I’m not sure if this exhibit at the city’s history museum is symbolic or an actual roll of barbed wire that they’ve found from World War Two, but it relates to the situation that Ljubljana faced in 1941. Italian forces seized the city, but they were soon overrun by attacks from partisans and panic in the Italian leadership set in.
Much of the local population didn’t accept Italian occupation and the military felt that it could only respond by putting barbed wire up around the entire city. That was thirty kilometres of barbed wire, gateposts and checkpoints. Quite an effort really, but it was the only way they could find of trying to maintain order.
The project was not a success. It was just too much area to secure with guards being bribed and partisans continuing to operate by just being resourceful. It also annoyed the residents of Ljubljana who found themselves hemmed into their own city, when they actually liked to leave it every now and then.
It all fell apart for the Italians in 1943 when Mussolini was overthrown and the Germans stormed in to take over the city in case the partisans managed to run things themselves. The Germans quite liked the barbed wire fence, so they decided to keep that. They initially used Quisling guards to maintain it, but by 1944 there were fears that Tito’s forces would take the city, so what they considered as the better trained German military took over instead.
Actually, whilst on the matter of Tito (1892-1980), who was a controversial politician who led the partisans and then led communist Yugoslavia for many years, he was someone who displeased Stalin who tried to kill him. I like Tito’s public response:
“Stalin. Stop sending assassins to murder me. We have already caught five, one with a bomb, another with a rifle. If this doesn’t stop, I will send one man to Moscow and there will be no need to send another.”
Classy to be fair. Tito ripped up the barbed wire fence when he took control of the country, so it was gone by the autumn of 1945.
Today, there is a permanent reminder of this ridiculous barbed wire fence, it’s called the Trail of Remembrance and Comradeship and it’s a 33km walk around the city. Work started on the construction of this path in the mid-1970s and it was completed in the 1980s, a reminder of the only city in the Second World War that found itself entirely surrounded by barbed wire. I’d quite like to walk that one day, that’s another little project for my never-ending list.