June 1945, shortly after the end of World War II in Europe. American troops
looking for war criminals responsible for the crimes committed during the Second World War
arrive at the Capuchin Monastery in Altötting, Germany. They find the
man they have been looking for - a catholic priest. However, he is no ordinary priest.
He is a former president of the fascist Slovak State which collaborated closely with Nazi
Germany during the Second World War and sent tens of thousands of Slovak Jews to concentration camps
where they were met with their death. His name is Jozef Tiso.
Jozef Tiso was born on the 13th of October 1887
in Bytča, then part of Austria-Hungary. His father was a butcher and Jozef was
raised in a religious family. Because he was an excellent student with a talent for languages,
especially Hungarian and German, he caught the eye of the bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese
of Nitra- Imrich Bende - who sent him to study theology at the University of Vienna in 1906. In
1910 Jozef Tiso was ordained as a priest and one year later he graduated as a Doctor of Theology.
After returning to his homeland, Tiso became an assistant priest in three parishes in today’s
Slovakia. He performed extensive educational and social work among the local people and
fought against poverty and alcoholism. It is believed that it was during this time when his
antisemitic views were formed. Tiso blamed the Jewish tavern owners for the rising alcoholism,
and he was also a member of self-help association
selling food and clothing cheaper than the local store which was owned by a Jew.
After the outbreak of the First World War on the 28th of July 1914, Jozef Tiso served as a
military priest of the 71st infantry regiment of the Austro-Hungarian Army which consisted mostly
of Slovak soldiers. During the spiritual care of the wounded and dying soldiers,
Tiso got first-hand experience with horrors of war.
At the end of 1914 Tiso fell ill with serious kidney illness and his military career was over.
The dissolution of the Russian, German, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires
led to the creation of independent states including Poland and Czechoslovakia which was
created in October 1918, when it declared its independence from Austria-Hungary.
It included the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, Slovakia, the province of Subcarpathian
Rus, which occupied the eastern region of Czechoslovakia, and portions of Austrian Silesia.
50 percent of the Czechoslovak population consisted of Czechs.
Germans and Slovaks accounted for 22 and 16 percent respectively. The rest
being Hungarians, Ukrainians, Hebrew and Yiddish and Polish.
The First World War ended on the 11th of November 1918 when the German leaders signed the armistice
in the Compiègne Forest in France. The introduction of new weapons like the machine
gun and gas warfare led to the enormous losses and the war claimed the lives of ten million soldiers.
Property and industry losses were catastrophic.
As a result, the victorious powers imposed a series of treaties upon the defeated powers.
Among the treaties, the 1919 Treaty of Versailles held Germany responsible for starting the war
and liable for massive material damages. The treaty required demilitarization of the Rhineland,
extensive reparation payments by Germany and the loss of 13% of Germany’s prewar territories
including Hlučín district which Germany had to concede over to Czechoslovakia.
The treaty was signed on the 28th of June 1919 in the Palace of Versailles.
The shame of defeat and the 1919 peace settlement played an important role in
the rise of Nazism in Germany and the coming of a Second World War just 20 years later.
In December 1918, a few months before the 1919 Treaty of Versailles,
Jozef Tiso joined the Slovak People's Party – a far-right clerico-fascist political party
with an authoritarian ideology. The party had been founded by Andrej
Hlinka - a Slovak Catholic Priest - in 1913. After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire at the end of the World War 1 and the formation of Czechoslovakia in October 1918,
Andrej Hlinka was opposing Czechoslovakism which underlined the reciprocity of the Czechs and the
Slovaks; and demanded Slovak autonomy. Jozef Tiso became a popular speaker of the party gradually
strengthening his position owing to his energy as well as intelligence and elite education.
In 1925 the party changed its name to the Hlinka's Slovak People's Party.
Tiso became one of the party's leaders and after he became the Czechoslovak Minister of Health
and Physical Education in 1927, he surprisingly refused the government-provided ministry flat,
staying in one of Prague monasteries instead. In 1930, Tiso became the official vice-president
of the Hlinka's Slovak People's Party and seemed destined to succeed Hlinka.
In the years after World War I, the Soviet Union and Italy saw the rise of totalitarian regimes
led by dictators such as Joseph Stalin or Benito Mussolini.
This form of government prohibited all opposition parties and the state
attempted to assert control over every aspect of public and private life.
By the middle 1930s, Tiso's view shifted toward authoritarian and totalitarian ideas, too.
He repeatedly declared that the Hlinka's Slovak People's Party
was the only party representing the Slovaks and the only one which spoke for the Slovak nation.
Adolf Hitler became a dictator in 1933 when his Nazi Party came into power.
