Slovak Republic (1939–1945)

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 14th of March 1939, the Slovak parliament gathered in Bratislava and voted unanimously to break away from Czechoslovakia. The vote came under extraordinary pressure. Franz Karmasin, leader of the German minority in Slovakia, had just warned the assembled deputies that any delay would see their country carved up between Hungary and Germany. Within hours, a new state existed. It was the first formally independent Slovak state in history.

  The man who made it happen was Monsignor Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest and politician who had traveled to Berlin the day before to meet Adolf Hitler personally. Hitler had made the stakes plain: proclaim independence, or watch Slovakia fall to its neighbors. Tiso, unwilling to decide alone, returned home and let parliament make the call for him.

  What followed over the next six years raises questions that Slovakia has never fully settled. How did a state born under German coercion become one of the few countries to actively pay for the deportation of its own Jewish citizens? What drove an armed uprising against the very government that had presided over independence? And why, decades after the war ended, does the date of March 14th still divide Slovak society?

• 2. A State Under Pressure

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  Hitler's meeting with Tiso on the 13th of March 1939 was not an invitation. It was a warning. During that Berlin meeting, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop passed Tiso a report claiming that Hungarian troops were massing at the Slovak border. The message was clear: declare independence now, or lose Slovakia to partition.

  The path to that meeting had been laid by the Munich Agreement, which had already stripped Slovakia of its southern territories under the First Vienna Award. When Tiso brought Hitler's ultimatum to the Slovak Diet the next day, some deputies were openly skeptical. A Slovak state, they worried, would be too small and burdened by a large Hungarian minority. The debate ended when Karmasin delivered his warning about partition, and all doubts dissolved into a unanimous vote.

  The new state did not wait long before formalizing its dependence on Berlin. On the 23rd of March 1939, just nine days after independence, Slovakia signed the so-called protection treaty, which partially subordinated its foreign policy, military affairs, and economic decisions to Germany. In August of that year, the German Wehrmacht established a "Protective Zone" in western Slovakia. By November 1940, Slovak leaders had signed the Tripartite Pact, formally joining the Axis powers.

• 3. The One-Party State

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  Hlinka's Slovak People's Party governed the republic with no effective opposition. Two smaller parties, the Hungarian National Party and the German Party, technically operated, but they formed a coalition with the dominant party and functioned as appendages of it rather than rivals. Slovakia was, in practical terms, a one-party state.

  The constitution of 1939 placed Jozef Tiso at the head of the state as president from the 26th of October 1939 until the collapse of the republic in 1945. An assembly elected for five years served as the highest legislative body, though no general elections were actually held. The government ran through eight ministries.

  Historians have characterized Tiso's government as clerical fascism. The state adopted many elements of Nazism under German pressure. It pushed women out of public life and restricted access to birth control while increasing criminal penalties for abortion. Of the 2.6 million people living within the republic's 1939 borders, 85 percent had declared Slovak nationality on the 1938 census, with Catholics making up 75 percent of the population. Half of those people worked in agriculture.

  The Hlinka Guard was the regime's paramilitary arm. Founded in 1938 on the Nazi model, it wore black uniforms and used the raised-arm salute, with the official greeting "Na stráž!" meaning "On guard!" A 1941 reshuffling drove out many middle-class members, leaving the organization dominated by peasants, unskilled laborers, and what sources describe as "various doubtful elements." The most radical faction within it was a small group called Náš Boj, or "Our Struggle," which operated directly under SS auspices.

• 4. The Holocaust in Slovakia

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  The deportations from Slovakia began on the 25th of March 1942. The deal that made them possible had been negotiated the previous October, when Slovak officials proposed trading their Jewish population in exchange for not having to send Slovak workers to Germany. After the Wannsee Conference, Germany accepted, and the Slovak Republic agreed to pay 500 Reichsmark for every Jew deported, receiving in return Germany's promise that the deportees would never come back.

  The original scope was "20,000 young, strong Jews," but Slovak authorities quickly agreed to deport the entire Jewish population. The Hlinka Guard rounded up families with only four hours' warning. Beatings were routine; invasive searches for hidden valuables were standard. Of the 89,000 Jews still living in Slovakia after the loss of southern territory to Hungary, roughly 58,000 had been deported to Auschwitz by the time the deportations halted on the 20th of October 1942.

  The halt came through an unlikely coalition. Gisi Fleischmann and Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl organized a group of Jewish citizens who built relationships with Vatican officials and government insiders, and used a combination of bribery and negotiation to stop the process. The pause lasted nearly two years.

