The German–Slovak Treaty of Protection

On 23 March 1939 in Berlin the Reich Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop put his signature to the Treaty on the Protective Relationship between the German Reich and the Slovak State (Vertrag über das Schutzverhältnis, commonly the Schutzvertrag). The Slovak signatories – Prime Minister Jozef Tiso, Deputy Prime Minister Vojtech Tuka and Foreign Minister Ferdinand Ďurčanský – had already signed it in Vienna, which is why the document bears two dates: “Vienna, 18 March 1939. Berlin, 23 March 1939”. Concluded for 25 years and in force from the moment of signature, the treaty was the first international agreement of the Slovak State, which had been proclaimed nine days earlier. In exchange for a German guarantee of its independence and borders, Slovakia gave the Reich a strip of its territory in the west and undertook to conduct its military and foreign policy “in close agreement” with Germany.

The document is sometimes called the “Schutzzonenvertrag”, and some summaries state that it created a German protective zone in Slovakia. This simplification conflates two acts. The treaty of 23 March did grant the Wehrmacht a strip of land along Slovakia’s western border, but a separate agreement on this “protective zone” (Schutzzone), defining its status in detail, was not concluded until August 1939.

From telegram to treaty

The proclamation of the Slovak State on 14 March 1939 took place at Berlin’s dictation: Adolf Hitler had threatened Tiso that if the Slovaks did not declare independence immediately, he would leave them to Hungary. On 15 March Tiso sent Hitler a telegram, drafted while he was still in Berlin, asking for the new state to be taken under the Reich’s protection. On the same day Germany occupied Bohemia and Moravia, and Hungary marched into Carpatho-Ukraine. On 16 March, the day the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was proclaimed, Hitler replied to Tiso that the Reich was assuming the protection of the Slovak State.

The protection had a military dimension from the outset. In the days after 15 March Wehrmacht units entered western Slovakia, especially the valley of the Váh, carried off the Czechoslovak army equipment they found there and took control of the local arms factories. The government in Bratislava hoped that a formal treaty would regulate this presence and, above all, protect Slovakia against Hungary, which made no secret of wanting more than Carpatho-Ukraine.

The talks were held in Vienna, where Hitler went after his stay in Prague. The Germans presented a ready-made text. According to Slovak studies, Tuka and Ďurčanský signed it on 18 March, Tiso a day later, and Ribbentrop on 23 March in Berlin, which is regarded as the date on which the treaty was concluded. A confidential protocol on economic and financial cooperation was signed at the same time.

The terms of the treaty

The treaty was short. Its preamble stated that the Slovak State had “placed itself under the protection of the German Reich” and that both sides wished to regulate the consequences.

• Article 1: the German Reich assumes the protection of the political independence of the Slovak State and the integrity of its territory.
• Article 2: to exercise this protection, the German armed forces have the right at any time to build military installations and garrison them in whatever strength they consider necessary, in a zone bounded to the west by the Slovak border and to the east by the eastern edges of the Little Carpathians, the White Carpathians and the Javorníky. The Slovak government was to make the necessary land available to the Wehrmacht and ensure duty-free supplies for the troops and construction work. In this zone military sovereignty was exercised by the Wehrmacht, and Germans employed on the construction work were subject to German courts.
• Article 3: the Slovak government will organise its armed forces “in close agreement” with the German armed forces.
• Article 4: in keeping with the agreed protective relationship, the Slovak government will conduct its foreign policy “in close agreement” with the German government.
• Article 5: the treaty enters into force upon signature and is valid for 25 years; before this period expires the parties will agree on its extension.

The secret economic protocol subordinated Slovakia’s economy to the interests of the Reich: agriculture, industry and the construction of roads and railways were to be planned in consultation with Germany, and the Reich gained priority in the extraction of Slovak mineral resources.

The meaning of “protection”

Formally, Slovakia remained an independent state with its own government, parliament, currency and army, and in domestic policy it did retain a certain freedom. But the strip of western Slovakia from around Bratislava to the Javorníky became an area where the Wehrmacht had the final say, and the two fields that normally determine sovereignty – the armed forces and foreign policy – were subordinated to Berlin. The German guarantee also had limits that the Slovaks had not foreseen. On the very day Ribbentrop signed the treaty, Hungary attacked eastern Slovakia from Carpatho-Ukraine. The Reich did not come to the aid of its new ward: Berlin did not intervene, and after a few days of fighting Slovakia had to cede a strip of land in the east to Hungary. For Hitler, Slovakia was above all a forward base against Poland and a card to play in his dealings with Budapest.

23 March was altogether a day of German expansion in the east. On that day Hitler arrived aboard the pocket battleship Deutschland in Klaipėda, which Lithuania had surrendered to the Reich after Ribbentrop’s ultimatum, and spoke from the balcony of the municipal theatre as Germany took Klaipėda. Within a week the Reich had seized Bohemia, Moravia and Klaipėda and taken Slovakia under its “care”.

Poland and the treaty

Warsaw read the treaty as a threat. The Foreign Minister, Józef Beck, had welcomed Slovak independence, counting on a Catholic state wary of Prague and closer to Poland than to Germany; Poland was one of the first countries to recognise the new state. A few days later it turned out that the Wehrmacht had the right to station troops in Slovakia and that the Slovak army was to act in agreement with the German one. Poland was now surrounded by the Reich from the west, from the north – from East Prussia – and from the south, along the whole Carpathian frontier, which had ceased to be safe.

The Slovak question became entangled with Germany’s demands on Poland. On 21 March Ribbentrop put to Ambassador Józef Lipski the demand for Danzig and an extraterritorial road across Pomerania. According to Lipski’s account, when the ambassador remarked that the German protection of Slovakia had been received in Poland as a blow, Ribbentrop hinted that Slovakia, too, could be discussed if Poland accepted the German proposals. The Polish government rejected them, and the German presence to the south became one of the arguments that led London to give Poland a guarantee so quickly.

What followed

The protective zone under Article 2 received a separate statute in August 1939. The negotiations were difficult, as the Slovaks argued with the Germans over the Czechoslovak army’s weapons left in Slovakia and the size of their own army. The agreement on the zone was signed only on the eve of the war; sources give the date as either 12 or 28 August. In the last days of August units of the German Fourteenth Army were deployed in Slovakia, and the Slovaks made roads, airfields and depots available to them. On 1 September 1939 German divisions advanced on Poland from Slovak territory, and alongside them went the Slovak army under the Minister of Defence, General Ferdinand Čatloš, which entered Podhale, the Nowy Sącz region and the Bieszczady. In practice Article 3 of the treaty proved to be an obligation to take part in the war. As a reward, Germany gave Slovakia the areas of Spiš and Orava that had passed to Poland between 1920 and 1938.

Further agreements tightened the dependence. On 30 January 1940 a war economy treaty (Wehrwirtschaftsvertrag) was signed; in July 1940 in Salzburg Hitler forced changes in the Slovak government and the removal of the overly independent Ďurčanský, and German advisers were installed in the ministries in Bratislava. The Wehrmacht kept the protective zone until the end of the war, building fortifications and bases there, and after the outbreak of the Slovak National Uprising in August 1944 it occupied the whole of Slovakia. The treaty concluded for 25 years lasted six. Its significance on the road to war lay in the fact that in the spring of 1939 Hitler gained, without firing a shot, a new forward base against Poland, and the Carpathian frontier, regarded in Warsaw as quiet for two decades, became within a week a border with a German forward zone.