: 04/24/2001 
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Dr. Thomas Reimer
: 04/24/2001
This Webpage is under construction.
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The next ethnic group that became dominant were Slavs. Small groups of Slavic people had moved from the East to live among the local Germans since the 2nd century C.E. In the late 6th century, many more moved into the now nearly empty land and assimilated its German remnants. These Slovak settlements paid tribute to the Awars, a confederation of mainly Turkic nomadic tribes that dominated the Pannonic plain and the surrounding mountain arc called the Carpathian Mountains. After several large plundering sprees to the West, the Awars were decisively beaten by the Frankish-Germanic Empire of Karl the Great (Charlemagne). Their empire dissolved, allowing among else the flourishing, during the 9th century, of a minor kingdom, the not very aptly named "Great Moravian Empire," which was neither an Empire nor centered in Moravia, but in Neutra (slovak Nitra), in Western Slovakia. Owing to constant tribal wars, the population remained small, by the 9th century at best around 130,000 people, living chiefly in the main river valleys. During that time, German priests lived in Slovakia, and possibly settlers in the areas near Pressburg.
In the South, the customs station of Pressburg was developped into a German city in the 12th century. The royal charters of 1217 and 1405 specified that only Germans could become city freeholders, (in practice this meant people recognized by the community as Germans. There was extensive intermarriage, and since the Middle Ages, many Carpathian Germans have Slavic and Magyar names, while many local Magyars and Slovaks have German surnames), and only German and Latin used as official languages. But after the Hungarian Kingdom was annihilated by the Turks at the battle of Mohacs, Pressburg became the capital of what was left of Hungary, and the refuge of many Hungarian noblemen. They chafed at being excluded from voting privileges in their own capital. After 60 years of agitation, the Hungarian parliament forced the city to amend its charter and give Magyars of noble status the rights of freeholders. But Pressburg was close to the core German area, only 25 miles from Vienna, and received many new immigrants from Bavaria, Upper Austria and Bohemia. It also was surrounded by many German villages and small cities, such as Boesing and Limbach, and the rich Schuett-Island to the South, with its 12 German villages. This was important, for the mortality rate in medieval cities was high even in the best of times, and required a constant inflow of migrants from the countryside to survive.The German character of the city survived until 1867, when its charter was voided.
In the 12th century, Hungarians kings invited Germans to settle the empty mountain fastness of the
Zips. The Germans were to guard the mountain passes, part of an important trade route to the
Baltic, and develop mining, if possible. To reward them for coming, the Magyars gave the settlers large
farms and extensive corporate autonomy. It included the right to use the German language and bar
non-Germans from freeholdership. By 1241, the Zips had 4,000 mostly German inhabitants, mainly from the
Rhineland but others from South Tyrol (Eisackstal, notably, who founded Eisdorf), brought as dowry to
Hungary by Gertrud of Andechs-Meran. But in April 1241, a Mongol army under Batu-Khan annihilated the
Hungarian army at the village of Muhi on the river Sajo (slovak Slana), and then devastated much of the
Hungarian Kingdom. In the Zips, a century of work was destroyed, and about half of the people killed by the
Mongols.The others survived a heroic siege on the Zufluchtsstein (Stone of Refuge, Lapis Refugii), a fortified
mountain plateau, under their commander Jordan von Gargau, ancestor of the locally
important noble family of Görgey. After the Mongols left in 1242, immigration resumed. In 1271, most
of the area was consolidated into a German county, which remained autonomous till 1876. An important
concession was that the governor, the count of the Zips, was not appointed by the king but elected for life
by an assembly of county notables, city mayors and priests. By 1300, 26 small cities and over 100 hamlets
flourished. The cultural centers were Kesmark and Leutschau (today Levoc"a). But the position of the
Zipser was weakened by the lack of new settlers, repelled by the harsh climate and not needing to emigrate
after the pandemic of the 1340s-1350s, which killed over a third of Europe's population, had reduced
overpopulation in Germany. In addition, the Hungarian kings mortgaged 13 Zipser cities to Poland from
1412 to 1749. The Poles drained the local economy and pressured cities to accept Slovaks as freeholders.
The worst were the frequent wars, especially the wars with the Czech Hussites in the 15th
century and the Turks in the 16th-17th centuries, followed by civil wars between pro- and anti-Habsburg
Magyar nobles, and the suppression of the largely German protestants. For each army, the German cities,
not the Slovak villages, were the most tempting targets for plunder and murder. When the area finally
became peaceful in the 18th century, Germans were a minority in the Zips. Small cities such as Rosenberg
(Ruzomberok), Deutschlipsch (Nemecka Lipc"a, s. 1946 Partisanska Lupc"a), Gross-Steffelsdorf,
Siebenbrot etc, founded by Germans, were now entirely populated by Slovaks.
After the disastrous defeat against the Ottoman Turks at Mohacs in 1526, the Kingdom of Hungary shrank, until the 1690s, to the sliver on the left, with the capital moved to Pressburg. The remaining Hungarian areas were subjected to frequent Turkish raids. The "Roman Empire" may confuse some readers--it is the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, or First German Empire, which lasted from 843 AD (when Charlemagne's Empire was split between his 3 grandsons) to 1806, when Napoleon forced it to dissolve.
The Map is a courtesy from the historical map collection online at the University of Texas at Austin.
The Hungarian kings hoped that the Germans would develop mining, but the Zips had few minerals save some copper in the lower Zips. But plenty of minerals were found in the Hauerland, about 50 miles to the West. Small copper and iron deposits had been worked by Germans in the 11th century. In the late 13th and 14th century the Hungarian kings began to finance large-scale mining, and imported thousands of miners from Thueringia and Silesia. Within a century, over 20 mining towns developped. The largest were the "golden" Kremnitz (Kremnica), the "silver" Schemnitz (Banska St^iavnica), and the "copper" Neusohl (Banska Bistryca). The churches built during that era are among the most beautiful in Eastern Europe. But the ore was depleted in the 16th century. In the Zips, the settlers had received large farms just in case the wealth from copper did not materialize. But in the Hauerland, ore was a certainty, and the settlers received only small plots of land. The area was mountainous, steep and infertile, with forests eroded from mining, and immiserated. By the early 19th century, many cities were near-ghost towns unable to preserve their German character. Only in the market and government center of Kremnitz did a large German population survive. In 1541, 92% of its people were German. In 1880, 69% still were that.
For instance, in the Zips, by 1847, a third, or 63,833 of the county's population of 191,523 was Carpathian German, while half was Slovak. By 1880, the number of Germans had fallen to 48,169, and 38,434 in 1910, that is less than a quarter. The county's overall population had declined as well, from 191,523 in 1847 to 172,881 in 1880 and 171,725 in 1910, mainly through emigration to the United States.But as important was "magyarization." In 1847, only 500 Magyars lived in Zipser County. By 1880, there were 3,526 and in 1910 18,658 --the majority being assimilated Germans and Slovaks! In Pressburg, in 1850, of 42,238 inhabitants, 31,509 or 74.6%, were German, 7.4% Magyars, mostly officials, and Slovaks, mostly workers and servants, 17.9%. But by 1880, Germans fell to 30,432 of 48,006 people, or 63.4%, by 1890 31394 of 52411,or 59.9%, by 1900 30953 of 61537, or 50.3%. Then they became a minority in their own city, being 36,729 of 73,459 people, or 41.9%, in 1910. Slovaks still were only 14.8% of the city's population.
