Janics: Czechoslovak Policy and the Hungarian Minority

THE PEOPLE'S COURTS IN ACTION

In Czechoslovakia, the explicit task of the people's courts was to punish so-called war crimes. Roughly speaking, there were three types of war crimes, rather arbitrarily, recognized by Czechoslovak laws: acts motivated by Fascist ideology; disloyalty to the Czechoslovak state either before or during the war; collaboration with the enemy under occupation. The peculiarity of the Czechoslovak people's courts persecuting war criminals was that they meted out justice according to different judicial standards, and assessed the individual cases according to different ideology, depending on whether the accused was Czech, Slovak, German, or Hungarian. The German and Hungarian population was collectively deprived of civil rights already by the Presidential decrees of 1945, therefore it could not realistically be expected that they would receive fair trials. Yet the political corruption of the people's courts led to such distortions of justice, especially against the Hungarian minority of Slovakia that it surprised even those who expected the worst.

The people's courts in Slovakia did not conceal their bias. Their manifest purpose was to scare the Hungarian population and force it to flee the country. In other words, the people's courts in action, by different means, continued the government's expulsion policy. The scare tactics of the people's courts was directed in particular against the intelligentsia as a part of the liquidation strategy against the Hungarian minority. According to Slovak calculations, if the better educated Hungarians were forced to flee, the people left behind would find it hard to organize themselves as a distinct ethnic group. The people's courts were thus assigned an important role in the final solution of the Hungarian question in postwar "democratic" Czechoslovakia.

Stretching and exaggerating the concept of war crimes against the Hungarians to no end, it looked as if the Hungarian minority in Slovakia had been burdened with war crimes more heavily than any other people of Europe; as if this fragment of the Hungarian nation, half a million or So strong, had been one of the principle causes and culprits of the Second World War. Later generations of Hungarians and non-Hungarians, unfamiliar with the facts, might conclude from the records of the people's courts that the Hungarian minority of Slovakia had sunk already before the Second World War came, they were ready to commit the most abject crimes in brief, that the Hungarians of Slovakia were a band of criminals. The supposedly scholarly monograph on the people's courts written by the Slovak historian Anton Rasla would only further confirm such an impression.¹

Law 33/1945, establishing and regulating the activities of the people's courts in Slovakia, was promulgated on May 15,1945, shortly after the promulgation of the Kosice government program in liberated Czechoslovakia. The two were linked by both letter and spirit. The Kosice pro. gram has laid the foundation for the theory of the Hungarian minority's collective guilt against the Republic. The people's courts in action were to furnish the evidence for that theory. The law of retribution enabled the people's courts to deal more strictly with the Hungarians, since almost any organized Hungarian activity in Slovakia could be declared as "Fascist" and thus automatically serve as an evidence of any type of war crime, in particular in its vaguest form: collaboration with the enemy.

Charges of war crimes were meant to provide moral justification for the general policy aimed against the Hungarians: expulsion. When the Potsdam conference failed to authorize Czechoslovakia to follow a policy of expulsion against the Hungarian minority, the greater became the effort of the people's courts to furnish moral justification for such a policy. The law made the work of the courts easy by putting the Hungarian State under the Horthy regime on an equal footing with the Hitlerite Third Reich. The overwhelming majority of Czechoslovakia's Hungarian minority lived during the war in Horthy Hungary; that fact alone could be easily manipulated to produce some sort of evidence of a war crime. Since one of the principal trademarks of the Slovak law, similar to the Nuremberg charter, was the principle of retroactivity, nothing was easier than to prove that a Hungarian living under the Horthy regime committed a war crime against Czechoslovakia.

A network of local people's courts began to operate shortly after Slovakia's liberation. Major war criminals were prosecuted by the county people's courts, and the top ones by the National Court in Bratislava. The greatest number of cases had been dealt with by 1946, although quite a few cases dragged on until the summer of 1947.

The first summary of the activities of the people's courts was published in March 1948 by the Slovak Secretary of Justice, Dr. Julius Viktory. According to this first account, only 19 percent of those condemned as war criminals were Slovaks.² However, according to Rasla's monograph, quoted above and published in 1969, the final percentage of Slovaks was 28.9 percent (2295 persons). The Hungarians took the lead with 59.74 percent (4812 persons); Germans and others made up the rest, 11.77 percent (950 persons).³ In 1946, there were 2.7 million Slovaks, 600,000 Hungarians, and 158,000 Germans living in Slovakia. Taking the size of various nationalities, the statistical ratio is as follows: 0.085 percent of the Slovaks were sentenced for war crimes, as compared to 0.8 percent of the Hungarians and 0.5 percent of the Germans. In other words, the people's courts dealt ten times more severely with the Hungarians, but only about twice as severely with the Germans. It is worth noting that the Czechs were more severe against their own people than the Slovaks. The people's courts in the Czech lands found 0.16 percent of the Czechs guilty (13,284 persons),⁴ which is twice as many as the corresponding number of Slovaks found guilty by the people's c0urts in Slovakia.

