Slovakian Parliament commemorates victims of the Holocaust

To commemorate the 80th anniversary of the first trains taking the country’s Jews to Auschwitz, the National Council of the Slovak Republic has officially denounced the transport and appealed to remaining survivors and their relatives for forgiveness.

Slovakia was originally the eastern province of the first Czechoslovak Republic, formed after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918. After Hitler annexed the Sudetenland in the wake of the 1938 Munich Agreement, Slovakia seceded from Czechoslovakia, becoming the Slovak Republic.

This state would, in turn, become a Nazi satellite state following the racial policies of the Third Reich, in which Slovakian Jews were robbed of their human and civil rights. Eventually, 70,000 of them were sent to Nazi concentration camps in two waves, the first from March to October 1942 and the second from September 1944 to March 1945. The vast majority of the Jews reported to these camps would be murdered. 

Slovak parliamentarians also observed a minute’s silence in honour of the victims.

The only party that did not take part in the vote on the resolution was the openly neo-Nazi People’s Party Our Slovakia. Party leader Marian Kotleba is a vocal supporter of Jozef Tiso, President of the Slovak Nazi puppet state. Mr Kotleba has called Jews “devils in human skin” and promoted the “Zionist Occupied Government” conspiracy theory. Other party members have been charged with Holocaust denial, a criminal offence in Slovakia, on several occasions.

In the 2020 Slovakian parliamentary elections, People’s Party Our Slovakia won seventeen of the 150 available seats with a vote share of 7.97%. The Party reportedly has almost no support in any of the country’s major cities, including the capital Bratislava.

On 5th April 2020, Marian Kotleba was given a six-month suspended sentence for harbouring neo-Nazi sympathies. The appeals court did, however, dismiss an earlier ruling convicting Mr Kotleba of the illegal use of neo-Nazi symbols, for which he had been sentenced to four years and four months in prison.

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