To defend their existence would have been difficult at best. The 180,000 Carpathian Germans in 1910 were only 5% of the population of Upper Hungary, spoke three dialects that were not easily mutually understood, and the economic interests of each area were different, too. Also, a substantial number of the bourgeoisie now mistook their ancestors' traditional loyalty to the Hungarian state with the obligation of becoming Magyars, in order to create a strong Hungarian nation-state. The long-term survival of Carpathian Germans was doubtful. But then came World War I. After suffering war, hunger, and civil war in early 1919, the Feldivek was torn by the victorious Allies from the state it belonged to for a millenium, and incorporated, without popular consultation, into an entity that had never existed before. This "Czechoslovakia" had a short but unhappy history that would result, a.e., in the destruction of the Carpathian German people.
But it was not a true democracy. For the Czechs considered themselves the sole indigenous people, and the other ethnic groups as mere "guests" living on Czech sufferance. This incredible notion was the root cause of the dissolution of the CSR. The Czechs created a centralized state, in which power over local matters lay with the heads of the Z"upans, (counties), who, like the prefects in France then, were appointed by the central government to control the locals, not to represent them. The Czechs pretended that Slovaks did not exist by inventing a "Czechoslovak" ethnicity that made Slovaks into dumb country cousins who needed to be taught, forcibly if necessary, their "true" ethnicity. They mistreated Magyars and the Sudeten Germans who lived in the mountain rim since the 12th century. Before 1919, about 300,000 Czechs formed 10% of the Sudetenland's population. Most of these had moved there in the past generation only, attracted by the growing industries, and even, in same areas, altering the ethnic balance. Budweis and Pilsen, for instance, good German burghs till the 1850s, and justly famous for their beer, had by 1910 Czech majorities. But now, from 1920 to 1938, in order to alter the ethnic balance of the entire area, and push in as many places as possible the number of Germans below 20%, after which they could not legally use their language, the Czech government pumped 400,000 Czechs from the inner part of Bohemia to Sudeten areas, gave them German-owned farms whose owners had been expropriated under a land reform that hit mainly German and Magyar landowners, and a monopoly on civil service jobs. There were many other forms of discrimination, despite a formal equality of civil rights. (An apt comparision would be the status of the Arab population of Israel, theorerically equal to Jewish Israelis, but in practice not.) The scandalized Sudeten Germans protested to the League of Nations, without success, then demanded autonomy, and, after they were repressed, eventual reunification with Germany, to which Bohemia, after all, had belonged until 1866, when the German Confederation fell apart. Hitler merely skillfully used, for his own plans, a situation created by the Czech political elite. The Czech/Sudeten German conflict would result, among else, in the destruction of the Carpathian Germans, which is why its final course needs to be understood.
The situation became worse in 1935, after the resignation of president Masaryk, who had tried to govern with some fairness. His successor was the political mountebank Dr. Eduard Benes", leader of the aptly-named Czech National Socialist Party, who had been the country's foreign minister. His policies finalized the alienation of most German, Magyar, Polish and Ruthenian citizens, and of a substantial number of Slovak citizens. Yet Sudeten Germans were divided about a reunification under Hitler, especially Catholic conservatives, led by Logman von Auen, and the Social-Democrats, led by Wenzel Jaksch. Of course, there were Sudeten German Nazis, too, but they were not a large group. Though the CSR had not earned the loyalty of its subject ethnic groups, until the very end, Sudeten Germans still only asked for autonomy. When the CSR in 1938 called a general mobilization to show Hitler the will to fight, 95% of Sudeten German men obeyed.Even Konrad Henlein, the leader of the Sudetendeutsche Partei, demanded publicly never more than a Swiss-style autonomy, again in his April 24, 1938 speech in Karlsbad, but also during his visit to London in May,even in his private interview with Winston Churchill. But Benes" and the Czech leadership still refused. On September 8, 1938, after the ethnic strife had attracted Hitler's attention, Bishop Dr.Tiso, head of the Slovak autonomists, Dr. Szüllö and Count Eszterhazy, (Magyars), K. H. Frank, (Sudeten Germans) met Benes" a last time to get a minority statute.They were roughly rebuffed. Only now, on the 15th, did Henlein demand union with Germany. The next day Benes" banned all autonomist parties. Henlein's new demand received popular support, for after their latest humiliation, many Sudeten Germans were through with Prague rule.Their alienation was the result of policies pursued by the Czech government for twenty years, it was not created by Hitler. Czech oppression was well documented, such as by the fact-finding mission of Lord Runciman in 1938, which convinced the British government to conclude the 29 September 1938 Munich Agreement, not to "appease" an aggressor, but to correct a blatant injustice. Had Benes" given autonomy, Hitler's policy would have become an open act of aggression, and the British, French and Sudeten German response probably different. But Czech policies allowed Hitler to pose as a Wilsonian liberator. Benes" resigned on October 5, and left for London amidst popular revulsion, now that his nationalistic policy had ended in disaster. Emil Hacha was elected president, a humanistic old gentleman who desired to conciliate the ethnic minorities. But he would not have the time. In March 1939, Hitler used riots between Czech and Slovaks, and Czech violence against the small German population of inner Bohemia (most cities had German populations since the middle ages, including Prague), to occupy Bohemia and Moravia, and set up a puppet government. Slovakia became independent. Hitler, as known today, did not care much about the suffering of the Sudeten Germans. His goal had been to disarm a main French ally that was an obstacle to his goal of becoming the master of Europe. But no one in Fall 1938 could have known Hitler's ultimate motives and plans.
As the former British Prime Minister Lloyd George, who had been co-responsible for its creation in 1919, concluded on the main cause of the disintegration of the CSR in 1938-1939:
"The Czechs were specially favoured by the Allies. The result was the recognition of the
polyglot and incoherent state of Czechoslovakia....Had the Czech leaders, in time and without
waiting for the menacing pressure of Germany, redeemed their promise to grant local autonomy to
the various races in their Republic on the lines of the Swiss Confederation, the present troubles
would have been averted."
(Lloyd George, The Truth about the Peace Treaties, 1953, p. 948, 952, cited in J.M.
