March 1939 Slovakia was declared an independent state, with Father Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest, as Prime Minister, and with the Hlinka People's party, a right-wing Catholic nationalist group, as the only legal party. Slovakia had to adhere to the German-Italian-Japanese axis, to provide rail and road access for the Germans to the east, and after the German attack on Russia, also to provide fighting troops. In October 1939 Tiso was elected President; pro-Nazi Voytech Tuka became Prime Minister; Sano Mach, head of the Hlinka Guard, became Minister of the Interior, and Ferdinand Durcansky, Foreign Minister.
For the first two years of the war, Slovakia enjoyed significant benefits from its new status, such as increased trade and help in industrial development, but after the German defeat at Stalingrad and the turning of the tide of the war, Slovak sentiment among both government and people became noticably less pro-German. At the beginning of 1944, when the Soviet army stood at the frontiers of Ruthenia, young Slovaks began to be more responsive to the appeals for resistance issued by the Czech government-in-exile. Soldiers in the Slovak army began to desert to join resistance groups in the mountains. Popular opposition grew. Open fighting broke out in August 1944. Tiso then proclaimed martial law and total mobilization. The Slovak uprising gave the Germans the pretext they needed to occupy the country. Serious fighting between the Slovak partisans and the Germans continued through October, when the Germans succeeded in crushing the resistance. The Russian advance through Slovakia began in January 1945, but it was not before April 1945 that Slovakia was liberated from German occupation.
In 1938 about 135,000 Jews lived in Slovakia, of whom 40,000 lived in the territory ceded to Hungary (Ruthenia and Subcarpathia). About 5,000 emigrated voluntarily before the war, leaving about 90,000 Jews, 3 percent of the population. Slovakia was poorer and far less industrialized than the historic Czech crown provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, and so were its Jews. They were engaged mostly in retail trade and handicrafts, servicing the peasantry.
The small segment of well-to-do Jews spoke Hungarian and were assimilated, maintaining religious congregations of a somewhat lukewarm character. Most other Jews were highly traditional, among whom Hasidic rebbes enjoyed huge followings.
During the life of the Czechoslovak Republic, Jews enjoyed full civic and religious rights, even though anti-Semitism, particularly among the predominant population, was widespread.
In April 1939 the new Slovak state began to enact anti-Jewish legislation, defining the status of a Jew along religious rather than racial lines (Slovakia was a Catholic country, ruled by a priest and Catholic party). In rapid succession came a series of decrees excluding and restricting Jews in various professions and occupations. Anti-Semitic violence on the part of the Hlinka Guard accompanied the administrative anti-Semitism.
In August 1940 SS-Haupsturmfuhrer Dieter Wisliceny, Eichmann's representative from the Reich Security Main Office, arrive in Bratislava as an adviser on Jewish affairs. The Hlinka Guard and the Freiwillige Schutzstaffel (Slovak volunteers in the SS) were reorganized on the model of the SS and given the responsibility of carrying out anti-Jewish measures.
On September 9, 1941, the Slovak government promulgated a major body of ant-Jewish legislation, containing 270 articles, redefining the Jews as a racial group, requiring them to wear the identifying yellow Star of David, making them liable to force labor, and evicting them from specified towns and districts.
Plans for deportation began late in 1941; in March 1942 five assembly points for deportees were set up, and despite intensive efforts on the part of Jewish communal leaders to halt them, deportations continued unabated from March through August 1942. By then, only 25,000 Jews remained in Slovakia. Three more transports left in September and October. Some 58,000 Jews, 75 percent of Slovak Jews, had been deported, mostly to Auchwitz.
Further deportations were put off, partly through the intervention of the Catholic church and partly through a strategy of bribery and promises of financial profit that the Jewish leaders used in negotiations with Slovaks and with Wisliceny himself.
After the Slovak national uprising in 1944, the SS took 19,000 prisoners, of whom 5,000 were Jews. Under the subsequent German occupation, 13,500 more Jews were deported. No more than 5,000 Slovakian Jews remained in the country in hiding or on Aryan papers. About 10,000 of those deported in 1944 survived and returned to Slovakia.
*TEXT: Lucy S. Davidowicz. The War Against The Jews, 1933-1945.
