The Slovak National Uprising (Slovak: Slovenské národné povstanie, abbreviated SNP; alternatively also Povstanie roku 1944, English: The Uprising of 1944) was an attempted insurrection organised by the Slovak resistance during the Second World War. It was directed on the one hand against the German invasion of Slovakia by the Wehrmacht, which began on 29 August 1944, and on the other against the Slovak collaborationist regime of the Ludaks under Jozef Tiso. It was one of the largest uprisings against Nazism and its allies in Europe.
Carried out by parts of the Slovak army, the main area of the uprising was in central Slovakia, with the town of Banská Bystrica as its centre. The Slovak insurgent army (officially the 1st Czechoslovak Army in Slovakia) was under the overall command of a military headquarters of the opposition Slovak National Council. This represented a coalition of the civic Democratic Party and the Slovak communists and was linked to the Czechoslovak government-in-exile in London. The uprising was additionally supported by Soviet and Slovak partisan units. At the beginning of the uprising, the insurgents controlled over half of what was then Slovak territory, but quickly lost ground as a result of the German advance. After 60 days of fighting, the uprising ended on 28 October 1944. With the fall of Banská Bystrica, the military leadership of the insurgents gave up fighting openly against the Wehrmacht. Without surrendering, the insurgents switched to pure partisan fighting, which they continued until the Red Army liberated Slovakia from Nazi control in April 1945.
As a result of the uprising, both conflicting parties also committed numerous war crimes. In the areas controlled by the insurgents, up to 1,500 people were murdered (mostly members of the German minority). The German occupation regime, for its part, claimed up to 5,000 lives (about 2,000 of them being Jews), especially after the suppression of the uprising with targeted "punitive measures" against the civilian population. The German leadership also used the uprising as an opportunity to complete the extermination of the Jews in Slovakia, which resulted in the deportation or murder of more than 14,000 Jews on Slovak territory by the end of the war. A total of about 30,000 Slovak citizens were deported to German prison, labour, internment and concentration camps.
After the communist takeover in Czechoslovakia in 1948, the Slovak National Uprising underwent strong reinterpretations. As a result, the share of communists and partisans in the uprising was exaggerated by official Czechoslovak historiography. The civic resistance and the significance of the insurgent army, whose representatives were persecuted by the communist leadership after 1948, were neglected. With the fall of communism in 1989, a process of re-evaluation began in Slovakia, through which the role of the civic resistance and the insurgent army was emphasised. 29 August is a public holiday in today's Slovakia.
The Slovak National Uprising (Slovak: Slovenské národné povstanie, abbreviated SNP; alternatively also Povstanie roku 1944, English: The Uprising of 1944) was an attempted insurrection organised by the Slovak resistance during the Second World War. It was directed on the one hand against the German invasion of Slovakia by the Wehrmacht, which began on 29 August 1944, and on the other against the Slovak collaborationist regime of the Ludaks under Jozef Tiso. It was one of the largest uprisings against Nazism and its allies in Europe.
Carried out by parts of the Slovak army, the main area of the uprising was in central Slovakia, with the town of Banská Bystrica as its centre. The Slovak insurgent army (officially the 1st Czechoslovak Army in Slovakia) was under the overall command of a military headquarters of the opposition Slovak National Council. This represented a coalition of the civic Democratic Party and the Slovak communists and was linked to the Czechoslovak government-in-exile in London. The uprising was additionally supported by Soviet and Slovak partisan units. At the beginning of the uprising, the insurgents controlled over half of what was then Slovak territory, but quickly lost ground as a result of the German advance. After 60 days of fighting, the uprising ended on 28 October 1944. With the fall of Banská Bystrica, the military leadership of the insurgents gave up fighting openly against the Wehrmacht. Without surrendering, the insurgents switched to pure partisan fighting, which they continued until the Red Army liberated Slovakia from Nazi control in April 1945.
As a result of the uprising, both conflicting parties also committed numerous war crimes. In the areas controlled by the insurgents, up to 1,500 people were murdered (mostly members of the German minority). The German occupation regime, for its part, claimed up to 5,000 lives (about 2,000 of them being Jews), especially after the suppression of the uprising with targeted "punitive measures" against the civilian population. The German leadership also used the uprising as an opportunity to complete the extermination of the Jews in Slovakia, which resulted in the deportation or murder of more than 14,000 Jews on Slovak territory by the end of the war. A total of about 30,000 Slovak citizens were deported to German prison, labour, internment and concentration camps.