Kirschbaum, Slovakia: Nation at the Crossroads of Europe, 1960, p. 210-211)
Many Sudeten Germans cheered the Munich agreement. It was not because they now endorsed Nazism, but out of relief that Czech oppression would end, without the war that seemed so likely in the past months. Also, the Nazi dictatorship did not yet seem worse than Mussolini's Italy or other authoritarian regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. The relief of many was not proof that they had accepted the racist ideology of the Nazis, as was alleged by Benes" after the war to justify their genocide. In any case, the Sudeten Germans had not been asked their opinion: Hitler opposed a plebiscite, fearing a less than overwhelming welcome, Benes" for it might encourage Slovaks, Hungarians and Ruthenians to ask for one as well. And about 50,000 Sudeten Germans even left homes and families to go into exile instead of living under Hitler, such as Wenzel Jaksch. This was a large proportion for such a small people. Others tried to resist as well as they could. Estimates of those killed by the Nazis vary, as, in order to minimize the extent of resistance among Germans, the Nazis often camouflaged the true causes of arrest and execution, but the Sudeten GermanLandsmannschaft webpage states at least 1000 Social-democrats, and perhaps the same number of non-leftist resisters,were killed for opposing the regime, while Prof. Alfred Schickel noted 20,000 "victims of the Nazis," which probably includes those who survived jail or concentration camps, in addition to most of 35,000 Sudeten German Jews recorded by the 1930 Census, a perfectly integrated group that had participated in the struggle against Czech oppression.
Considering their situation between hammer and anvil, this was a creditable record. By comparision, the official 1946 Report by the Benes" government spoke of 35-55000 killed Czechs, but including people that were victims of the war, but not of the Nazis, such as those killed by Allied bombing while working in Germany, and those executed for offenses that were not political. The Nazis also killed 6,000 Romanies from Bohemia and Moravia, and about 77,000 Jews, plus another 20,000 Gypsies and 100,000 Jews in Slovakia and the Carpatho-Ukraine. The Gypsies had suffered cruel discrimination in the CSR, and can not morally be claimed, once dead, among "Czech" victims. Neither can most Jewish victims, since they had considered themselves not as Czechs, but as ethnic Jews, or Magyars or Germans of Jewish heritage, and registered as such in the Census. Quite rightly, the 1946 Report (unlike today's Czech government), included under Czech victims only those Jews and Gypsies who had registered their ethnicity as Czech in the 1930 Census. But the 1946 Report omitted to note that many of the victims were denounced, arrested, sentenced, and executed by Czech collaborators. A little known fact in the West is that, unlike Poles, Czechs had their Vichy-style government that ran the country on behalf of Adolf Hitler, under the general supervision of a Reichsprotektor (Nazi viceroy). The old and ill Hacha remained president, while the country was run first by prime-minister general Elias", and then by general Radola Gajda, head of the prewar fascist VLAJKA movement. Most Czechs were passive, the country had a very low rate of resistance, and a sizable proportion actively supported the Nazis, such as the industrialists Skoda and Bata, or Lida Baarova, the actress. The concentration camp for Gypsies at Lety, established before Hitler's occupation of the Czech part of Bohemia, remained entirely under Czech administration. (Even today, there is no museum or large monument to the Gypsies murdered there by Czech guards. A small stone square notes the place, while most of the former camp area is used by a pig-farm). It was well evident then, at least to people with a decent heart, that guilt and innocence in Bohemia were not tied to ethnicity.
Before 1918, Carpathian Germans had had few contacts with Sudeten Germans. Inter-regional contacts had been rather with other South-East Germans in the old Kingdom of Hungary, such as the Banat Suebians,(see Donauschwaben) Transsylvanian Saxons, Germans of Budapest, and others. Yet it was the Sudeten-German/Czech conflict that would destroy their people.
For Carpathian Germans, the CSR minority laws were an improvement compared to the harsher Magyar rule, even though their second-class status hurt, as well as the elimination of the historic German names of many cities from official use. The most poignant change happened to Pressburg, called Prezpurok in Slovak and Posony in Magyar. In 1919, the new Czech government ordered "Bratislava" as the sole name allowed for public use, a name invented by nationalistic professors in the late 19th century. In the 1920s, Carpathian Germans rebuilt their school system on a religious basis, and cooperatives to help their peasantry. The Carpathian German intelligentsia began to have more regular contacts with each other and with German-speaking countries. This increased the desire for political unity. In the early 1920s, the politically inexperienced Carpathian Germans formed many small parties, often as junior partners of the National Hungarian Party. This angered Slovaks, since that party agitated for a return of Hungarian rule. By the late 1920s, the pro-German Karpatendeutsche Partei (KDP) and the pro-Hungarian Zipser Partei competed for Carpathian German votes. After 1935, each party had one deputy and one Senator in Prague. As the oppression of minorities continued, the KDP began to adopt a more aggressive stance in favor of autonomy, and in 1935 joined the Sudetendeutsche Partei. As noted earlier, the SDP was ideologically not a party close to the Third Reich at the time, there was nothing sinister about that merger. Franz Karmasin, 1901-1970, a Sudeten German engineer who lived in Slovakia, became head of the KDP.
In March 1939, Tiso and other Slovak politicians contacted several officials in Austria to see what Hitler's attitude might be should Slovakia opt for independence. Suddenly, Hitler invited Tiso to Berlin on March 7. The Czech government at once deposed Tiso, declared martial law, arrested over 200 Slovak leaders, and brought in Czech troops from the West. There were bloody riots between Czechs and Slovaks. For Hitler, the situation was perfect to advance his goals while seeming a reasonable statesman concerned with regional peace. He ordered his troops to Prague after successfully pressuring president Emil Hacha to request his protection to maintain order. On March 14, 1939, the Slovak provincial parliament unanimously voted for independence, and Tiso was elected president. Slovakia was recognized by 27 countries, Germany, Poland, Hungary, the Vatican, France, Great Britain, Sweden, Spain, Belgium, Lithuania, Ecuador, Costa Rica, China and Siam, to list a few. It were not only the allies and satellites of the Third Reich who recognized the right of the Slovak people to be independent--despite less than ideal circumstances.
The First Slovak Republic satisfied many of its citizens, even though, like many other European countries at the time, it was an authoritarian state with many similarities to Franco's Spain. It had freed Slovaks from Czech rule, yet prevented their reannexation by Hungary. The alliance with the Third Reich, the price for independence, seemed in the first years not a great burden to most people. Hitler was not interested in Slovakia, left it much diplomatic leeway, and did not have many troops there until after the begining of the putsch of Summer 1944. The economy boomed. Until 1945 people did not experience the food shortages suffered in much of Europe. In addition, Hitler fought the Soviet Union. And while knowledge of Nazi atrocities spread slowly--the Holocaust had begun, in secret, only in Winter 1941/42--the prewar Stalinist massacres (8 million dead men, women, children by 1936, according to Robert Conquest, killed because they belonged to the wrong ethnicity, like Ukrainians, or social class), were well-known and scared people who, whether of Slovak, Magyar or German ethnicity, were in general of a rural and conservative Christian mindset.
Independent Slovakia was smaller than the Slovak province of the CSR. The new state had to give in 1938 certain border districts,
about 100 square miles, to Poland (regained in 1939, together with the boundary losses of 1919), and 11,000 km2 to Hungary.
