Germany hands Polish land to Slovakia

In November 1939 the Third Reich handed Slovakia the disputed Polish–Slovak borderland: the Polish part of Spiš (PL) and Orava, which Poland had received in 1920–1924, together with the strips of land in Spiš, Orava and Kysuce that it had occupied in the autumn of 1938 after the Munich Agreement. According to the most commonly cited figures, the transfer covered about 770 square kilometres and several dozen villages, inhabited mainly by highlanders who spoke Polish dialects. It was a reward for the government in Bratislava, because in September Slovakia, as Hitler’s first ally, had taken part in the attack on Poland.

Some chronologies record under 26 November that Germany and Slovakia signed a border treaty. Documents of the German Foreign Ministry and the work of Slovak historians show that the agreement was concluded in Berlin on 21 November 1939. It was signed on the German side by the Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and on the Slovak side by the envoy in Berlin, Matúš Černák. The formal incorporation of the territory into the Slovak state followed a month later, by a constitutional act passed by the parliament in Bratislava on 22 December 1939.

Twenty years of dispute

The border between Poland and Czechoslovakia in the Tatras and the Beskids was drawn after the First World War in an atmosphere of mutual distrust. Both sides laid claim to northern Spiš and upper Orava, home to a highland population whose national identity was still uncertain and who mostly spoke Polish dialects. The promised plebiscite never took place. In July 1920, as the Red Army marched on Warsaw, the Polish government agreed at the Spa Conference to submit the matter to the arbitration of the Great Powers. On 28 July 1920 the Conference of Ambassadors awarded Poland 13 villages in Spiš – about 195 square kilometres with just under 9,000 inhabitants – and 12 villages in Orava, along with part of Lipnica. The dispute over Javorina in the Tatras was settled by the Council of the League of Nations in March 1924 in Czechoslovakia’s favour. In the same year Poland gave up Suchá Hora and Hladovka in Orava in exchange for the rest of Lipnica. In Poland this was regarded as a defeat, while among Slovaks the conviction took root that Prague had given Slovak land away to the Poles.

In the autumn of 1938, as Czechoslovakia, after Munich, was ceding the Sudetenland to Germany and Zaolzie to Poland, the government in Warsaw, whose foreign policy was directed by Józef Beck, also put forward demands to Slovakia, then an autonomous part of Czecho-Slovakia. They concerned small areas that were nonetheless symbolic for the Slovaks: Javorina, Lesnica in the Pieniny, Suchá Hora and Hladovka, and parts of communes around Čadca and Skalité. Prague accepted them on 1 November. At the end of November Polish troops entered the disputed areas – not without exchanges of fire near Čadca and Javorina – and on 1 December 1938 a protocol on the new border was signed in Zakopane. According to the Slovak historian Igor Baka, Poland gained 226 square kilometres with 4,280 inhabitants. Contemporary Slovak statistics gave 221 square kilometres and almost 10,000 people, probably counting whole communes rather than only the parts that were annexed. In Slovakia this was seen as a betrayal by a state that had until then presented itself as a friend of the Slovaks, at the very moment when Slovakia was losing its south to Hungary in the First Vienna Award. Anti-Polish feeling persisted into 1939, and the government of the priest Jozef Tiso exploited it to justify taking part in the war against Poland.

September and the negotiations with Berlin

On 1 September 1939 the Slovak field army “Bernolák” under General Ferdinand Čatloš crossed the border together with the German 14th Army. On the very first day Slovak units took Javorina, and over the following days they entered Spiš, Orava and Podhale. Propaganda in Bratislava proclaimed that Javorina was “ours again”. In the occupied areas the Slovak authorities immediately began setting up gendarmerie posts and branches of the People’s Party and the Hlinka Guard, but formally the territory was under German military command.

Berlin was in no hurry to decide. It had earlier promised the Slovaks the return of the land lost in 1938, but did not wish to commit itself over the territory Poland had held since 1920. German diplomats feared that this would complicate future peace talks with Poland, and Hungary protested, suspecting that Germany had also promised the Slovaks a revision of the Hungarian border. The State Secretary, Ernst von Weizsäcker, argued to Ribbentrop, however, that the Slovaks, disappointed by the delay, might lose their enthusiasm for cooperation. On 10 September Ribbentrop agreed that Slovakia could count on “purely Slovak” territory, and a few days later the Germans allowed Slovak officials to take over the administration of the areas Poland had held since 1920. Černák went on pressing the matter in Berlin for several more weeks.

