Kaznovana podjetnost: kranjski trgovec in industrialec Franjo Sirc
Gespeichert in:
| 1. Verfasser: | |
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| Format: | Buch |
| Sprache: | Slovenian |
| Veröffentlicht: |
Ljubljana
Nova Revija
2005
|
| Schlagworte: | |
| Online-Zugang: | Inhaltsverzeichnis Abstract |
| Beschreibung: | 199 S. Ill. |
| ISBN: | 9616352970 |
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Datensatz im Suchindex
| _version_ | 1804137125563596800 |
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| adam_text | Vsebina
Ljubo Sire: Zgodba
о
očetu
in
sinu
7
Rod
Franja
Sirca
17
Franjeva
mladost
21
V Pirčevi hiši
31
Trgovec Sire
35
Bančni direktor
39
Tiskárna
Sava
45
Udeležba pri ustanavljanju tekstilnih
tovarn v
Kranju
51
Delovanje
v
krajevni politiki
57
Pot do
lastne
továrne
65
Hotel Union
73
Razširitev
in
modernizacija
továrne
79
Vse bližje vojni
89
Tekstilni strokovnjak
97
Zasebno življenje
103
V
izgnanstvu
v
Ljubljani
113
Razprodaja Sirčevega premoženja; nova proizvodnja
v továrni
119
Sirčeva prizadevanja
v
okupirani Ljubljani
123
Življenje
v
Ljubljani
129
Novi čaši
133
Prizadevanja za vrnitev premoženja
141
Domače skrbi
147
Aretacija, obtožba
149
Sodba
157
Zaplemba premoženja
163
Prestajanje kazni, smrt
1б5
Zaključek
169
Povzetek
173
Summary
181
The
1947
show trial involving
Franjo
Sire
191
Viri in
literatura
193
Imensko kazalo
196
Summary
Before the First World War, Carniola
-
nowadays the central part of the Republic of Slovenia
-
was an Austrian
Crown Land, acquired by the Habsburgs in the Fourteenth Century. The
population spoke Slovene with the exception of some nobles and townspe¬
ople who used German, which was the official language. The ancestors of
the later merchant and industrialist
Franjo
Sire (pronounced Franyo
Sierts ) came from the northern part of this area, called Upper Carniola. The
Sires were peasants in Primskovo, a village which has now been incorpora¬
ted into the main regional town of Kranj (pronounced
Kran )· Kranj
used
to be a small fortified medieval town between two rivers blocking the path
of Turkish raids into the Alps. When this danger passed towards the end of
the Seventeenth Century, it became a simple market town.
The local peasants tended to have so many children that some inevitably
had to leave the farms and acquire new skills to earn a living.
Franjo
Sire s
grandfather Joseph became a wheelwright and in the following generation
his father, Franc, spent a few years as a waiter in Trieste and
Rijeka,
which
enabled him to start a grocery business back home. He bought the present
Sire family house in Kranj in
1889
and established his shop on the ground
floor; he also opened an inn next to the new railway station, appropriately
naming it The Last Coin, since that is what the travellers would be spending
there. The railway line passing through Kranj was a side-line of the Vienna
- Graz -
Ljubljana
-
Trieste line built in the mid- Nineteenth Century linking
Austria and also Germany (via Salzburg) with the Adriatic.
181
Jože Žontar
Καζηουαηα
podjetnost
Franjo
Sire s father, Franc, married the young Maria
Magdalena
Francheţii,
known as
Magda ,
daughter of an Italian immigrant from Vicenza, Peter
Paul
(Pietro
Paolo) Franchetti. They had two sons
-
Franjo
(27.11.1891)
and
Vinko
(11.8.1893),
but while the boys were still very young, Franc contrac¬
ted tuberculosis and died in
1899.
Magda
remarried, becoming Mrs Rant,
but her second husband also died young, so she was soon left to cope with
the shop and the inn on the other side of the river on her own.
The young
Franjo
attended the local primary school and then the classi¬
cal Gymnasium [an academic high school on the German model] for four
years, but he was really more interested in business than in Greek and Latin
and managed to persuade his mother to let him transfer to a commercial
college in Prague, for which the local council gave him a scholarship. The
establishment he attended was called the Czech-Slavonic Business
Academy, and it appealed to him because he would not only be doing busi¬
ness studies but would be taught in Czech, another Slavonic language,
instead of German. This was the period of Pan-Slav national reawakening,
when young people wanted to emancipate themselves from the Germanic
influence of Austria.
The sojourn in Prague and fluency in Czech gave
Franjo
the credentials
to become a clerk with the Trieste subsidiary of the Czech
Živnostenská
Banka
(Business Bank). Later on he moved to the Trieste subsidiary of the
Ljubljana Credit Bank and finally to the central office of this bank in
Ljubljana.
When he was
20,
Franjo
had to serve a year in the Austrian Army and
became an officer in the reserve. Afterwards, he intended to expand his
mother s business in agricultural produce and hoped to launch the export
of dried mushrooms to Britain, amongst other countries. But his plans were
interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War, in which he served as a
quartermaster officer, first in Russia, and later, when Italy joined the war, in
South Tyrol. He was demobilised before the end of the war, and married
Zdenka,
his
fiancée
of some years standing, in September,
1918.
She was the
daughter of Ciril
Pire, a
member of the Kranj Municipal Council and previ¬
ously, until
1913,
a member of the Carniola Crown Land Assembly.
Franjo
acquired a commercial licence in
1918
and a year later a licence to
open a general store. He immediately gained high esteem in business circ¬
les, as is evident from the fact that at the
1919
meeting launching the Society
of Merchants for the district of Kranj he was elected chairman, a post he
retained until
1936.
But his attempt to develop his mother s shop into a
wholesale establishment failed, and he decided to go back into banking. He
was appointed Manager of the newly formed subsidiary of the
Slavenska
Banka,
partly funded with Czech capital, in Kranj and remained there until
the bank collapsed in
1927.
Nonetheless, his association with the
Slavenska
Banka
brought him into contact with people who were about to attempt
big developments in collaboration with Czech capital, and he abandoned
his original plans for the general store, which had in any case become pro¬
blematical due to the deterioration of his mother s health. Although they
182
Summary
had together founded the Sire
-
Rant Company in August,
1926,
Magda
gave
it up a few years later.
Franj
o s
younger brother,
Vinko,
returned quite late from the war becau¬
se he deliberately allowed himself to be captured by the Russians and
volunteered to join the so-called Yugoslav division to fight on the Serbian
side in the Balkans. After demobilisation he worked in banks and insuran¬
ce companies and later also acted as the Renault agent for Slovenia.
Magda
handed over the inn to him, renamed the Station Restaurant, but
Vinko
never ran it himself.
Before the First World War,
Franjo
Sire s father-in-law, Ciril
Pire,
had foun¬
ded the
Sava
Printing Office for political purposes, i.e. to publish a newspa¬
per in Slovene, but he had been obliged to close it down. After the war and
the establishment of the new state of Yugoslavia he reactivated it as a priva¬
te company, and
Franjo
was not only one of the main shareholders but actu¬
ally managed the business, modernising it in
1930.
But when he expanded
his own textile factory it required his full attention, so that he gave up his
work in the printing office.
