Loyalty in east-central Europe

Hungary's efforts to adjudicate the loyalty of its returned citizens in 1938 were comparable to similar activities on the part of other east-central European states in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The members of the Felvidék Loyalty Commissions, all residents of the Hungarian-Slovak borderlands, experienced some of these actions first-hand. The methods and criteria utilised to determine loyalty in 1938 in the name of the Hungarian state were undoubtedly influenced by the Hungarian-Slovak borderland's twenty years under Czechoslovak rule and longer historical trajectory as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire relied on the supranational institutions of the monarchy and the common army to inculcate loyalty among its subjects. In the decades prior to the First World War loyalty to the Emperor-King Franz Joseph I and the House of Habsburg was the standard way of displaying patriotism to the empire. Dynastic loyalty was accessible to all subjects, regardless of which languages they spoke or even with which nation they may have identified. A pamphlet distributed to soldiers in the imperial and royal army during Franz Joseph's Fiftieth Jubilee emphasised that the ‘Emperor and King must be able to count on the loyalty of His [subjects] – irrespective of language and nation, of tribe and confession – in the face of any danger’.Footnote ²⁰ At least rhetorically, all were equally capable of dynastic loyalty.Footnote ²¹

What held true for peacetime – that the Habsburg army was a conduit for loyalty to the empire – was turned on its head during the First World War. As losses mounted on the battlefield, the empire's military leadership began questioning the patriotism and loyalty of rank-and-file soldiers. Whereas prior to the First World War loyalty had been open to and expected of any and all nationalities of the empire equally, in the context of world war, imperial authorities increasingly viewed disloyalty through an ethnic lens. Alon Rachamimov's research on Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war reveals ‘a different standard of patriotism for different nationalities’.Footnote ²² For example, imperial censors interpreted Czech or Slovak nationalist pronouncements as unpatriotic statements that were incompatible with loyalty for the empire, but permitted similar utterings by Hungarian- or Polish-speaking soldiers. Slovak and Czech speakers thus had a much narrower range within which to express loyalty than their Hungarian- and Polish-speaking counterparts. It was not that Czechs and Slovaks were incapable of being loyal, but that they were assumed to have greater tendencies towards disloyalty.Footnote ²³ The increasingly ethnic coding of loyalty directly reflected the empire's tendency to legitimate some national projects while denouncing others. Habsburg loyalty was no longer conceived in universal terms.

The destruction of the multi-national empire in favour of nation states after the First World War necessitated a complete redefinition of loyalty in which language use and nationality became integral. No longer could loyalty be defined through the subject's personal devotion to the imperial family; rather, loyalty was to come from each citizen to the state. Unlike the multi-national empire, these new states were explicitly nation states, containing sizable national minorities. The tendency that developed in the empire during the First World War of assuming different standards of loyalty based on nationality arose in the successor states as well. If an individual identified with the titular nation, state authorities assumed a greater likelihood he or she would be a loyal citizen than those who identified with a national minority. But the exact correlation between loyalty and nationality was rarely explained. Gábor Egry's research on public servants in interwar Transylvania, where a lack of trained Romanian-speaking civil servants meant the state was forced to retain many former imperial officials (even those who had refused to take the oath of loyalty required by the Romanian state), shows that nationality was not the ultimate determining factor in establishing an individual's loyalty; rather, there was an ‘implicit assumption’ that national identity and loyalty were linked.Footnote ²⁴ As the most easily identifiable marker of nationality in interwar Transylvania, language use became a commonly cited issue in accusations of disloyalty. Denouncers argued that using Hungarian or German in state offices instead of Romanian was a sign at least of a lack of enthusiasm, and potentially of Magyar chauvinism and sabotage.

In an atmosphere of political upheaval and uncertainty, a handful of nationalist movements competed for the loyalty of the local residents of Southern Slovakia during the interwar period. The Czechoslovak state-building agenda centred in Prague, homeland nationalism emanating from Budapest, the exclusive Slovak national project out of Bratislava and the Czechoslovak minority Hungarian political movement all claimed to best represent the interests of the peoples of the Hungarian-Slovak borderland. These various groups sometimes worked in opposition to one another, sometimes in collaboration.

