The Holocaust in Slovakia
The Holocaust in Slovakia was the systematic dispossession, deportation, and murder of Jews in the Slovak Republic, a client state of Nazi Germany, during World War II. Out of 89,000 Jews in the country in 1940, an estimated 69,000 were murdered in the Holocaust.
After the September 1938 Munich Agreement, Slovakia unilaterally declared its autonomy within Czechoslovakia, but lost significant territory to Hungary in the First Vienna Award, signed in November. The following year, with German encouragement, the ruling ethnonationalist Slovak People's Party declared independence from Czechoslovakia. The Slovak government blamed the Jews for the territorial losses. Jews were targeted for discrimination and harassment, including the [|confiscation of their property and businesses]. The exclusion of Jews from the economy impoverished the community, which encouraged the government to conscript them for forced labor. On 9 September 1941, the government passed the Jewish Code, which it claimed to be the strictest anti-Jewish law in Europe.
In 1941, the Slovak government negotiated with Nazi Germany for the mass deportation of Jews to German-occupied Poland. Between March and October 1942, 58,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz concentration camp and the Lublin District of the General Governorate; only a few hundred survived until the end of the war. The Slovak government organized the transports and paid 500 Reichsmarks per Jew for the supposed cost of resettlement. The persecution of Jews resumed in August 1944, when Germany invaded Slovakia and triggered the Slovak National Uprising. Another 13,500 Jews were deported and hundreds to thousands were murdered in Slovakia by Einsatzgruppe H and the Hlinka Guard Emergency Divisions.
After liberation by the Red Army, survivors faced renewed antisemitism and difficulty regaining stolen property; most emigrated after the 1948 Communist coup. The postwar Communist regime censored discussion of the Holocaust; free speech was restored after the fall of the Communist regime in 1989. The Slovak government's complicity in the Holocaust continues to be disputed by far-right nationalists.
Background
Before 1939, Slovakia had never been an independent country; its territory had been part of the Kingdom of Hungary for a thousand years. Seventeen medieval Jewish communities have been documented in the territory of modern-day Slovakia, but significant Jewish presence was ended with the expulsions following the Hungarian defeat at the Battle of Mohács in 1526. Many Jews immigrated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Jews from Moravia settled west of the Tatra Mountains, forming the Oberlander Jews, while Jews from Galicia settled east of the mountains, forming a separate community influenced by Hasidism. Due to the schism in Hungarian Jewry, communities split in the mid-nineteenth century into Orthodox, Status Quo, and more assimilated Neolog factions. Following Jewish emancipation, complete by 1896, many Jews adopted the Hungarian language and customs to advance in society.Although they were not as integrated as the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia, many Slovak Jews moved to cities and joined all the professions; others remained in the countryside, mostly working as artisans, merchants, and shopkeepers. Jews spearheaded the nineteenth-century economic changes that led to greater commerce in rural areas; by the end of the century some 70 percent of the bankers and businessmen in the Slovak uplands were Jewish. Although a few Jews supported Slovak nationalism, by the mid-nineteenth century antisemitism had become a theme in the Slovak national movement, Jews being branded "agents of magyarization". In the western Slovak lands, anti-Jewish riots broke out in the wake of the Revolutions of 1848; more riots occurred due to the Tiszaeszlár blood libel in 1882–1883. Traditional religious antisemitism was joined by the stereotypical view of Jews as exploiters of poor Slovaks, and national antisemitism: Jews were strongly associated with the Hungarian state and accused of sympathizing with Hungarian at the expense of Slovak ambitions. During the Holocaust, leading members of the Slovak government cited their belief that Jews were Hungarians or served Hungarian interests as a reason for their persecution and deportation.
After World War I, Slovakia became part of the new country of Czechoslovakia. Jews lived in 227 communities and their population was estimated at 135,918. Anti-Jewish riots broke out in the aftermath of the declaration of independence, although the violence was not nearly as serious as in Ukraine or Poland. Slovak nationalists associated Jews with the Czechoslovak state and accused them of supporting Czechoslovakism. Blood libel accusations occurred in Trenčin and in Šalavský Gemer in the 1920s. In the 1930s, the Great Depression affected Jewish-owned businesses and also increased economic antisemitism. Economic underdevelopment and perceptions of discrimination in Czechoslovakia led a plurality of Slovaks to support the conservative, ethnonationalist Slovak People's Party. HSĽS viewed minority groups such as Czechs, Hungarians, Jews, and Romani people as a destructive influence on the Slovak nation, and presented Slovak autonomy as the solution to Slovakia's problems. The party began to emphasize antisemitism during the late 1930s following a wave of Jewish refugees from Austria in 1938 and anti-Jewish laws passed by Hungary, Poland, and Romania.
