took control of the Gottschee. On 13 April, Wilhelm Lampeter took office as Bezirkshauptmann (District Leader) of the Gottschee in the old city palace of the Auerspergs in the town of Gottschee. However, only ten days later, Lampeter was forced to step down from this post on 23 April, after the region became part of the Province of Ljubljana, an Italian occupation zone. On October 1 of the same year, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini reached a resettlement treaty, and plans to resettle the Gottscheers into German territory devised by the Main Welfare Office for Ethnic Germans (VoMi) were put into action. Members of the Mannschaft quickly initiated the resettlement across the region, and the first train carrying the Gottscheers departed from the Town of Gottschee on November 14. Resettling Gottscheers were allowed to take some household belongings and 1/3 of their livestock with them. Ostensibly, the vacated land was to be given to Italian settlers, however, due to the intensity of partisan attacks in the area, Italian settlement was never implemented in any appreciable scale.

Support for resettlement was far from uniform and decreased precipitously as the operation continued. The great majority of Gottscheer Priests stood in opposition to the resettlement on moral grounds, and as news of the substandard conditions in resettlement areas spread, some Gottscheers began engaging in passive resistance. 56 Gottscheers went as far as to join the Slovene partisans and resist resettlement and invasion. Nonetheless, the Italian settlement agency took action to expel any Gottscheers who refused to leave, and by the end of the resettlement period on 26 January, 11,506 Gottscheer Germans, or 95% of the group’s population, were resettled.

Ethnic Germans from Gottschee facing resettlement in 1941

The Gottscheers were resettled from the Italian-annexed territory to the Rann Triangle (German: Ranner Dreieck), a region in Lower Styria between the confluences of the Krka, Sotla, and Sava rivers.

To achieve the goal of resettlement, accommodation had to be made for the Gottscheer settlers and, beginning in November 1941, some 46,000 Slovenes from the Rann Triangle region were deported to eastern Germany for potential Germanisation or forced labor. Shortly before that, propaganda aimed at both the Gottscheers and the Slovenes promised the latter equivalent farmland in Germany for the land relinquished in Lower Styria. The Gottscheers were given Reich passports and transportation to the Rann area straight after the forced departure of the Slovenes. Most left their homes following coercion and threats as the VoMi had set 31 December 1941 as the deadline for the movement of both groups. Though many Gottscheers received houses and farmland, inevitably there was great dissatisfaction that many properties were of lesser value and quality than their original lands, and were in disarray after the hasty expulsion of their previous occupants. The Rann Triangle was also settled by other Volksdeutsche, including Bessarabian and Dobruja Germans, giving rise to sectarian unease.

From the time of their arrival until the end of the war, Gottscheer farmers were harassed and sometimes killed by Yugoslav partisans who saw them as an instrument of the Axis powers. Among these partisans were Slovenes who had escaped deportation from the Rann Triangle to the surrounding forests.The attempt to resettle the Gottscheers proved a costly failure for the Nazi regime, which needed to deploy extra manpower to protect the farmers from the partisans. The deported Slovenes were taken to several camps in Saxony, Silesia, and elsewhere in Germany, where they were forced to work on German farms or in factories from 1941 to 1945. The laborers were not always kept in formal internment, but often in nearby vacant buildings. After the end of the war, most returned to Yugoslavia to find their homes destroyed.

After the war[edit]

By 1945, nearly all Gottscheers had fled the Rann Triangle for Austria,. Stragglers were interned and later expelled in the aftermath of treaties between the defeated Germans and the Yugoslav Partisans. The Gottscheers became stateless refugees in Austria. In the aftermath of the war, around 3,000 stayed in Austria and 2,000 immigrated to Germany, while the remainder immigrated to the United States and Canada. By all accounts, less than 400 ethnic Germans found themselves in the new Socialist Republic of Slovenia, with OZNA counting a mere 110.

The region of Gottschee was settled by a variety of ethnic Slovenes after the war, creating a unique [[mixed dialect area]](Mixed Kočevje subdialects). Although the current Kočevje Municipality has a similar Slovene population to the German population of the 1920s, many Gottscheer villages were abandoned following the war: of the 177 municipalities depopulated in the war, 112 were razed, of 123 Gottscheer parish churches, only 12 remain standing, and out of 38 Gottscheer cemeteries, 28 were leveled or cleansed of German inscriptions.

One of the infamous Bleiburg Repatriations, the Kočevski Rog massacre, took place within the bounds of Gottschee, although its victims were non-Gottscheers.

The vast majority of Gottscheers and their descendants now live in the United States, mainly in New York City and Cleveland, but also in other parts of the country.^{[citation needed]} Smaller numbers have settled in Kitchener, Ontario, along with those who remained in Europe. Gottscheer Hall in Ridgewood, Queens serves as a cultural hub and gathering place for the community.