One of the reasons was that many Germans could not concede their country’s defeat in World War I,
arguing that “backstabbing” and weakness in the rear had paralyzed and, eventually,
caused the front to collapse. The Jews, they claimed, had done much to spread defeatism and
thus destroy the German army. They interpreted the terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty and the
steep compensation payments that it entailed as revenge by the victors and a glaring injustice.
Hitler claimed that Communists, and Jews had surrendered German honor to a shameful peace.
The Nazi Regime began not only to restrict the civil and human rights of the Jews - establishing
the first concentration camps, but it also demanded the “return” of the Sudetenland,
to the German Reich. The Sudetenland was a border area of Czechoslovakia on which
ethnic German population of Czechoslovakia lived. This part of Czechoslovakia also
contained the Czechoslovak Army's defensive positions in event of a war with Germany.
In late summer 1938, Hitler threatened to unleash a European war unless the Sudetenland was ceded
to Germany. The leaders of Britain, France, Italy, and Germany held a conference in Munich
between the 29th and 30th of September 1938. In what became known as the Munich Agreement, they
agreed to the German annexation of the Sudetenland in exchange for a pledge of peace from Hitler.
The Czechoslovaks were not invited to the conference and felt they had been betrayed
by the British and French governments. On the 30th of September 1938 the British
Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, on his return from Munich, made a "Peace for our
time" declaration believing he had averted war. However, this peace would not last long.
As a result of the Munich Agreement, the leaders
of the democratic government in Czechoslovakia resigned,
President Beneš left the country for France and Slovakia was granted significant autonomy.
At this time Jozef Tiso was already the leader of the Hlinka's Slovak People's Party as Andrej
Hlinka had died in August of 1938, only a few weeks before the Munich Conference took place.
On the 14th of March 1939 Jozef Tiso became a prime minister of the First
Slovak Republic which was, until then part of Czechoslovakia as autonomous Slovak State.
One day later on the 15th of March, Nazi Germany invaded and occupied the
Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, in flagrant violation of the Munich Agreement.
Under Tiso’s leadership, Slovakia became a Nazi puppet state whose
followers established a fascist, authoritarian, one-party dictatorship,
strongly influenced by the separatist Catholic clerical hierarchy in internal
policy and closely allied with Nazi Germany. The ruling party was the Slovak People's Party.
The Second World War started on the 1st of September 1939 with the invasion of Poland.
In October 1939 Tiso became a president of the First Slovak Republic
and closely collaborated with a Nazi regime.
In April 1940 the First Aryanization Law was passed which meant the seizure
of Jewish-owned property and exclusion of Jews from the economy. This was justified by the
stereotype and reinforced by the propaganda that Jews obtained their wealth by oppressing Slovaks.
In mid-July 1940, shortly after the fall of France, Adolf Hitler invited Tiso to a summit
held in Salzburg. The reason was that after in 1939 Slovakia renounced much of its foreign-policy
and military autonomy to Germany in exchange for border guarantees and economic assistance.
The fraction of the Slovak People's Party which consisted of intellectuals centered around the
journal Nástup, opposed the imitation of Germany and insisted on an independent foreign policy.
Germany sought the expulsion of the Nástup group from positions of influence.
Next to Nástup, there were two other fractions of the Slovak People's Party - the radical branch led
by the Slovak Prime Minister Vojtech Tuka who also took part in the Salzburg conference, and
the clerical branch led by President Jozef Tiso. On the 28th of July, Tiso first met privately with
German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, who informed the Slovaks that Germany considered
Slovakia within its Lebensraum meaning the living space, and therefore justified interference in
Slovakia's internal affairs. Jozef Tiso then met Adolf Hitler who explained him that failure to
comply would leave the Slovak State at the mercy of Hungary by revoking the protection guarantees
of 1939. Hungary had already annexed territory in southern Slovakia in the autumn of 1938.
The result of the Salzburg Conference was the Slovaks agreed to replace influential Nastup
supporters with reliably pro-German radicals and that the Slovak state
became more strongly oriented towards Germany, especially in the area of anti-Jewish measures.
Another result was the appointment of various German advisers to Slovakia.
On the 9th of September 1941 the Tiso government passed the Jewish Code which was based on the
German Nuremeberg Laws. Government propaganda boasted that the Jewish Code was the strictest
set of anti-Jewish laws in Europe. This law definitively excluded Jews from public life
restricting the hours that they were allowed to travel and shop, and barring them from clubs,
organizations, and public events. It also significantly reduced their personal life and
property rights. This was a harbinger of the deportations of Jews to extermination camps.