Slovakia had in 1930 49.021 km2, in 1940 38.055 km2. This altered the ethnic composition of the country.
In 1930, the population had been 3.3 million, of which 66.8% were Slovaks, 17.2% Magyars, 4.4% Germans, 3.6% Czechs
(mostly civil servants and postwar profiteers who left in 1938-39), 2.7% Ruthenes, 0.9% Gypsies, 1.9% Jews by ethnicity. The Census
counted 136,737 Jews by religion, but only 65,385 Jews by ethnicity. Most of the others of Jewish faith in Slovakia registered as ethnic
Magyars, and 9,945, mainly in Pressburg (that is over half of the 14,882 Pressburg Jews by religion), as ethnic Germans--which they
hardly would have done if their Christian German/Magyar neighbors had been rabid anti-semites. In 1940, Slovakia had 2.65 million
people, 84.8% were Slovaks,1% Czechs, 5.1% German, 2.6% Magyar, 2.4% Ruthenes, 3.2% Jews. The Census counted 87,617 Jews by
ethnicity and 86,629 by religion. Few Jews, this time, reported as Germans or Magyars, perhaps were not allowed to do so, for Slovakia
had passed its first anti-semitic laws then. In 1940, 135,408 Carpathian Germans were counted, compared to 147,501 in 1930, reflecting the
loss of Jewish Germans, and of several thousand in the territories returned to Hungary, and in Engerau and Theben, returned to
Austria/Germany. Around 35,000 Germans lived in and around Pressburg, 50,000 each in the Hauerland and the Zips.
The position of the Carpathian Germans improved in several ways. In many formerly German Lutheran parishes, Slovaks were now the majority and pushed their language in school and church. The Hungarian and Czech regimes had not allowed them to separate, but the new regime allowed in 1940 the creation of the German Lutheran Synod of Slovakia. Its only bishop,Johann Scherer,1889-1966, and his young secretary Rev. Desider Alexy, 1905-1963, worked to restore cultural pride in their flock. The July 1939 Constitution gave Germans three seats in Parliament, a state secretary, full autonomy in cultural and civil matters, and two battalions in the Slovak army. Magyars received similar rights.
However, the enjoyment of this autonomy was limited by two problems. One was that the Slovak state gave Karmasin's DP a lot of administrative power over the daily lives of ordinary Carpathian Germans. This reflected the corporative structure of the new state (The Magyar Party also was made the sole legal representative of the Magyar minority). But the Nazis also expected the DP to blindly obey orders from Berlin, which many Carpathian Germans found distasteful. Many DP members rejected the racist parts of the Nazi program. Because of the reality of life in a police state, opposition was rarely voiced publicly, yet as Slovakia remained independent, the Nazis were never able to totally control Carpathian Germans or even the DP. And so, suspected of being soft on doctrine, the DP was closely watched by the Gestapo, while the Grenzbote, its organ, was banned from sale in Germany throughout the war. Another threat was that, influenced by the spirit of the times, many Slovaks began to dream of an ethnically homogenous state. Germans were now the largest remaining ethnic minority, and replaced Magyars as the main irritant to Slovak nationalists. During the 1940 Census, the Slovaks, eager to show that they were a majority in their capital, pressured the local Germans, still a fifth of the population, to register as Slovaks, and were angered when the latter resisted.The government opened schools in German areas and forced children from mixed marriages to attend. It allowed members of any ethnic group to register as Slovaks, but not the reverse. Government employees had to speak Slovak in public and private, and were pressured to change their surnames.Though officially aimed at "magyarone" Slovaks (Who had adopted Hungarian before 1918), in practice this targeted Germans and Magyars as well. The final aim, assimilation, was obvious. And though Slovakia was an ally of the Third Reich, they received little help from its ambassador. Still, the Republic is remembered by its Magyar and German citizens as having been much fairer to its minorities than earlier and later regimes. And this was indeed true--save, unfortunatly, for one of them.
A shadow over the Republic was the Holocaust. Prodded by Hitler, but also by the desire to create a Slovak middle-class, the Slovak parliament passed the first anti-semitic laws on April 18, 1939, instituting quotas in the liberal professions, followed in June 1940 by the forcible sale of Jewish-owned property to Slovak "Arizators." In 1941, another 51 anti-Jewish laws were passed, with scant opposition, though on September 9, during the vote on the Jewish Code, there was a scandal after, out of protest, Rev. Josef Steinhuebl, one of the Carpathian German deputies, refused to vote, while Count Janos Eszterhazy, the Magyar deputy, even voted against. The two marred the cheerful unanimity which the Slovak state, like other authoritarian states, expected from its legislators. Between October 1941 and March 1942, the majority of the Jews living in the cities were deported to the countryside--also removing them from their friends and acquaintances who could have helped them. In Pressburg, only about 6,000 ot the 15,000 Jews, who had been mostly ethnic Germans or Magyars, remained by Spring 1942. Then, from their rural dwellings, many of these Jews were rounded up by Slovak police for deportation to the East. At the time, the Slovak authorities, the population, and the Jewish victims themselves, had no reason to doubt the Nazi propaganda that they were to be resettled farther East since the Nazis, as late as 1941, had publicly declared that they wanted to create a Jewish autonomous area near Lublin in occupied Poland. This is also why the Slovak parliament, moved by feelings of guilt, alloted 500 Reichsmark per Jewish deporteee, to be paid to the Nazis to be used for seeds, agricultural implements and training to help their former Jewish countrymen. But around December 1941, Hitler had changed his mind and secretly decided to exterminate European Jewry. In summer 1942, Pope Pius XII warned Tiso that rumours that Jews were being killed instead of resettled were true.Tiso stopped at once the deportations. About 58,000 Jews had been deported, but 33,000 remained. To avoid antagonizing a small but strategically placed ally, Hitler tolerated Tiso's orders for the time being. The deportations resumed only in Fall 1944, when, in the wake of the failed putsch in central Slovakia, Hitler sent in troops, which included in their wake Gestapo and SD units. By the end of the war, about 90,000 Slovak Jews had died in the Holocaust.
This included most of the 10,000 Jews who had become Germans, and borne witness to this in the 1930 Census, when to do so brought only hassles and discrimination from the Czechs. Their Christian fellow Carpathian Germans, themselves a small and powerless minority closely watched by the Slovak state and the Third Reich, were unable to save most of them. But where possible, men of courage did so. For example, in Pressburg, Stefan Kammerhofer had not only courage, but, even more importantly, a place where to hide people. In the large medieval basement under his pharmacy, he hid 32 Jews till war's end. Paul Kerner and his family hid the Lichtenstein family. In Altwalddorf/Zips, the families of Johann Breuer and Jakob Scholtz hid Jews in their barns. As Paul Brosz noted in his work about the end of the Carpathian German people, the community was small, and many hiding places known to others, yet even DP leaders did not betray them. And after the 1944 uprising, DP leaders such as Leo Kowal, Kreisleiter of Pressburg, Chrobok, Kreisleiter of Goellnitz, and Dr. Scholz, the Kreisleiter for Unterzips, were thrown into KZ's for strongly protesting against the wanton executions and deportations by Gestapo and SS of Jewish civilians who were innocent of any crimes during the uprising.
