In March of 1939, the Nazi’s invaded the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia on the eastern side of then Czechoslovakia. Eventually Reinhard Heydrich was made the Reich Protector of these areas but his authority did not extend into Slovakia.
The day after the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, on March 19, 1939, the Slovaks declared their independence. Slovakia became an ally of Germany under the leadership of Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest. Slovakia soon adopted all of the Nazi anti-Jewish laws and the situation for Slovakia’s 100,000 Jews went from bad to worse.
By October of 1941, some 80,000 Slovaks were working in Germany. Tiso came up with an idea that he should negotiate with the Germans to substitute Slovak Jews for non-Jews who could then return to Slovakia. Shortly after the Wannsee conference in January of 1942 where the Nazis “final solution” was devised, Germany agreed to Tiso’s request as long as Slovakia also paid 500 Reichsmarks for each Jew deported. Thus it came to be that Slovakia has the dubious distinction of being the one country that actually paid the Nazis to take away their Jewish population. The agreement also stipulated that the Jews would never be returned to Slovakia (the Nazis didn’t object to this idea for obvious reasons) and that the Germans would make no claims for the property of the Jews left back in Slovakia, thus leaving their homes and contents to the local Slovaks.
As news of what was happening in the Nazi concentration camps started to spread, the Vatican put pressure on Tiso to stop the deportations. By this time, more than 1/2 of the Slovak’s Jews were already deported. As a result of the Vatican’s pressure, deportations did stop towards the end of 1943 and only began again after the Slovak Uprising.
Encouraged by the Czechoslovak government in exile in the UK, under Edward Benes, a joint command of the Slovak army and air force was supposed to announce the overthrow of Tiso and the creation of a new provisional government on August 29, 1944. However things began to unravel very quickly. At the appointed time, Tiso’s defense minister announced that the Nazi’s were now occupying Slovakia and a signal was sent to all Slovak military units to begin the uprising. Unfortunately, the very next day, the commander of the Slovak air force took the entire air force into Poland where they joined the Soviet fight in Poland, thus leaving the Slovak Army without any air cover and sowing mass confusion in the ranks.
To “help” bring some organization to the uprising the Amerian OSS under a Lt James Holt Green flew in with a number of B-17’s and P-51’s. This added to an already confused coordination effort with Soviet aligned partisans, escaped French POW’s and members of England’s SOE under Major John Sehmer.
Tiso refused to resign his position and instead called in the Nazi SS to fight the uprising. As with the uprising in Warsaw, the Soviets were not really interested in any US or English success in Eastern Europe and Stalin started to refuse the resupply of the forces in Slovakia fighting the SS. As with Poland, as far as Stalin was concerned, only a communist uprising owing its allegiance to him was going to be supported and successful.
At the start of October, the Germans launched a major attack out of Hungary with 30,000+ men. The in-fighting between Stalin, the Czechs, the Slovaks, the OSS and the SOE doomed the uprising when Stalin proclaimed that all his efforts needed to go into fighting his way into Hungary (further south). By October 28, 1944, it was all over. Tiso proclaimed victory for his Nazi aligned government and the captured Slovak and Czech soldiers were all deported to slave labor camps. Almost all would perish.
The OSS, SOE and leaders of the uprising were all eventually captured. Some were immediately shot while a number were sent to be tortured and murdered in Mauthausen.
Thus ending the sad chapter of the Slovak Uprising.
Below is a memorial at Mauthausen that makes reference to the SOE and US (OSS) members murdered there.
