Janics: Czechoslovak Policy and the Hungarian Minority

THE ACCUSED AND THE ACCUSER

As the Second World War was drawing to a close, Hungarian public opinion was imbued by an altogether mistaken notion about the future of Hungary's northern boundaries drawn by the Vienna Award of 1938. Since Tiso's Slovakia too, not unlike Hungary, was an ally of Hitler, the overwhelming majority of Hungarians believed that the Slovaks will be in no position to raise revisionist claims against the boundaries of the Vienna Award.

This mistaken simplification followed logically from the general miss-conception with which the Hungarians have viewed the course of the war. There was hardly anybody in Hungary who fully comprehended the background of Allied wartime diplomatic accords. In particular, Hungarian public opinion did not realize that, following the Soviet recognition of Czechoslovakia's prewar boundaries, everything that happened in Slovakia since the summer of 1941 (when Hitler invaded Russia), would be treated merely as misdeeds of a small clique of traitors who usurped power in that part of Czechoslovakia. Thus, the accomplished facts of wartime diplomacy came as a surprise not merely to the Hungarian ruling class, but to the uninformed and optimistic Hungarian public in general, to the intellectuals no less than to the peasants, and to the overwhelming majority of the workers as well. The renewed loss of the recently "repossessed" territories in fact became no less a shock after the Second World War than the dismemberment of Hungary has been after the First World War.

The mass of charges collected by the Hungarians against Slovak Fascism, and thought to become effective when the war ends, proved to be, of course, totally ineffective. The internationally recognized principle of Czechoslovakia's legal continuity absolved the Slovaks as a nation of any guilt for its Fascist crimes. The Hungarians of Southern Slovakia, returned after the war under Czechoslovak rule, learned to their surprise that Slovakia, since the summer of 1941, according to international law, existed only as a geographical term. Slovakia was treated as a territory under German yoke no less than the lands of the Czech Protectorate, consequently the Allies saw no cause even to declare war against the Slovak State of Tiso.

The wartime notion entertained by the majority of Hungarians of Southern Slovakia was that Slovak and Hungarian Fascism were identical phenomena. Or, if they were not exactly the same, as Fascist systems they shared equal responsibilities for their Fascist crimes. Furthermore, as the Hungarians saw it: Slovakia was Hitler's first satellite, having taken part, unlike Hungary, already in the war against Poland. Also, the Slovaks had preceded Hungary in racial persecution of the Jews. And in general, in repressing democratic freedoms, Slovakia's record certainly was worse than that of Hungary's. Naive as these views have tuned out to be, the Hungarians seemed to forget one of the basic lessons of history: losers cannot argue against victors, let alone against the interests of Great Powers and the accomplished facts of diplomacy.

Credit for achieving international recognition of the principle of Czechoslovakia's legal continuity goes to Edvard Benes. Already in the early stages of the war, through international agreements and treaties, Benes has succeeded in safeguarding the fundamental interests of the Czechoslovak State as he saw them fit. The significance of these accomplishments is not diminished by the fact that subsequent events-above all the Slovak national uprising of 1944-swept away the concept of a unitary "Czechoslovak nation," so dear to Benes's centralist thinking.

During the war, anti-Fascism was Benes's ideological platform upon which he built his theories of Czechoslovakia's legal restoration. However, with the war over, Benes shifted his ideological emphasis from anti-Fascism to the principle of a homogeneous Slav nation-state free of national minorities. To justify the liquidation of minorities, he stressed the ideology of national self-defense. He declared in fact the homogeneous nation-state a prime necessity of national self-defense. In addition, the expulsion of national minorities from Czechoslovakia was declared a just punishment for their "mass betrayal" of the Czechoslovak State. The principles of this extreme nationalist ideology were laid down in the Government program of Kosice 1945.

