November 9-10, 2011
Krystallnacht, anniversary of the beginning of the Holocaust …. in special memory of the 75,000 innocent Slovakian Jewish men, women and children sent to their deaths by the concerted efforts of the Third Reich and its puppet Tiso regime of Slovakia, including the machinations of Slovak fascist leader and Nazi collaborator Jozef M. Kirschbaum.
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(Note: This article was last edited on January 10, 2012)
For those seeking a general history of the Slovak nation, there currently exist only four books in the English language which provide an overview of the modern history of Slovakia per se, as opposed to a focus on the country as a sub-unit of Czechoslovakia or other past Central European entities. These are History of Modern Slovakia (New York: Praegar. 1955) by Joseph Lettrich, Slovakia and its People by Gilbert L. Oddo (New York: Robert Speller & Sons. 1960), Slovakia: from Samo to Dzurina (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press. 2001) by Peter A. Toma and Dusan Kovac, and York University professor Stanislav J. Kirschbaum’s A History of Slovakia: the Struggle for Survival (1st Ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press. 1995; 2nd Ed. New York: PalgraveMacMillan 2005).
Front cover of A History of Slovakia: the Struggle for Survival (1995, 1st Edition) by Stanislav J. Kirschbaum
A certain figure who had created an international scandal for Canada pertaining to the Nazi Holocaust just six years prior to the publication of A History of Slovakia, Jozef M. Kirschbaum, is frequently cited in the book as an authoritative, guiding source for its text; multiple quotations and footnoted references are taken from Jozef Kirschbaum’s written works on Slovakia. Yet nowhere is it mentioned that this personage is also the author Stanislvav J.(ozef) Kirschbaum’s father and mentor. Furthering this contradiction and breach of academic honesty is the book’s positive presentation of Jozef Kirschbaum and total omission of Kirschbaum’s landmark historical roles and actions in perpetrating the Nazi Holocaust of Slovak Jews.
Neither can any description be found in the book of Kirschbaum’s position in leading the 1930s/40s Slovak “HSLS” (Hlinka People’s Party) political orgaization as a violent, fascist organization, and work with Gestapo chief Hermann Goering to create the “Slovak Republic” puppet state, and complete the breakup and German annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1938-39; nor can mention be found of Kirschbaum’s blocking the efforts of Swiss Red Cross investigator Georges Dunand to save millions of the remaining Jews of Europe in 1944 in Bern, Switzerland when Kirschbaum was serving as Axis Slovakia’s Ambassador to neutral Switzerland.
Also omitted is any mention of Kirschbaum’s post-war work with British intelligence (despite his official status as a fugitive Nazi war criminal) and other Slavic, former Nazi collaborators to instigate a fascist putsch in democratic Czechoslovakia in 1947. Moreover, the particular matter of Jozef Kirschbaum aside, A History of Slovakia twists, inverts, whitewashes the facts every which way as it depicts the “Slovak Republic” (1939-45) as a valid, beneficent and laudable state, rather than the Hitler-created Nazi satellite, Nazi-mimicking dictatorship it actually was; a place aptly summarized in 1949 by acclaimed American journalist John Gunther as a “wretched, ‘autonomous’ puppet state” of the Third Reich.
By author Stanislav Kirschbaum’s own half-admission (page one, in the “Introduction” chapter, 2nd Edition) A History of Slovakia: the Struggle for Survival is a revisionist work:
“the collapse of the Communist regimes meant the end of the exclusive hold of Marxism in the social sciences there….In many instances this means a serious revision of what has been for the last four decades the official history of those nations. And for no nation can such a perspective be more welcome than for the Slovaks….in Slovakia, history was written under serious constraints and limitations. A similar situation has existed in the West; there were and, now to a lesser degree, still are particular conditions that affect the writing of Slovak history. However, just as in Slovakia, scholarship in the West on the Slovaks is undergoing change, not only because of the new situation, but above all because of the status it had in the past.”
