The proclamation of the Slovak State

Shortly after noon on 14 March 1939 the deputies of the autonomous diet of the Slovak Land, assembled in Bratislava, rose from their seats and without debate adopted a law creating an independent Slovak state. There was no formal vote; the deputies sang the song “Hej, Slováci” and dispersed, feeling they had had no choice. The day before, in Berlin, Adolf Hitler had told the dismissed Slovak prime minister, Father Jozef Tiso, that if the Slovaks did not declare independence at once, Germany would leave them at the mercy of Hungary. Thus was born the Slovak State (Slovenský štát), officially the Slovak Republic from July 1939. It was the first independent state of the Slovaks in history, and at the same time a state dependent on the Third Reich from its very first day. Its proclamation served Hitler as a pretext: the following night he told the President of Czecho-Slovakia that a state that was falling apart could not count on the guarantees given at Munich, and on the morning of 15 March the Wehrmacht marched into Bohemia and Moravia.

The new state is often called a “pro-German puppet state”. Historians debate how far the term reflects reality: in domestic policy the government in Bratislava kept a considerable margin of freedom, but in foreign, military and economic affairs Slovakia from March 1939 was a state “under the protection” of the Reich – and by its own, coerced, signature.

The Slovaks in Czechoslovakia

In 1918 the Slovaks entered a common state with the Czechs after a thousand years within the Kingdom of Hungary. Their border with Hungary was confirmed by the Treaty of Trianon, which left a large Hungarian minority in southern Slovakia. The official ideology spoke of a single “Czechoslovak” nation, and Prague governed centrally. Many Slovaks, especially Catholics, felt like the younger brothers of the secular and better-educated Czechs, who filled the offices and schools in Slovakia.

On this soil grew the Slovak People’s Party of Father Andrej Hlinka, known from 1925 as Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party. It demanded autonomy for Slovakia within Czechoslovakia and won about 30 per cent of the vote in Slovakia, making it the largest party in that part of the country. Its leading politician was Tiso, parish priest of Bánovce nad Bebravou and, in 1927–1929, Minister of Health in the Prague government. After Hlinka’s death in August 1938 Tiso took over the de facto leadership of the party. Alongside his moderate wing were the radicals: Vojtech Tuka, once convicted of spying for Hungary; the young nationalists Ferdinand Ďurčanský and Alexander Mach, who looked to Berlin for support; and Karol Sidor, commander of the party’s Hlinka Guard, known for his sympathy towards Poland.

Autonomy after Munich

The Munich Agreement of 30 September 1938 stripped Czechoslovakia of the Sudetenland and broke Prague’s authority. On 6 October in Žilina, representatives of the People’s Party and most of the other Slovak parties proclaimed Slovak autonomy, and on 7 October the President appointed Tiso prime minister of the autonomous government. On 22 November the parliament in Prague passed a constitutional law on the autonomy of the Slovak Land, and the state took the name of the Czecho-Slovak Republic. Autonomy was also granted to Subcarpathian Ruthenia, soon renamed Carpatho-Ukraine (PL).

The new autonomous Slovakia promptly lost territory. Talks with Hungary at Komárno, chaired by Tiso, ended in failure, and on 2 November 1938 the German–Italian First Vienna Award gave Hungary southern Slovakia with Košice – more than 10,000 square kilometres with some 850,000 inhabitants. Poland, which had seized Zaolzie (the Trans-Olza area) in October, took a few more small strips of land in Spiš and Orava in November, including Javorina, which turned many Slovaks against it.

Tiso’s government quickly did away with Slovak democracy. In November 1938 the Slovak parties were merged, often under pressure, with the People’s Party into a single party of “national unity”, and the rest were dissolved or banned; only the parties of the German and Hungarian minorities remained legal. In the elections to the Slovak diet on 18 December 1938 voters could vote for only one list. The black-uniformed Hlinka Guard was given a monopoly on paramilitary training. In early November, after the Vienna Award, the autonomous government had several thousand Jews, including the elderly and children, taken to the no man’s land along the new Hungarian border; the operation was called off after a few days.