From June to October 1944, central Slovakia was the scene of an uprising, the desperate attempt of a few army leaders, supported by Russian partisans, to replace the Slovak government and switch sides before the impending defeat of the Third Reich. The uprising failed because the Slovak population was upset that the Allies made it clear that after victory, there would be no independent Slovakia, but that they would be forced back under Benes"'s rule. They also were horrified by the crimes of the "anti-fascists," who murdered over 2,000 ethnic Germans in the Hauerland. In Glaserhau, e.g., on 21 Sept., the entire male German population,187 peaceful peasants, were forced to dig a mass grave and then executed. Mass-killings of Carpathian Germans also happened in Deutschlipsch, Rosenberg, Biely Potok (incl. women), Magurka, and makeshift concentration camps in Sklabina and Slovenska Lupca.The rebels also killed a number of Magyars and Ruthenes, nearly 2,000 Slovak priests and officials, and 150 soldiers who refused to join them.Slovaks had to be somehow tied to the regime to be at risk, but Germans were killed solely because of their ethnicity. Because Hitler now distrusted the loyalty of remaining Slovak troops, the rebellion was put down by Wehrmacht and German and foreign SS units, including the feared Ukrainian SS Division Galicia, while the Red Army was beaten back at the Dukla-Pass. In the rear, about 3,000 Jews and rebel Slovaks were killed by SD units and by friends and relatives of the 2,000 Slovaks murdered by the rebels.The bungled uprising made no sense at all. But it led to the deaths of most surviving Jews in Slovakia, and increased the atmosphere of murderous ethnic hatreds.
A temporary evacuation of Carpathian German civilians seemed advisable, but Hitler's "no surrender" policy generally forbade any evacuation in the East until it was much too late. But in Fall 1944, Karmasin began to secretly evacuate many children to schools in Austria, and made plans for a general evacuation until the end of the war. When the Embassy heard of this, Karmasin was cited to Berlin to explain his "defeatism." He went, expecting the worst, but was able to convince of the need for a temporary tactical retreat. From December to March, Zipser, Hauerlaender and Pressburger were evacuated in long trecks, slogging through the snow, their children and sparse belongings in makeshift carts. Still, many remained, trapped in the highlands. On March 2, the Red Army took Liptau St Nikolaus (today Liptovsky Mikulas) for a few days. The murders and rapes committed during the short Soviet occupation stiffened resistance by German troops and Slovak anti-Communists--Tiso's army still had 30,000 soldiers then. After more hard fighting, Pressburg fell on April 4, 1945, Sillein (Zilina) on April 30.
By April 4, 1945, the Red Army had conquered most of Slovakia and put it under the authority of Benes" 's government. In a reign of terror, 28,000 Slovaks were accused of high treason, and 11,800 sentenced to jail or execution to discredit and destroy the desire for Slovak independence. Tiso was hung in public. Worse was the fate of the non-Slavic minorities. Benes"'s April 5, 1945 Program declared that the CSR would be a purely Slavic state since the "guests" (living there since the 12th century!) had misbehaved. Their demands for equal rights, then autonomy, were considered to be in themselves proof of collusion with Hitler, for had the CSR not been a perfect democracy? On the basis of this distorted reasoning (which would make fair game of any ethnic minority demanding equal rights), mobs began killing and deporting the native German and Magyar population, with medieval brutality. All Germans had to wear white armbands, making them easy targets. In Prague, for instance, in May, several dozen old men were tied to lampposts on the Charles Bridge, doused with gasoline, and burned alive under the jeers of Czech nationalist mobs. According to an investigation by the German government in the 1950s, the accounting of the victims, and studies by historians such as Fritz-Peter Habel and Alfred de Zayas, about 250,000-350,000 Sudeten Germans were murdered. Even outstanding resisters were murdered, such as the Victorin family, the parents of artist Herta Ondrus"ova-Victorin, Prague Germans who had dared the Gestapo to save the lives of 40 Czech workers wrongly accused of sabotage. Their courageous deed was known, but it did not save them. Surviving non-orthodox Jews, who often had considered themselves of German or Magyar ethnicity before the war, were told to assimilate or leave the country. In 1946, another Benes" decree made the killings not even crimes needing amnesty, but lawful patriotic deeds. These decrees remain valid laws in the Czech Republic to the present day.
In Slovakia, this "final solution" to the "German problem" found little support. Slovaks generally drew the line at trying to assimilate their neighbors, as they had tried during the war, and murdering them. The Slovak communist party, whose prewar support among the Catholic Slovak peasantry had been very limited, had many German and Magyar members. Benes" had ordered the Czech resistance not to work with Sudeten German anti-Nazis, for he needed the picture of their collective support for Hitler to gain Allied support for his murderous plans. But his writ did not extend to wartime Slovakia. Over 250 Carpathian Germans fought with the partisans. Several dozen, including their leader Ferdinand Zimbaur, died in the KZ of Mauthausen. Remembering this, even Slovak communists asked Benes to differentiate between the innocent and the guilty, but to no avail. At least they were able to stop the deportation of Magyars in 1948, so that a substantial number remained in Slovakia.
That any German joined the partisans at all was a wonder, for resistance in Eastern Europe was, thanks to decisions taken by FDR, morally far more ambigous than is commonly realized in the United States. Besides the need for courage to face the police of a totalitarian state, which makes the number of resisters small, whether in the Soviet Union, Third Reich or Red China, Germans had to consider that the Allies, despite their claims to represent decency and humanity, had embraced the mass-murderer "Uncle Joe," and given him Eastern Europe. Now this would be bad for all people living in the East. But, in addition, the Western Allies tarred an entire ethnic group with collective guilt for an ideology most of them had not chosen. Any would-be German partisan had to mull over that he may, in the end, only be helping the murderers of his own women and children. As the events of 1945/46 showed, such fears were not at all far-fetched.
According to Paul Brosz, by April, there still were 21,000 Carpathian Germans in Slovakia. After fighting ceased, perhaps 40,000 returned to their homeland. They were innocent of any crimes, and saw no reason for anxiety. Stripped of all civil rights, they were interned and and many died, usually of willfull neglect from starvation and disease, in camps such as Novaky near Priewitz/Prividza, or massacres such as in Prerau/Moravia on June 18, 1945, when Czech soldiers under captain Karol Pazura pulled 269 mainly Zipser women, children and old men from a train, (young men were POWs or labor camp inmates), had them dig their graves, strip,and killed.The youngest victim was seven months old. Others were carried off as slave laborers to the Soviet Union and died there. In 1949 the Hilfskomitee fuer die ev.-luth. Karpatendeutschen calculated that about 13,000 Germans had been killed between Summer 1944 and Dezember 1946. Paul Brosz, in Das letzte Jahrhundert, p. 66, notes that 23,000 Carpathian Germans were killed during and after the war, 13,000 being civilians murdered between Summer 1944 and the closing of the camps in 1947, plus 9,000 soldiers at the front and about 1,000 civilians deported to Sibiria. This means of blood toll of 16%, or every sixth Carpathian German. By the end of 1946, the majority of interned Carpathian Germans were deported to Germany and Austria. Between 6,000 to 10,000 remained in Slovakia, usually women married to Slovak men, and the village of Hopgarten, (today Chmelnica),protected by its remotedness and a lot of luck.
