1938 deportation of Jews from Slovakia
With the help of Adolf Eichmann, Slovak People's Party leaders planned the deportation, which was carried out by local police and the Hlinka Guard.
Many of the deportees managed to return home within a few days, but more than 800 were left in tent camps near Miloslavov, Veľký Kýr, and Šamorín in the no man's land along the border for months with some groups staying until January or February 1939.
[3][4] On 1 November, several Jews were arrested at a pro-Hungarian demonstration at the Carlton Hotel in Bratislava, agitating for the city to be annexed by Hungary.
[5] On 3 November, SS official Adolf Eichmann met with several radical politicians—including Jozef Faláth of the HSĽS; leader of the Academic Hlinka Guard, Jozef Kirschbaum [cs; sk]; Julius Janek, a local Hlinka Guard commander; Konrad Goldbach, a correspondent of the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter; and German Party leader Franz Karmasin—at the Carlton Hotel.
[11] Before midnight, the police and guardsmen were to physically remove all Jews "without material means" to the territory that would be ceded to Hungary,[5] in order to effect a "quick solution to the Jewish problem in Slovakia".
[16] From 4 to 7 November, between 4,000[14] and 7,600 Jews[b] were deported, in a chaotic, pogrom-like operation in which Hlinka Guard, Freiwillige Schutzstaffel, and the German Party participated.
[24][25] In many places, the Hlinka Guard's zeal was such that they continued the action after the order was rescinded; the Jews of Vranov nad Topľou were expelled on 7 November.
[12] The arrests did not prevent a spike in capital flight,[15] and Hungary refused to admit the deported Jews, so Tiso canceled the operation on 7 November 1938.
[13][28] Deportees were confined in makeshift tent camps at Miloslavov (Hungarian: Annamajor, German: Michsdorf, near Bratislava) and Veľký Kýr (Nyitranagykér, near Nitra) on the new Slovak–Hungarian border during the winter.
[13] Heinrich Schwartz, a representative of the Orthodox Religious Communities, and Marie Schmolka, director of HICEM Prague, were allowed to visit Miloslavov in late November.
[29] At the same time, local officials worried that the tent camps would become a haven for infectious diseases, which could spread to neighboring Slovak communities.
On 8 December, Slovak authorities issued another order that the deportation of Jews would not be done en masse but on a case-by-case basis and in line with Czechoslovak law.
[29] On 19 December,[31] 118 deportees at Miloslavov were moved to Kühmeyer Inn on the outskirts of Bratislava (in the Červený Most [cs; sk] area) and from there to a former ammunition factory in Patrónka, where they remained (according to Aron Grünhut) until the 1942 deportations.
[33] According to Slovak National Archives documents, many of the Jews in Miloslavov were able to emigrate and the rest were deported overnight to Hungary in January 1939, in order to minimize publicity.
[41] In Slovak historiography, the deportations are presented as the result of the cynical opportunism of the HSĽS leadership, which sought to scapegoat Jews for its own foreign policy failure.
