Abstract
This article describes a largely unknown Swedish effort to intervene in deportations of Jews of Slovakia between 1942 and 1944. Swedish officials and religious leaders used their diplomatic correspondence with the Slovak government to extract some Jewish individuals and later on the whole Jewish community of Slovakia from deportations by their government and eventually by German officials. Despite the efforts of the Swedish Royal Consulate in Bratislava, the Swedish archbishop, Erling Eidem, and the Slovak consul, Bohumil Pissko, in Stockholm, and despite the acts taken by some Slovak ministries, the Slovak officials, including the president of the Slovak Republic, Jozef Tiso, revoked further negotiations in the autumn of 1944. However, the negotiations between Slovakia and Sweden created a scope for actions to protect some Jewish individuals which were doomed to failure because of the political situation. Nevertheless, this plan and the previous diplomatic interventions are significant for a description of the almost unknown Swedish and Slovak efforts to save the Jews of Slovakia. Repeated Swedish offers to take in Jewish individuals and later the whole community could well have prepared the way for larger rescues. These never occurred, given the Slovak interest in deporting their own Jewish citizens and later the German occupation of Slovakia.
Highlights
This article describes a largely unknown Swedish effort to intervene in deportations of Jews of Slovakia between 1942 and 1944
Swedish officials and religious leaders used their diplomatic correspondence with the Slovak government to extract some Jewish individuals and later on the whole Jewish community of Slovakia from deportations by their government and eventually by German officials
Conditions for implementing the ‘final solution’ for the ‘Jewish question’ in Slovakia were a result of the international politics of Germany in combination with autochthonous anti-Jewish tendencies within Slovak society and their implementation in antisemitic laws introduced by Slovak political institutions – government, parliament, the state council and Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest, and a leading politician of the Hlinka Slovak People’s Party (HSPP), who was the country’s president from 1939 to 1945, and who was convicted and hanged for treason in 1947
Summary
Abstract This article describes a largely unknown Swedish effort to intervene in deportations of Jews of Slovakia between 1942 and 1944. The negotiations between Slovakia and Sweden created a scope for actions to protect some Jewish individuals which were doomedto failure because of the political situation This plan and the previous diplomatic interventions are significant for a description of the almost unknown Swedish and Slovak efforts to save the Jews of Slovakia. In the seminal work of Ján Hlavinka and Eduard Nižňanský readers must look to the footnotes of the work to learn about the ‘personal intervention of a protestant archbishop from Uppsala’ (Hlavinka and Nižňanský 2009: 131) These works introduced the Swedish involvement in the fate of Jews of Slovakia to scholarly research. Bohumil Pissko – a key actor in the rescue attempts – or cases of rescuing individuals do not appear None of these crucial works recognises Swedish attempts to assist the Jews of Slovakia in depth. This study incorpor ates the voices of the representatives of the Slovak–Swedish communication via official documents and diplomatic or private correspondence
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