During WWII, how did the Slovakian government and people feel about the anti-Slavic rhetoric of its ally Germany?

by 585AM
Bruncvik

As for Slovakia, the short answer is propaganda and political maneuvering. Common people are not recorded as having cared about that particular rhetoric, and the government kept it that way.

Longer answer: Slovakia was fashioned after Italian fascism, rather than the Nazi ideology, In fact, the first Slovak State is sometimes referred to as "cleric-fascist", owing to the fact that the government party was founded by a priest and the President of the state, Jozef Tiso, was also a priest. As a result, any xenophobic ideology was not inherently part of the official canon. The Slovak government actually understood the political realities of the day and had to walk a thin line between pleasing the German government and keeping the population content. For internal political purposes, they only adopted that portion of the Nazi ideology that suited them, namely the anti-Jewish stance.

The general population was focusing on something entirely different. For the most part of the war, Slovak economy was booming, and the general population was for the most part content or happy. Larger companies benefited from the opening of the German markets and the increased war demand, helped, by large part, of an artificially low exchange rate that made Slovak products very cheap. Middle class was a main benefactor of the so-called "Aryanization", or the confiscation of Jewish property and distribution to non-Jews. (Ironically, the name suggest distribution to people of Aryan origin, but the government and people elected to ignore that part and focus on the money.) The President actually vetoed the law to disown Jews at first, because he thought it disproportionately benefited the upper class, and only signed it after the middle class got more out of it. This was not the only propagandist move to placate the population: the government, at least internally, was portrayed as sovereign and anti-German. For example, Germany insisted on having "observers" and "specialists" within the Slovak police, which was very publicly criticized by the President, and which soon was also very publicly abandoned. In reality, though, the close cooperation with the Germans continued within the Slovak secret police.

As for government officials themselves, I could not find any public record of them objecting to the anti-Slavic rhetoric.

barakokula31

To add onto this, how did the Nazi puppet Independent State of Croatia feel about it? Were they given the status of honorary aryans similar to the Japanese?