Fighting on all Fronts (36 page)

There was nothing wrong in itself with planning to assassinate Heydrich, but what the CNLC aimed to get out of it is indicative of its strategy. It hoped that assassinating Heydrich would prove to the Western allies that the Czech resistance was a serious part of the fight against Nazi imperialism, and that this would lead the Allies to officially repudiate the Munich Agreement and sign up to restoring the First Republic. The CNLC achieved this when the Western Allies formally repudiated the Agreement after the assassination. The resistance, including the UVOD and the Communist Party, would not begin to recover until 1944.

The partial discrediting of Czechoslovakia’s old ruling class opened up the possibility of working class resistance from below and discussion about what society after liberation should look like. But the fact that a group around Benes was able to form a “government in exile” still allowed it to play a role in the resistance in both the Czech and Slovak lands and had a significant impact on its outcome. It meant that there was struggle from below but it was still partly led by the dead hand of the old order. This was particularly true in the SNP and this general context is crucial to understanding it, but the uprising also has to be understood against the backdrop of Tiso’s fascist puppet regime.

In Slovakia, as in the Czech lands, the ruling class split in different directions under the pressure of Nazi imperialism and the disintegration of the inter-war republic. But Slovak nationalism and the lack of direct occupation meant the local ruling class bending towards different imperialisms took on a particular dynamic. Following the Munich Agreement the nationalist movements and local ruling classes inside the inter-war republic made bids for autonomy or independence.
²⁰
Father Joseph Tiso’s Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party (HSLS) led the charge in Slovakia and achieved its long fought for aim of Slovak autonomy with the “Zilina Declaration” on 6 October 1938, though the party’s ultranationalist wing still pushed for full independence. However, the HSLS and the new Slovak regime would be totally dependent on their Nazi imperialist sponsor.

The HSLS—“Ludaks”—was formed as a nationalist party in 1906 during the Hapsburg Empire and appealed to a Slovak “national identity” constructed around agrarianism and a reactionary brand of Catholicism. But following the First World War it began cooperating with political forces further to its right. Vojtech Tuka, who would become the prime minister of the “Slovak State”, had also been a member in 1919 of the Provincial Christian Socialist Party (OKSZP), which was led by an alliance of local landowners, the clerical hierarchy and the middle class. It based itself among the Hungarian minority and agitated for Slovak autonomy and against the threat of socialist revolution—a threat that had been made all too real by the Hungarian Soviet Republic and the short lived Slovak Soviet Republic of 1919.

These sorts of developments led the HSLS to develop two wings: its traditional conservative wing and Tuka’s openly fascist wing that would come to politically dominate it. Tuka founded the party’s first paramilitary unit, the Home Defence, in 1927, which would develop into the notorious Hlinka Guard and was the main figure behind the murder and deportation of Slovak Jews.

Following the declaration of Slovak autonomy, Tiso moved to cement the Ludaks political hegemony as the ruling party. All the old political parties, except the Communists and the Social Democrats, merged under pressure with Tiso’s Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party, which now suffixed its name with “The Party of Slovak National Unity”. Then on 9 October 1938 the ministry of the interior of the autonomous Slovak government officially banned activity by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in Slovakia. Not long afterwards, its affiliated organisations, such as the “red
trade unions”, the “Unity” gyms and sectional groups, were also stopped from organising openly. While the Communists were one of the new regime’s main targets,
²¹
it also moved against other mass organisations and left wing and Jewish groups. The Czechoslovak Social Democratic Workers’ Party (CSDSD), the German Social Democratic Workers’ Party in Czechoslovakia (DSAP), the Jewish Party (ZS) and the United Socialist Zionist Party were all dissolved.
²²

During the dismemberment of the Czechoslovak state its territories were divided between Nazi Germany, Hungary and Poland under the “Vienna Arbitration” that followed the Munich Agreement. It was a free for all for the ruling classes of Czechoslovakia’s neighbouring states, who felt that they had been done out or sold short of territory after the First World War. Slovakia had to abandon substantial territory along its southern border to Hungary and two smaller areas near its capital Bratislava to Germany.
²³