Czechoslovak state officials, like those in interwar Romania, struggled to define loyalty among the state's minority civil servants while having ‘to borrow much of their personnel from the remains of the imperial political and bureaucratic elites’, at least in the short term.Footnote ²⁵ Due to the Kingdom of Hungary's Magyarisation policies and the benefits of a Hungarian identification to career advancement, nearly all civil servants in the territory of what would become Slovakia identified as Hungarians in the last years of the empire's existence. The 1910 census counted only 164 Slovaks among the ranks of civil servants, out of a total of 6,185.Footnote ²⁶ Many of these officials stayed at their posts in the transitional period immediately after the war when the final state boundaries remained up in the air. When the Hungarian Soviet Republic invaded Slovakia in 1919, Hungarian rail and postal workers in the territory staged a strike in the hopes of toppling Czechoslovak rule, confirming some of the government's fears about minority loyalty.Footnote ²⁷

The composition of the state administration changed dramatically during the post-war period; the new government purged the civil service corps, bringing in a legion of new workers from Bohemia and Moravia, and thousands of former Hungarian bureaucrats migrated south to Trianon Hungary.Footnote ²⁸ The Czechoslovak government required a loyalty oath to the republic by all state officials. By the late 1930s, 90 per cent of public administration employees were listed as belonging to the Czechoslovak nationality, and 10 per cent were national minorities, though minorities made up over 33 per cent of the republic's population. The Hungarian minority, which accounted for 4.8 per cent of Czechoslovakia's population according to the 1930 census, made up 1 per cent of state employees.Footnote ²⁹ The statistics are somewhat misleading, as the number of Hungarian-speaking civil servants was no doubt higher. They now self-identified on the census as Czechoslovaks and were counted as such in the statistics. While professing Czechoslovak nationality was not a requirement for a state job, it was viewed as an indicator of loyalty to the Republic and therefore increased one's likelihood of landing or retaining such a position.

Hungarian speakers were actively engaged in Czechoslovak party politics, voting for and loyally participating in a number of different political parties. Some opted for class-based parties – the Communist Party, the Agrarian Party or the Social Democratic Party. Others chose to vote for one of the nationally-based parties of the Hungarian minority – the Hungarian Christian Socialists or the Hungarian Smallholders' Party – which often proclaimed ‘virtually identical economic programmes and national goals’.Footnote ³⁰ In 1936 these two parties merged to create the United Hungarian Party (Egyesült Magyar Párt), becoming the most electorally successful Hungarian minority party and by one estimate garnering between 75 and 80 per cent of the ethnic Hungarian vote in the 1938 local election in Slovakia.Footnote ³¹ This made the United Hungarian Party the most influential party in the Hungarian-Slovak borderland on the eve of the First Vienna Arbitration.

The United Hungarian Party viewed the Social Democratic and Agrarian parties as their fiercest competition and entreated voters to vote based on their nationality rather than their class. Poaching votes from the Social Democrats and Agrarians represented, to a certain extent, a victory against the central government in Prague as well, because ‘to align as a nationalist meant to vote against the prevailing government position, while to identify oneself in economic terms generally meant a vote for the government’.Footnote ³² These interwar party rivalries remained salient even after the Hungarian-Slovak borderland was reannexed to Hungary and became an important factor in determining loyalty to the Hungarian state.

Establishing the Felvidék Loyalty Commissions

The Felvidék Loyalty Commissions were part of a broader set of practical policies aimed at reintegrating reannexed Felvidék to the national body and state. Locals and officials at the highest levels of government debated who would serve in the Hungarian state's employ in Felvidék, with some championing local applicants from Felvidék and others favouring the appointment of officials from the substantial group of unemployed civil servants in Hungary proper, a corps still bloated since the shrinking of the country after the First World War.Footnote ³³ Even before the territory's reannexation, leaders of the United Hungarian Party ‘watched with concern as lines started to form in Budapest’ for positions in Felvidék.Footnote ³⁴ In Budapest, the members of parliament appointed to represent reannexed Felvidék lobbied for giving locals preferential consideration to fill the positions vacated by Czech and Slovak officials.Footnote ³⁵ Andor Jaross, the Minister without Portfolio for Felvidék in Prime Minister Béla Imrédy's cabinet, explained that if applicants were evaluated based on merit alone, Felvidék Hungarians were at a severe disadvantage since, ‘for reasons beyond their control, [they] could not receive higher academic degrees or enter into public service’.Footnote ³⁶ Therefore, he advocated a type of affirmative action for Felvidék Hungarians who, despite perhaps having inferior job experience and academic qualifications, brought special skills to government positions that imports from Trianon Hungary would not possess: familiarity with local conditions and knowledge of the Slovak language, both of which, Jaross argued, were necessary for administering the returned territories.

