The Historiography of the Holocaust

454 Florin Lobont
Slovakia offers numerous samples of deflective Holocaust denial more or less
openly present in its mainstream politics. The former prime minister (1991–2)
of Czechoslovakia and head of the Christian Democratic Movement (KHD),
Ian Carnogurski, who in 2000 was still a member of the Slovak government,
claimed his party’s direct descent from Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party, which
governed as a wartime satellite of Nazi Germany. Although distancing himself
from the notorious negative aspects of the Tiso regime, Carnogurski, whose
father held high office in the government during the period in question, clearly
asserted the need to play down criticism of the Tiso regime for the sake of
winning legitimacy for Slovakia today and in order to secure the votes of the
numerous Tiso supporters. In this process the ‘Jewish Question’ became a central
issue when leading intellectuals rejected attempts to mythologize the ‘Slovak
national state’ and the Tiso cult. The response of nationalist politicians, historians
and media figures was prompt and forceful. They all tried to prove the
legality of the Tiso state in order to provide a legal basis for the emerging, postcommunist
Slovakia. 55
This process involves adopting the legacy of wartime Slovak nationalism and
attributing the responsibility for the deportation and death of some 80,000 of
Czechoslovakia’s 140,000 Jews. Continuing the Slovak National Council’s
pleadings from exile, the Slovak politicians placed increasing stress on the rescue
of Slovak Jews by the Tiso regime (allegedly numbering between 30,000 and
40,000 through the application of the Presidential exceptions), at the same
time blaming the Germans exclusively for the Holocaust. 56 Like Romania,
Slovakia insists on demonstrating (and perpetuating) its homogeneous nationstate
character despite the fact that at least 17 per cent of its people are minorities,
primarily Hungarians and Romanies. Another parallel with Romania is its
‘antisemitism without Jews[:]...the need for scapegoats, the search for “aliens”
who oppose the national will, the myths of Judeo-communism on the one side
and the Jewish plutocracy on the other, are a part of [the country’s] contemporary
nationalist revival’. 57
Romania’s deflective negationist camp is very large and includes nationalist
historians, politicians and opinion leaders, as well as high-ranking military
officers. Thus historians like Maria Covaci, General I.A. Munteanu and P. Turlea,
Gheorghe Dumitrascu (from Iliescu’s party but very close to C.V. Tudor and
regularly published by him) and writers like A.M. Stoenescu deflect in their
writings the guilt for the Iasi pogrom ( June–July 1941) or the decimation of Jews
in Bessarabia and Transnistria to the Nazis.
Other deflectionists admit their own nationals’ participation in atrocities but
maintain that the perpetrators of the crimes were marginal or ‘aberrations’.
Historiography under Ceausescu and its continuation (Maria Covaci, Aurica
Simion, Mircea Musat – a founding member of Greater Romania Party) was
generally aligned with this view, accusing a small number of Iron Guardists