The severe punishment of Hungarians in Slovakia can also be measured by comparison with the war crime trials in Hungary. There only 0.17 percent of the population (17,699 persons) were sentenced ⁵ (about the same ratio as Czechs in the Czech lands). The Hungarian minority of Slovakia would thus appear to have been five times as "Fascist" as the Hungarians in Hungary proper. Also, the Hungarians of Slovakia fare far worse than the Sudeten Germans did in the Czech lands. The Czech people's courts sentenced only 0.4 percent (about 14,000 persons) of the Sudenten Germans, which in percentages is about half of the Hungarians condemned by the Slovaks.⁶

Thanks to the Slovak "anti-Fascist" zeal, the Hungarian minority of Czechoslovakia, with 0.8 percent, had set a European record in producing war criminals. Yet the Slovak press still kept urging stricter measures against the Hungarians and as late as 1968, the Slovak historian J. Purgat bemoans the fact that the activity of the people's courts against the Hungarians was not sufficiently effective: "'Even though the data are not yet complete, nevertheless they indicate that the activities of the people's courts were inadequate, especially in the areas inhabited by the Hungarians.

It is characteristic of postwar conditions in Slovakia that anti-Hungarian attitudes could be invoked as a mitigating circumstance by Slovak war criminals. Saòo Mach, Tiso's Minister of Interior, in his war crime trial, defended his approval of the deportation of Jews by saying that he considered the Jews as "90 percent Hungarians," which was termed a "more profound" argument.⁸ Saòo Mach escaped the death sentence.

The Slovak Secretary of Justice, Dr. J. Viktory, squarely admitted the pro-Slovak bias of the people's courts: "I was not guided exclusively by the laws . . . Had I been guided exclusively by the principles of the retribution decrees, we would have had to jail most [Slovak] civil or public servants for decades, and dismiss the rest without exception as collaborators, if only because they served the Fascist regime.

The same spirit of leniency had been shown by the people's courts in action toward members of the National Assembly of Tiso's Slovakia. They were either exonerated or sentenced to but a few months in jail. However, the only openly anti-Fascist member of that Assembly, the Hungarian Deputy János Esterházy, head of the Hungarian Party, was condemned to death as a traitor. In fact, any member of the Hungarian Party could be charged with treason whereas Slovaks even with leading roles in the Hlinka Party were left unmolested. The courts were given a free hand in deciding what was treason and what was not, which political act should be considered Fascist and which should not. The courts had the right to declare, without even having to supply evidence, that the accused Hungarian was "an enemy" of the Czech and Slovak nation. What deeds determined this qualification, never was spelled out with any precision. Ethnic discrimination could prevail unchallenged because of the vague language of the law.

Law 33/1945 on the people's courts in Slovakia defined treason as any act that "significantly promoted the military-political or economic interests of Nazi Germany or Horthy's Hungary." Tiso's Fascist Slovakia, a creation of Hitler, was not placed on equal footing with Nazi Germany. But in Southern Slovakia, those Hungarians who did not "resist" under the Horthy regime since they supported the "Hungarian occupation" by their daily work, could be tried as traitors. This double standard of the courts was supported by the theory of Czechoslovakia's "legal continuity" during the war.¹⁰ In line with this theory, the entire Hungarian population of Southern Slovakia could be charged indiscriminately with treason.

Another Slovak legal definition of war criminals was of no help either to protect the Hungarians against arbitrary persecutions. It spoke of those "who had aided the Fascist occupation force and the traitors at home in any form whatsoever." Since "Fascist occupation" meant Hungarian administration in the territories returned to Hungary in 1938, any Hungarian who had anything to do with that administration could be found guilty. By the same token, any Slovak could have been found guilty of aiding the "traitors at home" namely the Tiso administration of independent Slovakia. However, the people's courts served as much as a shield for the Slovaks as they were used as a weapon against the Hungarians.

Finally, the law defined treason as activities directed against the Czechoslovak Republic from May 21, 1938 (date of partial mobilization following Hitler's annexation of Austria) to October 28, 1945 (liberated Czechoslovakia's first national holiday commemorating the founding of the Republic in 1918). The starting date of this period in particular could have been applicable to Slovak prewar activities in destroying Czechoslovakia with Hitler's assistance. Yet the people's courts, not unlike Czechoslovak historians, have always adhered to the theory that the principal cause of Czechoslovakia's disintegration had been the collaboration between the Sudeten Germans and the Hungarian minority.

