5.1. The Holocaust in the Slovak State: from: http://www.geocities.com/ycrtmr/history.htm

A shadow over the Republic was the Holocaust. Prodded by Hitler, but also by the desire to create a Slovak middle-class, the Slovak parliament passed the first anti-semitic laws on April 18, 1939, instituting quotas in

the liberal professions, followed in June 1940 by the forcible sale of Jewish-owned property to Slovak "Arizators." In 1941, another 51 anti-Jewish laws were passed, with scant opposition, though on September 9,

during the vote on the Jewish Code, there was a scandal after, out of protest, Rev. Josef Steinhuebl, one of the Carpathian German deputies, refused to vote, while Count Janos Eszterhazy, the Magyar deputy, even

voted against, thus marring the cheerful unanimity which the Slovak state, like other authoritarian states, expected from its legislators. Between October 1941 and March 1942, the majority of the Jews living in the

cities were deported to the countryside--also removing them from their friends and acquaintances who could have helped them. In Pressburg, only about 6,000 ot the 15,000 Jews, who had been mostly ethnic

Germans or Magyars, remained by Spring 1942. Then, from their rural dwellings, many of these Jews were rounded up by Slovak police for deportation to the East. At the time, the Slovak authorities, the population,

and the Jewish victims themselves, had no reason to doubt the Nazi propaganda that they were to be resettled farther East since the Nazis, as late as 1941, had publicly declared that they wanted to create a Jewish

autonomous area near Lublin in occupied Poland. This is also why the Slovak parliament, moved by feelings of guilt, alloted 500 Reichsmark per Jewish deporteee, to be paid to the Nazis to be used for seeds,

agricultural implements and training to help their former Jewish countrymen. But around December 1941, Hitler had changed his mind and secretly decided to exterminate European Jewry. In summer 1942, Pope

Pius XII warned Tiso that rumours that Jews were being killed instead of resettled were true.Tiso stopped at once the deportations. About 58,000 Jews had been deported, but 33,000 remained. To avoid antagonizing

a small but strategically placed ally, Hitler tolerated Tiso's orders for the time being. The deportations resumed only in Fall 1944, when, in the wake of the failed putsch in central Slovakia, Hitler sent in troops,

which included in their wake Gestapo and SD units. By the end of the war, about 90,000 Slovak Jews had died in the Holocaust.