Once the First World War was over, the people of Carniola, which used to
be an agricultural backwater under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, realised
that they had to catch up with the northern provinces of the former Empire
if they wanted to improve their standard of living. Under Austria, industry
was concentrated around Vienna in competition with Bohemia, where the
very able Czechs succeeded in catching up with and even overtaking the
economic performance of the Austrians and the Germans. With the new
South Slav state came new opportunities. The new customs
tarifs
protec¬
ting industrial development persuaded some Czech firms to move south.
The first textile factory to settle in Kranj was built by the Czech-owned com¬
pany
Jugočeska,
attracted by an offer from the Municipal Council led by
Ciril
Pire
to provide it with a free site. Other foreign companies followed
suit: Intex, owned by Paul
Markgraf
and
Gustav
Horale,
who came from
Poland,
Textilindus,
belonging to Arthur Heller from Prague and his wife, a
local woman, and Jugobruna, founded by
František
Bruna
from Moravia.
Sire was very interested in this development and helped as a adviser to fore¬
ign investors, as well as acting as a business partner and responsible mana¬
ger. This was a legal requirement in Yugoslavia under a law stating that a
part of the invested capital should belong to Yugoslav citizens, who also
had to participate in the management. This industrial development had an
immense influence on the economic situation of Kranj, which, together
with the surrounding area, gained some
6,000
jobs in a few years and beca¬
me an important textile centre. It was said that this development marked
the end of rural poverty and of migration to America. Sire also took part in
local politics, encouraged by his father-in-law, who was one of die Liberal
leaders in Kranj. In
1921,
Pire
became the town mayor and Sire was elected
a town councillor, He was elected again in
1927.
At Town Council meetings,
Sire contributed thoughtful interventions, especially when his father-in-law
the mayor deserved some support,
183
Jože Žontar Kaznovana podjetnost
Before his energies were totally taken up by textile production, Sire had
time to participate in cultural pursuits such as the
Narodna Citalnica
(National Reading Society), the focal point of Slovene Liberal nationalist
activities, which promoted the use of the Slovene language by organising
theatrical productions, library use, lectures and local New Year celebrati¬
ons.
When the various Czech and Polish factories in Kranj became established,
domestic entrepreneurs began showing initiative, and Sire thought of star¬
ting his own enterprise. In
1929,
he built a state-of-the-art textile factory in
a village over the river on the periphery of Kranj. He came to an arrange¬
ment with
Bruna
that the plant would produce simple cotton textiles which
would be bought wholesale and marketed by Bruna s firm. Sire continued
to collaborate in the establishment of new enterprises, not just in Kranj, but
also in Skofja
loka,
not far from Kranj, and in
Kočevje,
in Southern Slovenia.
In spite of industrial developments, the business people in Kranj thought
that the town was also a potential tourist centre due to its position on the
main road between the sea and the already popular resort of Bled in the
Alps. Sire joined this endeavour and bought an old building, originally used
for the billeting of passing soldiers, to convert into a hotel, in spite of the
opposition of local inn-keepers and hotel-owners. But tourism failed to
take off in Kranj, and the Sire hotel closed.
The co-operation with Jugobruna continued for five years, after which
Sire had to market his products on his own. He began to expand the facto¬
ry, increasing the output and the number of employees to
250
as well. The
German invasion of Yugoslavia in
1941
prevented the installation of a new
spinning
-
mill which had already been purchased and delivered. The pro¬
duction included all sorts of textiles. The top
productwas
considered to be
Balonseide (literally: parachute silk),a silky treated cotton textile for the
manufacture of raincoats. The great textile workers strike in
1936
did not
cause a major disruption.
The factories in Kranj worked well, but the entrepreneurs had to think of
the future. Labour in the area was becoming scarce. Sire planned to build a
factory in Serbia, where he intended to move the weaving operations, while
the spinning requiring more skilled workers would remain in Kranj. The
plan was to locate the plant on the outskirts of Belgrade (today the area
would actually be inside the city boundaries), and plots of land were
bought in readiness.
With regard to the
Sava
Printing Office, he continued to be involved only
as a member of the management board. In
1941,
he transfered the land and
buildings of the-Sava company to his son
Ljubo,
and began looking for a
buyer for the machinery. His Union Hotel worked at a loss, so he converted
it into flats for the textile factory employees in
1938,
transfering ownership
to his wife
Zdenka.
After the beginning of the Second World War in
1939,
it became ever
more difficult to import cotton yarn. The Ministry of Trade and Industry in
Belgrade therefore established an advisory council for the textile industry
184
Summary
to survey the needs of the industry and distribute the raw materials equita¬
bly between the plants.
Franjo
Sire was nominated a member of the coun¬
cil by the Chamber of Commerce, Trade and Industry in Ljubljana, having
been made a member of their own Council in
1931.
Sire participated in vari¬
ous
négociations
with Italian businessmen regarding cotton yarn supplies
on behalf of the Yugoslav counterparts. Similarly, in
1940,
Milija
Pavlovic,
a
Belgrade factory-owner, and Sire concluded several contracts for the supply
of cotton, first with the Turks in Istanbul and Ankara and finally with the
Soviets in Moscow.
Franjo
Sire was a member of the Central Committee of the Jugoslovenska
Nacionalna Stranka
(Yugoslav National Party), but did not participate in
party politics, though he had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances wit¬
hin the party. In the local context, while not participating in the municipal
politics of Kranj, he was always ready to give moral support to Ciril
Pire
and
continued to lend a hand to the Liberal organisations in Kranj.
Business also dominated Sire s home life: his wife
Zdenka,
though trai¬
ning as a pharmacist, took over as his secretary and deputy after their mar¬
riage. Despite their preoccupation with the thriving business, they provi¬
ded a happy childhood for their only child,
Ljubo,
born in
1920;
he fell dan¬
gerously ill with tuberculosis of the lungs in his teens and was absent from
home for three years, receiving treatment in various sanatoria, until suffici¬
ently recovered to finish his schooling and matriculate as a student in the
Faculty of Law in Ljubljana in
1939.
When the German invasion began in
1941,
Sire followed events with inc¬
reasing anxiety: for him it was especially disconcerting that some of his
long-term associates now declared themselves to be
Volksdeutsche
(i.e. eth¬
nic Germans who were citizens of other countries). It was also very worry¬
ing that one of his factory employees, a Viennese specialist in textile dye¬
ing, Rudolf
Mutz, was
clearly risking arrest, because he was Jewish. Warned
of their own danger by
Dr
Herbert
Markgraf,
tlie
son of Paul
Markgraf,
co-
owner of Intex
,
who now chose to define himself as an ethnic German, rat¬
her than a Pole, and was appointed the municipal commissar,
Franjo
and
Zdenka
Sire realised they had to flee to Ljubljana, deemed safer because it
was under Italian, rather than German occupation.When visiting occupied
Slovenia, Hitler demanded that it should be made German again ; the way
to achieve this was to expel a large part of the Slovene population to Serbia
or Croatia, or to deport mem to slave labour camps in Germany. Sire urged
Rudolf
Mutz
to leave for Ljubljana with tlaem, but he unwisely refused, pre-
fering to remain in Kranj because he wrongly assumed his family was safe
at their home in Vienna, and his papers were in order .
