la were annexed by the Independent State of Croatia.
The Nazis started a policy of violent Germanisation. During the war, tens of thousands of Slovenes were resettled or chased away, imprisoned, or transported to labor, internment and extermination camps. Many were sent into exile to Nedić's Serbia and Croatia. The numbers of Slovenes drafted to the German military and paramilitary formations has been estimated at 150,000 men and women, almost a quarter of them lost their lives on various European battlefields, mostly on the Eastern Front. The Italian occupation authority in the Province of Ljubljana left Slovenes a significant cultural autonomy. The Province was annexed to Italy and the Fascist system was systematically introduced in the region.
In the summer of 1941, a resistance movement led by the Liberation Front of the Slovene Nation, emerged in both the Italian and in the German occupation zones. The resistance, pluralistic at the beginning, was gradually taken over by the Communist Party, as in the rest of occupied Yugoslavia. Contrary to elsewhere in Yugoslavia, where on the freed territories the political life was organized by the military itself, the Slovene Partisans were subordinated to the civil political authority of the Front. The guerilla warfare mostly took place in the Italian occupation zone. The Italian Army reacted with brutal repression, which included war crimes against the civilian population, including summary executions of civilians and destruction of whole villages. More than 30,000 Slovenes (around 7,5% of the whole population of the Province) were interned into the Rab and the Gonars concentration camps.
In the summer of 1942, a civil war between Slovenes broke out. The two fighting factions were the Slovenian Partisans and the Italian-sponsored anti-communist militia, known as the White Guard, later re-organized under Nazi command as the Slovene Home Guard. Small units of Slovenian Chetniks also existed in Lower