The above-mentioned “change” that is supposedly occurring, and which Kirschbaum hopes to further conjure into being, is a veiled reference to the expanded dissemination of fascism-endorsing, historical revisionist literature written by Slovak Nazi collaborators in exile, and their supporters. Kirschbaum states this more explicitly on page four:
“Fortunately Slovaks abroad were partially able to fill the void….this postwar generation of postwar emigres managed to do remarkable work ….they launched three scientific journals, Slowakei for articles in German, Slovakia for the English-speaking public and Slovak Studies with articles in Slovak as well as in Western European languages. Last but not least, thanks to the support of the Slovak World Congress, which many of them helped found in 1970, they organized conferences and published the proceedings. Among the publications worthy of note are the surveys of modern Slovak history published by Joseph M. Kirschbaum and [Jozef A.] Mikus [a far-right Slovak and friend of Jozef Kirschbaum who stated that a German victory in World War II would have been preferable to the Allied victory.]“
Thoroughly in line with the periodicals and tracts cited above, Stanislav Kirschbaum’s A History of Slovakia: the Struggle for Survival is replete with distortions, omissions and falsifications that serve to mask the crimes against humanity of the autocratic (sometimes described as “clerical fascist,” emphasizing Catholic religious law in its militarist-statism) and anti-Semitic Slovak state created by Hitler in 1939, with the top-level help of Stanislav Kirschbaum’s father, Jozef Kirschbaum, and maternal grandfather Stefan Danihel. At the time, both men were working under the auspices of Gestapo chief Hermann Goering and German Foreign Minister Joachim Von Ribbentrop.
The book portrays Slovakia’s Nazi-installed dictator, a Roman Catholic priest named Father Jozef Tiso (fervently loyal to Hitler to the end, and executed as a Nazi collaborator in Czechoslovakia on April 18, 1947), as a sympathetic figure. And it presents Axis Slovakia as a morally legitimate, truly independent country, that deported half of its Jewish population to Auschwitz in 1942 only because the regime, naively and innocently, did not know what would happen to them there, and stopped its cattle car trains to the death camp when Tiso discovered their true fates. This is a widely discredited supposition that has been roundly disproved many times over, in contrast to the post-war assertions of exiled, former Slovak Nazi collaborators.
Like his Historical Dictionary of Slovakia (Scarecrow Press, 1997 1st Ed. and 2007 2nd Ed.) Stanislav Kirschbaum’s A History of Slovakia: the Struggle for Survival has received distribution and promotion as a source-book for higher education worldwide. As such, this book has extended the reach of the self-serving, Nazi collaborator Slovaks’ false retelling of events and atrocities into the mainstream world of respectable scholarship.
And this is simply unacceptable: not to any one who cares about historical accuracy in the schools and libraries, or who is attuned to the persistent dangers of renascent Slavic fascism and neo-Nazism (of particular import to Jews and non-white minority groups).
For these latter phenomena, Stanislav Kirschbaum’s book provides a pseudo-historical academic foundation with the full imprimatur of a prominent publishing house, and his own silver-plated establishment position as a Canadian media current events “expert,” with many TV and radio appearances. Kirschbaum is also listed in Who’s Who in Canada, is a fellow in the Canadian “Royal Society of Canada” (considered one of Canada’s highest honors), and has an advisory and editorial role for the NATO military alliance and a full professorship at York University in Toronto. (Kirschbaum’s faculty position is in “International Relations,” by the way, not in history nor any department of historical studies, his degree is also in diplomacy and international relations, and he does not have a formal, professional background in history).
Some examples of the appalling errors, bias and distortion in
A History of Slovakia: the Struggle for Survival:
Summing up the Nazi puppet state of dictator Jozef Tiso’s “Slovak Republic” (1939-45), which sent two divisions worth of young Slovak men to fight for Hitler as Axis draftee soldiers (starting with the Third Reich’s invasion of Poland in August 1939), terrorized the population with its SS-imitating, paramilitary Hlinka Guard, and threw the land into periods of severe economic decline, Kirschbaum states:
“Slovak historians [the book's misleading and oft-repeated, anonymous code-term for the propagandists of the Slovak World Congress] write that ‘the political ideal of Dr. Jozef Tiso and the majority of Populist politicians was a conservative, paternalistic and authoritarian system with a special emphasis on the ‘protection of the poor’ ‘ The regime was, in fact, successful in taking the Slovak people far down the road of modernization, and, until the uprising of 1944, it looked after its non-Jewish citizens through planned economic and social development.”
