The Barbara Pit massacre (Slovene: Pokol v Barbara rovu, Croatian: Pokolj u Barbarinom rovu), also known as the Huda Jama massacre, was the mass killing of prisoners of war of Ante Pavelić's NDH Armed Forces and the Slovene Home Guard, as well as civilians, after the end of World War II in Yugoslavia in an abandoned coal mine near Huda Jama, Slovenia. More than a thousand prisoners of war and some civilians were executed by the Yugoslav Partisans during May and June 1945, following the Bleiburg repatriations by the British. The location of the massacre was then sealed with concrete barriers and discussion about it was forbidden.
The mass grave site, one of the largest in Slovenia, was first publicly discussed in 1990, after the fall of communism in Yugoslavia. A memorial chapel was raised near the entrance to the mine in 1997. Investigation of the Barbara Pit mine began in 2008. It took several months for workers to remove concrete walls built after the war to seal the cave. On 3 March 2009, investigators found 427 unidentified bodies at a ditch in the mine. Another 369 corpses were found on the first five meters of a nearby shaft. The Barbara Pit mine was subsequently visited by the Croatian and Slovenian political leadership to pay tribute to the victims. On 25 October 2017, the Slovenian government announced that the remains of 1,416 victims were exhumed from the site and reburied at the Dobrava memorial park near Maribor.
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