Franjo
and
Zdenka
travelled light in order to be unobtrusive, arranging
with relatives to smuggle their personal belongings down to the Italian
zone later. Ciril
Pire
was persuaded to flee without his wife, but was so
depressed by events that he fell ill and died in Ljubljana in May,
1941.
Later
on, the Germans tried to persuade Sire to return to Kranj, expecting that
they could use him to get their hands on the awaited Soviet cotton, but he
185
Jože Žontar
Καζηουαηα
podjetnost
refused; he found a flat in the centre of Ljubljana and tried to make the best
of a bad situation. Rudolf
Mutz was
inevitably arrested and deported to
Serbia, where he died. Another Jewish associate, the Zagreb representative
of the firm,
Sasa Valin-Weiss,
succeeded in escaping to Italian-occupied
Dalmaţia
and ended up in New York.The mothers of both
Franjo
and
Zdenka
endured the German occupation in Kranj. Franjo s mother suffered
from various health problems and died in
1942,
at the age of
75.
Things went from bad to worse: the entire Sire property was confiscated
by the German occupation authority, declaring it to be inimical to the
German people and the Reich. This decree covered the Sire factory, their
family house, the former Union Hotel and the
Sava
Printing Office. The
Germans appointed a commissar to liquidate the current operations. The
real estate would then be handed over to the firm of
Luftfahrtanlagen
(a
military aeroplane plant) in Berlin. A representative of this firm,
Willi
Schubert, came to Kranj in August
1941
to take over and dismantle the fac¬
tory and install in its buildings the necessary machinery for the production
of component parts to supply to the main factory in Berlin. The commissar
sold off the entire remaining stock belonging to the Sire factory
-
finished
goods and cotton stocks- while the representative of the
Reichskommissar
für die Festigung des deutschen Volkstums (i.e.
of
Heinrich Himmler,
as the
Reich s commissar for the strengthening of German Nationhood ) sold on
the brand-new spinning-mill machinery which had only arrived from
Germany on the very day of the German invasion. Schubert sold the dis¬
mantled weaving machinery and other equipment to other factories and
individuals. The liquidation of the textile factory was completed by May,
1942,
when the new plant started production. The
Sava
Printing Office was
acquired by the NS
Gauverlag
and
Druckerei,
Kärnten
(National Socialist
Regional Publishing House and Printing Office for Carinthia) in
Klagenfurt.(The Austrian town is known as
Celovec
in Slovene).
Hoping against hope, Sire did not keep quiet in Ljubljana. In desperation,
he tried to save some of his property, first by demanding the back payment
of salary to his wife and money owed to other relatives. In addition he
hoped that he would succeed in taking over the Turkish cotton which had
just started arriving in Belgrade and collect the payment for cotton goods
supplied to the Yugoslav Army and the wholesaler
Koen.
He privately
hoped that he could lay hands on the confiscated machinery through a
third party and then start a new enterprise in either Croatia or Serbia.
Finally, he hired a lawyer in Rome and another in Vienna in an attempt to
persuade the Germans to pay his factory debts to Ljubljana banks.
All endeavours were in vain and the stress gave him a nervous break¬
down. He also worried about his son
Ljubo,
who had been forced to go into
hiding with relations and friends in order to avoid arrest. Nevertheless, his
son managed to graduate in
1943
and then escaped to Switzerland,
The Sires flat in Ljubljana became a meeting-place for relations, friends
and neighbours. Initially,
Franjo Sire
believed that Mihailovic was the right
man to back, and supported his movement in Slovenia, Later, when neigh-
186
Summary
bours from the flat next door started visiting, contact with the communist-
dominated Liberation Front was established. It would be an exaggeration
to claim that Sire was enthusiastic about its aims, but he did not oppose it
either and indeed contributed to its finances. When the German occupati¬
on replaced the Italians in Ljubljana, the atmosphere in the city became
very tense, but Sire condemned the Homeguards, Slovene troops, for colla¬
borating with the Germans in response to the communist killing of people
they considered N class enemies . He thought that the agreement between
Tito and Subasic, the Premier of the exile Yugoslav Government in London
in
1944,
was the last chance of preventing a communist take-over in
Yugoslavia. It was consequently very disappointing for him when the Allies
allowed Tito to subvert the agreement.
On May 9th,
1945,
the partisans, and with them the new communist
government entered Ljubljana, with
Ljubo
Sire in the ranks of the
VII
Corps.
Arriving on his parents doorstep unannounced as an armed partisan in
uniform, he caused considerable alarm. The following day,
Ljubo
was able
to cycle up to Kranj, returning with the sad news that the retreating German
army had set fire to the buildings of the former Sire factory, which now lay
in ruins.
Franjo Sire
and his wife had no option but to remain in Ljubljana. Their fami¬
ly home in Kranj had been used by the Germans as an auxiliary hospital, and
after the retreat it was used to house some of the many homeless. Sire was
soon called to the new, communist-controlled Ministry of Industry and
Mining in Ljubljana, where he was appointed an adviser to the cotton industry.
His first task was to work out the types of goods to be produced, followed
by the reorganisation of the textile industry. In between, he had to travel to
Vienna to see to the repatriation of textile machinery displaced during the
war, and to buy materials required for the functioning of industry in
Slovenia. Since he was in charge of cotton
-
spinning and weaving
-
mills,
he often had to attend conferences in Belgrade, the capital of the People s
Republic of Yugoslavia.
In April,
1946,
he was sent to the central office of UNRRA in Washington.
He succeeded in persuading those in charge to increase the supply of raw
cotton and hides to Yugoslavia considerably, a task which was made all the
more difficult due to the shooting-down of two American planes by the
Yugoslav communists while he was still in the United States. Upon his
return, he was allocated to the newly established Textile Industry
Administration for Slovenia and became its Deputy Head. This was the
beginning of the preparations for a Five-Year Plan, for which Sire could
swiftly and skilfully produce an assessment of the Slovene textile industry.
Since he was known to be a first-class specialist in cotton-spinning and wea¬
ving, and was furthermore determined to do a good job, he was appointed
Director of the Plan when the administration was reorganised into a
General Direction of the Textile Industry in April,
1947.
In the same period
of a few months he also hud to travel to Warsaw to help with the drafting of
the new trade agreement between Poland and Yugoslavia.
187
Jože Žontar Kaznovana podjetnost
In his former capacity as factory owner, Sire reported war damage amo¬
unting to over
123
million dinars. At first the Ministry of Industry put Sire s
factory on the list of enterprises to be rebuilt, but it was removed after a
short time. In
1946,
Minister Leskosek apparently approved a loan of
7,800,000
dinars for the restoration of the factory. Sire s plan was to resolve
the problem of his factory by ceding the building and the machinery to the
state, which in turn would pay his pre-war debts and provide him with an
old-age pension.
On May 24th,
1945,
an Act was passed on the treatment of property which
the owners had to abandon during the war, viz. property which they were
deprived of by the occupiers and their helpers. On this basis Sire succeeded
in October
1945
in obtaining the restitution of the factory land in the villa¬
ge of
Stražišče,
outside Kranj, and his family house, while his wife
Zdenka
was restituted the former Union Hotel. Where the
Sava
Printing Office was
concerned, the authorities had a different plan. The Public Prosecutor
appealed against the court decision on the restitution of the printing offi¬
ce, by which it was confiscated as the property of the wartime German NS-
Gauverlag and
Druckerei,
Kärnten..
