The capture of Bratislava

On the evening of 4 April 1945 units of the Soviet 7th Guards Army, supported by ships of the Danube Flotilla, drove the last German detachments out of Bratislava. So ended the life of the capital of the Slovak Republic – a state created six years earlier by Hitler’s grace, which remained his ally to the end. President Jozef Tiso and his ministers, however, had not waited in the city for the Red Army to arrive. The frequently encountered version according to which the “remaining members” of the government fled to Austria with the fall of Bratislava needs to be made more precise: the authorities of the Slovak State had left the capital as early as 31 March, and on 4 April they were on their way to the Benedictine abbey at Kremsmünster in Upper Austria.

A state at the Reich’s mercy

The Slovak Republic was proclaimed on 14 March 1939, on the eve of the German entry into Prague. A few days later its government signed a Treaty of Protection with Germany, handing the Reich control over the new state’s foreign policy and army. At its head stood a priest, Jozef Tiso, from October 1939 its president, and the ruling Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party was backed by the paramilitary Hlinka Guard. Slovakia took part in the attack on Poland in September 1939, and in June 1941 it declared war on the Soviet Union and sent its divisions east.

Bratislava, with some 140,000 inhabitants at the time, was the capital of this state, though it no longer held all of its own former territory. After the Munich Agreement Germany annexed Petržalka (German: Engerau), on the right bank of the Danube, and Devín, and in November 1938 the First Vienna Award gave the southern strips of Slovakia to Hungary. The border with the Reich thus ran right beneath the windows of the government buildings.

The darkest chapter of Tiso’s state was the deportation of the Jews. Between March and October 1942 the Slovak authorities, paying the Germans 500 Reichsmarks for each person, handed over some 58,000 Jews (PL), who were deported to Auschwitz and the Lublin region; a few hundred of them survived. After the suppression of the 1944 uprising the Germans deported some 13,000 more people, mainly through the transit camp in the small town of Sereď. Bratislava’s Jewish community, one of the oldest in the region, practically ceased to exist.

From the uprising to the offensive

The turning point was the Slovak National Uprising, which broke out in central Slovakia on 29 August 1944. After its collapse in October the country came under de facto German occupation: SS and Hlinka Guard units carried out reprisals, and Tiso, who thanked the German soldiers for crushing the uprising, remained president increasingly in name only. In the autumn of 1944 Soviet and Czechoslovak troops entered from the east, through the Carpathian passes, and by the spring of 1945 they had taken eastern Slovakia.

At the western end of the country, on the Danube, the front came to a halt in the winter of 1944/1945 on the river Hron, where in February the Germans eliminated a Soviet bridgehead. After the fall of Budapest the Stavka ordered Marshal Rodion Malinovsky’s 2nd Ukrainian Front to advance on Bratislava and Brno, in parallel with the 3rd Ukrainian Front’s offensive on Vienna. The Bratislava–Brno offensive began on the night of 24/25 March 1945. Forward battalions of General Mikhail Shumilov’s 7th Guards Army and of the 53rd Army crossed the Hron, and General Issa Pliyev’s cavalry-mechanised group poured into the breach. Along the Danube operated Rear Admiral Georgy Kholostyakov’s Danube Flotilla, which put landing parties ashore behind the German defences – according to Slovak and Russian accounts, among them the 83rd Naval Infantry Brigade. On 29 March Nové Zámky fell, and the Soviet troops, despite the thaw and swollen rivers, forced the Váh and set off across the Danubian Lowland towards the capital. Further north, in the mountains, the 40th Army was advancing, with Romanian troops at its side.

The government’s flight

When the front approached Trnava and the capital was threatened with encirclement, the German envoy in Bratislava, Hanns Ludin, advised the Slovak authorities to leave. According to Slovak historians, the president, the government of Prime Minister Štefan Tiso (a relative of the president) and the leading figures of the People’s Party left Bratislava on 31 March 1945. A column of cars crossed Austria and by 5 April at the latest reached the abbey at Kremsmünster, where the monks gave the fugitives shelter. Some of those connected with the regime – officials, guardsmen, families – fled on their own, westwards towards Germany. The population remained in the city and had to survive the passage of the front.