(page 200, A History of Slovakia: the Struggle for Survival)
One might also wonder, from the above text, how well “looked after” did Slovakia’s “non_Jewish citizens” (!) feel upon seeing their Jewish non-citizen friends, neighbors and familial relations and their children being harassed, beaten, robbed of all assets and possessions and carried away screaming in the night to Auschwitz-bound cattle cars courtesy of Jozef Kirschbaum and Stefan Danihel’s Slovakian Axis regime. And why those same “non-Jewish citizens” participated in the 1944 anti-Nazi, anti-Tiso, anti-Kirschbaum, pro-Allies Slovak National Uprising in the first place.
Also according to the book, Axis Slovakia had not been at war with Britain and the United States during World War II. This would be some startling news to those British and American World War II veterans, and their friends and families, who bravely battled dictator Tiso’s Slovak troops and German/Slovak air defenses as the Allies provided men, arms and supplies to the anti-Nazi, anti-Tiso/Kirschbaum insurgency inside Slovakia (led in part by the Czechoslovakia exile-government harbored in London). But as we find on page 204:
“Some also assert that Slovakia was at war with Britain and the United States; this assertion is based on a press report from Germany alleging such a declaration by Tuka in December 1941. No text of this declaration was quoted and none was ever found in State Department archives.”
(Page 204, A History of Slovakia: the Struggle for Survival)
The potential influence and effects of Kirschbaum’s book are made worse by the aforementioned scarcity of books on the history of Slovakia, which has been an independent nation since peacefully splitting from Czechoslovakia in 1993, and is a member state of both the European Union and NATO.
Charging in to fill a post-Cold War informational vacuum, Jozef Kirschbaum and son Stanislav exploited this academic gap to the fullest in the 1990s and 2000s, managing to successfully place their revisionist doctrines on university shelves under mainstream, respectable publishing imprints. With few alternative texts available, the opportunity was afforded them to mold the opinions of students, educators and the general public on a higher level of mainstream prominence that had heretofore proved elusive.
By the time of the book’s release date in 1995, one big obstacle to this goal was well behind them, and the public awareness of it firmly pressed down into dormancy: the public scandal of 1988-89 sparked by an expose in an Ontario newspaper, the Kingston Whig-Standard, that publicly revealed, in an in-depth and irrefutable fashion, Jozef Kirschbaum’s past as a Nazi war criminal and Holocaust perpetrator.
At this time there had been renewed calls from Jewish organizations, Holocaust survivors and Nazi hunters, including Rudolf Vrba and Sol Littman, for Jozef Kirschbaum’s extradition from Canada to Czechoslovakia, to serve the 20-year prison sentence that the fugitive Kirschbaum had been handed in abstentia by a Czechoslovakian court in 1947. The RCMP conducted a criminal investigation of Kirschbaum, but declined to prosecute the case further, and the records of this investigation into Jozef Kirschbaum were then sealed for decades from public view by the Canadian government.
The RCMP findings are still slated to remain officially hidden away for another 20 years from the time of this writing.
A 1989 declaration by the US Justice Department that banned Jozef Kirschbaum from crossing the border into the United States still held, however, and remained in place until Kirschbaum’s death in August of 2001.
Deploying carefully worded language, A History of Slovakia: the Struggle for Survival misleads the reader by cloaking the identities and backgrounds of its highly biased and unreliable sources, and omitting key people and events while inflating the insignificant. In doing so, author Stanislav Kirschbaum preserves the untenable, pro-fascist narrative and odd phraseology of the propaganda books and journals that were churned out in the post-war era (from the 1950s into the 2000s) by the Toronto-based, far-right “Slovak World Congress,and its predecessor and offshoot political organizations. ( See previous entries in this blog for more information on the Slovak World Congress and its affiliated groups, and the Nazi era and post-war activities of Jozef M. Kirschbaum).
Tags: Holocaust
