brought Italian teachers from Southern Italy to Italianize ethnic Slovene and Croatian children, while the Slovene and Croatian teachers, poets, writers, artists and clergy were exiled to Sardinia and elsewhere to Southern Italy. In 1926, claiming that it was restoring surnames to their original Italian form, the Italian government announced the Italianization of names and surnames not only of citizens of the Slovene minority, but also of Croatian and German. Some Slovenes willingly accepted Italianization in order to lose the status of being second-class citizens with no upward social mobility. By the mid-1930s, around 70,000 Slovenes had fled the region, mostly to Yugoslavia and South America. In the bilingual regions people of Carinthia decided in a 1920 referendum that most of Carinthia should remain in Austria. Slovene volunteers also participated in the Spanish Civil War and the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. World War II and aftermath During World War II, Slovenes were in a unique situation. While Greece shared its experience of being trisected, Slovenia was the only country that experienced a further step—absorption and annexation into neighboring Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Hungary. After Yugoslavia was invaded by Axis Powers on 6 April 1941, Germany and Hungary occupied northern Slovenia. Some villages in Lower Carniola 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. Compared to the German policies in the northern Nazi-occupied area of Slovenia and the forced Fascist italianization in the former Austrian Littoral that was annexed after the First World War, the initial Italian policy in the central Slovenia was not as violent. Tens of thousands of Slovenes from German-occupied Lower Styria and Upper Carniola escaped to the Province of Ljubljana until June 1941. However, after resistance started in Province of Ljubljana, Italian violence against the Slovene civil population easily matched that of the Germans. The province saw the deportation of 25,000 people—which equated to 7.5% of the total population of the province—in one of the most drastic operations in Europe