The Act of May 24th provided that indu¬
strial enterprises should be returned to the owner, including the contents
and other objects owned by him. In this particular case the description
covered stocks and machinery. Sire began by trying to collect payments for
the textiles sold by the German commissar during the occupation. The col¬
lection was halted, however, due to an Amendment to the Act which provi¬
ded that the Act did not apply to consumer goods. Subsequently he began
to establish the location of his machinery, while his son
Ljubo
initiated pro¬
ceedings for the restitution of machinery found to be in the possession of
private persons.
After his return from America, Sire discovered the whereabouts of his
machinery in larger textile factories. In March,
1947,
he was informed that
his machinery in the Litija Spinning
-
Mill and in the Cotton
-
Spinning and
Weaving
-
Mill in Trzic had been nationalised when the two factories had
been confiscated. Sire also tried to open the question of his machinery in
the
Škofja
Loka
Spinning Mill and in the
Textilindus
Factory. He handed to
Minister Leskosek in person an offer to donate his factory with the remains
of the buildings on the site and the machinery in both enterprises as above
in exchange for the payment of his debts in the Ljubljana banks and for an
appropriate old-age pension. He never received an answer.
Sire spent most of his time in his government office and was in addition
often absent from Ljubljana. He was too frightened to take an interest in
politics. He met hardly anyone and did not renew contacts with prewar fri¬
ends. He was also worried about the dwindling employment prospects for
his son, who was then working on a Ph.D. in Law at Ljubljana University.
On May 31st,
1947,
when he returned by train from a trip to Warsaw on
government business,
Franjo Sire
was arrested at the railway station by the
secret police. He was interrogated without delay, and since the questions
were mostly about his son
Ljubo,
it soon became clear to him that
Ljubo
188
Summary
was also in prison. He complained formally against the issue of a pretrial
prison order, but received no answer. When answering the questions put
by the investigator, Sire was careful not to endanger his son in any way. He
emphasised his own innocence and claimed that he deserved a prize for
his sterling work in the service of the new communist government rather
than being imprisoned. The indictment against him charged him with
being indirectly connected with an anti-people organisation which aimed
at overthrowing the existing State order. It was claimed that he handed over
to his son data about the state of the textile industry obtained in his capaci¬
ty as a highly placed employee of the Ministry of Industry, which his son
then passed on to the British Consul in Ljubljana.
On July 29th,
1947,
a three judge panel of the Supreme Court of the
People s Republic of Slovenia opened a trial.
Franjo
Sire was sentenced to
10
years imprisonment with forced labour, me confiscation of his entire
property and the loss of political rights for a period of three years. He could
not understand what he had been accused of, since he had no dealings
whatsoever with the British Consul. The official documents found in his flat
contained no important data, while the British were fully aware of the state
of the textile industry via UNRRA. The request of a pardon from his wife
Zdenka
to the Supreme Court was rejected, as was a similar request addres¬
sed to the
Praesidium
of the People s Assembly of the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia. On the other hand, the death sentence passed on his son
Ljubo
was commuted to a sentence of
20
years imprisonment with forced labour
(of which he served
7
years).
The judgement implied the loss of his job and the confiscation of his enti¬
re property, including die machinery the ownership of which he had clai¬
med. His wife also suffered: only after years of court actions did she succe¬
ed in getting some of her own property excluded from confiscation. But as
most of her confiscated belongings had been appropriated by secret poli¬
cemen before court officials were able to
malee
an inventory, she had to
make do with a symbolic compensation.
Franjo
Sire had a very bad time in prison because he suffered from high
blood pressure. In the second half of
1949
he was moved from Ljubljana to
the prison in
Maribor,
and his state of health deteriorated rapidly. In spite
of his serious illness, his wife was unable to secure a conditional release or
pardon. In August,
1950,
he was taken back to Ljubljana and kept in the pri¬
son section of the general hospital. His condition worsened, so that finally
he was released
from
prison and moved to the civilian section of the
Internal Clinic, where he died on November 8th,
1950.
Sire had applied for a retrial immediately after his sentence, and after his
death his wife and son continued with similar applications. But it took
44
years for the Supreme Court of the Republic of Slovenia to quash the sen¬
tence and for die Public Prosecutor to withdraw die indictment. The
Supreme Court established in the year
1991
that die trial was a political
show trial and the indictment a total invention. In addition it ruled that the
fundamental rules of trial procedure had been completely disregarded.
189
Jože Žontar Kaznovana podjetnost
Franjo
Sire
contributed decisively to the development of the textile industry
in Kranj, but also in a much wider context. He was possessed of limitless
energy which he applied in other fields as well. But persecution by the
communists prevented him from making full use of his talents. The purely
Marxist reasoning behind his imprisonment became clear from a revealing
aside made in a prison cell by the organiser of the trial, Secret Police
Colonel Mitja
Ribičič:
when his son was told that his own death sentence
had been commuted to
20
years in prison, he immediately protested about
the sentence passed on his innocent father, but Ribicic answered that if his
father had not done what he was accused of, he had done other things. He
added: »It will do him no harm to be re-educated! In fact the communists
considered
-
and this is an attitude which seems difficult to eradicate- that
anybody who could organise an enterprise, providing employment and
increasing productivity, was an
ч
exploiter , worse than a common criminal.
Franjo
Sire s court file is marked »A Spy«.
190
|
| adam_txt |
Vsebina
Ljubo Sire: Zgodba
о
očetu
in
sinu
7
Rod
Franja
Sirca
17
Franjeva
mladost
21
V Pirčevi hiši
31
Trgovec Sire
35
Bančni direktor
39
Tiskárna
Sava
45
Udeležba pri ustanavljanju tekstilnih
tovarn v
Kranju
51
Delovanje
v
krajevni politiki
57
Pot do
lastne
továrne
65
Hotel Union
73
Razširitev
in
modernizacija
továrne
79
Vse bližje vojni
89
Tekstilni strokovnjak
97
Zasebno življenje
103
V
izgnanstvu
v
Ljubljani
113
Razprodaja Sirčevega premoženja; nova proizvodnja
v továrni
119
Sirčeva prizadevanja
v
okupirani Ljubljani
123
Življenje
v
Ljubljani
129
Novi čaši
133
Prizadevanja za vrnitev premoženja
141
Domače skrbi
147
Aretacija, obtožba
149
Sodba
157
Zaplemba premoženja
163
Prestajanje kazni, smrt
1б5
Zaključek
169
Povzetek
173
Summary
181
The
1947
show trial involving
Franjo
Sire
191
Viri in
literatura
193
Imensko kazalo
196
Summary
Before the First World War, Carniola
-
nowadays the central part of the Republic of Slovenia
-
was an Austrian
Crown Land, acquired by the Habsburgs in the Fourteenth Century. The
population spoke Slovene with the exception of some nobles and townspe¬
ople who used German, which was the official language. The ancestors of
the later merchant and industrialist
Franjo
Sire (pronounced "Franyo
Sierts') came from the northern part of this area, called Upper Carniola. The
Sires were peasants in Primskovo, a village which has now been incorpora¬
ted into the main regional town of Kranj (pronounced
'Kran')· Kranj
used
to be a small fortified medieval town between two rivers blocking the path
of Turkish raids into the Alps. When this danger passed towards the end of
the Seventeenth Century, it became a simple market town.