Saddeningly, the Western Allies agreed to the elimination at the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences in 1945. How could this have happened after the "Good War," supposedly fought for the rights of humans not to be killed or hurt because of their ethnicity? Hitler, looking at the large number of Jews in Communist movements, had concocted a Jewish collective guilt for Communist crimes, ludicrously including anti-Communists and the unpolitical majority. This is why he killed them after Fall 1941. But the Allied governments concocted an equally immoral guilt-by-ethnic-association for the crimes of the Nazi dictatorship, again not caring whether a particular individual had actually resisted the Nazis, or belonged to the majority of ordinary people who, in any dictatorship, are powerless and unpolitical, and merely try to survive. (For comment "Nazifying the Germans," by Prof. Ralph Raico, SUNY Buffalo, use browser, for his site wanders). The result of this policy was the genocide of the East Germans. About 15 million lost the homelands in which Germans had often lived for close to a thousand years, while about 2.5 to 3 million were butchered on the roads, killed in camps, or starved to death. Few had been involved in Nazi crimes (those guys already had fled). In the 1940s, people such as the Anglo-Jewish publisher, politician and humanitarian Victor Gollancz and the Alsatian humanitarian Albert Schweitzer reminded Allied audiences that they had sullied their victory by allowing this massacre of innocents. But then this tragedy was entombed in media silence, as if it had never happened. Few people in the United States are aware of it. A general overview is given by Alfred de Zayas, a senior lawyer for the UN Center on Human Rights in Geneva, and by Prof. Kalman Janics Czechoslovak Policy. A moving litterary treatment has been written, in English, by the young writer Astrid Julian, called Irene's Song. Her short story is about the Danube Suebians. But what Carpathian Germans, and so many others, went through, was similar.
In Stuttgart, Rev. Desider Alexy and Rev. Jakob Bauer founded in 1946 relief societies for Lutherans and Catholics, united in 1950 as the Karpatendeutsche Landsmannschaft. Its first speaker (we do not have presidents), was Anton Birkner. At first, the need was to lobby for relief for Carpathian Germans expelled to Germany and Austria, a task that continued into the 1960s, when the last Carpathian Germans slave laborers were released from Sibiria. There also was a constant trickle of individuals who either fled, or were allowed to join their families in the West. To house its old people, the KDL initiated a building cooperative, Karpatenland, that built several old peoples' homes and a housing development near Stuttgart. Today, the main task is to keep the memories alive. The KDL publishes the monthly Karpatenpost and the annual Karpatenjahrbuch,with serious, professionally researched, articles on local history and folklore. They built a museum in Karlsruhe, so that their existence would not be forgotten. The museum, with 5 rooms, and research library with 4,000 books and an archives, is run by the Karpatendeutsches Kulturwerk, founded on the initiative of Julius Robert Luchs (1901 Kaesmark, 1988 Korbach/Germany). Those who were able to remain in Austria formed their own Landsmannschaft, and publish the Heimatblatt der Karpatendeutschen, now six times a year. A memorial stone in Hainburg/Austria, tells of our people's tragic fate.
There were Czech and Slovaks leaders in exile who recognized that a horrible crime had been committed. In 1953, the Slovak National Council in Exile (represented by Matus" C^ernak and Karol Sidor), concluded a treaty with the KDL promising that in a free Slovakia, German innocents would be as welcome as other exiles. The treaty was endorsed on July 22, 1953 by the influential Slovak League in America, with whom the KDL had close contacts, especially under its leader Filip Hrobak. Hrobak also came to the annual convention of the Carpathian Germans in Stuttgart in 1961 and reiterated that in a free Slovakia, Germans would gain restitution. In 1955, the Czech resistance hero, general Lev Prchala, now head of the National Executive Committee, one of several Czech exile groups, concluded a similar treaty with the Sudeten Germans.
But their exile groups faded in the 1970s. In the CSSR itself, the Germans were "cleansed" from history as well. Every German artifact was declared a Slavic creation, from Meister Paul, a famous Carpathian German medieval woodcarver, to the famous beer of Budweis and Pilsen in the Sudetenland. After the CSSR became free in 1989, the new president Vaclav Havel denounced the Vertreibung as immoral. Justice seemed to win, in the end. But then Havel changed his tune. Stung by the strong Czech nationalist reaction that endangered his reelection, in 1995, at an extraordinary speech before the Charles University in Prague, he attacked the wish of the exiles to return by blaming ordinary Sudeten Germans for Nazi crimes in Bohemia, using Benes'" wartime lies, and attacking people who disagreed with this collective guilt thesis as close to the Nazis.These lies were then the basis of the 1997 Czech-German "Reconciliation" Agreement, which denounces only the brutality of the deportation, but not the deportation itself, and precludes any return, even if the victims purchased back their own former homes. The Czech political class wants the results of the ethnic cleansing to be final. Sudeten Germans were scandalized by this heartless cynicism.
The number of slain Sudeten Germans had been calculated with great care by the Statistical Office of the German Federal Republic in the 1950s, and was probably too low since it overestimated the number of deportees sent to the future GDR. So far, no one had seen any factual reason to dismiss these findings, which tallied with what survivors knew about who had survived from their home communities. But now nationalist Czech historians proceeded through various accounting tricks to pretend that "only" Sudeten 40,000 Germans were slain, while hiking the number of "Czech" victims (notably by including Jews and Gypsies who had not felt to be Czech when alive), in an Orwellian juggling with corpses intended to make the number of German victims less than the number of Czech victims. For Carpathian Germans, the death toll was put at "several hundred"! At the urging of the German Kohl-government, eager to get on with improving foreign relations and capitalist trade, the Czech-German Historical Commission in 1996 validated these propaganda figures.
A poll printed in Die Welt showed that, unlike the current "reeducated" German political caste, which, educated mostly in the 1960s, has been greatly influenced by collective guilt notions, (for comment, see Raico, above), most Germans agreed with the scandalized Sudeten Germans that this was no basis for friendship within the European Union, which the Czech Republic hopes to join. So does Gernot Facius, Welt's humanist grand old man, in editorials such as on October 12, December 11, 1996, Jan. 21, Febr. 17, May 24, 1997, see Die Welt,the SPD politician Peter Glotz, and among Czechs, former dissidents such as the historian Bohumil Dolezal, the philosopher Petr Prihoda, and Chess champion Ludek Pachman. So does the Bavarian State Government. The ties between Bavaria and neighboring Sudetenland had been close, and after the war many deportees settled there. It agreed to the treaty only with the reservation that it must be not a closure, but a first step that will enable talks convincing the Czech public of the need to come clean before God and History. Another fighter for the truth is historian Frantisek Hybl, who after years of agitation to an often hostile crowd convinced the city of Prerau (Presov) in Moravia to erect a German/Czech memorial to the Carpathian Germans massacred there.