After the communist takeover in Czechoslovakia in 1948, the Slovak National Uprising underwent strong reinterpretations. As a result, the share of communists and partisans in the uprising was exaggerated by official Czechoslovak historiography. The civic resistance and the significance of the insurgent army, whose representatives were persecuted by the communist leadership after 1948, were neglected. With the fall of communism in 1989, a process of re-evaluation began in Slovakia, through which the role of the civic resistance and the insurgent army was emphasised. 29 August is a public holiday in today's Slovakia.
Background
Initial political situation
On 14 March 1939, under strong pressure from the Third Reich, the Slovak Parliament declared independence from the Czecho-Slovak Republic and proclaimed the Slovak State. Slovakia's political development in the following six years was determined by its status as a "protective state" of the German Reich. In the "Protection Treaty" concluded on 23 March 1939, Slovakia strived to conduct its foreign policy and the building of its army "in close agreement" with the German Reich and to make a "protection zone" in the western part of the country available to the Wehrmacht for the establishment of military installations and garrisons. In the additionally concluded "Confidential Protocol on Economic and Financial Cooperation", Germany also secured its interests vis-à-vis the Slovak economy. In return, the German Reich strived to "protect the political independence of the Slovak state and the integrity of its territory."
Nevertheless, at the time of the state's founding, Slovakia's independence was still far from being secured. The flexibility of the German Reich in its protective obligations became apparent shortly after independence, when Slovakia was invaded by Hungarian troops and subsequently had to cede eastern Slovak territories to Horthy's Hungary. Berlin did not grant Slovakia any protection in this conflict, but merely assumed the role of mediator. In fact, for several months after the formation of the Slovak state, the German leadership was still unclear about its continued existence and regarded it as a bargaining chip in negotiations with Hungary and Poland. Since only the German government could give a guarantee of the existence of the independent state, good conduct and compliancy were therefore the order of the day among Slovak politicians, so as not to jeopardise protection by the German Reich."
The Slovak state was governed by a one-party regime of the dictatorial Ludaks. Historians sometimes classify it as fascist or – with reference to the close ties between the government and the Catholic clergy – This as clerical-fascist, but also simply as totalitarian or authoritarian. The Slovak constitution of July 1939 was modelled more on the constitutions of Salazar's Portugal and Dollfuss' Austria than on the dictatorship of the National Socialists. The domestic political situation in Slovakia from 1939 to 1942 was determined by a power struggle between the state president and party leader Jozef Tiso on the one hand and the prime minister and foreign minister Vojtech Tuka on the other. While Tuka, out of his admiration for National Socialism, entered into a voluntary relationship of instruction with the Third Reich, it was Tiso's endeavour to shield Slovak society from German influence. In return, however, Tiso was prepared to cooperate in the economic sphere, in military participation in the wars against Poland and the Soviet Union, and in the deportation of Slovak Jews. In 1942, by introducing the Führerprinzip, Tiso was able to oust Tuka and his radical party wing and subsequently establish a presidential dictatorship.
On the international political scene, the Slovak state initially established itself relatively successfully despite its limited sovereignty. Even before the beginning of the Second World War, it obtained de jure or de facto recognition by 18 states, including Great Britain (de facto, 4 May 1939) and France (de facto, 14 July 1939). After the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 23 August 1939, de facto and de jure recognition by the Soviet Union also soon followed. In total, the Slovak state was recognised by 27 states over the course of its existence.
As a result of the Salzburg Conference of 1940, Slovakia became even more closely tied to the German Reich. In November 1940, Slovakia joined the Axis powers, which led to Slovakia's declaration of war against the Soviet Union in June 1941 and against Great Britain and the United States in December 1941. Through its support of the Third Reich, Slovakia fell into ever greater international isolation and reduced its chances of a possible post-war existence, especially when the Allies adopted the restoration of Czechoslovakia as one of their wartime objectives in 1941. Since it had become apparent that the Allies would not recognise an independent Slovakia after the war, the question was no longer whether Slovakia would become part of Czechoslovakia again, but only under what conditions.
Collaboration regime and population
The Ludaks of the ruling Hlinka party had already been the strongest political force in Slovakia since 1925, but within Czechoslovakia they never received more than a third of the Slovak electoral votes. In the autumn of 1938 they took over the autonomous Slovak provincial government and by December 1938 imposed a one-party dictatorship in which only the political representations of the German and Hungarian minorities remained. The other civic parties were pressured into forced unification with the Hlinka Party, and left-wing and Jewish parties were banned. Press censorship was introduced and a concentration camp for actual or alleged opponents of the regime was set up in Ilava. With its organisations – the Hlinka Guard and the Hlinka Youth – it strove to dominate all life in Slovakia. The emergence of the Slovak state was seen by many Ludaks – despite its shortcomings and limitations under constitutional law – as the completion of Slovak national-emancipatory aspirations.
