Gertrude Enderle-Burcel, Dieter Stiefel, Alice Teichova (Hrsg.): Sonderband 9. „Zarte Bande” – Österreich und die europäischen planwirtschaftlichen Länder / „Delicate Relationships” – Austria and Europe’s Planned Economies (2006)
L'udovit Hallon - Miroslav Londák: Sources and Possibilities of Research on Slovak-Austrian Economic Relations after the Second World War
Sources and Possibilities of Research on Slovak-Austrian Economic Relations... factories of the Dynamit - Nobel Company and the refinery Apollo in Bratislava. Among finished products we must mention glass, flexural furniture, fur products, pipes, enameled dishes, as well as electrical engineering goods and conductors from the Bratislava factories of Siemens - Schuckert and the factory for cables, in which Austrian capital participated. After the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy only a fragment of the export of finished products remained.4 Goods also took the opposite direction, e. g. from the region of present-day Austria to Slovakia. However, the picture of imports from Austria is in Slovak historiography even more modest than in the case of exports. As for raw materials, chalk, raw-hide and asbestos planks were imported. The cores of imports were finished products, especially a whole range of products from the mechanical and electrical engineering industry for the use of individual economic sectors. The Austrian mechanical and electrical engineering industry was important in Slovakia between the wars because the newest technology for modernization was needed. At the time of the clerico-fascist dictatorship in the Slovak Republic between 1939 and 1945 Slovakia had its first independent trade relationships managed by its own ministry. In the given short period of time we can track in statistics and archive files the independent development of Slovakia’s foreign trade, although Austria as an integral part of the German Reich since March 1938 was on the basis of clearing included in trade relations with Germany. After 1939 Slovakia was economically wholly linked to Germany, similar to its other satellites. That is why Germany became the main foreign trade partner of Slovakia. In the years 1940-1943 exports from Slovakia to Germany grew in value from 859 million to 2 270 million crowns and imports from Germany to Slovakia rose from 1 182 million to 2 142 million crowns. The share of Germany in overall Slovak exports grew in the monitored period from 27 to 40 percent and the share in overall imports remained on the level of 41 percent.5 While trading with, for example, the Czech - Moravian Protectorate or the Polish General Government, were shown separately in Slovak statistics, the volume of Austrian trade was part of the volume of imports and exports between Slovakia and Germany. We can estimate that the share of Austria in the volume of Slovak-German trade ranged from 10 to 20 percent. During the war boom and growing shortage of goods of almost all kinds, formerly existing relationships of product exchange could be renewed in trade between Slovakia and Austria after 1938. Trading with some commodities, which was discontinued or much reduced in the time between the two wars, could thus be renewed and widened in the war years. No doubt this was true about the supply of food products from Slovakia to Austria but also about other traditional fields of mutual trade relationships. During the war the volume of trade grew in supply of 4 Dejiny Slovenska (History of Slovakia). Vol. 3. Bratislava 1989, p. 448-454. 5 Slovak foreign trade 1 93 9- 1 94 3 . in: Statisticka priruCka Slovenska (1947). p. 232- 237. 293
