The first part of the conference was dedicated to the issue of discontinuity of authority in Croatia in 1945 and the heritage of Croatian anti-fascism.
Drago Roksandic, a professor at the Zagreb Faculty of Philosophy, said that the behaviour of the authorities towards the Catholic Church had been contradictory and had turned the church into a bastion of resistance.
Ivo Goldstein, a professor at the Zagreb Faculty of Political Sciences, said that most people were on the side of the winners after World War II and that they were satisfied with 1945 because of the peace that was established that year.
Around 570,000 people were killed in the war on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia, Goldstein said, adding that some 266,000 people were killed on the territory of today's Croatia.
He said that all Roma, four-fifths of the Jewish community, every sixth Serb and every twentieth Croat were killed in Croatia in WWII.
The events at Bleiburg and the Way of the Cross were an act of revenge and punishment for the enemy, Goldstein said, adding that none of the older historiographers had studied the causes of the Bleiburg events.
Slovene historian Jera Vodusek Staric spoke about the ideology and methods of taking over power, stating that the German model of coming to terms with one's own history could not be applied to the area of the former Yugoslavia.
"Communism by its structure is not a reaction at all," Staric said, adding that Communism was a fighting movement based on Lenin's programme and Stalin's additions to that programme.
Under one of the definitions from Lenin's programme the dictatorship of proletarians is the rule of proletarians that is not limited by law and that rests on violence, Staric said, adding that 1945 was the culmination of a process that had started around 1939.