Turnover in the civil service was dramatic following Felvidék's reannexation. During the first days of Hungarian rule thousands of bureaucrats employed by the Czechoslovak state were dismissed from their positions and thousands more fled fearing discrimination by the new regime.Footnote ³⁷ Still, many police officers, railway workers, notaries and others deemed essential to the maintenance of order and insurance of basic services temporarily kept their jobs. Initial perceptions in Felvidék were that the Hungarian government favoured bringing in civil servants from Trianon Hungary to fill vacancies to the detriment of locals. This inclination produced widespread resentment in the returned territory; locals who identified as Hungarians desperately sought out government jobs that they believed were owed to them to compensate for the alleged discrimination they suffered in applying for such jobs under the previous regime. The National Council of the city of Kassa (Košice) reported in December 1938 that they had received over six thousand applications for government positions since reannexation a month earlier. The council noted that these applicants, disfavoured by the Czechoslovaks due to their Hungarian nationality, now had the right to fill these positions. ‘The resolute Hungarians of Kassa – and clearly only them!! – deserve this support!’ the council charged.Footnote ³⁸ Individual job applicants echoed the council's plea to rectify past suffering at the hands of the Czechoslovak government in their requests for employment. One applicant for a road maintenance position recounted that he had been dismissed from his job in roadwork during the ‘Czech occupation . . . precisely because of [his] Hungarianness’.Footnote ³⁹ In emphasising national suffering, job applicants reproduced a common trope the Hungarian state used to justify border revision: that minority Hungarians endured abuse and oppression at the hands of the Czechoslovak regime. Such arguments did not necessarily reflect reality; even those who worked for the Czechoslovak government made similar allegations. Claims of suffering were instead a way to conform to the Hungarian government's expectations and possibly benefit while doing so. The Hungarian government implemented a preferential job placement policy for reannexed Felvidék residents in 1939, in response to local pressure and Jaross's state-level advocacy to ensure local representation in the civil service. There was, however, one critical condition: all state employees from the returned territories would have to be thoroughly vetted for loyalty to Hungary. Interior Minister Ferenc Keresztes-Fischer outlined the government's concerns in January 1939. ‘Part [of the civil service] is unreliable from a Hungarian racial standpoint’, he remarked, and ‘part from a national loyalty standpoint’.Footnote ⁴⁰

Keresztes-Fischer's concern about racial reliability applied primarily to Jews. It would be forcefully addressed a few months later, when the so-called Second Jewish Law, passed in May 1939, barred Jews from working for the Hungarian government.Footnote ⁴¹ This legislation was the first to define Jews in Hungary racially, adopting a system similar to the German Nuremberg Laws for establishing Jewishness. Hungarian, Czechoslovak and Slovak nationalists fought over Jewish adherents in the Hungarian-Slovak borderlands and linked the question of Jewish loyalty to language use.Footnote ⁴² Many Jews in the Hungarian-Slovak borderland identified as Hungarians and had been encouraged to do so by Hungarian nationalist leaders who wanted to strengthen the Hungarian demographic position. In calling for Hungarian unity in elections prior to the border change in 1938, the United Hungarian Party emphasised that Jews should cast their vote for the party: ‘In the voting booth’, one Hungarian daily proclaimed, ‘I am neither communist nor Catholic, Protestant or Jewish, but a Hungarian!’Footnote ⁴³ The transfer to Hungarian sovereignty thus brought about a radical shift for the Jewish population who were encouraged to be Hungarians one day and racially excluded from being Hungarian the next. Jews' exclusion from the Hungarian administration based on race thus circumvented any discussion of Jewish loyalty to Hungary in the context of state employment.

To tackle the issue of national loyalty and facilitate employment certification, the government established the Felvidék Loyalty Commissions, and individuals who had worked for the Czechoslovak state and wanted to retain a position in the Hungarian civil service were required to appear before a local commission. The person under investigation gave a statement detailing his or her past actions working for the Czechoslovak state and fielded questions from commission members. Commissions also considered written denunciations or letters of support, and occasionally witnesses from the community gave statements on the behaviour of the person in question. If the commission ruled in favour of the individual, he or she received a loyalty certificate, enabling them to retain their post working for the Hungarian state. The United Hungarian Party, which, since reannexation, had become the only legal political party in Felvidék, played a critical role in the loyalty proceedings, providing members to staff the commissions. Thus, while the mandate for the Felvidék Loyalty Commissions came from the central government, the actual adjudicators were local party members who explicitly framed their ideas of what it meant to be loyal to the Hungarian state through the priorities of the United Hungarian Party and in relation to their experiences as national minorities in Czechoslovakia. Felvidék Loyalty Commissions scrutinised a person's behaviour under the old system to see how individuals behaved when Hungarians were not in power to determine who should retain the privilege of representing the Hungarian state. The commissions took many of the same factors into consideration when determining loyalty that the Czechoslovak state had, such as ethnicity and language, albeit privileging Hungarian and disadvantaging Slovak. However, political orientation, over any other single consideration, was the most important calculus of loyalty for the commissions.