The local peasants tended to have so many children that some inevitably
had to leave the farms and acquire new skills to earn a living.
Franjo
Sire's
grandfather Joseph became a wheelwright and in the following generation
his father, Franc, spent a few years as a waiter in Trieste and
Rijeka,
which
enabled him to start a grocery business back home. He bought the present
Sire family house in Kranj in
1889
and established his shop on the ground
floor; he also opened an inn next to the new railway station, appropriately
naming it The Last Coin, since that is what the travellers would be spending
there. The railway line passing through Kranj was a side-line of the Vienna
- Graz -
Ljubljana
-
Trieste line built in the mid- Nineteenth Century linking
Austria and also Germany (via Salzburg) with the Adriatic.
181
Jože Žontar
Καζηουαηα
podjetnost
Franjo
Sire's father, Franc, married the young Maria
Magdalena
Francheţii,
known as
'Magda',
daughter of an Italian immigrant from Vicenza, Peter
Paul
(Pietro
Paolo) Franchetti. They had two sons
-
Franjo
(27.11.1891)
and
Vinko
(11.8.1893),
but while the boys were still very young, Franc contrac¬
ted tuberculosis and died in
1899.
Magda
remarried, becoming Mrs Rant,
but her second husband also died young, so she was soon left to cope with
the shop and the inn on the other side of the river on her own.
The young
Franjo
attended the local primary school and then the classi¬
cal Gymnasium [an academic high school on the German model] for four
years, but he was really more interested in business than in Greek and Latin
and managed to persuade his mother to let him transfer to a commercial
college in Prague, for which the local council gave him a scholarship. The
establishment he attended was called the Czech-Slavonic Business
Academy, and it appealed to him because he would not only be doing busi¬
ness studies but would be taught in Czech, another Slavonic language,
instead of German. This was the period of Pan-Slav national reawakening,
when young people wanted to emancipate themselves from the Germanic
influence of Austria.
The sojourn in Prague and fluency in Czech gave
Franjo
the credentials
to become a clerk with the Trieste subsidiary of the Czech
Živnostenská
Banka
(Business Bank). Later on he moved to the Trieste subsidiary of the
Ljubljana Credit Bank and finally to the central office of this bank in
Ljubljana.
When he was
20,
Franjo
had to serve a year in the Austrian Army and
became an officer in the reserve. Afterwards, he intended to expand his
mother's business in agricultural produce and hoped to launch the export
of dried mushrooms to Britain, amongst other countries. But his plans were
interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War, in which he served as a
quartermaster officer, first in Russia, and later, when Italy joined the war, in
South Tyrol. He was demobilised before the end of the war, and married
Zdenka,
his
fiancée
of some years standing, in September,
1918.
She was the
daughter of Ciril
Pire, a
member of the Kranj Municipal Council and previ¬
ously, until
1913,
a member of the Carniola Crown Land Assembly.
Franjo
acquired a commercial licence in
1918
and a year later a licence to
open a general store. He immediately gained high esteem in business circ¬
les, as is evident from the fact that at the
1919
meeting launching the Society
of Merchants for the district of Kranj he was elected chairman, a post he
retained until
1936.
But his attempt to develop his mother's shop into a
wholesale establishment failed, and he decided to go back into banking. He
was appointed Manager of the newly formed subsidiary of the
Slavenska
Banka,
partly funded with Czech capital, in Kranj and remained there until
the bank collapsed in
1927.
Nonetheless, his association with the
Slavenska
Banka
brought him into contact with people who were about to attempt
big developments in collaboration with Czech capital, and he abandoned
his original plans for the general store, which had in any case become pro¬
blematical due to the deterioration of his mother's health. Although they
182
Summary
had together founded the Sire
-
Rant Company in August,
1926,
Magda
gave
it up a few years later.
Franj
o's
younger brother,
Vinko,
returned quite late from the war becau¬
se he deliberately allowed himself to be captured by the Russians and
volunteered to join the so-called "Yugoslav' division to fight on the Serbian
side in the Balkans. After demobilisation he worked in banks and insuran¬
ce companies and later also acted as the Renault agent for Slovenia.
Magda
handed over the inn to him, renamed the Station Restaurant, but
Vinko
never ran it himself.
Before the First World War,
Franjo
Sire's father-in-law, Ciril
Pire,
had foun¬
ded the
Sava
Printing Office for political purposes, i.e. to publish a newspa¬
per in Slovene, but he had been obliged to close it down. After the war and
the establishment of the new state of Yugoslavia he reactivated it as a priva¬
te company, and
Franjo
was not only one of the main shareholders but actu¬
ally managed the business, modernising it in
1930.
But when he expanded
his own textile factory it required his full attention, so that he gave up his
work in the printing office.
Once the First World War was over, the people of Carniola, which used to
be an agricultural backwater under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, realised
that they had to catch up with the northern provinces of the former Empire
if they wanted to improve their standard of living. Under Austria, industry
was concentrated around Vienna in competition with Bohemia, where the
very able Czechs succeeded in catching up with and even overtaking the
economic performance of the Austrians and the Germans. With the new
South Slav state came new opportunities. The new customs
tarifs
protec¬
ting industrial development persuaded some Czech firms to move south.
The first textile factory to settle in Kranj was built by the Czech-owned com¬
pany
Jugočeska,
attracted by an offer from the Municipal Council led by
Ciril
Pire
to provide it with a free site. Other foreign companies followed
suit: Intex, owned by Paul
Markgraf
and
Gustav
Horale,
who came from
Poland,
Textilindus,
belonging to Arthur Heller from Prague and his wife, a
local woman, and Jugobruna, founded by
František
Bruna
from Moravia.
Sire was very interested in this development and helped as a adviser to fore¬
ign investors, as well as acting as a business partner and responsible mana¬
ger. This was a legal requirement in Yugoslavia under a law stating that a
part of the invested capital should belong to Yugoslav citizens, who also
had to participate in the management. This industrial development had an
immense influence on the economic situation of Kranj, which, together
with the surrounding area, gained some
6,000
jobs in a few years and beca¬
me an important textile centre. It was said that this development marked
the end of rural poverty and of migration to America. Sire also took part in
local politics, encouraged by his father-in-law, who was one of die Liberal
leaders in Kranj. In
1921,
Pire
became the town mayor and Sire was elected
a town councillor, He was elected again in
1927.
At Town Council meetings,
Sire contributed thoughtful interventions, especially when his father-in-law
the mayor deserved some support,
183
Jože Žontar Kaznovana podjetnost
Before his energies were totally taken up by textile production, Sire had
time to participate in cultural pursuits such as the
Narodna Citalnica
(National Reading Society), the focal point of Slovene Liberal nationalist
activities, which promoted the use of the Slovene language by organising
theatrical productions, library use, lectures and local New Year celebrati¬
ons.
When the various Czech and Polish factories in Kranj became established,
domestic entrepreneurs began showing initiative, and Sire thought of star¬
ting his own enterprise. In
1929,
he built a state-of-the-art textile factory in
a village over the river on the periphery of Kranj. He came to an arrange¬
ment with
Bruna
that the plant would produce simple cotton textiles which
would be bought wholesale and marketed by Bruna's firm. Sire continued
to collaborate in the establishment of new enterprises, not just in Kranj, but
also in Skofja
loka,
not far from Kranj, and in
Kočevje,
in Southern Slovenia.
