How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

In his 2015 book, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder writes: During the transition from Czechoslovak to Slovak law, Slovaks and others stole with enthusiasm from the Jews. Tiso and the leaders of the new state saw this as part of a natural process whereby Slovaks would displace Jews (and, in some measure, Slovak Catholics would displace Slovak Protestants) as the middle class. Laws expropriating Jews thus created an artificial Jewish question: what to do with all of these impoverished people?4 Snyder subsequently explains that the solution Slovak leaders chose was to deport their Jewish population to Auschwitz, after first seeking assurances from the Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler that the fifty-eight thousand Slovakian Jews they sent would not be returned.