In the United States, historians such as Charles Ingrao and the Jewish-Hungarian Istvan Deak remind people that, as Deak stressed in 1996, "Nor is the murder and expulsion of the Bosnian muslims any more of a criminal act than was the murder and expulsion of the Sudeten Germans, both being based on the monstrous principle of collective guilt and preventive action." (Vertreibung).
After this betrayal by a German government they had trusted, the Sudeten Germans face now the arduous task of educating the public, which they had neglected to do since the justice of their position seemed so obvious. They also had believed the coldwar propaganda that democracies are naturally virtuous. The only obstacle seemed the Communist dictatorship. This will become even more arduous under the new socialist- ecologist government elected in Germany in September 1998. It was elected to deal more effectively with the very high unemployment rate. Yet, as most of its members belong to the '68ers, who believe that human rights are not universal, but can be withdrawn from politically incorrect ethnic groups, in this case Germans, the new government is likely to be very damaging to the flickering hope for recognition held by the victims of the Vertreibung, as the utterances made in late October 1998 by the new Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer to the Polish government hint. See the event page for current political happenings. [To the top of the Webpage]
Though not a complete vindication, the relationship with the newly free Slovakia became better than expected. In April 1990, at a workshop in Stuttgart, KDL speaker Isidor Lasslob introduced two envoys of the provincial Slovak government, Dr Pavel Hollak and Anton Snahican. Dr. Pollak spoke the words the exiles had longed for: "Our first task can only be to honestly ask the Carpathian Germans for forgiveness for their suffering from 1944 to 1946. We wish to clear that path, to be able again to walk on it freely, as brothers with Christian love and respect." The official commemoration of the 1944 Slovak Uprising in 1990 also included, for the first time, a recognition of its innocent victims, and an incipient debate in the press about the doubtful nature of the competing hagiographies around the uprising created by Benes"ists and Communists to legitimize their rule.
The official declaration of the Slovak parliament of 13.Feb.1991 was more ambigous--fair to the history of Carpathian Germans until 1918, but then scapegoating that small and powerless minority for all that went wrong in Slovakia from 1918 to 1945, especially the anti-Jewish policies of the Tiso regime.The KDL in Germany and Austria, while welcoming the declaration in general, rejected the latter part as blatantly untrue. But the Slovak government refused to amend it. Slovak President Michael Kovac" suggested a meeting of historians to clear things up, but it met only once in 1992, and again only in September 1998. After 1992, the commemorations of the uprising again turned hagiographical and omitted any mention of the civilians murdered by the partisans. Slovakia has its rabid nationalists, of course, while fifty years of hate propaganda have left their mark on public opinion and popular stereotypes, and fill newspapers and schoolbooks. Others, though personally more open to the truth, found out that German-bashing pays, especially when approaching American and West European politicians, media and academia, thus allowing the new state to bypass its moral obligations to one of its former minorities. Remaining Carpathian Germans have already received over 20% of their property confiscated in 1946, (mainly derelict fields in isolated villages, and even there without the buildings, but still...) while the Czechs have returned nothing to the few thousand Germans survivors in Bohemia and Moravia, using the Benes-decrees as legal basis to deny elementary justice. But political and economic reasons have prevented so far the abolition of the racist Benes" decrees in Slovakia, the restoration of all property to the survivors still living there, not to speak about a right of return for the deportees. Right now, legally, they are treated just like ordinary tourists and cannot even purchase back their old homes.
Still, despite the raw wound left by the Benes" decrees, it must be stressed that compared to the post- Communist Czech Republic and Poland, the second Slovak state has done much for its demonized minority. Slovak works begin to acknowledge the existence and contributions of their German countrymen. The Slovak government allowed the creation of the Karpatendeutscher Verein, gives some financial support to its monthly Karpatenblatt, gave it a seat on the Roundtable for Minorities at the Interior Ministry, and basically treats Germans just like the other minorities. A KDV member, Augustin Lang, even became Slovak consul-general in Munich for a while.
The KDV was founded in 1990 in Metzenseifen. The first leader was Matthias Schmoegner (1990-91), followed by Wilhelm Gedeon, (1991-94), Gertrud Greser, (1994-2000) and Bartholomaeus Eiben (2000-). Like the KDL, the KDV is organized in Ortsgemeinschaften (village communities), of which in 2000 there were 34 with a total of 4600 members. The OGs are grouped into five regions, (Pressburg area; Hauerland; Upper Zips; Lower Zips; Bodwa-Valley and Kaschau).
Working closely with the KDL in Stuttgart, notably the energetic and politically well-connected (as long as Klaus Kinkel was German foreign minister) Oskar Marczy, the KDV succeeded in creating the following measures to help the Carpathian German minority: The KDL/KDV presented in Dezember 1992 a plan for bilingual German minority schools to the Slovak Ministry of Culture. It was adopted and most of the measures implemented by 2000. Germany and Austria sent German teachers. The schools are supported since 1999 by the KDL OGs coming from each region. Considering th poverty of the Slovak Republic, each DM 1,000 donated counts a great deal.
Funds from the German government to buy and renovate old buildings in each region to use as German cultural centers. These "Begegnungshaeuser"were opened 1993-1997 in Kesmark (Kes^marok), Einsiedel a.d. Goellnitz (Mnis^ek nad Hnilcom) in the Zips, Metzenseifen (Medzev), Deutsch-Proben (Nitrianske Pravno), Krickerhau (Handlova) in the Hauerland, in Pressburg (Bratislava) and Kaschau (Kos^ice) in the Bodwatal area. The libraries were donated by KDL members, as well as much money. For details, see the events page.
The German government awarded initial grants to develop Carpathian German small businesses. The money, when paid back, is then loaned out again by the Carpathian German Association, a non-profit created for that purpose and headed by former KDV speaker Wilhelm Gedeon. The total sum granted that way was from 1992 to 1999 53.3 million crowns (about $1.2 million). Since 1995, money from repayments is available, too. A total of 185 small businesses, from carpenters to dentists, received funds, saving or creating about 1400 jobs of which the majority benefit Carpathian Germans. (Wilhelm Gedeon, Report in Karpatenpost June 1999, p. 16-17).
The slovak broadcasting network has a half-hour of German radio and TV, and the state subsidizes the Carpathian German press, theater and a handsome museum in Pressburg.
Important is that the Slovak governments since 1990 do not restrict cooperation between the KDV and the KDL in Germany and Austria, for after a half-century of pariah-like existence, the few remnants in Slovakia cannot, yet, support all by themselves these many institutions.