According to a census of the 15th of December 1940, there were 89,000 Jews in Slovakia. In
March 1942, the Slovak State signed an agreement with Germany that permitted
the deportation of the Slovak Jews. Between March and October 1942,
some 58,000 Slovak Jews were concentrated in indigenously established labor and concentration
camps—mainly in the camps Sereď, Nováky, and Vyhne. The Slovak authorities then transported
the Jews to the border of the Government General or the German Reich and turned them over to
German SS and police. One of the main forces behind the deportation of Slovak Jews to Nazi
concentration camps in German occupied Poland was Vojtech Tuka, the Slovak Prime Minister.
Virtually all of the deported Slovak Jews were killed in Auschwitz, Majdanek, Sobibor,
and other locations in German-occupied Poland. Only 300 of them survived. Among them
were Alfred Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba who escaped from Auschwitz in the spring of 1944 and compiled
the first detailed report on operations there for general dissemination in the west.
Jews who were not deported were granted a presidential exception
as they were crucial for the war economy.
During Tiso’s presidency, the Slovak State paid Germany 500 RM for every deported Jew for,
what they called "retraining and accommodation". In total the Slovak State paid Nazi Germany 10
million Reich Marks for murdering its citizens - the Slovak Jews - in Nazi death camps.
During the deportations, some 6,000 Slovak Jews escaped to Hungary.
When the Papal Nuncio reached the Tiso government that the German authorities were murdering the
Slovak Jews in German-occupied Poland, the Slovak President hesitated, and then refused,
to deport the remaining 24,000 Jews in Slovakia in the autumn of 1942.
The situation changed with the outbreak of the Slovak National Uprising on the 29th of August,
1944, when the Slovak Communist and non-Communist underground rose against the Tiso regime as
Soviet troops entered neighboring Subcarpathian Rus. Because the Tiso government was not able
to quell the uprising, German troops moved in. Einsatzgruppe H - Nazi mobile death squads - whose
duties included rounding up and killing or deporting the remainder of the Slovak Jews,
accompanied the Wehrmacht – German Armed forces - into Slovakia. Between September
1944 and the end of the year, German units deported approximately 12,600 Slovak Jews, most of
them to Auschwitz, Theresienstadt, and other camps in Germany. Only about half of them survived.
A few thousand Jews who were caught in hiding or fighting with the partisans in Slovakia,
were killed by the German and Slovak Hlinka Guard units. The Slovak National Uprising lasted from
August until the 28th of October 1944. On the 30th of October the same year,
Jozef Tiso personally decorated German soldiers in Banská Bystrica in Slovakia,
who had fought in the uprising. One of the decorated was Oskar Dirlewanger,
one of the most notorious perpetrators of the criminal Nazi regime whose unit terrorized
the civilians and committed unspeakable atrocities mostly in Poland and Belarus.
In all, German and Slovak authorities deported more than 70,000 Jews from Slovakia.
The Germans murdered more than 60,000 of them.
By the end of the Holocaust, more than two-thirds of the Jews living in Slovakia had been murdered.
When the Red Army conquered the last parts of Slovakia,
Jozef Tiso ran away via Austria to Germany where he went into hiding with false identity documents
under assumed name – Dr. Jozef Táborský. After he was captured by the American
forces in June 1945, Tiso was extradited to Czechoslovakia in October the same year.
The trial with Jozef Tiso began on the 2nd of December 1946. According to the prosecutor, when
Tiso was shown the footage from the concentration camps, “he was indifferent, looking sideways or
at the ground”. He showed no remorse and refused to make a statement condemning the crimes of Nazi
Germany on the grounds that if he had condemned anything the Germans had done or felt sorry for
the victims, they would have said that that he had broken down and was confessing his guilt.
He added that if this situation had occured again, he would have acted in the same way.
On the 15th of April 1947, the Czechoslovak National Court
found Jozef Tiso responsible for a number of crimes including approving the Jewish Code,
expropriating the assets of the Jews and approving deportation of almost 58 000
Slovak Jews to Nazi concentration camps in 1942 and sentenced him to death by hanging.
The night before the execution Tiso said that he felt “like a martyr of the Slovak nation”.
He was 59 years old when he was executed on the 18th of April 1947 in Bratislava.
As he walked to the gallows, he was wearing his clerical outfit. According to the contemporary
press, Tiso was pronounced dead by a doctor seven minutes after the execution had begun. This moment
started the legends and myths surrounding the trial and his death.
Even though the Czechoslovak government buried him secretly to avoid having his grave become
a shrine, the Tiso far-right followers soon identified the grave in Bratislava. Decades later,
the body of Tiso was exhumed and buried in the Cathedral in Nitra, in accordance with canon law.
Today, many proclaim Tiso as a "martyr" who "sacrificed his life for his belief
and nation" portraying him as an innocent victim of communism and the saint.
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