Austria–Slovakia border

Rivers and a capital

In its lower course the Morava divides the Czech Republic from Slovakia and then Slovakia from Austria, before entering the Danube just above Bratislava. Its valley has long been one of Europe’s natural corridors.^[1]

Bratislava lies where the Danube cuts through the Little Carpathians near the meeting point of Slovakia, Austria and Hungary, 56 km from Vienna. For more than 200 years it was the capital of Hungary; after the First World War it became the capital of Slovakia within Czechoslovakia.^[2]

The Iron Curtain at Bratislava

After the communist coup of February 1948 Czechoslovakia began closing its border with Austria, and a law of July 1951 created border and forbidden zones patrolled by a Border Guard allowed to shoot even unarmed people. Devín, beneath its castle at the Morava–Danube confluence, became almost inaccessible in the 1950s. Between 1951 and 1989 at least 7,500 people were detained trying to cross into Austria here.^[3]

Slovakia’s Nation’s Memory Institute has documented at least 42 people killed on the Slovak section between 1948 and 1989, by gunfire, electrified fences, mines and guard dogs. In 1951 Dorota Wallnerová was shot dead near Kopčany while fleeing with her family; in 1986 Hartmut Tautz of East Germany was mauled by guard dogs near Bratislava. The guards themselves dismantled the Iron Curtain after November 1989.^[4][5]

“We were unarmed and they were shooting at us.”^[5]