Since the Landsmannschaften in Germany and Austria are unlikely to survive more than another decade--the integration of the third generation just has been too perfect--their gentle nudging of the Slovak Republic to do right at least to the survivors there will abate. Yet there is hope that this small ethnic group will survive in Slovakia, and someday receive the compassion and justice its suffering deserves.
Perhaps a genealogical and heritage circle could be founded in North America, similar to the German-Bohemian Heritage Society, to provide an anchor-society for Carpathian German history and culture after the Landsmannschaften, having fulfilled their destiny, have gone into the gentle night.
Many Carpathian Germans, as well as Slovaks and Ruthenes, returned home with their savings. Little is known today about these immigrants to historians.There are several reasons for this. Carpathian Germans were not numerous anywhere, even in cities where they congregated, e.g. Philadelphia, Charleroi, PA, Schenectady, NY, Greater New York, Chicago, Cleveland, or Danbury, CT. Also, unlike Transylvanian Saxons or Danube Suebians, they had not a strong sense of regional ethnicity. Most of them, if they thought at all about this, saw themselves as German-Hungarians. And so, because of their small numbers and lack of desire, Pressburger, Hauerlaender and many Zipsers simply joined existing German or Hungarian parishes and clubs, sometimes Slovak ones. Unlike so many other German immigrants, they did not create many regional societies. Therefore, though individual families may have information about these early immigrants, it is difficult to find material about them as a group. The Deutsch-Ungarischer Bote, also German-Hungarian Herald, published in Cincinatti, Ohio, for all German-Americans from the old Kingdom of Hungary, did not survive in libraries in the United States save for its last six months in 1918, (at the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago, miscataloged there as German-American Herald). The other likely source, the Oesterreichisch-Ungarische Zeitung, published in Chicago and New York City from 1881 to after 1912, vanished, too. In Upper Hungary, the Hauerland had no German paper before the war, but news about individual emigrants certainly will be found in the newspapers of Pressburg, and the Kesmarker Karpathen-Post, published from 1879 to 1940. Zipser had a somewhat stronger sense of regional identity, and before World War I founded several K.U.V. (or Krankenunterstuetzungsverein, sickness support society). In the absence of material, the following chapter is intended as sketch, and will be developed as more information comes in.
In New York City, Zipser founded on 12 October 1889 the 1. ZIPSER KUV. The labor daily New Yorker Volks-Zeitung reported once or twice a year about their socials.These small clippings give us a glimpse on early Carpathian German-American life. In 1893, for instance, the Zipser KUV had its 4th annual picnic at Zahler's Clinton Park in Maspeth, L.I., on June 19, and on September 3 a fest at Wavrac's Garden in Tremont, Bronx. The members and guests danced, the men competed at bowling and rope-tugging (prizes $10, $5, $3, not bad when a worker earned $1.50 for 10 hours of hard labor), the ladies in egg-racing and bird-sticking (prizes $5,$3,$2). The articles stressed that, besides Zipser Germans, there were guests from other ethnic groups from Hungary, and "German, Magyar, Croat, and Slavic were spoken together." In any case, all had "recht flott gezecht" (did drink heartily). Whether in 1900 or 1913, the games were the same, and so was the observation that despite rising ethnic conflicts in Central and Eastern Europe, the Zipser Germans mixed easily with their fellow Zipser Slovaks and Magyars. How large was that KUV? Data is scarce, but in 1905 it was noted that it had 183 members and $6,000 in the bank.
The Interwar Years More is known about that period, thanks to obituaries in the monthly Karpatenpost, and an excellent article by Kurt Sauter in the Karpatenjahrbuch 1986. After the war ended, and mail services resumed, Carpathian German-Americans were able to learn about the incredible hunger and dislocation in their home. Relief was not easy to organize. For, as many other German-Americans, they had been attacked and vilified as "hyphenate Huns." Many were undoubtedly intimidated from expressing publicly concern with fellow human beings who happened to be German. That hate-filled atmosphere is well described in David Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society, (1980), and Joan Jensen, The Price of Vigilance, (1968). Many individuals discreetly helped their families directly. But this was not always the most efficient. Local relief associations were founded, such as the Zipser Hilfsverein of Philadelphia, and the Zipser House Association of Newark. An estimated 15,000 Zipser lived in the United States at the time. Gustav Adolf Weiss, from New York, (1867-1933), born in Kesmark, decided to organize the Zipser Bund of America. In September 1919, a benefit fest was held in Fram Park in Newark, NJ, followed by a much larger one in 1920 in New York City. Over $1100 were sent to the Zips. Among the organizers were Adolph Kaltstein and Miss Elsa Weiss, of New York. The organization became permanent, a monthly, the Zipser Bote, published from 1920-1928. Till 1930 over 1 million Czech Crowns sent over. Besides saving countless lives from starvation in the aftermath of the war--fighting in the Zips lasted till Summer 1919--the money funded German schools in the Zips. Gustav Adolf Weiss visited in 1922/23. In 1929 he led 120 members to the old homeland, who were honored by their grateful countrymen. In 1933, Weiss was succeeded as president by Alexander Rothberg. The Great Depression severely cut donations, since so many Zipser--usually artisans and skilled workers--had to fear for their own livelyhood. Yet contacts and donations continued till the outbreak of the war.
After the Vertreibung. After the war, and Benes"'s final solution to the German minority, there was no Zipser homeland anylonger. The Zipser Bund collected relief for their deported countrymen, helped those who immigrated to the United States, and then faded away. Its last president, William Dirr, from Zipser Bela, brought its flag to Germany, where it hangs now in the Heimatmuseum in Karlsruhe as a witness to the philanthrophy of Zipser abroad. But organized Carpathian German activities continued, notably under the energetic leadership of the late Reverend Geza Antony.The current president of the Carpathian German Association in the United States is John Gally. We meet annually, either in Danbury, CT or Philadelphia. The meetings are mainly social in nature, but the Association also tries to prevent our little group from being entirely forgotten. There is a memorial stone at the Danbury Lutheran cemetery, and soon there will be a book in English.
An overview over postwar Carpathian German immigration, written by Julius Loisch, has been published in the Karpatenjahrbuch 2000, pp. 161-188. It describes among else the history of Julius Loisch himself, from Muehlenbach/Zips, a former engineer for the US army in Alamogordo, and then for a company making parts for NASA. His sunwind-measurer on Apollo XII worked much longer than expected. Other families noted in that article are the family of Gustav Scharritter from Altwalddorf, Johann Zubak from Hunsdorf, Julius Klein from Muehlenbach, Gesa Knott from Rissdorf, Julius Demko from Kaesmark, Johann Gally from Forberg, Julius Menhardt, Hans Weiss, from Malthern, a hobby painter of great skill and retired manufacturer of parts for NASA in Manchester, CT, (Dynamic Metal Products, Co.), and Otto Maurer, who founded a great cabinetmaking company in Toronto.
If you are a descendant of Germans from the Northern Carpathians, or have an interest in Carpathian German history, culture, or genealogy, come and join us.