This political situation opened up more possibilities for a war from below, and meant that the Communists and Social Democrats could play an important role in the underground resistance. But the old ruling class was still able to assert itself in the resistance, albeit initially to a lesser extent than in the Czech lands. While a chunk of the old order willingly supported the “Slovak State” throughout the war on the Eastern Front and the Holocaust, the Nazis’ greatest crime, another part of the old ruling class remained committed to the idea of the old Czechoslovak republic. This included the bourgeois democratic politicians and Protestant religious leaders, but also dissident military commanders who now served in Tiso’s army—this specifically allowed the old order to play a decisive role in the SNP itself.

The Czechoslovak army had always been an important group during the inter-war republic, because of its officer corps’ links to the Legions that helped Masaryk’s nationalist movement find imperialist backing for independence during the First Word War. Its material and ideological basis was firmly tied to the old ruling class and the idea of a unitary Czechoslovak state. This meant that during the last days of the inter-war republic the significant bulk of the army high command tried to resist the momentum of further disintegration. When Tiso’s parliament declared Slovak independence on 14 March 1939, a group of prominent former legionnaires, including one of the SNP’s generals Rudolf Viest, published a protest:

Honourable Diet of Slovakia

Gentlemen,

If you are to decide today whether Slovakia is to be a part of the Czecho-Slovak Republic or an independent state by the side of some neighbouring country, bear in mind that:

Brave Slovak patriots fought and died together with the Czechs for the liberty of the Slovak Nation; that it was the Czechs who helped the Slovaks in the worst moments of their history and that all that we have from the spiritual and material point of view today we have acquired with Czech help during the last twenty years.

We implore you not to tarnish the national honour of the Slovaks and the memory of our fallen comrades, foremost among whom was General M R Stefánik.

For lack of time it is not possible for all Slovak Legionaries and volunteers still living to join us in reminding you, but we are certainly voicing the feeling of them all and of the great majority of the Slovak people.

Bratislava, March 14, 1939

General Rudolf Viest

Lieutenant Colonel Augustine Malár

Anton Granatier

Arch Juro Tvarožek

Staff Captain J. M. Kristin

Josef Kustra

M Miškóci

Dr Ján Jesenský

Jozef Gregor-Tajovský

Ing Kalamen Králiček
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However, the unity of the Czechoslovak officer corps’ old guard would not hold, with some emigrating to serve in Benes’s reconstituted “free army” and others loyally taking part in the Nazi invasion of Poland and then Russia. General Viest hung on as the inspector general of the Slovak Army as a member of the ON group and maintained contact with the CNLC in London, but fled to join the “free forces” in France in 1939 as the prospect of invading Poland neared. In seeming contrast, Malar remained a loyal officer in Tiso’s army and commanded Slovak troops during the Nazi invasions of both Poland and Russia. But the apparent differences between the signatories belie the fact that they were part of a general preocess whereby the various sections of the old ruling class tried to either
adapt to
or
resist
the new situation.

The turning point that would fracture the Legionaries was the war with Hungary, which invaded southern Slovakia in March 1939. Admiral Miklos Horthy’s Hungary now sought to expand the territorial acquisitions it had made in southern Slovakia during the “Vienna Arbitration”. Hungary had began occupying Ruthenia on 16 March 1939 as agreed in Vienna, but it sought to take advantage of the official limbo before the Nazi foreign minister Joachim Ribbentrop counter-signed the “Treaty of Protection”. Its troops attacked the eastern border of the “Slovak State” on 23 March. The war lasted only three days and was a military and political defeat for Tiso, but the Slovak Army had been commanded by the old legionnaire Malar. For many of the generals, protecting what was left of the old order by
adapting
to the new reality became the order of the day.

