The Slovak Expeditionary Army Group was an element of the military forces of the Slovak Republic that fought under Nazi German command on the Eastern Front during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...

Background

The Slovak Republic was a

puppet state A puppet state, puppet régime, puppet government or dummy government, is a state that is ''de jure'' independent but ''de facto'' completely dependent upon an outside power and subject to its orders.Compare: Puppet states have nominal sove ...

established on 14 March 1939. It possessed a small army of its own, largely made up of parts inherited from the old Czechoslovak Army. The 1st Slovak Infantry Division took part in the

German invasion of Poland The invasion of Poland (1 September – 6 October 1939) was a joint attack on the Republic of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union which marked the beginning of World War II. The German invasion began on 1 September 1939, one week afte ...

in September 1939. In the aftermath of the

German invasion of France France has been invaded on numerous occasions, by foreign powers or rival French governments; there have also been unimplemented invasion plans. * the 1746 War of the Austrian Succession, Austria-Italian forces supported by the British navy attemp ...

, the German government consolidated its control of the Slovak regime. On 21 June 1941, the Slovak government not informed about the invasion of Russia and offered to participate in the

German invasion of the Soviet Union Operation Barbarossa (german: link=no, Unternehmen Barbarossa; ) was the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany and many of its Axis allies, starting on Sunday, 22 June 1941, during the Second World War. The operation, code-named afte ...

. Germany accepted the following day. The Slovak Army was called up, as the regime sought to demonstrate its indispensability to Nazi Germany and its greater loyalty than

Hungary Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the ...

History

The Slovak Expeditionary Army Group of about 45,000 men entered the Soviet Union shortly after the German attack. This army lacked logistic and transportation support, so a much smaller unit, the ''Slovak Mobile Command'' under command of Rudolf Pilfousek (a.k.a. the ''Pilfousek Brigade''), was formed from units selected from this force; the rest of the Slovak army was relegated to rear-area security duty. The Slovak Mobile Command was attached to the German 17th Army (as was the Hungarian

Carpathian Group The Carpathian Mountains or Carpathians () are a range of mountains forming an arc across Central Europe. Roughly long, it is the third-longest European mountain range after the Urals at and the Scandinavian Mountains at . The range stretches ...

also) and shortly thereafter given over to direct German command, the Slovaks lacking the command infrastructure to exercise effective operational control. This unit fought with the 17th Army through July 1941, including at the

Battle of Uman The Battle of Uman (15 July – 8 August 1941) was the World War II German offensive in Uman, Ukraine against the 6th and 12th Soviet Armies. In a three-week period, the Wehrmacht encircled and annihilated the two Soviet armies. The battle occ ...

and the Battle of Lypovec. At the beginning of August 1941, the Slovak Mobile Command was dissolved and instead two infantry divisions were formed from the Slovak Expeditionary Army Group. The Slovak 2nd Division was a

security division Security Divisions (German: ''Sicherungs-Divisionen'') were German rear-area military units engaged in Nazi security warfare in occupied Europe during World War II. Almost all divisions were employed in areas on the Eastern front with the exceptio ...

, but the Slovak 1st Division was a front-line unit which fought in the campaigns of 1941 and 1942, reaching the Caucasus area with

Army Group B Army Group B (German: ') was the title of three German Army Groups that saw action during World War II. Operational history Army Group B first took part in the Battle of France in 1940 in Belgium and the Netherlands. The second formation of Ar ...

. The Slovak 1st Division then shared the fate of the German southern forces, losing its heavy equipment in the

Kuban bridgehead The Kuban Bridgehead (german: Kuban-Brückenkopf), also known as the "Goth's head position" (), was a German military position on the Taman Peninsula, Russia, between the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea. Existing from January to October 1943, the ...

and suffering heavy losses at Melitopol in the southern Ukraine. Slovak troops took part in Operation Bamberg, an anti-partisan action in which 5,000 alleged partisans, including 200 Jews, were shot. Slovak soldiers participated in numerous pogroms and frequently robbed Jews during the first days and weeks of the occupation in the summer of 1941. However, there was no equivalent of the

Barbarossa decree During World War II, the Barbarossa decree was one of the Wehrmacht criminal orders given on 13 May 1941, shortly before Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. The decree was laid out by Adolf Hitler during a high-level meeting w ...

(which authorized Wehrmacht soldiers to execute civilians without trial) and some Slovak soldiers were tried for robbing or murdering Jews, receiving only very light sentences. Many Slovak soldiers and the army leadership nevertheless approved of the Holocaust, due in part to the large amount of propaganda promoting the Jewish Bolshevik canard. In June 1944, the remnant of the division, no longer considered fit for combat due to low morale, was disarmed and the personnel assigned to construction and

logistical Logistics is generally the detailed organization and implementation of a complex operation. In a general business sense, logistics manages the flow of goods between the point of origin and the point of consumption to meet the requirements of ...

work, a fate which had already befallen the Slovak 2nd Division earlier for the same reason.

Commanders of the 1st Mobile Infantry Division

* Augustín Malár (September 1941 – September 1942) * Jozef Turanec (September 1942 – January 1943) * Stefan Jurech (January 1943 – September 1943) * Elmir Lendvay (September 1943 – June 1944)Feldgrau WW2 Slovakian Axis Forces
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References

Bibliography

External links