Anton Vašek

Anton Vašek (born April 29, 1905 in Hrubá Borša , † July 30, 1946 in Bratislava ) was a Slovak publicist , journalist and politician . As head of the Anti-Jewish Department No. 14 of the Slovak Ministry of the Interior, he was largely responsible for the gradual discrimination, expropriation and deportation of Slovak Jews in the First Slovak Republic , which is why he was ironically called the “Jewish King” ( Slovak : Židovský kráľ ).

Life

Vašek studied at the Faculty of Law and worked as a civil servant and editor in Bratislava. He was involved as a functionary of youth and student union associations and was from 1928 to 1929 chairman of the Association of Slovak Students (Slovak. Zväz slovenskeho študentstva ). From 1927 Vašek was general secretary of the Slovak National Association of Municipalities, Towns and Districts . In 1935 he ran unsuccessfully for the Slovak People's Party for a seat in parliament. After 1939 he worked in leading positions at the notary office in the Slovak capital. Vašek was an active publicist and from 1930 to 1938 the editor in charge of the newspapers Zprávy mesta Bratislavy and Hlas slovenskej samosprávy . From 1939 to 1942 he was the head of the Control and Audit Department of the City Office in Bratislava.

In April 1942 Anton Vašek became head of Department No. 14 of the Slovak Ministry of the Interior and soon became known there under the name “King of the Jews”. As early as the summer of 1941, the department - also known as the "Jewish Department" - gradually took over from Augustín Morávek's Central Economic Office (Slovak: Ústredný hospodárský úrad ) the main responsibility for the removal of Jews from public life, which was accompanied by brutal persecution. The pinnacle of these efforts were the deportations in 1942, the main organizer of which was Department No. 14 of the Ministry of the Interior. Vašek organized and directed the deportations and constantly insisted on their continuation - even after the majority of the decision-makers were no longer interested in them. As early as 1942 Vašek had in his book The Solution to the Jewish Question in Slovakia. Systematic translation of anti-Jewish legislation (Globus-Verlag, Bratislava) proposed the total liquidation of the Slovak Jews (after the end of the Second World War in the Soviet occupation zone the document was placed on the list of literature to be eliminated).

From these actions he built his dubious political career, but most of all he amassed huge sums of money in bribes with which he allowed himself to be corrupted. Vašek accepted bribes from people at risk of deportation, but also from “ Aryans ” protecting Jews, and then literally had people dragged out of the deportation trains. At the same time, he complained to the agents of the German security service stationed in Slovakia that the Slovak offices were granting far too many certificates of exemption to Jews and that church circles were campaigning for the Jews, which hindered the rapid implementation of the deportations.

After Department No. 14 of the Ministry of Interior was disbanded as a result of the Slovak National Uprising on September 1, 1944, Vašek returned to the Bratislava Notary Office. From September 1944 to April 1945 he collaborated with the German occupation organs in the function of the chief notary of the Bratislava City Office. After the liberation of Slovakia by the Red Army , he was arrested by a Czechoslovak People's Court in 1946 to death by the strand convicted and executed .

swell

• www.plus7dni.sk, Kamenec, Ivan: Tukovi židobijci, on July 6, 2007 (online) (Slovak)
• www.sandorde.webgarden.cz, Anton Vašek, on August 31, 2008 (online) (Slovak)
• List of those sentenced to death by the Czechoslovak People's Court for crimes against humanity (online)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Jörg Konrad Hoensch: Studia Slovaca: Studies on the history of the Slovaks and Slovakia. P. 242 (online)
2. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1946-nslit-v.html