Holocaust in Slovakia

The Holocaust in Slovakia was the systematic dispossession, deportation, and murder of Jews in the Slovak State, 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. State propaganda 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 was 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 (Unterlander Jews) influenced by Hasidism. Due to the schism in Hungarian Jewry, communities split in the mid-nineteenth century into Orthodox (the majority), 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" and "the most powerful prop to the ungarianruling classes", in the words of historian Thomas Lorman. 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 (economic antisemitism), and national antisemitism: Jews were strongly associated with the Hungarian state and accused of sympathizing with Hungarian at the expense of Slovak ambitions.

After World War I, Slovakia became part of the new country of Czechoslovakia. Jews lived in 227 communities (in 1918) and their population was estimated at 135,918 (in 1921). Anti-Jewish riots broke out in the aftermath of the declaration of independence (1918–1920), 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 businessmen and also increased economic antisemitism. Economic underdevelopment and perceptions of discrimination in Czechoslovakia led a plurality (about one-third) of Slovaks to support the conservative, ethnonationalist Slovak People's Party ( sk, Hlinkova slovenská ľudová strana: HSĽS). 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 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 Slovakia was established as a state in 1938, the government began firing its Jewish 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 . 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

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