Slovak independence
The September 1938 Munich Agreement ceded the Sudetenland, the German-speaking region of the Czech lands, to Germany. HSĽS took advantage of the ensuing political chaos to declare Slovakia's autonomy on 6 October. Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest and HSĽS leader, became prime minister of the Slovak autonomous region. Catholicism, the religion of 80 percent of the country's inhabitants, was key to the regime with many of its leaders being bishops, priests, or laymen. Under Tiso's leadership, the Slovak government opened negotiations in Komárno with Hungary regarding their border. The dispute was submitted to arbitration in Vienna by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Hungary was awarded much of southern Slovakia on 2 November, including 40 percent of Slovakia's arable land and 270,000 people who had declared Czechoslovak ethnicity.HSĽS consolidated its power by passing an enabling act, banning opposition parties, shutting down independent newspapers, distributing antisemitic and anti-Czech propaganda, and founding the paramilitary Hlinka Guard. Parties for the German and Hungarian minorities were allowed under HSĽS hegemony, and the German Party formed the Freiwillige Schutzstaffel militia. HSĽS imprisoned thousands of its political opponents, but never carried out a sentence of capital punishment. Un-free elections in December 1938 resulted in a 95-percent vote for HSĽS.
On 14 March 1939, the Slovak State proclaimed its independence with German support and protection. Germany annexed and invaded the Czech rump state the following day, and Hungary seized Carpathian Ruthenia with German acquiescence. In a treaty signed on 23 March, Slovakia renounced much of its foreign policy and military autonomy to Germany in exchange for border guarantees and economic assistance. It was neither fully independent nor a German puppet state, but occupied an intermediate status. In October 1939, Tiso, leader of the conservative-clerical branch of HSĽS, became president; Vojtech Tuka, leader of the party's radical fascist wing, was appointed prime minister. Both wings of the party struggled for Germany's favor. The radical wing of the party was pro-German, while the conservatives favored autonomy from Germany; the radicals relied on the Hlinka Guard and German support, while Tiso was popular among the clergy and the population.
Anti-Jewish measures (1938–1941)
Initial actions
Immediately after it came to power in 1938, the autonomous government began firing Jewish government employees. The Committee for the Solution of the Jewish Question was founded on 23 January 1939 to discuss anti-Jewish legislation. The state-sponsored media demonized Jews as "enemies of the state" and of the Slovak nation. Jewish businesses were robbed, and physical attacks on Jews occurred both spontaneously and at the instigation of the Hlinka Guard and Freiwillige Schutzstaffel. In his first radio address following the establishment of the Slovak State in 1939, Tiso emphasized his desire to "solve the Jewish Question"; anti-Jewish legislation was the only concrete measure that he promised. The persecution of Jews was a key element of the state's domestic policy. Discriminatory measures affected all aspects of life, serving to isolate and dispossess Jews before they were deported.In the days after the announcement of the First Vienna Award, antisemitic rioting broke out in Bratislava; newspapers justified the riots with Jews' alleged support for Hungary during the partition negotiations. Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi official who had been sent to Bratislava, coauthored a plan with Tiso and other HSĽS politicians to deport impoverished and foreign Jews to the territory ceded to Hungary. Meanwhile, Jews with a net worth of over 500,000 Czechoslovak koruna were arrested in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent capital flight. Between 4 and 7 November, 4,000 or 7,600 Jews were deported, in a chaotic, pogrom-like operation in which the Hlinka Guard, the Freiwillige Schutzstaffel, and the German Party participated. The deportees included young children, the elderly, and pregnant women. A few days later, Tiso canceled the operation; most of the Jews were allowed to return home in December. More than 800 were confined to makeshift tent camps at Veľký Kýr, Miloslavov, and Šamorín on the new Slovak–Hungarian border during the winter. The Slovak deportations occurred just after Germany's deportation of thousands of Polish Jews, attracted international criticism, reduced British investment, increased dependence on German capital, and were a rehearsal for the 1942 deportations.
Initially, many Jews believed that the measures taken against them would be temporary. Nevertheless, some attempted to emigrate and take their property with them, particularly after the invasion of Poland. Between December 1938 and February 1939, more than 2.25 million Kčs were transferred illegally to the Czech lands, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom; further amounts were transferred legally. Slovak government officials took advantage of the circumstances to purchase the property of wealthy Jewish emigrants at a significant discount, a precursor to the state-sponsored transfer of Jewish property as part of Aryanization. The Slovak government's attempts to prevent capital flight and foreign countries' unwillingness to admit Jewish refugees hindered would-be emigrants. In 1940, Bratislava became a hub for Aliyah Bet operatives organizing illegal immigration to Mandatory Palestine. By early 1941, further emigration was impossible; even Jews who received valid United States visas were not allowed transit visas through Germany. The total number of Slovak Jewish emigrants has been estimated at 5,000 to 6,000. As 45,000 lived in the areas ceded to Hungary, the 1940 census found that 89,000 Jews lived in the Slovak Republic, 3.4 percent of the population.