The “Slovak State” was a ramshackle mix of competing interests temporarily glued together by the political situation, and led by Tiso’s HSLS under the tutelage of Nazi imperialism. When the tide began to turn against Nazi imperialism on the Eastern Front, parts of the Tiso apparatus and military began to plot against the regime as the different groups’ unified purpose began to fracture. The machinations among the officer corps that resulted weakened the SNP both military and politically. Furthermore, many now hoped to do a deal with Russian imperialism that wasn’t interested in the uprising’s success either.

There is little evidence that the majority of the population supported the new fascist regime, while people might have still preferred Slovak independence as an alternative to direct Nazi occupation and becoming a “protectorate” of Hitler’s Reich.
²⁵
There was resistance, albeit predominately passive at first, to the Tiso regime from the beginning, which included left wing groups and groups of organised workers. That it did not translate into a mass resistance movement is down to repression but also the dead hand of the old order still playing a part. The military nature of organisations such as the National Defence (NO), made up of officers loyal to Benes, partially limited mass participation and their focus was on intelligence gathering and maintaining contact with the London government.

There was resistance from within the old ruling class that reached outside of the old officer corps. Many Protestants were sympathetic to the resistance because of the Tiso regime’s reactionary Catholic
chauvinism. This was driven home with its regular denouncements of Protestants as disloyal to the Slovak nation. Indeed, when the Slovak National Uprising began it was denounced as a “Czecho-Lutheran-Jewish-Bolshevik putsch”. This general trend among Protestants was evident in the high rate of abstention in mainly Protestant wards during the rigged elections of 1938 and later in participation in the SNP.

Resistance from the Lutheran church hierarchy continued throughout the Tiso regime. The Lutheran bishops’ group also officially denounced the actions of the Hlinka Guard and the persecution and deportation of Slovak Jews. The official Lutheran newspaper,
Church Letters
, frequently published articles denouncing the Ludaks until it was shut down on 15 January 1940. The Tranoscius Evangelical group and printing press in Liptovsky St Mikulas were then shut down for publishing propaganda leaflets on the 25th anniversary of the birth of the Czechoslovak state. Members of the Union of Evangelical Youth (SEM), the main Protestant youth organisation, refused to step into the Hlinka Guard and Protestants were part of all the main resistance organisations.
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However, it would be wrong to look at this superficially through a religious lens. The history behind Tiso’s repression and Protestant allegiances to the resistance had a definite class character. Many of the industrial and middle class interests in Slovakia were Protestant, meaning it was in their interests to oppose autonomy and subscribe to “Czechoslovakism”, the official ideology of the inter-war republic that espoused a single “national identity”.

Protestants also willingly joined the HSLS and prominent figures, such as the defence minister General Ferdinand Catlos, were also Protestant. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party was predominantly Catholic, but was set up in 1944 as the non-communist wing within the Slovak National Council (SNC) that became the umbrella resistance organisation. Underlying all of this were the contradictory directions the ruling class was pulled in after the Munich Agreement. When it comes to the official “Protestant resistance” from the church, it should be firmly placed in among resistance from the old order.

Broadly speaking, there were three streams in the Slovak resistance before the SNP: the Communist Party, the Social Democratic Party and the bourgeois democratic politicians and “civic resistance” organisations such as Vavro Srobar’s group and “Flora”.

Debates about what position the resistance should take towards the “Slovak question” were dominant—primarily because the aim of the old ruling class resistance was to restore the inter-war republic—but this didn’t stop the development of a national liberation programme that contained both national and socialist aspirations. The Communists and Social Democrats both agitated around social issues. There were, for example, KSS leaflets entitled “Give us work” and “Lower Taxes”. However, until the tide began to turn against Nazi imperialism, the focus would be on building tight knit illegal political organisations.
²⁷

The Communist Party in Slovakia (KSS), now independent from its mother party, was set up illegally in 1939 but remained unrecognised by Moscow and the Comintern. The Communists’ own claims that the KSS was
the
leading resistance organisation are false. However, it was one of the largest groups alongside the Social Democrats and the strongest organisationally.
²⁸
The KSS was the Tiso regime’s main political target. The fact that the Centre of State Security (USB), the Tiso regime’s secret police force, had a dedicated department for suppressing Communist activity is testament to this.