Stripped of power, the state could not revive itself in exile. On 8 May 1945, the day of Germany’s surrender, Prime Minister Štefan Tiso and three ministers handed representatives of the US Army at Kremsmünster a memorandum in which the government placed itself under the army’s protection – according to some Slovak authors, an act of capitulation by a state that de facto no longer existed. The president himself hid in a Capuchin monastery at Altötting in Bavaria, where the Americans arrested him in June 1945. Handed over to Czechoslovakia, he was tried before the National Court in Bratislava, sentenced to death and hanged on 18 April 1947.

The fighting for the city

On 2 April units of the 7th Guards Army took the airfield at Vajnory on the north-eastern edge of the city; this day is taken as the start of the fighting for Bratislava. The Germans had prepared the capital for defence – Russian accounts mention reinforced-concrete firing points, anti-tank ditches, minefields and barricades in the streets, especially in the eastern suburbs. According to Russian historiography, Malinovsky, wishing to spare the city, decided to bypass it from the north-west, but could not avoid street fighting. On the night of 2/3 April the Germans blew up the main bridges over the Danube.

For two days the 25th Guards Rifle Corps and the 23rd Rifle Corps, supported by the 27th Tank Brigade and the guns of the Danube Flotilla, drove the defenders out of one district after another. By the evening of 4 April the city on the left bank of the Danube was in Soviet hands; Moscow marked its capture with artillery salutes. Petržalka on the other side of the river, formally still part of the Reich, was taken on 4–5 April by units of the 46th Army advancing along the right bank of the Danube as part of the Vienna offensive. It soon returned to Czechoslovakia.

The losses of both sides in the fighting for Bratislava itself are hard to separate from the toll of the whole operation, in which, according to Slovak accounts, nearly 17,000 Soviet soldiers were killed. Those who fell in the fighting for Bratislava and its surroundings were later buried on a hill above the city; in 1957–1960 the Slavín memorial and war cemetery was built there, according to the memorial’s own figures the resting place of 6,845 soldiers. As in other cities it took, the Red Army’s entry was accompanied by looting and the rape of women; its scale cannot be established, and for decades of communist rule the subject was passed over in silence.

The rebirth of Czechoslovakia

The fall of Bratislava coincided with the birth of new Czechoslovak authorities. President Edvard Beneš, who since 1940 had led the government-in-exile from London, travelled via Moscow to liberated Košice. There, on 4 April, the day Bratislava was taken, he appointed a National Front government of Czechs and Slovaks headed by Zdeněk Fierlinger, and the next day its Košice Programme, agreed beforehand in Moscow, was announced. The programme recognised the Slovaks as a separate nation and the Slovak National Council, which had emerged during the uprising, as their representative body; it promised the punishment of collaborators, the nationalisation of part of industry and a close alliance with the Soviet Union. It also stripped most Germans and Hungarians of their citizenship, paving the way for the post-war expulsions. The communists, who took key ministries in the government, thereby gained a strong starting position.

The Slovak National Council soon moved to Bratislava, which for a few weeks also became the seat of part of the state authorities; on 10 May the government left for liberated Prague. Thus the six-year episode of a Slovakia that was independent in name but in reality subordinate to Hitler came to an end. In the restored republic the reckoning with the leaders of Tiso’s state began, and the memory of it – and of the Slovak National Uprising – divided Slovak society for decades.

Its place in the war

The capture of Bratislava was one of many Red Army successes on the southern flank of the Eastern Front in the spring of 1945. A few days earlier troops of the 3rd Ukrainian Front had entered Austria, and on 2 April the battle for Vienna began. Taking the city and the Danube crossings covered the northern flank of the advance on the Austrian capital and opened the way west. As early as 5 April units of the 7th Guards Army forced the border river Morava, and in Moravia heavy fighting for Lanžhot, Hodonín and Brno continued for several more weeks. The Bratislava–Brno offensive ended only on 5 May, on the eve of the last offensive of the war in Europe – the Prague offensive.

For the Slovaks, 4 April 1945 became a watershed: the end of a state created under German protection and the beginning of the rebuilding of a common republic with the Czechs. As throughout Central Europe, however, liberation from the Third Reich also meant entry into the Soviet sphere of influence, which became fully apparent after the communist coup in Prague in February 1948.