Unburied | willaspinall

Unburied Pilot

00:00 / 13:36

One man wants to organise a funeral for 3,450 people.

One country wants to stop him.

On 20 October 2019, Jože Dežman was working on a hunch. The head of Slovenia’s Commission on Concealed Mass Graves (CCMG), Dežman had experience of finding hundreds of hidden burials, but the location of one extraordinary crime was eluding him. In the late '90s three survivors published a book about the summer of 1945, when they had been flung into a deep pit, their falls broken by a pile of hundreds of bodies beneath them. These men emigrated to the US and Canada and died of old age, never finding the exact location of their horrific ordeal.

Finally, after years of failure, Dežman and his team had found a possible candidate deep inside one of Slovenia’s pristine forests: jama pod Macesnovo Gorico- 'the cave under Larch Hill'. A specialist caver lowered himself 15 metres down into the pit. “Bones! I’ve found bones! Whole skeletons!” Crime scene tape was wrapped around the perimeter, and an arduous and dangerous exhumation began. In 2022 thousands of tons of rock was removed before an unbelievable 3,450 human remains were discovered.

The plan was to store the remains briefly in a local government garage before building a new tomb in the national cemetery in the capital, Ljubljana. But the Mayor of the city has called these murdered men traitors - reopening decades of division in a country once torn apart by civil war.

The Mayor, Zoran Janković, is a canny operator and knows his left wing base appreciates such inflammatory comments. Because, to thousands of people in this country, these men were traitors: they belonged to the collaborationist domobranci or 'home guard', an army under the control of the Nazi occupiers. But while the real war criminals were tried at Nuremberg - where 10 out of the 22 defendants were spared the death sentence - thousands of young men were summarily executed without trial.

My name is Will Aspinall. I’m a British radio and TV documentary maker, and I’ve also lived in this beautiful country for over half a decade. And this is Unburied: The Cave Under Larch Hill, a podcast series with a difference. It spans the genres of true crime, history and current affairs, but it also goes to the heart of what makes us human, alive or dead.

My plan is to follow Dežman on his quest to organise a funeral for 3,450 people. On the way I’ll join relatives of the victims on their painful journey for justice, and I’ll find out how and why it took so long to discover these murdered men. We’ll revisit the darkest hours of the 1940s and sweep through Cold War European history before tackling more recent events.

The series is also going to challenge my own beliefs. Because, for my whole life, I’ve accepted the legend of Britain’s heroism in World War Two, and the huge sacrifices that were made liberating Europe from fascism. Researching this I’ve discovered something more disturbing in our war record. Something that will be hard to hear, but vital to understanding our true history.

Because it was the British Army who packed these Slovenian men into cattle trucks and sent them to their deaths.

Episode Breakdown

Episode One: Make this Land German Again

We go back to April 26 1941, when Hitler makes an unwelcome entry to his latest acquisition and, not coincidentally, the founding day of the Slovene partisans. Will meets relatives of the murdered men and we introduce Jože Dežman and his work. We look at life under occupation, and Will travels to a nearby town, Dražgoše, to find out how the battle there in January 1942 is controversial to this day.

We return to 2017 when an early discovery at Larch Hill promises to uncover a decades old mystery - where did thousands of men go?

Episode Two: Wars Within Wars

As the world war rages across Europe, Will finds out how and why Slovenia’s civil war intensified. We tell the story of the Slovene holocaust of Roma and Jewish residents, and an emboldened partisan resistance. We examine how Churchill came to back partisan leader Tito and his communist revolutionaries, leading to a fateful decision.

Episode Three: We Survived Death

May 1945. We tell the tragic story of the brutal last weeks of life for the murdered young men through the words and archive interviews of the six survivors. Will travels to Oxford to interview historians Count Nikolai Tolstoy and Marcus Ferrar to reveal why Britain had a hand in the killings. We uncover the moving story of Canadian Major Paul Barre, who stopped thousands more Slovenes from also being sent to their deaths.

Episode Four: Lies and Lies and Libel

1946-1989 We look at life under Tito’s repressive regime in Yugoslavia, and how dramatic attempts to reveal the truth about the murders were silenced. We find out how the surviving men emigrated to the US and Canada and to put the past behind them, while in London, historian Nikolai Tolstoy faced bankruptcy after one of the British officers responsible for returning the men in 1945 sued for libel.

Episode Five: The Pompei of Totalitarian killing

In 1990 Slovenia declared independence, and a new era of self-governance promised to finally bring truth and reconciliation. Will meets founding members of the Commission for Concealed Mass Graves, and how they attempted to bring key partisans to trial for war crimes.

As Dežman and his team made ever more gruesome discoveries, the 2009 excavations at a site known as Huda Jama - the 'Cave of Evil' - took the horrors of the Tito regime to a new level.

Episode Six: 88 Cubic Metres

2019-present. We pick up from the first discovery of human remains in the cave under Larch Hill, to the main excavations in 2022, to Dr Dežman’s work trying to get the reburial to take place. Will attempts to interview the Mayor of Ljubljana and other key politicians to find out why the move is being blocked.

The International Perspective

The question of rights for the dead is both timely and not isolated to Slovenia. From Palestine to Ukraine, Chile to Spain, obligations under international law are often ignored or unevenly enforced. Unlawful deaths and deaths related to natural disasters, mass migration, and pandemics do not get equal treatment, leading to an influential UN report in 2024 by Dr Morris Tidball-Binz. “Inequalities, discrimination, and injustices which occur in life are sadly replicated in death, causing extreme suffering to families of deceased minorities,” Tidball-Binz wrote.

The Story So Far…

I’ve been engaging with Jože Dežman, this story and its key personnel since December 2024, including initial contact with Marcus Ferrar, author of Slovenia 1945, one of the key resources for this series; American anthropologist Dr Julia Barnes, who did her PhD on Slovene mass graves and reconciliation and witnessed the 2022 discovery at Larch Hill; and Count Nikolai Tolstoy, an English historian whose book The Minister and the Massacres placed him at the centre of a very British scandal.

Resources

I need financial and editorial support, and would love to collaborate with a prestigious production house.

I need time to research and make a compelling radio series with broad human interest. I need a Slovene researcher to help me source archive, find relatives and dig deeper into the lives of a handful of these murdered men. I also need time to follow Dežman and document his work.

I am resourceful and self-sufficient with my decades of experience in working within the declining budgets of British factual television. In the field I can work alone and record tape with my own equipment- although company, if there are funds, is always appreciated!

The locations for this story are mostly in Slovenia, just over the border in Austria, and the London area. There is an opportunity for recording in the US too as many of the survivors migrated and settled down there. The accounts of third generation Slovene-Americans could provide an interesting perspective and add to its international relevance.