Historical evidences brought to light by the Slovaks themselves during the trials of the Slovak war criminals contradict the deliberate falsifications, yet the views of the falsifiers are left unchallenged.

Concerning the controversial question of whose collaboration with whom had been the principal cause of Czechoslovakia's downfall in 1938, it may be worth quoting the following passage from the prosecution's charges at the Tiso trial in 1947:

The leaders of Hlinka's Slovak People's Party openly stated that they did not consider autonomy as an end goal; for some time, Dr. Tiso has stressed that the People's Party was aiming at full sovereignty of the [Slovak] nation . . . Thus the German plan relied on Hlinka's Slovak People's Party and its autonomist program, especially on the separatist and radical wing of this Party. Czechoslovakia could have resisted a German attack, it had an excellent army, which was demonstrated by the mobilization of May 1938, when the Germans did not dare to launch an attack against the country . . . The cause of the destruction of Czechoslovakia was not its inability to defend itself, but the disintegration within brought about by Hlinka's Slovak People's Party and his collaboration with the Germans.¹¹

On the other hand, the defense at the Tiso trial cited the theory also evoked by the Czechoslovak delegation at the peace conference -according to which the disintegration of the Republic was caused by the collaboration of the Sudeten Germans and the Hungarian minority. Significantly, the jury at the Tiso trial rejected this point of view. Tiso was found guilty, sentenced to death, and executed.

The Tiso trial had also touched on the expulsion of the Czechs from Slovakia under the Tiso regime a most sensitive issue since it contradicts the claim of Czech-Slovak national unity as well as the wartime theory of Czechoslovakia's legal continuity. The court, showing great resourcefulness in protecting Czechoslovak interests, blamed the expulsion of Czechs personally on Dr. Ferdinand Ïurèansky, Minister of Foreign Affairs in Tiso's Slovakia.¹² "What a fine example of double standards! The expulsion of five thousand Slovaks from Southern Slovakia under the Horthy regime served to support the charges of Hungarian collective guilt, but the expulsion of twenty times more Czechs from Slovakia under the Tiso regime was blamed on one single person.

The Tiso trial also brought to light some interesting evidences touching on the Vienna Award which returned Southern Slovakia to Hungary on the basis of the controversial ethnic principle. It was revealed that at a Cabinet meeting on October 25, 1938, the Prague Government at Tiso's advice, accepted the Hungarian territorial claims against Czechoslovakia "to the same extent as later determined by the adjudication of Germany and Italy." ¹³ This evidence certainly puts the so-called "Vienna boundary" into somewhat different light than the views denouncing it as an utterly unjust "Fascist" violation of democratic Czechoslovakia's territorial integrity.

In the same context, the minutes of the Prague Cabinet meeting of November 4, 1938, also deserve attention: "Minister of Foreign Affairs Chvalkovsky expressed his appreciation for the attitude of the Slovak Government's ministers [present] at Vienna [during the German-Italian arbitration proceedings on Slovakia's frontiers] . By accepting the Polish demands, they cleared the way for an agreement with Poland without resorting to [German-Italian] adjudication." The Same minutes point out that U_horod became part of Hungary because the Jews of that area sided with the Hungarians."¹⁴

The people's courts in Slovakia were unfair to the Hungarians and lenient to the Slovaks. Their unfairness to the Hungarians did not bother the Slovak sense of justice but the leniency to the Slovaks occasionally did. Thus M. Ferjenèik, head of the Department in charge of Internal Affairs in Slovakia, honestly admitted:

The people's courts which should have been a significant factor in the purification process, did not live up to expectations, and did not fulfill their tasks; all this was the logical outcome of our over-politicized internal conditions . . . In general it can be said that the justice provided by the people's courts was very complex and difficult to understand. If we add the reciprocal concessions made by the [political] parties-the deals, that is, which overlooked certain things on one side in return for similar favors from the other side-it will become pretty clear how this purification process actually worked and how it might have worked for the benefit of our State and our public life.¹⁵

The leniency of the Slovak people's courts toward the Slovaks was not-iced and disapproved by the Czech press, both Communist and bourgeois. Wrote one Czech paper: "Slovakia, in fact, had been completely inter-woven with Fascism under the Tiso regime . . . [today] the lower political leadership in Slovakia includes persons who would have been condemned for collaboration in Bohemia. The problem of Slovak collaboration is intricate and presents no clear solution."¹⁶

Janics: Czechoslovak Policy and the Hungarian Minority