Determining ethnicity and loyalty

The Felvidék Loyalty Commissions factored ethnicity into their decisions on who should work for the Hungarian civil administration. Hungarianising the civil service was deemed an important part of reintegrating Felvidék; it would reflect the return to Hungarian rule and the demographic realities of the region, as Hungarian administrators saw them. According to a census conducted by Hungarian officials shortly after the territory's return to Hungarian sovereignty, 84.8 per cent of the inhabitants were Hungarian-speakers, 13.8 per cent Slovak-speakers, and 0.7 per cent German-speakers.Footnote ⁴⁴ The 1930 Czechoslovak census had painted a different picture: 59.1 per cent Hungarian, 29.1 per cent Czechoslovak, 3.1 per cent Jewish, 0.9 per cent German.Footnote ⁴⁵ The drastically different numbers can be partially explained by the two states' divergent computation methods (‘mother-tongue’ for the Hungarian census, ‘nationality’ for the Czechoslovak) and categories (‘Slovak’ as opposed to ‘Czechoslovak’ and ‘Jewish’ on the Czechoslovak census, but not on the Hungarian). But they also speak to the malleability of the local population, who might describe themselves in a number of different ways, based on political pressure, opportunism or circumstance. As Elena Mannová has noted for the Czechoslovak period, ‘many people stood “between two cultures”, [and] their ethnic consciousness was unstable and situational’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Despite such an ambiguous reality in the borderland, those who came before the Felvidék Loyalty Commissions had to declare a single ‘nationality’ (nemzetiség).Footnote ⁴⁷ While this declaration was left to the individual, if the committee members' perception of one's ‘true’ nationality differed from what the person under investigation declared, it was grounds for denying a loyalty certificate.Footnote ⁴⁸

The Felvidék Loyalty Commissions supposed a link between ethnicity and loyalty, but, like Egry's findings in the interwar Romanian case, never fully defined it. In order to ‘make loyalty measureable’Footnote ⁴⁹ for minority Slovak candidates, who the Budapest government professed not to exclude from participation in civic life, commissions scrutinised their potential for civic loyalty.Footnote ⁵⁰ Cases where Slovaks were granted loyalty certificates usually concluded with a stock phrase explaining that since there were no complaints concerning anti-Hungarian behaviour lodged against the individual and because ‘to this point [he or she] has demonstrated civic loyalty, certification is recommended’.Footnote ⁵¹ In prioritising civic loyalty in the Slovak cases, commissions tried to determine if the person in question could uphold the laws of the Hungarian state and refrain from overt criticism of government policies.

The Felvidék Loyalty Commissions considered overt loyalty to the Czechoslovak Republic and loyalty to Hungary to be mutually exclusive. The more entrenched a Slovak individual had been in Czechoslovak cultural or political life in the Czechoslovak Republic, the more difficult it was for him or her to receive a loyalty certificate from the Hungarian government. Past membership in a Czechoslovak political party, trade union or cultural organisation could be grounds for denial.Footnote ⁵² These types of affiliations were damning not only because they were explicitly ‘Czechoslovak’ – a collective Czech-Slovak identity the Hungarian government vehemently denied existed – but also because they could be interpreted as leftist political leanings, which were antithetical to the conservative, authoritarian Hungarian state. Receiving land in the 1919 Czechoslovak Land Reform, which parcelled up large estates owned by Hungarian nobility and redistributed the land mainly to Czechs and Slovaks, was likewise deemed highly suspicious and often cited by commissions as justification for not granting a loyalty certificate.Footnote ⁵³ The perception that such people had profited from Hungarian misfortune and artificially diluted Hungarian ethnic predominance in Felvidék made them favourite targets of the regime. Furthermore, because members of the Czechoslovak Legion, the volunteer fighting force formed during the First World War, and supporters of the nationalist Slovak League disproportionately benefited from the land reform,Footnote ⁵⁴ those who had received parcels of land were automatically associated with these organisations, whether they had belonged to them or not. The loyalty commissions also scrutinised past job performance for evidence of anti-Hungarian tendencies. Pál Jancsovics (Pavol Jančovič) was denied certification because it was alleged that, in his official capacity as a former bailiff, ‘he handled affairs concerning Hungarians with malice and harmful intent’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Actions against ordinary Hungarians, even ones committed in the past, were considered actions against the state directly.Footnote ⁵⁶

After the establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic, the term Magyarone took on a more explicitly political meaning, denoting those who preferred a Hungarian-Slovak political alignment rather than the current Czech-Slovak oneFootnote ⁵⁷ and became a way to justify certifying Slovak candidates. In the context of the loyalty trials, Slovak applicants regularly invoked their now potentially desirable Magyarone credentials. One such applicant was Károly Rozsival (Karol Rožival), a town clerk from Nagysurány (Šurany), one of the few solidly Slovak-speaking areas returned to Hungary in 1938. Rozsival was born in 1900 in the settlement of Kisvárad (Nitriansky Hrádok) and studied at a Hungarian school in Érsekújvár (Nové Zámky) in the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He testified that, although he considered himself Slovak, he spoke Hungarian regularly and had raised his three children to know Hungarian as well, to the extent that they even passed the Hungarian state language exam once the area came back under Hungarian control.Footnote ⁵⁸