In spite of industrial developments, the business people in Kranj thought
that the town was also a potential tourist centre due to its position on the
main road between the sea and the already popular resort of Bled in the
Alps. Sire joined this endeavour and bought an old building, originally used
for the billeting of passing soldiers, to convert into a hotel, in spite of the
opposition of local inn-keepers and hotel-owners. But tourism failed to
take off in Kranj, and the Sire hotel closed.
The co-operation with Jugobruna continued for five years, after which
Sire had to market his products on his own. He began to expand the facto¬
ry, increasing the output and the number of employees to
250
as well. The
German invasion of Yugoslavia in
1941
prevented the installation of a new
spinning
-
mill which had already been purchased and delivered. The pro¬
duction included all sorts of textiles. The top
productwas
considered to be
Balonseide (literally: parachute silk),a silky treated cotton textile for the
manufacture of raincoats. The great textile workers' strike in
1936
did not
cause a major disruption.
The factories in Kranj worked well, but the entrepreneurs had to think of
the future. Labour in the area was becoming scarce. Sire planned to build a
factory in Serbia, where he intended to move the weaving operations, while
the spinning requiring more skilled workers would remain in Kranj. The
plan was to locate the plant on the outskirts of Belgrade (today the area
would actually be inside the city boundaries), and plots of land were
bought in readiness.
With regard to the
Sava
Printing Office, he continued to be involved only
as a member of the management board. In
1941,
he transfered the land and
buildings of the-Sava company to his son
Ljubo,
and began looking for a
buyer for the machinery. His Union Hotel worked at a loss, so he converted
it into flats for the textile factory employees in
1938,
transfering ownership
to his wife
Zdenka.
After the beginning of the Second World War in
1939,
it became ever
more difficult to import cotton yarn. The Ministry of Trade and Industry in
Belgrade therefore established an advisory council for the textile industry
184
Summary
to survey the needs of the industry and distribute the raw materials equita¬
bly between the plants.
Franjo
Sire was nominated a member of the coun¬
cil by the Chamber of Commerce, Trade and Industry in Ljubljana, having
been made a member of their own Council in
1931.
Sire participated in vari¬
ous
négociations
with Italian businessmen regarding cotton yarn supplies
on behalf of the Yugoslav counterparts. Similarly, in
1940,
Milija
Pavlovic,
a
Belgrade factory-owner, and Sire concluded several contracts for the supply
of cotton, first with the Turks in Istanbul and Ankara and finally with the
Soviets in Moscow.
Franjo
Sire was a member of the Central Committee of the Jugoslovenska
Nacionalna Stranka
(Yugoslav National Party), but did not participate in
party politics, though he had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances wit¬
hin the party. In the local context, while not participating in the municipal
politics of Kranj, he was always ready to give moral support to Ciril
Pire
and
continued to lend a hand to the Liberal organisations in Kranj.
Business also dominated Sire's home life: his wife
Zdenka,
though trai¬
ning as a pharmacist, took over as his secretary and deputy after their mar¬
riage. Despite their preoccupation with the thriving business, they provi¬
ded a happy childhood for their only child,
Ljubo,
born in
1920;
he fell dan¬
gerously ill with tuberculosis of the lungs in his teens and was absent from
home for three years, receiving treatment in various sanatoria, until suffici¬
ently recovered to finish his schooling and matriculate as a student in the
Faculty of Law in Ljubljana in
1939.
When the German invasion began in
1941,
Sire followed events with inc¬
reasing anxiety: for him it was especially disconcerting that some of his
long-term associates now declared themselves to be
Volksdeutsche
(i.e. eth¬
nic Germans who were citizens of other countries). It was also very worry¬
ing that one of his factory employees, a Viennese specialist in textile dye¬
ing, Rudolf
Mutz, was
clearly risking arrest, because he was Jewish. Warned
of their own danger by
Dr
Herbert
Markgraf,
tlie
son of Paul
Markgraf,
co-
owner of Intex
,
who now chose to define himself as an ethnic German, rat¬
her than a Pole, and was appointed the municipal commissar,
Franjo
and
Zdenka
Sire realised they had to flee to Ljubljana, deemed safer because it
was under Italian, rather than German occupation.When visiting occupied
Slovenia, Hitler demanded that it should be made German 'again'; the way
to achieve this was to expel a large part of the Slovene population to Serbia
or Croatia, or to deport mem to slave labour camps in Germany. Sire urged
Rudolf
Mutz
to leave for Ljubljana with tlaem, but he unwisely refused, pre-
fering to remain in Kranj because he wrongly assumed his family was safe
at their home in Vienna, and his papers were "in order'.
Franjo
and
Zdenka
travelled light in order to be unobtrusive, arranging
with relatives to smuggle their personal belongings down to the Italian
zone later. Ciril
Pire
was persuaded to flee without his wife, but was so
depressed by events that he fell ill and died in Ljubljana in May,
1941.
Later
on, the Germans tried to persuade Sire to return to Kranj, expecting that
they could use him to get their hands on the awaited Soviet cotton, but he
185
Jože Žontar
Καζηουαηα
podjetnost
refused; he found a flat in the centre of Ljubljana and tried to make the best
of a bad situation. Rudolf
Mutz was
inevitably arrested and deported to
Serbia, where he died. Another Jewish associate, the Zagreb representative
of the firm,
Sasa Valin-Weiss,
succeeded in escaping to Italian-occupied
Dalmaţia
and ended up in New York.The mothers of both
Franjo
and
Zdenka
endured the German occupation in Kranj. Franjo's mother suffered
from various health problems and died in
1942,
at the age of
75.
Things went from bad to worse: the entire Sire property was confiscated
by the German occupation authority, declaring it to be inimical to the
German people and the Reich. This decree covered the Sire factory, their
family house, the former Union Hotel and the
Sava
Printing Office. The
Germans appointed a commissar to liquidate the current operations. The
real estate would then be handed over to the firm of
Luftfahrtanlagen
(a
military aeroplane plant) in Berlin. A representative of this firm,
Willi
Schubert, came to Kranj in August
1941
to take over and dismantle the fac¬
tory and install in its buildings the necessary machinery for the production
of component parts to supply to the main factory in Berlin. The commissar
sold off the entire remaining stock belonging to the Sire factory
-
finished
goods and cotton stocks- while the representative of the
Reichskommissar
für die Festigung des deutschen Volkstums (i.e.
of
Heinrich Himmler,
as the
Reich's commissar for the "strengthening of German Nationhood') sold on
the brand-new spinning-mill machinery which had only arrived from
Germany on the very day of the German invasion. Schubert sold the dis¬
mantled weaving machinery and other equipment to other factories and
individuals. The liquidation of the textile factory was completed by May,
1942,
when the new plant started production. The
Sava
Printing Office was
acquired by the NS
Gauverlag
and
Druckerei,
Kärnten
(National Socialist
Regional Publishing House and Printing Office for Carinthia) in
Klagenfurt.(The Austrian town is known as
Celovec
in Slovene).