Berlin’s game

In October 1938 Tiso and Ďurčanský held talks with Joachim von Ribbentrop, who gave them to understand that Germany would welcome the “greatest possible independence” for Slovakia. Ďurčanský was enthusiastic; Tiso declared that he preferred autonomy within the Czechoslovak state. Hitler, who after Munich felt he had been cheated of his war, was meanwhile preparing to seize the rest of the Czech lands. Slovakia was a tool in this game: its secession was to show that Czecho-Slovakia had fallen apart of its own accord and that the guarantees promised to it at Munich had nothing left to guarantee.

The Slovak radicals sought direct contact with Hitler. On 12 February 1939 he received Tuka in Berlin, who, without any authority, declared that he was placing the fate of the Slovak nation in Hitler’s hands. Under pressure from this group Tiso too shifted his position: on 21 February he spoke in the diet in Bratislava of building “our Slovak state”, although in his view independence was to come gradually, not at once. One of the intermediaries was Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Austrian Nazi and Reich Governor in Vienna. The German Security Service (SD) and activists of the German minority in Slovakia fanned the tension, and Bratislava saw a series of bomb attacks attributed to provocateurs.

The “Homola Putsch”

The government in Prague decided it had to act before Slovakia broke away. On the night of 9–10 March 1939 President Emil Hácha dismissed Tiso and most of his ministers, and a state of emergency was declared in Slovakia. The army occupied government offices, post offices and railway stations, and the police and gendarmerie detained some 250 activists of the People’s Party and the Hlinka Guard. The operation later became known as the “Homola Putsch”, after General Bedřich Homola, the corps commander in Banská Bystrica, who signed the proclamation of the state of emergency; the name was coined by the Guardists’ press, although in reality it was a lawful, if clumsy, act of the state authorities. The first successor named to replace Tiso was Jozef Sivák, who happened to be in Rome for the coronation of Pope Pius XII and declined the appointment; on 11 March Sidor became prime minister.

The intervention was very badly received in Slovakia, but the “Slovak revolution” the Germans had hoped for did not happen. Ďurčanský fled to Vienna and from there, over German radio, called for a declaration of independence, without much response. On the evening of 11 March the Gauleiter of Vienna, Josef Bürckel, Seyss-Inquart and several German generals unexpectedly walked into a meeting of Sidor’s government in Bratislava and demanded the immediate proclamation of independence. Sidor refused, saying he had to consult Prague; he also rejected a proposal to proclaim independence under the protection of German divisions waiting in Petržalka, by then already a German suburb of Bratislava. Tiso, who after his dismissal had first taken refuge in a Jesuit monastery in Bratislava, went back to his parish in Bánovce and took no action.

The meeting at the Reich Chancellery

So the Germans turned to him. On 12 March he learned that Berlin did not recognise his dismissal and was inviting him for talks. He was visited by successive delegations of radicals and German-minority activists. On 13 March, after consulting the party leadership in Bratislava, which sent him to Berlin as its delegate, Tiso travelled to Vienna and from there flew with Ďurčanský to Berlin in a German aircraft. He was received with the honours due to a head of state.

That evening at the Reich Chancellery, in Ribbentrop’s presence, Hitler told him that within the next few hours he would decide the fate of the Czech lands, and that Slovakia had to decide for itself what it wanted. If it declared independence, the Reich would guarantee its existence. If it hesitated, Hitler would leave it to the course of events, for which he would bear no responsibility. It was not a matter of days, he said, but of hours. During the conversation Ribbentrop “happened” to hand Hitler a report on Hungarian troops massing on the Slovak border. The threat was clear: without German protection Slovakia would be carved up by Hungary, and perhaps by Poland too.

Tiso would not declare independence from Berlin, as Ribbentrop proposed – he had a ready-made text of the proclamation and was offering a radio station. Tiso held that only the diet could do so. By telephone he obtained the consent of Hácha and Sidor to convene the Slovak diet for ten o’clock the next day. According to Slovak accounts, before his flight home that night the text of a telegram to Hitler asking him to take Slovakia under his protection was also signed, to be sent after the diet had made its decision.