Although it is impossible to know Rozsival's motives for maintaining links to the Hungarian language within his family, raising his children in the Czechoslovak Republic to speak a minority language in a Slovak-majority and comparatively monolingual town, there are a number of possible reasons for his nationally indifferent behaviour. It may be an indicator of a pro-Hungarian political orientation, as the loyalty commission interpreted it. In this scenario, Rozsival could be viewed as a sort of double agent: he appeared to support Czechoslovak rule by working for the state apparatus, but his private actions of raising his children to know Hungarian revealed his true loyalties lay with Hungary. It also may be shrewd opportunism; perhaps Rozsival correctly deduced from the political instability he had already experienced in his lifetime that Hungarian sovereignty might return to Nagysurány, and that his children's best chance of social advancement was to be able to navigate Hungarian cultural and linguistic settings. Or, perhaps most likely, we should read Rozsival's nationally indifferent behaviour as a continuation of middle-class social practices in the Hungarian-Slovak borderland, much as Czech and German speakers continued child exchange programmes in Bohemia, despite the protests of both Czech and German nationalists.Footnote ⁵⁹ We might read Rozsival's actions as a personal assertion of what it meant to be Slovak in the borderland: that knowing Hungarian did not make a person less Slovak, regardless of what nationalists on either side argued. Nationally indifferent behaviours made the task of adjudicating loyalty and its relationship to ethnicity impossible for loyalty commissions to determine in a consistent manner.

Nationality in public and private spheres

The dichotomy between civic and national loyalty, private and public behaviour meant that the loyalty trials often focused heavily on the private sphere in an attempt to ascertain an individual's ‘true’ allegiance. In the case of Ferenc Piffkó (František Pifko), an officer in the Czechoslovak police force in Galánta (Galanta) who retained his position when the Hungarian government took control of the town, both supporters and detractors pointed to Piffkó's private life for evidence of his Hungarian loyalty, or lack thereof. In his statement, Officer Piffkó, who claimed Hungarian nationality, described his home life as exclusively Hungarian: he had married a Hungarian woman and raised his children to speak only Hungarian.Footnote ⁶⁰ However, a witness claimed he saw Officer Piffkó beat his children for speaking Hungarian and forced them to speak Slovak instead. Equally troubling for his case, school records showed that Piffkó's youngest daughter attended a Slovak-language school during the Czechoslovak period.

The school issue was a critical one for nationalists in the Hungarian-Slovak borderland. The 1919 Czechoslovak Minority Schools Act guaranteed that a minority school be provided by the state in any district where at least 20 per cent of inhabitants belonged to a particular minority group. Although Czechoslovak authorities sometimes redistricted areas to divide the Hungarian population and keep their numbers below the 20 per cent threshold, most Hungarian communities in Czechoslovakia had access to Hungarian-language primary education.Footnote ⁶¹ Some Hungarian-speaking parents, however, chose to send their children to Slovak-language schools. They cited a variety of reasons, such as a school's proximity to their home, greater resources at the Slovak-language school compared to the Hungarian alternative, wanting their children to have a greater familiarity with an official state language or a desire for their children to be better integrated into Czechoslovak society. Hungarian educational administrators interpreted these parents' decisions as acts of national betrayal, arguing that the Slovak-language schools ‘create[d] citizens loyal to [Czechoslovakia] against the spirit of their [Hungarian] family upbringing’,Footnote ⁶² producing at best morally corrupt Hungarians, at worst, transforming Hungarian youth into Czechoslovaks.Footnote ⁶³ The loyalty commissions often listed sending one's child to a Slovak-language school as grounds for denying a loyalty certificate.Footnote ⁶⁴ Piffkó explained to the court that his wife had made the decision ‘from a cleanliness and health standpoint’ without his knowledge, because the Hungarian school was in a bad part of town near a gypsy encampment.Footnote ⁶⁵ Piffkó employed a common strategy that relied on states' gendered national expectations to explain away his daughter's dubious educational history. Men often blamed politically or nationally problematic behaviours on wives or mothers who had less to lose from a financial standpoint and whose actions could be labelled ignorant rather than treacherous enabled men to manoeuvre more easily through the political upheaval of the borderland.Footnote ⁶⁶ Furthermore, Piffkó's defence critiqued the Czechoslovak state for neglecting Hungarian schools. Mentioning the Hungarian schools' proximity to a ‘gypsy encampment’ implied that Czechoslovak neglect meant it was an institution unfit for educating ‘civilised’ Hungarian children. Sending his daughter to the Slovak-language school was thus, he argued, actually a nationally appropriate decision.