The principle of "just self-defense," of course, is nothing new. Nor are the excesses that spring from a willful expansion of this principle. It is a flimsy principle. For what passes for just self-defense at one time is rejected as such at another time. Also, history abounds in examples of how bellicosity in the pursuit of security leads to loss of self-control. Thus, already the Romans "had fought in self-defense until they gradually forced the entire then known world under their yoke."' Countless wars had been fought in rightful self-defense through the ages. In our time, Nazism too has made use of this dubious principle, when it claimed that "anti-Semitism" was purely a defensive movement."² Where are then the limits of rightful self-defense? Apologies for the policies of the Slovak Fascist State vividly demonstrate the inherent dangers of this slippery principle. For instance, we are told that anti-Semitism in Tiso's Slovakia, too, was initially a defensive measure: "In the beginning not every anti-Semitic measure was justified by biological or racial arguments but, rather, they were termed measures serving the protection of the Slovak nation."³

Following the defeat of Slovak Fascism, anti-Semitic passions in Slovakia were turned into hatred against the Hungarians. This could be done all the more easily Since the events of 1938 (the loss of territories to Hungary) had left Strong anti-Hungarian resentments behind in Slovakia. It should be noted, however, that the post-1945 anti-Hungarian campaign, in which the Hungarians took the place of the Jews as targets of public hatted, was not spontaneous. It was the result of a massive manipulation from above, it was an integral part of an ultra-nationalistic hate propaganda. It was built around the slogan of the Hungarians' collective "Fascist" guilt and was conducted in a spirit of absolute self-righteousness to serve Slovak national interests.

The Hungarian minority was declared collectively guilty on the grounds of betraying the Czechoslovak State in 1938. In order to justify this charge against the Hungarians, the prewar treatment of minorities in Czechoslovakia was described in glowing terms and considerably embellished. It is true that the minority policy of Czechoslovakia was far more democratic than those of Hungary, Rumania, Poland or Yugoslavia. Yet, the Hungarian minority in Czechoslovakia could never feel entirely free of discrimination. It was primarily in the economic field that the Status of second-class citizenship has been felt at every Step. This was admitted even by those so-called "activist" minority politicians who supported the Republic and defended it against hostile attacks from both inside and outside. For instance, in Piest'any, on September 7, 1936, István Csomor, a Hungarian member of the Czechoslovak Agrarian Party, presented Prime Minister Milan Hodza a memorandum detailing the grievances of the Hungarian minority. It read in part:

We have wounds and we are waiting for the curing balm. Grievances have accumulated and these have to be redressed. The Hungarian minority has a new home, but that home has no roof yet. A lot remains to be done for the benefit of the Hungarian minority. . . . Let's see to it that every Hungarian of Czechoslovakia feels at home in his new homeland, that they are free citizens of a free state, the Republic of Czechoslovakia. We have put into writing the grievances of the Hungarian minority, its cultural and economic demands. We request that these be given serious consideration. Listen to the words and fulfill our wishes.⁴

However, during the Second World War, and even more so after 1945, including at the peace conference, the principal charge against the Hungarian minorities was it's lack of appreciation of its privileges. It was said that, despite complete equality in the bourgeois republic, they almost unanimously betrayed the common fatherland during its crisis in 1938.

The political climate in the aftermath of war was unfavorable to revealing the facts about the prewar minority situation. And ever since, Slovak historiography has failed to evaluate the facts with professional objectivity. On the other hand, several works of progressive Hungarians have pointed out the homeless feelings in prewar Czechoslovakia. For instance, Edgár Balogh, a well-known Hungarian Communist in interior Czechoslovakia, now living in Transylvania, wrote: "The crux of the problem was that this state [Czechoslovakia] was unable to become our fatherland."⁵ we were facing chauvinistic ambitions of the same kind with which, in former times, the Hungarian imperialists have persecuted their minorities."⁶ Imre Forbáth, another Hungarian Communist writer of the same background, bids goodbye to Czechoslovakia with the same bitter sincerity:

