A memorial commemorating those killed in the post-World War II reprisals by the Communist authorities on the Pohorje Massif above the city of Maribor has been unveiled in an effort spearheaded by a local and financed by private donations.

The stone monument is located next to a popular hiking trail just below St Areh's Church and commemorates all those who were killed and buried nameless in the Pohorje forests.

Some 23 mass graves have been discovered in the area so far. They have been marked with wooden crosses, some of which can be found in a forest near the new memorial.

According to a report by the newspaper Večer, the monument was unveiled on 5 October with a commemoration attended by descendants of the German minority in Maribor and Austrians who lost their relatives in the summary killings.

They attended the bilingual event "in great numbers" and had also contributed the funds for the memorial, blessed by Archbishop of Maribor Alojzij Cvikl during the event.

The ambassadors of Austria and Germany, Elisabeth Ellison-Kramer and Sylvia Groneick, as well as opposition leader Janez Janša attended the ceremony as well.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Robert Golob and National Assembly President Urška Klakočar Zupančič, had sent their "good wishes", as had Maribor Mayor Saša Arsenovič, and Austrian officials, the governor of Styria and Carinthia, Christopher Drexler and Peter Kaiser, according to Večer.

Hundreds of people executed

The newspaper reported that many locals had known about the mass graves on Pohorje but had kept quiet until Slovenia became independent. Večer ran the first story about the post-WWII killings in Maribor and Pohorje in 1992 when it was said that 600 people had been executed.

In the early 2010s, an Austrian association of Germans who moved out of lower Styria drew attention to the killings in a petition initiated by Margarete Jahn, who lost both parents in the atrocity.

Martin Kostrevc, a man from Pohorje who is now 90, had been researching the mass graves at the time. In 2007 he persuaded the government commission for concealed mass graves to start exhumations. In one grave alone, over 180 victims were found. From there on, Kostrevc, Jahn and Ingeborg Mallner pushed for the memorial to be erected.

Honorary speaker Mitja Ferenc, an authority on post-WWII killings, said "it has taken courageous and persevering individuals like Kostrevc for our country to occasionally step on the path of reducing the debt society owes to the nameless victims".

He read an account of a member of the OZNA security service about the Pohorje atrocities in 1945.

Confronting the crimes

German Ambassador Groneick said that Germany had caused much suffering during WWII, but that unfortunately the violence had not ended when the invaders withdrew.

"The loss of those killed during and after the war still hurts on both sides. It is something to live with, to come to terms with. But it is also important to confront the crimes. The memorial we are unveiling today is an important step in that direction," she said in her speech.

The government commission for concealed mass graves has recorded more than 750 sites of mass graves so far, virtually across the entire country.

More than 10,000 people are believed to have perished in the mass killings. Among them were civilians, as well as members of the Slovenian, Croatian and Serbian pro-Nazi or anti-communist militias whom the allies returned from Austria to Yugoslavia. Most of them were executed between May and July 1945.