Escape of a Nazi War Criminal …. to Canadian Freedom, Prosperity and the Whitewashing of His Own Anti-Semitic Crimes in Mainstream Texts

Published November 9, 2010: the anniversary of Kristallnacht (also the Nazis’ patriotic remembrance date for the official German holiday commemorating Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch, the early Nazi coup attempt in Munich).

by Daniel Barenblatt

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. —Sissela Bok

Introduction: A tale told in pictures.

Below: Jozef Marian Kirschbaum (as he appeared in the late 1930s/early 1940), the pro-Nazi leader of Slovakia’s fascist party, agent in the service of Hermann Goering and anti-Semitic speechmaker. Kirschbaum also drafted and enforced the first Slovakian anti-Jewish laws, and an early, lethal, Jewish mass deportation attempt.

Above: from Unholy Trinity by Mark Aarons and John Loftus. Jozef Kirschbaum appears in uniform, bottom photo.

Kirschbaum in Toronto, Canada in the late 1980s. At this time, Kirschbaum was a wanted Nazi war criminal, barred from entering the United States, who found shelter in Canada, and a powerful, uranium tycoon patron. In December of 1988 Kirschbaum became the focus of an international scandal over his fugitive status and past:

Above: from The Roman Empire: The Life and Times of Stephen Roman by Paul McKay. Top photo is Jozef Kirschbaum in Canada, late 1980s. Bottom photo is Jozef Kirschbaum in the Nazi Era.

Below: Jozef Kirschbaum in Toronto, Canada, October 22, 1997. At a meeting with top Slovakia politician Eduard Kukan (seated in front of the Canadian flag), also present is Kirschbaum’s son, Professor Stanislav Jozef Kirschbaum of York University. In a year’s time, Eduard Kukan would become the Foreign Minister of Slovakia. Jozef Kirschbaum is sitting to Kukan’s right. Stanislav J. Kirschbaum is seated at the other side of the table, wearing a black and white striped shirt.

Jozef Kirschbaum was never extradited to Czechoslovakia to serve his adjudicated 20-year prison sentence for war crimes, including Holocaust-related crimes against humanity. On the contrary, he is seen here, long past the age of 80 at the time, in a position of apparent political power and international influence. One is compelled to ask, how and why could this have happened?

Detail of previous photo of Kirschbaums-Kukan meeting in Toronto.

Jozef Kirschbaum is at viewer’s left, Eduard Kukan is at right.

Up until his death in August 2001 at the age of 88, Kirschbaum, in exile, remained active in attempts to historically rehabilitate the Nazi puppet regime of Slovakia (1939-45), of which he was a leading administrator, and co-conspirator in its founding. Kirschbaum’s past did not go away, so why did the public attention, the legal charges, the calls for justice and the dire warnings of his ongoing pro-fascist activities?

Below: Eduard Kukan at the 2006 NATO meeting in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Kukan was the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Slovakia at the time.

Eduard Kukan, standing at far right at a 2004 NATO meeting, beside other East European foreign ministers and NATO chief Jaap de Hoop Scheffer (standing fifth from left).

Newspaper article on Jozef Kirschbaum, from December 10, 1988. (The Kingston Whig-Standard, authored by Paul McKay and Beppi Crosariol, part of their lengthy investigative series “The Kirschbaum File”).

The Holocaust in Slovakia.

Above, top to bottom photos show, in turn, Slovak Jews harassed by Slovak fascist, paramilitary “Hlinka Guard”; forced to wear yellow star identification and assembled under guard; forced to board deportation train to Nazi death camp outside of the Nazi puppet state of Slovakia. Most Slovak Jews perished at Auschwitz.

The Beginning: A Nation and People Under Outside Manipulation

The European Union member state of Slovakia is a small, east-central european nation of 5.4 million people that from 1918 to 1993 comprised the eastern part of Czechoslovakia. From March 1939 until April of 1945, Slovaks lived under a nominally “independent” puppet regime, the “Slovak Republic,” created and directed by Nazi Germany as part of Hitler’s program to break apart, partially annex, and militarily occupy the democratic state of Czechoslovakia.

Germany’s desired Slovak secession was effected with the help of a native Slovak clique of violent and virulently anti-Semitic fascist-nationalists, who were enlisted in the clandestine service of Hermann Goering, the founder of the Gestapo and, later, “Reichsmarschall” and top policymaker for Hitler.

This new Slovak state never attained diplomatic recognition from the United States, nor most other countries of the world, and its new political leaders immediately began enacting harsh, anti-Semitic laws against the Slovak Jewish population, mimicking Berlin’s policies. Dissidents and political opponents, Jewish or not, were arrested and dealt with harshly by Slovakia’s SS-modeled, paramilitary “Hlinka Guard.”

