Christian Nationalism, Nation-Building, and the Making of the Holocaust in Slovakia (forthcoming with Oxford University Press)
Christian Nationalism, Nation Building, and the Making of the Holocaust in Slovakia tells how communal murder and betrayal intersected with nation-building during World War II.
Considering ethnic cleansing as a confrontation between protagonists of the regime and civilian populations, this book exposes the crucial role of Christian nationalism in cultivating complicity and collaboration. Building on existing topographies of power, social hierarchies, and sectarian tensions that paralleled ethnic conflicts over territory, I show how a state ideology adapted to fit the concerns of the urban elites in Bratislava, whose power hinged on appeasing not only Hitler but also the far from homogenous national populations and their local elites, religious figures, gendarmes, and teachers especially.
Previous scholarship on fascism has typically focused on state actors operating from urban centers and orchestrating coercion. Here, in contrast, I focus on the evolving relationship between the center and the eastern borderlands of the Slovak state, and through that, on the differently positioned people and communities who gained power. I examine how this relationship was forged, how it was maintained, and how, ultimately, the state’s ideological agenda was made practice by a broad coalition of perpetrators on the ground.
It is when recentering the story that we may actually see how nationalist ideas and agendas travel––across different territories and, one might argue, times.
This book is the result of my years of research in twenty-one archives across Slovakia, Czechia, Germany, Israel, and the United States.
The archives consulted here include both large public ones like the Slovak National Archive and the smallest local archives in eastern Slovakia. Some archives had multiple collections, such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, while others, like the Hoover Institution & Archives at Stanford University, had only one item I needed. Due to the devastation caused by the German army’s retreat and the Soviet army’s arrival in 1944–5, many regional collections were lost or destroyed. But even preserved institutional sources contain gaps and omissions, and pitfalls for researchers. When studying these materials, I searched for what they are saying, including the language and tone, but also what they omit to disclose.
I worked here with diverse sources such as official minutes, situational reports, construction plans, ideological doctrines, national and local newspapers, testimonies, ego documents, but also under-researched historical photographs and maps.