Another way of gauging Piffkó's Hungarianness was to scrutinise his political leanings through his reading preferences. One witness noted that Piffkó read Czechoslovak newspapers like A-Zet, a socialist daily, and Slovenská Politika, published by the Czechoslovak Agrarian Party. Piffkó countered that he ‘did not speak Czech well enough to read such newspapers’ and, furthermore, that he ‘didn't buy newspapers because he didn't have that kind of money’.Footnote ⁶⁷ He read newspapers such as Prágai Magyar Hirlap (the highest circulating Hungarian-language newspaper in Czechoslovakia) in coffeehouses instead. While the publication language of the newspapers was certainly noted, their political associations were even more important for members of the loyalty commission. A-Zet and Slovenská Politika were both associated with parties on the left of the political spectrum, so the accusation that Piffkó read such newspapers intimated a political disposition unfavourable to the loyalty commissions. Piffkó's counter claim of reading Prágai Magyar Hirlap implied the opposite: it was the paper of the United Hungarian Party, and thus associated with those who practiced proper Hungarian behaviour during the Czechoslovak period. Such evidence reveals the extent to which the everyday lives of the people in the Hungarian-Slovak borderland were ethnicised, but also the ways in which that ethnicisation was explicitly political. For the loyalty commission members, proper Hungarians were by definition politically conservative nationalists; associating with leftist politics, on the other hand, was construed as anti-Hungarian behaviour.

Politics and ethnicity further intersected in Piffkó's case in the assessment of his job performance. Witnesses who supported Piffkó's claims of loyalty to Hungary asserted that, although he was employed as a Czechoslovak police officer, Piffkó had nevertheless remained a faithful Hungarian. Two witnesses testified that ‘officer Piffkó was trustworthy from a nationality standpoint’ and had ‘always worked in the interest of Hungarians’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Another witness, musician János Bartos, recounted how Piffkó had worked to protect the Hungarian minority, undermining the attempts of the Czechoslovak state to police nationalist activity. Bartos claimed that whenever a Hungarian was denounced for singing forbidden Hungarian songs or the national anthem at the local pub, Piffkó would forewarn the individual and coach him in how to properly deny the Czechoslovak police's questioning to escape prosecution. In addition, Piffkó sometimes participated in these late-night Hungarian sing-alongs himself. According to Bartos, Piffkó ‘sang [the anthem] with as much enthusiasm as the other Hungarians’.Footnote ⁶⁹ In this instance, civic loyalty and national loyalty were in direct conflict with one another: defying the Czechoslovak state and ignoring his duties as a police officer made Piffkó a preserver of the Hungarian nation and a subversive presence, working to undermine the Czechoslovak nation-building process. Essentially, the witnesses argued that Piffkó should be retained as a Hungarian police officer because he had been a bad Czechoslovak police officer. Piffkó's ability to prove that he had used his authority to support the Hungarian minority turned the undesirable quality of working for the Czechoslovak state into an asset.

But other witnesses gave contrasting evidence that brought to light ‘serious accusations’ about Piffkó's ‘national allegiance’.Footnote ⁷⁰ His main detractor, Vilmos Záreczky, testified that Piffkó had reported him for rebuking Slovaks and the Czech government during a football game, which Záreczky interpreted as a blatantly anti-Hungarian act. Furthermore, he alleged that Piffkó had spoken in Slovak during Záreczky's trial after the match, even though the judge addressed Piffkó in Hungarian. Presented with testimonies that exposed a variety of contradictory national behaviours on Piffkó's part, the loyalty commission in Galánta ultimately relied on politics to settle the case. Based on reports that Záreczky was a former communist who had aided Hungarian Soviet troops in 1919, commission members labelled him an ‘untrustworthy’ witness and disregarded his testimony. The commission granted Piffkó a loyalty certificate and he remained at his post as a police officer.

Denunciations in the loyalty trials

As we have already seen in Piffkó's case, defining and determining loyalty in the Hungarian-Slovak borderland was contingent on locals reporting on one another's behaviour to the loyalty commissions. The act of denouncing, which has been studied in depth for totalitarian states, serves a variety of purposes for individuals, including advancing personal interests, ‘correcting injustice . . . [and] protecting the interests of the community’ by provoking state action.Footnote ⁷¹ In the context of the loyalty hearings, denunciations were often very obviously about personal vendettas or acts of self-preservation, in which an individual denounced someone as a way to deflect scrutiny away from him/herself. More importantly, denunciations also gave inhabitants of the Hungarian-Slovak borderland a say in defining proper national behaviour. While denunciations play a role in nearly every modern society, their power is amplified in times of political flux. The culture of denunciation in reannexed Felvidék shows similar patterns to other borderlands that underwent changes in sovereignty, including the democratic system implemented after 1918 in Alsace-Lorraine when it returned to French rule and to the totalitarian regime installed by the Nazis in 1939 in the annexed Sudetenland. In all of these areas the new regimes were deeply suspicious of residents' political loyalties and relied on denunciations by private citizens to ascertain who should be considered a patriot and who a traitor.Footnote ⁷²