Even the minority policy of a most democratic bourgeois system [such as prewar Czechoslovakia's] is not free of the ruling class ambition to maintain the hegemony of the ruling nation, to hide the social antagonism of classes behind artificially nurtured racial, national, and other conflicts. The tragic disintegration of the Czechoslovak Republic albeit its principal cause was certainly the attack of Fascism and the surrender of the bourgeoisie was also the con-sequence of its minority policies. . . After decades of neglect, not even in the moment of extreme danger, could a greedy and short-sighted ruling clique bring itself to correcting the Situation by a rapid and earnest reform. Thus, not even honest effort of the best people was able to save the fatherland from the consequences of a mass of crimes. . . In the decisive moment, the large majority of Czechoslovakia's minorities had left the country in the lurch.⁷

It is almost impossible to unravel the true historical forces affecting events of almost four decades ago, to describe and evaluate, according to its true value, the will of the masses. The perception of events of the past have been distorted above all by nationalist prejudices. Hence, in all our search for the truth, we must arm ourselves not only with scientific arguments supported by information from reliable sources, but also with memories of contemporaries and eyewitnesses.

In the twenty years of the Czechoslovak bourgeois republic, it was plain for everyone to see that one of the most important foreign policy objectives of the post-First World War era was the isolation of Hungary. Political thinking was determined by the anti-Hungarian ideology of the Little Entente. The postwar German danger was discovered only when Hitler began to threaten the Republic. But a change of policy toward Hungary was still not being considered, although well before Munich an English friend of Czechoslovakia had warned: It was rumored since the end of 1936 that a German attack was imminent against Czechoslovakia. An improvement of the Hungarian minority's situation is highly desirable, either on the basis of satisfying Hungarian demands, or simply for the sake of justice. If the Czechoslovak government were farsighted, it would not try to extract a high price for the fulfillment of such concessions."⁸

R. W. Seton-Watson (alias Scotus Viator) has actually noticed already in the aftermath of the First World War that not everything was right with the "solution" of the Hungarian question. He was astounded by the nationalist land-reform Hungary's rival neighbors have carried out on Hungarian ethnic territories at the expense of the Hungarian populations.⁹ Indeed, many things were not right as far as Czechoslovakia's Hungarians were concerned, Hence there was enough cause for bitter feelings in 1938. Who could anybody expect the Hungarian minority to forget its national grievances and adjust its feelings to the anti-Fascist interests of the European balance of power?

The pro-Czechoslovak stand taken by the Hungarian anti-Fascist left in 1938 could hardly have affected the sentiments of the Hungarian minority as a whole. The leftists could stage a few successful demonstrations. But the leftists themselves, in particular the Communists, were in disarray in 1938, not to speak of the many disappointments that weakened their influence already well before 1938 among the masses. We cannot place the blame for the lack of an anti-Fascist mood on the Hungarian masses alone, or on their leaders. Above all, the Czechoslovak regime's ruling classes, their narrow-minded, anachronistic nationality policy are to be blamed.

No wonder that, in spite of the not particularly attractive traits of the Horthy regime, South Slovakia's Hungarian population was in favor of return to Hungary. This mood was noticeable already at the time of the communal elections in May 1938. By late summer, and certainly by early fall, open irredentism became quite obvious. Moreover, Sándor Balogh rightly summed up the "choices" when he wrote in retrospect: At that time [in 1938], the Hungarian national minority in Czechoslovakia could no longer choose between the bourgeois democratic Czechoslovakia and the Fascist Horthy regime in Hungary, but only between an autonomous Slovakia under the totalitarian Fascist regime of Tiso, and the Hungary of Horthy." ¹⁰

It is hypocritical to ask: why didn't the overwhelming majority of the Hungarian minority in Czechoslovakia demonstrate its patriotic loyalty to the Republic during the crisis of 1938? Everybody knows that such a patriotism did not exist and could not have existed. The ruling class of the ruling nation itself did not want it to exist.

