14 - The Slovak National Uprising: the most dramatic moment in the nation's history

Summary

Less than five and half years after the declaration of independence, and before Allied forces entered its territory the Slovak state had become the scene of an armed rising against both Nazi Germany and the local regime connected with it. The signal to begin fighting was given on 29 August 1944, the moment when units of the German army entered the region of Žilina to restore order, which had been disrupted by partisan operations. Out of the uprising emerged the military defence of a contiguous territory, led by units of the regular Slovak armed forces who declared themselves part of the Czechoslovak armed forces; they were subordinated to the high command of the military arm of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile.

In the early days of the uprising, the insurgent territory included more than 20,000 km² (over half the area of the Slovak state) with a population of 1.7 million (64 per cent of the total population of war-time Slovakia). The defence of the free area, which gradually decreased in size (by early October it had shrunk to only 6,800 km² with a population of 340,000), lasted sixty days. At first, 18,000 soldiers and several thousand partisans, and later as many as 60,000 soldiers and 12,000 partisans, conducted a ‘small-scale war’ in the midst of the wider war, until the moment when, under the pressure of the enemy's military superiority and after the exhaustion of its own reserves, the defence of the independent free territory collapsed.