The majority of the Slovak population also took a decidedly positive view of its new state, at least in the first years of its existence. In contrast to the Czech protectorate, Slovakia had been spared a German occupation, and in terms of domestic and cultural policy it remained largely autonomous. The restriction of civil liberties was considered tolerable (the regime's brutality was concentrated against the Jewish population) and the economy profited greatly from the war. Education, science and culture also experienced a boost. Until late summer of 1944, conditions in Slovakia were better than in neighbouring countries in Central Europe. That is why the Slovak government could rely on broad tolerance or even approval of its measures by the population for years. However, the representatives and members of the Protestant Church in particular were dissatisfied with the government. They made up about 17% of the Slovak population, were traditionally Czechoslovak-oriented and felt treated as second-class citizens by the Catholic-dominated Ludak regime. Since December 1938, only four Lutherans were represented in the Slovak parliament, and only one Protestant, Defence Minister Ferdinand Čatloš, made it into the government and the continued presidency of the Hlinka party.
Contributing to the disgruntlement of the Slovak population were the very unpopular wars against the Slavic states of Poland and the Soviet Union, in which Slovakia participated with its own troops, as well as the establishment of German advisory positions in Slovak ministries, the one-sided orientation towards Hitler's Germany and the exaggerated nationalism. Later, the Slovak regime's policy towards the Jews also met with widespread social disapproval. After the Salzburg Conference in 1940, the strengthened radical party wing of Prime Minister Tuka's Ludaks pushed through a rapid radicalisation of the so-called "solution to the Jewish question". The Jewish Code issued by the government in September 1941 completed the transition from the hitherto customary religious to the racial assessment of the Jewish question and was among the harshest anti-Semitic laws in Europe. On Tuka's initiative, two-thirds of the Slovak Jews (about 58,000) were then deported to German extermination camps between March and October 1942; of these, only a few hundred survived.
After the war situation turned against the Axis powers in the winter of 1942/43, unrest within Slovakia increased. In 1943, major news of German defeats (Stalingrad, Kursk, Italy's exit from the war) and the looming overall German defeat reached the country. Under the impression of the victories of the Red Army, but also of the spreading news of Nazi war crimes in the Soviet Union, a wave of Russophilia and Slavophilia grew in Slovak society. Thus, in the spring of 1944, Slovakia outwardly presented the image of an "oasis of peace", but internally fundamental changes and a radical change of mood had taken place in all strata of the population. Nevertheless, despite growing anti-German sentiment among the population, it took until mid-1944 for the political conditions in Slovakia to change to such an extent (as a result of the dramatic events in all European theatres of war) that the conditions for a national uprising were in place.
Resistance groups and formation of the Slovak National Council
As in several other countries, there were two main lines of political resistance in Slovakia – This one communist and one non-communist. The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) was the first party ever to be banned in 1938 and thus forced into illegality. After the emergence of the Slovak state, the Slovak communists became independent and the Communist Party of Slovakia (KSS) was formed. The leadership of the Czechoslovak communists defected to Moscow.
From the beginning, the Slovak communists were the main force of resistance in Slovakia and, as such, were the most fiercely persecuted. They initially became active by publishing illegal writings and coordinating strikes. Their attitude towards Slovak independence and Czechoslovakia went through several transformations and depended on Moscow's official policy. Until the recognition of Slovakia by the Soviet Union on 16 September 1939, the party leadership favoured the restoration of Czechoslovakia, after which it accepted the idea of an independent Slovakia. After 1940, the Slovak communists again made the establishment of a "Slovak Soviet Republic" their party programme. Only when Stalin recognised Edvard Beneš' Czechoslovak government-in-exile in 1941 did the KSS accept the restoration of Czechoslovakia, but demanded its federalisation.
The civic and social-democratic resistance was in contact with the Czechoslovak foreign movement and established contacts with the Czech resistance in the Protectorate. From the emergence of independent Slovakia in March 1939, civil servants and politicians who remained loyal to Czechoslovakia and Beneš formed resistance groups. They gathered intellectuals from the military and politics and helped Czech refugees from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (mostly civil servants and resistance fighters) to escape via Slovakia to the Balkans and then to the West. All these groups rejected the idea of an independent Slovakia and advocated the restoration of Czechoslovakia.
The most significant among the non-communist resistance groups were the Slovak agrarians, the majority of whom were Protestants. However, the relationship between the Slovak agrarians and Beneš was complex, due to the fact that the government-in-exile adhered to the idea of a unified Czechoslovak nation – a position that the agrarians found unacceptable. The Slovak agrarians no longer valued Prague centralism and a unified Czechoslovak nation in their ideas about a renewed Czechoslovakia. The majority of them were in favour of respecting Slovak national autonomy, from which they also derived appropriate changes in Slovakia's status under state law.