No less hypocritical was the charge of betrayal. For where there is no genuine loyalty there can be no real betrayal either. The Czechoslovak majority itself was not sure how to sort out the so-called traitors. In the first years after the war, the national minorities as a whole were charged with treason. After 1948 for a while, under Communist rule, a certain measure of Marxist objectivity has been practiced by judging individual cases from a class point of view. However, after the mid-196O's, a relapse into nationalist prejudices has gained ground again, and, in the l970s, Slovak historiography returned all the way to the indiscriminately biased points of view of 1945, with Samuel Cambel's work on the postwar agrarian question in Slovakia in the lead.¹¹

Paradoxically, right after the war, occasionally the historical truth came to light more sharply on certain occasions than in the works of Slovak historians. For instance, General Bohuslav Eèer, head of the Czechoslovak delegation to the Nuremberg trials truthfully admitted: "The our country the role of the fifth column was played by the Sudeten Germans and Tiso's [Slovak] L'udáks."¹² In the judicial commentary on Tiso's death sentence, too, a listing of real forces that contributed to the destruction of the Republic, no mention was made of the Hungarians: "The cause of the destruction of the Czechoslovak Republic was not its incapacity to defend itself, but inner political disintegration precipitated by the [Slovak] Hlinka party and its cooperation with the Germans."¹³ Also, Igor Daxer, president of the National Court of Bratislava, has termed the Hlinka parry's cooperation with the Sudeten Germans as crucial in Czechoslovakia's destruction. He wrote in his memoirs: "The first step was taken by the lifetime leader of the People's Party, Ondrej Hlinka, on February 8, 1938, at Ru_omberok, a month before the [Austrian] Anschluss, when he reached an agreement with K. H. Frank, Kundt, and Karmasin - representatives of Konrad Henlein-on all essential aspects of the Struggle for autonomy ¹⁴

However, as time went on, the destructive role of the Hlinka party came to be described in an ever more muted tone in the works of Slovak historians.

In the course of the postwar anti-Hungarian hate campaign much was said about the destructive anti-State activities of János Esterházy, political leader of the Hungarian minority. Listed among his crimes was his "siding" with the struggle for Slovak autonomy in co-operation with the Sudeten Germans. Curiously, the autonomist Hlinka Party's struggle, and its collaboration with the Germans, is no more regarded as too much of a crime by Slovak historiography; nor is it remembered that, in addition to the Hungarian and Sudeten German political leadership, a Slav family member, the Ukrainian Piesèák, too, was "siding" with the Slovak autonomists.¹⁵

In particular, Esterházy's meeting with Henlein's lieutenant, K. H. Frank, in the summer of 1938, has been treated since 1945 as a capital Hungarian crime.¹⁶ Frank, appointed Bohemia's Reich Protector by Hitler in 1942, following the Heydrich assassination, came to be known as "the executioner" of the Czech nation, On the ground of Esterházy's single meeting with Frank four years before Frank's appointment as Bohemia's Reich Protector, the postwar bate campaign declared the Hungarian minority collectively guilty of complicity in the Lidice and Le_áky mass murders organized by Frank! This absurd charge against the Hungarian minority was brought up even at the Paris peace conference in 1946.¹⁷

The identification of Hungarians with the Fascist mentality was not limited to the Hungarian minority of Southern Slovakia. The postwar anti-Hungarian propaganda in Czechoslovakia denounced the entire Hungarian nation as the outstanding European representative of Fascist anti-Semitism and national oppression. An image has thus been created of the Hungarians as inferior people. And to top national humiliation: Communist-sponsored so-called "national self-criticism" in postwar Hungary encouraged views similar to those of the Czechoslovak anti-Hungarian propaganda.

This was the postwar state of official opinion propagated in the Danube region in matters pertaining to the Hungarians. In closed scientific circles, however, the truth has slowly been brought to light even in Czechoslovakia. For instance, at a scientific conference on prewar minorities, held in 1974, the Czech Jozef Kolejka no longer placed the Hungarians in the forefront of anti-Semitism and national oppression. In his words: "The Jews were exposed to repression to varying degrees, most strongly in Poland and Rumania, somewhat less in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. . . National oppression was most pronounced in Rumania and Poland."¹⁸

