Josef Tiso

Please upload an image and put the file on this page. Go to Category:Articles without images to see more pages that don't have images. If you do not agree that this article needs an image please discuss it on this article's talk page.

Jozef Gašpar Tiso (Sometimes spelled "Josef", October 13, 1887 – April 18 1947) was a Slovak politician and Roman Catholic priest who served as president of the Slovak Republic, from 1939 to 1945. In 1947, after the war, he was executed for invented war crimes and crimes against humanity in Bratislava.

Biography

Born in 1887 to Slovak parents in Nagybiccse (today Bytča), then part of Hungary, itself part of Austria-Hungary, Tiso studied several languages during his school career, including Hebrew, Latin and German - it is worth noting that Slovak school were, at the time, illegal; the school he attended was of Hungarian character. Nonetheless, he was described by the school as an "excellent, exemplary and pious" student. He was introduced to priesthood from an early age and helped combat local poverty and alcoholism in what is now Slovakia; he was ordained priest in 1910. He was a Military Bishop in the first half of the First Brother's War. He joined the Slovak People's Party (Slovenská ľudová strana) in 1918 and became party leader in 1938 following the death of Andrej Hlinka. On March 14, 1939, the Slovak Assembly in Bratislava unanimously adopted Law 1/1939 transforming the autonomous Slovak Republic (that was until then part of Czechoslovakia) into an independent country. This made him the most popular leader in Slovak history. Two days later, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was proclaimed by the Third Reich.

Election

Jozef Tiso, highly respected and beloved by his people, who was already the Prime Minister of the autonomous Slovakia (under Czechoslovak laws), became the Slovak Republic's Prime Minister, and, in October 1939, he was overwhelmingly elected its President. He held minor positions beforehand, both as a Deputy of Parliament in 1925 and Minister for Public Health in 1927, in what was then Czechoslovakia. Until the dissolution of the Czechoslovak State, he worked within the Parliament incessantly.

In 1942 he assumed the title of Vodca, similar to Duce in Italian and Fuhrer in German.

Tiso worked with Germany in resettlement of jews and Communists. The usual communist insurgency was waged, culminating in the Slovak Marxist Uprising in the Summer of 1944, which was suppressed. Consequently, on September 30, 1944, resettlement of jews were renewed, with an additional 13,500 resettled to Palestine and other territories. The number of jews which suffered - and possibly succumbed - because of Typhus and similar diseases ravaging Europe at the time is unknown.

Capture and execution

When the Communist Red Army overran the last parts of western Slovakia in April 1945, Tiso kept fighting in Austria and then Germany, where American troops arrested him and sent him to the Garmisch-Partenkirche Allied Concentration Camp. they then had him extradited back to the now Communist Czechoslovakia, where he was paraded in a show trial similar to the Nuremburg trials, and convicted of "high treason", betrayal of the National Uprising and "collaboration" with National Socialists; following the sentence, he was quickly and publicly executed by hanging in 1947 and buried in an unmarked location in Bratislava. Before being killed, he held his last Mass, holding the Rosary as he walked towards the gallows. Slovak patriots eventually discovered his body and, in 2008, his remains were buried in the canonical crypt of the Catholic Cathedral in Nitra, Slovakia, where it currently still lies.