Acts of denunciation came to a head in the case of Gyula Subik (Július Šubik), a district notary for the Czechoslovak state from the village of Hidaskürt (Mostová), who requested a loyalty certificate to retain his post. He had important connections to the Hungarian government through his borther Károly Subik, a Roman Catholic priest and member of the Order of Vitéz, a knightly order established by Hungarian Regent Miklós Horthy and strongly associated with the 1919 counter-revolution and Hungarian Christian conservatism. Gyula Subik had attended school until the age of seventeen in the city of Eger and joined the Hungarian army in 1916. He was injured at the Italian front and sent home to recuperate with his parents in 1918 in Magyardiószeg (Veľký Diosek), after which time Czechoslovak forces occupied the area. His family was split, with some members ending up in Trianon Hungary while he remained in Czechoslovakia. Despite Subik's Hungarian family connections, education and military service, his conduct during the Czechoslovak period came under scrutiny due to a series of denunciations. He was accused of taking part in Czechoslovak Independence Day activities in 1930 and of turning in Hungarians to Czechoslovak authorities. One individual recounted an instance in which Subik reported some Hungarians to the Czech authorities for selling meat on the black market. ‘If Mr. Subik was even a little bit Hungarian’, the witness stated, ‘he would not have . . . denounced a Hungarian person for such a thing’.Footnote ⁷³ Once again, this denunciation of Subik suggests that Hungarian national loyalty was at odds with Czechoslovak civic loyalty and that proper civic behaviour, in this case reporting a criminal activity, could be retroactively deemed a betrayal of the nation.

The loyalty council likewise interpreted Subik's admission of national indifference and attempts to recast himself as loyal to different groups for the sake of self-preservation as a national betrayal. A local priest added to Subik's problems by describing him as a loner who had neither helped nor hindered the Hungarian cause. The priest stated that Subik had asked him for two statements; ‘one would have demonstrated Hungarian loyalty, the other Slovak’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Such hedging of bets did not sit well with the loyalty commission members. They were further confounded when Subik ‘confessed that he considered himself neither Hungarian nor Slovak’. In their eyes, this was symptomatic of a grave problem: Subik's ‘unpatriotic attitude’.Footnote ⁷⁵ He was further hurt by the fact that, apart from the Czechoslovak parade allegation, he had not taken part in any kind of cultural activities or political life on either side. Subik's only significant association was as an employee of the Czechoslovak government. Although his family lived in Trianon Hungary and vouched that he had ‘manfully taken part in every anti-Czechoslovak movement’, the loyalty commission concluded that the denunciations describing his past anti-Hungarian transgressions and his own admission of national indifference precluded Subik from obtaining a loyalty certificate to retain his job as district notary.

Denunciation could occasionally work against the loyalty adjudicators as much as it did those on trial. During his appeal hearing Subik resorted to flinging accusations elsewhere in a desperate attempt to prove his loyalty to Hungary. Subik's aim was too high, however, when he targeted one of the members of the loyalty council, Ernő Biskoroványi. ‘Do not judge me in front of that loyalty council member Mr. Biskoroványi’, Subik charged, ‘who sent his child to a Slovak school over a Hungarian one and thereby contaminated the soul of his innocent child with the Czechoslovak spirit!’Footnote ⁷⁶ This accusation was met with indignation by the council, which called Subik's claim ‘excessive, audacious, arrogant, hypocritical, [and] mystifyingly false’. The council's report on Subik charged that he was ‘oppressed by dark guilt’ when Hungarian troops reoccupied Felvidék and that ‘in his entire demeanour he gave off the impression of a guilty person’.Footnote ⁷⁷ The commission took extreme offence at the questioning of Biskoroványi's loyalty and the chairman wrote a letter to the Interior Minister in which he pleaded for legal action against Subik:

There is no evidence that the Interior Ministry authorised bringing a criminal case against Subik, but his appeal for a loyalty certificate was denied.

Subik's accusation against a powerful local official demonstrates that in Felvidék, denunciations became a way for individuals to express their frustrations toward the invasive Hungarian state even if they were couched in patriotic language. It was also Subik's way of critiquing the loyalty commissions themselves; he questioned their authority to judge him as properly Hungarian, aggressively exposing Biskoroványi's own suspect behaviour. The severe reaction of the loyalty commission attests to the fact that although denunciations assisted the state in policing loyalty, they could not be fully controlled and could be used against state organisations as well. Furthermore, if Subik's accusation was indeed accurate, it suggests that even those who acquired the power to adjudicate loyalty had made compromises and sometimes acted in ways that could be retroactively interpreted as disloyal.

