Slovakia is the case of an independent state that paid Germany to take its Jews away. Around 89,000 Slovak Jews lived in the country at the start of the war. Around 70,000 of them were murdered in the Holocaust, a death rate of 80 per cent. The deportations of 1942 were carried out by the Slovak state on Slovak initiative, with the Slovak government paying Germany 500 Reichsmarks per deportee, on the explicit understanding that they would not be returned. Slovakia is the only country known to have paid for its own deportations. The unusual financial arrangement was the work of the Slovak Prime Minister Vojtech Tuka, the Interior Minister Alexander Mach, and the President, the Catholic priest Jozef Tiso.
The Slovak state
Slovakia became nominally independent in March 1939 after Germany dismembered Czechoslovakia. The new state was a German client run by the Hlinka People’s Party, a clerical-fascist party rooted in Slovak Catholic nationalism. The President was Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest who had been a senior figure in the party for years. Tiso was a moderate by the standards of the regime, with the more radical antisemites Tuka and Mach below him in the government. The Slovak state was permitted to maintain its own legal system, its own armed forces, and its own foreign policy, within the constraints of being a German ally. It was a useful client for Germany: a Slavic nation with an antisemitic government, given partial sovereignty as a demonstration that the German New Order in Europe could include nominally independent states.
The Slovak antisemitic legislation
The Slovak Jewish Codex of September 1941 was a comprehensive antisemitic legal framework along Nuremberg lines. It excluded Jews from public life, banned them from most professions, required them to wear a yellow star, and forced them into ghettos and labour camps. The legislation was drafted by Slovak officials and applied by Slovak police, with no German operational involvement. The Hlinka Guard, the Slovak paramilitary force, served as the local enforcement arm.
The 1942 deportations
In March 1942 the Slovak government negotiated with Germany for the deportation of Slovak Jews. The agreement was specific: Slovakia would pay 500 Reichsmarks per deportee for what was termed resettlement and labour service, and Germany would not require the deportees to be returned. The negotiations were led on the Slovak side by Tuka and Mach. The 500-Reichsmark figure was negotiated down from a higher initial German demand. The Slovak government also undertook to confiscate the property of the deportees and to pay Germany an additional handling charge for that.
The deportations began on 25 March 1942 and ran until October 1942. Around 58,000 Slovak Jews were deported, mostly to Auschwitz and to the Operation Reinhard camps. Almost all were murdered. The deportations were halted in October 1942 partly because the Vatican and the Slovak Catholic episcopate had begun to protest, partly because reports were reaching the Slovak public from escapees and from the Polish underground that the deportees were being killed rather than resettled, and partly because the Slovak government had run out of Jews to send. The remaining around 22,000 Slovak Jews were held in Slovak labour camps for the next two years.
The Working Group
An underground Jewish rescue organisation, the Working Group, operated in Bratislava from 1942 onwards under the leadership of Gisi Fleischmann, a Slovak Jewish woman, and Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl. The Working Group attempted to bribe German officials, particularly Dieter Wisliceny, Eichmann’s representative in Slovakia, to halt the deportations. The Slovak Plan, an initial bribery scheme that paid Wisliceny a substantial sum, coincided with the October 1942 halt and may have contributed to it. The Working Group then attempted, in the Europa Plan of 1943, to negotiate a much larger ransom for the lives of all remaining European Jews. The plan failed but it kept the Working Group active and it preserved several thousand Slovak Jews from deportation through 1943.
The Slovak National Uprising and the second deportations
In August 1944 the Slovak National Uprising broke out, an armed insurrection by Slovak partisan forces against the Tiso regime and the German occupation. The uprising was crushed by German forces over the following two months, and the Germans took direct control of the country. The remaining Slovak Jews, around 14,000 people, were now deported to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen by the German occupation forces. Around 12,000 more Slovak Jews were murdered in this final phase. The total Slovak Jewish death toll reached around 70,000.
Around 25,000 Slovak Jews survived
The survivors had escaped to Hungary, hidden with Slovak farmers, joined the partisans during the 1944 uprising, or hidden in Bratislava itself. Slovak Catholic and Lutheran communities sheltered Jews in numbers; Slovak villagers sheltered them in others. The Slovak Jewish post-war community was reduced to around 30,000 by the end of the 1940s as survivors emigrated. Today the community is small, around 3,000 people.
The post-war record
Tiso was tried by the post-war Czechoslovak state and hanged in 1947. Tuka was tried and hanged the same year. Mach received a thirty-year sentence and was eventually released. The post-war Czechoslovak state, like other communist Eastern European states, treated the Holocaust as a German crime and underplayed the Slovak role. Independent Slovakia since 1993 has done so unevenly. The country has a Holocaust memorial in Bratislava and has formally acknowledged the wartime deportations, but a small Slovak nationalist current still rehabilitates Tiso as a Slovak patriot rather than as the head of a regime that paid Germany to take its Jews.
Why the Slovak record matters
Slovakia is the case that disposes of any defence based on German coercion. The deportations of 1942 were proposed by the Slovak government, paid for by the Slovak government, organised by Slovak police, and carried out on Slovak initiative. Germany received and killed the deportees, but the project was Slovak. The Catholic government of an officially Catholic country, with bishops in the cabinet, paid Germany 500 Reichsmarks per Jew to take their citizens away. That is the record.
Sources
- Yeshayahu Jelinek, The Parish Republic: Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party 1939-1945, East European Quarterly, 1976
- Livia Rothkirchen, The Destruction of Slovak Jewry, Yad Vashem, 1961
- James Mace Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia, Cornell University Press, 2013
- USHMM: Slovakia