  In August 1942, with most Slovak Jews already sent to occupied Poland and evidence accumulating that they were being murdered, Tiso delivered a speech in Holič calling on Slovaks to "cast off your parasite." Hitler commented privately on the 30th of August: "It is interesting how this little Catholic priest Tiso is sending us the Jews!" Vatican undersecretary Domenico Tardini noted with frustration that the Holy See seemed unable to discipline one of its own priests.

  Deportations resumed on the 30th of September 1944 under full German occupation. Another 13,500 Jews were deported during this phase, and 5,000 more were imprisoned. A 2006 estimate calculated that approximately 105,000 Slovak Jews, representing 77 percent of their pre-war population, died during the war.

• 5. The Uprising and Its Aftermath

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  On the 29th of August 1944, a resistance movement launched from Banská Bystrica with the goal of toppling Tiso's government and resisting the German troops who had moved into Slovak territory. The Slovak National Uprising drew support from Democratic Party members, social democrats, and communists. Some Slovak military units joined the resistance; others fought alongside the Germans to suppress it.

  German forces crushed the main uprising, but guerrilla resistance continued in the mountains. The reprisals were systematic. Einsatzgruppe H and the Hlinka Guard Emergency Divisions executed Slovaks suspected of aiding the rebels and Jews who had survived earlier deportations. Ninety-three villages were destroyed on suspicion of collaboration. Ostrý Grúň and Kľak were burned to the ground on the 21st of January 1945, their inhabitants murdered. Kalište suffered the same fate on the 18th of March 1945. The largest single massacres occurred at Kremnička, where 747 people, mostly Jews and Roma, were killed, and at Nemecká, where 900 people died. Authorities later found 211 mass graves. A subsequent death toll estimate reached 5,304.

  American B-24 bombers from the Fifteenth Air Force had already struck Bratislava on the 16th of June 1944, hitting the Apollo oil refinery in a raid that killed 181 people across four waves involving 158 planes. The city absorbed repeated Allied bombardment during the final phase of the war.

• 6. Collapse and Reckoning

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  The First Slovak Republic ended twice. De facto, it ceased to exist on the 4th of April 1945, when the Soviet Red Army's 2nd Ukrainian Front captured Bratislava during the Bratislava-Brno offensive. De jure, the government-in-exile surrendered to General Walton Walker of the XX Corps of the 3rd US Army on the 8th of May 1945, in the Austrian town of Kremsmünster.

  The trials that followed were swift. Vojtech Tuka, who had served as prime minister from October 1939 to September 1944, suffered a stroke near the end of the war and fled to Austria in a wheelchair, accompanied by his wife and medical staff. He was arrested by Allied forces, handed over to Czechoslovakia, and hanged on the 20th of August 1946.

  Tiso's case drew more attention. His prosecutor recommended clemency, and Tiso appealed directly to President Edvard Beneš expecting a reprieve. No reprieve came. Wearing his clerical outfit, Tiso was hanged in Bratislava on the 18th of April 1947. The Czechoslovak government buried him in secret to prevent his grave from becoming a site of veneration, but far-right supporters eventually located the burial site in the St Martin cemetery in Bratislava. A DNA test conducted in April 2008 confirmed the identification, after which Tiso's remains were exhumed and reinterred at St Emmeram's Cathedral in Nitra, in accordance with canon law.

  A 1965 Czechoslovak film, The Shop on Main Street, depicted the Aryanization program of the wartime Slovak Republic and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film that year. Actress Ida Kamińska received a nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role the following year.

• 7. A Contested Memory

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  January 1st is the official independence day of the modern Slovak Republic, marking the Velvet Divorce of 1993. But some nationalist groups insist on March 14th as an alternative date of independence, creating a persistent division in Slovak public life. The Christian Democratic Movement split over the question of March 14th commemorations in the early 1990s.

  The People's Party Our Slovakia, a far-right party, has promoted Tiso as a "martyr" who "sacrificed his life for his belief and nation." In October 2008, admirers erected a memorial grave in the Martin cemetery. It has functioned since as a gathering point for far-right groups. This framing positions Tiso as an innocent victim of communist persecution, erasing his active role in the deportation of tens of thousands of Slovak Jews.

  In 2018, Slovak public broadcaster RTVS included Tiso among the candidates in a television poll called The Greatest Slovak, a local spin-off of the British series 100 Greatest Britons. Following public criticism, RTVS removed Tiso from the list. The modern Slovak Republic does not consider itself the legal successor of the wartime state; it traces its legal lineage through the Czechoslovak Federal Republic instead. The Slovak Liberation Committee, which advocated in the 1950s for restoring the wartime republic and renewing war against the Soviet Union, formally dissolved after the creation of the modern state declared Tiso's wartime authorizations obsolete.