Hoping against hope, Sire did not keep quiet in Ljubljana. In desperation,
he tried to save some of his property, first by demanding the back payment
of salary to his wife and money owed to other relatives. In addition he
hoped that he would succeed in taking over the Turkish cotton which had
just started arriving in Belgrade and collect the payment for cotton goods
supplied to the Yugoslav Army and the wholesaler
Koen.
He privately
hoped that he could lay hands on the confiscated machinery through a
third party and then start a new enterprise in either Croatia or Serbia.
Finally, he hired a lawyer in Rome and another in Vienna in an attempt to
persuade the Germans to pay his factory debts to Ljubljana banks.
All endeavours were in vain and the stress gave him a nervous break¬
down. He also worried about his son
Ljubo,
who had been forced to go into
hiding with relations and friends in order to avoid arrest. Nevertheless, his
son managed to graduate in
1943
and then escaped to Switzerland,
The Sires' flat in Ljubljana became a meeting-place for relations, friends
and neighbours. Initially,
Franjo Sire
believed that Mihailovic was the right
man to back, and supported his movement in Slovenia, Later, when neigh-
186
Summary
bours from the flat next door started visiting, contact with the communist-
dominated Liberation Front was established. It would be an exaggeration
to claim that Sire was enthusiastic about its aims, but he did not oppose it
either and indeed contributed to its finances. When the German occupati¬
on replaced the Italians in Ljubljana, the atmosphere in the city became
very tense, but Sire condemned the Homeguards, Slovene troops, for colla¬
borating with the Germans in response to the communist killing of people
they considered N class enemies'. He thought that the agreement between
Tito and Subasic, the Premier of the exile Yugoslav Government in London
in
1944,
was the last chance of preventing a communist take-over in
Yugoslavia. It was consequently very disappointing for him when the Allies
allowed Tito to subvert the agreement.
On May 9th,
1945,
the partisans, and with them the new communist
government entered Ljubljana, with
Ljubo
Sire in the ranks of the
VII
Corps.
Arriving on his parents' doorstep unannounced as an armed partisan in
uniform, he caused considerable alarm. The following day,
Ljubo
was able
to cycle up to Kranj, returning with the sad news that the retreating German
army had set fire to the buildings of the former Sire factory, which now lay
in ruins.
Franjo Sire
and his wife had no option but to remain in Ljubljana. Their fami¬
ly home in Kranj had been used by the Germans as an auxiliary hospital, and
after the retreat it was used to house some of the many homeless. Sire was
soon called to the new, communist-controlled Ministry of Industry and
Mining in Ljubljana, where he was appointed an adviser to the cotton industry.
His first task was to work out the types of goods to be produced, followed
by the reorganisation of the textile industry. In between, he had to travel to
Vienna to see to the repatriation of textile machinery displaced during the
war, and to buy materials required for the functioning of industry in
Slovenia. Since he was in charge of cotton
-
spinning and weaving
-
mills,
he often had to attend conferences in Belgrade, the capital of the People's
Republic of Yugoslavia.
In April,
1946,
he was sent to the central office of UNRRA in Washington.
He succeeded in persuading those in charge to increase the supply of raw
cotton and hides to Yugoslavia considerably, a task which was made all the
more difficult due to the shooting-down of two American planes by the
Yugoslav communists while he was still in the United States. Upon his
return, he was allocated to the newly established Textile Industry
Administration for Slovenia and became its Deputy Head. This was the
beginning of the preparations for a Five-Year Plan, for which Sire could
swiftly and skilfully produce an assessment of the Slovene textile industry.
Since he was known to be a first-class specialist in cotton-spinning and wea¬
ving, and was furthermore determined to do a good job, he was appointed
Director of the Plan when the administration was reorganised into a
General Direction of the Textile Industry in April,
1947.
In the same period
of a few months he also hud to travel to Warsaw to help with the drafting of
the new trade agreement between Poland and Yugoslavia.
187
Jože Žontar Kaznovana podjetnost
In his former capacity as factory owner, Sire reported war damage amo¬
unting to over
123
million dinars. At first the Ministry of Industry put Sire's
factory on the list of enterprises to be rebuilt, but it was removed after a
short time. In
1946,
Minister Leskosek apparently approved a loan of
7,800,000
dinars for the restoration of the factory. Sire's plan was to resolve
the problem of his factory by ceding the building and the machinery to the
state, which in turn would pay his pre-war debts and provide him with an
old-age pension.
On May 24th,
1945,
an Act was passed on the treatment of property which
the owners had to abandon during the war, viz. property which they were
deprived of by the occupiers and their helpers. On this basis Sire succeeded
in October
1945
in obtaining the restitution of the factory land in the villa¬
ge of
Stražišče,
outside Kranj, and his family house, while his wife
Zdenka
was restituted the former Union Hotel. Where the
Sava
Printing Office was
concerned, the authorities had a different plan. The Public Prosecutor
appealed against the court decision on the restitution of the printing offi¬
ce, by which it was confiscated as the property of the wartime German NS-
Gauverlag and
Druckerei,
Kärnten.
The Act of May 24th provided that indu¬
strial enterprises should be returned to the owner, including the contents
and other objects owned by him. In this particular case the description
covered stocks and machinery. Sire began by trying to collect payments for
the textiles sold by the German commissar during the occupation. The col¬
lection was halted, however, due to an Amendment to the Act which provi¬
ded that the Act did not apply to consumer goods. Subsequently he began
to establish the location of his machinery, while his son
Ljubo
initiated pro¬
ceedings for the restitution of machinery found to be in the possession of
private persons.
After his return from America, Sire discovered the whereabouts of his
machinery in larger textile factories. In March,
1947,
he was informed that
his machinery in the Litija Spinning
-
Mill and in the Cotton
-
Spinning and
Weaving
-
Mill in Trzic had been nationalised when the two factories had
been confiscated. Sire also tried to open the question of his machinery in
the
Škofja
Loka
Spinning Mill and in the
Textilindus
Factory. He handed to
Minister Leskosek in person an offer to donate his factory with the remains
of the buildings on the site and the machinery in both enterprises as above
in exchange for the payment of his debts in the Ljubljana banks and for an
appropriate old-age pension. He never received an answer.
Sire spent most of his time in his government office and was in addition
often absent from Ljubljana. He was too frightened to take an interest in
politics. He met hardly anyone and did not renew contacts with prewar fri¬
ends. He was also worried about the dwindling employment prospects for
his son, who was then working on a Ph.D. in Law at Ljubljana University.
On May 31st,
1947,
when he returned by train from a trip to Warsaw on
government business,
Franjo Sire
was arrested at the railway station by the
secret police. He was interrogated without delay, and since the questions
were mostly about his son
Ljubo,
it soon became clear to him that
Ljubo
188
Summary
was also in prison. He complained formally against the issue of a pretrial
prison order, but received no answer. When answering the questions put
by the investigator, Sire was careful not to endanger his son in any way. He
emphasised his own innocence and claimed that he deserved a prize for
his sterling work in the service of the new communist government rather
than being imprisoned. The indictment against him charged him with
being indirectly connected with an 'anti-people' organisation which aimed
at overthrowing the existing State order. It was claimed that he handed over
to his son data about the state of the textile industry obtained in his capaci¬
ty as a highly placed employee of the Ministry of Industry, which his son
then passed on to the British Consul in Ljubljana.
On July 29th,
1947,
a three judge panel of the Supreme Court of the
People's Republic of Slovenia opened a trial.
