“UNRELIABLE ELEMENTS”. PROFESSIONAL SOLDIERS OF JEWISH ORIGIN IN THE SLOVAK ARMY AFTER 1939

• Authors: Baka Igor , Janecová Tamara
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The topic of persecution and discrimination of Jews in the army in Slovakia has already been the focus of several papers. Most of the attention was paid to the VI Labour Battalion of the Labour Corps of the Ministry of National Defence (MNO). However, some of the aspects of this topic have not received the historians’ interest to this day. Nor has more attention been paid to the status of persons who, even after 1939, served in the army on the basis of an exception as professional soldiers or worked as civilian employees in the MNO and were directly or indirectly exposed to the consequences of the anti-Jewish legal norms. This did not only concern the Jews themselves (only one of whom eventually served in the army on the basis of an exception), but also the category of so-called Jewish mongrels and, last but not least, the “Aryans” themselves, whose wives, however, were of Jewish origin. In the study, the authors focus on the first two categories of persons. They are not aiming merely at descriptive interpretation of the legislative and legal norms permitting the exclusion of Jews from the army. They would also like to document their reactions, which represented a desperate effort to keep their place in the army. Those represented (from their authors’ point of view) an extremely humiliating and desperate effort in every respect to conform to the demands of the regime derived from the official anti-Jewish stereotypes of the propaganda of the Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party. The latter regarded the Jews as a hostile element. The text pays special attention to the personality of František M. Borský, whose fate in the Slovak Army has not yet been further examined.

Keywords

EN

MILITARY HISTORY; SLOVAKIA; SLOVAK ARMY; JEWS

• Publisher: Vojenský historický ústav Bratislava
• Journal: Vojenská história
• Year: 2023
• Volume: 27
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 33 - 60

Contributors

author

Baka Igor

• Vojenský historický ústav, Krajná 27, 821 04 Bratislava, Slovak Republic

• https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9870-1232

author

Janecová Tamara

• https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8873-6965