After the German–Soviet treaty of 28 September, the Polish state, in the eyes of the occupiers, had ceased to exist, and Germany considered itself free to dispose of its territory. According to a note by Walther Hewel, Ribbentrop’s liaison officer to Hitler, on 17 October Hitler agreed to give the Slovaks all the disputed areas they had asked for, and was even prepared to add Zakopane. Hewel observed that the Slovaks probably did not want it, since only Poles lived there, and Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who was dealing with Slovak affairs, wrote in November that Tiso and the Prime Minister, Vojtech Tuka, wanted only the land lost between 1920 and 1938, and that the areas around Zakopane and Krynica could not possibly be regarded as Slovak. At his trial after the war Tiso claimed that the Germans had offered him more and that he had refused because Slovakia wished to keep to the historic border. On 21 October Černák, before being received by Hitler, was officially informed of the Reich’s consent. The areas Slovakia did not receive, including Podhale with Zakopane and the Nowy Sącz region with Krynica, became part of the General Government.

The agreement signed in Berlin on 21 November 1939 granted Slovakia all the land Poland had received in 1920, 1924 and 1938, including its part of Spiš with Niedzica, Łapsze and Jurgów, and upper Orava with Jabłonka and Lipnica. In Spiš and Orava the Slovak border thus returned roughly to the line of the old Hungarian border from before 1918.

Incorporation and Slovakisation

On 22 December 1939 the parliament of the Slovak Republic passed a constitutional act on the incorporation of the “territory taken by former Poland in 1920, 1924 and 1938”. The rapporteur called it “the righting of a wrong” and gave thanks to Providence, the President, the army, the Hlinka Guard and “the friendly German nation” and its leader. One deputy assured the house that the act was being accomplished “without doing the slightest wrong to any other nation or state”. Nobody in the parliament spoke against it.

Reality in the annexed territory differed from the picture painted by propaganda. The first weeks were chaotic; supplies broke down, and the army, which was itself not receiving food, requisitioned it from a starving population. Many inhabitants of villages that had belonged to Poland for twenty years regarded Poland as their homeland. A Slovak police report from 1940 admitted that the population did not believe the new border would last, was counting on the rebirth of Poland and was evading Slovak regulations. The authorities responded with Slovakisation. As early as 6 November 1939 the Ministry of Education ordered Polish communal libraries to be closed as quickly as possible and replaced with Slovak ones; according to Polish studies, Polish teachers and some priests were removed from many villages, Slovak was introduced in schools and churches, and official posts were taken over by newcomers from the interior of the country. Recruitment for the Hlinka Guard was carried out in the annexed territory.

Even so, the situation of the people there was far better than in the neighbouring General Government: Slovakia did not pursue a policy of extermination and expulsion against the Poles. The Jews were the exception. In 1942 the Slovak state handed most of its Jewish citizens, including those from the annexed villages and small towns, over to the Germans, to die in the extermination camps.

The Polish government-in-exile recognised none of the border changes made by the occupiers, including the transfer of land to Slovakia. Britain had already ceased to recognise the Slovak state in September and treated it as part of occupied Czechoslovakia.

Place in the war

The agreement of November 1939 was one of the first acts by which Hitler distributed the territory of defeated Poland among his allies, and a model of how the Reich rewarded states that collaborated with it faithfully. In the east Stalin did much the same, handing Wilno (Vilnius) to Lithuania. For Slovakia the territorial gain was the only tangible benefit of taking part in the war. It strengthened Tiso’s position and the conviction that the alliance with Germany paid. In 1941 Slovakia joined Germany in the attack on the Soviet Union.

The border drawn in Berlin lasted until the end of the war. At the beginning of 1945 Spiš and Orava were taken by the Red Army. Under a provisional agreement of 20 May 1945 Czechoslovakia agreed to return to Poland the land awarded to it in 1920. In the summer the Polish authorities took it over again, not without clashes with the Slovak militia in Orava. The strips occupied by Poland in 1938, Javorina among them, remained with Czechoslovakia. The border along its 1924–1938 line was finally confirmed by a Polish–Czechoslovak agreement signed in Warsaw on 13 June 1958. Polish Spiš and Orava remained a reminder of a dispute that had set two neighbouring nations against each other after the First World War, and which Germany skilfully exploited in 1939.