Franjo
Sire was sentenced to
10
years imprisonment with forced labour, me confiscation of his entire
property and the loss of political rights for a period of three years. He could
not understand what he had been accused of, since he had no dealings
whatsoever with the British Consul. The official documents found in his flat
contained no important data, while the British were fully aware of the state
of the textile industry via UNRRA. The request of a pardon from his wife
Zdenka
to the Supreme Court was rejected, as was a similar request addres¬
sed to the
Praesidium
of the People's Assembly of the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia. On the other hand, the death sentence passed on his son
Ljubo
was commuted to a sentence of
20
years imprisonment with forced labour
(of which he served
7
years).
The judgement implied the loss of his job and the confiscation of his enti¬
re property, including die machinery the ownership of which he had clai¬
med. His wife also suffered: only after years of court actions did she succe¬
ed in getting some of her own property excluded from confiscation. But as
most of her confiscated belongings had been appropriated by secret poli¬
cemen before court officials were able to
malee
an inventory, she had to
make do with a symbolic compensation.
Franjo
Sire had a very bad time in prison because he suffered from high
blood pressure. In the second half of
1949
he was moved from Ljubljana to
the prison in
Maribor,
and his state of health deteriorated rapidly. In spite
of his serious illness, his wife was unable to secure a conditional release or
pardon. In August,
1950,
he was taken back to Ljubljana and kept in the pri¬
son section of the general hospital. His condition worsened, so that finally
he was released
from
prison and moved to the civilian section of the
Internal Clinic, where he died on November 8th,
1950.
Sire had applied for a retrial immediately after his sentence, and after his
death his wife and son continued with similar applications. But it took
44
years for the Supreme Court of the Republic of Slovenia to quash the sen¬
tence and for die Public Prosecutor to withdraw die indictment. The
Supreme Court established in the year
1991
that die trial was a political
show trial and the indictment a total invention. In addition it ruled that the
fundamental rules of trial procedure had been completely disregarded.
189
Jože Žontar Kaznovana podjetnost
Franjo
Sire
contributed decisively to the development of the textile industry
in Kranj, but also in a much wider context. He was possessed of limitless
energy which he applied in other fields as well. But persecution by the
communists prevented him from making full use of his talents. The purely
Marxist reasoning behind his imprisonment became clear from a revealing
aside made in a prison cell by the organiser of the trial, Secret Police
Colonel Mitja
Ribičič:
when his son was told that his own death sentence
had been commuted to
20
years in prison, he immediately protested about
the sentence passed on his innocent father, but Ribicic answered that if his
father had not done what he was accused of, he had done other things. He
added: »It will do him no harm to be re-educated! 'In fact the communists
considered
-
and this is an attitude which seems difficult to eradicate- that
anybody who could organise an enterprise, providing employment and
increasing productivity, was an
ч
exploiter', worse than a common criminal.
Franjo
Sire's court file is marked »A Spy«.
190 |
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| building | Verbundindex |
| bvnumber | BV022867881 |
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| geographic | Kranj (DE-588)4264631-5 gnd |
| geographic_facet | Kranj |
| id | DE-604.BV022867881 |
| illustrated | Illustrated |
| index_date | 2024-07-02T18:45:58Z |
| indexdate | 2024-07-09T21:07:19Z |
| institution | BVB |
| isbn | 9616352970 |
| language | Slovenian |
| oai_aleph_id | oai:aleph.bib-bvb.de:BVB01-016073037 |
| oclc_num | 448278651 |
| open_access_boolean | |
| owner | DE-12 |
| owner_facet | DE-12 |
| physical | 199 S. Ill. |
| publishDate | 2005 |
| publishDateSearch | 2005 |
| publishDateSort | 2005 |
| publisher | Nova Revija |
| record_format | marc |
| spelling | Žontar, Jože 1932- Verfasser (DE-588)113104251 aut Kaznovana podjetnost kranjski trgovec in industrialec Franjo Sirc Jože Žontar Ljubljana Nova Revija 2005 199 S. Ill. txt rdacontent n rdamedia nc rdacarrier Sirc, Franjo <1891-1950> - Biografije ssg Sirc, Franjo 1891-1950 (DE-588)136935079 gnd rswk-swf Textilindustrie (DE-588)4059618-7 gnd rswk-swf Kranj (DE-588)4264631-5 gnd rswk-swf Sirc, Franjo 1891-1950 (DE-588)136935079 p Kranj (DE-588)4264631-5 g Textilindustrie (DE-588)4059618-7 s DE-604 Digitalisierung BSBMuenchen application/pdf http://bvbr.bib-bvb.de:8991/F?func=service&doc_library=BVB01&local_base=BVB01&doc_number=016073037&sequence=000003&line_number=0001&func_code=DB_RECORDS&service_type=MEDIA Inhaltsverzeichnis Digitalisierung BSB Muenchen application/pdf http://bvbr.bib-bvb.de:8991/F?func=service&doc_library=BVB01&local_base=BVB01&doc_number=016073037&sequence=000004&line_number=0002&func_code=DB_RECORDS&service_type=MEDIA Abstract |
| spellingShingle | Žontar, Jože 1932- Kaznovana podjetnost kranjski trgovec in industrialec Franjo Sirc Sirc, Franjo <1891-1950> - Biografije ssg Sirc, Franjo 1891-1950 (DE-588)136935079 gnd Textilindustrie (DE-588)4059618-7 gnd |
| subject_GND | (DE-588)136935079 (DE-588)4059618-7 (DE-588)4264631-5 |
| title | Kaznovana podjetnost kranjski trgovec in industrialec Franjo Sirc |
| title_auth | Kaznovana podjetnost kranjski trgovec in industrialec Franjo Sirc |
| title_exact_search | Kaznovana podjetnost kranjski trgovec in industrialec Franjo Sirc |
| title_exact_search_txtP | Kaznovana podjetnost kranjski trgovec in industrialec Franjo Sirc |
| title_full | Kaznovana podjetnost kranjski trgovec in industrialec Franjo Sirc Jože Žontar |
| title_fullStr | Kaznovana podjetnost kranjski trgovec in industrialec Franjo Sirc Jože Žontar |
| title_full_unstemmed | Kaznovana podjetnost kranjski trgovec in industrialec Franjo Sirc Jože Žontar |
| title_short | Kaznovana podjetnost |
| title_sort | kaznovana podjetnost kranjski trgovec in industrialec franjo sirc |
| title_sub | kranjski trgovec in industrialec Franjo Sirc |
| topic | Sirc, Franjo <1891-1950> - Biografije ssg Sirc, Franjo 1891-1950 (DE-588)136935079 gnd Textilindustrie (DE-588)4059618-7 gnd |
| topic_facet | Sirc, Franjo <1891-1950> - Biografije Sirc, Franjo 1891-1950 Textilindustrie Kranj |
| url | http://bvbr.bib-bvb.de:8991/F?func=service&doc_library=BVB01&local_base=BVB01&doc_number=016073037&sequence=000003&line_number=0001&func_code=DB_RECORDS&service_type=MEDIA http://bvbr.bib-bvb.de:8991/F?func=service&doc_library=BVB01&local_base=BVB01&doc_number=016073037&sequence=000004&line_number=0002&func_code=DB_RECORDS&service_type=MEDIA |
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