The Holocaust in Slovakia 

was the systematic dispossession, deportation, and murder

of Jews in the Slovak State, a client state of Nazi Germany, during World War II. Out of
89,000 Jews in the country in 1940, around 69,000 were murdered in the Holocaust.
After the September 1938 Munich Agreement, Slovakia unilaterally declared its autonomy
within Czechoslovakia, but lost significant territory to Hungary in the First Vienna Award, signed
in November. The following year, with German encouragement, the
ruling ethnonationalist Slovak People's Party declared independence from Czechoslovakia. State
propaganda blamed the Jews for the territorial losses. Jews were targeted for discrimination and
harassment, including the confiscation of their property and businesses. The exclusion of Jews
from the economy impoverished the community, which encouraged the government to conscript
them for forced labor. On 9 September 1941, the government passed the Jewish Code, which it
claimed to be the strictest anti-Jewish law in Europe.
In 1941, the Slovak government negotiated with Nazi Germany for the mass deportation of Jews
to German-occupied Poland. Between March and October 1942, 58,000 Jews were
deported to Auschwitz concentration camp and the Lublin District of the General Governorate;
only a few hundred survived until the end of the war. The Slovak government organized the
transports and paid 500 Reichsmarks per Jew for the supposed cost of resettlement. The
persecution of Jews resumed in August 1944, when Germany invaded Slovakia and triggered
the Slovak National Uprising. Another 13,500 Jews were deported and hundreds to thousands
were murdered in Slovakia by Einsatzgruppe H and the Hlinka Guard Emergency Divisions.
After liberation by the Red Army, survivors faced renewed antisemitism and difficulty regaining
stolen property; most emigrated after the 1948 Communist coup. The postwar Communist
regime censored discussion of the Holocaust; free speech was restored after the fall of the
Communist regime in 1989. The Slovak government's complicity in the Holocaust continues to be
disputed by far-right nationalists.