By April of 1945, over 70,000 Slovak Jewish men, women and children had been killed by the Slovak regime working in tandem with the Third Reich. Most of them had been forced onto deportation trains to neighboring Poland and gassed at Auschwitz. At war’s end, only 15% of the Slovakian pre-war Jewish population remained. Slovakia’s dictator, Monsignor Jozef Tiso, was a Hitler loyalist and Catholic priest from whom the Vatican officially distanced itself.

After the war, the fugitive Tiso was found hiding in an Austrian monastery, and brought back to Czechoslovakia where he was tried and executed as a war criminal in 1947.

The current, independent country of Slovakia (which peacefully split from Czechoslovakia in 1993) is in no way considered a successor state to the 1939-45 Nazi puppet entity. Slovaks today generally revile the Tiso era and observe as an official, national holiday the anniversary of a heroic but failed popular rebellion against Tiso and his henchmen, sponsored and assisted with men and arms by the Allied nations including Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union.

Known as the “Slovak National Uprising” of August 1944, this insurgency was led by partisans and renegade units of Tiso’s own Slovak military. It was brutally crushed by Hitler’s Wehrmacht, German SS divisions, Tiso’s Hlinka Guard forces and Ukrainian SS death squads. These troops massacred 93 Slovak villages, and targeted Jews and Gypsies for roundups and extermination.

Now the above-cited facts of this Nazi-dominated period in Slovakian history are indisputable, and accepted by all historians left, right and center. So it comes as a quite a shock to find that two of the standard English language history books of Slovakia, currently in use by many schools and students, falsely portray the 1939-45 Nazi-puppet “Slovak Republic” as a genuinely independent country that was merely in “Germany’s orbit” and “aligned” with the Third Reich.

And rather than being a genocidal dictatorship, Tiso’s Slovakia is presented as having been a legitimate parliamentary republic that treated its “non-Jewish” subjects fairly. The author conveys a sense that the Nazi-dominated years of Slovakia were a prosperous and positive time for Slovak society. The reader is also given the impression that the fighters of the Slovak National Uprising had no higher moral ground than their Nazi oppressors.

As for the Holocaust in Slovakia, the author, in his
relatively brief descriptions of the matter, is careful to never
once use the word “Holocaust,” nor “death camp” nor “Auschwitz,” “Dachau,” “Terezin” and other place names, while using euphemisic language manipulations to minimize both the numbers of Jews killed, and the guilt of the Slovakia collaborator regime’s top officials, including Jozef Tiso.

And throughout these two books, the author suggests that the aforementioned whitewashes and attempts to turn real history upside-down are actually mainstream historical thinking: standard views and basic facts shared by all but a few on the fringe.

The author is not a readily identifiable “nut-job” extremist such as David Duke or Did Six Million Really Die? German-Canadian author Ernst Zundel, but one Dr. Stanislav Kirschbaum, a professor of international relations and diplomacy at York University in Toronto, Canada. The two books are his Historical Dictionary of Slovakia and A History of Slovakia: the Struggle for Survival . Their publishing houses are mainstream and thoroughly respectable, indeed prestigious: PalgraveMacmillan publishes A History of Slovakia: the Struggle for Survival (First Edition 1995, Second Edition 2005) , and Historical Dictionary of Slovakia (First Edition 1997, Second Edition 2007) is published as a part of Scarecrow Press’ “Historical Dictionary” reference work series (its many other titles in the series include, for example Historical Dictionary of the Czech Republic, and Historical Dictionary of the Holocaust ), that are commonly used in university libraries as standard and authoritative sources of information. Scarecrow Press is based in Lantham, Maryland.

How could this absurd and appalling situation come to pass? The answer partly lies in the fact that both in terms of scholarly focus and media attention, the history and culture of Slovakia has been a fairly obscure and rarified field of history and popular concern. Compared to the neighboring Czech Republic, with which it had been in federation as part of Czechoslovakia, Slovakia had been a relative hinterland. Most of the population, strategic resources and industry of Czechoslovakia were concentrated in the Czech provinces, and Slovakia only first emerged as a truly independent state in 1993 (although the Slovak people and culture can be traced back to ancient times, including a Slovak Jewish community that existed during the times of the Roman Empire, and predated the arrival of Christianity in Slovakia).

A nation and people for whom a gap exists in scholarship and historical literature are unfortuately vulnerable to the actions of historians, or pseudo-historians, prepared to pounce and fill that lacuna with their own revisionist accounts, biased agendas and distortions. And in the case of Slovakia, Dr. Stanislav Kirschbaum, and as I shall explain below, Dr. Kirschbaum’s father Jozef Marian Kirschbaum and his international “Slovak World Congress” organization, that is precisely what has happened….

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