14 March in Bratislava

The diet met in an atmosphere of fear. Tiso, matter-of-factly and without pathos, reported on his conversation with Hitler and stressed that there was no time. Some deputies doubted whether a small state, with a large Hungarian minority and no arms industry, could survive. The leader of the Slovak Germans, Franz Karmasin, warned that any delay would end with Slovakia partitioned between Hungary and Germany. During a recess the presidium of the diet, under its speaker Martin Sokol, prepared a draft law, and in a closed session the deputies adopted it by rising from their seats. Law No. 1/1939 declared the Slovak Land “an autonomous, independent Slovak state”, and the diet became its parliament. Tiso became prime minister of the new government, Tuka deputy prime minister, Ďurčanský foreign minister and General Ferdinand Čatloš minister of defence. Sidor, nominally minister of the interior, soon left to become envoy to the Vatican. Mach announced the birth of the state on the radio.

A few moments too late, representatives of former Czechoslovak legionnaires arrived at the diet building – among them the future commanders of the Slovak National Uprising, General Rudolf Viest and Lieutenant Colonel Augustín Malár – with a memorandum calling for the common state to be preserved. The vote had already taken place.

On the evening of the same day Hácha, with the foreign minister František Chvalkovský, arrived in Berlin by train to save what was left of the state. On 15 March Tiso sent Hitler a telegram asking him to “take over the protection” of Slovakia. On 16 March Hitler replied that the Reich was taking it over.

Poland and independent Slovakia

Polish diplomacy looked on Slovak aspirations with sympathy. The Foreign Minister, Józef Beck, hoped that the break-up of Czecho-Slovakia would give Poland a common border with Hungary, and that an independent Slovakia – Catholic and mistrustful of Prague – would draw closer to Warsaw rather than Berlin. On 14 March he assured a Slovak envoy that Poland would accept any solution the Slovaks chose. Poland was one of the first countries to recognise the new state, immediately after Hungary; sources give the date as 15 or 16 March. A Polish legation was opened in Bratislava.

Beck’s calculations collapsed within days. Slovakia became not a buffer state between Poland and the Reich but a German forward base. On its southern border Poland now faced the Wehrmacht, which from 15 March was already in Moravia and moving into western Slovakia. This was one of the reasons why March 1939 put an end to Warsaw’s illusions about Hitler’s intentions.

What followed

The Slovak State was subordinated to the Reich almost immediately. On 18 March in Vienna representatives of the Slovak government signed a treaty on a “protective relationship”, completed in Berlin on 23 March: Germany gained the right to station troops in a zone of western Slovakia, and Slovakia’s army and foreign policy were to be conducted “in close agreement” with the Reich. The protection proved selective. On that same day, 23 March, Hungary, which had occupied Carpatho-Ukraine on 15 March, attacked eastern Slovakia; in the brief “Little War” Slovakia lost a strip of land in the east, and Germany did not intervene.

On 21 July 1939 the diet adopted a constitution, and the state took the name of the Slovak Republic. By September it had been recognised by more than a dozen states, including Italy, the Vatican, Britain (de facto, in May) and France (in July), and in September by the Soviet Union; the United States never recognised it. On 1 September 1939 Slovakia attacked Poland, the only participant in the invasion apart from Germany. Čatloš’s field army “Bernolák”, some 50,000 men, advanced into Podhale, the Nowy Sącz region and the Bieszczady, and as a reward Slovakia received from Germany the lands it had lost to Poland in 1920, 1924 and 1938, some 770 square kilometres. In October 1939 Tiso became president.

Father Tiso’s state was a one-party dictatorship, with the Hlinka Guard as its armed wing. In 1940 it joined the Tripartite Pact, and in 1941 its troops entered the USSR alongside the Germans. Slovakia was the first ally of the Reich to agree to hand over its Jews to Germany, and it paid 500 Reichsmarks for each person deported. Between March and October 1942 some 58,000 people were deported, mostly to Auschwitz and to the occupied Lublin region; a few hundred survived. After the outbreak of the Slovak National Uprising in August 1944 the Germans occupied the country and the deportations resumed: some 13,000 more people were deported. In April 1945 the Red Army took Bratislava, Slovakia returned to Czechoslovakia, and Tiso, convicted of treason and collaboration, was executed in 1947.

The proclamation of 14 March was the first act in the dismemberment of Czecho-Slovakia, which allowed Hitler to take Prague without war and without a formal break with Munich. For Poland it meant something more immediate: from March 1939 the Reich enveloped it from the west, north and south, and six months later part of the German 14th Army and the Slovak army set out against Poland from Slovak territory.