Loyalty re-examined

Hungarian state officials received numerous complaints from residents concerning their treatment at the hands of the Felvidék Loyalty Commissions and hundreds of appeals to reopen the cases of applicants who had been denied loyalty certificates. The appeals went to the government agency that the person appealing the decision had previously worked for: appeals from rail workers went to the Ministry of Transportation; those from schoolteachers went to the Ministry of Education. Particularly contentious cases even reached the Prime Minister's Office, as the region's residents sought redress from the highest level of the Hungarian government. These appeals show that many residents felt that the ways in which the Felvidék Loyalty Commissions interpreted loyalty were too harsh and did not reflect the realities of life in the borderland.

Residents complained vociferously about the toll the loyalty proceedings had taken on their local communities. For instance, Mrs. János Csalthó wrote a letter to Prime Minister Pál Teleki in December 1939 protesting that her village of Zsitafödémes (Úľany nad Žitavou) had been hit particularly hard. ‘Of the two thousand residents in our village, at least five hundred work for the railway’, she noted. During the loyalty proceedings, many people ‘who had no complaints against them were released [from their railway jobs]’. Furthermore, the loyalty commission gave no explanation to the individuals as to why they had been rejected. The commission's decisions had created ‘bitterness’ on the part of many locals, who were increasingly ‘turning to Slovak leadership for help . . . [because] they feared the Hungarian leaders’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Csalthó appealed to the prime minister to review the cases of three men from the village whom she believed had been unjustly released from their jobs and left without a way to support their families. She described the individuals' Hungarian credentials: one had married a Hungarian woman and been the first to hoist the Hungarian flag at the train station after the town's reannexation; another had sent his son to a Hungarian school; the third man had fought for the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War. ‘None of these men were [Hlinka] Guardsmen, nor were they [Czechoslovak] Legionaries. None of them had ever taken part in anti-Hungarian actions’, she assured the prime minister.

Like the commission members, Csalthó linked loyalty to politics, but her interpretation of Hungarian loyalty differed from that used by the loyalty commissions. In her mind, the fact that the men had not belonged to the Hlinka Guard or Czechoslovak Legion – overtly nationalist and explicitly anti-Hungarian political groups – should be sufficient for them to retain their posts. The subsequent investigation by the prime minister's office revealed that the loyalty commissions rejected the men because their party affiliations failed to meet their more rigid standards; two had belonged to Edvard Beneš's Czechoslovak National Socialist Party and one had joined the Social Democratic Union organisation in 1938.Footnote ⁸⁰ Whereas Csalthó associated Hungarian disloyalty with Czechoslovak and Slovak ultranationalism, the commission members connected disloyalty just as readily to moderate left-wing parliamentary parties. In Zsitafödémes, locals responded to the commission's narrow definition of Hungarian loyalty by ‘loathing’ Hungarian officials, whom they, like Csalthó, believed had unnecessarily caused them hardships.Footnote ⁸¹

Other appeals emphasised that ‘patriotic’ Hungarians had suffered because of the arbitrary decisions of the loyalty commissions. János Kozma, a schoolteacher and Hungarian scout troop leader in the town of Diószeg (Diosek/Sládkovičovo), lost his teaching position of thirty-four years at a Hungarian-language school after he was denied a loyalty certificate because he allegedly wrote a column critical of Regent Horthy in a pro-Czech Hungarian-language Agrarian Party newspaper sixteen years prior (it was not, in fact, written by this particular János Kozma). The community rallied to his defence, writing numerous letters of support on his behalf to the Ministry of Education. When the ministry rejected their repeated requests, Kozma's entire scout troop sent a letter to Prime Minister Teleki (who was at one time Hungary's Chief of Scouting), arguing that ‘during the twenty years of foreign rule, [Kozma] never wavered in his Hungarianness and . . . performed self-sacrificing work for the local Hungarian [community]’. He was ‘the unfortunate victim’, the scouts' letter assured the prime minister, ‘of a fatal misunderstanding’.Footnote ⁸² High-level Roman Catholic officials in Hungary also rallied to Kozma's defence. István Bárdos, High Commissioner of the Archbishop of Esztergom, asked for Kozma's reinstatement, complaining that his treatment by the Felvidék Loyalty Commission was ‘shockingly lamentable’ and needed to be rectified immediately.Footnote ⁸³ After investigating Kozma's case and agreeing that he had been wrongly labelled disloyal, the Prime Minister's Office concluded that the entire procedure for certifying loyalty needed revision. Ministry officials argued that the Felvidék Loyalty Commissions, which had been hastily implemented after the territory was returned to Hungary, suffered from a ‘lack of judicial procedural safeguards’. This put individuals at risk because the decision of these commissions affected both their disposition toward the Hungarian state and their ‘entire livelihoods’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Prime Minister Teleki conceded that ‘during the certification process, it is generally known that in some cases, the decisions were erroneous’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Most of the Felvidék Loyalty Commissions' verdicts nevertheless remained unchanged and continued to affect the makeup of the region's civil service throughout the seven years of Hungarian rule.