To set the record straight as to the policy of the Hungarian United Party in prewar Czechoslovakia (of which Janos Esterhazy was one of the leaders): before Munich, in 1938, the Hungarian political leadership in Czechoslovakia had no clear idea of the future. They were hesitant of cooperation with the Sudeten Germans. For instance, Kunzel, a Sudeten German member of the Czechoslovak Parliament, expressed his concern over the lack of cooperation with the Hungarian minority. In an interview with István Bethlen, the well-known Hungarian statesman, Kunzel expressed the wish of the Sudeten German leadership that "pressure should be exerted from Hungary on the leaders of the Hungarian minority in Czechoslovakia, in order to encourage cooperation with the Sudeten Germans in joint actions against the Czechoslovak state ideology."¹⁹ In the l930s, during the appeasement period, Hungarian anti-State activism in Czechoslovakia was launched hesitatingly, and did not become a mass movement until September 1938.

As for the Slovaks of Czechoslovakia, the Situation was quite different. The truth comes to light even from published Slovak sources. The conservative Slovak bourgeois movement lead by Ondrej Hlinka following World War I grew step by step into a Fascist movement. It adjusted itself readily to the Hitler era in the appeasement of the 1930. Yet, even observers with some sense of objectivity are ready to blame the "irredentist minorities" for the Hlinka Party's total "fascization." Thus, we read in a postwar analysis of the Slovak antonomist movement by L. Lipscher: "In the spring of 1938, the process of fascization developed into a nationalist aggressivity through steady cooperation with the irredentist minorities ²⁰

Slovak historical writers (Cambel, Vietor, Purgat, and others) treat the political party of the Hungarian minority simply as a Fascist party; they have to, in order to justify the postwar anti-Hungarian reprisals. But there are a few exceptions to this willful interpretation. According to L. Lipscher: "The truth regarding the times of the first Republic is that the only representative of Fascist movement in Slovakia would be the Hlinka Party. . . ."²¹ Lipscher dates the Fascist orientation of HIinka's Slovak People's Party from 1936, the date of the Party congress at Piest'any. According to Lipscher, Hlinka's party became "Fascist" in 1936 because it accepted the totalitarian principles of "one nation, one party, one leader." One may add to Lipscher's story of "fascization" that anti-Semitic propaganda appeared regularly in the Slovák, the Hlinka party's daily, since the 1930s.

The impact of Munich completed the fascization of the Slovak People's Party. A week after Munich, a decisive step was the fusion of all Slovák political parties carried out by the Zilina agreement of October 6, 1938. This marked the end of the quite significant role the Czechoslovak Social Democratic and Agrarian parties had played for twenty years in Slovákia. The new united Slovak political leadership ignored the draft-constitution of post-Munich hyphenated Czechoslovakia, a work of the Agrarian and Social Democratic parties, although the draft endorsed the program of the Slovak autonomists. Published after the war by Ivan Dérer, a Slovak Social Democrat, the draft-constitution's leading principle, revising the relationship between Czechs and Slovaks, was the consolidation of Slovak autonomy ²² On the other hand, the draft took no notice of Slovakia's Hungarian minority, because it took for granted that Slovakia will loose the Hungarian inhabited southern borderlands. Or was the omission perhaps a premature first step toward the postwar concept of a homogeneous Slovak nation-state with no Hungarian minority? Certainly, after the Second World War, the Socialist-Nationalist Ivan Deter became one of the most determined spokesman for southern Slovakia's "de-Magyarization."

The United Hungarian Party (as the bourgeois-conservative nationalist party of the Hungarian minority was called since 1936) is described by Slovak historians as a "separatist irredentist" party. This is a label arrived at by a posteriori oversimplification. Even though by 1938, the party did -have separatist aspirations, and Hungarian revisionist propaganda always had an impact on the Hungarian minorities, the party had its own legally approved program, and was functioning accordingly. Anyway, there was no realism in irredentism before 1938 and the Hungarian political leadership knew it. Irredentist movements would have been promptly liquidated by the Czechoslovak authorities the well-known Tuka incident of 1929 is a case in point.

Janics: Czechoslovak Policy and the Hungarian Minority